bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:11 am
"these very writings, by the very fact that they were canonical, saw to it that they were recognized and proclaimed to be canonical"
"we will not be obedient to the Church but to the Word of God, and therefore in the true sense to the Church"
"an absolute guarantee that... what we know as the Canon is closed... cannot be given by the Church"
"a biblical theology [is] a series of attempted approximations, a collection of individual exegeses. There can never be... a system"
barth on theology: don't connect the dots. http://goo.gl/Dx04I
barth needs a tl;dr edition http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"we cannot think it: we can only contemplate it. we cannot assert & prove it: we can only believe it..." http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"Scripture attests itself in the fact that at its decisive centre it attests the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"
connecting the dots
TL;DR? here's what Barth asserts: don't connect the dots. Barth, CD I/2, p.483-484:
Rightly understood, the unity of Holy Scripture gives rise to a conclusion & demand to which the Church must pay good heed. But this conclusion & demand is not that we should abstract from the Bible some concealed historical or conceptual system, an economy of salvation or a Christian view of things. There can be no biblical theology in this sense, either of the Old or New Testament, or of the Bible as a whole. The presupposition & organising centre of such a system would have to be the object of the biblical witness, that is, revelation. Now revelation is no more & no less than the life of God Himself turned to us, the Word of God coming to us by the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ. But in our thinking, even in our meditation on the biblical texts, it is only improperly, i.e., only in the form of our recollection & expectation, that we can "presuppose" Jesus Christ & then add to this presupposition other thoughts, even those which are derived from our exposition of those texts. Properly, & that means, in living fact, revelation can only be presupposed to our thoughts, even to those based on exposition, that is, it can only be their organising centre by revelation itself. Therefore, a biblical theology can never consist in more than a series of attempted approximations, a collection of individual exegeses. There can never be any question of a system in the sense of Platonic, Aristotelian or Hegelian philosophy... Even the biblical witnesses themselves cannot & do not try to introduce revelation of themselves. They show themselves to be genuine witnesses of it by the fact that they only speak of it by looking forward to it & by looking back at it. How can we wish to complete the totality of their witness by treating revelation as a presupposition which we can control? How can we expound it except by surrendering ourselves with them to the recollection, their recollection, and to the expectation, their expectation? It is only in this surrender - and not in an arbitrary doing of what they omitted to do - that our exposition of that witness will be kept pure and will become our own witness. Biblical theology (and self-evidently dogmatics too) can consist only in an exercise of this surrender, not in an attempt to introduce the totality of the biblical witness.
At this point we must ask whether the older Protestant theology of the 17th century did not do too much, and therefore too little. Intrinsically, there can be no objection to the fact that in its exposition it made such active use of the instruments of Aristotelian and later Cartesian philosophy. How can we find fault, and not take as a model, the comprehensive thoroughness & accuracy which it obviously sought & in such surprising measure revealed? If only it had kept itself freer from the temptation to be inspired to go further & to seek that which is theologically impossible, a systematics of revelation, a system in which revelation itself can be used as a presupposition! It attempted to bring in the witness of revelation as such in its unity & entirety. But in so doing it did violence to it. And it was on this that it foundered when the Philistines came upon it in the 18th century as once they had come upon Samson. We must leave it to revelation itself to introduce itself either in its unity & entirety or indeed at all. Revelation is never behind us: always we can only follow it. We cannot think it: we can only contemplate it. We cannot assert & prove it: we can only believe it, believe it in recollection & expectation, so that if our faith is right and well-pleasing to God in what we then think & say, it can assert & prove itself.
declining crime
The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession. In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.
The news was not as positive in New York City, however. After leading a long decline in crime rates, the city saw increases in all four types of violent lawbreaking — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — including a nearly 14 percent rise in murders. But data from the past few months suggest the city’s upward trend may have slowed or stopped.
via NYTimes.com.
