Veni Creator Spiritus

“According to the eighth chapter of Romans, there is more hope when one sighs Veni Creator Spiritus, than when he exults as if the spirit were already his.” – Karl Barth

What Shall We Say?

“And what shall we say, O my God, my life, my holy, dear delight, or what can any man say when he speaketh of thee? And woe be to them that are silent in thy praise, when even they who speak most thereof may be accounted to be but dumb.” – Saint Augustine, Confessions, I, 4.

Yet Another Thing the Christian Left and Right Seem to Share. . .

From my observation of contemporary preaching, neither “conservative” nor “liberal” preachers are immune from the temptation to take the grace of God into our hands and justify our sermons on the basis of our own rhetorical efforts, though we do this in different ways. Too many who fancy themselves as “expository,” even “biblical” preachers tend first to reduce the bubbling biblical text to a set of propositions, such as “six biblical principles for success” or “ten steps to a happier family life,” and then preach those conceivable steps, using bits of the Bible as a sort of gloss on the principles that they derived from contemporary culture rather than from the scripture. Preachers of a more liberal disposition devise some story, an extended illustration, whereby they hope to evoke–more typically, to induce–some feeling of God’s nearness to and affirmation of the listener in the listener. Both methods tend to be evasions of the truth that “the just shall live by faith.”
- William H. Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006) 174.

The Chattering, Squinting, Stuttering Church

“It is the church which for the sake of security wants to construct an ontology before beginning theology; which instead of expounding the Bible gives itself with deadly seriousness to the problem of hermeneutics (to love of love instead of love itself!); which instead of speaking of the Word entrusted to it speaks constantly of the speech event; which constantly analyzes humanity instead of speaking simply and directly to it (because it knows what it wants and has to say). Supposedly to reach people where they are, this church is forever paying regard to them, adjusting to them, trying to win their attention and sympathy, attempting to be — or to appear to be — as pleasant as possible to them. It is the distracted and therefore the chattering church, the squinting and therefore the stuttering church.” - Karl Barth

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.)

“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)