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Four for Friday

It has been a while since I’ve done a round-up of discoveries, so here goes…

1) I have no idea what I was listening to in 2010, but it should have been this. Thank you Spotify for this recommendation. I will probably be listening to Angus and Julia for an entire month now.

2) “Simon” has been looking forward to seeing The Lego Movie for months. I had no idea Tegan and Sara had it in them. “Everything is cool when you’re part of a team!”

3) Much of my master’s thesis was written while listening to Big Gigantic’s Nocturnal. I think I can confidently say that never before has a PhD been written on Barth while listening to this band.

4) And we’ll round things out with a quote from this Swiss guy who is becoming like a best friend.

Except we’ve never met.

Nor will we.

Because he’s dead.

No one has read the Bible only with his own eyes and no one should. The only question is what interpreters we allow and in what order we let them speak. It is a pure superstition that the systematizing of a so-called historico-critical theology has as such a greater affinity to holy scripture itself and has therefore in some sense to be heard before the Apostles’ Creed or the Heidelberg Catechism as a more convincing exposition of the biblical witness. What we have there is simply a commentary of a theology, if not a mythology.

Happy Friday!

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Evangelical Theology – The Word

In Evangelical Theology Barth moves from his introductory material and begins to address the Word as the object of theological reflection.

First, he briefly speaks to the place of theology within the University. He suggests that this field of study, which at one time held a prominent position in educational life, has been relegated to the backwater of humanities. This marginalization of theology results in an insecurity within the discipline which manifests itself in a need to secure its place in the academy by capitulating to the philosophical presuppositions which animate the university. At a weekly school meeting, I’ve been a part of an ongoing conversation for about a month now in which one of the things we’re discussing is how theology is meant to interface with other fields of thought. While the conversation has been helpful, there certainly haven’t been any meaningful conclusions. That said, Barth is something of a radical in suggesting that theology can go about its business without being overly concerned with what other academic disciplines think of the theologians work.

Barth’s aim in the remainder of the chapter is to further extend the observation he made in the introductory section that theology has a specific object – namely God. However, Barth is insistent that one isn’t able to immediately apprehend God. Fair enough. Rather, we can only ‘theologize’ over that which God chooses to reveal of himself. This revelation is his Word.

Now, evangelical protestants will want to avoid jumping to conclusions concerning the identity of this ‘Word’. Our impulse is to equate God’s Word with the Bible. This one to one identification is something that we make with little or no effort. Not so for Barth. He understands the Word to be God’s self-disclosure – primarily in Jesus Christ. There is a way of understanding the Bible in terms of the Word of God, but only in as much as it is a re-presentation of the Word that is Jesus. I know that for most this is the kind of hair-splitting that causes people to think theologians need a good kick in the pants. I assure you that for Barth, there is much hanging in the balance on this. The main thing to remember is that Scripture and the Word aren’t exactly the same thing. He’ll have a different “w” word for Scripture that he’ll get to in the next chapter.

Part of Barth’s insistence on wanting to make a distinction between Scripture and Word is his insistence that the God has spoken, is speaking, and will continue to speak. I realize that one can (and does) say this is exactly what the Bible is all about, but Barth wants to maintain a distinction between a ‘Person’ who speaks and the book that both reveals his speaking and is the means by which that Person speaks.

In as much as the Word has been revealed in Christ, then Christian theology is not just study of God in some general sense, but the particularity of God revealing himself in a human being and…

The task of evangelical theology, therefore, is to hear, understand, and speak of the consummation of God’s Word, both its intensive and its extensive perfection as the Word of the covenant of grace and peace. In the Christ of Israel this Word has becomeparticular, that is, Jewish flesh. it is in the particularity of the flesh that it applies universally to all men. The Christ of Israel is the Saviour of the World.

Folks often have deep concerns about Barth’s orthodoxy (and perhaps rightly so), but it doesn’t get much more ‘evangelical’ than that. By the way, since the word ‘universal’ is so freighted with baggage these days, you should know that Barth doesn’t necessarily use it in the same way that people have come to understand it today. I know that this is a recurring theme, Barth not using words the way we use words. He isn’t being cagey. He’s just living in a different time and place.

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i’d like to teach the world to sing (and give us lots of money)

Coca-cola-logo

Don’t expect anything profound here, but I wanted to make a very quick observation about the recent Coke commercial controversy. If you didn’t look at social media in the last couple days, you may have missed it. Coke did an advertisement during the Superbowl in which ‘America the Beautiful’ is sung in various languages. This caused some kind of uproar among certain true-blooded Americans. No, not native Americans, Americans whose ancestors immigrated from European counties. Many of which I presume didn’t speak “American”. Thank goodness the internet exists so that these good folk will have a way to vent the racist remarks that they have had to repress for so long. I don’t have anything to add to that conversation that would be enlightening. I’m not sure anyone does.