Nationally, the drop in violent crime not only calls into question the theory that crime rates are closely correlated with economic hardship, but another argument as well, said Frank E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
As the percentage of people behind bars has decreased in the past few years, violent crime rates have fallen as well. For those who believed that higher incarceration rates inevitably led to less crime, “this would also be the last time to expect a crime decline,” he said.
“The last three years have been a contrarian’s delight — just when you expect the bananas to hit the fan,” said Mr. Zimring, a visiting law professor at New York University and the author of a coming book on the decline in the city’s crime rate.
But he said there was no way to know why — at least not yet.
“The only thing that is reassuring being in a room full of crime experts now is that they are as puzzled as I am,” he said.
buddhist economics
Buddhist economist Sulak Sivaraksa has advice for Western capitalist societies.
"Globalisation," he writes, "is a demonic religion imposing materialistic values," and "a new form of colonialism". If Cameron is fond of the odd cola on the beach, he'd better stop. "To drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola in Siam is not just to ingest junk food, but to support exploitative values." Economic crises such as those that hit the West in 2008 and East Asia a decade earlier are "heavenly messengers" to "encourage us to seek alternative" models – as Sivaraksa told a no doubt startled James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank.
via The Independent.
Sivaraksa's view is that true happiness is not to be found in material gains or in the constant pursuit of unlimited growth, but starts with the search for inner calm. "You in the West have been indoctrinated by the Cartesian concept of thinking: I think, therefore I am. But the ego, the 'I' – it's not real. We are all inter-related." His path is not "cogito ergo sum" but "I breathe, therefore I am".
"We breathe all the time, yet we are not taught how to. Are we so arrogant that we ignore the most important element in life? Once you learn how to breathe properly, respect the air, cultivate peace within, that is the beginning of Gross National Happiness."
It also means doing away with what he considers the West's "mania for success": "Real success is not to conquer others, not to have more cars and money, but to appreciate what you have, how to share with others."
He admits that what he proposes may strike some as "Eastern garbage". Neither would all find it easy, or even desirable, to follow one example he gives of a friend in America: "He noticed that when a man he knew missed a bus, he would say, 'Wonderful! I have more time to contemplate.' The same when the train was late. My friend asked how he had this attitude, and he said: 'I'm a Buddhist.'"
Instead, Sivaraksa stresses that the West has its own traditions that he thinks we should revisit. "You need to go back into your spiritual past, to those such as Francis of Assisi. In my opinion, that's very close to the Buddhist approach." For Sivaraksa, a rationalism that only accepts what can be proven scientifically has led us to ignore riches from our own culture. "The West took Plato, Socrates and Aristotle only on the intellectual level. Plato's the man! Everything else is footnotes. But in Plato, there is also mysticism – being in the cave, talking to the gods. You dismissed all that."
Sivaraksa suggests that the West should open itself up to "cognitive diversity", to truths from different cultures. "As Gandhi said, 'Any wind coming through.'" Or, as Sivaraksa puts it in his new book: "We uncritically accept 'established knowledge' ... It is time for us to question the fundamentals of the Enlightenment in order to become truly enlightened."
the tree of life
Brad Pitt on Terence Malick & The Tree of Life:
Terry has an embrace for Christianity, for all religions, but not in the textbook definition of Christianity. You're looking at a man who loves science, and has an interpretation and a feeling for God. In America those two things usually don't coincide. And yet he sees the two as one: he sees God in science and science in God.I also grew up in a Christian environment, and as I became an adult — it doesn't work for me. I hesitate to say anything about religion, and yet I think I should say it, when so many wars are spawned by it. I got my issues; I can't talk about it without getting a little bit hot. It's probably not best for me to talk about that. But I was actually very comfortable playing within the religious iconography, because I lived that.
I'd say that Tree of Life is not a Christian so much as a spiritual film. I was surprised, watching it last night, how powerfully it struck me. What the film was saying to me is that there is an unexplained power; there is this force. And maybe peace can be found, but not by trying to explain it with the religion. Maybe there's peace to be found just in that acceptance of the unknown.
via TIME.