November 11, 2009 • 7:09 pm
Here’s a neat quote from Barth on how the Old and New Testaments relate:
As regards handling of Old Testament texts, we maintain that for us the Old Testament is valid only in relation to the New. If the church as declared itself to be the lawful successor of the synagogue, this means that the Old Testament is witness to Christ, before Christ but not without Christ. Each sentence in the Old Testament must be seen in this context. Historical exegesis can and must be done, but at the same time we have to ask whether this exegesis does justice to the context in which the Old and New Testaments stand. Even in a sermon on Judges 6:3 it is possible both insist on the literal sense and also to set one’s sights on Christ. As a wholly Jewish book, the Old Testament is a pointer to Christ. As regards the justification of allegory, we have again to refer to the relation between the Old Testament and the New. In the Old Testament the natural sense is the issue. Preaching must bring out what the Old Testament passage actually says, but in a way that affirms the basic premise on which the church adopted the Old Testament. This does not mean that we will give the passage a second sense — just as we are not to oppose historical and Christian exposition to one another. Instead, we will see that this passage in its immanence points beyond itself. It is a signpost that gives us direction. The Old Testament points forwards, the New Testament points backward, and both point to Christ.
- Karl Barth, Homiletics Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Donald E. Daniels (Louisville, KY: WJK, 1991) 80-81.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Hermeneutics, Karl Barth, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Biblical Theology, Karl Barth, Brevard Childs
October 13, 2009 • 8:31 pm
I should really be studying right now, but I couldn’t resist posting this quote. I have sometimes wondered, after hearing Van Tillian critiques of Barth, whether Van Til really understood Barth. Obviously, I don’t think Van Til completely misunderstood Barth (he probably understood him better than I do), but I do think that there are places, perhaps at the most fundamental level, where Van Til overlooked a few things. Here’s Vanhoozer:
Given Van Til’s well-known presuppositional apologetics, it is highly ironic that a faulty presupposition underlies, and hence undermines, his reading of Barth. Van Til reads Barth as being committed to a critical (i.e. Kantian) philosophy. Van Til seems not to have grasped the possibility that Barth may have had other, more properly theological, reasons for his dialectical approach. It has also been suggested that one reason behind Van Til’s “Barthian animus” is the apparent similarity between Barth’s theology and Reformed orthodoxy. Might it not also be because of a strong point of similarity between Barth and Van Til himsef? Many would place both thinkers together on the spectrum of contemporary theology: both were biblical fideists; both were uncompromising about their respective starting-points; both made the doctrine of the Trinity their key presupposition.
- Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “A Person of the Book? Barth on Biblical Authority and Interpretation,” in Sung Wook Chung ed. Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 30.
Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Cornelius Van Til, Karl Barth, Kevin J. Vanhoozer
October 12, 2009 • 9:13 am
Shane and Andrew discuss some issues about Beale’s book on inerrancy here.
Filed under: Reformed Theology , Inerrancy, Reformed Reader
September 19, 2009 • 7:17 pm
Going through some of Barth’s Church Dogmatics for a research paper, I’m reminded of why I like the Swiss theologian so much:
We can indeed say that God hates sin but does not cease to love the sinner. But it is only as we see God in Jesus Christ that we can really say this. (IV, 1: 406)
Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth
August 18, 2009 • 9:34 pm
In a chapter entitled Beyond Literalism and Expressivism, George Hunsinger describes what he calls Karl Barth’s “Hermeneutical Realism.” This way of understanding theological language avoids the naive univocality of literalism as well as the skeptical equivocality of expressivism, going beyond both, by describing the relation between text and referent as analogical.
