"We are," said Barth, "a people that walk in darkness. But we have seen a great light." A sermon in accord with revelation will be aligned with the two foci of revelation: Christmas and the Day of Christ (incarnation event and eschaton). "All that is said must always be said between these two points."

Yet Barth did not isolate the preacher from the church. On the contrary, he insisted that preaching must always "be done in the sphere of the church." The church is constituted by revelation, and "conformity to the church follows conformity to revelation."

Barth agreed with the definition of the church found in the Augsburg Confession; "where the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered." He took that definition seriously, insisting that the preaching events and the sacraments of the church must never be isolated from one another. The sacraments (Barth's Reformed conception limited the sacraments, of course, to baptism and the Lord's Supper) should frame the sermon, with baptism preceding the sermon and Communion at the end of the service.

Barth accused both Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism with misunderstanding the sacraments; the Catholics raising them to idolatrous levels and the Protestants neglecting and isolating them altogether. Barth, who once described his dogmatic effort as an attempt to construct a formidable alternative to Roman Catholicism, did not point Protestants to the Catholic example. Conversely, he insisted that Protestants must recapture a proper sacramentalism in the context of worship. (Interestingly, Barth shifted his thought away from infant baptism and toward believers baptism in his later years.)

Barth's section on preaching as confession is by itself worth the price of the book. In an age when many ask what preaching is supposed to do, Barth answers with a resounding No. Preaching is not designed to accomplish a purpose, other than confession of the gospel as found in Scripture. "When the church undertakes to proclaim the Word of God, this is not because it seeks to fulfill a plan or to serve an abstract purpose. Even the best purpose can have no place in a definition of what the church is doing."

With astounding clarity, Barth avers that "The church is not a tool to uphold the world or to further its progress. It is not an instrument to serve either what is old or what is new. The church and preaching are not ambulances on the battlefield of life."

Confession is not a matter of mere testimony. Barth elaborates: "Confession of faith cannot mean that we are expressing what lives in us, or that we are thinking certain things in common. Professio fidei (professing the faith) means stating what we believe, what we who say credimus (we believe) must believe and confess because we have been listening to revelation."

Barth's section on Scripture is, simultaneously, the glory and fatal weakness of his system. He calls preachers to exposition of Scripture as the only proper mode of proclamation. Preachers are not to preach their own systematic theology, current events, or their philosophy of life. Barth exhorted preachers to place their full confidence in Scripture. For the preacher to live by faith is to live by Scripture.