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Revelation and Trinity

March 26, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 6 Comments

In this week’s reading of Church Dogmatics Barth works out the nature of revelation in conversation with the identity of God itself.

There were two amusing moments for me in this reading. One was when he said on p. 330:

    The statement: Individuum est ineffabile, can indeed be made but characteristically it cannot be proved, whereas revelation is ineffabile which encounters and reaches man and proves itself to be such. From this standpoint, then, we finally achieve full clarity regarding what was said in 1. and 2. about the unveiling and veiling of God in His revelation.

Full clarity? Right…

The other amusing moment came at the end:

    Any child knows that [the church's doctrine of the Trinity] uses some of the philosophoumena of declining pagan antiquity.

I confirmed this with my three year old. He said that he did, in fact, know this.

Otherwise, this chapter was a mixed bag for me.

What I absolutely loved:

Barth is insisting in this chapter that we must wrestle first with the question Who is God, first and foremost, rather than the question, What is God.

Abstract categories of God’s identity and philosophical speculations about the necessity of some god’s existence are not the stuff of Christian dogmatics. This is absolutely true. The idea that we can “prove” the existence of some “unmoved mover” (for example) tells us absolutely nothing about Christian faith.

We must begin with the particular God who is revealed in the particular story of the Bible.

The other good things about Barth’s approach is that he is holding the line against those who want to suggest that Christianity is articulating universal truths that are generally experienced.

Barth avoids the temptation of this universalising by saying, no–God does in fact reveal. People in particular times know that in what are otherwise “historical” events God has made Godself known. Ultimately, of course, this is so in the revelation of God who is Jesus.

The place where I am not so happy with this chapter is the overall notion that it’s the Trinity that is the core of our understanding of God’s identity. While Barth is keen to make sure that the “who God is of whom we speak” is none other than “the God who has revealed Godself in this particular story,” the move away from the revelation of the story to the later reflection of the church on that revelation undermines the stated point.

The weakness of the approach is illustrated in the ways that it impacts exegesis.

Throughout the chapter we catch glimpses of where we’re supposed to recognize that it’s this God, this Trinity, who is at work. But all too often, these are not indications of Jesus as divine, or Spirit as divine person. Peter’s confession, even in Matthew, has nothing to do with Trinity. The baptismal formula in Matthew 28 is no more Trinitarian than Jesus’ baptism–and that’s not even getting to the Old Testament.

It’s the OT that creates the most significant challenges here. Can we so tie the identity of God with the Christian story that this same God is recognizable on the pages of the OT? Here is where the loss of narrative categories, and the adoption of the “philosophoumena of declining antiquity” is most unfortunate.

The continuity of God is a question for the NT writers, and we should follow their lead in recognizing that the God we worship is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who witnessed to Jesus by mighty deeds, the Father who did not spare his son but delivered him up for us all, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

We Must Always Speak Prophetically

March 18, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 8 Comments

This week and last, a firestorm swelled over the release of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. One line of response was to counter Bell’s “long tradition” of “untold number” of devout Christians holding something like his view on heaven and hell was to say, “only a tiny minority of Christians have espoused the position over two millennia.”

To which, Karl Barth reminds us, we must say, “Who cares?”

In putting the finishing touches on his prolegomena (§1.7.2-3), Barth takes a final run at keeping evangelical theology robustly Biblical in a way that neither Catholic nor Modernist theology can be.

Barth is aware that theology is a deeply contextualized enterprise. But what we do with this datum is subject to falling off the horse on two different sides.

On the “Catholic” side there is the danger of attempting to turn dogmatics into a repetition of the dogmatics of the past. The idea that a good historical theology is tantamount to a good articulation of what the church today should believe and preach is widespread. One catches a whiff of it, perhaps, in the “history” argument against Rob Bell.

But neither does the inculturated nature of the theological enterprise mean that we must simply listen to culture as defining our standard. This mistake of modernism, of assuming that “what is happening in the world” is tantamount to “what God is doing in the world” fails as Christian dogmatics because it is not, in any recognizable sense, Christian.

The task of dogmatics, as Barth understands it, is never simply to affirm–either the church in what the church has said or the world in what the world is saying. Because dogmatics is always, and will always be, done by sinful people in particular contexts, the articulations of the past will always have to be corrected.

The history of our theology must never become our canon, because the canon of scripture as the word of God will always continue to correct it.

