In Jesus Christ is Sinai and Zion, Bethel and Jerusalem

Here’s a nice quote from Barth on the Church’s relationship to “holy places” (i.e., Israel, the temple, tabernacle, etc.):

[. . .] Special places can no longer exist in this sense. If Christianity, for its part, tries to proclaim and accept holy places in this sense, it will mean always a relapse into Judaism, or more correctly, into a pagan self-misunderstanding of Judaism, or even ore accurately, a rejection of the true Judaism of Solomon and Jeremiah. Theologically, then, we cannot expect anything for the Jews from a return to Palestine as the holy land; and recent propaganda for the gathering of all Christian Jew to Palestine as the place of the promise which avails for all who are baptised out of Israel involves a twofold error. Now that Israel’s Messiah has appeared, and has been rejected by Israel, and manifested as the Saviour of believers from both Jews and Gentiles, there does not exist any more a holy mountain or holy city or holy land which can be marked on a map. The reason is not that God’s holiness in space has suddenly become unworthy of Him or has changed into a heathen ubiquity. The reason is that all prophecy is now fulfilled in Jesus, and God’s holiness in space, like all God’s holiness, is now called and is Jesus of Nazareth. This holiness is certainly to be encountered in the created space that can be represented on maps. But in this space it only where Jesus Himself, having entered heaven (in fulfilment of the entering of the high priest into the tabernacle, Heb. 9.24), is now present in the world from heaven and therefore from the throne of God in such a way that He calls and quickens men to faith in Him by His Word and His Spirit, and therefore calls and quickens them for worship in spirit and truth desired by the Father. In Him is Sinai and Zion, Bethel and Jerusalem.
(CD, II.1 p 482)

Theology: A Peculiarly Beautiful Science

. . . theology as a whole, in its parts and in their interconnexion, in its content and method, is, apart from anything else, a peculiarly beautiful science. Indeed, we can confidently say that it is the most beautiful of all the sciences. To find the sciences distasteful is the mark of the Philistine. It is an extreme form of Philistinism to find, or to be able to find, theology distasteful. The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science. May God deliver us from what the Catholic Church reckons one of the seven sins of the monk–taedium–in respect of the great spiritual truths with which theology has to do. But we must know, of course, that it is only God who can keep us from it.
(CD, II.1 p 658)

Barth on the Foolishness of the Gospel

By the very fact of what God has done through this Gospel He has made tabula rasa of all that is published in the world as wisdom but is not. “God has made foolish the wisdom of the world” (v.20b). Whatever this wisdom may be in itself, confronted with what God has done in this Gospel it is clear that it is assuredly not what it claims to be, the art of living, worldly wisdom, but the exact opposite. For what happened at this point? Διὰ τῆς σοφίας, applying its own supposed wisdom, the world failed to recognize God ἐν τῇ σοφίᾳ αὐτοῦ, i.e., where His wisdom actually was and acted and revealed itself. But it pleased God by the supposed folly of this preaching to save them that believe (v.21): by the preaching of the crucified Christ, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, not only the power of God, but also the wisdom of God (v. 23f). Even this supposed folly of God is in fact wiser than men–so much wiser as Solomon was wiser than all men–and even this supposed weakness of God is in fact stronger than men (v. 25). For this reason, it is not a bad sign for the Church, but an indication of the genuineness of its calling, that not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are in it. In keeping with the presumed folly of this Gospel, God has chosen the so-called foolish ones of this world to confound the wisdom of the wise, the weak to confound the strong, the trivial and contemptible, the things that are not (τὰ μὴ ὄντα) to bring to nothing those that are (ἵνα τὰ ὄντα καταργήσῃ), in order that it may be manifest that no flesh can glory in His presence (vv. 26-29).
(CD, II.1 p 435-36)

Consistent Biblicism?

. . . In actual fact, there has never been a Biblicist who for all his grandiloquent appeal directly to Scripture against the fathers and tradition has proved himself so independent of the spirit and philosophy of his age and especially of his favourite religious ideas that in his teaching he has really allowed the Bible and the Bible alone to speak reliably by means or in spite of his anti-traditionalism. (CD, I.2 p 609)

An Old Testament Abstracted from Christ

I think it was Seitz who said that the issue for the early church was not how to explain the Old Testament in the light of Christ, but how to understand Christ in light of the Old Testament as Scripture. It was impossible for the early church not to understand the Old Testament as being all about Christ. Barth (who is also followed by Childs here) points out that Christ is the true subject matter to which both testaments are witnesses to. Failure to see this necessarily leads to an abandonment and misunderstanding of both the Old and New Testament:

. . . A religio-historical understanding of the Old Testament in abstraction from the revelation of the risen Christ is simply an abandonment of the New Testament and of the sphere of the Church in favour of that of the Synagogue, and therefore in favour of an Old Testament which is understood apart from its true object, and content. [. . .] If Christ has risen from the dead, then the understanding of the Old Testament as a witness to Christ is not a later interpretation, but an understanding of its original and only legitimate sense. Moses and the prophets do not belong only because the New Testament undoubtedly says so, but–when the New Testament has undoubtedly said so on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus–they belong, not as representatives of an earlier religion prior to the Evangelists and apostles, but as the prophetic heralds of Jesus Christ side by side with them. Therefore the Church cannot be released from its task of expounding and applying the Old Testament witness too, and of respecting its authority as the Word of God. (I.2 p 489-90)

