Is this Day Seven or Day Eight?

Today’s reading moves from the Word of God preached to the Word of God written. Barth stresses both the importance of Church proclamation through preaching, and the Holy Scriptures that serve as the text from which one preaches. Barth understands these two things to be in relationship to one another. On the one hand, we’ve already seen how, for Barth, Church proclamation is central. On the other hand, the Holy Scriptures are what allow us to distinguish the Christ that the Church proclaims from seeing Christ as the Church, writing that, “the distinction of the Head [Christ] from the body [the Church] and the superiority of the Head over the body find concrete expression in the fact that proclamation in the Church is confronted by a factor which is very like it as a phenomenon which is temporal as it is, and yet which is different from it and in order superior to it. This factor is Holy Scripture” (101).

Sunday Thoughts

On this first day off from Barth reading, I thought I would offer a few thoughts now that I made it a full week.

1. I’m really glad I’m doing this. It’s really helpful to have both the encouragement to do the reading, and the space to reflect on it and hear what others say. It’s only been a week, but I feel like I’ve already learned a lot.
2. I wish I either had the fancy new study edition or could read Latin, German, etc… trying to make sense of the small print is sometimes a little tricky not knowing the translations, and I don’t have the time or energy to go to the Karl Barth digital archive for the English translation every time…. Luckily, even though I am probably missing a little bit not catching everything in the small print, there is not a lack of material to engage with…
3. I like the routine I have going. Every day begins and ends with Barth. Every night, I do my reading for the following day, and every morning, as soon as I wake up and feed the dog, I make myself a cup of tea and write a blog post. I’m enjoying the rhythm.
4. I noticed that I ramble a lot when I blog.
5. I am also already enjoying having Sundays off. I had a few beers last night, and was out late celebrating a friend’s birthday. It was nice not to have any reading to come home too.
6. I have been especially inspired by the dedication of some of my friends….Talk about training up a child in the way she should go….

Peter Dula on Barth’s vulnerability of the church

The vulnerability of the church has come up several times. At one point I referenced a book by Peter Dula that looks at this aspect of Barth’s theology. The book is Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (OUP, 2011) in the chapter “Fugitive Ecclesia” (which was recently picked up in The Gift of Difference, edited by Chris Huebner and Tripp York, out of CMU Press).

Dula does not end up landing in the same place as Barth (the book is an experiment in the theological possibility of companionship without the turn to the church) but his comments are instructive as we’re thinking about what’s going on in these first sections:

We could, like Karl Barth, refuse to make the church bear so much weight. Barth is as fond of the word ‘only’ as Milbank. But, for Barth, it modified ‘Jesus Christ’ not ‘the church.’ The Barthian option maintains the high expectations and standards, but doesn’t pin so much on meeting them. Better, doesn’t have to pin so much on the church meeting them because Jesus Christ met them on the cross and everything is pinned on that event. While ‘the world would be lost without Jesus Christ and His word and work… the world would not necessarily be lost if there were no Church.’ It is not clear, but I think it is highly doubtful that any of the theologians I have been concerned with would agree this claim of Barth’s (Hauerwas, Milbank, Pinches). But it is this which enables such radical dispossession on Barth’s part and his openness to outsiders. It also makes the acceptance of the fugitive possible, even necessary.

For Dula the problem is that “Barth’s ecclesiology sacrifices concreteness, loses some of its force.”

Day Six

Today, I think, is another taking it easy kind of day, partly because it is Saturday and my dog is somehow simultaneously giving me the puppy dog eyes and the evil eye, cause we should be well on our way to the dog park, and also because again, today is a bit more of the same—Halden’s way of going through this by sections seems to make a lot of sense…

Today’s reading continues to discuss the relationship between church proclamation and dogmatics. Barth spends a lot of time in these pages discussing “the possibility of the dogmatic question” as it arises from within the space of the Church (77). He interrogates the role of dogmatics and the role of the Church simultaneously, seeming to, as Melissa pointed out earlier in the week, be presenting a sort of theology of vulnerability.

Day Five: Preaching and Church Proclamation

So, I really am going to take it easy today… in large part because today’s reading is really more of the same, and I don’t have much left to say about it.

Basically, Barth continues to etch out the importance of church proclamation as the material of dogmatics, and in these pages, stresses the importance of preaching in that proclamation, again criticizing the Roman Catholic church for its elevation of sacraments at the expense of preaching, writing that “in this dogmatics preaching is not only assigned little importance, but virtually no importance at all compared to the sacrament which is received and celebrated so zealously” (65). Modern dogmatics is also again implicated as well. For Barth, church proclamation is at the center of dogmatics, and the Roman Catholics and modernists are flawed in failing to recognize and live this.

Day Four: The Church and Talk about God

I wrote a lot yesterday, so I am going to take it a bit easy today… I’m also still processing what Halden said in the comments section of my post on day two on the question of revelation. I was struck by his explanation that:

So, in other words what I think we have Barth saying is not that we have an unmediated source of knowledge available to us in “revelation.” What I hear him saying is that the act of God in Jesus Christ is an event of such uniqueness that it makes claims of us that we cannot do other than obey and theology is the attempt to interrogate and examine our attempts to do just that.

I really do think that this is the first good, clear explanation I’ve heard about what revelation and mediation mean for theology, which is saying a lot, considering most of the time, these questions have be asked to my professors at Duke…

Catching up on §2

Ok, on to §2, and being officially caught up.

§2.1 The Necessity of Dogmatic Prolegomena

Summary: Prolegomena is the introductory part of theology that seeks to understand its particular way of knowledge. Prolegomena, thus, is our attempt to speak about how we go about knowing in theology. Why do we need prolegomena? Well, first of all it isn’t something simply forced on us by modernity. Barth rejects the notion that somehow our present age is unique and different than all others that preceded it: “Knowledge of the revelation believed in the Church does not stand or fall with the general religious possibility that is made easier by the ancient view of things and more difficult by the modern” (p. 28). Moreover, this view (i.e. that the modern situation requires theology to offer a sort of justificatory prolegomena that explains how revelation is possible) is to be reject also on the grounds that revelation, as the church confesses it, has occured and it creates its own “point of contact in [hu]man[ity]” (p. 29). We cannot set about looking into the possibility of knowing divine revelation, we can only speak about its actuality. However, speaking in this way of course leaves open the possibility of heresy, that is a genuinely Christian deviations (or seeming deviation) from truth of revelation. This is a possibility that we can never foreclose, and which is in fact essential for the life of the church.

Money Quote: “In this conversation [between faith and heresy] the Church must wrestle with heresy in such  way that it may itself be the Church. And heresy must attack the Church because it is not sufficiently or truly the Church. . . . In true encounter with heresy faith is plunged into conflict with itself, because, so long and so far as it is not free of heresy, so long and so far as it must accept responsibility in relation to it, it cannot allow even the the voice of unbelief which it thinks it hears in heresy to cause it to treat as not at least also faith but simply as unbelief. It must understand it as a possibility of faith.” (p. 33)