Five Books That Have Most Influenced My Reading of the Bible

I got tagged about a week ago by Richard and I just saw it on my dashboard. Here we go (in no particular order):

1. Kingdom Prologue - Meredith Kline
This was the main book that brought me over from dispensationalism and opened up an entirely new way of reading Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. Although I’m not entirely settled on everything in KP, the book definitely shifted my entire approach to the Bible. Kline’s framework interpretation of Genesis showed me that there are other ways to inerpret/understand Scripture that are true to Scripture and consistent with science though not at all contingent on the latter.

2. Church Dogmatics - Karl Barth
I’m actually working through the 30 volumes (or 14 depending on which edition you have) right now. I’m almost done with III.4 and so far I’m loving it. There have been very few dull moments reading Barth. While I certainly don’t agree with everything he says, there are many things thatI have gained from my readings. Just to name a few: the fact that he is not content to merely dismiss Schleiermacher, but seriously engages him and takes whatever good things he can is admirable. It’s also interesting to see him interact with Roman Catholic theologians and agree with them on some points, but on other points (e.g., justification) be bold enough to say how wrong they are. His section on the teaching/hearing Church is a must read for every theologian. Finally, the greatest strength (and to many, the greatest weakness) of Barth’s theology is his thoroughgoing Christology. He refuses to keep Christology apart from any aspect of his theology. I feel this makes his theology a lot less arbitrary in certain aspects–which clarifies a lot–but (paradoxically) it seems to make other places in his theology more arbitrary (this may be due to my own theological blindness, though).

3. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative – Hans W. Frei
I absolutely hated this book by the time I was almost finished and it wasn’t until a few months later that I began to realize the impact it had on my thinking (Shane, if you’re reading this: thanks again for recommending it!). Reading this book allowed me to see how much the meaning of the text had shifted from the narrative in the text itself to the world behind the text (i.e., ostensive historical reference). I still don’t know what to think of Frei’s conclusions, but I do think he tracks a very important decline in the priority of the biblical narrative itself. This relates to Kline’s framework interpretation of Genesis–focusing on the ostensive historical reference, though it may at times be important, may end up being a hindrance to understanding what Scripture is actually about.

4. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments - Brevard S. Childs
This book led to books 2-3 on this list. Andrew Compton blogged about Childs and Phil Sumpter seemed to really like him so I thought I’d give him a try and I ended up being blown away by his stuff. I think a good amount of that being blown away was due to the fact that he was the first “non-conservative” Biblical scholar I’d read, but I think that he presents some really profound and interesting material. His view of the shaping of the canon has helped me to see just how complex the issue itself is as well as helped me, again, to focus on the text itself for its meaning rather than the world behind the text. Another thing about Childs is his desire to let both the OT and NT speak in its respective voice without either separating or confounding the two. Barth’s influence comes out here–Childs keeps the two testaments together by their common subject matter, which is Jesus Christ. Out of excitment I read about five more books by Childs immediately after I’d finished his BT. There are several more sitting on my bookshelf, but those’ll have to wait until I’m done with CD.

5. On Being a Theologian of the Cross – Gerhard O. Forde
This isn’t explicitly related to reading Scripture, but it was for me. Luther’s distinction between a theologia gloriae and a theologia crucis is, I believe, something that  applies to all spheres of theological exercise. One could say that it was Luther’s theologia crucis that opened my fundamentalist ears to even bothering listening to Kline or Barth or any of the other guys listed above. Forde clearly and profoundly expounds Luther’s theologia crucis. I think this is a book every Christian must read (a cliché, I know).

Barth on the Basis of Prayer

In his section on prayer, Barth discusses the real basis of prayer. Before positively establishing it, he discusses those things which are not the real basis of prayer.

First off, neither our recognition of our need nor our need itself teach us to pray. Barth says,

It is not the case that need teaches us to pray. It may also teach us an anxiety that does not pray but curiously competes with a prayer which it naturally thinks rather curious itself. It may also teach defiance, cursing and scoffing. It may also teach us to beg. It may also teach resignation. At best it will teach us to work. Even deprivation of God and desire for Him can obviously lead past prayer to the strangest by-ways of individual and collective self-help. (CD, III.4 p 91)

Secondly, it is also not “awareness of the presence of all blessings and goodness in God, of their origin and emanation from Him” that “will in itself and as such lead  a man to prayer . . .” Rather than being the real basis of prayer, this awareness may very well

lead us to consider that if it rests with God to give us all that we truly lack and desire, and if we may seriously assume that He really can and will do this, and actually does it, then we must obviously suppose that He knows our legitimate needs better than we do, and even before we ourselves discover or state them.

Thirdly, we cannot “maintain that, in childish defiance of all these arguments, the demand for divine help and gifts will necessarily drive man to utterance, to formal and serious petition, and therefore to prayer.” (92)

It may well turn out, and necessarily so in most cases, that in his very awareness of need man is so oppressed by the distinction and contrast between himself and God, between the majesty of God and his own unworthiness, that he hesitates to worry Him with his desires and requests. [. . .] The result of all this is that prayer is hindered , that man has not the heart really to pray, namely, to bring his desire to utterance, even though it may really be there.

