The Old and New Testaments as Pointing to Christ

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

Vanhoozer on Van Til and Barth (lots of names)

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

Some More Barth. . .

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

Beyond Literalism and Expressivism

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

Barth on The Church’s Solidarity With the World

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

“All this I did for thee; What wilt thou do for me?”: The Wrong Way to View Sanctification

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

Pleading Faith Rather Than Christ

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

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)

Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes , Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth, Prayer

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”.

Filed under: Church History, Eschatology, Hermeneutics, Karl Barth, Quotes , Chistology, Church Dogmatics, Hermeneutics, Karl Barth

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)

Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes , Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth, Sanctification