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For a class, I am reading Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline, which comprises lectures he gave on the Apostle’s Creed. Today, we discussed Barth’s chapter on “God the Creator,” and my professor drew our attention to this paragraph:

We are not nearer to believing in God the Creator, than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article [of the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ…”] needs a revelation. (50)

In other words, we cannot believe in the Creator apart from believing in the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Thinking about it in the context of the class discussion, I thought about the following modern analogy: I wonder whether praying to a generic god in a politically correct prayer would be the same thing as if a man slept with any married woman at all, arguing in his defense that he was only sleeping with “wife.”

Even if each woman is a wife, none of them is his wife.

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