Definite Marks by Which We May Know Whether the Love of God is in Us

. . . According to Kohlbrügge there are definite marks of a sorrowful kind by which the children of God can know that the love of God is in them. These are weeping, groaning, crying, sorrow and concern because in their hearts they find only perversity and hostility, only the love of sin and the world and the things which are seen, because they have no desire at all for God and His love, but a cold, sluggish, hard and stony heart, filled with all kinds of evil considerations and other sinful thoughts. Therefore the children of God must at all points humble themselves before the holiness of God. They must bow beneath His holy law. They must be crushed and broken in respect of the love of God and neighbor. They must be humbled to the very core. They must apply to themselves what the apostle Paul in the seventh chapter of Romans, especially of the sin which the regenerate find in themselves in light of God’s law. For the fact that they are overwhelmed in this way proves that the love of God is in them. (I.2 p 390-91)

Barth on Homoousia

I’ve recently begun reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics and it’s been interesting. I haven’t been posting as frequently just because either I’m not sure exactly what Barth is saying (or the implications of what he’s saying) or because I’m too busy just trying to get through the book (it’s taking me an hour to read about 10 pages!). There’s definitely a lot of things in CD that I appreciate so far. Barth seems to have immense respect for the Reformers even if he may disagree with them (quotes a whole bunch of them: Calvin, Melancthon, Turretin, Gerhard, Chenmitz, Polanus, Wollebius, and so on. . . Luther’s quoted almost every other page!) and he also quotes from Roman Catholic theologians, Eastern Orthodox, the early Church Fathers, and a handful of his own contemporaries (obviously he makes reference to Schleiermacher and von Harnack, but I was surprised and delighted to find him quoting Bavinck). Much of what I’ve read so far seems to resonate with Luther’s  theologia crucis–if there’s anything Barth refuses to do, it is to go beyond what God has revealed to see him “in the nude” (as Luther would say).

Anyway, I probably will not be posting as often these next few months, but I’ll be posting quotations here and there of things that are interesting, helpful, odd, or all of the above.

For now, here’s Barth on the concept homoousia:

. . . The concept of homoousia is not an attempt at independent, arbitrary, so-called natural knowledge of God. It seeks to serve the knowledge of God by His revelation in faith. We have not concealed the historical and material ambiguity of this particular concept. Hence we neither can nor would hide the fact that considered in itself it serves the knowledge of God very badly. For philosophers and philosophical theologians it has always been easy game. But it may be that very little depends on its immanent soundness or unsoundness. It may be that even in its obvious frailty it was the necessary standard which necessarily had to be set up in the 4th century and which even to-day, as often before, has still to be kept aloft against the new Arians, not as the standard of a foolhardy speculative intuition of the Church, but as the standard of an unheard-of encounter which has overtaken the Church in Holy Scripture. If this is so, of what avail is anything that might be said against it? Do we not have to be aware of all these objections, and yet still acknowledge it as the dogma which the Church, having once recognized, can never let go again? For in all its folly it is more true than all the wisdom which has voiced its opposition to it. We have no reason to take any other view of it. We are under no illusion as to the fact that we do not know what we are saying when we take this term upon our lips. But still less can we be under any illusion as to the fact that all the lines of our deliberations on the deity of Christ converge at the point where we must assent to the dogma that Jesus Christ is ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, consubstantialis Patri. (CD, I.1 p 440-41)

For those who are interested in Barth a new collection of essays titled Engaging with Barth should be helpful (Michael Horton is one of the contributors). Also, van Genderen and Velema interact a lot with Barth in Concise Reformed Dogmatics from a more confessionally Reformed perspective.

Barth on Scholasticism

. . . Nothing that can claim to be truly of the Church need shrink from the sober light of “scholasticism.” No matter how free and individual it may be in its first expression, if it seeks universal acceptance, it will be under constraint to set up a school and therefore to become the teaching of a school. Fear of Scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet. The true prophet will be ready to submit his message to this test too. (CD, I.1 p 274)

Personal Testimony as Ground of Assurance?

Despite the fact that Karl Barth’s theology is not always clear or helpful to those of us who are committed to a more confessional type of Reformed theology, his lucidity on certain topics are often difficult to ignore. Here’s George Hunsinger on Barth’s ’soteriological objectivism’ (i.e., a salvation which has its reality independent of us) in relation to more experience-based concepts of faith:

. . . Contrary to certain forms of both pietistic and modern liberal theology, there can be no real “assurance of salvation,” no “genuinely peaceful and happy awareness of our good and glorious existence,” so long as we regard it as being “grounded in some way in ourselves, so long as we do not see that our personal Christian existence . . . is a second thing which results from something else which is really first, being secured in this and and not in our own experience” (IV/3, 566). Indeed, when one’s experience is made into the object of assurance and the basis of trust, the results will be anything but genuinely peaceful and happy. For what does one really see in one’s own life if not “all kinds of attempts and fragments, all kinds of unfulfilled and therefore very doubtful beginnings, all kinds of half-lights which may equally well be those of sunset or sunrise” (II/2, 775)? How, then, can one find assurance or put trust in these things?

Those who trust in these things, in their conversion and new birth as such, in their walk before God as an element of biography, ascribing credibility and the force of witness to a supposed ‘pneumatic actuality’ in the sphere of experience, and thus trying to live in faith in themselves, building their house upon the sand, are only involved in a feat of juggling in which they may achieve a sensational but very dangerous interchange of supreme rapture and the most profound disillusionment, but will know nothing of the death of the old human being and the life of the new, and therefore nothing of our direction, preparation and exercise for eternal life. (II/2, 775-76 rev.)

- George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122-23.

Although Barth views the objectivity of salvation in a way unlike any of the Reformers, the quote above is still helpful for those who believe that it is in looking to Christ’s work, rather than our feelings or experience, that believers find true assurance.

[Barth's view is that Christ's work is applied to all of humanity. One must be cautious, however, before accusing Barth of universalism since his thought on this topic is not that simple. Barth holds both Christ's death for all humanity and the necessity of individual faith in tension without seeking any resolution.]