That is the great both/and of Barth’s theology: a realization that pursuit of a truly biblical theology will never allow us to rest content with the theology we have already articulated. Because the Bible, as the living active word of God that brings the word of God to bear afresh to the church, will always correct where we have erred and carry us to fresh articulations in new times and places.

If I had a gripe in this section of the Dogmatics, it was Barth’s insistence that dogmatic theology is necessary. Here, I think he mistakes the necessity foisted upon us by our existence in the western intellectual tradition with an inner necessity in the Christian faith itself. There is no reason in principle why Christianity could not have gone the route of Judaism, where biblical interpretation and instruction in life are the ways in which the faith is explored rather than dogmatics or systematic theology.

But overall, I am happy that Barth continues to lay out a truly Reformed way of being Protestant: not to continue to say what the Reformers (or church fathers) said, but to say what we must say on the basis of both what the tradition has said and what the scripture continues to say afresh.

Here endeth ch. 1 of the Dogmatics.Up next, Ch. 2, “The Revelation of God.”

Church, Culture, and the Word of God

March 11, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

When we first started reading the Dogmatics, I got a good bit of advice for starting points other than 1.1. It seems that there is some really great stuff to jump into in book 4, in particular. But I like to go through things from start to finish, and I am increasingly glad that we’ve gone this way.

The questions Barth wrestles with in 1.1 always seem to be dancing around the bread-and-butter questions of my vocation to biblical scholarship: what is the word of God? what does the Bible have to do with the word of God? how does the Bible function in the church as the word of God? and what does this Bible as word of God have to do with what the church has said and must say in confessing its faith?

As Barth comes in §1.7 to situate all that he has said about the Word of God within the enterprise of Dogmatics, he makes it clear how a Protestant Dogmatics must differ from both a modernist dogmatics and a Roman Catholic dogmatics–and in both counts it has to do with the place of the Bible as a word that can always stand as a witness over against the words of people.

The summary of the whole might be found on p 255:

    In fact Church proclamation is not an undertaking which can come under other criteria than God’s Word in respect of its content.

Other criteria cede ground, building the identity of the church on something other than that which truly defines it.

One target of Barths’ polemics in this section is the Roman Catholic Church. And here he reminded me of why I am Protestant.

As Barth articulates the difference between dogmatics as he practices it and RC dogmatics, the distinction comes to whether the church has been entrusted with dogmas that must be believed. And Barth insists that to place our belief in church dogmas is to place our belief in the words of men rather than the Word of God. In fact, their very character as dogmas that can be studied differentiates them from the dogmatics that affirms church proclamation: a dogmatics that demands an obedience to God, a response to the divine word, and not the learning of a theological system.

As much as my largely Protestant readership might agree with this in theory, it is a word of caution about what makes our theology truly Protestant that needs broader application in our context. I see two places where Protestants are acting, or are hedging more toward, a Roman Catholic manner of constructing theology, and I find each, in its own way, alarming.

First, there is the conservative expression of Reformed Theology that is spreading like wildfire these days. Conservative Calvinism has had a perennial challenge of honoring its traditions while maintaining its truly Protestant spirit of allowing the Bible, rather than traditions of men, to be the authoritative voice. In all, it is failing on this regard. To be Reformed in this world means, by and large, not to do what the Reformers did in going to the sources of both the Bible and those who have spoken about it, but instead saying what the Reformers said in their theological confessions.

In short, the Reformed Traditions has replaced the Roman Catholic Church as the magisterium in a system that defers to words of people, the word of the church, rather than the word of God.

The other place this tendency toward prioritizing the words of people over the Bible as word of God is, somewhat surprisingly, the Biblical studies academy, in that arm of it striving to do theological interpretation for the church.

In this world, a number of interpreters are advocating a return to “the rule of faith” as our guide for reading scripture. There are exercises at SBL sessions in which parts of the NT are read through the lens of a part of the creed, for example.

And in these exercises, Biblical scholars (of all people!) are practicing what happens when the word of God is subjected to and constrained by the words of men. While the results are sometimes “interesting,” I cannot bring myself to think that this is either what we should be doing as biblical scholars nor what we should be doing as the church. It is not the creeds that regulate our Bibles, but our Bibles which should be unleashed to speak afresh–even if that means challenging the creeds.

