Tag Archive - scripture

On Trusting the Bible

January 3, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 33 Comments

Funny, just yesterday I post a few musings about what might be hot topics, I sort of give B list status to “what’s the Bible and what are we supposed to do about it,” and then the onslaught.

First, there was Rachel Held Evans’ indication that this is going to be a big topic for her this year: we need to learn to love the Bible we actually have.

Then there was an email message from someone taking a church history course that had come to the point of dealing with Neoorthodoxy and Karl Barth in particular.

Here’s how it’s all connected.

The student taking the church history class was getting an assessment of Neo-Orthodoxy from a prof at a school with an inerrancy statement. So there’s a presumption of a high view of scripture here–which is a point at which more conservative Evangelicals have routinely chided the Neo-Orthodox.

A summary of his assessment was this: the Neo-Orthodox were reacting against historical Jesus scholarship, and separated actual history from interpreted history. In retreating from actual history, Barth, Bultmann and Brunner severed the link between what actually happened and scripture. As a historian, this prof says that we have to affirm the actual history relayed in the text.

Here are a few thoughts: first, Barth and Bultmann were doing very different projects. Bultmann was moving away from a historicized Jesus in favor of a demythologized Jesus who confronts believers in an existential moment of decision. He is intentionally recontextualizing Jesus into the framework provided by existentialism.

Barth was doing something very different, inasmuch as he was calling the church back to scripture as the authoritative witness to Jesus as the incarnate word of God.

But here’s the more important point for today’s discussion: the inerrantist church history professor is calling us to a Jesus we have no access to, in denial of the Bible we actually have, in order to uphold his “high view” of scripture.

In reaffirming the centrality of the historical Jesus, the professor has done several things at once. First, he has affirmed the centrality of a kind of access to Jesus that God has not seen fit to give to the church. We do not have a historical Jesus record, we have theologically crafted narratives that interpret Jesus for the church.

Second, in so affirming this need, he denies the sufficiency of the Bible we actually have. Barth was right: the Gospels are witnesses to the incarnate logos, and this is what God has given us. To insist on the centrality of the historical Jesus is not only to clamor for what we do not have, it is to misunderstand the nature of the Gospels as historical documents that tell about historical events.

It’s both as historians and theologians that we must acknowledge that the Gospels are interpreted, theologically laden narratives–and that this is just what God wanted us to have.

Ironically, the conservative rejection of Neo-Orthodoxy in the name of a “high” view of scripture, at least in the case of Barth, ends up as a rejection of the Bible we actually have in favor of a man-made construct that does not match up with it.

We do not need to fear the theologically-laden, deeply interested, and individually shaped narratives of Jesus that God has given us. We need to find ways to celebrate that our God has given us precisely this Bible rather than the one we so often would prefer.

What’s On Your Plate?

January 2, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 14 Comments

Slowing the blogging pace and stepping back for a week or two over the holidays, I started to think about what streams of conversation are flowing with particular force these days.

Over the past couple of years there have been emergent or missional conversations that always provided ready fodder for conversation. But those streams have largely dried up as ever-present conversation pieces.

Here are a couple of things that strike me as continuing points of interest as I scan the blogosphere. But I’d also love to hear from you: what are you thinking about and finding yourself in vigorous conversation about as you strive to work out what it looks like to faithfully follow Jesus in 2012?

  1. The Gospel. I know that sounds rather broad and… well… settled, but here’s what I mean: in the more or less evangelical circles in which I run, we are finding a good deal of traction in conversations that press us to articulate a holistic gospel that affirms the “spiritual” dynamics of a restored relationship with God through the death and resurrection of Jesus while also affirming that the spiritual work of being at work in the world for the good of all God’s creatures is integral to the faith.

    Recent books by Scot McKnight, Tom Wright, and yours truly are all working to contribute to such a recalibration of the evangelical gospel, that has been too long denying what it should have been affirming (in many circles). The gospel is good news for the whole world.

