‘WHO AM I?’
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Cone found themselves
all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus
and he asked the four the same Christological question, “Who do you say that
I, the Son of Man, am?”
Karl Barth stands up and says: “You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious
trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism.”
Not prepared for Barth’s brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: “You are he who
heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential
estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the
analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.”
Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: “You are
the impossible possibility who brings to us children of light and children
of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught
condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential
anxieties of our ontological relationships.”
Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: “You are my Oppressed One,
my soul’s shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never
left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the
oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and
symbolic.”
Then Jesus stooped down and wrote in the sand, “Huh?”
[Original source unknown]
~~
Dr Bob Griffin, www.grif.net
1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given