Join in the Karl Barth seminar via Facebook

My postgrad seminar on Barth's early theology starts this week. If anyone would like to join in the weekly readings and to be part of the discussion, I've created a Facebook group. Anyone is welcome to join. The first short reading is Barth's early lecture, "The New World of the Bible". The 12 weekly readings are listed here.

Karl Barth postgraduate seminar

I promised you an update on what we'll be reading for my Barth seminar this semester. Thanks for all the great suggestions, both here and on Facebook. After much reflection and dialectical hesitation and whatnot, I decided to head off in a slightly different direction, and that is to make Barth's concept of religion a focal point for the seminar. I think this helps to cover a lot of bases. It allows us to read both the Romans commentary and an important section of Church Dogmatics, while keeping strong thematic links across the semester. And it opens up some of the most important areas of Barth's thought (e.g. revelation, election, grace, the task of theology, the critique of protestant liberalism on the one side and Roman Catholicism on the other, etc). In a perfect world we would also have time to read Barth's "doctrine of the lights" from later in the Church Dogmatics. But, ladies and gentlemen, last time I looked out the window it was not a perfect world.

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)

And here are the twelve weekly readings that we'll be discussing:

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!

Postgraduate seminar on Karl Barth: what to read?

This year it was Origen; next year I’ll be teaching a postgraduate seminar on the theology of Karl Barth. It’s a 12-week course and I’m trying to decide on the readings. Barth presents special challenges here, given the huge slow expansiveness of his best work. The best seminar in the world would be one on Church Dogmatics IV – but where on God’s good earth are the students who would agree to read the requisite 3,000 pages?

Anyway, I’ve come up with three possible approaches so far, and I’d love to know what you think. Which of these would you prefer if you were doing a seminar like this? Which texts you would choose if you were the teacher? Anyone else out there have experience with a course like this?

First Idea. Barth’s early theology

The Word of God and Theology (2 weeks)
Epistle to the Romans (5 weeks)
Göttingen Dogmatics (5 weeks)

Second Idea. Barth’s dogmatics

Göttingen Dogmatics (5 weeks)
Michael Allen’s Church Dogmatics reader (5 weeks)
The Humanity of God (2 weeks)

Third Idea. Barth’s doctrine of creation

Parts of Church Dogmatics III/1 – creation and covenant (6 weeks)
Parts of Church Dogmatics III/3 – providence and evil (6 weeks)

Sonderegger on Style

A good book gathers annotations—marginal notes, exclamations marks, and question marks, often paired together. When the margins are full, these engagements overflow into the pages of journals and reviews. Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology is a good book. Marginalia has just published a wonderful review essay by Brad East, which captures well the confounding and compelling spirit of Sonderegger’s work.

Brad ends his review with a comment on style: “Her distinction is not that she does systematic theology… but how she does it. Her style is a throwback: unashamedly spiritual, punch-drunk with praise and prayer, compelled by living encounter with divine reality.” Which describes wonderfully the experience of reading her work.

Style, after all, has been of interest to Sonderegger for years. In the early 90s, she published a piece, “On Style in Karl Barth”, which made me never want to write on Barth again. In the opening paragraphs, she provides a chilling description of the lifelessness of Barth scholarship when compared with its source. “The lengthy treatments of Barth’s ‘method’, so popular among Anglo-Americans, seem to march on, correctly but rather mercilessly, revealing so little of the joyful delight and freedom of movement Barth shows at every turn” (p. 65). 

Those who wish to avoid method might attempt to write on Barth’s doctrine, but will hardly fare any better, since Barth forces a choice upon the interpreter: “are they ‘within the system’, or are they without, looking in? … Allegiance often results in a wooden repetition of Barth’s own phrases, only in a very loud voice” (p. 66). If one wishes to reckon with Barth at all, one must face this problem at some point, either creating a false system to critique from a distance, or entering into his world and bumbling like a fool. “It is”, Sonderegger laments, “a particularly friendless hour when this problem finally arrives at your door. Nothing, really, is so wooden to read as one’s own prose about Barth” (p. 66).

And so it is no wonder that when she comes to turn her hand to a systematic theology, Sonderegger mostly puts Barth to the side and speaks with her own voice. Perhaps being a true disciple of Barth means simply doing the work of theology, as Sonderegger says, "without a loss of nerve."

Review of Donald Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II

Donald W. Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Eerdmans, 2015)

This is a timely book. Indeed as Donald Norward had been hatching it long before Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, it is a prophetic book. Unitatis Redintegratio, the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism, states: “In its pilgrimage on earth Christ summons the church to continual reformation, of which it is always in need, in so far as it is an institution of human beings here on earth.” Yet after nearly fifty years this promising declaration seemed, to many an ecumenical Simeon, to have become a forlorn hope. Then, suddenly, habemus papam whose agenda actually includes – “reforming Rome.” (Well, at least the Roman Curia!)

At 232 pages of text Reforming Rome is not a long book, but its 25-page bibliography is suggestive of its compact comprehensiveness. It is hugely instructive and illuminating about Vatican II, not only in terms of input and output, but also as an event. That is, it not only provides a description and analysis of the Council’s work, it also gives a vivid sense of the Council as a kind of huge ecclesial gala for gift-exchange, as much about relationships as ideas. How delightfully Norwood weaves into his narrative snippets of the personal interactions of members and guests, before and after the Council as well as during it. Thus Vatican II becomes a model for the way to do our ecumenism today: unity-through-friendship. Which doesn’t mean that we must always be nice to each other, let alone agree with each other, but it does mean that we will always have each other’s backs.