  2. Human origins after evolution. As denial of evolution becomes a rallying cry for both religiously and politically conservative movements, it moves certain brands of Christianity into more of a backwater. Too many Christians now have too much education for this non-viable position to continue to hold sway among thoughtful evangelicals.

    But, this means that we are confronted with a monumental task. And here is where the conservatives are right: to affirm evolution entails a reconfiguring of the narrative of humanity in significant ways. What can Christians say about the significance of humanity’s place in the cosmos once the story of evolution displaces the story of one-off creation? What can be retained? What must be replaced? Pete Enns’ book, and the interest it is generating even prior to publication, is one piece of bookish evidence about the continuing significance of this issue.

  3. Gender in the church. Here’s one for which I have no direct evidence in terms of tell-tale books. (I apologize.) But, with the continuing surge of the neo-Reformed movement, there has been a concomitant surge theological conviction about male dominance of the church.

What do you think? Are these issues the ones that are active points of conversation in your world? Are there others? I started to wonder if “what the Bible is” might not be another significant point where evangelicals are entering a new place (cf. Christian Smith’s, The Bible Made Impossible), and if folks find themselves increasingly in conversations about sex and sexuality?

Anyone?

On Not Harmonizing

October 31, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 28 Comments

I’ve just wrapped up teaching the Synoptic Gospels part of my Gospels and Acts course. Going through the individual books, looking over proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem, and seeing how the seemingly harmonious stories portray Jesus’ ministry in quite different lights, we are left with a few conclusion that are surprising to many of us. Here are a couple:

  • The Gospel writers have different ideas about how Jesus’ death works, which means they have different ideas about how God brings salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
  • The Gospels we have used sources, including, probably, Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, and yet they felt free to change this source for various reasons, including: style, making a somewhat different point, causing the story to more clearly echo an OT antecedent, eliminating theological claims that they did not want to make, or including new theological claims that are somewhat at odds with the theological claims of the original story.

This means that there is not only a plurality of voices in the NT, there is an irreducible theological diversity.

But more importantly, this theological diversity is no accident of history but, on the human level, has been intentionally introduced into the texts we have in front of us. Luke intentionally modifies Mark (and Matthew?) to increase the continuity between the OT narrative and the work of Jesus, and to eliminate the idea of Jesus’ death procuring salvation for people as such.

Two questions came up that I think are important for us to keep working through, especially as evangelicals for whom such conclusions seem to push against our prior conception of what it means to call the Bible the word of God.

First, what does this mean for “scripture interpreting scripture”? This rule became quite popular at the time of the Reformation, or at least, if you Google “scripture interprets scripture” the people who are the most fierce advocates for the view are likely to be appealing to the Reformation traditions in their defense.

But what do we do when Luke says, “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized?

What are we to do when Mark says that you don’t put new wine in old wineskins, but Luke feels compelled to add, “No one wants new wine, old is better!”? Do we let Mark’s apparent meaning stand, where Jesus is the new wine that cannot be contained by the older Jewish practices? Or do we allow the “more clear” Lucan conclusion to change our reading?

Image: WikiBooks, Gospel of Mark ch. 8

My response: (1) allow the scripture one author wrote help interpret that author’s other passages; and (2) allow the NT’s example of rereading the OT in light of Christ to train us to reread the OT as a witness to the saving life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.

If we insist on giving the one meaning made clear by the other texts, we start to force the Bible into our preconception of what kind of Bible would be good for us, what kind of Bible would qualify as “word of God,” and in so doing we spurn the actual Bible that God did give us, and that God thought was adequate for conveying God’s word.

Question two is what do we do with this stuff as pastors?

My answer here: it is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize that the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.

Preaching the Incomprehensible Word

October 21, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 3 Comments

Barth’s discourse on the Word of God takes its final turn when he moves to preaching as the Word of God.

He has already spoken of Christ as Word of God, and also the Bible. The question he wrestles with now is how it is that human speech about God, not the speech of the apostles and prophets but the speech of any preacher, might be the word of God.

Barth puts forward to central ideas. First, the challenge for us to speak the word of God comes from the fact of our humanity and the otherness of God as the subject about whom we would speak.

