Tag Archive - #barthtogether

Humanity Ready for God

February 4, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 7 Comments

Karl Barth claims that God is ready to be known by people, and hence actually knowable by people. In §26 of the Church Dogmatics, he approaches this from two different angles.

First, as we discussed previously (here and here), Barth draws us back to revelation, claiming that God is only known as God has revealed himself in and by the word.

In §26.2, Barth takes up the same question from the human side. If God is knowable, there must not only be a God who makes Godself known, but a humanity capable of receiving this knowledge.

Who, then, or perhaps what, is this humanity?

First, Barth returns to the question of natural theology, applying his previous arguments about God as knowable through the natural order to humanity as those who can know as they are by nature.

Well, not exactly as humanity is “by nature.” What humanity is in its “fallen nature” is more to the point. We’ll come back to this in a second. At any rate, humans as we actually are cannot truly know the true God through a natural theology, but only through God’s revelation.

“Anthropology” is not the route to humanity’s ability to know God.

Interestingly, and again, perhaps, surprisingly, Barth is equally insistent that ecclesiology, humanity as addressed by the church, is not the humanity able to receive the revelation of God. Humanity in the church is as liable to deception about its understanding of God as humanity in general. It is as liable to control it for its own purposes, as humanity in general.

Though I don’t recall Barth saying so explicitly, I wonder if this twin denial isn’t a recurrence of Barth’s regular two-sided glance: on the one hand he wants to show how evangelical dogmatics stands over against Christian liberalism; on the other he wants to show how it stands over against Roman Catholicism.

If not anthropology or ecclesiology, then on what basis can we discover humanity’s readiness for God? Unsurprisingly, it comes from Christology.

God is known knower in the triune, eternal relationship between Father and Son. This Son who has eternally known God, becomes human, thus joining the eternal self-knowing God with human flesh. How can people know God? Because, on the human side as well as the divine, God knows Godself. “On the human side” meaning, in this case, the humanity of the God-man.

I have a couple of questions about Barth’s construction.

First, do his stances against anthropology and ecclesiology as means by which we might see that God is knowable to people underplay the significance of Christ as The Human One and of the church as the Body of Christ? In the salvation story, there is a redefinition of humanity, of “image of God,” of the people of God, of “the church,” that is derivative from Christ himself.

Does Barth take this incorporation into Christ seriously enough in his denial that as humans or as the church we can know God?

Second, and related, does Barth give too much play to sin as a defining element in our human nature? Not that all humans aren’t born in sin and all the rest. But being sinful isn’t at the core of what it means to be human. Yes, it’s the reality that we are born into and from which Christ ushers us into a better future.

But Christ was fully human, and yet without sin. So if it’s sinfulness that keeps us from knowing God, it’s not our humanness that keeps us from God, but instead it’s the lack of true humanness that keeps us from knowing God.

So then, third, why is it that Christ offers a new humanity in which God is knowable? Is it because Christ is God? Or is it because Christ is truly human? Has Barth retreated too quickly to the Trinity rather than taking full stock of the inherent value of humanity as created in God’s image and recreated in the image of God in Christ?

That’s the real fun stuff. On a side note: is there a difference between natural theology and general revelation? The latter phrase keeps the requirement of “revelation” on the table, as Barth says is necessary, but allows for a broader compass of revelation than we find in only scripture, Christ, and preaching.

No Such Thing as Christian Natural Theology

January 27, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 22 Comments

So there you were, cultivating a rich missiological approach to your own cultural context. You were studying the environment in which you found yourself, looking for glimmers of the transcendent, unconscious acknowledgements that there was a God worthy of worship just beyond the recognition of your neighbors.

You were looking at Acts 17, and pondering what statues to an unknown God there might be in your workplace or civic life.

You were studying Romans 1 and imagining that a knowledge of God persists among those who do not, as yet, know God in Christ.

And then brother Karl comes along and opens up his can of Christological grace in the presence of totally depraved sinners.

Next thing you know, natural theology of every time is being denied. Points of contact are shown up as little more than ways to get people to see quickly that they do not, in fact, know God (and won’t likely be willing to). And you are sent to your room in tears.

The main line of biblical witness, Barth maintains, is that God is known, and can only be known, through His revelation of Himself in Christ. This consistently Christological frame of reference radically discounts claims that God is known otherwise than as God is revealed in what is often called “special revelation.”

Barth explores the “secondary line” of biblical witness that may seem to require us to acknowledge that God can be known, in some sense, in creation. But again and again he comes back to the point that what the text such as Ps 8 or Ps 19 or Rom 1 or Acts 17 depend upon is a prior conviction that God is truly known as the God of Israel.