Enter the ever polemical Karl Barth. From the first volume of his Church Dogmatics when he (in?)famously declared that the analogia entis, the ontological foundation for doing natural theology, is “the invention of Antichrist,” Barth was always up for a theological punch-up with Rome. Until the (school) bell, that is, when many of his Catholic interlocutors became beloved companions (particularly the two Hanses, Urs von Balthasar and Küng). Indeed for all his tenacious cross-examination of the Council’s documents – he lamented the failure of Nostra Aetate “to set forth an explicit confession of guilt” for the Church’s historic anti-Semitism; dubbed Dignitatis Humanae a “monstrosity”; and remained underwhelmed by even the moderated Mariology of Lumen Gentium – Barth was a dedicated evangelist for Vatican II, convinced in his dotage that there were now no “irreconcilable differences” to block the eschatological not-yet of unity from becoming ever more realised.

Other areas of contemporary as well as historical interest covered by Norwood – “The past is not dead; it is not even past,” wrote William Faulkner – include the excellent section devoted to the question of women (Barth told Rome that it still has work to do; women told Barth that he still has work to do too!); an update on why the doctrine of justification by faith should no longer be considered a church-dividing issue (though in my view the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith might be even more of an ecumenical game-changer had insights from the “New Perspectives on Paul” on the ecclesiological import of the doctrine informed the biblical studies done by its working party); and the parts that touch on polity, hierarchy, and the purple elephant that won’t leave the building, i.e., episcopacy (Barth, I sense, would support the ecumenical consensus about the threefold ministry, as long as there are laocratic checks and balances to the exercise of episcopal authority).

Reforming Rome is a must-read for anyone interested in Vatican II, in Karl Barth, and for all engaged in current ecumenical discussions, not least for the contagiousness of the author’s unquenchable enthusiasm for visible unity. In the book’s acknowledgements, Donald Norwood writes that “without the support of my lovely wife Margaret, I could not write another word.” To which uxorial praise I would only add: Margaret, stay healthy!

First published in the Society for Ecumenical Studies Journal

Jenson about Barth on Jenson on Barth: a review-anecdote

In a “review” of D. Stephen Long’s Saving Karl Barth published in Pro Ecclesia last year, Robert Jenson offers a corrective and an anecdote. Long, like many others, takes exception to Bruce McCormack’s view that II/2 forms the metaphysical centre of Barth’s theology. Students of Jenson will know that Jenson himself made the same claim—well before McCormack—in his PhD, which was revised and published as Alpha and Omega. Long claims that there is “no positive statement by Barth of II/2’s centrality.” Jenson is amused at this argument, since “there is in fact such a statement, and I am its most direct witness.”

In the summer of 1959 we moved our young family from Heidelberg to Basel in hope of my consulting Barth himself during the final drafting of my Heidelberg dissertation, which was on ‘The Election of Jesus Christ in the Theology of Karl Barth.’ Barth was open to this, reading a final version before we returned to Heidelberg. In it I argued, as bluntly as possible, that his doctrine of election in II/2 upended traditional understandings of the relation between time and eternity and thus inaugurated an innovative ontology, and that this complex was then—for better or worse—the ruling center of his subsequent theology. Barth invited me to his study, and after some conversation said, "Aber Herr Jenson—Sie haben mich verstanden," "But Mr. Jenson—you have understood me." A bit later an interviewer for the Christian Century asked Barth if anyone had grasped the real center of his thinking. Barth answered that there was ‘one, a young American.’ Subsequently I was identified by name in the journal as the one—not by me.

McCormack's theology is hardly identical to Jenson's, but they accord the same status to II/2. The result, Jenson claims, is that Barth's imprimatur extends to McCormack on at least this point. One who wishes to disagree with McCormack’s central thesis about election, Jenson concludes, is not discrediting McCormack, but “it is Barth’s teaching that is thus discredited.”

And so the Barth-wars continue.

A tweet for every volume of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics

Yesterday someone on twitter suggested the idea of tweet-summaries of Barth's Church Dogmatics. Reader, how could I resist? I could not. As well as providing much-needed edification for the twittersphere, it gave me something to do on a long road trip. I was driving all day from Sydney to Melbourne, so I composed the tweets while driving and then gleefully posted them whenever I could find a spot to pull over. As you can easily imagine, an exercise like this adds a dash of excitement to the drudgery of hurtling along a highway at 110 km/hr listening to audiobooks of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky while the thunderstorms come rolling over the plains. So here are the tweets:

Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics

I/1: Before I ever thought of God, before I opened my mouth to speak, God is, God speaks, and what God says is "God!"

I/2: God's mighty Word is humbly hidden in the human flesh of Jesus, the human words of scripture, and the boredom of the Sunday sermon.

II/1: God's friendly Word is unconditioned by anything in us. That's why God is better than anyone, because God is free to love everyone.

II/2: Why is God so good at freely loving us? Because God had so much practice before we ever existed.

III/1: We were summoned into being by God's freely loving Word. From that day on, God has spared no expense in trying to befriend us.

III/2: Our nature fits God like a glove: God wore it first then let us try it on, and Jesus shows us how to wear it right.

III/3: God's freely loving Word holds the world in being and keeps at bay the dreadful power of nonbeing. (P.S. There are angels.)

III/4: How good it is to be a creature! To be freely ourselves, never more or less, within the constraints that God has lovingly set for us.

IV/1: When I saw how Jesus used his deity to become small and humble for my sake, it took my breath away (and then my pride).

IV/2: When I saw Jesus triumphant in his humanity, it roused me from a deadly boredom: I became freely and fully human, almost a god.

