126.

One hundred twenty-six years ago, the most influential theologian of the twentieth century was born. Yes, as one of my colleagues put it, May 10 is “Happy Barth-day.” In the spirit of celebrating, I wanted to share the following excerpt from Barth's preface to the English edition of der Romerbrief:

No one can, of course, bring out the meaning of a text (_auslegen_) without at the same time adding something to it (_einlegen_). Moreover, no interpreter is rid of the danger of in fact adding more than he extracts. I neither was nor am free from this danger. And yet I should be altogether misunderstood if my readers refuse to credit me with the honesty of, at any rate intending to ex-plain the text.

Frequently Barth has been denied that credit, unfortunately, and that has meant a lot of the good correctives Barth offers concerning the modern Church have been missed by many parts of that Church. Paying attention to Barth's own care for the meaning of Scripture would help assure many of Barth's “opponents” that there might be more to the Swiss theologian than they wish to admit.

Abe Lincoln for WI Governor?

CNN reports on an odd bit of the Wisconsin recall election contest:

mediaman sat down with Arthur Kohl-Riggs, a young Republican who carries the values of President Abraham Lincoln and even looks quite a bit like him. Kohl-Riggs, 23, is running against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the recall election, which is tomorrow. He decided to join the race to educate the public. 'Mainstream media's investigative laziness has rendered them unwitting accomplices to Scott Walker's extreme corporate agenda,' Kohl-Riggs told mediaman in an interview on May 3.

What the Thunder Said

A little sampling from T.S. Eliot's the Waste Land seems appropriate as the thunder pounds off in the distance like so many reports in a distant fireworks display.

After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

Nothing to Sneeze At

Kerry Grens reports on a rather fascinating finding:

Amish children raised on rural farms in northern Indiana suffer from asthma and allergies less often even than Swiss farm kids, a group known to be relatively free from allergies, according to a new study.

Giving Up Reading

Harry Marks presents a humorous take on the pledges some bloggers will take to do something seemingly difficult (and arbitrary) allegedly for some reason that will lead to a better life, but really mostly oriented towards publicity and obtaining more readers:

Abandoning reading will force me to be better with my time, vastly more aloof to current events, and a complete bore to everyone around me. And if you're still crazy enough to be talking to your computer screen, you might be asking, “Why couldn't you just limit how much you're reading instead of cutting it out completely?” The answer is simple, young one - because common sense doesn't get page views.

Towering

The new One World Trade Center sounds (and looks) quite impressive. I haven't followed it all that closely in recent times, so I was surprised they had made as much progress on it as they have. Too bad it isn't going to be the tallest structure in North America.

How the NYT News Room Works

This seems to be uncannily accurate to the way the NYT is covering Apple these days.

HT: Gruber

If Separated from Apple, "iPhoneCo" Would Be...

Henry Blodget, not typically a huge fan of Apple, notes some of the more incredible aspects of Apple's latest financial results report. If the iPhone portion of Apple were a separate company, for example, it alone could be the world's most profitable company:

Seriously… here's how we get there. Apple's overall profit margin is 30%. We estimate that the iPhone's profit margin is slightly higher, say 35%. The iPhone is currently generating annualized revenue of nearly $100 billion. The iPhone's annualized profit, therefore, may be as much as $35 billion a year. That's bigger than the $30 billion of profit ExxonMobil generated last year.

Incredible.

HT: Gassee.

On Disagreements Within the Church

Reading B.A. Gerrish's excellent essay on Calvin's view of Luther in a festschrift for Wilhelm Pauck edited by Lewis Spitz, I was struck by a particularly astute quote from Calvin's Commentary on Romans:

God has never seen fit to bestow such ravor on his servants that each individually should be endowed with full and perfect knowledge on every point. No doubt, his design was to keep us both humble and eager for brotherly communication. In Ihis life, then, we should not hope for what otherwise would be most desirable, that there should be continual agreement among us in understanding passages of Scripture. We must therefore take care that, if we depart from the opinions of those who went before us, we do not do so because excited by the itch after novelty, nor driven by fondness for deriding others, nor goaded by animosity, nor tickled by ambition, but only because compelled by pure necessity and with no other aim than to be of service.

Gerrish speculates that Calvin may have originally penned this statement as part of an apology he planned to send to Luther, but under advisement chose not to send. Whether it was aimed directly at what disagreements there were between the two great reformers or the Church as a whole, both points the Genevan reformer makes are invaluable. We ought to remain humble, recognizing out inability to reach “perfect knowledge,” and we should never depart from the faithful of ages past lightly.

Luther and Calvin both seemed to understand these principles better than many of us who are their theological decedents do. I am thankful for their examples.

Big Shrimp

The words do not fit together very well, but they do fit Asian tiger shrimp. According to the Daily Mail, these guys are starting to appear frequently in the Gulf. Somehow, I don't think they will work very well for a shrimp cocktail. I hope they do not completely overtake their smaller, native “cousins.”