However, one version of the patriotic rant went something along the lines of…

“When our ancestors immigrated from the their country of origin, no one catered to them and made their life easier in America by making allowances for them to keep speaking their mother tongue. They were forced to learn English if they wanted to make their way in this new world. There was no ‘press 1’ to hear it in their own language.”

My observation doesn’t have anything to do with the truthfulness of this statement or even if it is a right thing to do or not. I simply want to register that the ‘press 1’ accommodation has absolutely nothing to do with welcoming the foreigner into our midst. It has everything to do with capitalism. People who don’t speak English are a definable target market. If ‘pressing 1’ helps a company to sell stuff to them, then you can bet that corporations will ‘welcome’ and ‘accommodate’ all day long. And in the event you were thinking that Coca-Cola was trying to create a beautiful expression of modern multi-cultural America with their insanely expensive Superbowl ad, think again. It’s all about the dolla bills y’all.

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Evangelical Theology – “Commentary”

barthevth

So a while back, I talked about reading through one of Barth’s more accessible books with some folks. I think a few people picked up the book, but we never really figured out a way to generate a meaningful conversation over it. In my own re-reading of it, I started feeling bad about the recommendation. “Accessible” may not be the first word that comes to mind for my friends who are reading it. So in lieu of a legitimate reading group, and in a spirit of wanting to honor the folks who actually spent some cold hard cash on the book, I’m going to blog my way through it in the the hopes that one or two of my reflections will help others to make some sense of what’s going on there. That is, of course, assuming that I’ll be able to make any sense of it myself.

In the introduction (which is oddly called, “Commentary”), Barth sets out to define what he means by the terms “Evangelical” and “Theology”. While there is some overlap between Barth’s use of the word “evangelical” and more current uses of the word to describe a conservative movement within the larger Church, Barth isn’t caught up in quite the same turf battles of recent American church history. Importing our meaning onto his meaning will be more frustrating than helpful. That said, Barth did write in response to the liberal Protestant theology of his own place and time. This is an over-simplification for sure, but liberal Protestantism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to reinterpret Christianity in terms of universal human experience, thereby removing any of its particularity. Once Christian faith has been reduced to vague spirituality, then faith becomes a matter of religious feelings or “consciousness”. In as much as there are parallels between early 20th century liberal Protestantism and early 21st century (post-)evangelicalism, Barth’s critique is as relevant today as it was in his day. I’ll leave it to you (or we can take it up in the comments) to make the connections.

So when Barth wants to define theology, he is blatantly affirming that the object of study is God. “Evangelical” theology goes one or two steps further to say that God has revealed himself as not simply a divine being, but specifically a triune God, and one discovers this trinatarian God in the pages of scripture. I realize for some reading that this shouldn’t need to be spelled out in any detail. In most people’s mind Christian theology tries to makes sense of the God of the Bible, but in Barth’s day (and perhaps ours) this is not what theology had become. Theology for some is not study of God, but a study of man’s experience of God or religious feelings or intuitions. I’m not suggesting that those aren’t important subjects worthy of study, but they aren’t necessarily theology proper. One can (and many have) responded that all we are able to study is man’s experience of God. This isn’t necessarily the place to rehash a whole long history of epistemology and religious experience. Instead, I’ll simply make the somewhat naive suggestion that if we make it our goal to start with humanity and our experience of God, then we are committing ourselves to a never ending game of navel gazing. On the other hand, if we take the scriptures at their word that God has revealed himself and we set our sights on describing that self-revelation, then even while acknowledging all the limitations of human creatureliness, Barth suggests we are at least aiming at the right target. I understand that some would see any and all talk of God as the ultimate game of navel gazing, and that the whole theological enterprise is predictably circular. My sense is that any discourse on reality in general has a certain element of circularity to it, which is exactly why we need a Word from without to save us from that fate. Anyway, this line of reasoning could go on and on. Eventually, one simply has to acknowledge all the complexities and then define what one is going to attempt and then go from there. That is more or less what Barth is doing in this opening section.

There is much more that Barth can and will say about this act of God’s self-revelation. My insanely brief commentary on Barth’s “commentary” in Evangelical Theology doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but hopefully these thoughts can help you to begin to make sense of the context in which Barth is carrying out his theological vision.