Reformed Forum https://reformedforum.org Reformed Theological Resources Fri, 11 Nov 2022 13:44:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://reformedforum.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/04/cropped-reformed-forum-logo-300dpi-side_by_side-1-32x32.png Neo-Orthodoxy – Reformed Forum https://reformedforum.org 32 32 The Deeper Protestant Conception https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc556/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc556/#comments Fri, 24 Aug 2018 04:00:13 +0000 http://reformedforum.org/?p=10587 We discuss how a return to sola scriptura through confessional Reformed theology spares us from the errors of Roman Catholicism and modernism. Reformed covenant theology, broadly considered, is facing a […]]]>

We discuss how a return to sola scriptura through confessional Reformed theology spares us from the errors of Roman Catholicism and modernism.

Reformed covenant theology, broadly considered, is facing a crisis regarding what constitutes “reformed” theology. The situation currently is one of chaos and confusion. Some claim that the way forward is by way of retrieving the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor of the Roman Catholic church, in the service of a so-called “Reformed” apologetic. The line of this argument is that if you follow the Roman Catholic theology and method of Aquinas, you will arrive at Protestant conclusions. Others enlist Aquinas in conversation with the likes of John Webster and Karl Barth, in the interest of retrieving “catholic” tradition in the development of a reformed theological identity. Still others, outside of our reformed circles, are engaged in ecumenical dialogue between Thomas and Barth (Bruce McCormack and Thomas Joseph White’s Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Dialogue, or Keith Johnson’s Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, which helpfully to my mind points out the significant points of convergence between the two theologians).

It is very much worth pointing out that Van Til virtually predicted this in advance in his sadly neglected but highly important work Confession of 1967, where he says, “If now we live in a dialogical age and if only the church as ecumenical can meet the needs of such an age, then surely the Roman Catholic too must learn to see this fact. As Martin Marty says, “If Protestants and Roman Catholics wish to make possible a creative coexistence, to enrich our pluralistic society, and to profit from each other’s separate histories, they will have to participate in dialogue.…” And what does such “dialogue” look like? Again, Van Til says, “It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who, more than anyone else, has helped Barth to see that Roman Catholicism also begins its theology from the Christ-Event. Roman Catholicism, says von Balthasar, does not believe in direct revelation any more than does Barth. To be sure, Rome does speak of “faith and works,” of “nature and grace,” of “reason and revelation.” But this “and” is not, as Barth thinks, fatal to the idea of the primacy of Christ and of faith in Christ. The whole discussion between Barth and the Roman Catholic position may therefore start from the idea that revelation is revelation in hiddenness. ”The difference between Barth and Roman Catholicism will therefore be not of principle but of degree” (Confession, 119).

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https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc556/feed/ 15 We discuss how a return to sola scriptura through confessional Reformed theology spares us from the errors of Roman Catholicism and modernism Reformed covenant theology broadly considered is facing a ...Apologetics,Calvin,CorneliusVanTil,GeerhardusVos,KarlBarth,Neo-Orthodoxy,SystematicTheologyReformed Forumnono
God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #7 https://reformedforum.org/god-after-god-jenson-after-barth-part-7/ https://reformedforum.org/god-after-god-jenson-after-barth-part-7/#respond http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4572 Perhaps you will remember from the last post, according to Jenson, Israel’s hope, as well as our own, is for participation in God’s own reality, which is nothing less than […]]]>

Perhaps you will remember from the last post, according to Jenson, Israel’s hope, as well as our own, is for participation in God’s own reality, which is nothing less than deification.[1] Working this idea out, Jenson asks, can God as Triune “bring other persons into that life?”[2] His answer is, on the surface, less threatening than we might have expected, though minimally. He writes, “that if bringing other persons into the triune life were in such a fashion to ‘deify’ them as to increase the number of persons whose life it is, if it added to the identities of God, then God could not accommodate them without undoing himself.”[3]

So, how does Jenson explain the deification of participants in the divine life? Not surprisingly his answer has a grammatical focus. In other words, the participant who is deified does not become a divine identity. But what does that mean? According to Jenson, “a divine identity is a persona just of that dramatis dei actually told by the gospel,” thus any other relation than this “is not a divine identity.”[4]

Consequently, Jenson is drawing a distinction between the narrative of Scripture and history itself. Thus, the Triune God is eternal “by the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection.”[5] However, in and through Christ God takes our time into His time. Thus, the source of God’s temporal infinity is found in the Person of Christ. Therefore, we find that Jenson wants to distinguish between Creator and creature even in the telos.

This constant attempt to maintain a Creator creature distinction is also consistent with his understanding of the analogia entis. Let us return one final time to Jenson’s revolutionized understanding of analogy this time as it relates to deification or perichoresis. I have already pointed out that for Jenson the analogia entis is an irreducibly grammatical construct as it relates to being, which is conversation.

However, Jenson realizes that there is a breakdown between grammatical assertion “God is” and “creatures are.”[6] Thus, Jenson adopts categories that will help us to understand the breakdown. He says, “‘x is’ is univocal in its locutionary sense” but “equivocal in its ‘illocutionary force.’”[7] In other words, the utterance’s illocutionary force is the particular act performed when it is said.[8] We might interpret Jenson as saying that the illocutionary force is the product (act) of the locutionary sense. Thus, says Jenson, “We may ask, when we say “God is,” what do we do?”[9]

Consequently, Jenson maintains an archetype ectype distinction in his understanding of analogy and in his view of deification. But can he uphold the distinction? Again, let us return to Jenson’s conception of the incarnation. For him, it is simply the adoption of Christ; an adoption that is only constituted in the univocal address of the man Jesus of Nazareth to God the Father. However, can there be a coincidence between the thought of man and the thought of God, or according to Jenson, between the conversation of man and God, without there being a coincidence of being? Surely the answer is, no.

Thus, the implications are obvious. If there is a univocal epistemological address between God and man then there must be a univocal correspondence between the being of God and man. Thus, in and through the application of Jenson’s view of the analogia entis to the incarnation of the second Person of Trinity, Jenson has destroyed the archetype ectype distinction that he seeks so carefully to maintain. Thus, God has become history or perhaps more to the point, man has become the Biblical narrative. Thus, Jenson has thoroughly temporalized God. There is now, no distinction between God and man. God has been thoroughly temporalized; man has been thoroughly deified. Thus, both God and man are irreducibly univocal grammatical constructions.

Having come to the end of this series, which was one post more than intended, I believe that I have demonstrated my thesis. Through his revolutionized understanding of the analogia entis Jenson laid the groundwork for the total temporalizing of God. What is more, Jenson’s inability to reconcile the univocal address of the man Jesus in his adoptionistic grammatically oriented view of the incarnation destroyed any residue of an archetype ectype distinction. Furthermore, such a move opened the door for the full deification of participants in the Godhead.

Throughout these posts the nagging question has been; has Jenson gone beyond

Barth? Now, we may answer without reservation. Yes, though Barth sowed the seeds, Jenson has indeed reaped a Barthian harvest of ideas with regard to the Creator-creature distinction that are simply contrary to the Biblical account and the orthodox confessions of the faith.

 

[1] Jenson, ST 1, 71.

[2] Ibid., 226.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 219.

[6] Jenson, ST II, 38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #6 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-6/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-6/#respond Wed, 07 Oct 2015 18:47:27 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4571 In our last post, (a while back!) I argued that Jenson had in fact compromised the creator creature distinction and I said that we would flesh that out a bit, […]]]>

In our last post, (a while back!) I argued that Jenson had in fact compromised the creator creature distinction and I said that we would flesh that out a bit, which is what I plan to do here. So, if Jenson has damaged the crucial theological distinction between Creator and creature what are the implications?

First, let me identify the problem. When discussing the univocity of address between Jesus the man and the eternal God, Jenson cannot adopt the view that God is communication and man is communication, but their conversation is separate from one another. Quite the contrary, if the address of Jesus, the adopted Son, to the Father is univocal (as Jenson argued), then there must be an epistemological correspondence between the conversation of God and man. Moreover, if there is an epistemological correspondence then God is no longer hidden.

Now, before critiquing this apparent problem let us explore one way in which Jenson might free himself from this difficulty. He might appeal to Kant’s theory of transcendental unity of apperception as applied to the Godhead. According to Kant, self – consciousness is not really consciousness of self; rather a self – conscious person is merely identifying his experiences as his own. So, says Jenson, “If the ‘I’ is not primally identical with the focus of consciousness, then the self is not a ‘self’-contained or ‘self’-sustaining something.”[1]

Jenson applies this concept to theology. For him, “It should always have been apparent that Father, Son, and Spirit could not each be personal quite in the same way.”[2] Jenson’s conclusion is, for example, the Spirit, is then someone’s Spirit, so that he (the Spirit) cannot be an autonomous someone.[3] But the end of such reasoning is that the Persons of the Godhead are not fully self-aware.[4] That is, each person of the Triune Godhead could only identify their experiences ad extra, but not necessarily be aware of themselves individually. So, perhaps Jenson could argue that the hiddenness of God resides at just this point.

However, this seems an unlikely position due to the fact that Jenson seems to follow Barth’s model of the Trinity. For Barth, the Trinity was a threefold repetition of the divine ousia. Jenson, consistent with his understanding of being as communication, interprets Barth’s view by suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity is merely a “set of identifying descriptions” to back up the name “God.”[5]

Thus, for Barth, God is a uni-conscious being. However, Jenson, sensitive to the criticism of Modalism that was leveled against Barth, asks if “we can interpret the differing personalities of the Father as the Father, and the Father as the Trinity, ontologically.”[6] His answer is alarming and consistent with Barth. He says, “All suggestions at this point must have an arbitrary air, as we again strain the limits of language.”[7] However, Jenson does attempt to strain the limits of language but in the end he can only affirm the “oneness of the one Trinity.”[8] Consequently, it appears that Kant’s theory of transcendental unity of apperception as applied to the Trinity cannot be sustained over against a God that is solely uni-conscious.[9]

Therefore, we return to our original assertion. When discussing the univocity of address between the man Jesus and the eternal God, Jenson cannot adopt the view that God is communication and man is communication, but their conversation is separate from one another. To do so would ontologically and narratively sever the Son from the Father, according to Jenson’s way of thinking.

Second, to posit that the univocal correspondence of conversation between the eternal God and the man Jesus would make Scripture more than what Jenson has alleged it to be. For example, if all that I have claimed thus far concerning Jenson’s understanding of language, per a cultural – linguistic model follows, then, for Jenson, the Bible is not a set of truth propositions that have cognitive correspondence between man and God. The statements found in Scripture are only ontologically true insofar as they are intra-systemically consistent.

Thus, whether Jenson would admit to it or not, the Bible is reduced to pious feelings set forth in speech. Therefore, to snatch a line from Cornelius Van Til with slight modification, Jenson’s “theology is anthropology still; the ‘cool smile’ of Feuerbach may perhaps now be thought of as a sardonic grin.”[10]

Though Jenson obviously believes that Scripture is simply pious feeling set forth in speech he is still unable to extricate himself from the difficulty Jesus’ univocal address creates. That is, if the man Jesus of Nazareth was adopted to be the Second Person of the Trinity, and that adoption is constituted by Jesus’ address to the Father, then Scripture must be more than pious feeling set forth in speech. Moreover, Scripture, at least the address of the Son in Scripture, must have a cognitive correspondence between man and God at that point, which pulls God out from His hiddenness and makes the unknown God knowable.

Therefore, we must conclude that although Jenson’s view of God and his revolutionized analogia entis lays the groundwork for the temporalizing of God, it is the incarnation (i.e. the adoption of Christ) that wholly temporalizes God. Furthermore, it is this wholesale temporalizing of the deity that raises a final point that we will address in the final post; our being enfolded into the Triune God or as Jenson puts it, our deification.

 

[1] Jenson, ST 1, 121.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] It’s interesting that Oliphint notes that ideas depicting Christ as schizophrenic have begun to surface in discussions of Christology and the incarnation. Cf. Oliphint, 287-88n14.

[5] Jenson, God after God, 98.

[6] Jenson, ST 1, 122, Cf. 119. Jenson also calls the Trinity “a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ,” (ST 1, 60, Cf. 46). However, one must be sympathetic with Jenson’s attempt to free himself from the charge of Modalism because of the Biblical narrative itself (ST 1, 96-100).

[7] Jenson, ST 1, 122.

[8] Ibid., 123.

[9] Obviously, Jenson could say that God, as a uni-conscious being, is not self-aware. However, this does not seem to be the direction that Jenson wants to go due to his view of God as free act.

[10] Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (Philadelphia, PA: P & R Publishing, 1947), 244.

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #5 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-5/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-5/#respond Wed, 15 Jul 2015 14:19:34 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4461 In the last post we asked if Jenson had gone beyond Barth. Has he temporalized eternity? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he […]]]>

In the last post we asked if Jenson had gone beyond Barth. Has he temporalized eternity? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he really achieved a consummation between the two? Frankly, at this point his theology appears no more threatening than that of Barth. However, we may not see a storm cloud in the sky but we sure can smell the rain. Therefore, we must now consider the person of Jesus Christ in Jenson’s thought. Because, according to Jenson, this is the epitome of God’s temporality and so to this we now turn.