Barth Must Speak

When I was in seminary much ado was made about the “Creator-creature distinction.” The point: God is simply other. God “lives” in a way that our “living” only dimly approximates. God “is” in a way that cannot be defined or limited by “being” as we know it.

How can such a God speak within this sphere?

That’s the question of the word of God in Christian preaching–how the God who is other becomes present and revealed in human speech. This is a problem, not of human sinfulness, but of humanness as such. God is what we are not. God exists where and how we do not.

So how can we speak of God? How do we even know it’s possible?

This is a real question that haunts our modern day theological and ethical debates as much as it occupies the minds of theologians.

Ever been fighting about something (in a good way, of course) and hear (or say), “How can you even know what God thinks about that?” There’s a denial of the very possibility of revelation–that we could know what God thinks, that God could speak to us, that we could ever speak for him.

But Barth says no. This is false humility.

The Christian confession is that Jesus Christ is the very word of God. God has spoken. In time. In human space.

And the church is, at the heart of its calling, in Christ.

So the church must neither think that it can speak God’s word on its own (no, it is human and God is God), there is no room for arrogance; nor that it must wait for some special work of the Spirit (no, it has received its vocation).

Because the church is in Christ, the Christ who has come and spoken as none other than the word of God itself, it must also faithfully speak the word of God, and hear the word preached as the word of God.

Barth once again places the Christ event at the center. The coming of Jesus shows us the possibility by which we know everything else that is possible. Because God has spoken, in Christ and the Bible, we must speak as well.

On Reading the Bible

October 16, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 5 Comments

Barth finishes ch. 3 of the Dogmatics with a section on reading the Bible. As we have been noting through the review of Christian Smith’s work, reading the Bible is not as straightforward as one might guess.

There is a historical sense to be had–or at least, to be approximated and approached.

But articulating what the apostles and prophets said is not the same as understanding what those words entail, and it is not the same as being transformed in our whole way of life by them.

Barth insists that the act of biblical interpretation must, then, not only be a practice of articulating what the text meant, but of actively engaging that text as witness to the Word of God. We have not “read” if we have not been changed, made obedient, transformed in mind and heart.

What about the theologies and philosophies we bring with us? Barth recognizes that we all bring a philosophy of our own day and time with us. Somewhat surprisingly, but quite realistically, he does not demand the (futile) attempt to set these aside.

Instead, we should recognize that each philosophy has the ability to be taken hold of by the grace of God and made an instrument for communicating the word; and, each philosophy has the ability to become an idolatrous substitute, determining in advance what the word must conform to.

And when we say, “philosophy” here, we also mean “theological system.”

The church is free under the word so long as it reads and listens to that word, listening in the sense of being taken hold of by it and willing to have its prior understandings transformed by the voice of God speaking in scripture.

The ideas Barth hits on here continue to be important: is historical critical reading of the Bible sufficient? what about praxis in response to what we’ve read? do we bring a strong paradigm that controls what the scriptures can say?

Biblical scholarship (and, indeed, the church at large) has not yet embodied a viable solution to these questions. And we might anticipate that there will not be one final solution–because this itself would, no doubt, turn into yet another version of that controlling idol that attempts to constrain the voice of God speaking through scripture.

Bible Made Impossible: Final Reflections

October 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 8 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been offering my engagements with Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

You can find the first four installments here (pt 1), here (pt 2), here (pt 3), and here (pt 4).

My enthusiasm for Smith’s assessment and proposal continues in this final installment. He has put his finger on the problematic treatment of the Bible in evangelical circles, calling out the ways in which its understanding of scripture is insufficiently biblical, and insufficiently defined by the gospel.

Chapter 6, “Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity,” is bookended by two fantastic paragraphs that clearly articulate the problems with “evangelical biblicism”:

Ironcially, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to try to make it something that it evidently is not. (127)

And then this:

The Anglican divine Richard Hooker put this well when he said about the Bible, “We must… take great heed, lest, in attributing unto scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed.” In other words, the more we try to make the Bible say allegedly important things that are in fact subsidiary, nonbinding, or perhaps not even clearly taught, the more we risk detracting form the crucial, central message of the Bible about God reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ. (148)

Biblicism, by insisting on the equality of every chapter and verse, creates a world in which everything we believe takes on equal significance. Deny the necessity of homeschooling and you’ve rejected the gospel. The importance of the Christological hermeneutic is that it allows back seat issues to stay in the back seat.