This is something that has been on my mind the past few months (mainly because of Childs and Frei). I found the following quotation to be helpful:
Barth’s decision to construe the relation [between text and referent] as analogical rather than univocal or equivocal depended not on general considerations but on his reading of the texts as a modern human being within the community of faith. If one asked about the “semantic force” — that is, about the mode of reference — of the biblical texts, then the referent itself was the decisive factor, Barth reasoned, which ruled out both the “literalist” and the “expressivist” solutions. The “univocal” solution proposed by the literalists was ruled out because it could not do justice to the referent’s abiding mystery. It failed to honor the mysterious divine hiddenness in the midst of the divine revelation. Likewise, the “equivocal” solution proposed by the expressivists was ruled out because it could not do justice to the referent — this time to its self-predication. It failed to honor the perspicuous divine self-unveiling in the midst of the divine hiddenness. The alternative was therefore to construe the mode of reference “analogically.” The reticence of analogy honored the mystery, the predication of analogy the perspicuity, of God’s self-revelation as attested in Scripture.
- George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 221.
Filed under: Hermeneutics, Karl Barth, Quotes , Expressivism, George Hunsinger, Hermeneutic, Karl Barth, Literalism
August 13, 2009 • 6:57 am
After having not posted for a while I’m finding it a little difficult to get back in the loop.
That is all.
Filed under: Reformed Theology
Just finished the last page of Barth’s Church Dogmatics!
I’m starting summer Greek soon, so I probably won’t be posting often, but I will try to post more than I have these past three months. Stay tuned!
Filed under: Karl Barth , Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth
Here’s another quote from Barth. Here he talks about the Church’s solidarity with the world as an implication of her existence for God (which necessarily follows from God’s being for the world):
Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion. (CD, IV.3.2, 774.)
Filed under: Ecclesiology, Karl Barth, Quotes , Ecclesiology, Karl Barth
Here’s an excellent quote from Barth on his section on sanctification. It’s not uncommon to see preachers guilting their congregants into “obedience,” and then wrongly calling the resulting work sanctification. Obedience that does not flow from faith in Jesus Christ (not an abstract ideal which can be replaced, but the concrete Jesus Christ who is the incarnate Son of God) is neither true nor acceptable obedience before God:
. . . Far too often the matter has been conceived and represented as though His humiliation to death for our justification by Him as our Representative were His own act, but our exaltation to fellowship with God as the corresponding counter-movement, and therefore our sanctification, were left to us, to be accomplished by us. “All this I did for thee; What wilt thou do for me?” The New Testament does not speak this way. It knows nothing of a Jesus who lived and died for the forgiveness of our sins, to free us as it were retrospectively, but who now waits as though with tied arms for us to act in accordance with the freedom achieved for us. It is natural that He should be thought of in this way when it is overlooked and forgotten that He is not only the suffering Son of God but also the victorious and triumphant Son of Man. He is this, too, in our place and favour. (CD, IV. 2 p 516)
Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Church Dogmatics, Justification, Karl Barth, Sanctification
Here’s a nice quote from Barth on man’s sanctification. It’s easy to forget that both sanctification and justification consist in our looking away from ourselves and looking outward to Jesus Christ. As soon as our gaze is taken off of Christ and placed on ourselves we will either end up as ‘pharisaic publicans’ (as Barth likes to put it) or we will end up wallowing in Bunyan’s ’slough of despond’:
As a being and work liberated from the unrighteousness of the old man and filled with the righteousness of the new he [believing man] cannot plead before Him his faith–let alone anything else. And remarkably enough, the more sincere and deep our faith actually is, the less we will find in our faith as in all our other being and activity, the more strange and impossible will be the thought that we can please God with this one work of faith, the more we will try to cling to the fact that we have died as the old man in Jesus Christ, and that we are created and alive as a new man in Jesus Christ, and that we have not to produce our own confirmation of this righteousness before God in our life and being, not our own Christian righteousness, not our own righteousness of faith as a product and achievement and state of our own heart and mind in which we can lay hold of the truth and power of the divine verdict. In faith the Christian will find himself justified because believing in this divine sentence fulfilled and revealed in Jesus Christ he dashes himself against the rock of that work of God which God has willed and done, certainly on behalf of man, but primarily for His own sake, to assert His honour and to maintain His glory against him. (CD, IV. 1 p 97-8)
Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes , Church Dogmatics, Justification, Karl Barth, Sanctification