And that’s at the heart of Barth’s point: God of Israel.

In order for God to be known, God must be known as God has bound himself to a particular people and a particular act of salvation. There is no idea of “God in general,” no abstracted knowledge of what a god is like that is simply true of our God because it’s true of some hypothetical being. God is known as God truly is, and that is tied to a particular revelation.

The God whom the Psalmists know is the God of Israel, the Lord of the Exodus and of the wandering in the wilderness, the Giver of the Law, the Hope of David, His wisdom , His power, His goodness, His righteousness, originally and conclusively this God alone. (Dogmatics §26.1, p. 109)

To me, the most interesting moments in this section were Barth’s wrestling matches with the apparent biblical counter-evidence.

Why does Acts 17 not establish the viability and significance of the “point of contact” for reaching new people? Because it is when he brings in the identity of the unknown God as the one who has raised Jesus and will judge the world–i.e., what is revealed of God in Christ–that Paul is mocked and rejected. Is this really an invitation to hold onto “in roads” for the gospel where people are ignorant in their so-called “knowledge”?

There are unanswered exegetical questions, but in this section we see the genius and consistency of Barth as he demands that the revelation of God always be a true disclosing of the true God–something unavailable to fallen human beings unless it come to us by grace.

Natural theology? No. Only theology of the revelation of God in Christ.

Knowing One Particular God

January 20, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Is there some idea of “knowing” that simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand how we know God?

Is there some idea of “being” or essence that we simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand the God who is?

Do we begin with knowledge and being to know the God who truly is?

When we think about who God is as Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler, do we reason upward from our general ideas to a God who is Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler because he is such notions of ours writ large?

No, Barth will argue throughout the first part of his discussion of “The Readiness of God” (Church Dogmatics §26.1). We do not have general categories which God fills in a bigger way, and thereby conforms to humanity’s innate ideas. We know the true God as this God is revealed in Scripture. God is known as all these things: Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler altogether–so that knowledge of the true God depends on what I would call here the story to which God has bound Godself as primary actor, not simply human notions of what someone called god should do.

In fact, Barth wants to push it back farther than this and to say that it’s not merely our ideas of Lordship, Creation, and the like that are derivative from God’s revelation of who God truly is.

The very idea, and long-standing philosophical problem, of God’s very knowability, is dependent on a prior action of God as well. We can know God because God is actually known and has actually chosen to make himself known. We can know the truth of who God is because God “is” before we are, and this truth of himself is known: Father to Son and Son to Father by the Spirit.

Knowledge of God is, then, an act of grace in which God makes Himself known. This means that it is not an act of nature, in which people might simply reason their way to true knowledge of the true God.

That last piece, an argument against natural theology, takes up a great deal of Barth’s energies as the chapter moves on.

I confess to finding myself torn here. As someone who deals with the deeply contextualized, historically situated texts of the Bible, I stumble over the idea that our images and metaphors for God are revealed rather than varied human expressions of various people in various times and cultures. Note well! I do believe that God reveals and speaks through the images–but that this revelation is known and understood and used because it carries certain preexisting connotative freight for the first hearers.

But on the other hand, I appreciate Barth’s insistence that we not affirm some “god” in general in vain hopes that someone serving such a being will one day attain to faith in the Christian God in particular. This skepticism of natural theology, not only in its validity but also in its purported pastoral value, is well grounded.

Those were my impressions of these 30ish pages. You?

Fearing and Loving the Covenant God

January 15, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

Can we truly know God? If so, what does such knowledge entail? How can the God who is wholly Other make Himself known to creatures? If we were to know this infinite God, as finite creatures, what would such knowledge look like?

Karl Barth claims that it would be an involved knowledge, a true knowledge, and a knowledge that is nonetheless shrouded in mystery.

Knowledge of God is self-involving. To know God is to love God. This is not the knowing of propositions, but the knowledge of faith and love. We know God as we trust what we have heard in the proclamation of the word.

But with “love,” Barth also insists that true knowledge entails fear of the Lord. Yes, perfect love casts out fear–of judgement. But there is an otherness of God that is embraced, and an appropriate response of fear, that comes when we truly know the true God.

It seems that the point to which Barth is perhaps most eager to arrive, however, has to do with how God can possibly become a true object of our knowledge. Here, he turns to the Trinity.

God does not become known and knowable after there are people to know God. God is eternally known and knowable because the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father (through the Spirit? or does the Spirit know, too?).

Human knowledge is true, if limited. God has revealed Himself as this God whom God knows himself to be.