Barth’s other interlocutor is modernism: theologies that begin with what we already know about people or the world based on outside factors such as psychology or philosophy.

And while, on a popular level, this sort of theology is perhaps not so sophisticated, it is nonetheless rampant. The question is often posed these days, “What is God doing in the world.” This is a crucial question, to be sure! But it is also easily confused with, “What is happening in the world?” and our world can become the measure of what we must say when we speak of God, rather than allowing the Word of God to stand against us and speak a word of judgment upon what is going on in the world.

If not. If we don’t allow the word of God to challenge us as the church or as people embedded in particular cultures, we might find ourselves, strangely, guilty of nothing worthy of a conviction:

Faith and the Faithful One

March 3, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

It is sometimes said that one of the weaknesses of Reformed Theology is its tendency toward so prioritizing faith that it becomes entirely a religion about a human disposition rather than one about the Christ to whom that faith is directed.

In fact, this is a recurring issue in the Reformed Tradition: what does the faith as the disposition of my heart have to do with the Christ event as such as the means of salvation?

In Church Dogmatics 1.6.4, Karl Barth tackles the thorny problem of the relationship of faith to the word of God. And when “word of God” means, first and foremost, Christ the word of God, what we are dealing with is the relationship between Christ as the object of our faith and our own faithful response to that Word.

As with the discussion of “word” and our “experience” of it, Barth in his discussion of faith is most concern to insist that what is true about how God is at work in the world is never true merely in and of itself, but only as a continuing act of God.

When discussing faith, Barth begins with a small-print exposition of faith that begins with pistis as the faithfulness of God (Rom 3) and then through Christ’s work, the human response, Christian teaching, and finally a religion that exists throughout history and as such can be studied as a phenomenon.

When talking about faith as the human response to the gospel, Barth draws us to a reality that is not inherent in humans in and of ourselves. It is not a mere dimension of our humanness that can be directed in any number of directions. True faith is defined by its object, not by an inherent human disposition being employed.

Moreover, even for the Christian, faith is not merely a one-off gift or experience. It must be ever exercised afresh, from faith to faith we might say.

Faith is real, because God has given us his Word and we have seen it. And it is real as it is lived and experienced afresh and anew–even as Barth demands that the word of God is real and is in fact the word of God inasmuch as it is experienced afresh and anew by the continuing work of God.

Having put this finishing touch on the knowability of God’s word, Barth is now ready to turn to the project itself and address the problem of dogmatics.

Your Experience Does Not Control God

February 25, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

God acts in the world. Barth is sure of it. Christians must be sure of it.

Our knowledge of God is knowledge of God, and not of ourselves, because God acts, God speaks, and God enables us to hear and to receive.

But what are we to think of the vestiges of God’s activity?

When God speaks and a written word is left behind–what is its relation to the spoken word of God? Barth has insisted earlier that what is left behind is, yes, the words through which God spoke, but is not the word of God such that God’s word is delivered under our control. God maintains God’s freedom, even when the acts of God and words of God leave imprints on the world.

In §1.1.6.3 of the Church Dogmatics Barth turns to the place of human experience in our assessment of the word of God. Does the fact that God acts and we, in our God-enabled self-determination, respond, mean that there remains a vestige of the word of God in us that is separate from God himself, truly ours, something we can know with reference to ourselves alone and not always dependent on God?

Barth Experiences God Via His Pipe

Barth wants to position Christian experience of God over against two vying alternatives.

One is the pure Caretesianism that says that the human is the beginning point of all knowledge and understanding: “I think, therefore I am,” “I am a thinking being,” “I can know myself truly and distinctly, but God comes later.”

Against theological liberalism that put the locus of Christian theology in the universal religious experience, Barth has been arguing throughout CD 1.1 that what we know we truly know because God speaks, not because of the kinds of people we inherently are.

In this section, though, he is more concerned with after. What can we say about ourselves, what is the place of ourselves in knowing the word of God after we have heard and received the word of God?

And here is where Barth wants to preserve the freedom of God over against some of his theological contemporaries.

It seems to me that Barth is striving to maintain something akin to the popular theological impulse which will say things like, “It’s none of me, all of God,” or, “If there’s anything good come of this is not my doing but only God’s,” and the like.

I struggled with this section as I did with the section on God’s freedom and scripture as written word. While agreeing with Barth about the freedom of God, I wonder if Barth’s own theological matrix isn’t amenable to another outworking.

