I wrote these for other social media outlets of mine. I thought I’d share them here as miscellanies.
People reject Barth out of hand simply because they’ve been told that Barth is ultimately a liberal (still). But these same people have never actually read Barth enough to know whether that be true or not. Coming from someone, an evangelical conservative Christian (me), who has both read Barth and Barth literature extensively, and published on Barth, these people are simply living in a willful land of ignorance. Granted, Barth’s 𝑜𝑒𝑢𝑣𝑟𝑒 is extensive. But there are ways into Barth that can introduce you to him without having to read all of him, or even a substantive amount of him. But most will never give him a fair hearing.
One reason Barth is pertinent to theology today is because he elides so much of the pop debates surrounding Reformed and non-Reformed theology; among many other important offerings. He truly offers an 𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑐ℎ 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 way forward that is actually true and correspondent with the best of what even a North American evangelical theology has striven for.
There is a hermeneutical logic inherent to the ℎ𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑠 articulated and thought out at the Council of Nicaea (and post). It offers a ‘depth dimensional’ understanding of Holy Scripture that functions well within what can be called the 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑠. That is, it understands that the Bible has an ontology (a givenness by God), and thus an antecedent context wherein it comes to make meaningful sense in the 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝𝑜𝑛 (face) of God in Christ. It realizes that Scripture is simply a 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑢𝑚 (sign) to its 𝑟𝑒𝑠 (reality) in Christ in the triune life. The fact that so many would-be exegetes of Scripture gloss right past this in favor of a higher critical approach, ought to be a warning of what being a theologian of glory looks like rather than a theologian of the cross (seeing the unseen things as seen).