To begin, let us return for a moment to our discussion of Jenson’s revolutionized understanding of the analogia entis as it relates to his archetype ectype distinction. Again, it is vital to remember that God’s being is utterance, which is in contradistinction to “an unspoken mental form.”[1] Thus, “being itself must be such as to compel analogous use of language when evoking it.”[2] So, again we are to understand that being is an irreducible grammatical construction.

Following Jenson’s logic, we may conclude that God has being in precisely the same way that creatures have being. Whatever God means by “be” is exactly what it means for Him or a creature to be.[3] “Therefore,” says Jenson, “insofar as ‘being’ says something about God or creatures, ‘being’ must after all be univocal rather than analogous.”[4]

But what does Jenson mean by saying that being, as shared by God and creatures, must be univocal? Again, let us remember that for Jenson “being is conversation.”[5] But how can the conversation of God and man be shared univocally when the word of God is hidden behind the word of Scripture? In order for God’s word in conversation to be univocal with our word in conversation, and vice versa, what is attributed to one thing must be identical when attributed to another.[6] Thus, the question is; what is identical in the conversation that God shares with man?

Before pursuing this question further I will demonstrate what Jenson does not mean. Jenson does not mean that the statement “God is good” and the statement “Paul is good” share a univocity, and the reason is simple. According to Jenson, “good” is not an essential element of the nature of God or man. Hence, Jenson is clearly defining the parameters of what may be considered univocal and what may not be. Therefore, the only thing that can be considered univocal between God and man is being, and being is conversation. So again, what univocal element does the conversation between God and man share?

It seems that Jenson has become entangled in a difficulty. If he says that the language of God and the language of man coincide at any given point then some type of cognitive knowledge between God and man must exist, which is exactly what Jenson does not want to maintain. But if he says that God and man share univocally in being, in the sense that God is communication and man is communication but their conversation is separate from one another, then he has really said nothing about the univocity that supposedly exists between Creator and creature. Perhaps this is the position that Jenson wants to maintain, for prior to this he has maintained that our conversations are surely not identical with one another, though he would certainly disagree that this univocity says nothing about God’s relationship to man.

However, Jenson’s view of analogy, as applied to the incarnation, brings a new dimension to the discussion. Jenson begins his discussion of the Persons of the Godhead by affirming an adoptionist Christology. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth was the adopted Son of God. He became what He was not.[7] Jenson claims that the Nazarene was merely a man as set forth in the narrative of Scripture. Moreover, this man from Nazareth was adopted to be the eternal Son of God. But what constitutes the adoption of Jesus?

For Jenson, “Primally, it denotes the claim Jesus makes for himself in addressing God as Father.”[8] In fact, posits Jenson, “This Son is an eternally divine Son only in and by this relation” of address.[9] So, for Jenson, the adoption of Christ is established in the univocal address of the Son to God as Father. Let me say it another way. The utterance of Jesus, the man from Nazareth, addresses the Father, and both man and God understood that conversation in a univocal manner.

This appears to create a difficulty for Jenson but he puts off answering the crucial point for the time being. He says, “When trinitarian reflection recognizes the Son as an eternal divine Son, a question will indeed arise about the relation of his divine identity to his reality as creature, but this is a question of secondary reflection, whose systematic place is further on.”[10] However, this particular topic is not taken up again. Jenson does deal with pre-existence in light of the birth of Christ, but the notion of the univocal address that constitutes Sonship does not appear again.

Yet, the relation of the Son’s “divine identity to His reality as a creature” is no secondary matter, especially as it relates to the univocal relationship of being between God and man. It is at this very point that Jenson can no longer maintain his distinction between Creator and creature. In our next post we will flesh this out.

 

[1] Jenson, ST II, 38.

[2] Ibid., 37.

[3] Ibid., 38.

[4] Ibid. Following Thomas, “being,” says Jenson, “used simultaneously of God and creatures must, as we use it, mean in the case of God ‘first archetypical causation of created being’ and in the case of creatures just ‘being.’”

[5] Ibid., 49.

[6]Oliphint, Reasons {for Faith} (Phillipsburg, NJ: P& R Publishing, 2006), 98.

[7] For Jenson there is no pre-existence of the Son in any traditional sense, Cf. Jenson, ST 1, 141.

[8] Jenson, ST 1, 77.

[9] Ibid, emphasis mine.

[10] Ibid., 78.

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Christ is All: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Karl Barth — Part 4 https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-4/ https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-4/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2015 05:07:22 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4445 Thus far in this series we have looked at the life of Barth as well as begin to explore his theology as well. In particular we have shown how Christ […]]]>

Thus far in this series we have looked at the life of Barth as well as begin to explore his theology as well. In particular we have shown how Christ is everything for Barth in the sense that he reframes every loci of systematic theology along christological lines. Jesus Christ, the God-man, forms the two sides of each doctrine that comes under review. Christ is himself both the divine and human sides of the covenantal relationship between eternity and time. We looked at how that is the case for his doctrines of revelation and election. Now we will look at how it is the case for his doctrines of creation and reconciliation. We will then conclude this part, and the series, with some critical reflections.

c. Creation

In Barth’s doctrine of creation he will make an important distinction which many of us will appreciate. He holds at every place the importance of making the distinction between the creator and the creature. Now, he uses that word “creation” in a very interesting way. He understands “creation” to be a reference to both an act and a thing. We may speak about “creation” as an act of God whereby he calls that which is not into existence. We can also use the word to describe the finished product, the thing which God has made – the “creation.” So we can speak about the act of creation, and we can speak about the creation. So, really, there are three elements to Barth’s doctrine of creation: the creator, the creature, and the act of creation.

So, now, you may already be anticipating how his Christology structures his doctrine of creation. In the tradition, the act of creation is an event that occurs at the beginning of time by the triune God. Particularly, it is the second person of the Trinity, the pre-incarnate Word, who is the immediate agent of creation. However, for Barth, Jesus Christ is himself the subject, object, and act of creation. He is both the creating God and the creature, as well as the act of creation. His divine nature is the creator, and his human nature is the creature, and the incarnation is itself the act of creation – the actualistic bond that holds together both creator and creature.

Jesus Christ is always both sides of the covenant, for Barth. He is the revealing God, and the revealed-to man. He is the electing God, and the elect (and reprobate!) man. He is the creating God and the created creature. He is always and everywhere both sides of the covenant, without separation and without confusion.

d. Reconciliation

And lastly we have Barth’s Christological doctrine of reconciliation. Here we may, once again, begin on familiar ground. Let us begin with John Murray’s classic Redemption: Accomplished and Applied. The two parts of redemption correspond, roughly, to the historia salutis (what Christ has accomplished for me in history) and ordo salutis (the application of Christ’s work to me by the Holy Spirit).

In traditional Reformed theology these are two aspects of soteriology which are one act of God, but distinct in time. Christ’s accomplished work of redemption is done at a particular time and in a particular place once for all. But Christ, by his Spirit, applies that once and for all work to believers all through history – both those who came before his work, and those who came after it. But there is a time differential between redemption accomplished and applied.

Barth proposes to close that gap. He does so by eliminating our faith, and the necessity thereof, as a condition for receiving the application of the benefits of Christ’s accomplished redemption. He does so by making the two aspects of redemption one time-event. Following the pattern we have seen before, Christ is himself both God the redeemer and the redeemed man. He is, from above, the divine accomplishment of redemption and, from below, the human application of redemption. In one transcendent act of grace, Jesus Christ is himself both redemption accomplished and applied.

E. Barth and Modern Theology

And so we can see how Barth would be subject to the label “christomonism.” Christ is literally all. All of theology is reduced to Christology. There is no single loci of doctrine that is not reframed along Christological lines. For Barth, Christ is all in his theology.

Nevertheless, the expression “christomonism” may not be the most accurate label. Which is why I am proposing the term “christopanism” instead (see part 1 of this series). For Barth Christ restructures all of theology along the lines of God’s one transcendent act of grace in his time for us in Jesus Christ.

Now, its that idea of “transcendent act” that I would like to discuss now. In Barth, time and eternity, or God and the creature, are both wrapped up in this one act. This is an act that takes place, for Barth, in a transcendent time – called “God’s time for us.” This time is neither our time, nor is it pure eternity – as eternity is traditionally conceived. Rather, it is a different time altogether. As such Jesus Christ is quite literally out of this world, he is the great beyond, being beyond our time.

Barth’s theology was formed viz-a-viz the imminence theology of modern theology. Liberalism sought to bring together God and man in the sphere, or in the time, of the human experience. It was a theology from below. God and man participated in a common act – the feeling of absolute dependence. Modern theology, from Kant to Schleiermacher to Ritschl, rejected Western metaphysics and developed an actualistic ontology. Ontology would be understood in terms of act, not substance. God and man shared in the same imminent act of human experience. You can understand why Barth tied together the the analogia entis of medieval Catholicism and modern day liberalism. In both schemes God and man share in some kind of commonality.

Barth would not shed this actualism. In fact, he would advance it and apply it more consistently in his theology than anyone before him. But what Barth does is moves, he shifts, the act. In liberalism, the act of feeling of absolute dependence is essentially man’s act. But for Barth, actualism describes not the act of man in his subjective experience, but the act of God in his objectivity. And so he shifts the act from below to above. The act which forms the ground of all theology is an act of God in his grace in Jesus Christ. And it is an act that occurs above, in a realm or sphere which is wholly other. It is not our sphere or time, space, or history.

Besides the fact that he runs into all sorts of difficulties with regard to the historical nature of the acts of God in the historia salutis, Barth also did not shed the most significant problem he found in liberalism. God and man, in Barth, still share something – naming the time of God’s grace. This third time, God’s time for us, is that in which God and man (in the Man, Jesus Christ) participate. They share in this one transcendent sphere. He hasn’t eliminated the modern problem, he’s only shifted it.

In this way, really, Barth has not eliminated the analogia entis, he has only reframed it and reshaped it. To refine that last point some, we might say that Barth has swapped out the ae for an “analogia vera temporis” – an analogy of actual time. That is to say, God and man, on Barth’s scheme, do not share in some abstract notion of “being” but rather in the concrete act of time. Time then becomes the singular concept that holds both God and man together in God’s gracious transcendent act. In other words, at the end of the day, in Jesus Christ there is no real ontological duality. God and man are not, in Jesus Christ, utterly distinct. In fact, there is a complete, radical, and transcendent univocal relation which obtains between them. Barth really never gives up the modus operandi of modern theology after all.

F. Van Til and Barth

Now, I really have to give credit to Cornelius Van Til on this last point. According to Van Til this is the Achilles heal of Barth’s system. The idea of time as the common sphere in which both God and man participate is not developed by Van Til, its a theme I develop in my dissertation. But the basic critique is Van Til all the way. Van Til, long before I was born, analyzed Barth’s thought along similar lines. I’m simply trying to add color and contour as I seek to advance Van Til’s fundamental insights.

Van Til had many criticism to level against Barth. However, in summary form, Van Til’s critique can be understood in two basic steps. If you get this, you are well on your way to understanding Van Til’s transcendental critique of Barth.

First, according to Van Til, there is no direct revelation in Barth’s system. This should be fairly uncontroversial. For Barth, as people like McCormack and Trevor Hart have pointed out, revelation can never become a product of our history or time. Revelation, as we said above, is a transcendent event. Therefore, revelation is not a thing to be possessed by humanity. Rather, revelation is a person in this gracious act of God in Jesus Christ. In this way, then, revelation can only be indirectly known by us. We have no immediate access to revelation. We can only know of revelation as the Bible as the Church point to revelation. But revelation does not take place in nature, and it does not take place in the Bible. Therefore, man cannot read revelation or perceive revelation. He may read about revelation. He may perceive of revelation. But one thing is for sure, man may not have direct access to revelation.

Because of this, while the Bible is important, it can only be a fallible witness to revelation. We must come to the Bible by faith, in order to see this revelation. And since it is a fallible witness, Barth opens the way for a critical reading of the Bible. What is reliable and what is not in the Bible is determined by revelation itself. Because of this, we must read the Bible only in light of Jesus Christ. But what that revelation is is really quite beyond us. We can never grasp this revelation. We can never bottle up this revelation in the form of verbal, intellectual propositions. For Van Til this produces a kind of nominalism in theology. Ultimately and essentially it is irrationalism, deism, and agnosticism.

But since man cannot claim any level of certainty with regard to knowledge of revelation, the theologian is left to formulate his theology on that which is not revelation. Now, to be sure, Barth believes in exegesis. He does quite a bit of it, especially in the first part of volume III on the doctrine of creation. Nevertheless, it is still theologizing without – at least in theory – an infallible Word from God directly given to us. Rather, God is only – but fully and exhaustively (read: with no remainder) – revealed to man in Jesus Christ. This yields, of course, rationalism.