A final chapter from Smith works hard to articulate a third way between the conservative posture of biblicism and the strategies of liberalism or full-blown postmodernism. It is important for readers to appreciate that critical realism is, in fact, a true third way. No doubt it will be described as opening the back door for liberalism by many who hold to the position Smith wishes to advance. But that is plain wrong.

This final contribution is an accessible crash-course in hermeneutics and has the power to destabalize how we think about the Bible as an authoritative text. How do we, in fact, condemn slavery as morally reprehensible when the biblical writers seem so accepting of it? There are good reasons for our difference–and these are instructive for us when we think about what the Bible is and what we should be doing with it.

Smith’s book comes on the scene at an opportune time. As the evangelical right tightens its grip on evangelicalism more broadly, an tremendous number of believers are slipping through their fingers. Whether the conservative resurgence shows itself to be less-than-biblical because of a particular issue (e.g., the earth’s being 6,000 years old) or because of a holistic and yet inconsistent way of attempting to apply the Bible as an equally authoritative voice to all of life, those who leave biblicist worlds behind are reconfiguring what it means to confess that the Bible is the word of God.

So even though Smith will not doubt become another point at which the biblicist world points to encroaching liberalism and thereby solidifies anew its identity over against “them,” it also provides an invaluable tool to those who know that the biblicist Bible is, in fact, impossible–but who continue to believe that the Bible we have is, in fact, the word of God given to bear witness to the Word of God.

Then & There, Here & Now

October 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 22 Comments

A friend recently gave me the heads up on an article in the Harvard Theological Review by Paul E. Capetz entitled, “Theology and the Historical-Critical Study of the Bible” (HTR 104 (2011): 459-88). It is a lengthy engagement with three advocates of Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Brevard Childs, Christopher Seitz, and Dale Martin.

Capetz writes from the standpoint of an avowedly liberal theological tradition, and asks why it is that otherwise critically-engaged scholars insist on setting aside critical scholarship when it comes to moving into theology for the church.

He contends that the move from critical to theological exegesis is arbitrary and muddy–and that it does not in fact honor the tradition of the church which it seeks to uphold. For instance: is it really honoring the “orthodox” forebears of the Christian tradition if we simultaneously say, “Yes, they were right that God is Triune” but then in the next breath say, “But no, Paul isn’t a Trinitarian–in fact, he’s a subordinationist” (478-79)?

Are we really honoring the tradition when we, on historical-critical grounds, affirm the exegesis of the heretics while simultaneously affirming the theological conclusions of the proponents of orthodoxy?

These are the very real questions that beset historical-critical study of the Bible. These are the types of issues that have left many snubbing biblical scholarship as useless for the church’s faith, and has led others to conclude that there is no faith worth finding in the Bible.

To my mind, all of this brings us back around to the question Christian Smith is rightly pressing in his book: what does the reality of the struggles entailed in reading the Bible tell us about what the Bible is and thus what we should be doing with it?

Not so incidentally, this is why I also have chosen a narrative model for making sense of both scripture and Christian theology. We need a model for thinking about who we are, and what our book is, that makes room for development, change, and even contradiction.

I find myself drawn in both directions in this debate that Capetz articulates. On the one hand, I agree that one of the most significant things that historical-critical scholarship helps us to is a better reading of the texts. Unlike Capetz, I agree that these texts are the normative rule of faith and life for the church.

Thus, the historical-critical study provides one piece of evidence, one point on the line of the developing narrative that the church continues to live in today.

