A Sudden Return and a Barth Quote

I've been gone for a long time. Mostly because I can't get my thoughts organized enough to want to post them. We've just had some good friends come through town, though--Liz and Micah Hoover--and I'm feeling somewhat inspired to post briefly.

Most of what I think about these days comes directly from what I'm reading. Today I'm reading Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics vol. 4 on reconciliation. Barth brilliantly flirts with orthodoxy and lands himself within the bounds of the Reformed tradition in most instances. If we remember the context and time in which he was writing, I think we can appreciate his theological acumen for what it is. In the midst of the section I'm in, he says something that caused me to stop. It's something we say a lot in the Reformed tradition--our actions, attitudes, emotions, etc. towards God are to come out of gratitude, not guilt or some sense of inducing his favor towards us. But here's how Barth says it:

"The thing which we maintain when we describe the covenant as the covenant of grace is that the covenant engages man as the partner of God only, but actually and necessarily, to gratitude. On the side of God it is only a matter of free grace and this in the form of benefit. For the other partner in the covenant to whom God turns in this grace, the only proper thing, but the thing which is unconditionally and inescapably demanded, is that he should be thankful. How can anything more or different be asked of man? The only answer to karis (grace) is eukaristia (thankfulness). But how can it be doubted for a moment that this is in fact asked of him? Karis always demands the answer of eukaristia. Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning. Not by virtue of any necessity of the concepts as such. But we are speaking of the grace of the God who is God for man, and of the gratitude of man as his response to this grace. Here, at any rate, the two belong together, so that only gratitude can correspond to grace, and this correspondence cannot fail. Its failure, ingratitude, is sin, trangession. Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude--man's refusal of the one but necessary thing which is proper to and is required of him with whom God has graciously entered into covenant."