Although the Trinity can never be a philosophical answer to the problem of the knowledge of God, it is one that coheres within the Christian claim about God’s identity, and the nature of God’s self-revelation.

Knowing God?

January 6, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Media with 11 Comments

The question of whether, and how, we can know God has been very much alive for the past couple hundred years. It’s been a problem philosophically, as the gulf between a supposedly transcendent God and the world in which we find ourselves has proven too much, say the philosophers, for the God on the other side to do us much good.

God got sent to the in-law suite in the attic whilst we went about our daily business of cooking and cleaning and loving and warring.

With Freud and Feuerbach, the problem came closer to home. Maybe the problem isn’t that God is too much “out there” to do us any good. Perhaps the problem is that God is far too much “inside.” Perhaps God is a projection of our needs, of our desires.

We are living, now, in a somewhat peculiar moment. The information age has made the musings of the phiolosphers more readily available; the education age has made advanced study of theology and philosophy more extensively enjoyed (or, at least, performed!); and people with philosophical and theological training are bringing their message to the masses both in books and in freely available popular media (return here to point 1: information age).

Where this is all going is here: over the past two weeks I have read Peter Rollins’ Insurrection, heard him with Barry Taylor on the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast, engaged with Rollins’ “love is God” philosophy with friends on Twitter–only to turn to the first 30 pages of Karl Barth, Year 2, and find his insistence that there is a God who is objectively known and knowable, because this God is, in fact, known in the church.

Barth Experiences God by Listening to Homebrewed Christianity on His iPod

Here, Barth does not argue against the position that God as such is truly known, if mediated, God makes Himself known and people hear with faithful obedience. Instead, he begins with the assumption that because there is a God made known through Jesus Christ in the church, that God is, in fact, knowable.

Barth’s argument is circular: God is knowable because we know God. He does not attempt to enter the circle by way of argumentation, but begins within the Christian story where God is made known in Christ and in scripture, and uses this story to tell us what it is to know God.

But I agree with Barth in the necessity of this circularity: you do not arrive at the God of the Christian story by starting with an idea of God in general and working your way in. You either believe in this God or you don’t; you either believe in this particular God, or you believe in another. The unmoved mover is not the God of Israel.

I found Barth more satisfying than those who suggest that God is of ourselves rather than made known according to God’s own decision.

In short, the notion that God is of ourselves, or found in our actions, or project of our desires, is not the God of the Christian story. If God was not in Christ reconciling the world to Godself, then the story is simply false. To confess resurrection is to look to a moment in time when God broke into history and vindicated the crucified Christ–truly overcoming death and taking Jesus out of the world.

The God found in my acts of love does not have this power, the power of the gospel, which is real power for salvation.

Barth manages to hold onto both the uniqueness/otherness and true knowability of God. God chooses to reveal Godself as an object that we can know. This knowledge is always mediated: ultimately through the Word of God in the flesh.

Knowledge is true because God chooses to make Godself object. It is unique because we are dependent on this self-disclosure and cannot know the true God without such disclosure. It is true knowledge when we not only believe that this God has spoken, but obey the summons that the voice brings.

The self-involving God is an object of our knowing through a self-involvement of us as knowers. Thus, while the truth of the notion that God is known when we love in obedience to God is maintained, so is the otherness of God who is not identical with that love of neighbor itself.

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Jerry has his Barth Together thoughts here.

And Brain Maiers is back in the game!
Anyone else?

Barth Together, Year 2

December 23, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 5 Comments

The reading plan for reading through the Dogmatics has been updated on my Karl Barth Reading page. The plan for year 2 entails 35ish pages per week, with breaks sprinkled throughout.

Word on the street is that you can pick up the Dogmatics and jump in anywhere. So if you began last year with good intentions to keep up, but dropped out, jump back on the wagon!

Or, if you never thought about it before, now’s the time to get into the work of “the most important theologian of the twentieth century,” or whatever you want to call him.

The whole set of the Church Dogmatics can be had from Christian Book Distributors for $99.

I look forward to another year of good conversation spurred by brother Karl. Last year’s highlights included getting some thoughts on the table for a more viable doctrine of scripture than most of us evangelicals tend to work with. Who knows what year two might bring?

One year down, 5 or 6 to go! Jump on in!

Two Down, or…

December 15, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

Karl Barth, The Man-Crush Resumes.

Dogmatics, Two Down

In the final section of Doctrine of the Word of God, Barth touches on two dynamics of his work that make my heart sing, and clarifies one of the recurring challenges I’ve had (including from part one of this section).