So, for Van Til, Barth – along with all anti-theistic thinking or thinking that stands on the basis of man’s would-be autonomous reason – is caught up in a rational-irrational dialectic. The would-be autonomous theologian has both ignorance and omniscience at once and the same time.

Second, because God and man meet together in this one time-act in Jesus Christ, God and man share in a common reality. God makes himself fully known through himself. Jesus Christ is the revealing God and the revealed-to man. God and man then, in Jesus Christ, mutually exhaust each other.

So, because of the transcendent nature of the ontological relationship between God and man, God (and man!) remains so “wholly other” that he is truly disconnected from us in the here and now. This is the Kantian and deistic aspect to Barth’s ontological scheme.

But since God and man share in the same actualized time-sphere, God and man are wholly identified with one another. This is the pantheistic, or analogia, aspect of his ontology. This yields an on-going, persistent and consistent deistic-pantheistic dialectic in Barth’s thought. Which, as Van Til points out, is no better than liberalism. If in liberalism God and man become one in the imminent, subjective experience of man, then on Barth’s scheme God and man become one in the transcendent, objective act of God in Jesus Christ. Same problem, shifted to a different sphere.

And this is why I believe so many other criticisms of Barth’s thought have fallen flat. No one else, of those who have written major critiques of Barth, analyze his system as deeply as Van Til. Berkhower and Horton, for example, hover on the surface in their criticisms of Barth, attacking this doctrine or that doctrine. But they never expose the deep structures of his thought.

G. Conclusion

In this series, we have attempted to show at least two things.

First, for Barth Jesus Christ really is all. In fact, the label of christmonism is an appropriate way of summarizing Barth’s theology. But what is more appropriate is to apply the label “christopanism” to his system of theology as a whole.

Second, Barth’s theology is of a cloth with his liberal professors. He did break with his professors, but it was not a radical break. It was a protest driven by political and cultural concerns. He shifts the ground of theology from the subjective to the objective, but does not return to the theology of Calvin, Luther, and the Heidelberg Catechism.

These two factors, his “christopanism” and essentially modern approach to theology, lead to the dialectical tensions in his thought which have plagued his writings ever since he was flourishing in the mid-20th c. Far from being a resource for Reformed theology in the 21st c., Barth’s thought should rather be regarded as a voice of caution from the past. To be sure, all Reformed theology should be Christ-centered. Christ is himself the goal, the sum, and substance of all redemptive history. But when Christ is not just the center, but when he becomes “all,” the irony is that we lose the one true Christ of biblical revelation. If the incarnation becomes an analogy, or conceptual framework, for each loci of theology, only trouble and confusion can result. When a preconceived Christology, even if it is a Chalcedonian Christology, becomes the structure into which everything else must be fitted, man becomes sovereign over his own theological system.

But when we begin with the direct self-revelation of Christ which he gives to his people in his Spirit-breathed Word, then our theology will be truly a manifold witness. It can include a Christ-centered understanding of creation or redemption without forcing it into a christopanistic mold. Christ can be – and must be – preeminent as we do exegesis of the very Word and Words of God in Scripture. But the Scriptures, of course, reveal to us God’s mind about other things other than Christ – even though Christ is always and everywhere the sovereign Lord over all things.

Unfortunately, attempting to move forward with Barth today is actually (ironically?) a returning to the past. It is to return to the 19th century and even back to Kant himself. It is to return to the old pagan philosophies in which man is autonomous and God is made in man’s image.

No, rather, I would urge the next generation of pastor-theologians to move forward by advancing what we have learned from the past. Taking our starting point from the Infallible Word, let us do exegesis while learning, without re-inventing the theological wheel, from Irenaeus, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas, Calvin, Owen, Hodge, Warfield, Machen, and Murray. And let us learn from them with discernment, delighting in the glorious treasures which they have – by God’s grace – mined from the depths of the Bible.

And not just delight in them, but to live them and to teach them to others. It is these truths, the grand truths of the Reformed Faith, that can and will feed and drive the church until that day when our Savior appears for a second time, this time apart from sin, to take us to himself forever.

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Christ is All: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Karl Barth — Part 3 https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-3/ https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-3/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2015 05:07:32 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4439 This is the third part of a four part series on the life and thought of Karl Barth. After completing a brief biography, we now turn to examine his thought. […]]]>

This is the third part of a four part series on the life and thought of Karl Barth. After completing a brief biography, we now turn to examine his thought. We will take this section in two parts. The first will survey how Barth offered a Protestant answer to the analogia entis, and how he applies that answer to the doctrines of revelation and election. The next and last part finishes my summary of his theology along with a closing critical analysis. Barth’s thought is so intricate that this section will hardly do justice to Barth. So, my attempt here is a modest one. I hope simply to give some “take-home” concepts for the reader. Consider this an effort in giving those presently uninformed about Barth’s theology a head start for future learning. Needless to say, there are more opinions out there about how to understand Barth’s theology than there are pages in the Church Dogmatics! Here you are reading one of those opinions. Many will disagree with my read of Barth and the criticism I offer. That’s OK, I welcome the dialogue. This series is a start to discussion about Barth, not the final word.

  1. Thought

A. Introduction

We begin here where we left off in part 2: at the parting of the ways with Bultmann and Brunner, as an entry way into his thought. He could not walk with them because he believed they both compromised with the analogia entis. Barth was convince that the analogia entis is of the antiChrist. In other to understand that concern of his, we need to set the background of what exactly the analogia entis is.

B. The analogia entis

The analogia entis means literally “the analogy of being.” Without getting into all the detail, it is the metaphysical scheme with which medieval Roman Catholic theology usually gets labeled, especially Thomas Aquinas. Now, that theory of Thomas’ metaphysic is under intense scrutiny today, and most Thomas sympathizers have rejected it, even to the point that if you attach the label to Thomas anymore, you are automatically seen as a theological Neanderthal. Where have you been the last 50 years?

Be that as it may, the idea is that in order for there to be any connection at all between our knowledge and God’s knowledge there must be something which we and God have in common. For the analogia entis that “commonality” is being. What God and man share, what they have in common, is “being.” God has being, and we have being. The only difference is that God has more of it and to a greater – in fact, perfect – degree. He has – and he is – by virtue of being pure act an eternal and infinite being. We have limited and temporal being. But we both have being. God is at the top of the ladder of being, we are on the lower rungs. Not as low as pond scum, but not as high as unfallen angels either.

Now, it is this idea of there being a commonality between God and man, a metaphysical commonality, that Barth abhors. And rightly so. If nothing else, Van Til has taught us that there are two circles of being – the creator and the creature – and the twain do not overlap. God is God, man is man, and his ways are not our ways, his being is not our being. God has a being all his own, a divine being. Our being is created. God is himself the source of all being. God does not participate in being, he IS being. His being is original, our’s is derived. Therefore, God’s knowledge of himself is of a different order than our knowledge of God. Because of the creator-creature distinction, God is incomprehensible to us.

And so, here, we can be sympathetic with Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis. For him, to say that God and man have something in common means that God can come under the control of man. Natural theology, according to Barth, is man – creation itself – encapsulating God within the sphere of man’s own dwelling. It is, in fact, an exercise in – to use a Lutherism – the theology of glory. It was there resident in the thinking of his liberal professors who supported the Kaiser’s war effort, it was in the rise of national socialism, and in the German Christian movement. All these movements instilled Christian value into nationalistic pride. Christianity was identified with this-worldly considerations, like being a German. The interests of the nation and the German people were identified with the interests of the Gospel. All of this was a product of analogia entis thinking.

This was also the problem with the liberalism which Barth at first embraced. Schleiermacher placed the knowledge of God within the sphere of man’s feeling of absolute dependence, Kant in the categorical imperative, Ritschl in the value judgments of the community of faith. God was captured, time and again, by man and subjected to the whims of man’s own internal self-reflection. Liberalism was nothing more than theologians shouting “man” with a megaphone, rendering God as nothing more than a being made in the image of man.

Barth’s response to the analogia entis (hereafter, ae) – of either the medieval or liberal sort – was to replace it with a transcendence theology, with a God who is “wholly other.” To use the language found in his Romans, he begins his thinking with the quantitative difference between God and creation.

C. Bridging the Gap

So militant was Barth’s opposition to the theology of his professors that in his Romans commentary there was almost a one-sided commitment to widening the gap between God and man as much as possible. God is God and we stand under the divide between creator and creature. As such we are those under the creator’s judgment, his crises. We are all sin, all fallen, and estranged from God. We cannot be in God, or near God, we cannot possess him, or even know him. He is a stranger in a strange land.

But Barth would soon have to deal with the question of relevance. If such was the case, then what relevance has God for us? If he is so wholly other, then what good does that do us? Is God so aloof that the Christian religion has no meaningful relevance for us today?

Barth quickly realized that he needed some kind of analogia in order to bridge the gap between God and us. At some point, God must have some contact with creation. Whereas Van Til proposed revelation, God’s self-disclosure in both general and special revelation, Barth proposed faith. This is what he called the analogia fidei (hereafter, af). Now, this doctrine of the analogy of faith is extremely complex, and I have yet to read or hear someone explain in a completely lucid fashion. So, bear with me while I try.1

First, the af is not an analogy of being. The relation between God’s knowledge of himself and our knowledge of God is not grounded upon a putative commonality of being (as in the ae).

Second, the af describes how our act of faith corresponds to God’s act of faith, or grace. So, faith is understood by Barth in terms of his actualism. Faith is not a substance, a thing we have or possess. Rather it is something that happens, it is an event or an act. Barth replaces the idea of substance with act (i.e., actualism). Reality, for Barth (and with Barth modern theology generally) is not made up of stuff but, rather, actions or events. Faith, both on our side and on God’s side, is an event, not a thing.

Third, our faith only corresponds to God’s act, it does it not possess God – either ontologically or epistemologically.

Fourth, God’s event of faith is God’s own self-knowing. God knows himself only in, by, with, and through himself. God’s revelation is a self-revelation – a revelation of himself and through himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s act of revelation. Jesus Christ, as a transcendent event, is simultaneously the known God and the knowing man. God makes himself known to man by faith, but he makes himself known to man by faith only in the faith of the man Jesus Christ. This is an event, an act of God’s grace, that takes place in God’s own special time – God’s time for us – and as such is wholly other from us. It is a time we cannot enter, it is a time we cannot possess or access.

Fifth – and finally – our faith only analogically corresponds to God’s gracious act in the faith-revelation of Jesus Christ. We believe, to be sure, but it is not an act which we ourselves originate. Faith originates, continues and endures, only in the act of God in his revelation in Jesus Christ. And yet, when we believe in the object of faith, Jesus Christ, we believe only in a way that is like God’s self-revelation, its analogous. We believe, and therefore we know, but we know only indirectly. We know only by knowing that we do not know. In Romans II, Barth was waxing existential, when he wrote “faith is therefore never finished, never a given, never secured; psychologically considered, it is always and ever again a leap into uncertainty, into the dark, into empty air.” (The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, 74; Romans, 73).

So, in conclusion, the af is a “correspondence between the human act of faith and the action of divine grace, an analogy that is not ontological but miraculous.” (Handbook, 74). God does the act of revelation in Jesus Christ, and we simply, miraculous and passive believe. We trust and know that which we ourselves could never trust, know or manufacture. We only mirror or reflect by our faith the faith which is the act of God that is always present to us in Jesus Christ.

D. Christ is All

So, now we have laid the ground work for the rest of Barth’s theology in the CD. If God is wholly other, and we are not-God, then we have no capacity for God. Our time is the time of complete and utter corruption. Therefore, the ground of theology must be found in something other than us or our present, temporal reality. And this is where Barth’s Christology comes in. Every loci of theology gets re-interpreted in terms of the rapprochement between the creator and the creature in Jesus Christ. For Barth theology always has two sides: the divine and creaturely. Jesus Christ – the God-man – represents, and in the divine act of grace is, those two sides.

This is, to be sure, where Barth receives the charge of “christomonism.” It is a term that is not completely inappropriate. In fact, he himself seems to own the label. In the preface to CD III.3, concerning the label of christomonism, he says:

It is my one concern to cling to this in these spheres (in the doctrine of creation) too. And my question to those who are dissatisfied is whether with a good conscience and cheerful heart Christian theology can do anything but seriously and finally remember “Christ alone” at each and every point.

In other words, while the label often times is used as a criticism of Barth’s theology, it need not necessarily be so. Barth himself would turn it around, and wear as a badge of honor. So, without negativity, we’re going to show this “christomonism” (or, “christopanism,” which I believe is a term more faithful to Barth) over the span of the four major doctrines which make up the CD: Revelation, Election, Creation, and Reconciliation.

a. Revelation

When it comes to his doctrine of revelation, he crafts it along Christological lines. For Barth revelation is Jesus Christ. Revelation is not God’s self-disclosure in nature. That would be natural theology, and to resort back to the ae . Revelation is not a human subjective experience, that would be to resort back to liberalism. Revelation is not even the Scriptures. Here 17th century Protestant Scholasticism, according to Barth, falls back to ae in trying to capture God in a book.