IV/3: The human messenger is the divine Message: Jesus, the living truth that unmasks my self-deception and makes me a disciple of truth.

IV/4: So cheer up! God's faithfulness frees us for faith. God's loving address frees us to answer. God's gift frees us for gratitude.

V: And the rest, my friends, is Mozart.

The Divine Unity: Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology

The first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s new Systematic Theology is nearing release, and the curious can sample the preface and first chapter of the book on Fortress’ website. 

It looks like an unmissable volume—if only because she resolutely refuses to begin with Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity. “This theology is neither Christomorphic nor Christocentric” (p. xvii). 

In her preface, Sonderegger observes that “Modern Christian theology has shown an allergy to questions about Deity—what God is” (p. xi). She sets out in this volume to explore the perfections of God through the foundational perfection: divine oneness—“oneness governs the Divine Perfections: all in the doctrine of God must serve, set forth, and conform to the transcendent Unity of God” (p. xiv). 

While some modern theologians have depicted the renewed emphasis on the doctrine of the Trinity as the victory of scripture over philosophy, Sonderegger points to the priority of divine oneness in scripture. There is nothing more scriptural, she observes, than monotheism. This marks a departure from the modern trend of beginning with the Trinity. The beloved doctrine of the modern West will have to wait until volume 2.

The sample from the first chapter is rich and interesting. Sonderegger enters into extended engagement with Jenson as a prime example of a doctrine of God that “conjoins divine identity, narrative, Trinity, philo-Judaism, and anti-Hellenism” (p. 7). Jenson’s theology is worth examining, she argues, because Jenson insists that “its defiant starting point in the doctrine of the Trinity moves it not away [from], … but closer to the law, observance, and piety of rabbinic Judaism” (p. 7). However, she finds the sidelining of oneness in his treatment dissatisfying. Against Jenson and his comrades Sonderegger argues that the foundational form of the Old Testament is not “narrative” or “story”, but Torah (p. 11). Israel’s scripture teaches divine oneness as a metaphysical commitment.

Whereas Barth, Jenson, and others have suggested that a purely monadic God would be an idol, Sonderegger argues that according to scripture a visible God would be more idolatrous. God’s invisibility is what sets the true God apart from idols (pp. 17-21). How she will reconcile this with christology and the iconoclast controversy remains to be seen.

While it is questionable to offer a critique based on a short sample—a bit like reviewing a movie after having watched only the trailer—a question did keep coming to mind. Sonderegger has decided to avoid treating God as triune in this volume in order to redress the oversight of the unity of God in modern theology. However, I am not quite convinced that the unity of God has been overlooked in the modern renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity. It seems to me that for Jenson (and perhaps for Barth and others), the unity of the divine being is a presupposition that needs to be converted by an encounter with divine revelation. That certain theologians prefer to begin with the doctrine of the Trinity does not necessarily mean, as Sonderegger argues, “that the Oneness of God comes under heavy threat” (p. 9). However, she is right that the current theological climate makes it difficult to know what we can/should say about the oneness of God.

Sonderegger’s prose is alive with scriptural allusions and spiritual insights. Most compelling is her reflection on the spiritual and theological importance of God’s humility: “So humble is this God that He will lay Himself down in our knowledge, making our paths straight, illumining our darkness, raising up the creature in His own ineffable Light… This is the exceeding Goodness of our God, His Lowliness, that He will come to us, and make His dwelling there” (p. xx).

I look forward to reading the full volume. It seems to me that her attentiveness to scripture and to spiritual practices is to be celebrated and emulated. If doing so problematises received models or methods for theology, so be it.

On not reading Karl Barth anymore: a white male's perspective

by Peter Kline (in response to Janice Rees’ post On Not Reading Barth)

I’d like to tell my own story about being a white male who once read and studied Karl Barth but does so no longer.

I first started reading Barth as an undergrad while doing a theology degree at Wheaton College. At that institution at the time, reading Barth was a way to hold on to some form of “evangelical” thought and piety while also pushing and dissolving some of the more suffocating boundaries that evangelical churches and institutions create. My experience of reading Barth then was exciting and liberating. He allowed me to begin to let go of many of my religious and intellectual anxieties. He introduced me to the beauty and poetry of theology.

But already then, at Wheaton, the pressures that have caused me to stop reading Barth were mounting. These pressures are difficult to speak about because they involve the intersection of institutional and social forces with my own developmental needs, anxieties and quirks as a young, white, privileged, pious, adolescent male. Sorting out completely this complex web of forces and attractions would be impossible. Suffice it to say, I have no interest in disavowing responsibility for my own feelings and actions in order to point fingers. We are responsible for our own anxieties and despair, even if what has led us to them are massive forces beyond our conscious knowledge and control.

At Wheaton, or at least in the circles within the Wheaton theology department I found myself in, Barth represented sophistication, savviness, critical distance from sentimental, moist-eyed evangelicalism, and the possibility of an alert and intellectually serious, yet heart-felt, evangelical theology. An aura of promise surrounded Barth; with him one could be an unembarrassed evangelical. And in those days at Wheaton, there was a promised land: Princeton Theological Seminary. There one could enjoy the pure milk and honey of the world’s finest Barth scholars, even if one still had to do occasional battle with some Canaanites, i.e., liberals.