First, Barth here talks about the dogmatic method as deriving from the word of God. In other words, there can be no systematization based on a prior idea of what is most basic or foundational. No “law of God,” no theory of the atonement, no primacy of creation.

Yes, law, atonement, and creation are all important! But they are important as pokes radiating out from the center which is the Word of God itself: Christ the word, witnessed to in scripture.

This means that the “analytic” approach to theology that had its heyday in the 18th century and following, needs to take a back seat to a reconceptualization in which various elements sit alongside one another, informing one another, correcting one another, and all mutually subject to Christ the Word.

Second, and relatedly, I think Barth said in a more respectful and sophisticated way what I was striving to say in my somewhat iconoclastic rant about the Trinity a week or two ago. Yes, he has a Trinitarian statement about God, and even about the various doctrines he will cover. However, this Trinitarian statement is not the source of that structure but coordinately derived from the word of God.

The Trinity is crucial, but it does not displace the word of God as the structuring element in Dogmatics; it does not displace the foundational place of the Word of God. Or, “No foundation can be laid other than the one which has already been laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Finally, in Barth’s very brief outline of what is to come, he leaves me anticipating that ethics will suffuse his understanding of that the church is supposed to teach.

I have been wary thus far that Barth puts too much on the teaching office itself. I see the entire Evangelical project in danger of becoming the teaching church that never faithfully embodies its calling to be the doing church. I have good hopes that Barth will offer something better. We will have to see how that develops over the remaining 6ish years of our time in the Dogmatics.

This brings Year 1 of the Barth Together reading group to a close! Yay!

If you didn’t keep up this year, you won’t feel any more disoriented than the rest of us should you choose to jump in with volume 2 in January. I hope many of you will pick up again and keep reading in 2012. Stay tuned for a reading schedule to go up in the next couple weeks.

Teaching in Grace

December 13, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Church with 5 Comments

The final chapter of Church Dogmatics volume 1 returns to familiar themes: the importance of teaching, the grace which the church must entrust itself to so that it can continue teaching while it recognizes its own imperfections, and the mandate to continue teaching that the church must answer to in all circumstances.

I find myself once again wrestling with an ambivalent reaction to Barth.

Barth Teaches--But Does He Act?

On the one hand, he does well to keep insisting that the church must entrust itself to grace and continue teaching, not waiting for some presumed level of perfection to be attained before following its mandate. I have known too much, in the Reformed Tradition, of “waiting for the Spirit to move”/allegedly “keeping in step with the Spirit,” as an excuse not to pursue obedience.

But on the other hand, I continue in my dissatisfaction with Barth’s summary of the church’s vocation in under the rubric of “teaching.”

Even in the book where Jesus is most centrally depicted as “teacher,” and where the disciples are entrusted with carrying forward the teaching ministry of Jesus, they are not told to “go teach doctrine,” but instead, “Go… teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”

Doctrine is important. What we believe can delineate the saving story of God in which we are enveloped and within which we find our salvation.

However, the end of the church is not teaching, but obedience to what we are taught; not obeying the mandate to teach true doctrine, but the mandate to live a whole life following in the way and submitted to the instruction of the Teacher.

There is a rise in the love of old things in the church these days. Some people falling in love with the Reformers and their theology, some people falling in love with the church fathers; everyone falling in love with the liturgy.

The old things are good!

But there is a danger here that in getting wrapped up in the ancients we will get wrapped up in their fights; that in getting wrapped up in the controversies that lent them their identities we will wrap our own up in affirming the answers to the questions they gave.

We become the church that believes, and confesses through its practice, that our identity and highest calling is to teach true doctrine. And on the way to our theology classes, ancient texts clutched close to our breasts, we bless the homeless on the street: peace be upon you! be warm and well fed!

This is where I think Barth is dangerous: in affirming as the core of our identity the mistake that many of us, academics like my self most of all, are prone to fall into. Teaching is not what makes the church the church.

The self-giving love of Jesus has that honor, and our highest calling is to embody that story in our life together.

Norming Theology

December 2, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Yes, I’m a week behind in the Barth reading, but come on–only 40 pages left and we’re done for the year!

Today we get to digest Barth’s section entitled, “The Dogmatic Norm” (§23.2).

How is Dogmatics “normed,” how is it judged, what is its basis? 1. Scripture. 2. Confession. 3. Current-Day Church.

This chapter contains so much of what I love about Barth, and also so much about what I think needs to be reevaluated as we think about doing theology in a postmodern context.

Barth’s insistence that theology must listen, and be part of the church, not standing over it or over scripture, continues to summon us to a humble posture in how we articulate and hold our theology. Dogmatics is always a church dogmatics: it works within the church, building on the given of Jesus Christ as the Word of God.

