bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 12:10 pm
"what in the OT (the expectation) was God's covenant with man, is here in the NT (the fulfillment) God's becoming man"
"To the protest of the Synagogue we can and must reply unreservedly that God's becoming man is the goal of the Old Testament"
"...there ceases to exist in the NT the manifold and multiform office of men of God, the instruments of the covenant"
"the whole problem of the OT is compressed into the twofold question as to why it goes so ill with this people, & why it is so evil"
"it is only because Jesus lives that His cross is the sign under which His Church marches"
"against the whole unending burden... stand the words: it is finished"
"in the most artless possible way all the NT Easter narratives fail to supply... an account of the resurrection itself"
"not a line of the real NT can be properly understood unless it is read as ... the witness to hope"
"Christ is always He who stands at the door and knocks, & faith is always the decision in which a man opens to Him that He may enter"
"as Christians and theologians we do not reject the description of Mary as the 'mother of God'..."
"Mariology is an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought. Excrescences must be excised"
salman khan
In an undistinguished ranch house off the main freeway of Silicon Valley, in a converted walk-in closet filled with a few hundred dollars' worth of video equipment and bookshelves and his toddler's red Elmo underfoot, is the epicenter of the educational earthquake that has captivated Gates and others. It is here that Salman Khan produces online lessons on math, science, and a range of other subjects that have made him a web sensation.
via CNN.
Like so many entrepreneurial epiphanies, Khan's came by accident. Born and raised in New Orleans -- the son of immigrants from India and what's now Bangladesh -- Khan was long an academic star. With his MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science. He also was the president of his MIT class and did volunteer teaching in nearby Brookline for talented children, as well as developed software to teach children with ADHD. What he doesn't know he picks up from endless reading and cogitation: His gift, like that of many teachers, is being able to reduce the complex. "Part of the beauty of what he does is his consistency," says Gates. Of Khan's capacity to teach, Gates, who says he spends considerable time trying to help his three kids learn the basics of math and science, tells Fortune, "I kind of envy him."
Micah & I are thoroughly enjoying Sal's pedagogy. He makes the basics crystal clear. In any field, gaining a deeply intuitive feel for the fundamentals is everything - the complexities are only impossibly or confusingly complex when the fundamentals aren't really understood. And teaching the basics well is very difficult - I myself haven't the patience or ability. And so, I'm incredibly grateful for Sal.
Micah says: this is simply not fair - he's making school-stuff exciting and fun!
in search of gladness
Tony Woodlief in Image:
It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs.It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can hope is that if the second half doesn’t bring redemption, perhaps it will bring something different than what I have lived thus far.
I don’t tell them this, because young people don’t want to hear about your mistakes, other than the salacious details. Our mistakes are usually more interesting to us, and they don’t help anyone anyway; mostly we each commit our sins thinking we are doing right, or that we can’t bear for another second whatever it is that’s crushing us. What good is someone’s else’s cautionary tale in the face of false virtue or aching hunger?
via Andrew Sullivan.
So I warn them that while I have hopes for them, my greatest hope is that they can live better lives than I.
Then I direct them to the words of Frederick Buechner.
I love Fred. More than once, when I’d thought too long about where I could go to put my 9 mm in my mouth, how I might arrange it so my children wouldn’t be the ones to find the corpse, it was Buechner’s words that assuaged my impulse to self-destruction.
Buechner, who found the body of his own father, a suicide. Sweet, tortured Buechner, the minister who does not preach in a church, but in pages.
The particular words of Buechner’s to which I direct them concern vocation. What he says is that our vocation is that place where our deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger. “In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.”
These are scandalous notions, that we need to be glad, that the world needs our gladness. Our Puritan forbears were certainly suspicious of gladness, and their modern, secular inheritors of grimness—professors and politicians and preachers—demand not gladness, but utility.
Finally:
Do you know what brings you gladness?
It would be a pity to reach the end of this life not having known, not having stretched out our hands toward the gladness for which we were surely crafted. But it’s a frightening thing, to look fully at our work and relationships and amusements, to gauge whether they bring us true gladness, or just momentary respite from fear, from hurt, from regret.
So here’s my offer to you, dear stranger: I’ll look if you look.
And may we each have the courage to embrace what is good for us, what draws us nearer to ourselves and to God, no matter from what it draws us away. Because if we don’t find our gladness, and pursue it to the deep-running needs of this world, how will our children ever know to do the same?
I just returned from a bike ride with Micah. That makes me glad, every time.
heresy & love
I don't always see things the way Greg Boyd does (though I love his clear and articulate voice), but in this he is spot-on:
Christians are known in the broader society for a lot of things, but their depth of love for one another — let alone for “sinners” and “enemies” — doesn’t make the list (see Kinnaman & Lyons, UnChristian). In this light, the beautiful vision of the Church that Jesus expressed in his prayer on the night he was betrayed — the vision of a Church that reflects the perfect love of the triune God — almost sounds comical.So what should we do? Whatever else might be said, I honestly don’t believe we’ll even begin to move in the right direction until we resolve that loving one another (and everyone else) is a higher priority than proving, protecting and enforcing the rightness of our doctrines.