Looking back, I now recognize both painfully and humorously that my decision to go to Princeton Seminary directly from Wheaton was driven by a desire to secure for myself and perform a particular identity: the white, male, Barthian-evangelical theologian. The pressures at Wheaton to pursue that identity were complicated and deep-seated. There was the peer pressure, the upperclassmen in my dorm who were themselves desiring and pursuing that identity. They seemed to know it all and have it all: the Barth-knowledge, the approval of professors, the girlfriends-soon-to-be-wives, the Princeton acceptance letters. I wanted all of that. There was the internal, self-pressure, the anxious need to grasp at an identity using the closest available language and resources. This self-pressure was compounded and given shape by my personal, spiritual-religious history of being the smart, good, Christian boy. There was the approval and acclamation of (white male) professors at Wheaton that I eventually received, one of whom had received his doctorate from Princeton writing on Barth under a big-name Barth scholar. These professors, who I didn’t want to disappoint, ushered me off to Princeton with a glow of pride and enthusiasm. I was white, I was male, I was smart, I had a thesis on Barth written, I had my Princeton acceptance letter, I had my fiancée, I had it all. I had my identity. It was all working for me.

And it continued to. I won’t go into all the details of my time at Princeton Seminary and how my study of Barth developed and deepened. I’ll just say that I did what I set out to do: I made it into the inner-circle of Barth studies. I became a prized student of the Princeton Barth scholars and developed informed and detailed opinions about all of the Barth debates that were circling around campus. I worked in the Barth Center. I went to the Barth conferences. It was all working for me. I became close to one professor in particular who believed in my abilities as a theologian and a reader of Barth and who wanted to see me go on and get a PhD. In a conversation about my future, this professor suggested that I do a ThM year at the University of Edinburgh with plans to return to Princeton to do a PhD. Eager to please a professor who had trained me and who I thought knew what was best for me, and eager to secure my future as a white-Barth-boy, I decided to do the year in Edinburgh. So my wife and I moved.

The nine months I spent in Edinburgh were some of the bleakest of my life thus far. About two months in, I started having crippling panic attacks and sunk into depression. Part of it was the move and the culture shock, undoubtedly. But at the heart of it was confronting the deep alienation from myself that had quietly grown over the past six years while constructing my evangelical-Barthian-theologian identity. I had emptied myself out into a discourse that was quickly becoming meaningless to me because I was realizing that I had no idea who I was in that discourse, even though I had become fluent in it. In Edinburgh, the meaninglessness irrupted into my life and undid me.

I had worked tirelessly to secure a privileged identity and make it into the inner circle where I thought I would find myself, and right as I was about to take the long-desired step into the inner sanctum (getting into Princeton’s PhD program), I found myself alone, on the outside, cold, angry and dejected, a stranger to myself. In therapy that year, the physical move to Scotland became for me a parable of emotional and spiritual exile. I began to realize that when you aim for the inner circle and do everything to please its gatekeepers and succeed at it, sooner or later you find out that the center is a lonely and meaningless abyss. It’s a bit like the shock of discovering that the deepest level of hell in Dante’s Inferno is frozen over, but only worse, because you thought you were traveling to paradise. That winter in Edinburgh was cold, the coldest one the city had seen in decades.

There is no inside. The inside is a lie. Once you get into the inside, you realize that it is another outside. The deeper in you press, the farther out you get thrown. Even boys have to work to get into the boys club, and once we are there we feel anxious and alone and forgotten, at least some of us do. Don’t buy the cockiness and self-assured talk. We are lonely. And we do theology harboring a despair so deep we can’t even recognize it as despair. 

I about gave up on the whole academic thing in Edinburgh. But for some reason, a reason I still struggle to see sometimes, I didn’t. I applied to PhD programs and got admitted to Princeton and Vanderbilt. It was part of my healing to say No to Princeton. But what exactly was I saying No to? It wasn’t until the Fall semester of my first year at Vanderbilt that I finally made a break with Barth in terms of my writing and research. The previous summer I had been invited to contribute to an online blog conference on Barth that would take place in October. The conversation that unfolded in response to my essay was painful for me. People I thought were my friends at Princeton treated me with a callousness and condescension that I found disgusting. But I realized that this was nothing new really, that I had been around this toxicity for years but hadn’t had the distance to see it. This is what talking about Barth sounded and felt like, a pious pissing contest. These are the kinds of conversations Barth’s discourse generates, and I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of them, even if I was good at them. After that essay, I decided not to write on Barth anymore, beyond what was required of me as a grad student. What I decided to walk away from was a whole Princeton-Barth culture that bred arrogance, pseudo-friendships, and a very limited set of theological possibilities.

So I don’t really read Barth anymore. I don’t reject everything or even a lot of what I learned while studying him for several years. All of it stays with me and informs me in various ways. But I consciously avoid the Barth industry. I am under no illusions that this is a subversive act on my part. I’m just practicing a bit of self-care. I’m also under no illusions that someone like me with my background can simply switch over from the Barth industry to the social-justice / critical-theory industry. I’ve learned at Vanderbilt that the latter is every bit as much an industry as the former with unspoken but obvious clubs and entrance requirements. Critical theory people can be every bit as self-protective.

I took a Queer Theory class here at Vanderbilt my second year here, and I loved it. But I was treated with suspicion by a fellow student. Aren’t you going to co-opt the discussion from the voices that should be having it and fold it into your white-boy systematic theology game? Are you just hunting for the latest trends and ideas? Are you queer enough to be talking about Queer Theory? I have deeply personal reasons for being interested in Queer Theory, reasons that no person should have to defend, so it was incredibly painful to be subjected to such suspicion. I don’t say this to paint myself as a victim. I am not a victim of anything. My story is not one of oppression or denied opportunities or a silenced voice. My story is one of the self-alienation that results from winning the game. But I have learned that there are lots of games in town, and the sooner I don’t care about winning any of them the better.