Still, we can speak about the Word of God in its three forms. In revelation, in Jesus Christ, we have the Word of God in its original form. Secondly, in Scripture we have the derivative Word of God. It is the Word of God only in so much as it witnesses to revelation. Its gets its “Word of Godness” by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, to which it points.

Barth illustrated this point from a painting, Grunwald’s Crucifixion, a copy of which hung right over Barth’s working desk. In this painting, John the Baptist stands by the crucified Christ, holding a book in his hand as he points with a long pointer finger away from himself to Christ dying on the cross, the Latin words written behind him from John 3:30 (He must increase, and I must decrease). This was an illustration of Barth’s sentiments about the Bible and doing theology. The Bible is not revelation itself, but rather points to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

The same can be said about the third form of the Word of God, which is the preaching of the church. Preaching too points away from the church, even as the theologian is to point away from himself. Therefore, the Bible is not the infallible revelation of God. On the contrary, it is a fallible witness to the infallible God-man, who is the only infallible revelation of God.

b. Election

By the time we get to the second volume of the CD, Barth covers the Doctrine of God, especially important is how he recasts the Doctrine of Election. There is a reason why he includes the Doctrine of Election in his Doctrine of God, as we will see.

Barth’s Doctrine of Election has come under a great deal of discussion and debate recently. We are unable to get into all the details here, but suffice it to say that at the center of the debate stands Bruce McCormack’s 2000 article “Grace and Being.” In this article, McCormack argues that for Barth God’s act of election constitutes his being as triune. In other words, the eternal act of election renders God’s being what it is. For God’s act precedes and constitutes his being as the Trinity.2

So, how does Barth articulate his doctrine of Election? He retains some formal similarities with the Reformed doctrine of double predestination, but radically reframes it along Christological lines. Christology frames the structure of his doctrine of election. And it is in the basic form of Chalcedon. That is to say, its a “two-nature” doctrine of election. Rather than saying that God elects some out of the human race to be saved, and passes over others in a sovereign act of reprobation, Barth can speak about Jesus Christ as the electing God and the elect man. The two natures of Christ, his divinity and his humanity, form the two parts of the divine act of election. His divinity denotes the electing God, and his humanity the elect man. In this man, all men, are elect. But Christ’s humanity, by virtue of his death and resurrection, is also – at once and the same time – both reprobate man and elect man. Humiliation and exaltation, which are traditionally understood as chronologically successive states in the human life of Christ, are reinterpreted by Barth not as two aspects of Christ. Humiliation is indicative of that which characterizes Christ’s life in our own fallen sphere of time. It is true humanity, humanity as fallen and under the judgment (crisis) of God. His exaltation is indicative of true divinity, that which is characteristic of God’s time.3 In this way, Jesus Christ is both electing God and elect man, while also being both the elect man and reprobate man. This is Barth’s doctrine of election, and you can see how his two-nature, “Chalcedonian,” Christology grounds and centers his articulation of election. 4

In the next, and final, part we will look at how Barth christologically reconstructs the doctrine of creation and redemption. We will then conclude with some critical interactions with his theological project as a whole.

1The best attempt I have seen is in McCormack’s Critical-Realistic, 17.

2This is the consistent application of Barth’s actualism, or the theological principle of esse sequitar operari (see CD II.1, 83), to the doctrine of the Trinity relative to election.

3See the helpful chart in Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, 53.

4 Albeit, he will reject the notion of “natures” as it has been historically conceived. But I retain that language here for convenience. On the exact way Barth employs (and alters) Chalcedonian language and structures see Bruce McCormack, Orthodox and Modern, 201-233.

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“Christ is All: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Karl Barth” — Part 2 https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-2/ https://reformedforum.org/christ-introduction-life-thought-karl-barth-part-2/#respond Mon, 29 Jun 2015 05:39:31 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4423 In our previous post, part 1, we introduced our thesis and opened with the beginning of Barth’s life. We pick up here with his years from the beginning of his […]]]>

In our previous post, part 1, we introduced our thesis and opened with the beginning of Barth’s life. We pick up here with his years from the beginning of his academic career to his death.

C. Professor Barth

In 1922 he was appointed professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen. The position was newly minted and was to accommodate Reformed students in an predominately Lutheran school. One of his first lectures was on the Heidelberg Catechism. This was his initiation into Reformed academic study. He worked, it is reported, day and night to prepare his lectures. Some of his earliest lectures were at 7 AM, having only finished his lecture notes between 3-5 AM! He was quite critical of the Catechism, saying that historically it marked the transition between the Reformation’s zeal to the church’s complacency (Busch, 128). The first question and answer, he said, is “definitely not good” beginning as it does with “your comfort.” Apparently, it was too pietistic and subjective!

It was during these years at Göttingen that he began to prepare his lectures on Dogmatics.1 Here he took up Heppe’s Dogmatics and began to understand and appreciate more and more the old Reformed theologians, especially Calvin. It is not that he agreed with them. But working from them, and learning lessons from them, he refined his own dogmatics in its own characteristic way. He could not go back to his Professors’ immanence theology, but neither could he go all the way with the Reformed. Rather, he re-appropriated the Reformed insights and gave them his own distinctive spin, within a basic modern framework. We’ll discussion his theology some more later on.

It was while in Göttingen in 1924 that Barth met Charlotte von Kirschbaum. She was a helper to Barth in his research, indexing and cataloging many quotes from the reading he was doing. Charlotte, or Lollo (sometime “my dear Lollo”) as he called her, was 13 years younger than Barth (born June 25, 1899). In the summer of 1925 we know she assisted Barth in his research on Augustine and Luther as they went off together to “the Bergli,” a summer cottage owned by their mutual friends. She was 26 at the time, and Barth had just turned 40. It is reported that there was a deep mutual trust and understanding between them (Busch, 185). In fact, so deep was their relationship that she moved into the home with him and his family (in 1929), much to Barth’s wife’s (Nelly) chagrin. This relationship caused a great strain in Barth’s other relationships, including with his mother and close friends. Busch notes that “the intimacy of her relationship with him made particularly heavy demands on the patience of his wife Nelly.” (ibid). Nelly increasingly faded into the background, even though she never left him. It is said that this arrangement, even and especially when Barth and Lollo went off to the Bergli for study, caused a great strain, burden, and suffering for his wife and children. Lollo was herself an accomplished theologian in her own right. She wrote on and lectured on the Protestant doctrine of woman. Her insights even made their way into CD III.2 (Busch, 363). When she finally died, several years after Barth (d. 1975), she was buried with him and his wife (d. 1976) in the same plot.

In 1925 he made another move, this time to Münster. There he prepared seminars on the history of Protestant theology from the time of Schleiermacher and also on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? This seminar (and the book that came from it), it is argued by some, was the impetus for a significant shift and change in his thinking. It is particularly the thesis of von Balthasar that his Anselm book marks a turn in Barth’s theology toward an analogia entis, or an analogy of being, in a more classically scholastic direction. More on this later.

In 1930 he made his last move in Germany, this time to the University of Bonn. It was here that Barth would come up against Hitler and the 3rd Reich. Eberhard Busch notes that

Politics suddenly became interesting for Barth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new “German Christian” churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma….[according to Barth] This was a nationalist heresy….[which produced] confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation.

In response to the Nazis, Barth launched a new magazine to attack this “heresy.” Furthermore, in 1934 he wrote the Barmen Declaration—an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed by 200 leaders of Germany’s Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Unionist churches.

It did not take long, however, for the Nazi’s to persecute non-conformists. The opposing party to the Nazi’s, the Democratic Socialists Party, was threatened by the Nazi’s. The leadership of the DSP advised those in the party who held academic posts to withdraw their formal membership so as not to sacrifice their academic careers. But Barth would not resign his membership. He said, in short, if they want him to teach, they have to take him as he is, party membership and all. Soon thereafter, the Nazi’s disbanded completely the Democratic Socialist Party.

And Barth’s days in Germany were now numbered.

So, the German Christian Movement began to grow, and they encouraged all others in the church to join with the Nationalist government. In the midst of this there was a push to make changes in the church’s book of order (Bausch, 226). The changes would be quite “patriotic,” speaking of “our beloved German Fatherland” and provide for a centralized “Reich Bishop.”

In response to these proposed changes, a group called the “Pastor’s Emergency League” was formed. Out of this group the “Confessing Church” was founded. The was a coalition that opposed the change in the church order. Barth wrote in this context calling the position of the German Christians “heresy” and summoning the church to do theology, and only theology. The church is to be concerned to preach the Gospel only, and is not to see church membership tied to race or blood.

The document in which he wrote this was entitled “Theological Existence Today” and was sent to Hitler on July 1, 1933. 37,000 copies were printed before it was banned the following year. The effect of this pamphlet is said to have been “tremendous” (Busch, 227). The new church order, however, was put into place, including the notorious “Aryan paragraph,” which stated that only Aryans, or those married to such, would qualify for employment in the church.

Accordingly, the persecution would only increase. As a professor at the University of Bonn, Barth was technically a civil servant. But he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Führer or open his classes with the Nazi salute. It would be bad taste, he told them, “to begin a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with ‘Heil Hitler.’” Soon after, Barth was brought before a Nazi court and found guilty of “seducing the minds” of German students, was suspended and eventually fined 20% of his annual salary.2 This spelled the end of his time in Bonn. Providentially, however, it was the occasion for his return home to Basle, where a special chair of theology was offered to him by the University. It is here in Basel that he would live, write, and teach for the rest of his life.

In 1962 Barth paid a long overdue visit to the U.S. Here he lectured many times, including at the University of Chicago and Princeton. While in America he met the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Billy Graham (whom he met earlier back in Europe). It was while he was at Princeton that he had his one and only run-in with the Westminster apologetics professor, Cornelius Van Til (more on this below). And finally in 1968, after suffering a series of health set-backs (including at least one stroke), he died peacefully at in his bed where he was being taken care of by his faithful wife, Nelly. She found him dead on the morning of December 10 in their Basel home.

D. Literary Corpus

Barth’s literary output is by any standard amazing. He wrote a lot along the way including a large library of sermons, letters, and other unpublished manuscripts. This is not even including his course lectures (much of which made it into his published volumes) and other special lectures he gave.

But the back bone to his literary work, after the two versions of his Romans commentary, is the Göttingen Dogmatics and his Church Dogmatics. While he was teaching in Göttingen, he gave two rounds of lectures on Dogmatics between 1924-25. These lectures were published in three volumes. It was anticipated that the Göttingen Dogmatics would be translated into English and made available in two volumes, but only one volume has ever been published.

After this, while he was in Münster, he published his Christian Dogmatics in Outline, which he later labeled “a false start.” But these four volumes all formed the ground work for his later real start, which became known as the Church Dogmatics.

He began the CD in Bonn and then continued it in Basel. The first part of volume I was released in 1932 and the final part of volume IV was released in 1967, the year before he died. He had anticipated writing a fifth volume on the doctrine of redemption, which would have included his thoughts on eschatology. However, by the time he finished volume IV, he was literally too tired to do it. He expressed his “lack of energy and mental drive” to make it happen. But the finished project was 13 tomes, excluding the index, spreading out over nearly 10,000 pages.

I have included a link to a timeline of Barth’s literary output and his career here. This timeline was put together by Darren Sumner and posted at the Out of Bounds blog. This provides a very helpful, at-a-glance, resource for gaining appreciation and understanding of his literary productivity.

E. Meeting with Van Til

There are many versions of the story of Van Til and Barth meeting. Truth is, Van Til made at least one attempt to meet Barth while he was in Basel, even phoning Barth’s house. Unfortunately, Barth was out of town and unable to meet.3 When Barth came to the States, he gave a lecture at the chapel on the campus of Princeton University. Van Til and Art Kuschke traveled up to Princeton to hear the lecture. Afterwards they hurried outside to meet Barth. Van Til introduced himself, they shook hands, and Barth said something to effect “you say bad things about me, but I forgive you.” According to Kuscke’s account, Van Til did not reply to Barth before he was whisked off in a car and taken away. Van Til did follow-up soon thereafter with a letter seeking to set the record straight that he never called Barth the worse heretic in church history, and never questioned his personal faith. Van Til also asked Barth’s forgiveness if he had misrepresented anything he wrote (Muether, 191). Barth never replied.

To the best of my knowledge, Barth never makes any explicit reference to Van Til in any of his published writings. He does seem to allude to him in a letter on June 1, 1961 to G.W. Bromiley at Fuller Seminary in which he refers to some of his “fundamentalist” critics as those who believe him to be the worse heretic of all time (Busch, 380; Karl Barth Letters: 1961-68, 8). He also refers to Van Til in a letter to Edward Geehan (editor of the festschrift for Van Til, Jerusalem and Athens) saying that Van Til has not understood a word he has written. Barth, however, quickly acknowledges that he himself had not understood Van Til’s critique! (Muether, 191). He further refers to Van Til, in a veiled manner, in his 1955 preface to CD IV.2, xii. In there he refers to certain “fundamentalists” who are beyond the pale of dialogue because they are “cannibals.” It is interesting to note that Van Til signed his last letter to Barth as “C. Van Til, Ein Menschenfresser” (Muether, 191).

