Karl Barth on Christmas & Easter

Nativity and Chippewa St. traffic
at the Catholic Supply Store 

“'The Word became flesh,' εγενετο, we read in John 1:14….'The Word became'---that points to the centre, to the mystery of revelation, the happening of the inconceivable fact that God is among us and with us. If there is any synthetic judgment at all it is this one, that ‘the Word became.’ But can or will the Word of God become? Does He not surrender thereby His divinity?....’The Word became’---if that is true, and true in such a way that a real becoming is thereby expressed without the slightest surrender of the divinity of the Word, its truth is that of a miraculous act, an act of mercy on the part of God…..

“Now it is no accident that for us the Virgin birth is paralleled by the miracle of which the Easter witness speaks, the miracle of the empty tomb. These two miracles belong together. They constitute, as it were a single sign, the special function of which, compared with the other signs and wonders of the New Testament witness, is to describe and mark out the existence of Jesus Christ, amid the many other existences in human history, as that human historical existence in which God is Himself, God is alone, God is directly the Subject, the temporal reality of which is not only called forth, but is identical with it.

"The Virgin birth at the opening and the empty tomb at the close of Jesus’ life bear witness that this life is a fact marked off from all the rest of human life, and marked off in the first instance, not by our understanding or our interpretation, but by itself. Marked off in regard to its origin: it is free of the arbitrariness which underlies all our existences. And marked off in regard to its goal; it is victorious over the death to which we are all liable. Only within these limits is it what it is and is it correctly understood, as the mystery of the revelation of God. …

"In Jesus Christ God comes forth out of the profound hiddenness of His divinity in order to act as God among us and upon us. That is revealed and made visible to us in the sign of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, but it is grounded upon the fact signified by the Virgin birth, that here in this Jesus God Himself has really come down and concealed Himself in humanity. It is because He was veiled here that He could and had to unveil Himself as He did at Easter.”

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Second Half-Volume (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 156, 182-183