Karl Barth's theological method: some analytic notes and queries

A post dedicated to Oliver Crisp, to celebrate the launch of his new open access Journal of Analytic Theology.
 

One of Karl Barth's most characteristic patterns of thinking – you'll find it everywhere in the Church Dogmatics – goes something like this:

(1) God has done x

(2) Therefore God can do x

(3) But God doesn't have to do x

(4) Therefore x is an act of God's freedom (the Can) and God's love (the Doesn't-have-to)

(5) By recognising God's Can and God's Doesn't-have-to in x, we understand x as revelation (i.e., a revelation of the God who loves in freedom).

Some observations and queries about this pattern of thought:

a. This might be called a theological method, but it is the furthest thing in the world from a generic method for producing knowledge. It would be more accurate to call it a distillation of Barth's doctrine of God, which is organised around the two mega-attributes of love and freedom (see Barth's definition in CD II/1: God is "the one who loves in freedom"). The content of theology is already written into the theologian's method.

b. This method of thinking would not get anywhere without (1) – that is, without God doing something. Method alone does not generate information about God. Method generates information only as it is applied to (1), to the fact of God's having done something. Specifically, in any given instance of God doing something, method is used to infer from that instance certain things about God's freedom (the Can) and God's love (the Doesn't-have-to). These inferences supply the content of theology. It is in this sense that Barth understands all theology as obedience, as thought following after God. His method is inferential abstraction from the facts of revelation.

c. Yet in (1) – "God has done x" – the word "God" already has content. The God who does something in this instance is already assumed to have a particular character, to be "the one who loves in freedom". It is only this assumption that gives the ensuing method any traction. For example, if God were not already assumed to be free, then instead of (3) we might simply posit that "God must have needed to do x", and the rest of the chain of reasoning would be aborted.

d. Does this mean that the method is incoherent? That in fact the Can and the Doesn't-have-to are supplied not by revelation itself but by the theologian? If so, it would mean that the method is in fact functioning as a revelation, since God's freedom and love are prescribed in the method and not derived from God's doing x.

e. Or does this reflect a recursive pattern that is proper to theological knowing? That the theologian's reflection on God's doing x will be a means of participating in the reality that x itself has brought into being? If so, then the method of theological knowing is itself one of the effects produced by revelation. The theologian does not initiate a process of knowing, but begins to think out of a participation in the God who has been revealed in x as the one who loves in freedom. In that case, what happens to the knower in the event of revelation supplies the method by which the knower begins to appropriate revelation as knowledge.

Notes on a manuscript discovery: Karl Barth's rough outlines for Church Dogmatics, Volume V

If you move in Barthian circles, you've probably heard by now about the rumored discovery a few weeks ago at the Barth-Archiv in Basel. While examining some of Barth's handwritten lecture notes from the 1960s, a Hungarian doctoral researcher claimed to have discovered a series of handwritten outlines for the fifth volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics – the unwritten final volume on eschatology (die Lehre von der Erlösung) that had formed part of Barth's original plan, though he died before completing even the fourth volume. Towards the end of his life Barth was often asked about the last volume of his Dogmatics, but he refused to speculate about it. It has always been believed that he never committed any thoughts to paper about this projected volume. But the Hungarian researcher identified a sequence of notes that look like a series of alternative plans for Volume V. The notes are interspersed haphazardly through an exercise book containing jottings for two public lectures that Barth delivered in 1968, the last year of his life.

When I heard about this manuscript discovery a couple of weeks ago, I was sceptical. Since then, I've exchanged a long string emails with the director of the Barth-Archiv, who has been busily studying the sequence of notes, trying to decipher Barth's (notoriously illegible) handwriting and to piece together the various fragments of notes. In the latest communication from him (which I received about an hour ago), he confirmed that he believes these are indeed a series of short sketches for a final volume of Church Dogmatics. It is hoped that a simple transcription of Barth's notes will be published later this year in the Basel journal, Theologische Zeitschrift, so that scholars can have access to the material as soon as possible.

In the mean time, I have been given permission to say a few things here about these handwritten notes. Please understand that what I will supply here are only provisional summaries; I have received these details by email from the director of the Barth-Archiv as he has been working through the material. I haven't seen this material at first hand, and I've been asked to emphasise the difficulty and ambiguity of some of Barth's notes, not only on account of Barth's handwriting and the damage to some parts of the manuscript (see below), but also because of the way these notes are freely interspersed throughout the exercise book, more or less seamlessly interwoven with other notes that Barth was preparing for the two public lectures. (Luckily we have the full text of these two lectures, which has made it possible to distinguish the notes associated with the lectures from this other layer of material.)

Keeping all that in mind, here are some of the general details as I have received them. Barth appears to have sketched out several different possible approaches to the doctrine of redemption, as follows:

(1) In one approach, he proposes revisiting each previous doctrine from the Dogmatics in reverse order, showing how the conceptual architecture of each doctrine is broken open – and ultimately reorganised – when it is reinterpreted as part of a theology of the Holy Spirit. After working back through reconciliation (volume IV), creation (volume III), election (volume II), and revelation (volume I), the Dogmatics would end where it began: in the doctrine of the Trinity – not, this time, as a doctrine of revelation, but as a doctrine of final redemption.

(2) In another approach, Barth loosely structures the doctrine around the Old Testament canon, with doctrinal sections corresponding to Law, Prophets, and Writings. Most of his notes concentrate on the second category; what he seems to have in mind is a schema in which the whole Bible (and the whole of dogmatics) is permeated by a prophetic dimension. In what looks like a programmatic statement, he writes: "Dogmatics in whole, and not just in part, is prophecy. The Spirit of which it partakes is always and everywhere a Spirit of prophecy."

