public faith
A beautiful & brilliant account of why & how to confess our faith in public, with confidence & humility. Barth, CD I/2, p.588-589:
...the Church is constituted as the Church by a common hearing and receiving of the Word of God... The life of the Church is the life of the members of a body. Where there is any attempt to break loose from the community of hearing and receiving necessarily involved, any attempt to hear and receive the Word of God in isolation - even the Word of God in the form of Holy Scripture - there is no Church, and no real hearing and receiving of the Word of God; for the Word of God is not spoken to individuals, but to the Church of God and to individuals only in the Church. The Word of God itself, therefore, demands this community of hearing and receiving. Those who really hear and receive it do so in this community. They would not hear and receive it if they tried to withdraw from this community.
But this common action is made concrete in the Church's confession. We will take the concept first in its most general sense. Confession in the most general sense is the accounting and responding which in the Church we owe one another and have to receive from one another in relation to the hearing and receiving of the Word of God. Confessing is the confirmation of that common action. I have not heard and received alone and for myself, but as a member of the one body of the Church. In confessing, I make known in the Church the faith I have received by and from the Word of God. I declare that my faith cannot be kept to myself as though it were a private matter. I acknowledge the general and public character of my faith by laying it before the generality, the public of the Church. I do not do this to force it on the Church in the peculiar form in which I necessarily hold it, as though I were presuming either to want or be able to rule in the Church with my faith as it is mine. On the contrary, I do it to submit it to the verdict of the Church, to enter into debate with the rest of the Church about the common faith of the Church, a debate in which I may have to be guided, or even opposed and certainly corrected, i.e., an open debate in which I do not set my word on the same footing as the Word of God, but regard it as a question for general consideration according to the Word of God commonly given to the Church. But because my confession is limited in this way, I cannot refrain from confessing, I cannot bury my talent. Irrespective of what may come of it or whether it may be shown that I have received ten talents or only one - I owe it to the Church not to withhold from it my faith, which can be a true faith only in community with its own, just as conversely it cannot be too small a thing for the Church, in order to assure itself afresh of a true faith in the community of faith, in order not to miss anything in its encounter with the Word of God, to take account even of my confession of faith and to enter into a debate which is open on its side as well.
But it is obvious that before I myself make a confession I must myself have heard the confession of the Church, i.e., the confession of the rest of the Church. In my hearing and receiving of the Word of God I cannot separate myself from the Church to which it is addressed. I cannot thrust myself into the debate about a right faith which goes on in the Church without first having listened... If my confession is to have weight in the Church, it must first be weighted with the fact that I have heard the church. If I have not heard the Church, I cannot speak to it... If I am to confess my faith generally with the whole Church and in that confession be certain that my faith is the right faith, then I must begin with the community of faith and therefore hear the Church's confession of faith as it comes to me from other members of the Church. And for that very reason I recognise an authority, a superiority in the Church: namely, that the confession of others who were before me in the Church and are beside me in the Church is superior to my confession if this really is an accounting and responding in relation to my hearing and receiving.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:39 am
"If Holy Scripture is not the Word of God... it is possible to have a Church of ineffective although quite impeccable orthodoxy"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:16 am<
"Christianity has always been & only been a living religion when it is not ashamed to be actually & seriously a book-religion"
"the lame walk, the blind see, the dead are raised, sinful & erring men speak the Word of God: that is the miracle..."
barth on infallibility. he's not for it. http://goo.gl/TwJYE
barth & infallibility
Whether or not you find his position plausible, the argument seems unusually defensive. And I think he's aware of the wobbliness... An oddly atypical bit of Barth.
CD I/2, p.529-530:
...every time we turn the Word of God into an infallible biblical word of man or the biblical word of man into an infallible Word of God we resist that which we ought never to resist, i.e., the truth of the miracle that here fallible men speak the Word of God in fallible human words - and we therefore resist the sovereignty of grace, in which God Himself became man in Christ, to glorify Himself in his humanity. If we cannot make up our minds for this hard thinking, let us see to it that we are not shutting ourselves off from the real word of comfort spoken to us by the existence of the Bible as such. And if we want to assert a supposedly stricter concept of the value and authority of the Bible, let us see to it that we are not moving away from the strictness of its true value and authority. If the prophets and apostles are not real and therefore fallible men, even in their office, even when they speak and write of God's revelation, then it is not a miracle that they speak the Word of God... To the bold postulate, that if their word is to be the Word of God they must be inerrant in every word, we oppose the even bolder assertion, that according to the scriptural witness about man, which applies to them too, they can be at fault in any word, and have been at fault in every word, and yet according to the same scriptural witness, being justified and sanctified by grace alone, they have still spoken the Word of God in their fallible and erring human word. It is the fact that in the Bible we can take part in this real miracle, the miracle of the grace of God to sinners, and not the idle miracle of human words which were not really human words at all, which is the foundation of the dignity and authority of the Bible.
