bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 5:28 pm
"the Lord of speech is also the Lord of our hearing. the Lord who gives the Word is also the Lord who gives faith"
bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 10:51 am
"recall John the Baptist in Grünewald's Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger"
"could anyone point away from himself more impressively & completely?"
"we do the Bible poor and unwelcome honour if we equate it directly with this other, with revelation itself"
"the direct identification between revelation and the Bible... takes place... when & where the biblical word becomes God's Word"
"thus in the event of God's Word revelation and the Bible are indeed one, and literally so"
"on the one hand Deus dixit, on the other Paulus dixit. These are two different things"
barth's gospel - http://goo.gl/kLwpR
"[the act of revelation] is the condition which conditions all things without itself being conditioned"
"to say revelation is to say: the Word became flesh" btw, I apologize (sort of) for the tweets. the practice is proving helpful for me, but I feel badly about cluttering your feed...
(2) "... both renounce any foundation apart from that which God has given once and for all by speaking."
(1) "As the Bible bears witness to God's revelation and as Church proclamation takes up this witness in obedience..."
"[the Word of God] is one and the same whether we understand it as revelation, Bible or proclamation"
"the revealed Word of God we know only from the Scriptures adopted by Church proclamation"
"the written Word of God we know only through the revelation which fulfills proclamation"
"the preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture"
"revelation, Scripture, proclamation : Father, Son, Holy Spirit"
"the Word of God has natural force too. but primarily & preeminently & decisively it has the simple spiritual power of truth."
"He is Lord of the wording of His Word. He is not bound to it but it to Him. He can use it or not use it..."
"what Holy Scripture proclaims as His Word can be proclaimed in a new wording as His Word so long as it is He Himself who speaks..."
"when God's Word is heard & proclaimed, something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by [it]"
"this is also and especially true of preaching among both coloured and white heathens" say what?
barth's gospel
Here's a clear proclamation (CD I.1 §4.3):
God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath. God was with us in all the reality and fulness with which He does what He does. He was with us as one of us. His Word became flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. His glory was seen here in the depths of our situation, and the full depths of our situation were disclosed for the first time when illumined then and there by the Lord's glory, when in His Word He came down to the lowest parts of the earth (Eph 4:9), in order that there and in that way He might rob death of its power and bring life and immortality to light (2 Tim 1:10). This happened, and this is what the Old Testament as a word of prophecy and the New Testament as a word of fulfilment both proclaim as having happened, as having happened conclusively, totally and sufficiently.
Word.
karl barth
Eugene Peterson's "The Pastor: A Memoir" has become somewhat of a manifesto for me. Someday, I hope to write more of what it's done for me, is doing for me... Eugene's books have been my sanity - a true lamp to my pastoral feet - time and time again. Once, many years ago, I met him at a conference on spiritual formation in LA. But that's another story for another time.
In the meantime, I've started immersing myself in Karl Barth. I've read sizeable chunks of Barth over the years, and a lot of books about Barth and his theology (theologies? two? or three? consistent? etc). But I haven't spent much time in Barth directly, mostly because I hadn't found much that caught my heart in the bits of Barth that I'd read. Graham Tomlin once told me that I spent too much time in the secondary sources and not enough in the primary, and that's true - I've always used secondary sources to give me a sense of whether I wanted to invest time and emotional energy in the primary.
Also, Barth's lately become a touchstone of theological "cool" in some circles, and I tend to react negatively to such things, no doubt due to my finely-honed cynicism, pride and critical spirit.
And then Eugene gave me good reason to dive into Barth qua Barth. In "The Pastor", he speaks affectionately of Barth as his theologian:
He became the theologian I never had, a theologian who got me interested in God as God, not just talk about God. Franz Kafka in a letter wrote, "If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?... A book must be like an ice-axe to break the sea frozen within us." This first book of Barth's that I read was "like an ice-axe.
So... I started in on Barth's Church Dogmatics last week. If there's one theologian I really need to know well, it's my pastor's theologian.
And to keep myself reflecting on what I'm reading, I'm both tweeting and writing here on bits and fragments that I'd like to reflect on, thoughts and phrases that seem representative of Barth, critical to his argument such as I understand it.
bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 12:17 am
"we stand before the fact of heresy. concretely, we stand before the fact of Roman Catholicism..."
"not all human talk is talk about God. it could be and should be. there is no reason in principle why it should not be"
"if the social work of the church as such were to try to be proclamation, it could only become propaganda..."
"God may suddenly be pleased to have Abraham blessed by Melchizedek, or Israel blessed by Balaam or helped by Cyrus"
"He can establish the church anew and directly when and where and how it pleases Him"
"if the question what God can do forces theology to be humble, the question what is commanded of us forces it to concrete obedience"
"God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog"
"proclamation... is always and always will be man's word. when and where it pleases God, it is God's own Word"
"nor can one see in the Asiatic crudities of Bolshevic ideology a rival which is even remotely a match for the Church's proclamation"
"the central factum on which dogmatics focuses will always be quite simply the Church's Sunday sermon of yesterday & tomorrow"
"the simplest proclamation of the Gospel can be proclamation of the truth in the most unlimited sense..." (1)
"... and can validly communicate the truth to the most unsophisticated hearer if God so will" (2)
"without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding, the vulnerability... it could not be real proclamation"
"the Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it"
the bible is dead?
Fascinatingly wrong-headed stuff.
For many potential Bible readers, that expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. If the Bible is God's perfect, infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.The Bible is anything but univocal about anything. It is a cacophony of voices and perspectives, often in conflict with one another. In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture.
Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.
But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That's a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. On the contrary, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere. Ultimately it resists conclusion and explodes any desire we might have for univocality.
via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
More muddle:
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with National Public Radio's Michele Norris about my book Roadside Religion (Beacon Press, 2005). That book tells the story of my family's "blue highways" exploration of roadside religious attractions, from the World's Largest Ten Commandments and Holy Land U.S.A. to Precious Moments Chap el and Golgotha Fun Park. Norris knew that I had grown up in a conservative Christian environment, and wondered what kinds of thoughts and feelings those places evoked for me. Her final question was meant to bring our conversation around to this topic.
"As an avowed atheist ... ," Norris began.
"Um, wait. I'm sorry. I'm not an atheist. I'm actually Christian."
"Really!? Your publicity kit says you're an atheist at least twice."
Later, I asked my publicist why the kit described me as an atheist. She said that she got it from the book's introduction, in which I wrote that there were days when I could "atheist anyone under the table." That's true. But to say that is not to say that I am an atheist. In fact, what I'd written was, "Although I can atheist anyone under the table on some days, I remain a Christian, and I remain committed to the church."
belief, reasoning & emotion
"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.
Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.
Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. First, the "boys upstairs" (as the aliens were sometimes called) did not show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted?
At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!
From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. "Their sense of urgency was enormous," wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more certain of their beliefs.
via Mother Jones.
...since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.