(3) In another approach, Barth sketches out three eschatological temptations, modelled on the three temptations of Jesus in Luke's Gospel: his headings are "Turning Stones to Bread"; "Power and Glory"; and "The Pinnacle of the Temple". He notes how in each instance Jesus resists and disarms the temptation of eschatological triumph. This is followed by notes on what might be called an eschatology of the cross (my phrase, not Barth's).

(4) In yet another approach, Barth has some brief (still undeciphered) notes under six paired categories: God and the angels; the angels and man; man and the demons; the demons and nothingness; nothingness and creation; creation and God. On the page he has drawn a circle, tracing a line of thought that begins and ends at the same place (i.e., God). Barth notes that the doctrine of redemption has to be understood as a doctrine of God the Redeemer, not of redemption viewed in abstract terms. Beneath this, he has added a curious gnomic comment: "Apokatastasis: untie the knot!"

(5) In one part of the book, Barth seems to have been making notes on several of Mozart's operas. It appears that he was trying (seriously? or in jest?) to derive a principle of doctrinal categorisation from the operas. These notes have covered two sides of a page in the exercise book; however, the page is badly water damaged, and only the first two lines, together with a few words and phrases here and there, remain visible.

(6) Elsewhere, Barth  considers organising his doctrine around four main sections, each corresponding to one of the letters of the Hebrew tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. There are some comments here that seem to relate to Kabbalah. There is a passage that looks like an experiment in automatic writing. Barth's notes here seem confused, and he does not develop this plan in any clear direction. But what he seems to have in mind is eschatology as an utterance of God's name in which ("nevertheless – or precisely thereby!") God remains hidden, veiled in the very act of God's final unveiling. There is a cryptic comment in this connection too: "Rapprochement with v. Balthasar. Mysticism!"

It must be emphasised again that these approaches to the doctrine of redemption are not always clearly delineated. The notes for one approach sometimes blend imperceptibly into the next. Barth drops a line of thought and then picks it up again later in the exercise book. Most importantly, it is not clear whether these notes were envisaged as distinct possibilities, or – as I have begun to hypothesise – the various dimensions of a wider picture.

But what is that wider picture? Under what imaginable circumstances could these wildly different theological arrangements all fit together? And what does it mean for our reading of the Church Dogmatics – that majestic bastion of theological rationality – if its author was, in his last days, looking for a way to transform the whole elaborate edifice into a gesture of mysticism?


Update: I hope you enjoyed the rest of your April Fools' Day too!

Sydney lecture: Paul Dafydd Jones on Barth and patience

If you're in Sydney this week, you might like to come along to a public lecture by Paul Dafydd Jones on “Patience and passion: Christian theology after Karl Barth.” The lecture aims to show the potential of patience as a major theological concept; it ranges from divine sovereignty and human freedom to questions of sanctification and sexuality. Jones' lecture will be followed by a response by Matthew Wilcoxen, then a time of general discussion. I'll be hosting the evening. 

If you'd like to join us, it's at 7.30 this Wednesday night, at United Theological College in North Parramatta. Entry is free; drinks and supper will be served afterwards.

On the virgin birth: or, why it's better to say the creed than to criticise it

I got an email from someone the other day about a post I wrote (seven years ago!) where I cast aspersions on the "historical" value of the New Testament's virgin birth narratives. 

I sent a reply email, and since I felt ashamed when I read that old post, I thought I'd reproduce my reply here:

Barth's famous discussion of the virgin birth is in Church Dogmatics I/2, the section on 'The Miracle of Christmas'. Barth always insists that acts of divine revelation are 'not historical'. But he doesn't mean they never happened. All he means is that revelation is a unique event, an act of God. It's not part of the normal historical sequence, it doesn't belong to a chain of cause-and-effect, and so there's no use trying to verify or disprove it on historical grounds. 

So in the case of the virgin birth, Barth argues that it's not subject to the methods of historiography. Its truth isn't for historians to decide. But he certainly believes that it really happened, that it happened in time and space, within the real material human world. It involved Mary's body, her real flesh and blood. In this section of Church Dogmatics, Barth's brilliant critique of Brunner rests on the assumption that the virgin birth really happened. His point is just that it happens as revelation, as an act of God. 

And so we can start to get our heads around the truth of the virgin birth only by confessing it. It's not an explanation or a conclusion that you could arrive at from other premises, historical or philosophical or whatever. It's a truth grasped in the humility of faith.

Anyway, I guess I misrepresented Barth in that post: don't hold it against me, it was so long ago! And I definitely misrepresented the Christian faith if I gave the impression that something can have theological meaning without actually happening! As though the creed were a conjuring trick, a magical formula rather than a confession about reality, about how things really are in this world. 

For what it's worth, nowadays I would never speak that way about the virgin birth. Who do I take myself for? Am I really so much smarter than St Matthew and St Luke? Am I qualified to correct the church's creed, the sum of the gospel, just because I've read two or three books on the topic? Would my own personalised ready-made faith – in which everything is arranged just as I like it, and everything difficult or offensive is removed – really be an improvement on the faith of the church? Wouldn't I be like the proud young carpenter who, on his first day on the job, scorns the silly traditions of other carpenters and gets to work building his own three-legged table – only to discover that the rest of the world knew what they were doing when they made them with four legs?