Barth sees the problem with these three bases lying in the fact that with them “we simply move round in a circle, and this is not the circle of a rolling but of a stationary wheel which can never roll without outside impetus.” The basis for prayer cannot lie within us or in our own ability to recognize certain things about God or ourselves rather, “its cause must lie outside the circle.” He continues,

The real basis of prayer is man’s freedom before God, the God-given permission to pray which, because it is given by God, becomes a command and order and therefore a necessity. As he is created free before God, man is simply placed under the superior, majestic and clear will of God. He is not, therefore, asked about his power or impotence, worthiness or unworthiness, disposition or indisposition, desire or lack of desire for prayer, but only whether it can be otherwise than that God’s will shall be done by him and in him, and therefore whether he has not to pray irrespective of all possible objections and considerations. What God wills of him is simply that he shall pray to Him, that he shall come to Him with his requests. He wills this just because it is a realisation of the natural relationship between them both, between God and man. This is true as seen from man’s side. As the creature of God he can only come to God and speak with Him as a suppliant, and he is directed to do so. But it is also true as seen from God’s side. For He is the God who lets man come to Him with his requests, and hears and answers them. He is God in the fact that He lets man apply to Him in this way, and wills that this should be the case. . . . (92-93)

A Brief Barth Update

For about two months now I’ve been spending six to eight hours a day in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I’m going to be starting the nineteenth volume (III.4) tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be done with all 30 volumes by the end of July (when I start summer school).

For anyone who plans on reading all of it, I would recommend reading it chronologically. Partly because I’m just anal-retentive, but also because I think that Barth works off the stuff he’s already written (not necessaily explicitly) so it helps to have read it. If anything, read I.1 and I.2 since in those two books he places dogmatics in its proper context (i.e., as serving Church proclamation).

While I don’t agree with (or even understand!) all of what Barth says, I’m definitely enjoying following along with his thoughts and I’m liking certain aspects of his methodology–especially what George Hunsinger calls Barth’s “particularism”.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll update a few more times before July, but until then auf wiedersehen!

Also: I found this site to be particularly helpful before I began trekking through CD.

Christ in the Old Testament

Here’s a quote from Barth on reading the Old Testament with a view to the fact that Jesus Christ is the Lord of time–past, present, and future:

. . . If there is a spiritual presence of Jesus the distance of Israel’s time on the regressive line of time makes no difference to the fact that its history was His pre-history, and that He was in it before He was, i.e., before this history reached its consummation, so that when He came, it was not only possible but necessary to recognize Him in this pre-history and its record. If His time is the real divine centre of all time, are we not forced to see it as the time which embraces and controls all time before and after Him? Consider the decisive place occupied by the Old Testament in the early Christian liturgy. Consider the ease with which the Church accepted the Canon of the Synagogue. Above all consider the degree to which the New Testament is impregnated with the Old. Such phenomena cannot be satisfactorily accounted for on secondary motives, or from accidents of history. We have here an intrinsic necessity of the highest order, an insight which the later Church may have done much to obscure, and which may even strike us as strange, but which for the apostles and their communities was a self-evident truth. They were forced to accept it because they knew from the very outset that the man Jesus was the fulfilment of the prophetic history of Israel, that its history was the beginning of His, and that its record in the Old Testament was the record of Him. The only way to Him was by reading, understanding and expounding Moses and the prophets, and therefore hearing His Word as the fulfilled and final Word of God, but the Word already proclaimed and attested. . . .
(CD, III.2 p 483.)

Elsewhere in his dogmatics, Barth makes the point that seeing Christ as the telos of the Old Testament is not merely a matter of scientific exegesis (i.e., simply quoting a handful of explicitly messianic proof-texts), but a matter of faith. It is to believe that Christ’s person and work was and is, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, “according to the Scriptures”.

Self-Sanctification?

What we see in our own life are 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, which vouch less for our sanctification than for the fact that we have never come from the judgment of God according to the divine purpose, which testify just as much, and even more, against the factuality of our sanctification by God’s command. When and where is not that which we know of our sanctification in ourselves merely an attempt at our self-sanctification which as such is again that which is forbidden us–a part of our conflict against the divine command? When and where have we so fulfilled that repentance of faith that this fact is so evident in what we have lived and experienced or done that we are summoned by it to new faith? When and where are we such believers of ourselves that we can believe on the basis of our own witness, the witness of our own inner or outer works? 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 man and the life of the new, and therefore of man’s direction, preparation and exercise for eternal life. It is not in this way that we can and shall taste and see how good the Lord is. In this way we do not even ask concerning Him. We do not allow the purpose of His judgment to speak for itself. We do not, therefore, understand it.
(CD, II.2 p 775-76)

Except as Proclamation of the Gospel . . .

“Except as the proclamation of the Gospel pointed and applied, even the most serious talk about the will and command of God can only be idle chatter, for which a Church is not needed, which can be much better done outside the Church.” (CD, II.2 p 564)