F. Relationship with Bultmann and Brunner

Many have lumped together the three great “B’s” of dialectical theology – Barth, Bultmann, and Brunner – as if they were of a cloth. But, actually, it did not take long for Barth to part company with these two. In the mid-30’s Brunner issued a call for dialectical theology to give some room to Natural Theology in its thinking. To this call Barth issued his very passionate “Nein!” where he argued that to give any quarter to Natural Theology is to go back to the analogia entis and neo-Protestantism. Bultmann with his denial of the historicity of the miracles of Jesus, the supernatural acts of God, and his demythologizing hermeneutic moved the basis of theology away from Christ and back to man. From Barth’s perspective, scientific history is a human construct and formed Bultmann’s starting part in theology. For Barth, this was to ground theology in something other than God’s revelation, which is Jesus Christ himself. Because of this, Barth leveled several lengthy critiques of Bultmann throughout his CD.

Again, so much more can – and should – be said about this man’s amazing (and often time disturbing!) life. But for now we move beyond his biography and reflect some on his thought. We will take up his theology in the next part of this series – part 3.

1Because he was a professor of Reformed Theology at an essentially Lutheran school, he had to change the name of class to Reformed Dogmatics, for plain Dogmatics was reserved for the Lutheran dogmatics classes.

2 For his defense, Barth pulled a copy of Plato’s Apology from his pocket, read Socrates’ argument to the court of Athens that he should be given a pension for his services to the city’s youth rather than be condemned to death. Something like that, Barth suggested, ought to be done for him. “It seemed like a good idea before going into court,” he says sadly, “but it made no impression on the judges.”

3In Muether, Van Til, and in Van Til’s Ein Menschenfesser letter to Barth.

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #4 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-4/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-4/#respond Wed, 24 Jun 2015 09:00:19 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4418 In our last post we left two questions begging to be asked. First, how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? Second, how is he able to identify […]]]>

In our last post we left two questions begging to be asked. First, how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? Second, how is he able to identify God as ontologically equivalent with the word of Scripture? Today we take up Jenson’s answers to these questions.

In the cultural–linguistic model of language Jenson has found an explanatory model.[1] There are two crucial concepts that attend the cultural-linguistic model of language that are useful for understanding Jenson’s thought. The first attending idea is the theory of “intrasystemic consistency.”[2] This category deals with the functional coherence of a given system. Unlike the idealist who defines coherence as the intelligent and consistent integration of any fact with all other facts; the cultural–linguistic model speaks in terms of systems. Thus, the internal consistency of a system is the meaning of coherence.

The second notion that must be taken into account is that of ontological truth statements.[3] According to the cultural-linguistic model, these statements deal with the truth of correspondence. Whereas, philosophically such a notion usually has to do with the correspondence of the idea I have in my mind to what is “out there;” however, for the cultural-linguistic model it has more to do with understanding one’s own system among many others. Correspondence, then, is not an attribute that any one system can itself possess.[4]

So, how can these concepts help us to understand Jenson’s view of God as ontologically present in a mere Scriptural witness, while at the same time remaining unknowable? Jenson claims to adopt the cultural-linguistic model of intrasystemic consistency because it is found in Scripture.[5] There is, says Jenson, a “theology of culture” that permeates Scripture. So, according to Jenson, “every culture is a religion and the body of every religion is a culture;” the religion of Israel is no exception.[6]

Furthermore, according to Jenson, this intrasystemic consistency is known as dramatic coherence.[7] Thus, after a grammatical and cultural discussion of words like “god” and “eternity” Jenson says, “We summarize this chapter so far: the God to be interpreted in this work is the God identified by the biblical narrative.”[8] The point is clear. Jenson is defining the system in which his theology is to be situated. He is dealing with the God of the biblical narrative. Jenson is not dealing with the Canaanite idols or the expressions of the divine found in Buddhism; instead, he is interpreting the God found in the system of the Biblical narrative.[9]

Having established the system in which he will converse, Jenson can now begin to use ontological truth statements. Since according to the cultural-linguistic model an intrasystemic true statement may be ontologically false in a system that lacks the appropriate concepts and categories of reference, but situated in its respective system as part of the system, the statement is now ontologically true.[10] Thus, it is possible according to a cultural-linguistic model of language for Jenson to posit an ontic equality between God and the narrative of Scripture, which is exactly what he does.[11]

However, these ontic statements need not correspond to what is beyond their own system. In his, The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck writes,

The ontological truth of religious utterances, like their intrasystematic truth, is different as well as similar to what holds in other realms of discourse. Their correspondence to reality in the view we are expounding is not an attribute that they have when considered in and of themselves, but is only a function of their role in constituting a form of life, a way of being in the world…[12]

Therefore, when Jenson talks about the narrative of Scripture being ontologically identifiable with God he is only being consistent with his own system as he sees it. That is not to say that the language corresponds with a being that stands over against the narrative. Nor are we to think that the grammatical logic of the narrative will correspond to anything beyond the system itself. Rather, we must simply and only think of these statements in the Scripture as having ontological status within the Biblical system as Jenson sees it.

To use the terminology of the cultural-linguistic model, these ontological truth statements merely express “a form of life, a way of being in the world.” This view is consistent with Jenson’s own understanding of Christian narrative in that insofar as “theological propositions are factual propositions, they be logically and epistemically homogeneous with propositions of first – level proclamation and prayer, as is ‘God is love.’”[13] Thus, ontological truth statements, according to a cultural-linguistic view, are simply statements that produce intrasystemic consistency in both the thought and life of the community.

Yet, the question remains; can these ontological truth statements provide any cognitive knowledge concerning God? Again, the answer must be, no. Our language cannot communicate anything cognitive about God. The event of God’s act cannot be known through intuition, reason, or theoretical categories. God does not adapt himself to our cognitive efforts.[14] So then, the ontological truth statements about God in Scripture are simply and only statements that will enable a community to function and communicate consistently with one another.

The nagging question at this point is; has Jenson really gone beyond Barth? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he really achieved a consummation between the two? At this point his theology appears no more threatening than that of Barth. After all, he still maintains a distinction between God and creation that can only be penetrated by an unknowable act, while at the same time, adopting a cultural-linguistic view of Scripture that enables the community to make ontological truth statements without the burden of correspondence. Therefore, we must now consider the person of Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, He is the epitome of God’s temporality and to Him we will turn in the next post.

 

[1] Jenson, ST 1, 18 n43.

[2] George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), 64.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 65

[5] Jenson, ST 1, 51.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid. 55.

[8] Ibid., 57.

[9] Ibid., 55 – 56.

[10] Lindbeck, 65.

[11] Jenson, ST 1, 59.

[12] Lindbeck, 65.

[13] Jenson, ST 1, 20.

[14] Ibid., 227.

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #3 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-3/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-3/#respond Fri, 05 Jun 2015 14:37:09 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4400 By now it should be understood by the reader that for Jenson, God is the act of utterance.[1] For Jenson, as I argued in my last post, God is to […]]]>

By now it should be understood by the reader that for Jenson, God is the act of utterance.[1] For Jenson, as I argued in my last post, God is to be identified by and as wholly temporalized in the narrative of Scripture. However, in a seemingly contradictory move, Jenson also believes that to reduce God to a set of propositions is to devolve “into the biblicisms of modernity.”[2] Following Barth, Jenson dismisses the notion that to simply adopt Biblical language is adequate to apprehend God.[3] God is ineffable.[4] Thus, before we can understand Jenson’s view of Scripture we must understand how the God who is to be identified by the narrative of Scripture is known in and from the narrative. Only then may we know the functional place of Scripture within the life of the church.

Therefore, how can we speak about the veracity of man’s knowledge of God? Can man know God cognitively? According to Jenson, “God’s knowability is not a dispositional property.”[5] Defining what he means by “dispositional property” Jenson explains, “That is, it is not his possession of qualities that adapt him to satisfy some exterior effort, in this case our cognitive effort.”[6]

Clearly, for Jenson, cognitive knowledge of God is impossible. In fact, says Jenson, our union with God “transcends the mind’s natural ‘cognitive capacity.’”[7] So, how does man come to know God? How does God pierce historie in order to make Himself known? For Jenson, the answer is simple; God reveals Himself.[8]

However, it is a matter of primary importance to remember how God is said to reveal Himself. According to Jenson, the way in which God discloses Himself is in act. For Jenson, this is a primary theological category. God is free event. In fact, God must be taken “as invariant through the event.”[9] He is not the gift that the event brings; He is the event. In other words, God reveals His whole self in the event of His act.

But what is the event of God’s self-revelation? According to Jenson, it is conversation. Furthermore, Jenson argues that this self-revealing act of conversation is the narrative of Scripture. He writes,

At several places in this chapter and before, a conceptual move has been made from the biblical God’s self-identification by events in time to his identification with those events; moreover, it will by now be apparent that the whole argument of the work depends on this move. In each case in which it has been made, it has been conceptually secured in that context. But it is now possible, and high time, to justify it directly.

Were God identified by Israel’s Exodus or Jesus’ resurrection, without being identified with them, the identification would be a revelation ontologically other than God himself. The revealing events would be our clues to God, but would not be God. And this, of course, is the normal pattern of religion: where the deity reveals itself is not where it is.[10]

Two important points stand out in these lines. First, the revealing events of Scripture are the act of God. They are the event of God’s self-revelation in utterance. Second, these events ontologically identify the person of God. They do not point to God; rather the narrative acts are God. Therefore, initially it appears that Jenson has gone beyond Barth in claiming that the act of God can be identified. After all, Barth claims that,

When on the basis of His revelation we always understand God as event, as act and as life, we have not in any way identified Him with a sum or content of event, act, or life generally. We can never expect to know generally what event or act or life is, in order from that point to conclude and assert that God is He to whom this is all proper in an unimaginable and incomprehensible fullness and completeness. When we know God as event, act and life, we have to admit that generally and apart from Him we do not know what this is.[11]

Thus, Barth maintains that even the act of God is unknowable. And so, for Barth, Scripture is only a witness to God’s act. Therefore, it would be untenable to suggest that Scripture could claim an ontic status with regard to the being of God.

So, has Jenson gone beyond Barth at this point? We must remember that, according to Jenson, Barth was not fully able to extricate himself from the material doctrine of being. Thus, for Barth the fundamental resemblance between God and creatures is that God is Being and creatures are beings. However, Jenson says that the analogous use of language is what constitutes the analogy of being making it an irreducibly grammatical construction. Therefore, God and the Biblical narrative are ontologically one.

However, this move by Jenson seems to lock him into three positions that he is unwilling to endorse. First, to posit an ontic equality between God and Scripture sanctions the “biblicism of modernity” that Jenson has previously repudiated. Second, an ontic equality between God and Scripture suggests that we can have cognitive knowledge about God. This is something that Jenson denies because the event of communication cannot occupy cognitive categories because it is an event that “transcends natural cognitive capacity.” Moreover, to claim that we can say, “God is good” is to posit something about the very nature of God. But if God is by definition a free act that can chose His own nature, then it is impossible for us to say that God is “anything” other than free decision. Any other claim goes beyond our ability to know.

So, how does Jenson answer this apparent problem? It is true that for Jenson, God is free utterance. He is communication. However, God is the word to which all other words respond.[12] He is not necessarily our word. He does not depend on a prior word or language.[13] In other words, God is the word that stands apart from the word of Scripture, whether in English or Swahili. God’s word remains hidden as it were behind the word of Scripture. Thus, a dual conversation takes place. According to Jenson, God is conversation and man is conversation but their conversations do not correspond at any given point, nor can they, for such a correspondence would entail an epistemological correspondence that Jenson wants to deny.

Therefore, the word of Scripture is a witness to God’s word and serves as a vehicle for encounter, but Scripture is not His word. Scripture must become His word – event.[14] Thus, Jenson is able to maintain a distinction between God as his own word and the word of Scripture. But the question that begs to be asked is how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? How is he able to identify God as ontologically equivalent with the word of Scripture? We will take up these questions in the next post.

 

[1] Jenson, God after God, 190.

[2] Jenson, ST 1, 29.

[3] Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 195.

[4] Ibid., 190.

[5] Jenson, ST 1, 227. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics II. 1, 205, “But is God really an object of human cognition? Is an object of human cognition God? No postulate, however necessary, can compel this to be true.”

[6] Jenson, ST 1, 227.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 124.

[9] Ibid., 50.

[10] Ibid., 59.

[11] Barth, Church Dogmatics II. 1, 264.

[12] Jenson, God after God, 190.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Jenson, ST 1, 28.

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #2 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-2/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-2/#comments Wed, 27 May 2015 13:13:08 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4381 I stated my basic contention in the last post. It was simply this, Robert Jenson, adopting Barth’s theological notion of time and eternity and taking that understanding to its logical […]]]>

I stated my basic contention in the last post. It was simply this, Robert Jenson, adopting Barth’s theological notion of time and eternity and taking that understanding to its logical conclusion, has laid the theological groundwork for the destruction of the Creator creature distinction that he seeks to maintain. Therefore, in this post I will demonstrate that Jenson’s definition of “being,” as conditioned by his understanding of the analogia entis, has laid the groundwork in order to thoroughly temporalize the Triune God, to the extent that an a se God does not, nor can He, stand apart from His creation.

