Tag: Barth

I’m starting to believe as I continue my trek through the 6M words of Barth’s CD that many young (and some old) so-called Barth scholars have never read through Barth’s CD. There are things in there about history, the resurrection, so on and so forth that completely emaciate any claim that Barth did not believe in a bodily, historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. How Barth thought of history, through Christ, ends up being different than the historicist vision. Even so, for Barth it is bodily, historical, history delimiting and primordial event. The way Barth takes Bultmann to task directly, in…

Is God really knowable, secularly, in the vestiges of the created order? In other words, does God repose in the fallen order to the point that vain and profane people can come to have some type of vestigial knowledge of the living God? According to Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics of similar ilk, the answer is a resounding: yes. Here is Thomas himself: as we have shown [q. 32, a. 1], the Trinity of persons cannot be demonstratively proven. But it is still congruous to place it in the light of some things which are more manifest to us. And…

Photo copyright of the Karl Barth-Archiv in Basel, Switzerland Almost seven years ago now I wrote a post based on Christiane Tietz’s just released essay (at that point) where she offers some of Karl Barth’s and Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s love letters, translated for the first time from their original German into English. My initial blog post ended up going relatively “viral” in the theo-blogosphere, and eventually, beyond. My post, and then series of posts, was referred to by an article written by Mark Galli at Christianity Today, and then at Mere Orthodoxy and other like outlets online. A little later my…

How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers! 2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night. Psalm 1:1-2   What does it mean to be genuinely human? This is a question philosophers, world religions, little kids, and others have been pondering for the millennia. Rather than speculate though, as Christians we have the more accurate way, the more concrete way; God’s way for answering said question. As is the case with everything in the Christian kingdom, our…

When engaging the theologians, it is an important exercise to broaden out the frame, every now and then, in order to get a greater, even critical understanding of just who we might be engaging with. This holds true for any of the theologians, including Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance (the two modern theologians who, of course, have had the greatest purchase in my life over the last, almost, two decades). In an effort to expand the scope on the way we might respectively approach Barth and Torrance, I wanted to offer some words from ecclesial intellectual historian, the late, Steven…

I want to talk about God’s shadow side. The rip against Thomas Torrance, Karl Barth and the Athanasian Reformed is that their respective doctrine of election leads to some form of Christian universalism (some are okay with that). But in fact, it doesn’t. People like Keven Vanhoozer, Robert Letham, Roger Olson et al. have critiqued Torrance, Barth, and Evangelical Calvinists, like myself, with reference to what they take to be our theological Achilles heel. Because they think from within an Aristotelian or Stoic theory of causation in a God-world relation, they cannot imagine how the Evangelical Calvinist, after Barth, Torrance…

I’ve been struggling, conflicted, whatever you want to call it, since 2017, with reference to what to do with Barth. I publicly began this struggle here at the blog, and you can read that series of posts here. Unlike many, like the recent TGC post on Barth and Von Kirschbaum, I have skin in the game. I’ve been reading Barth since 2002, and on him for just as long. I am a proponent of many of his theological themes, particularly his doctrine of election (which of course, impinges on everything else). This might sound melodramatic, but I’ve been wrestling with…

I was just re-reading the following post which I originally posted on September 13, 2021. I was looking for a post that got into the role that natural theology and no-natural theology plays in regard to Christian praxis vis-à-vis the state. This particular post has to do with BigMedicine, and what I call, along with Agamben, a new religion. Really it isn’t new at all though. Hitler rationalized that what he was doing, in pushing forward his third reich, was being done in the name of medical and scientific advancement (thus cultural advancement ushering in a new millennium where he would be…

Here’s a post I found in my drafts from 2013, not sure if I ever posted this. Election. Election has been such a source of consternation for so many of us through our own theological years. The battle continues to fray on and on between the rascally classical Calvinists and Arminians—at least in its most popular expression—there is a trading of proof texts that sail right past each other as two ships in the dark navigate precariously past one another. There is a more sophisticated way to engage with this tumultuous topic. I like to think that Myk Habets and…

A reader of the blog just contacted me via email to inquire about what I would recommend as introductory reading on and from Barth. The following is the list I put down off the top. 1) Michael Allen’s: Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader 2) George Hunsinger: How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology 3) The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth 4) David Guretzki: An Explorer’s Guide to Karl Barth 5) Bruce McCormack: Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth 6) Christiane Tietz: Karl Barth: A Life of Conflict   7) Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 8) Karl…