bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 8:21 am
"God comes forward to be man's Saviour. This presupposes... that man cannot be helped in any other way"
"It is not merely that man lacks something which he ought to be or to have or to be capable of in relation to God. He lacks everything"
"The few that find this way... are those who are chosen by God and who are therefore enabled to find what the many do not find"
"Blessed are the poor in spirit... this poverty, true & saving despair, is the gift of the Holy Spirit, the work of Jesus Christ"
"this has nothing to do with a magical invasion of the interrelated totality of our psycho-psychical life by supernatural forces" huh?
"the need for God is known only by the children of God"
"our participation in [the work of God] does not depend upon our fitness for this work... It rests upon the forgiveness of sins."
"only one thing is required of us. As those who cannot do it of ourselves... we have to participate when the Word does it"
"This burden... of my own & others' sins, does not lie upon me. It lies solely and entirely upon Jesus Christ, upon the Word of God"
(2) "... completely himself and not a cast, and yet completely represents the form and the way of the master and not a caricature"
(1) "no other master has the power to subordinate another man to his direction and leadership in such a way that the latter is ..."
no other master...
Barth: CD I/2 §16.2
To have our master unavoidably in Jesus Christ is to be subjected to a definite formation and direction. We can adapt ourselves to other masters. We can imitate them. We can model ourselves after them, or even on the caricature of them. No other master has the power to subordinate another man to his direction and leadership in such a way that the latter is completely himself and not a cast, and yet completely represents the form and the way of the master and not a caricature... The formation and direction of a man by the Word of God, which becomes a reality with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, has nothing to do with imitation. We must again insist that under this formation and direction, man remains the man he is. His own nature and thinking and willing and feeling, both in general and in detail, is not lost. But in the light of this his own being, he remains a sinner before God. Yet this very being of his as a sinner before God is subjected to the Word of God, and is therefore formed and directed by that Word. And because the subordination and therefore the formation and direction are perfect, there takes place at this point what imitation intends but can never achieve: the master acquires a pupil, a servant, a scholar, a follower, in whom he finds himself again, and in whom, accordingly he, the master, can also be found again by others.
How perfectly put, how beautifully understood!
exceptionalist justice
NT Wright, on recent events:
Consider the following scenario. A group of Irish republican terrorists carries out a bombing raid in London. People are killed and wounded. The group escapes, first to Ireland, then to the US, where they disappear into the sympathetic hinterland of a country where IRA leaders have in the past been welcomed at the White House. Britain cannot extradite them, because of the gross imbalance of the relevant treaty. So far, this seems plausible enough.But now imagine that the British government, seeing the murderers escape justice, sends an aircraft carrier (always supposing we've still got any) to the Nova Scotia coast. From there, unannounced, two helicopters fly in under the radar to the Boston suburb where the terrorists are holed up. They carry out a daring raid, killing the (unarmed) leaders and making their escape. Westminster celebrates; Washington is furious.
What's the difference between this and the recent events in Pakistan? Answer: American exceptionalism. America is subject to different rules to the rest of the world. By what right? Who says?
via guardian.co.uk.
I think Wright is wrong when he implies that US:Pakistan::UK:US
Well, perhaps not wrong... mere exaggeration?
Or perhaps I don't understand the realities of the IRA when compared to al-Qa'ida.
In any case, he makes a depressing point. Who decides what is terrorism, and what is justifiable action against it? I find myself in agreement with the action taken by the US in Abbottabad (for complicated reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that I'm Indian and grew up with a certain unfortunate perspective on Pakistan...), while grieving the real complexity of evil and our hopelessly wrong, inherently subverted & evil-multiplying attempts to defeat violence with more violence.
Revelation, reason, wisdom & love have long since departed this discourse, and all that's left is the rhetoric of power, politics, deception & hatred.
מרנא תא
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 10:13 am
"the virgin birth at the opening & the empty tomb at the close... bear witness that this life... is marked off from all the rest"
"[the church] is not created, formed & introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority & insight"
"in face of such a church [man initiated] we... must appeal to the free grace of God to be made blessed outside of it"
"a church of that description is not the Church but the work of sin, of apostasy in the Church"
"with God all things are possible, and with us at least very many" barthian humor?
"the revelation of God in its subjective reality [is] the existence of men who have been led by God himself to a certain conviction"
"the work of the Holy Spirit is that our blind eyes are opened &... in thankful self-surrender we recognize & acknowledge it: Amen"
Barth is either impossibly narrow or impossibly broad. can't yet figure it out. no worries, still have 8000p left. all in good time.
maybe that's where wisdom lies. in the tension between impossibly narrow & impossibly broad. or the harmony thereof. Paul, anyone?
"when we ask how a man comes to hear the Word of God, to believe in Christ... at once we must turn and point to the inconceivable..."
"the Word creates the fact that we hear the Word. Jesus Christ creates the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ"
"true preaching from the Holy Spirit will not consist in pointing to our own or other men's seizure, but to the divine seizing"
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.