bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:24 am
eugene peterson, karl barth & : why I'm still tweeting cryptic bits of barth http://goo.gl/qvl8K
"the Church is no longer the Church where it does not know a higher authority than its own"
"...for the Word of God is not spoken to individuals, but to the Church of God, and to individuals only in the Church"
barth's beautiful & brilliant account of why & how to confess our faith in public, with confidence & humility: http://goo.gl/VzaXl
"...before I myself make a confession I must myself have heard the confession of the Church"
"if I have not heard the Church, I cannot speak to it…"
"I cannot thrust myself into the debate about a right faith which goes on in the Church without first having listened…"
"my first duty is to love & respect [the confession of the Church] as the witness of my fathers & brethren..." http://goo.gl/CnsCX
If he keeps writing like this, I will no longer be able to simply listen & process at a safe distance… http://goo.gl/CnsCX
"the immediate goal & necessary result of a debate on true faith is that those who take part in it should make a common confession"
"wherever there is this agreement, & therefore a Church, debate about true faith has reached its goal"
dunbar's number
In May 1846, at the height of the Gold Rush, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California. Due to poor organization, some bad advice, and a huge dose of bad luck, by November the group had foundered in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada. They came to a halt at what is now known as Donner Pass, and, in an iconic if unpleasant moment in California’s history, they sat out winter in makeshift tents buried in snow, the group dwindling as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avert starvation. From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism — which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal — but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children.
For Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist cum anthropologist, stories such as this one highlight how human kin networks aid survival — and, therefore, why people may take great pains to manufacture kin, via godparents for instance, or marriage, or by obscuring or playing up paternity.
via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS.
Our big brains — in particular our species’ inordinately large neocortex — evolved, Dunbar argues, in lockstep with our ability to manage increasingly large social groups: to read motives, to keep track of who is doing what with whom, of who is a reliable sharer, who a likely freeloader, and so on. Many evolutionary biologists have made this point over the years, of course. Where Dunbar is unique is in having assigned a definite number to what constitutes a stable human group or community. The “Dunbar’s number” of his title is (drum roll…) 150. Extrapolating from the estimated size of Neolithic villages, of Amish and other communities, of companies in most armies, and other such data, Dunbar argues that this number is, more or less, the limit of stable social networks because it represents the limit, more or less, of our cognitive capacities.
The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends — people he or she might actually recognize and be recognized by at a random airport, 150 people he or she might feel comfortable borrowing five dollars from. As for how many friends we have evolved to “need” in a more intimate sense, that is a different matter. According to Dunbar, most of us have, on average, about 3-5 intimate friends whom we speak to at least weekly, and about 10-15 more friends whose deaths would greatly distress us. These circles can include kin; indeed, the more extended family we keep in close touch with, the fewer friends we are likely to have — precisely because our neocortices can only manage so many relationships. What is perhaps most intriguing is the degree to which the inner circles change over time; close friends can drop through the circles of intimacy if we do not spend time with them, and even out of the 150, especially when someone new captures our attention. By contrast, kin have enough staying power that we can visit and expect to be housed by a cousin we have never met or a great-aunt after decades of neglect. In short, while friendships “decay” if not actively cultivated, kin relationships do not. Or so Dunbar claims.
humble access
The prayer of humble access, from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 1662:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
hearing & receiving
If he keeps writing like this, I will no longer be able to simply listen and process at a safe distance... I'd better immerse myself in some other bits of Barth that will alienate me and thereby protect me from genuine affection, allowing me to preserve my pretense of neutrality. Barth, CD I/2, p. 590
...in what I hear as the confession of the Church, I will certainly have to reckon with the possibility of falsehood and error. I cannot safely hear the voice of the Church without also hearing the infallible Word of God Himself. Yet this thought will not be my first thought about the Church and its confession, but a necessarily inserted corrective. My first thought in this respect can and must be a thought of trust and respect which I cannot perhaps have for the men as such who constitute the Church, but which I cannot refuse to the Word of God by which it lives and Jesus Christ [who] rules it. How can I know Jesus Christ as the Lord who has called me by His Word if in relation to the rest of the Church I do not start from the thought that despite and in all the sin of the men who constitute it it too has been called and ruled by the same Word? Because my sins are forgiven me, I am bold to believe and, in spite of the sin of which I am conscious, to confess my faith as created in me by the Word of Christ. And if this is the case then in relation to the rest of the Church and its confession I cannot possibly begin with mistrust and rejection, just as in relation to our parents, no matter who they are or what they are like, we do not begin with mistrust and rejection or with the assertion that we must obey God rather than man, but with trust and respect and therefore, in the limits appointed to them as men, with obedience. As in and with the confession of the Church I hear the infallible Word of God, I have to reckon first and above all with the lordship of Jesus Christ in His Church and the forgiveness of sins, which is operative in the Church; not with sin and therefore with the possibility of falsehood and error which it involves. And this means that I have not primarily to criticise the confession of the Church as it confronts me as the confession of those who were before me in the Church and are with me in the Church. There will always be time and occasion for criticism. My first duty is to love and respect it as the witness of my fathers and brethren... This is how the authority of the Church arises. It always arises in this way, that in the community of hearing and receiving the Word of God which constitutes the Church, there is this superiority of the confession of some before others, this honour and love, this hearing of the confession of some before others, before the latter go on to make their own confession. Before both and therefore above both is the Lord of the Church with His Word. Only under His Word can some confess and others hear their confession before they confess themselves. But under His Word there does arise this priority and superiority of some over others, the necessity that in the Church we should listen to other men before we go on to speak. Under His Word there is, therefore, a genuine authority of the Church.
middle-class morality?
Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed out to Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were not really different except in having more money. McCloskey makes a similar observation about those with less: “The poor are not better than you and me. They’re just poorer.” Individual success in the market does not require another’s failure, so personal wealth is not an indicator of moral culpability: “Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime.”
via The Weekly Standard.
Seriously?