Understanding the Being of God Grammatically

For Jenson, the traditional definition of God as “invisible, timelessly present, something – analogous – to – a person” will no longer due(sic).”[1] According to Jenson, these are useless descriptions at best being more philosophical than Biblical.[2] So, Jenson sets out to establish a working definition of the traditional concept of being which has “become an inextricable determinant of the actual Christian doctrine of God.”[3]

For Jenson, this inadequate definition of being as understood by philosophy and adopted by traditional theology is threefold. First, being is immunity to time.[4] For Jenson, this is the traditional theological concept of timelessness, and, as he points out, this is more Greek than Biblical. Second, what truly is, is form (eidos).[5] A form, as defined by Plato, is a pattern that must be immune to time and therefore, is. This form, according to Greek philosophy, is a human being, a tree, or a god. This too is inadequate and part of the traditional concept of being. Third, form or eidos is the shape that the mind’s eye sees.[6] Compatible with his first two points Jenson observes that a being that is immune to time and possesses form must “appear in the present tense of the consciousness without inner reference to the past or future, as objects in space appear to sight.”[7] This, according to Jenson, is the traditional concept of being.

But for Jenson this philosophical definition of being is not suitable for a post-enlightenment, post-Kantian culture, nor does traditional theology help matters by simply filling the concept of being with different (i.e. Biblical) content.[8] So, Jenson asks, “What kind of being does God have as the one God?”[9] For Jenson, this question is crucial to his whole theological enterprise.

But before we can answer a question about the being of God we must ask another, namely, what is being? Jenson postulates that in metaphysical discourse, of which the Creator creature distinction is the first axiom, we may only use the concept of “being” analogously.[10] “Which is to say,” affirms Jenson, “that being itself must be such as to compel analogous use of language when evoking it, that “God is” and “this creature is” are irreducibly at once incomparable and comparable facts.”[11] As a result, Jenson has redefined the analogia entis making it an irreducibly grammatical construction. Thus, “being” is now to be interpreted by hearing rather than seeing.[12]

Only after having Jenson’s definition of being may we now ask; what kind of being does God have as the one God? Jenson gives a fourfold answer. First, God is an event.[13] According to Jenson, God is not “being” in the traditional sense; He is a concrete act. But it is not enough to say that God is Actus purus.[14] God must be a particular event; He must be Actus Purus et singularis.[15] Here Jenson follows Barth and concedes to Kant. According to Barth, Kant was right. We can have no access to God through intuition, reason, or theoretical categories. Therefore, how do we bring geschichte into meaningful relationship with historie? Barth’s answer to Kant was that we must not think of God in passive categories, but rather we must think of him in terms of event. God is, according to Jenson, the event that enters historie.

Second, Jenson says that, God is a person.[16] This raises the obvious question, if God is a person how can he not be “being” in the traditional sense that Jenson repudiates? It is important to notice that in order to answer this question Jenson modifies the definition of “person” offered by Boethius. Whereas Boethius defined person as an individual entity endowed with intellect Jenson says that to be a person is to be one with whom other persons can converse.[17] Thus, we might safely say that Jenson equates personhood with the ability to communicate.

Third, Jenson also posits that God is a decision.[18] For Jenson, who is simply following Barth at this point, “God’s freedom is that of a subject, of a person.”[19] Consequently, God is the subject who determines His own nature.[20] God is the act of His own decision.[21] In other words, God could have been other than who He is.[22]

Finally, and not surprisingly, Jenson says that God is a conversation.[23] For Jenson, this is the logical conclusion of the preceding items, including his understanding of the analogia entis. Again for Jenson, to be a person is to converse with another. Therefore, God, as free event, reveals Himself in his free decision to converse with His creation.

It is precisely at this point that Jenson believes he is taking Barth’s thought to its final conclusion. What is more, this understanding of God is consistent with Jenson’s view of being. God is the free event of conversation. Therefore, the divine is reduced to an irreducibly grammatical construction. Therefore, to say “God is” is to say, “language is.” Jenson says it like this, “God is the communication that creates our communication.”[24]

It is important to note that in God after God Jenson sees promising beginnings in Barth’s theology, per a reconstructed analogy of being.[25] However, Barth failed to destroy the traditional notion of analogy as it pertains to our understanding of God’s eternity.[26] Barth had only hinted at the importance of language but had maintained an analogy of image rather than destroying it altogether.

According to Jenson, in order for a theological revolution to take place “we will have to understand the radicalness of God’s temporality as a certain pattern of that temporality itself.”[27] Which means claims Jenson, new ways of understanding the continuities of God’s reality and work in time must be posited. And for Jenson it is “fairly clear what categories offer themselves: communication, utterance, and language. We will learn to understand God as an hermeneutic event, as a Word.”[28] Thus, we are provided with the context of Jenson’s claim in his own treatment of systematic theology that, “language is the possibility of historical being.”[29]

The Being of God as Narrative

We are thus brought back to the question, what is God? According to Jenson’s revolutionary understanding of the analogia entis and his four point description of God

culminating with God as conversation, Jenson makes the assertion that, “God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ.”[30] In other words, God is not identified by the events of Exodus and resurrection, but rather with those linguistic and grammatical events.[31]

Reciprocally, Jenson affirms, “the Scriptural narrative is thus itself Israel’s sole construal of the Lord’s self-identity.”[32] Perhaps one more instance will serve to solidify the point that Jenson has thoroughly identified God with the narrative of Scripture and that the narrative is our sole construal of the Lord’s self-identity. He writes, “God…is identified by the narrative of which his word by his prophets and our answering prayer make the dialogue.”[33] “Thus,” Jenson concludes, “the Lord is not only in fact identifiable by certain temporal events but is apprehended as himself temporally identifiable.”[34] That is too say, according to Jenson, “blatantly temporal events belong to his very deity.”[35]

At this point it seems rather obvious that Jenson has at least sought to temporalize God’s existence in and through the use of language as a new and irreducibly grammatical way of understanding the being of God. But even so, Jenson is unwilling to give up an archetypal ectypal distinction. What is more, the problems that inhere with his development seem to be equally plain to him.[36] As a result, he employs a cultural – linguistic view of language in order to establish not only his revolutionized notion of the analogia entis, but also an archetype ectype distinction. How he accomplishes this is for our next post.

 

[1] Jenson, God after God, 124.

[2] Ibid., 124n.3.

[3] Jenson, ST 1, 207.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 210.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 211.

[9] Ibid., 221.

[10] Jenson, ST II, 37. Jenson conceives this as a radical departure from Barth. Jenson says, “In the classical doctrine of analogy, the fundamental resemblance between God and creatures is that God is Being and creatures are beings” And according to Jenson, Barth’s “fundamental objection to the classical doctrine of the analogy of God and the world is that as the correspondence between them it puts being – in – general where Jesus Christ belongs” (Jenson, God after God, 77). Thus, Barth apparently maintained a somewhat traditional understanding of being but shifted it from theology to Christology. Such a move was not sufficient for Jenson (Cf. God after God, 85, 179).

[11] Jenson, ST II, 37.

[12] Jenson, ST 1, 210.

[13] Ibid., 222.

[14] Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 264.

[15] Ibid., Cf., Jenson, ST 1, 221.

[16] Jenson, ST 1, 222.

[17] Ibid., 117.

[18] Ibid., 222.

[19] Jenson, God after God, 126 (emphasis his).

[20] Ibid., 127.

[21] Jenson, ST 1, 140.

[22] Jenson, ST II, 27. Jenson is quick to point out that it is speculation to ask what this “other than” aspect could have been, Cf., ST 1, 65.

[23] Jenson, ST 1, 223.

[24] Jenson, God after God, 190.

[25] Ibid., 155.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid. 155 –156.

[29] Jenson, ST 1, 223. Cf. God after God, 190.

[30] Jenson, ST 1, 60.

[31] Ibid., 59.

[32] Ibid., 64.

[33] Ibid., 80.

[34] Ibid., 49 (emphasis his).

[35] Ibid.

[36] Even though Jenson does not view timelessness and temporality as categories of the archetype and ectype distinction he is unable to fully extricate himself from their implications (Cf. Jenson, ST 1, 99).

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God After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #1 https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-1/ https://reformedforum.org/god-god-jenson-barth-part-1/#respond Tue, 19 May 2015 21:59:36 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4358 When Karl Barth was once asked to comment on the reception of his theology in America, he noted that a bright young American scholar named Robert Jenson had rightly grasped […]]]>

When Karl Barth was once asked to comment on the reception of his theology in America, he noted that a bright young American scholar named Robert Jenson had rightly grasped and interpreted his dialectical theology.[1] Carl E. Braaten, Jenson’s long time friend and colleague, notes that since that time Jenson has always been a Barthian.[2] This is true with qualification. Though there are many similarities between the thought of Barth and Jenson, the comparative length of their systematics not withstanding, there are also many dissimilarities, not the least of which is their view of time and eternity. In the final analysis this too may need qualifying, especially if one adopts the view that Jenson’s theology is merely the logical outworking of Barth’s own thought.

According to Hunsinger, the distinction between God’s being as eternal and God’s being in relation to time and the world were, for Barth, a matter of immense importance even though he often failed to keep a clear distinction between the two.[3] Regarding this distinction Barth makes the following claim;

Eternity is God in the sense in which in Himself and in all things God is simultaneous, i.e., beginning and middle as well as end, without separation, distance, or contradiction. Eternity is not, then, an infinite extension of time both backwards and forwards. Time can have nothing to do with God.[4]

This distinction between the eternal Creator and creation is heightened even more when Barth claims that “eternity is God” whereas “time is God’s creation.”[5] Thus, according to Barth, created time can have nothing to do with God.

However, the confusion is introduced when Barth later makes the assertion that “God has time because and as he has eternity.”[6] This statement claiming that God possesses time “as he has eternity” clearly contradicts Barth’s earlier assertion that “time can have nothing to do with God.” The implications of these contradictory statements is monumental and has led Barthians like Hunsinger to take a defensive posture asserting that “although certain ambiguities and difficulties arise as a result, I do not think that they are finally insuperable.”[7]

Jenson is not sympathetic with regard to Hunsinger’s patchwork attitude toward Barth. In fact, Jenson seems to understand Barth’s apparent equivocation per eternity and time, as a failure to carry his own thought to its logical conclusion. Jenson did not share Barth’s reluctance to bring the Creator into univocal line with the creation. Much to the contrary, according to Jenson, “God is the temporalizing of the world.”[8] Again Jenson writes, “God’s eternity” is “temporal infinity.”[9]

Nevertheless, like Barth, Jenson is concerned to maintain a Creator creature distinction. Jenson writes in his second volume on systematics, “The first proposition: that God creates means there is other reality than God and that it is really other than me.”[10] Yet, if God is the temporality of the world, how can such a basic distinction between Creator and creation be credibly maintained?

It appears that on the one hand, Jenson wants to carry Barth’s theology forward in a logically consistent and constructive way so as to apprehend God as the temporality of the world.[11] However, on the other hand, Jenson wants to maintain an archetypal and ectypal distinction found in Barth that ultimately forbids a temporalizing of God, a distinction that ought to function as a corrective. Thus, Jenson seems only to make the “ambiguities and difficulties” that much more noticeable and insuperable.

However, Jenson would certainly object to having created such a problem. In fact, according to Jenson, this apparent difficulty merely drives us back to Jesus Christ.[12] For in Jesus Christ, “God ‘takes time,’ and in a most radical way: he becomes temporal, he makes our time the form of his eternity.”[13] But what does Jenson mean when he writes, “he (i.e. Christ) becomes temporal?” Moreover, how does such a statement affect his supposition that “God creates means there is other reality than God?” These and other questions appear to make Jenson’s Trinitarian theology just as insuperable as Barth’s Trinitarianism.

Therefore, my basic contention in this series will be that Jenson, adopting Barth’s theological notion of time and eternity and taking that understanding to its logical conclusion, has laid the theological groundwork for the destruction of the Creator creature distinction that he seeks to maintain. How this enterprise takes shape will be for next time.

 

[1] Colin E. Gunton ed., Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 4.

[2] Ibid. Braaten adds that Jenson’s Barthianism has increasingly diminished due to interaction with Catholic and Orthodox theologians. However, a careful reading of Jenson’s Systematic Theology proves otherwise. Jenson embraces the theological actualism that is the macro-argument and basic presupposition of the Church Dogmatics (Cf. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65 and Robert W. Jenson, Sytematic Theology, vol. II, The Works of God (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23.

[3] George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 197.

[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2004), 608.

[5] Ibid. Barth even goes so far as to say that, “eternity is the source of the deity of God in so far as this consists in his freedom, independence, and lordship” (610).

[6] Ibid. 201.