But historical criticism will not frame its work within a self-consciously Christian narrative. And that is where we must allow it to claim to be an end in itself. Or, better, we must not allow the constraints of segmented OT and NT disciplines to segment the implications of NT historical-critical work. In the latter we discover a practice of rereading the OT in light of the fulfillment of Israel’s story in Christ–a fulfillment that negates many alternative would-be endings to the story than a first OT audience might have anticipated.

So where does that leave us? I want to keep trying to hold the two together as two different players in the same drama of biblical interpretation: the historical critic tells us what the text might have meant to an early, historically contextualized audience, the Christian commitment summons us to contextualize, realize, and sometimes relativize the on-going significance of that text in light of the later, decisive moment of the story and our own continuing participation in it.

Stop With the Impossible Bible, Already! (pt. 2)

October 8, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 8 Comments

In this, our second installment in review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, I wish to begin by underscoring that he is not dealing with “strawmen,” as has been suggested in the comments to installment one. He does not insist that all 10 of his descriptions of evangelical biblicism are present in any one person’s thinking; he does, however, demonstrate that these are the kinds of assumptions driving not only popular but also scholarly engagements with Christian issues.

On the level of popular slogans, we have everything from “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!” to “Vote Responsibly–Vote the Bible!” to “Confused? Read the Directions! [picture of the Bible]” Evangelical biblicism is reflected throughout its kitsch culture (pp. 7-8).

Of course, it is elaborated at greater length in books: Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions, Biblical Principles for Starting and Operating a Business, How to Make Choices you Won’t Regret, Esther’s Secrets of Womanhood (pp. 8-10). The point: we treat the Bbile like it’s about everything–a handbook that answers all our questions. We treat the Bible like it’s a clear, direct word from God to us about how to live our lives. These assumptions are upheld by others such as, “If we read the Bible aright, it can perform this function for us.”

In the more technical theological realm, the idea of scripture’s unity and internal consistency are the points that come more to the fore, but still in ways that lead one to think that the Bible should be able to be heard with relative clarity on all that it speaks of. In particular, biblical statements about the Bible deny contradiction in scripture (which must all be consistent because it is God’s word, after all), or state that anything we need to know is either laid down in scripture or may be deduced by good and necessary consequence.

In fact, the more theological sophisticated versions make the Bible less a practical handbook for daily living and more a box of puzzle pieces to be rightly ordered into a system of doctrine. Both, however, depend on the same way of understanding the Bible as the word of God.

So what’s the problem with all this?

The single greatest problem Smith sees is proliferating interpretive pluaralism. In other words: people don’t agree with each other on what the Bible says. Not only this, they don’t agree about what the Bible says about significant, defining issues of faith and practice. This is because the Bible is not, in fact, univocal on important issues.

Here again, Smith points to publishing. You know all those awesome and helpful “Four Views” or “Three Views” books? Their very existence is an exhibition of the irreducible interpretive pluralism that will always beset the church so long as it thinks that “just believing the Bible” is what is required for faith and practice.

Note how important the topics covered are: Atonement, Baptism, the Doctrine of God (!), Hell, Divorce and Remarriage, The Lord’s Supper, Historical Jesus, War, Women in Ministry, Predestination, Christ (!).

So besides, Jesus, God, and how the cross works, we agree on all the “important” stuff?!

Smith insists, and he is correct, that at the root of this is a way of seeing and understanding what the Bible is, which is demonstrated to be false because we who read the Bible with honesty and integrity cannot agree on what it says. The theory is rendered false by the results it has produced.

Next time, we’ll look at how a theory that is falsified daily manages to keep such a strong hold on the church and also survey some of the other problems with evangelical biblicism.

You Have to Read the Bible

October 7, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

Yesterday we started a review of Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, today we return to Barth’s exposition of reading and applying the Bible in the church. Whereas Smith’s contention is that certain evangelical ways of thinking about the Bible make such a Bible, literally, impossible, Barth maintains that God himself has made communication with people possible, and that it is through our taking up the task of reading and interpreting the Scriptures that such a possibility becomes actualized.

In other words, this is Barth’s “The Bible Made Possible” chapter. I have a hunch that it will be more than a little related to Smith’s proposed solution to evangelical biblicism, but only time will tell.