What I mean is this: I agree with Barth that God is free to act as God will. I also agree in large part with the absolute necessity of divine action for people to receive the word and grace of God. We are not capable of receiving the word because we’re human; we’re capable of receiving it despite the fact

Barth Experiences God by Listening to Mozart on His iPod

that we’re sinful humans because God acts to stir us up to desire his good as our own.

But once God acts, once God imprints Godself in words or human hearts, there is a real transformation.

Barth insists that we can say what we say about God not based on any logical necessity, but only because of what God has actually said and done.

So what if part of God’s freedom was exercised in a decision to set aside God’s freedom by binding Godself to written word, or transforming sinful persons so that they are no longer what they once were?

In parallel to my hesitations about the “word of God” section, so here I wrestled with whether or not Barth gave sufficient space for the types of scriptures that imply a true transformation, such that we are not what we once were.

    “You are no longer of the flesh but of the Spirit.”

    “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by which we cry out [as our big brother Jesus cried out!], ‘Abba, Father.’”

    “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son…”

Romans 8 testifies throughout that the reception of the Spirit of God–that experience of the Word as it comes to us–changes who we are. In fact, it makes us, who receive the Word into little Words; we who receive the Spirit of the resurrected Son are little sons; we whom the Spirit unites to Christ are little Christs–Christians.

Is there, perhaps, a both/and?

Not that Barth is wrong that we must always look to God and never to ourselves, but that because we have become a people demarcated by the Holy Spirit. Thus who we “are” is now “Spiritual people,” so who we are is not about “man himself,” but about God being present in us, about God transforming us afresh into the image of God.

Can we say both? Yes, Barth, we can only know God in our experience if God chooses to continue to act in it; but, we can also affirm that God is known in our experience because of who we inherently are because as the people of Spirit who we inherently are is now inseparable from God himself.

God’s Word as God’s Mystery

February 18, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Barth’s reflections on the word of God continue to serve a program of not only reenvisioning what the word of God itself might be, but also of deconstructing ways of conceiving such a word that would enable us to think that we have mastered it–rather than always being in a position for it instead to master us (§1.5.4).

I found myself celebrating such outbursts as these:

    Is it clear to our generation in life as well as thought that the serious element in serious theological work is grounded in the fact that its object is never in any circumstances at our command, at the command of even the profoundest biblical or Reformation vision or knowledge, at the command of even the most delicate and careful construction? Absolutely any theological possibility can as such be pure threshing of straw and waste of energy, pure comedy and tragedy, pure deception and self-deception.

All this talk of mystery seems to be deeply indebted to Luther’s theology of the cross. The paradox Barth wants us to grapple with is that the mysterious word is mystery as a word that is spoken and revealed. That is, it’s not mysterious in that God is outside the world and we cannot know him or he cannot speak to us. It’s mystery in that God has in fact made himself knowable and spoken, yet within this sinful world.

The place where God’s word is revealed is objectively and subjectively the cosmos in which sin reigns. The form of God’s Word, then, is in fact the form of the cosmos which stands in contradiction to God.

One reason why I think that this discussion of the word of God is so important is that it’s an early attempt to reiterate a theology of the word of God after the advent of modern, critical study of the Bible.

Now, nothing that Barth says here requires the “insights” about the Bible’s humanness that have become stock and trade of contemporary biblical scholarship; however, the recognition that the word of God must always be spoken through the secular is one that the church simply cannot ignore at this point in history. And we have to figure out how to continue saying “yes, God has spoken,” while simultaneously saying, “Yes, these are the words spoken with a secular world with all of its limitations–including but not limited to the limitations of the sinfulness of the humans that wrote it.”

What is it to believe such a word?

    Hence believing means either hearing the divine content of God’s Word even though nothing but the secular form is discernible by us or it means hearing the secular form of God’s word even though only its divine content is discernible by us.

So what?

As I’ve been reading through Barth’s word of God theology, I’ve been bringing it into regular conversation with two recurring challenges facing the church’s understanding of scripture that suffuse my research interests. Both are reflected in yesterday’s post on Psalm 45.

The issues are these, and I believe they are related: What are we to do with the NT writers’ use of the OT, which seems to give revisionist readings of the OT documents? And, what are we to do with the church’s reading of the NT, which often sees a more developed theology, in particular a higher Christology, than was likely to have been present in the NT texts themselves?

