I spend a good amount of time reading the scholastics, as did Barth.

As I stated in the review, this book has a lot to offer, even for those who aren’t interested in Barth. The entire first section of the book is dedicated to the lapsarian debates of the 17th century, and the definitions given by men like Owen, Rutherford, Perkins, Baxter and a host of others.

This was a project I’ve been working on for fun, quite apart from my studies as a seminary student.

Is Austin Reed paying seminary tuition to write term papers about Barth?

Very nice discussion, conducted at an admirably high level.

I give an account of Aufhebung in my recent book Evangelcial, Catholic, and Reformed. Briefly, don’t forget that Hegel started out as a theology student. He turned the historical sequence from Incarnation to Crucifixion to Resurrection away from something unique and particular into something symbolic and universal as a dialectical-historical process–Aufhebung. That’s why there’s no one word that can translate it. For Barth there was often finally no “synthesis” that was non-mysterious and transcendable in itself.

Barth is not adequate, in my opinion, on the transition from a state of integrity to a state of corruprion, but he did not teach that humanity was created in a state of corruption. (He of course denied that.) He just took the state of corruption as an inexplicable mystery. It is false to suppose that he saw God as responsible for creating humanity in a state of corruption. He didn’t know how to square the transition from integrity to corruption with an acceptance of evolutionary biology. Who does? But he stayed too close to Schleiermacher at this point, in my opinion.

Barth was definitely Chalcedonian. He explicitly and repeatedly accepted the bounds of the Chalcedonian Definition. He actualized Chalcedon, but never departed from it. He regarded the Chalcedononian Definition as (i) offering a set of rules within which to work out an understanding of the person of Christ as well as (ii) making open-ended material affirmations. See my Charity book.

Barth has no “ontology” in a substantive sense. His “actualism” was an alternative to “ontology.” It was a motif, not a quasi-metaphysical or speculative construct.

As I tried to suggest in my Preface to Tseng, Barth does not fit within the traditional supra- and infra-lapsarian categories, even as Tseng retrieves them, because he establishes a new framework for understanding as seen from a center in Christ. He argues that the eternal God foresaw the fall into sin, mysteriously permitted it, and dealt with it in his pre-temporal christocentric decision of election from before the foundation of the world.

I’m glad to see you give Barth a fair hearing even if you don’t agree with him.

By the way, Tseng wrote his dissertation at Oxford. I was his Th.M. advisor at Princeton.