Barth CD I/2 11:16 am<

"Christianity has always been & only been a living religion when it is not ashamed to be actually & seriously a book-religion"

1:58 pm

"the lame walk, the blind see, the dead are raised, sinful & erring men speak the Word of God: that is the miracle..."

10:55 pm

barth on infallibility. he's not for it. http://goo.gl/TwJYE

Peggy Rosenthal, in The IMAGE Blog:

Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities.

And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Ali is as American as apple pie—or as bagels or pizza or curry or hummus.

These food analogies might seem a bit odd for a book with this title. But Fasting for Ramadan isn’t just about fasting. For Ali, the 30-day Ramadan fast draws his attention to the body’s nature in ever-new ways. So the book is about what it means to live in a body, how body-mind-spirit are connected, where our “self” resides, how the practices of Islam and yoga reinforce each other.

Yes, yoga. Ali has taught yoga and has a yoga practice. (What could be more American than that?) “Yoga,” he writes,” is from the same Sanskrit word that gives the word ‘yolk.’ And ‘yoke.’

And, interestingly: ‘religion.’ Which can be both yolk and yoke, fruitfully and restrictively. Yoga is a practice, not unlike fasting, that allows us to link the inside—the private experiences of the body and the mind—with the outside—the pulsing, breathing, actual world.

Say what?

Whether or not you find his position plausible, the argument seems unusually defensive. And I think he's aware of the wobbliness... An oddly atypical bit of Barth.

CD I/2, p.529-530:

...every time we turn the Word of God into an infallible biblical word of man or the biblical word of man into an infallible Word of God we resist that which we ought never to resist, i.e., the truth of the miracle that here fallible men speak the Word of God in fallible human words - and we therefore resist the sovereignty of grace, in which God Himself became man in Christ, to glorify Himself in his humanity. If we cannot make up our minds for this hard thinking, let us see to it that we are not shutting ourselves off from the real word of comfort spoken to us by the existence of the Bible as such. And if we want to assert a supposedly stricter concept of the value and authority of the Bible, let us see to it that we are not moving away from the strictness of its true value and authority. If the prophets and apostles are not real and therefore fallible men, even in their office, even when they speak and write of God's revelation, then it is not a miracle that they speak the Word of God... To the bold postulate, that if their word is to be the Word of God they must be inerrant in every word, we oppose the even bolder assertion, that according to the scriptural witness about man, which applies to them too, they can be at fault in any word, and have been at fault in every word, and yet according to the same scriptural witness, being justified and sanctified by grace alone, they have still spoken the Word of God in their fallible and erring human word. It is the fact that in the Bible we can take part in this real miracle, the miracle of the grace of God to sinners, and not the idle miracle of human words which were not really human words at all, which is the foundation of the dignity and authority of the Bible.

And then, p.531:

We are absolved from differentiating the Word of God in the Bible from other contents, infallible portions and expressions from the erroneous ones, the infallible from the fallible, and from imagining that by means of such discoveries we can create for ourselves encounters with the genuine Word of God in the Bible. If God was not ashamed of the fallibility of all the human words of the Bible, of their historical and scientific inaccuracies, their theological contradictions, the uncertainty of their tradition, and above all, their Judaism, but adopted and made use of these expressions in all their fallibility, we do not need to be ashamed when He wills to renew it to us in all its fallibility as witness, and it is mere self-will and disobedience to try to find some infallible elements in the Bible.