If Barth’s account of the “word of God” is on target, it opens up space for God to speak differently at different times through the same human words.

Part of the anxiety that swirls around the “misreading” of the texts is the notion that what Barth refers to as the “secular” aspect of the words of scripture must map perfectly onto the “divine” that is spoken in them.

But if in fact these are human words that God can put to use in different times and different places, there is no reason why God might not inspire a word of celebration for the king of Israel that would not have been seen as prophetic to its author and “original” celebrants–but that could be heard as true of Christ in a way that it could never be true of a Davidic king.

Analogously, the NT can speak of Christ as “son of God” with the overtones of Davidic kingship, and there is nothing to hinder a fresh hearing of those words by the church as an indication that Jesus is “son of God” in a sense that it could never be true of either Adam or David or even of us who are also sons and daughters of God.

There is both a binding of God to the story of Scripture, and a maintained freedom of God in its use and reception in the church. Barth might be onto a way to hold these together. Which might, also, provide us with a way to hold together historical-critical scholarship and the theological reflections of the church.

Word of God as Christ With Us

February 15, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 12 Comments

What, exactly, is the word of God?

***
UPDATE HERE:
I posted the summary below, and I’ve been scrambling about with other things for the past couple days. My apologies on that.

Over on Beginning Barth, Daniel Owens raised the issue of all the “theoretical” stuff that lies behind theology. And I agree with his assessment that where Theology as a discipline can often come up short in its persuasiveness is in the theoretical and/or philosophical underpinnings that don’t work for most normal people, or that might be countered by the next generation’s philosophy du jour.

But I actually think that Barth’s intention here is to move away from a philosophically grounded assessment of the word of God and into something more “tangible” (for lack of a better word).

The point of the small print in §1.5.1 was to distance himself from the idea that there is a way to speak of humanity, an “anthropology”, that accounts for the phenomenon of the word of God. He does not want to start with any “given” such as nature or “cogito ergo sum” or the like. He wants to insist that the only way we know that there is such a thing as the word of God is because God has spoken.

As Barth expands on this in the subsequent section, I think he actually agrees with what Daniel O. said, and where I find myself leaning as well, and shows it when he makes such statements as, “it is the divine reason communicating with the human reason and the divine person with the human person. The utter inconceivability of this event is obvious” (p. 135).

That God would speak to people is inconceivable, and yet it is so.

God speaks.

And we see again how Barth pushes against the idea that the Bible itself is the word of God, whenever it is read or spoken. I confess being of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I do wonder whether, in insisting that the words themselves are not necessarily the word of God, Barth has given due weight to the ways that scripture can be invoked as a constant, as what is true, as what we must heed if we would heed the voice of God.

But on the other, I see that in actual practice the words of the Bible can be and often are treated as any other word. They are not only the words of God but also words spoken by people and can be analyzed and dealt with as such. The Society of Biblical Literature comes to mind–and not necessarily as a bad guy, but simply as a picture of the fact that we often do, and must, wrestle with the words of the Bible as words spoken by particular people.

Two final things.

This section on the word of God is strongly bolted to Barth’s radical Christo-centrism. Jesus as the logos of God is the defining reality by which we know both that God can speak and what that speech is like. Jesus is God’s word.

I have been wary of this in the past, and to a certain extent maintain my reservation. I wonder if the two or so references to Jesus as God’s logos are sufficient to make Jesus the controlling category for “word of God,” when other speech acts seems to occupy much more of the biblical references to God’s word.

And yet, what I like about it is the way that it lays out what the word, then, cannot be: “namely, a fixed sum of revealed propositions which can be systematized like the sections of a corpus law” (137).

Barth is onto something. He recognizes that whatever the word of God is, it is not the right sort of thing to show its most true colors by being stripped of its context, organized according to its logic, and systematized into a theology.

A truly biblical theology is not going to be searching for the propositions that can be handed off to the systematician for ordering. It is going to be telling the story of the God who has spoken in Christ.

***

Barth has been wrestling with this question for a couple of sections now. And in the reading for this week (§1.5.1-3) he delves into some of the aspects of his theology that push against many of the assumptions of mainstream evangelical Christianity.

The word of God is not equivalent to scripture? No, says Barth, though the word of God has spoken in scripture. But a person may read scripture and not be confronted by the word of God.