I guess all I'm trying to say is that I used to be a lot more cynical and sophisticated than I am today. As one of the saints has said, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Nowadays, to be honest, I'm just very grateful to be a Christian at all. Three-legged tables are fine, as far as they go. But you can rely implicitly on the ones with four legs; that's the kind you want when you're sitting down in the comfort of your own home, day after day, a table just like the one your grandfather used, and just like the one your great-grandchildren will use too, long after you've left the world and gone to that big dinner table in the sky.

It's a good thing to be a Christian – I'm sorry to be so banal, but that's what really strikes me. It's a good thing to believe something that you didn't invent for yourself. It's a good thing to have a certain framework, a story that tells you what kind of place the world really is, so that there are some basic questions that are already settled, that you don't have to go on wringing your hands and wondering about. It's a privilege, a real privilege, to be able to join your voice to the church's confession: "... and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate" – and all the rest. 

If you ask me, a faith like that is as good as Christmas: as reliable as the calendar, but full of surprises too.

Karl Barth website

Karl Barth's great-granddaughter has created a new Barth website as part of a university project. It's well worth a visit, especially for the nice selection of photos, videos, and audio.

And speaking of Barth, I can't resist reposting this from David Williamson – this is Rowan Williams on Barth's obedient theology:

Somewhere in all of this business of theological education we have to come to terms with that sense of an otherness, an elsewhere – not another place, another realm, another world but that which is not simply on the map of our concerns, our security, our ideas. An obedient theology is one which seeks to be formed by what is there and a holy life is one which lets itself be impacted, be impressed by the will of God. For Karl Barth, that meant of course, that an obedient theologian was someone who was free to be the most dramatic possible nuisance in church and world. Obedient to the otherness of God, such a person would be obedient to no other constraints and no tyranny that could be concocted on the face of the earth.

Karl Barth for beginners

No doubt about it, when it comes to theology Charlie Barth was a bit of a genius. Trying to get your head around even a few of his ideas is no mean feat: if you're not careful it has been known to induce migraine, vertigo, religious conversion, or even doctoral studies.

So to help you out, here's a quick colloquial abridgement of Barth's whole theological career:

• Romans commentary (early 1920s): God judges
• Göttingen dogmatics (mid 1920s): God speaks
• Anselm book (1930): God knows
• Church Dogmatics I (1930s): God gives
• Church Dogmatics II (1940s): God loves
• Church Dogmatics III (1940s-50s): God blesses
• Church Dogmatics IV (1950s-60s): God befriends
• Church Dogmatics V (never written): God heals 

As you can tell, old Charlie Barth wasn't a fox, he was a hedgehog. He knew only one big thing – that God is God, and that the word "God" is a good word.

The Melbourne Cup and animal ethics: just a bloody punt

Today is one of the most sacred events in the Australian liturgical year: Melbourne Cup day. Pretty much everyone in the country stops to watch the race and to have a punt. Even school children are encouraged to join in the fun of betting on the horses. Though I don't mean to come across as the cranky old Christian spoil-sport, I wrote a piece for the ABC site today, drawing on Karl Barth's animal ethics – Melbourne Cup: the race that tramples creation: "The Melbourne Cup is the climax of a cruel and bloody practice, exhibiting what Karl Barth called our 'astonishing indifference and thoughtlessness' regarding animals."

As for the question of Australia's pathological predilection for gambling, here's a great video with a couple of excellent satirical TV ads. The second ad is especially good – I think this pretty much says it all:

Karl Barth miscellanies

Here are some Barth miscellanies – if you know of any other upcoming events, feel free to add a comment.

Christophe Chalamet (whose book I reviewed here) will be leaving his position at Fordham (and the jazz clubs of New York City) for an appointment as professeur associé de théologie systématique at the University of Geneva. Christophe is a very fine Barth scholar – so students can now consider the lovely city of Geneva as a destination for Barth studies. Congratulations, Christophe!

This year's Barth conference is on Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Protestant-Catholic Dialogue will be held in Princeton from 19-22 June. It's co-hosted by the Centre for Barth Studies and the Thomistic Institute. Speakers include John Bowlin, Holly Taylor Coolman, Robert Jenson, Keith Johnson, Guy Mansini, Amy Marga, Bruce McCormack, Richard Schenk, Joseph Wawrykow, and Thomas Joseph White. I've heard a rumour that the conference might even be webcast this year, which would be terrific.

A new review of John Flett's important new book, The Witness of God; and another one of David Haddorff's book on ethics; and another one on David Guretzk's book on Barth and the filioque.

Finally, since I read you Mark Twain's remarks about health the other day, here's a comment from Barth on the topic (from CD III/4, emailed to me by Jonathan Freeston):

We are indeed appalled at the many people who look upon health itself as a lofty or supreme goal, and “live for their health” alone. Lovingly cherishing their bodies or even their souls, and being constantly interested in what is good, less good or bad for them, they raise such things as sun, air and water, the power of different herbs and fruits, the beauty of a tanned skin and the dynamic strength of well-tempered muscles, and perhaps the possibilities of medical and psychological skill, and even quackery, to the level of beneficent demons to which they offer a devotion and credulity, and which they serve with a concentration and enthusiasm, that can only show them to be the unhealthiest persons.

Karl Barth's comic theology

Blogging here is a bit light at the moment. So instead of reading F&T, head over and check out the wonderful essay by Jessica DeCou of Chicago Divinity School: "'Too Dogmatic For Words'? Karl Barth's Comic Theology", Religion and Culture Web Forum February 2011. She argues that Barth's legendary combativeness and his legendary humour are two sides of the same coin: a "comic" theology. I think Eberhard Jüngel once described Barth as "the happiest theologian of our age" – and this essay shows that laughter and comedy are important for understanding Barth's thought.