Thus, it will never make the mistake of trying to say things generally true about God, will not deny that God has revealed himself, will never attempt to make up a theology to God “from below.” We receive the grace of God, and this posture of reception from God that lies at the heart of the gospel continues to define our posture as we enter the world of theologizing.

Biblical dogmatics witnesses to Jesus, just as the biblical writers did. Barth is correct here that dogmatics is not simply exegesis, but moves beyond exegesis to say what we must say today based on what the apostles and prophets said back then. Biblical dogmatics is a response to revelation.

The confessional attitude is where I start getting uneasy.

On the one hand, I like that Barth demands that we take what we actually believe with utmost seriousness.

It is only where adversaries are opposed with genuine dogmatic intolerance that there is the possibility of genuine and profitable discussion. For it is only there that one confession has something to say to another.

And, I confess to enjoying his pot-shot at the conservative Reformed tradition that treated him with such disdain:

I betray no secret in alluding to the fundamental (and, if I may say so, mutual) aversion which exists between the “historical” Calvinism that follows in the footsteps of A. Kuyper and the Reformed theology represented here.

But that pot-shot actually brings us to the problem.

Barth insists that true dogmatics must be Evangelical Dogmatics, and that it must be Reformed Evangelical Dogmatics.

He will not allow that there is a general Christian dogmatics that is not, at the same time, an Evangelial Dogmatics. While he concedes that Lutherans and Anglicans are also Evangelical in this sense, he sees their positions as errors within the true church, while he sees Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, no less than Neo-Protestantism, as heresies to be condemned.

Barth goes on, “we cannot be indefinitely content with doctrinal differences in the Church, for every difference of this kind has the character of a defect” (835).

So here’s the rub:

(1) Barth displays some of the arrogance that so often makes me wary, now, of the Reformed tradition. The notion that we have the truth in trust for the rest of the world to come around to, is exceedingly arrogant, and I think betrays Barth’s better theological instincts. But this is related to…

(2) I’m not sure that we can continue to say that every difference is a defect. The God who is One is also the God who is Three. The one gospel is depicted for us in four different gospels. The Bible that tells us that none can pluck any from Jesus’ hand also tells us that those enlightened by the Spirit might fall away never to return.

Diversity is an inherent part of Christianity, and has been from the very beginning. From the time that Jewish Christians were keeping Kosher while gentiles celebrated their feasts with bacon, Jesus has been worshiped in sundry manners.

Barth rightly concludes with an insistence that we cannot continue to simply say what has been said in the past. Dogmatics is for the church today. But once we’ve said this, we may also find ourselves saying that the dividing lines of old, and the fortresses of old, are not the ways to best answer the question, “Who do you say that I am,” or to respond to the summons, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Listening Teachers

November 11, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

The church’s task is, above all, to listen. The task of the church’s dogmatics is to stand under the word of God in giving stage direction to the church’s drama. And if it stands under the Word, it must continually listen to that word afresh, or else risk falling into the inevitable reality of straying from God’s word.

That’s my summary of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics §23.1.

Barth takes hold of the grace and promise of God, that God has not only spoken in the Word that is Jesus and the Word that is the Bible,

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

but will continue to speak the Word in the church. Those three dynamics of God’s speech are believed, clung to, passionately asserted.

This means that true Dogmatics is possible.

And and the same time, Barth stands with open eyes among people who can only speak and act aright because they are recipients of the grace of God. We receive grace, even the grace of truth, and mix our conceit, our love of the dogma more than the God about whom it speaks, and what was pure, if for a minute, becomes impure in our hands and in fresh need of the grace of God.

This means that a true Dogmatics will never become a possession that the church can cling to.

Barth’s recounting of how the church does theology calls it to keep listening, to be ready to hear from its dogmatics that everything it is doing demands repentance. It demands that we continue to be the church whose foundational calling is to speak not what had to be said to the church of times past, but to the church and place and time in which we find ourselves summoned to speak.

Because God has promised to speak, our “only resource is to seize the weapon of continually listening.”

Yes.

I continue to harbor my concern that dogmatics as speaking correctly about God takes too central a role in Barth’s understanding of the church’s calling. In the face of various heresies that the church has faced, stood against in the hope of God’s promise to speak in the church, Barth claims, “the existence of an orderly Church dogmatics is the unfailingly effective and only possible instrument of peace in the church” (807).

As much I like what Barth is calling us to in our theological articulations, I continue to worry that “Word” has taken too central a place, and that “deed” takes too secondary a role in establishing the church’s faithfulness, identity, and peace.

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