The word of God is, ultimately, the logos, the second person of the Trinity. Christ is the word of God as other words are not–or, they are because he is at work and present in them.

The word of God is Christ, and therefore it is not a system nor is it able to be systematized. It is a person.

The word of God remains in God’s power, and confronts us, and so when it does it discloses the divine election. It acts and shows the predestining of God.

Yes, this chapter is a veritable powder-keg.

My reflections on it tomorrow.

The Bible Can Stand and Witness Against Us

February 4, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 11 Comments

I am, to say the least, geeked out and other wise excited about this week’s #Barthtogether reading on the Bible as the word of God.

Here are a couple of teaser quotes.

    “[Scripture] does not seek to be a historical monument but rather a Church document, written proclamation.”

    “Exegesis… entails the constant danger that the Bible will be taken prisoner by the Church.”

    “after any exegesis… [the church] has to realise afresh the distinction between text and commentary and to let the text speak again”

That section of the reading (§1.4.2) was the highlight for me.

As I read through this section on the word of God written, I was gripped by Barth’s refusal to equate revelation with anything “within” us. I hear Barth’s voice as prophetic for today in a manner analogous to what he needed to say in his own day. The notion of written revelation is an after-the-fact confession that God has, in fact, acted; God has, in fact, revealed.

Revelation is not timeless truth, it is the act of God. And, we might add, what is revealed is not timeless truth, but the acts of God–Barth would say, I think, the act of the eternal God revealing himself to us in Jesus Christ.

This section made my heart sing because Barth does such a nice job of holding together the acts of God and historical contingency–something that we in our modern contexts too often find impossible, sliding to one side or the other. On the right, people slide off toward “God,” minimizing history; on the left, folks slide off toward the contingent, minimizing the word and act of God.

Barth also resonates with me here because of his insistence that the Bible be always free to stand over against the church, that it must always be freed afresh from the constraints of our exegesis so that the text might be at liberty again to confront us as a surprising revelation of God. My hesitancy to corral the Bible by the “rule of faith” and other confessional expressions found a perhaps unwitting ally here.

I did have a couple of quibbles. You know–those places where a biblical scholar reading a theologian talking about the Bible made me nervous.

The account of Bible as canon was as good as I think we can do: the Biblical books we have pressed themselves as word of God upon the early church. But then, the history of canonization is messy, and the biblical books don’t depict themselves as scripture for the most part.

And I could have entirely done without the claim at the end that word as revelation, proclamation, and scripture parallels and find its confirmation in the Trinity. To the paralleling of one’s theological thoughts with the Trinity there is no end. And I cannot imagine that many of theme approximate the reality of how God truly is at work in the world or left marks of God’s triunity within it.

On the level of a professional New Testament scholar, the reading raised interesting questions about how to conceptualize the handling of the Bible outside the church. If the Bible is word of God as it is testimony to God’s revelation, and the confirming testimony to the church’s proclamation, then what do we say about the Bible when it is read for what it said in history, when it is read outside the church, when it is talked about to describe it rather than to invite obedience?

Lingering questions…

Barth §1.3.2-1.4.1

January 29, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Book Reviews with 7 Comments

The first section for this week finds Barth delineating the relationship between preaching and dogmatics. Here I found myself resonating with the inherently contextualized nature of the theological enterprise that Barth is engaging in.

For Barth, dogmatics follows Christian preaching, reflects on it, and seeks to articulate what the church must say and must not say.

The effect of this subordination is to conceptualize dogmatics as something that will always be in process. The proclamation of the church must continue to speak to people of its own day and time, and dogmatics must look back to this recent past event in anticipation of a proclamation that will come in the near future.

At the same time, however, Barth insists that dogmatics not be made answerable to the demands of a given culture–an important caveat but perhaps one that needs to be worked out a bit more. Without being made “answerable” to various demands of science, philosophy, or aesthetics, the church’s theology must still speak within a world that has a particular scientific slate of knowledge, a given aesthetic and the like. Contextualization is inevitable, and dogmatics must help the church find its way forward well so that the church won’t end up just doing it badly.

I found myself of two minds when reading §4.1 on the Word of God preached (the first of three “Word of God” sections).

Barth is extraordinary in his repeated insistence that the Word is God’s, remains God’s, and never passes to human control. But I find myself wondering here if Barth hasn’t underestimated the divine freedom he so highly prizes? Might God not choose to bind himself to the word preached as an event that will occur at set times in human history? Must there be a decision by God to turn the human words into God’s words on an occasion?

