Summing Up the Evangelical Defense of Barth

So, I have spent a number of posts considering the issue of Barth and Scriptural inerrancy. I should be careful not to suggest that I think this is the key point to the prolegomena of the theology I have been “constructing” (in the loosest sense) here on my blog. Rather, I have gone through this several times in an attempt to show that Barth's rejection of Scriptural inerrancy need not be a stumbling block to proceeding with Neo-Orthodoxy inside Evangelicalism. Scripture isn't the point, but the means to the point. Christ is the point. My goal is not to construct an Evangelical theology, but rather to construct a theology that can be shown to be compatible with Evangelicalism.

The other contentions that I considered earlier are not nearly as much of a problem to this end, but bear a final consideration. If we adopt a Neo-Orthodox system, one is naturally going to ask if that means rejecting natural theology. Much as with the case of Scripture, I'm going to suggest that the correct answer is not yes or no but indifference. Natural theology can only be interpreted usefully within the interpretive framework of special revelation. While Paul seems to advocate the existence of natural law in Romans chapter 1, it is not a saving law, but rather a condemning law. Our concern is with the Gospel, and not the law. Natural law exists, but there is no point of contact because no one can make the leap of faith without the working of the Holy Spirit. Instead, what the natural law does provide is at least a sense of intelligibility. The Christian faith can be analyzed outside of belief, but it cannot be entered into through reason alone.

The second point, Universalism, I think is surprisingly easy for modern Evangelicals to deal with. I will again insist that Barth is no universalist, but the fact that he refuses to draw a firm line of the saved and the damned is something even fairly hard lined Evangelicals will do today. Few people are comfortable with suggesting the eternal damnation of those who have not and will not ever be given the chance to hear the Gospel, and while our comfort is not the guiding principle of interpretation, it is helpful to note that many Evangelicals will do precisely what Barth does — push the line between election to grace and election to condemnation into the realm of mystery — and so we ought not judge Barth for this. I think Barth is wise and draws out a principle of how we should do something from this (hi Ed!): in one of the best put statements in 2.2 (and there are a lot of great remarks in there), he says that church is to act on the Good News we do know and not on the bad that we do not know. Our mission is simple: to make disciples, so we ought to worry about that and leave the rest to God.

With these points aside the question is where does one go next? Barth starts his dogmatic theology with the Trinity; Aquinas starts his system with the existence and nature of God; Calvin starts with God as Creator. I am tempted by that alluring muse of Philosophy to follow Aquinas. In fact, I think it is perhaps helpful while still in the mode of prolegomena to consider the arguments for God, particularly since the framework I am trying to build hinges on paradox, and the arguments for God are going to help build the case of paradox. What do you think?

My First Things

Mark posted an interesting TQ meme on “first things,” so if you've been wondering about when I first did/saw/thought/whatever, read on and learn all there is to know about me (abridged)! Even better, respond with your own answers afterwards.

1. What was your first job ever?

That would probably be some programming work I did for a camera shop up in Seattle. I did work for them on and off for a couple of years. Just as now, however, I was a consultant, not an employee, so one could almost say I still have that job.

2. What was your first vehicle?

A Jeep Grand Cherokee. It served me well until I retired it last year when it was retired in favor of my little Bug.

3. What was the first day that you met your current significant other? (For those of you currently between relationships, pick a past one and tells us about it if you'd like)

Ah, I wish I could say, but that would mean I had previously had a significant other, and at the risk of perhaps sounding rather sad, I'm sorry to say I have not. So far, I've lived a good monk's life (but not Monk's life — fortunately!). I'll venture to say there is a story I'd like to tell here, but that would require me to say something to a certain person and I've not had the nerve as of yet. Notably, that person has read this blog occasionally — I wonder if she'd ever guess this was referring to her? I wonder if she'd think it good or bad if she did guess?

Well, that was a bit more answer than Mark was probably bargaining for.

4.What was your first major (you flew, drove more then 2-3hrs, etc etc) trip? Ok, the first one you can remember.

Ah, that would be a trip to Indiana, to see my grandparents and great grandmother. My great grandmother died in 1990, so it would have been sometime before that, but I'm not sure precisely when. That was a five hour or so trip and would be the only time I met my great grandmother on my dad's side.

5.What was the first website that you ever saw?

Prodigy.com, I guess. I was on Prodigy, and that would have been the first page to load when I tried out their web browser (pweb.exe). Nothing too grand there, I'm afraid to say. That would have been in 1994, I think. That browser fascinated me and led me to design my first web site by 1996 (my first site that was actually hosted online went live on August 26, 1996).

