bits of barth
Barth CD I/1 8:05 am
"in my work one is compelled as believer & theologian to do the impossible, namely, to jump over one's own shadow"
(3) "...a stimulation by the inner life, a basing of man's whole life on this mystery that is beyond himself"
(2) "...a making present of remote times, an obedience, a decision, a halting before the mystery..."
(1) "as man knows God's Word... there takes place an understanding, a personal involvement, an acceptance, an assent, an approval..."
"if [we] think we can handle the Word and faith like capital at our disposal, we simply prove that we have neither the Word nor faith"
"when we have them, we do not regard them as a possession but strain after them, hungering & thirsting, & for that reason blessed"
"faith is not one of the various capacities of man, whether native or acquired. capacity for the Word of God is not among these"
"the possibility of faith as it is given to man in the reality of faith... is loaned to man by God, and loaned exclusively for use"
"in faith man is capable of receiving God's Word... the Word of God is now the W heard by him & he is now the man addressed by this W"
barth & the soggy bottom boys. exclusively available at starbucks.
"he has not come to faith; faith has come to him through the Word. he has not adopted faith; faith has been granted him through the W"
"the Word of God becomes knowable by making itself known"
"what we had in view... should now have become provisionally comprehensible in all its incomprehensibility" hmm...
"even and precisely in the depths of unbelief faith hears the new summons to faith"
"to the extent another standard is applied here and not the Word of God itself, only confusion and destruction can result"
"this supreme authority which addresses the Church... is the free Bible, the Bible that remains free in face of all interpretation"
"we cannot speak as prophets or apostles. we cannot speak with the full assurance of the biblical witness: 'we beheld his glory'"
"the Word of God is above dogma as the heavens are above the earth"
"for the sake of dogma, dogmatics must deal with dogmas" :)
bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 5:28 pm
"the Lord of speech is also the Lord of our hearing. the Lord who gives the Word is also the Lord who gives faith"
bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 10:51 am
"recall John the Baptist in Grünewald's Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger"
"could anyone point away from himself more impressively & completely?"
"we do the Bible poor and unwelcome honour if we equate it directly with this other, with revelation itself"
"the direct identification between revelation and the Bible... takes place... when & where the biblical word becomes God's Word"
"thus in the event of God's Word revelation and the Bible are indeed one, and literally so"
"on the one hand Deus dixit, on the other Paulus dixit. These are two different things"
barth's gospel - http://goo.gl/kLwpR
"[the act of revelation] is the condition which conditions all things without itself being conditioned"
"to say revelation is to say: the Word became flesh" btw, I apologize (sort of) for the tweets. the practice is proving helpful for me, but I feel badly about cluttering your feed...
(2) "... both renounce any foundation apart from that which God has given once and for all by speaking."
(1) "As the Bible bears witness to God's revelation and as Church proclamation takes up this witness in obedience..."
"[the Word of God] is one and the same whether we understand it as revelation, Bible or proclamation"
"the revealed Word of God we know only from the Scriptures adopted by Church proclamation"
"the written Word of God we know only through the revelation which fulfills proclamation"
"the preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture"
"revelation, Scripture, proclamation : Father, Son, Holy Spirit"
"the Word of God has natural force too. but primarily & preeminently & decisively it has the simple spiritual power of truth."
"He is Lord of the wording of His Word. He is not bound to it but it to Him. He can use it or not use it..."
"what Holy Scripture proclaims as His Word can be proclaimed in a new wording as His Word so long as it is He Himself who speaks..."
"when God's Word is heard & proclaimed, something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by [it]"
"this is also and especially true of preaching among both coloured and white heathens" say what?
barth's gospel
Here's a clear proclamation (CD I.1 §4.3):
God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath. God was with us in all the reality and fulness with which He does what He does. He was with us as one of us. His Word became flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. His glory was seen here in the depths of our situation, and the full depths of our situation were disclosed for the first time when illumined then and there by the Lord's glory, when in His Word He came down to the lowest parts of the earth (Eph 4:9), in order that there and in that way He might rob death of its power and bring life and immortality to light (2 Tim 1:10). This happened, and this is what the Old Testament as a word of prophecy and the New Testament as a word of fulfilment both proclaim as having happened, as having happened conclusively, totally and sufficiently.
Word.
karl barth
Eugene Peterson's "The Pastor: A Memoir" has become somewhat of a manifesto for me. Someday, I hope to write more of what it's done for me, is doing for me... Eugene's books have been my sanity - a true lamp to my pastoral feet - time and time again. Once, many years ago, I met him at a conference on spiritual formation in LA. But that's another story for another time.
In the meantime, I've started immersing myself in Karl Barth. I've read sizeable chunks of Barth over the years, and a lot of books about Barth and his theology (theologies? two? or three? consistent? etc). But I haven't spent much time in Barth directly, mostly because I hadn't found much that caught my heart in the bits of Barth that I'd read. Graham Tomlin once told me that I spent too much time in the secondary sources and not enough in the primary, and that's true - I've always used secondary sources to give me a sense of whether I wanted to invest time and emotional energy in the primary.
Also, Barth's lately become a touchstone of theological "cool" in some circles, and I tend to react negatively to such things, no doubt due to my finely-honed cynicism, pride and critical spirit.
And then Eugene gave me good reason to dive into Barth qua Barth. In "The Pastor", he speaks affectionately of Barth as his theologian:
He became the theologian I never had, a theologian who got me interested in God as God, not just talk about God. Franz Kafka in a letter wrote, "If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?... A book must be like an ice-axe to break the sea frozen within us." This first book of Barth's that I read was "like an ice-axe.
So... I started in on Barth's Church Dogmatics last week. If there's one theologian I really need to know well, it's my pastor's theologian.
And to keep myself reflecting on what I'm reading, I'm both tweeting and writing here on bits and fragments that I'd like to reflect on, thoughts and phrases that seem representative of Barth, critical to his argument such as I understand it.
bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 12:17 am
"we stand before the fact of heresy. concretely, we stand before the fact of Roman Catholicism..."
"not all human talk is talk about God. it could be and should be. there is no reason in principle why it should not be"
"if the social work of the church as such were to try to be proclamation, it could only become propaganda..."
"God may suddenly be pleased to have Abraham blessed by Melchizedek, or Israel blessed by Balaam or helped by Cyrus"
"He can establish the church anew and directly when and where and how it pleases Him"
"if the question what God can do forces theology to be humble, the question what is commanded of us forces it to concrete obedience"
"God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog"
"proclamation... is always and always will be man's word. when and where it pleases God, it is God's own Word"
"nor can one see in the Asiatic crudities of Bolshevic ideology a rival which is even remotely a match for the Church's proclamation"
"the central factum on which dogmatics focuses will always be quite simply the Church's Sunday sermon of yesterday & tomorrow"
"the simplest proclamation of the Gospel can be proclamation of the truth in the most unlimited sense..." (1)
"... and can validly communicate the truth to the most unsophisticated hearer if God so will" (2)
"without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding, the vulnerability... it could not be real proclamation"
"the Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it"
ζωὴν αἰώνιον
reading, reflectinglistening, communing practicing, becoming • failing, receiving recovering, returning • not hurrying • settling into eternity.