Displaced!

Barth’s originality is also shown in his concept of displacement, or deposition. As the story of the primordial couple in Genesis 2-3 makes clear, our “original sin” was to set ourselves up as judges, that is, capable of determining good and evil on our own. In this presumption of ours we are radically in error. The usurpation of the role that belongs to God alone has led to the bondage of all creation (Rom. 8:20-23). Therefore the invasion of creation by God in Christ means that we have been radically displaced, deposed from our self-made throne or bench where we sit and judge others in order to shore up our restless need to prove our own righteousness. We want to “pronounce ourselves free and righteous and others more or less guilty.” We enjoy this role. But in the cross we see that we have been “displaced” by the one who is truly the Judge and is at the same time “radically and totally for us, in our place” (231-32). “For where does our own judgment always lead? To the place where we pronounce ourselves innocent . . . that is how we live. And that is how we can no longer live in the humiliating power of what took place in Jesus Christ. We are threatened by it because there is a complete turning of the tables. He who has acted there as Judge will also judge me, and He and not I will judge others” (233).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 518