“What it [the world] needs,” said Karl Barth, “is not to be confirmed and strengthened by another variation of its own way, but to be pointed beyond it in unambiguous practice.” The church exists (he continues), in obedience to and imitation of Jesus, “to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to its [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise . . . The true community of Jesus Christ does not rest in itself . . . It exists as it actively reaches beyond itself into the world.”459