6. What was the first book you remember reading that you were proud to have read by yourself without any help?

You know, I'm not really sure. You'd think I'd remember that, but I can't really recall. I guess I wasn't very proud about it! I think the first time I can remember being really proud about a book was one of the Goosebumps books — I read the whole thing in one sitting and impressed myself that I could do that! I know there were other books prior to that, though. Hmm… I wish I could remember the direct answer to this question — what a sad Literature guy am I!

Note: The questions on this page written by Mark are governed by the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. I believe my responses are allowed under fair use and therefore are not licensed under the Creative Commons license (I don't want people messing with adapting my personal opinions, thank you very much).

An Epilogue and New Blogues

Well it is a tradition of mine to “review” my classes after a semester is finished. I don't do it every semester, but I intend to at least. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to introduce my blogging buddies to my blogging seminary buddies. Hmm… the categorization police might come after me, for the first category includes the second, but you know what I mean.

I've added links to the blogs of three classmates and friends from seminary. Jennifer often has very encouraging posts, such as her staple “PTL” posts that quickly mention all kinds of praiseworthy things of the week; Brad is busy engaging with issues of Christ and culture and has produced some thought provoking commentary; and John is the shutterbug, who tries to post at least one interesting photo he has taken each week. I probably should follow the example of each of these three here on asisaid. They each add something nice to my blog roll.

Now to the postmortem. Probably the big surprise of the semester was Spiritual and Ministry Formation. We spent about 1/3 of the class dealing with calling and very practical applications of Myers-Briggs (I'm INFP) to ministry. The rest of the class featured a theological hero each week and asked “what is it about the Gospel of Grace that enabled” that person to achieve the amazing things that they did. This always served as a springboard into a topic such as God's sovereignty and human responsibility. Dr. Douglass approached it with a real zest and it was more fun than I ever thought I could have in an evening class!

I expected Church History: Reformation to Modern to be good, and it did not disappoint. Dr. Lucas is another great professor (who is also now on my blogroll), and his classes were tiring, not because they weren't interesting, but because I often felt like I was flying through time in them. He would cram so much great stuff into each lecture that it was as if I had experienced weeks or months of events in an hour and fifteen minutes. His class can literally wear you out! Wow. The accelerated speed made it possible to see how things connected by virtue of the fact that connected events came up in fairly close proximity, rather than days or weeks apart from each other in the lectures.

Introduction to Counseling with Dr. Winter was an interesting overview of a very complex field. I enjoyed seeing the connections with psychology and better understanding how pastoral counseling might be implemented. I wish I could take a one semester course from Dr. Winter on each of the one week units (depression, perfectionism, homosexuality, etc.) — I think that could be helpful. His assignments encouraged some useful self-reflection (for improvement, not for narcissism).

Finally, Beginning Greek I was a course I did not want to take. I really hoped to skip it since I had previously taken Koine Greek back in 2005 (and a bit of self-teaching in years prior), but I missed out on testing out by a small amount. I was bummed out going into the class, but it ended up being a delight. Dr. Doll (who finished his M.Div this semester and is now off to some fortunate church to pastor), who was formerly a classics professor, put his knowledge to great use and helped really dig into some of the interesting cultural and literary connections between the Greek language and the New Testament. It was great; I only hope Greek II and Greek in Exegesis this summer will prove just as good.

Well, that's all for now.

Tony's on Main

I last ate at Tony's about eight years ago and had their “White Chicken Nachos” (chicken, white cheese sauce and nachos). I met a friend there today after he found a coupon for Tony's lunch buffet in the paper. I didn't recall them having a buffet before — perhaps they did, but I think they've expanded quite a bit since I was last there — but it sounded interesting to me.

What a pleasant surprise! They had toasted ravioli, numerous St. Louis-style pizzas, a beautiful salad bar, white chicken nachos, some kind of chicken, burgers, two soups and cake on the buffet. I had the majority of those things and probably far more of them than I should have, at that. The pizza was quite good and I love toasted ravioli, so that was a treat. The cake was good too. Normally, the buffet is $6.99, but with the coupon it was a dollar or two cheaper than that.

All I can say is, if you happen to be on Main Street in St. Charles on a weekday, give Tony's a visit. I was pleasantly surprised and I think you would be too.

