Karl Barth postgraduate seminar
Anyway these are the texts that we'll be reading:
- "The New World in the Bible" and "The Word of God as the Task of Theology", from The Word of God and Theology, translated by Amy Marga
- Barth, Epistle to the Romans, translated by E. C. Hoskyns
- Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, translated by Garrett Green (this is a section of Church Dogmatics that was newly translated and published separately as a funky little paperback)
1 Revelation: "The New World in the Bible"
2 Dialectical theology: "The Word of God as the Task of Theology"
3 A new approach to scripture: Epistle to the Romans, prefaces (all of them!)
4 The night of sin: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 1
5 God's faithfulness: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 3
6 The new human being: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 5
7 Judgment on religion: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 7
8 Judgment on the church: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 10
9 Revelation and religion: On Religion, chapter 1
10 The sin of religion: On Religion, chapter 2
11 The justification of religion: On Religion, chapter 3a (pp. 111-44)
12 Christ and the Christian religion: On Religion, chapter 3b (pp. 144-66)
Students will be required to write a first paper exploring one particular chapter from the Romans commentary, and a second paper that explores one of the larger themes in these texts.
If anybody from the Sydney area would like to come along and join us, the seminar will be on Tuesday afternoons, commencing early March. Non-fee-paying audit participants are always welcome!
Looks great, Ben. Hope it goes well.
Ben - wishing we still were in Sydney, this looks so good. Is there a distance ed possibility?
Kerrie and Don
+1 for the distance-ed possibility! This looks amazing.
Mike (NZ)
People might not want to take the time to educate me in a comment thread, but what is Barth's "doctrine of the lights"? I'd never heard of it, and a Google search (Barth "doctrine of the lights") pulled up only four (!) hits, one of which is this post. So color me intrigued.
Richard, if you google "Lichterlehre" you'll get a lot more results. It's a much-discussed section in CD IV/3 where he argues that Jesus is the light of revelation and that there are other "little lights" and "secular parables". Some readers see this as an important shift in Barth's thinking about world religions. I'm not so sure about that - but I'm hoping to read this section myself at the end of the semester, just to see how it looks against the backdrop of these earlier texts.
I think it is very important to understand that Barth does not think primarily of other religions in his CD I/1 §17 on religion. At that time the term was coined by a certain 19th century understanding of religion as a fundamental concept for Christian theology, esp. its subjective dimension.
Barth thinks first and foremost about Christianity in his critique of religion: He is not interested in doing a "theology of religions" and to explore the relationship and dialogue of concrete and historical religions. Instead his treatment of religion is part of his prolegomena where he tries to establish the concept of "revelation" (the priority of the otherness and alterity ("objectivity") of God) as methodologically foundational for his theology - against "religion", which was until then the favorite of liberal theology for that function and tried to start theology with general phenomena of experience of transcendence.
Thus, one cannot directly compare the "Lichterlehre" and §17 because of the different theological context.
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