[7] Hunsinger, 197. According to Hunsinger this seeming contradiction is cleared up by understanding God’s eternity, as described by Barth, as the ground of creaturely time, cf. 201, 202.

[8] Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Christian Dogmatics: vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 168.

[9] Jenson, ST 1, 217.

[10] Jenson, ST II, 5.

[11] Robert Jenson, God After God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), 156.

[12] Ibid., 129.

[13] Ibid., 128.

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Is Karl Barth Neo-Orthodox? https://reformedforum.org/karl-barth-neo-orthodox/ https://reformedforum.org/karl-barth-neo-orthodox/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2015 11:00:24 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4301 Barth’s theology, fairly early on, received the label “neo-orthodox.” Barth himself rejected the label (CD III.3, xii). It is regarded by some today as a misnomer. As early as 1972, […]]]>

Barth’s theology, fairly early on, received the label “neo-orthodox.” Barth himself rejected the label (CD III.3, xii). It is regarded by some today as a misnomer. As early as 1972, German reflection on the thought of Barth were challenging the “neo-orthodox” label (see McCormack, Critical-Realistic, 24–28). Bruce McCormack’s magisterial study of Barth seeks to show that Barth’s theology never was an attempt to repristinate the older orthodoxy of either the Reformed or Lutheran traditions. Quite the contrary, while there are important discontinuities between Barth’s thought and that of modern theology since Schleiermacher, there is also a fundamental continuity which led the German scholar Trutz Rendtorff to conclude that Barth really was an “exponent of liberal theology” (McCormack, 28). The trouble, McCormack argues, is when theologians in the Anglo-American context try to read—or misread—Barth as a neo-orthodox theologian, as if Barth was bringing back that old time religion. The lesson here is, of course, don’t call Barth a “neo-orthodox” theologian and don’t refer to his theology as “neo-orthodoxy.” If anything, it might be more accurate to refer to his theology as neo-modernism. It’s not quite the old liberal theology, yet it’s not a rediscovery of pre-modern post-reformation Reformed orthodoxy. Rather, it really is something—for a lack of better term—wholly other. Its otherness notwithstanding, it still resides at home in the broader sphere of modern theology.1

1. The expression neo-orthodoxy was a charge leveled against Barth very early on, even in the early reviews to his first edition of Romans. He was charged with a lot of things, including being a pacifist and an anabaptist. But because of his rejection of history and scientific theology, it was believed that he was advocating for a return to the old, pre-modern theology.

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A Place for Rapprochement? Barth, Bavinck, and Van Til on Prolegomena https://reformedforum.org/place-rapprochement-barth-bavinck-van-til-prolegomena/ https://reformedforum.org/place-rapprochement-barth-bavinck-van-til-prolegomena/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2015 09:00:03 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=4256 Eberhard Busch describes Barth’s approach to theological prolegomena: he saw the prolegomena as being a first step into the subject-matter itself, bringing about a first clarification of what revelation was […]]]>

Eberhard Busch describes Barth’s approach to theological prolegomena:

he saw the prolegomena as being a first step into the subject-matter itself, bringing about a first clarification of what revelation was and how it was to be spoken of. The prolegomena were concerned “not with the things to be said beforehand, but with the things to be said first.” Or in other words: “Thus in the prolegomena to dogmatics we are concerned with the Word of God as the criterion of dogmatics.” (Karl Barth: His Life and Letters, 213)

Bavinck, interestingly, treats apologetics as an aspect of prolegomena in a similar fashion, folding the discipline into the dogmatic enterprise, not something prior to or outside of it:

Apologetics cannot precede faith and does not attempt a priori to argue the truth of revelation. It assumes the truth and belief in the truth. It does not, as the introductory part or as the foundational science, precede theology and dogmatics. It is itself a theological science through and through, which presupposes the faith and dogmatics and now maintains and defends the dogma against the opposition to which it is exposed. (RD I:515)

Bavinck’s statement is quite consistent with Van Til’s own approach to both theology and apologetics. Van Til was concerned to set a course correction in what he saw in the history of theology, particularly in Aquinas and Old Princeton tradition, where prolegomena in general and apologetics in particular were treated “philosophically” and as a precursor to doing theology. It gave the feel that apologetics has a different starting point than theology, as if prolegomena/apologetics were autonomous disciplines based on another ground than that of theology. Bavinck and Van Til, however, want to make it clear that prolegomena/apologetics, no less than theology, begin at the same place: special revelation. Therefore, prolegomena/apologetics are not separate from dogmatics, but an aspect of dogmatics.

Barth was quite famous for his rejection of apologetics. But his rejection of apologetics was not a rejection of defending the faith as such. What he rejected was a form of apologetics found in the analogia entis of Thomas and—Barth would add—liberal theology. Schleiermacher, and those who walked in his ways, were concerned to ground their defense of the faith and the things that need to be said beforehand in philosophy, reason, and what Barth regarded as “natural theology.” This gave the apologetic endeavor a man-made, or man-centered, orientation. This is why Barth shouted from the rooftops a resounding Nein! to Brunner’s proposal for a recovery of natural theology.

For Barth, then, prolegomena must be founded upon the same grounds as all of dogmatics—God’s revelation witnessed to in his Word. Barth disdained autonomous natural theology and man-centered prolegomena just as Bavinck and Van Til did.

Is there a place of rapprochement between Barth and Bavinck/Van Til?!

Now, to be sure, the agreement between Barth and Bavinck/Van Til does not last long. Barth takes his doctrine of revelation in a very different direction than Bavinck/Van Til did. Almost immediately the two diverge in polar opposite directions. Barth will allow for autonomy, indeed. It won’t be in the area of prolegomena, at least not formally. Yet where he allows for it will affect his prolegomena, whether he realized it or not. He could not keep the proverbial autonomous camel out of the tent once he allowed its nose of biblical studies in. Whereas for Van Til the Scriptures are the revelation of God giving us both the history of special revelation and its interpretation infallibly, Barth allowed the would-be autonomous bible scholar to discern what in Scripture witnesses to revelation and what does not. The Scriptures are the Word of God only insofar as they witness to revelation (i.e., Jesus Christ). Where they do that rightly, there we have the Word of God. But where there is error, there the authors and the text (both being caught up in this fallen world) fail to witness to revelation. And it is up to the autonomous reader to determine the difference.

And so, despite his best efforts to the contrary, natural theology found its way into Barth’s theology after all.

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Thomas, Barth and Modernity: Entering the Fray Over Matthew Rose’s Barth Article https://reformedforum.org/thomas-barth-modernity-entering-fray-matthew-roses-barth-article/ https://reformedforum.org/thomas-barth-modernity-entering-fray-matthew-roses-barth-article/#comments Mon, 19 May 2014 11:00:43 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=3592 A recent firestorm has arisen within the blogosphere concerning an alleged failure by Karl Barth. It was initiated by Matthew Rose over at First Things here, responded to by IVP […]]]>

A recent firestorm has arisen within the blogosphere concerning an alleged failure by Karl Barth. It was initiated by Matthew Rose over at First Things here, responded to by IVP editor David Congdon here, Darren Sumner here, David Guretzki here, and Kevin Davis at After Existentialism here, as well as Bobby Grow over at the Evangelical Calvinist here.

An accurate and helpful summary of Rose’s argument is given by Congdon above, so I won’t repeat it here. I agree with Congdon (and the others mentioned above) that Rose is seeking to promote, through criticism of Karl Barth, a Roman Catholic ontology and epistemology. As Congdon concludes:

modernity is Protestant, so to reject modernity is to reject Protestantism. Perhaps that is the underlying message of Rose’s article. Barth finally fails, because he remains, at the end of the day, a theologian of the Reformation.

As I understand Congdon (and company), to be modern is to be Protestant, and since Barth is thoroughly modern and Protestant in his ontology (event over metaphysics, the incapability of fallen man to know God, etc), to call Barth’s program a failure is to call the Reformation a failure. In other words, Rose’s beef with Barth is over the fact that he is not a Thomistic Roman Catholic. In my opinion, Congdon, et al., have penetrated to the heart of Rose’s contention precisely. So, in light of this, I have several thoughts:

  1. While I agree with the Young, Restless, and Barthian guys’ tagging of Rose’s agenda, I cannot concede their contention that modernity is identified with Protestantism. That is simply anachronistic and inaccurate. It is inaccurate because first of all modernism has made its way into Roman Catholicism, evidenced I believe by Vatican II (and even before that evidenced by the Leo XIII’s and Pius X’s attempt to stave off modernism in the church by decrees establishing Thomism as the official doctrine of the church and binding priests with the anti-Modernism Oath, respectively. HT: Camden Bucey). Second, the rise of modernity occurred after the rise of Protestantism and was, in effect, a self-conscious move beyond the Reformation. That the Enlightenment occurred within and among Protestants does not mean it constitutes Protestantism. That is simply the historical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Remember, Kant’s influence was nearly 300 years after the rise of the Reformation. Therefore, it is incorrect to read modernism back into the Reformation.
  2. As for Rose, I agree with him that Barth was modern and not orthodox. Now, that being said, I believe that Rose is far from having proven that Barth’s modern commitments necessarily arise to a failure. Especially if the alternative is medieval rationalism. Proving the failure of Barth’s newly constructed modernism requires, I believe, a thoroughgoing transcendental critique. More on that anon.
  3. Modernism and Thomism have more in common than Rose and the young Barthians will admit. In fact, they are both so fundamentally and essentially (not in an ontological sense) of a cloth that it must be said the Reformation stands over and against both Thomism and Modernism. In other words, the dividing line is not between Thomas and Modernism, ultimately. The dividing line – with regard to the principium cognoscendi externum of theology – is really between Calvin and the Reformed confessions on the one side and Thomas and Modernism on the other. Both of the latter, over against the Reformation, deny the epistemic priority of God’s verbal, inscripturated revelation in matters of church doctrine and life. There is a word for this phenomenon: rationalism. And Thomas, Modernism, and Barth are all guilty of it.

In closing, this charge of rationalism, especially relative to Barth, needs a defense. While I can only be brief here, I offer the following two points to consider and would welcome pushback from Rose, Congdon, and Grow:

  1. Barth was right to rise up against against both the analogia entis and his neo-Protestant professors to critique the theological structures which enabled them to support the Kaiser in his attempt at European dominance. However, Barth did not go far enough. He allowed modernism’s commitment to ontological dualism to stand, and with that its denial of God’s verbal, inscripturated revelation to man. In other words, Barth never exited the park which contained the playground of the theologians, even as he dropped a bomb on it. If Barth is correct to say that the event of revelation is not directly given to us in “our time,” then there is no direct revelation of God to us here and now. Scripture and preaching are only witnesses to revelation, but they are not revelation itself. This means that two problems in Barth’s system arise at once. Relative to epistemology, no direct revelation entails the dual and simultaneous problems of rationalism and nominalism/skepticism. On the one hand it entails nominalism because we here-and-now cannot know God, having no access to his direct revelation. We only have witnesses to revelation. But how is the theologian to know if those witnesses are reliable if he has no final arbiter to compare them to? Who is to say St. John’s witness is not more reliable than St. Paul’s? Or, who is to say that Polycarp’s witness is less dependable than St. Luke’s, or St. Peter’s compared to Thomas Aquinas? If there is no direct revelation, then all are equally valid witnesses. Even a dead dog is able to witness to revelation.
  2. On the other hand, it also entails rationalism. We are the ones who do the naming. We are speculating about who God is. Barth speaks piously about Jesus Christ, yet the Christ he talks about is a Christ he has constructed as his fundamental starting point from the words of merely fallible humans. In other words, Barth’s Christomonistic prolegomena is built upon the resources of man’s own “natural theology” no less than medieval Scholasticism. His system is nothing other than a modern reconstruction of the very natural theology he so passionately dismissed as the invention of the anti-Christ. And it is at this point, the point of Barth never having escape the very thing Rose is seeking to promote, which constitutes Barth’s fatal failure. It is the failure of all would-be autonomous man-made theologies. It is the failure of not just another equally valid expression of Christianity, but of another religion altogether.
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[Review] The Bonhoeffer Reader https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/rmr82/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/rmr82/#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2014 05:00:41 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?post_type=podcast&p=3358 Jim Cassidy reviews The Bonhoeffer Reader (Fortress Press) edited by Clifford Green and Michael DeJonge. From the Publisher: For the first time, a representative collection of all Bonhoeffer’s theological works is available in […]]]>

Jim Cassidy reviews The Bonhoeffer Reader (Fortress Press) edited by Clifford Green and Michael DeJonge.

From the Publisher:

For the first time, a representative collection of all Bonhoeffer’s theological works is available in a single volume, edited by Bonhoeffer scholars Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge. The Bonhoeffer Reader follows on the heels of the newly completed 16-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE), a major 25-year translation project supported by the International Bonhoeffer Society and published by Fortress Press. From this massive collection of books, lectures, articles, letters and sermons, about 800 pages of all Bonhoeffer’s key theological writing have been chosen to reveal his central theological ideas and their development. The Reader is formatted so that students can easily go back to the original DBWE volumes and all the additional resources included in them, making it easier than ever to pursue a more comprehensive study of Bonhoeffer’s brilliant theological career.