And then, p.531:
We are absolved from differentiating the Word of God in the Bible from other contents, infallible portions and expressions from the erroneous ones, the infallible from the fallible, and from imagining that by means of such discoveries we can create for ourselves encounters with the genuine Word of God in the Bible. If God was not ashamed of the fallibility of all the human words of the Bible, of their historical and scientific inaccuracies, their theological contradictions, the uncertainty of their tradition, and above all, their Judaism, but adopted and made use of these expressions in all their fallibility, we do not need to be ashamed when He wills to renew it to us in all its fallibility as witness, and it is mere self-will and disobedience to try to find some infallible elements in the Bible.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:11 am
"these very writings, by the very fact that they were canonical, saw to it that they were recognized and proclaimed to be canonical"
"we will not be obedient to the Church but to the Word of God, and therefore in the true sense to the Church"
"an absolute guarantee that... what we know as the Canon is closed... cannot be given by the Church"
"a biblical theology [is] a series of attempted approximations, a collection of individual exegeses. There can never be... a system"
barth on theology: don't connect the dots. http://goo.gl/Dx04I
barth needs a tl;dr edition http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"we cannot think it: we can only contemplate it. we cannot assert & prove it: we can only believe it..." http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"Scripture attests itself in the fact that at its decisive centre it attests the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"
connecting the dots
TL;DR? here's what Barth asserts: don't connect the dots. Barth, CD I/2, p.483-484:
Rightly understood, the unity of Holy Scripture gives rise to a conclusion & demand to which the Church must pay good heed. But this conclusion & demand is not that we should abstract from the Bible some concealed historical or conceptual system, an economy of salvation or a Christian view of things. There can be no biblical theology in this sense, either of the Old or New Testament, or of the Bible as a whole. The presupposition & organising centre of such a system would have to be the object of the biblical witness, that is, revelation. Now revelation is no more & no less than the life of God Himself turned to us, the Word of God coming to us by the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ. But in our thinking, even in our meditation on the biblical texts, it is only improperly, i.e., only in the form of our recollection & expectation, that we can "presuppose" Jesus Christ & then add to this presupposition other thoughts, even those which are derived from our exposition of those texts. Properly, & that means, in living fact, revelation can only be presupposed to our thoughts, even to those based on exposition, that is, it can only be their organising centre by revelation itself. Therefore, a biblical theology can never consist in more than a series of attempted approximations, a collection of individual exegeses. There can never be any question of a system in the sense of Platonic, Aristotelian or Hegelian philosophy... Even the biblical witnesses themselves cannot & do not try to introduce revelation of themselves. They show themselves to be genuine witnesses of it by the fact that they only speak of it by looking forward to it & by looking back at it. How can we wish to complete the totality of their witness by treating revelation as a presupposition which we can control? How can we expound it except by surrendering ourselves with them to the recollection, their recollection, and to the expectation, their expectation? It is only in this surrender - and not in an arbitrary doing of what they omitted to do - that our exposition of that witness will be kept pure and will become our own witness. Biblical theology (and self-evidently dogmatics too) can consist only in an exercise of this surrender, not in an attempt to introduce the totality of the biblical witness.
At this point we must ask whether the older Protestant theology of the 17th century did not do too much, and therefore too little. Intrinsically, there can be no objection to the fact that in its exposition it made such active use of the instruments of Aristotelian and later Cartesian philosophy. How can we find fault, and not take as a model, the comprehensive thoroughness & accuracy which it obviously sought & in such surprising measure revealed? If only it had kept itself freer from the temptation to be inspired to go further & to seek that which is theologically impossible, a systematics of revelation, a system in which revelation itself can be used as a presupposition! It attempted to bring in the witness of revelation as such in its unity & entirety. But in so doing it did violence to it. And it was on this that it foundered when the Philistines came upon it in the 18th century as once they had come upon Samson. We must leave it to revelation itself to introduce itself either in its unity & entirety or indeed at all. Revelation is never behind us: always we can only follow it. We cannot think it: we can only contemplate it. We cannot assert & prove it: we can only believe it, believe it in recollection & expectation, so that if our faith is right and well-pleasing to God in what we then think & say, it can assert & prove itself.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 8:50 am
"we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation. A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses"
"there is no point in ignoring the writtenness of Holy Writ for the sake of its holiness, its humanity for the sake of its divinity"
"There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting disposition for true exegesis... [this notion is] merely comical"