I’m almost certain someone just now had the thought — “Here we go again, compromising correct doctrine in the name of love. More fluffy, post-modern, sentimental garbage!” Was I right?
The thing is, there’s absolutely nothing fluffy, post-modern or sentimental about placing love above doctrinal correctness, for this conviction permeates the NT! Truth be told, we shouldn’t even contrast “love” and “doctrinal correctness” in the first place. We should rather regard the command to love as the most foundational doctrine of the church and thus the most important doctrine to be correct on! Peter says, “Above all, love each other deeply, for love covers a multitude of sins” (and alleged “heresies”? I Pet. 4:8, cf. Col 3:14). If love is to be placed “above all,” then there simply can’t be any other command or doctrine or agenda that competes with it for the top position. It must stand on top alone.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:07 am
"I should like... to utter an express warning against certain passages and contexts in my commentary on Romans"
"revelation will never be discovered by anyone who undertakes to arrive at a kind of timeless core by abstracting from all times..."
"revelation has its time, and only in and along with its time is it revelation"
"when I really give anyone my time, I thereby give him the last and most personal thing that I have to give at all, namely myself"
"as law, the covenant is grace, exactly as qua grace, it is law"
"it is not with pure, good, moral men that God makes & keeps covenant, but with transgressors, & incorrigible transgressors at that"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1
"...inscrutability, hiddenness is of the very essence of Him who is called God in the Bible"
"when the Bible gives an account of revelation it means to narrate history"
"the threefold yet single lordship of God as Father, Son and Spirit is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity"
"The situation would be hopeless if it were our task here to say what is really meant by 'person' in the doctrine of the Trinity"
"revealer, revelation, being revealed; holiness, mercy, love; good friday, easter, pentecost; creator, reconciler, redeemer..."
"none of the Three may be known without the other Two but each of the Three only with the other Two"
"[the Trinity] ...we should not be surprised at the incomprehensibilty in which it remains for us as it becomes comprehensible to us"
"God is unknown as our Father, as the Creator, to the degree that He is not made known by Jesus"
"Jesus did not proclaim the familiar Creator God & interpret Him by the unfamiliar name of Father. He revealed [His] unknown Father"
"God [as] Father denotes the mode of being of God in which He is the Author of His other modes of being"
"the Son is from the Father & the Spirit is from the Father & the Son, while the Father is from Himself alone"
"the Father is not only God the Creator, but with the Son and the Spirit He is also God the Reconciler & God the Redeemer"
"It would be just as improper to say that God the Father died as to say that Jesus or the Spirit of Pentecost created heaven & earth"
"this Father of His is God. He who reveals Him, then, reveals God. But who can reveal God except God Himself?"
"only the son who is already recalling his father's house knows that he is a lost son"
"reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond..."
"Jesus is the revelation of the Father and the revelation of the Father is Jesus" word.
"As we owe life to God the Creator, so we owe eternal life to God the Reconciler"
"We believe in the one Lord Jesus Christ. He has a claim on us and control over us. He commands and rules"
(3) "...in the process in which creation & sin... are not interfused but opposed even as they exist together"
(2) "He has come into being as the worm has come into being... He has come into being as man comes into being"
(1) "begotten... He has come into being in the context of sex and the nexus of the species..."
"it is not true that these names [Father & Son] are just freely chosen and in the last analysis meaningless symbols"
"We can speak of the truth only in untruth. We do not know what we are saying when we call God Father & Son"
"He is the eternal Word of the Father who speaks from all eternity, the eternal thought of the Father who thinks from all eternity"
"The Holy Spirit is the authorisation to speak about Christ... He is the summons to the Church to minister the Word"
"The Holy Spirit is the Lord who sets us free and by receiving Him we become the children of God"
"Even in receiving the Holy Spirit man remains man, the sinner sinner"
"eternity comes first and then time, therefore the future comes first and then the present..."
"God remains the Lord even and precisely when He comes into our hearts as His own gift, even and precisely when He fills us"
"No other intercedes with Him on our behalf except Himself. No other intercedes with us on His behalf except again Himself"
"The Holy Spirit is the fellowship, the act of communion, of the Father & the Son"
"The Holy Spirit is the love in which the Father loves the Son, and in which the Son loves the Father"
"[God] is the Father of the Son in such a way that with the Son He brings forth the Spirit, love, and is in Himself the Spirit, love"
Paul Lehmann: the angels are alone among God's creatures in having the time to read Barth's Dogmatics. one down, twelve to go.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1 9:44 am
"fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet"
"the sword of God's real judgment does hang over our heads when we take up and pursue this work [dogmatics/theology]"
"what finally counts is whether a dogmatics is scriptural. If it is not, then it will definitely be futile..."
"the path of Roman Catholicism & the path of Protestant Modernism differs from the path of the Evangelical Church"