JD, I have not and do not intend to read Karl Barth but I see from what you write that you look up to and respect him as a man of God. I'm just wondering what, (other than confusion) could come from his writings? Because to me it sounds like Barth exalts the "human" and follows his own private "revelation" - or does Wikipedia have it wrong? judyt
Whether you read Barth or not, is "o.k." of course. But what you see of Barth is not the same as what you read of Barth on this site. The anti-Barth quotes really make him out to be an atheist with too much time n his hands. Think about it. He doesn't believe in the historical Christ, the resurrection, a personal God, and so on. Now, why would an atheist take time to write some 20,000 pages of biblically based commentary?
I couldn't access any of the hypelinks included in the post from Wikipedia
But, yes, he is wrong. I have included a review of Barth for any who might be interested.
Wikipedia states the following about Karl Barth:
Barth's theology assumes a certain amount of the tenets of liberal Christianity, most notably the assumption that the Bible is not historically and scientifically accurate. Barth has been called by fundamentalist Christianity a "neo-Orthodox" because, while his theology retains most or all of the tenets of Christianity, he rejects Biblical inerrancy. His reconciliation of having a rigorous Christian theology without a supporting text that was considered to be historically accurate was to separate theological truth from historical truth. It is arguably for this belief that Barth has been criticized the most harshly by more conservative Christians such as the late Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer.
The relationship between Barth, liberalism and fundamentalism goes far beyond the issue of inerrancy. From Barth's perspective, liberalism (with Schleiermacher and Hegel as its leading exponents) is the divinization of human thinking. Some philosophical concepts become the false God, and the voice of the living God is blocked. This leads to the captivity of theology by human ideology. In Barth's theology, he emphasizes again and again that human concepts can never be considered as identical to God's revelation. In this aspect, Scripture is also written human language, expressing human concepts. It cannot be considered as identical as God's revelation. However, in His freedom and love, God truly reveals the Godself through human language and concepts. Thus he claims that Christ is truly presented in Scripture and the preaching of the church. Barth stands in the heritage of the Reformation in his weariness of the marriage between theology and philosophy. Whether his sharp distinction between human concepts and divine revelation is biblical or philosophically sound remains debatable.
Karl Barth
Dogmatics in Outline
(1947)
Stanley Hauerwas
Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 101 (March 2000): 46-47.In l946, standing amid the ruins of Bonn University, Karl Barth gave the lectures that we now know as Dogmatics in Outline. He lectured without a script, because as he tells us, the "primitive conditions which I met with in Germany made it absolutely necessary for me to âtalkâ instead of to âread.â" In fact Barth says it was impossible for him to be only an academic teacher (which he confesses came easy since he had never been that). But rather he had to be a kind of missionary, Sunday School teacher, and popular orator. Yet the result was and is a beautiful book that witnesses to the God who alone gives us hope that we can live in a world in which war is not assumed to be a given.First Things, I assume, is committed to the proposition that God matters for all that is matter. That God, moreover, is not just any god, but the God who has made Himself known to us in Israel and Jesus Christ. It is not easy to speak well of such a God in a world that might assume God is but another piece in the metaphysical furniture of the universe. Even the most "orthodox" in such a world often discover that in spite of themselves, their speech about God turns out to be speech that serves to underwrite idolatry. Dogmatics in Outline is Barthâs short, but intense, course in how to speak of God in a world that has lost the habits of faithful Christian speech.When he delivered the lectures in Bonn, Barth was sixty years old and he was working on the third volume of the Church Dogmatics. Barth lectured extemporaneously, but the words he spoke were ones that could come only from a life of struggle with the Bible. Indeed, one of the attractions of Dogmatics in Outlineâin form, a commentary on the Apostlesâ Creedâis that it really is an outline of Barthâs much larger Church Dogmatics. In the "Foreword" to the paperback edition of these lectures, Barth expresses some concern that some may try to substitute the reading of Dogmatics in Outline for the Dogmatics. Anyone who would do so he condemns by quoting Paulâ"If any one will not work, let him not eat."Barth understood that recovering Christian speech is work and it is a work that the world literally cannot live without. The heart of Barthâs theol ogy is the presumption that if we get God wrong, we get everything wrongâour politics, our science, our art, our very lives. Moreover, he thought the wars that had wracked this century were the result of our making ourselves rather than God the beginning and end of existence. Dogmatics in Outline, indeed the whole of the Dogmatics, was Barthâs attempt to help us regain the language adequate to our situation as creatures created to praise our Creator and thus capable of living at peace with one another.Barth coyly observes, "A Christian Father once rightly said that Deus non est in genere, âGod is not a particular instance within a class.â" That "Father" was, of course, Thomas Aquinas; and Barth, in spite of his attack on natural theology, knew he shared far more with Aquinas than he did with many Protestant theologians. Barth, like Aquinas, knew that God is God and we are not, and (also like Aquinas) took on the hard task of helping recover the grammar of the God Who is Trinity. Barth thought this work important because it cannot help but force men to speak and live precisely. For to say that "Jesus is Lord" overturns the presumption that we, not God, rule the world.Consider, for example, Barthâs claim: "Men are timeless when we are without God and without Christ. Then we have no time. But this timelessness he has overcome. Christ has time, the fullness of time. He sitteth at the right hand of God as he who has come, who has acted and suffered and triumphed in death. His session at Godâs right hand is not just the extract of this history; it is the eternal within this history." Accordingly Christians need not leap Lessingâs ditch separating the necessary truths justified by reason from the claims of faith justified only by history and tradition. Our Godâs history "is indeed an accidental truth of history." Our task is not to try to fit God into our histories, but rather to understand the good news that God has made us part of His history.Godâs history, moreover, cannot be told or lived without the living presence of the Jews: "If as Christians we thought that church and synagogue no longer affected one another, everything would be lost." Barthâs comment about the Jews is not an attempt to "make up" for the destruction of the Jews but rather a reminder to Christians that Hitlerâs hatred of the Jews must be read as a judgment on our unfaithfulness to our Lord. Our recognition that our God is the Lord of history requires that we recognize that Jesus was "of necessity a Jew. . . . The problem of Israel isâsince the problem of Christ is inseparable from itâthe problem of existence as such. The man who is ashamed of Israel is ashamed of Jesus Christ and therefore of his own existence."In the midst of his lectures at Bonn, Barth was asked if he was aware that many of the people at the lectures were not Christians. With his usual good humor and the sheer joy he found in theology freely done, Barth responded, "It makes no difference to me." Theology becomes a burden only when we take our unbelief seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriouslyâa faith, moreover, that recognizes that "we are not nearer to believing in God the Creator than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article needs a revelation." In both cases we are faced by the mystery of God and the recognition that our existence is the work of grace.That God and man have become one in Jesus Christ, however, has made through Christâs ascension not only the possibility but the necessity of the visible witnesses in the world called Church. Barth knew such witnesses could not help but appear in the world as "strangely human persons." How could we not but appear strange, believing as we do that we are timeless, if God has not in fact redeemed us in Christ? Just to the extent that those committed to the witness of First Things might be tempted to forget our strangeness, I can think of no better reminder than a yearly reading of Dogmatics in Outline. Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University.
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