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5 Important Books to Help You Understand Barth https://reformedforum.org/5-books-barth/ https://reformedforum.org/5-books-barth/#comments Thu, 27 Feb 2014 16:21:51 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=3299 Being interested in learning more about the theology of Karl Barth can be an overwhelming experience. Where does one begin? I would like to offer here just five books to […]]]>

Being interested in learning more about the theology of Karl Barth can be an overwhelming experience. Where does one begin? I would like to offer here just five books to get you started on your journey to understand the very complex thought of one of the twentieth century’s largest and more prolific theologians. But before doing so, it should be said that one can never really know Barth until one actually reads Barth. Therefore, the books below should be consulted in conjunction with actually reading Barth for oneself. But where does one begin here? That is easy: page one. That’s right, begin at the beginning of what Van Til called the “Great White Elephant” (a reference to the German edition of the Church Dogmatics, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, which was quite large and had a white hardcover!). Of course, most of us in the English-speaking world will make use of the English translation which can be found today for quite a bit less than I paid for it back 7 years ago! But along with Church Dogmatics, consider picking up the following as helpful secondary resources:

  1. George Hunsinger – How to Read Karl Barth. Hunsinger is a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a well-respected and world renown Barth scholar and interpreter. This book will get you acquainted with the basic contours of Barth’s way of thinking. Hunsinger outlines several motifs in Barth’s writing which he regards as equally ultimate in his thought. I have doubts about that myself, as I believe that an actualize view of time holds central place in his thought. However, that said, the motifs Hunsinger highlight are most certainly there in Barth, and you will have a hard time understanding Barth without first understanding what those motifs are. Hunsinger will get you there.
  2. Bruce McCormack – Orthodox and Modern. This volume is a collection of essays by arguably the world’s most prominent Barth interpreter. McCormack’s theories, however, have been hotly contested. Nevertheless, McCormack represents, in my opinion, one of the most level-headed interpretations of Barth’s theology today. I do not always agree with McCormack, but he allows Barth to be Barth at his most radical points without trying to smooth down his edges to fit him into a 21st century English-speaking evangelical mold—which is the pitfall of so many contemporary Barth interpreters.
  3. Eberhard Busch – Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. While sometimes as awkward translation from the German, this volume is a must read for those entering serious study of Barth. Busch was a personal assistant to Barth toward the end of his life. Busch therefore sets the Basel professor in the context of his historical, intellectual, and ecclesiological milieu. Many would-be Barth interpreters fall at this very point, trying to read Barth in abstraction from his context. Don’t be caught without contextual awareness!
  4. Cornelius Van Til – Christianity and Barthianism. This is the second full length monograph by Van Til on Barth’s theology, and his only treatment of Barth exclusively. In 1946 Van Til published The New Modernism which was a survey and critique of Barth and Brunner’s “Crisis Theology.” Christianity and Barthianism, however, surveys just Barth’s theology, and being first published in 1962 it has the advantage of having most of the complete Kirchliche Dogmatik to draw upon. The advantage to Van Til’s book is the very thing that leads many to regard it as weak: polemics. If you’re either a New Yorker or Texan in spirit you will love Christianity and Barthianism because it wears its heart on its sleeve. There are no pulling punches and what you see is what you get. Even the title of the volume is polemical. Taking his inspiration from Machen’s famous defense of orthodox Christianity, Christianity and Liberalism, Van Til communicates to us Machen’s thesis of 1929. Just as Christianity and liberalism are not two forms of the same religion, but different religions altogether, likewise Christianity and Barthianism are antithetical to the core. But don’t let the polemics turn you off. Contrary to popular opinion—Van Til is often dismissed while rarely read—this volume shows the hand of a man who read and understood Barth by mining the depths of the original German. You will not only gain a greater understanding of Barth’s thought, but you will also gain insight into how and where Barth differs from orthodox Christianity. Many proponents of Barth’s theology would also do well to consult Van Til’s work so that, even if they walk away still Barthian, they can appreciate and articulate better how and where Barth’s diverges from the tradition.
  5. Richard Burnett – The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth. This volume is virtually hot off the press. It surpasses all the other handbooks that have come before, because it reads more like a dictionary than a collection of essays. This is helpful for when you come across a concept in Barth you are having a hard time getting a handle on. Just note, however, that while this handbook reads like a dictionary it is not a dictionary! You are still getting the interpretations of particular Barth scholars which defy precise atomistic definitions. Often times the entries are for subjects over which there is great controversy and debate. So, it can be useful to you if you go into using it realizing that no two scholars agree on everything in Barth!

With that, take up and read! And do so expecting that understanding Barth will repay great dividends. Not because you will be spiritually nourished by his theology (in fact, you won’t), but because to understand Barth is to understand contemporary theology and its implications today and in the future.

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The Critics of Van Til’s Take on Barth https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc203/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc203/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 05:00:32 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=1772 Cornelius Van Til was an early and significant critic of Karl Barth, yet many contemporary Barthians reject his criticism. Several contributions in the recent book Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism contain […]]]>

Cornelius Van Til was an early and significant critic of Karl Barth, yet many contemporary Barthians reject his criticism. Several contributions in the recent book Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism contain this sentiment. Today, we spend time discussing this topic with Jim Cassidy with the hope of promoting a better understanding of Van Til’s position.

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The Theology of Karl Barth https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc202/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc202/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:00:41 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=1771 Jim Cassidy speaks about the basic contours of Karl Barth’s theology. Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson, is a recent contribution to this growing […]]]>

Jim Cassidy speaks about the basic contours of Karl Barth’s theology. Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson, is a recent contribution to this growing body of scholarship. The volume is compiled from contributions to a 2007 conference sponsored by The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and The Karl Barth Society of North America. In this episode, Jim helpfully describes the theology of Karl Barth, this incredibly significant figure.

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Van Til, Barth, and American Evangelicalism https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc199/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc199/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:00:59 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=1758 Darryl G. Hart returns to explore Barthianism in America. Darryl Hart has contributed to Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson, is an interesting volume, […]]]>

Darryl G. Hart returns to explore Barthianism in America. Darryl Hart has contributed to Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson, is an interesting volume, compiled from contributions to a 2007 conference sponsored by The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and The Karl Barth Society of North America. Interestingly, several contributions address the subject of Van Til’s pointed critique of the influential theologian. Any student of Van Til is likely to be interested in this new publication and this intriguing discussion with Darryl Hart.

Participants: ,

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Machen and Bultmann at Marburg https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc147/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc147/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:00:56 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=1450 Bill Dennison discusses the possibility of a personal acquaintance between J. Gresham Machen and Rudolf Bultmann. Both men are key figures in opposing wings of Protestantism. Machen being the figurehead […]]]>

Bill Dennison discusses the possibility of a personal acquaintance between J. Gresham Machen and Rudolf Bultmann. Both men are key figures in opposing wings of Protestantism. Machen being the figurehead of conservative Presbyterianism in the early 20th c. as he founded Westminster Theological Seminary and led the movement to begin the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Rudolf Bultmann, on the other hand, pioneered the Second Quest of higher biblical criticism.

Dr. Dennison is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA and Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Northwest Theological Seminary in Lynnwood, WA. Dennison is the author of The Young Bultmann: Context for His Understanding of God, 1884-1925.

Links

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Van Til, Barth and Liberalism https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc142/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc142/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:00:09 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=1413 Jim Cassidy and Camden Bucey open the subject of Van Til’s criticisms of Karl Barth. Van Til was one of Barth’s earliest English-writing critics, and his criticisms are found in […]]]>

Jim Cassidy and Camden Bucey open the subject of Van Til’s criticisms of Karl Barth. Van Til was one of Barth’s earliest English-writing critics, and his criticisms are found in his books The New Modernism and Christianity and Barthianism. Van Til’s take on Barth has come under fire, but at least one noted Barthian, Bruce McCormack, has vindicated Van Til’s understanding.

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The Young Bultmann https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc53/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc53/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:00:25 +0000 http://reformedforum.wpengine.com/?p=516 In this episode of Christ the Center the panel interviews Dr. William Dennison, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA, about his recent publication The Young Bultmann. Bultmann was at one time the most influential New Testament scholars of the western world. He is perhaps best known for his hermeneutic of demythologization. Questions of influences on Rudolf Bultmann come in for discussion (Neo-Kantian or Heidiggerian) as well as Bultmann’s relationship to Freiderich D. E. Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. Listeners interested in how presuppositional apologetics is brought to bear in understanding a major figure in NT studies will benefit from this discussion.

Panel

  • Dr. William Dennison
  • Jeff Waddington
  • Jim Cassidy
  • Camden Bucey

Bibliography

Dennison, William A., and William D. Dennison. Paul’s Two-Age Construction and Apologetics. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2000.

Dennison, William D. A Christian Approach to Interdisciplinary Studies: in Search of a Method and Starting Point. Eugene Or.: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007.

—. The Young Bultmann: Context for His Understanding of God,1884-1925. American university studies. New York: P. Lang, 2008.

Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Tipton, Lane G., and Jeffrey C. Waddington. Resurrection and Eschatology : Theology in Service of the Church : Essays in Honor of Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. Phillipsburg N.J.: P&R Pub., 2008.

Participants: , , ,

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https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc53/feed/ 5 49:19In this episode of Christ the Center the panel interviews Dr William Dennison professor of interdisciplinary studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain GA about his recent publication The Young ...ChurchHistory,ModernChurch,Neo-Orthodoxy,SystematicTheologyReformed Forumnono
Van Til and Barth https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc10/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc10/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:00:30 +0000 http://www.castlechurch.org/ctc010/ The group continues their discussion of Cornelius Van Til by examining Van Til’s critique of the theology of Karl Barth. Van Til’s two books The New Modernism and Christianity and Barthianism were extremely influential in developing an understanding of Barth among English-speaking theologians. The discussion brings the critique to the foreground particularly in the light of Barthianism’s dominance in the current evangelical landscape.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. T&T Clark Ltd, 2005.

Brunner, Emil. Natural theology : comprising “Nature and grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth. Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2002.

Colyer, E. “How to Read T. F. Torrance.” THEOLOGICAL STUDIES 63 (2002): 400-401.

Gaffin, Richard B., Jr. God’s Word in Servant-Form. Reformed Academic Press.

Grenz, Stanley. Beyond foundationalism : shaping theology in a postmodern context. 1st ed. Louisville Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Gunton, Colin. Becoming and being : the doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth. Oxford [Eng.] ;;New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Hunsinger, George. How to read Karl Barth : the shape of his theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1923.

McCormack, Bruce. Karl Barth’s critically realistic dialectical theology its genesis and development, 1909-1936. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

Muether, John. Cornelius Van Til : Reformed apologist and churchman. Phillipsburg N.J.: P&R Pub., 2007.

Muller, Richard A. “The Barth Legacy: New Athanasius or Origen Redivivus.” The Thomist 54 (1990): 673-704.

Oliphint, K. Revelation and reason : new essays in reformed apologetics. 1st ed. Phillipsburg N.J.: P&R Pub., 2007.

Oliphint, K. Scott. Reasons (for Faith): Philosophy in the Service of Theology. P & R Publishing, 2006.

Van Til, Cornelius. Christianity and Barthianism. P & R Publishing, 2004.

Van Til, Cornelius. Defense of the Faith. P & R Publishing, 1967.

Van Til, Cornelius. The new modernism an appraisal of the theology of Barth and Brunner, Philadelphia Pa.: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1946.

Webster, John. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

White, William. Van Til, defender of the faith : an authorized biography. Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1979.

Participants: , ,

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https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc10/feed/ 6 67:22The group continues their discussion of Cornelius Van Til by examining Van Til s critique of the theology of Karl Barth Van Til s two books The New Modernism and ...Apologetics,ChurchHistory,CorneliusVanTil,ModernChurch,Neo-Orthodoxy,NewTestament,SystematicTheologyReformed Forumnono
Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc7/ https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc7/#comments Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:00:51 +0000 http://www.castlechurch.org/ctc007/ Jim and Camden discuss the 20th century theologian Karl Barth and the main themes of his influential theology.

Panel Members

  • Jim Cassidy
  • Camden Bucey

Bibliography

Hunsinger, George. How to read Karl Barth : the shape of his theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

McCormack, Bruce. Karl Barth’s critically realistic dialectical theology its genesis and development, 1909-1936. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

Van Til, Cornelius. Christianity and Barthianism. P & R Publishing, 2004.

Van Til, Cornelius. The new modernism an appraisal of the theology of Barth and Brunner, Philadelphia Pa.: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1946.

Webster, John. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Participants: ,

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https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc7/feed/ 2 25:39Jim and Camden discuss the 20th century theologian Karl Barth and the main themes of his influential theology Panel Members Jim Cassidy Camden Bucey Bibliography Hunsinger George How to read ...ChurchHistory,ModernChurch,Neo-Orthodoxy,SystematicTheologyReformed Forumnono