Here Barth is clearly working out a thoroughgoing theological basis for the Protestant distance from Roman Catholicism: neither in sacrament nor in preaching is God’s presence, Spirit, and grace always present ex opere operato–just by the work being done.

On the other side, however, the discussion of how God uses people without setting aside their humanness (and bread without setting aside its breadness) rang true–especially inasmuch as there is analogy with Jesus as a human in whom the divine grace was at work. I leave you with this week’s money quote:

The human element is what God created. Only in the state of disobedience is it a factor standing over against God. In the state of obedience it is service of God. Between God and true service of God there can be no rivalry. Service of God does not have to be removed in order that God Himself may be honoured in it. Where God is truly served, there–with no removal of the human element, with the full and essential presence and operation of the human element in all its humanity–the willing and doing of God is not just present as a first or second co-operating factor; it is present as the first and decisive thing as befits God the Creator and Lord.

Barth on God-Talk and Church Proclamation

January 21, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Book Reviews with 10 Comments

Welcome to week 3 of #Barthtogether (Church Dogmatics §1.3.1). I’m enjoying this slow wade into the Church Dogmatics. And in particular, the exercise of attempting to stretch my mind around Barth’s understanding of the word of God is an important challenge. Here is where Barth has so often–right at the outset!–been left behind by more conservative Christians because he does not simply say that the words on the page of the Bible are the word of God.

Why won’t he just come out and say that? It think the reason is articulated when Barth differentiates between secular and sanctified; their distinction is not a state in which they exist or a subject matter about which they speak, or a realm they occupy. Instead, their differentiation is an event, “The ongoing event of the final distinction, the event in which God Himself acts…” (p. 48)

This event is, of course, tied to the creation of the church, which is the body of Christ, because God elects that body as his own sacred space, we might say. But that church is sanctified as an on-going act of God’s holy-making action–and that holy-making action must apply also as something that occurs to the church’s proclamation. God makes the human words holy that would not be holy without that act (p. 49).

In locating proclamation in the broader life of the church, Barth places himself squarely within a Protestant, even what we might with the right qualifications even call “evangelical”, mold: preaching is the presupposition of service for the world, teaching youth, and even theology.

But it’s Barth’s definition of preaching that is so vaunted as to cause me to step back and scratch my head over the dissonance between this theological ideal and what I experience in reality. Preaching is where God the king speaks through the mouth of God’s own herald, and is therefore God’s own speech, to be acted on by God’s subjects.

It is often the case that when theological interpreters of the New Testament today speak of the NT, they refer to its “totalizing theological claims.” The God spoken of, and actions performed, create a demand on the reader to respond in faith. This, says Barth, is the substance of our preaching as well: in the event, God speaks and demands response (p. 52).

A couple of points will follow from this overall picture of the need for God to be at work for the preaching to be the word of God. First, since what is needed is the act of God, God is free to speak in surprising places, to use surprising words and means to speak to people. You might think Balaam’s ass, you might think foreign priests like Melchizedek.

Another point that follows is that neither preaching nor any other churchly function conveys grace simply by doing it–they are only means by which God may choose to administer grace. The “event” of grace, of speaking, of truly demanding, is the work of the spirit as words are spoken (as sacraments are given, we might add), and not bound to the event as such. The grace is bound to God.

A third point that follows is that “modernist dogmatics” ultimately fails because it does not finally know that people have to listen to something outside ourselves–to a true God–rather than simply reflect on our experiences.

And here is where the value of Barth’s view comes into play in our own context as well.

As we grow continually more aware of the different ways that various cultures have spoken about God, and interpreted God through the lenses of their own time and place, we have to continue to find ways to speak of God’s revelation in the Word as something that truly comes from God and draws us into our own culture-bound reflection.

If the words are simply the words of people and fully explicable on that score, than there is no Word to be proclaimed. But if God has in fact revealed, if Christ is in fact the revelation of God, then revelation is not merely possible but has in fact occurred and can in fact be assumed.

And then, we can have hope, hope that there is a God beyond who speaks, who is known, who has made himself knowable to the people of the earth. And with such hope, we can respond in the obedience of faith, knowing that our labor is not in vain because we have heeded the living voice of the true and living God.

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