And while you're at it, here's another interesting piece on Barth: John Parratta, "Barth and Buddhism in the Theology of Katsume Takizawa", SJT 64:2 (2011).

Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain

A review by Kim Fabricius

D. Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain (T&T Clark 2010)

This is a learned book, informed by wide and deep reading of both Barth and those who received him – and those who received him not. But it is not just a history of ideas: the theology is concisely socially and culturally located.

This is an important book, a kind of exercise in reader-response criticism, perhaps not unique in tracing the history of what later or modern theologians have made of an earlier one – Fergus Kerr’s excellent After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (2002) comes to mind – but it is nevertheless rare in the thickness and colour of its thread. Indeed I hope it may serve as a paradigm and inspiration for others to do the research and writing on, say, Bonhoeffer reception in the UK and US.

This is an exciting book. Morgan cites Hans Frei’s observation that “reading ‘Barthians’, unlike Barth himself, can often be painfully boring.” This book is not boring. It reads like a road movie, moving in two tracks as it follows both Barth’s own Porsche of theological development, as well as the ensuing vehicles in the inside lane, upmarket and second-rate, that keep up, break down, or turn into cul-de-sacs. And if it starts off slowly, that’s because the reception was slow – Adolf Keller, the Swiss ecumenist and conveyor of continental theology to Britain and America, was the herald of coming good – but it quickly speeds up until by the Second World War, you are watching a thrilling, exhilarating chase.

This is also a fair book. Morgan is a theologian who clearly holds Barth in esteem and affection, but although he is not averse to the odd swipe (as he puts it in one instance) at the “spectacularly wrongheaded” response to his mentor, his criticisms are always judicious and often delivered with wry Welsh wit. Indeed the author is clever enough to provide sufficient quotation to let the good run free while the ugly are hoisted by their own petard.

The major disciples are all here, from Edwin Hoskyns and Daniel Jenkins, to T. F. Torrance and Colin Gunton. So too are theologians and church leaders who may and should be known in Britain but about whom the response “Who?” may be forgiven among non-Brits: the Scot John McConnachie, the Englishman Nathanial Micklem, and the Welshman John Edward Daniel, for example. And then there are the “minor” figures that turn out to be not so minor at all, not least the contingent of Welshmen who were as fired by Barth as the phalanx of Scots, but who thought, taught, and preached in the language of angels.

The usual suspicions are all here too: in the post-Römerbrief years, concerns about human agency in Barth’s ethics, about the impact of his rediscovery of eschatology and the divine transcendence on history and experience, about his rejection of natural theology and alleged cultural pessimism; in the post-war years, Nieburhian dismissals of Barth’s neo-orthodoxy and Cold War politics, and evangelical distrust of his soteriology and even the state of his soul (the famous Welsh fundamentalist Martyn Lloyd-Jones virtually asking, “But has he been saved?”); and during the sixties, the patronising liberal banalities about his datedness and irrelevance in a “world come of age”.

And there are surprises, like the indolence of the English Presbyterians in contrast to Congregationalists, and the enthusiasm of certain Anglo-Catholics rather than evangelical Anglicans, during the initial stages of Barth reception in the 1920s. There is drama, like the eyewitness account of the Welsh student Ivor Oswy Davies on the public dismissal of Barth from his teaching post in Bonn in December 1934: “there, in that ritual of darkness, I witnessed the University of Bonn losing its very soul.” And there is hope that the tide-turning resurgence of British Barth studies in the late twentieth century might continue to follow the trajectory on which we find it in the second decade of the second millennium.

Are there no flaws? None as far as I can see in the execution of what Morgan set out to do, what he calls “an exercise in Bangor theology”, a descriptive history of British Barth reception (though I wish he himself had followed the trajectory beyond the nine-page “Postlude: Barth in Britain 1968-86”). Morgan is a fly on the wall, and only occasionally a mosquito. If you want a Barthian bee making honey, you will have to go to Morgan’s delightful The Humble God: The Basics of Christian Belief (2005). But I do have one huge complaint: Barth was a great admirer of Bonhoeffers’ The Cost of Discipleship, but I don’t think he had in mind paying £65 for a book. (So diolch yn fawr for the review copy!)

--
Note: This review will also be published later this year in the Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society.

Fainting with damn praise

I received three compliments in the past couple of days, each one nicer than the one before:

Compliment #1. Mike Bird pointed me to a review of The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies in the latest issue of Catholic Biblical Quarterly. The reviewer, Kim Paffenroth, liked my chapter on Barth, and described it as "the collection's most thought-provoking essay", since it tries to "resolve the dichotomy between the two readings of pistis Christou by collapsing the anthropological and christological into one action".

Compliment #2. Then Kim told me that Jane Williams mentioned F&T in a Church Times piece. In contrast to all the "completely mad" resources on the internet, "there are blogs where you can join in theological conversations and ask questions: try Faith & Theology, run by Ben Myers, or Chrisendom, run by a colleague of mine, Chris Tilling." (Speaking of Chris Tilling's blog, check out his satirical committee review of Mark Seifrid's book review of Douglas Campbell.)

Compliment #3. And then, best of all, I got an email yesterday from someone who has just started a creative writing course at university. On her first day in class, the first short story they had to analyse was one I wrote here a few weeks ago: The Dream and the Drawing. I glowed with happiness for at least three hours after I heard that! And my six-year-old daughter felt prodigiously famous and important when I told her that a story written about her had been studied at university.