As usual, Barth sets his sights in two different directions and asks his readers to follow him in insisting that the way forward is not a “happy medium,” but instead a robust affirmation of both. Thus, there is a freedom in God’s grace of revelation that must meet with a freedom in human response.

Moreover, this whole bit about our freedom to respond gets worked from both angles. Keeping our engagement with scripture always within the framework of salvation by grace, Barth demands that we neither over-estimate the natural quality of the person who hears and receives the word of God nor underestimate the reality of this experience.

We don’t receive because we are better, nor because we are worse; we are not to take pride in the reception, nor to grow cynical at someone else’s story.

Throughout, the freedom for the word calls us to take seriously that freedom for the word is freedom for the Word who is Jesus Christ, the revelation of God.

At one point I was wondering if Barth was buying into some of the evangelical biblicism that Smith confronts in his book. But after speaking of the clarity and perspicuity of the word of God, Barth then goes on to say, Of course, this perfectly clear word of God is communicated by means of the words of men.

There is always mediation. There is always, therefore, the need to try to understand what was said, and how that saying of then and there must be said now and here if it is to be understood, and if the word of God to which it bears witness can be made known.

We have a job to do: we must participate in the interpretation of the word which is scripture in order that the word which is Jesus might be made known and obeyed. And we must exercise our freedom, under the word of God, to respond in faithful obedience. This response of faithfulness is inseparable from the practice of exegesis.

And, perhaps most importantly, it is not simply that we are free and that we believe. It is faith in Christ that drives and makes possible all appropriation of the biblical text. I might say here that the faith of Christ makes all this possible. Barth draws us back to Golgotha as the place where each of us comes to our own experience of God’s salvation.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure that everyone wrestling with critical scholarship, theological appropriation of the text, and related issues as a Christian should read both volumes of CD 1.

Bible Without Fundamentalism

September 30, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

Is it possible to be continually seeking scripture as the rule for faith and practice without becoming a “fundamentalist”? (And by fundamentalist, here, I mean what we all usually mean: someone to the right of us theologically whom we don’t particularly like.)

I wrestle with this question a great deal. I believe in the normativity of scripture for governing Christian faith and life, but I also recognize that the church has to continue listening afresh, and not allow itself to think that repeating the words of an earlier generation will maintain its vitality or faithfulness to God.

Here is where Karl Barth’s pervasive insistence on the active grace of God can come into play, driving us back to the text, yes, but doing so to listen afresh for the word of God to become living and active in our sphere.

Barth allows the old music to speak through fresh means

Church Dogmatics ยง21.1 is devoted to “The Freedom of the Word.” Here, as so often, Barth has his gaze cast in two seemingly opposite directions at once: the Roman Catholic Church and Modern Protestantism.

To those who have a strong sense of both tradition and ecclesial authority as such, Barth has a strong word of caution that we must not think that ossified statements of theology or church law will be for us the voice of God. The word is free within the church to command the church. The word of God cannot be controlled.

And, if the church decides to listen to itself rather than the word, then it has failed to be the true church–the place where God speaks and reveals.

This, then, becomes a word of warning for liberal Protestantism that looks too much to human effort in historical criticism or human activity in the world in general and fails to recognize both that the Word of God comes in the freedom of God, and that God has chosen the sphere of the church as the sphere of revelation.

These words of warning reach out to the would-be evangelical church as well.

We, no less than the Roman Catholic church, think that our tradition of biblical interpretation is, itself, what the Bible says. But we must not allow that to keep us from returning to the Bible as the sphere within which God is free to speak in such a way as to shatter what we thought we knew. We, no less than neo-Protestantism, must not think that our own mastery of the grammar and history and archaeology of scripture will dictate for us what God would say to the church.

So while the complaint of folks to the right has often been that Barth’s doctrine of scripture undermines its objective reality as the word of God, the response of Barth that scripture maintains its role as subject that speaks the word of God is more than compelling. It leaves scripture in the hand of God–never to be mastered by us, but always in a position to master us, and speak to us, and command obedience from us, afresh.

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