Late Night Haiku XXIII

LXIV. Shadows dance across walls,
A soft, playful twirl, gentle — gentle,
Oh, unreal yet real!

LXV. A cricket sings softly,
What tales does he sing aloud
Amidst the evening?

LXVI. In the cave's soft light,
What fantastic things can be,
That show not above?

Friday Feast on Sunday

Michael did this today, so I thought I would too.

Appetizer
List 3 emotions you experienced this week.
Joy, melancholy and loneliness.

Soup
Name a car you’d love to have.
Hmm, that's tough. I'm really very happy with my Volkswagen Bug. But, if I were going to select something different and more expensive than what I can afford, maybe a VW Eos — I love the combination of the hard top convertible with a moon roof, plus it has V-Dub's absolutely lovely 2.0T (turbocharged, that is) engine… as a rule, I don't speed, but I love how the 2.0T purrs along and begs for speed even more than my Bug's quite peppy 2.5L 5 cylinder. If I were to go for something with a different marquee, I'd probably go for an Audi A4 Quattro (ok, yes, I'm still in the Volkswagen family) or maybe a BMW 3-Series. The big thing would be that it would be a German car.

(More than likely, I'd go with another Volkswagen — they all have their charm. I wouldn't mind a New Beetle Cabriolet, Jetta 2.0T, Passat, Toureg, or — hey, if someone wanted to give such a beautiful and expensive car away — a Phaeton. I have sat in a Phaeton and it is, well, impressive. A nice VW TDI engine in any of those, so that I could enjoy the great fuel milage and lower average per gallon cost of a diesel, wouldn't be bad either.)

Salad
Describe your typical morning routine.
I don't have a completely typical routine because my schedule changes from day to day. I usually will try to get up early enough to read the paper for awhile before I head off. I am methodical about the paper: I start with the lightest section (e.g. I get my daily dose of Pearls Before Swine) , read through the business, then the front page, and then the op-ed's as the cherry on the sundae. Then I get ready, pray (I probably should do that earlier, but I find my concentration is better if I wake up first) and off I go.

Main Course
Have you ever emailed someone famous? If so, who, and what did you say to them? Did they reply?
Depends how you define famous. I have e-mailed editors of magazines and received replies. Nack in the heyday of the old OFB, I conversed fairly frequently with key figures of the Free/Open Source Software movement.

Dessert
Do you listen to podcasts? If so, which ones?

Nope, I sure don't. Call me old fashioned, call me an literature guy, but I prefer my RSS feeds to point to text. If I want radio, the legendary 50,000 watts of KMOX 1120 beckon. Although most of their programming is now podcasted for those interested…

Are We Asking the Wrong Questions?

My friend Ed raised some good points last week (while I was immersed in finals) in a response to my last post on Barth.

Ed notes that in his opinion, Barth is asking the wrong question when he delves into the inerrancy of the Bible, and likewise, I am really going no where useful in attempting to create a deconstructionist framework around the same basic principles as Barth. So, are we asking the wrong question?

Perhaps, but I think it is an important wrong question at least. I was reading some assigned sections of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology the other day (don't worry Ed, I'm not going to defend Tillich), and he was busy making the distinction between kerygmatic and apologetic theology. Barth, he correctly notes, is in the kerygmatic camp: Barth's intention (which I think he is fairly good at sticking to) is to let the Bible ask the questions and provide the answers. Tillich on the other hand wants to pose modern questions to the Bible, the apologetic approach. I think in as much as Barth is sticking to questions from the Bible, Ed wouldn't complain about Barth's approach.

But, Barth does worry about inerrancy and a bunch of other things, and I would say that is rightly so. My posts have essentially formed the prolegomena of my “theology,” and the sections of Barth we are dealing with are likewise from his prolegomena. When Barth rejects the inerrancy of the Bible and shifts the focus to the self-Revelation of Christ which is witnessed to in the Bible, he is setting the base assumption from which he will proceed. I would argue that the question is not perhaps the most relevant — we spend way too much time arguing about inerrancy — but at the same time, Barth does his readers a favor by explaining his methodology up front. He really must deal with the question, because people want to deal with that question.

It all comes down to admitting we all use a methodology. We cannot escape operating within frameworks. No matter how much we try to get to the core of the text (not only with the Bible, but with any text), we are still stuck interpreting it from within layers of frameworks — frameworks of experience, frameworks of knowledge of other texts, frameworks of personality and so on. We can skip over the question of interpretation, because it is primarily abstract and has little to do with doing, but I would assert that does not bring us closer to the meaning of the Bible, because we are still going to be reading it within the frameworks that we are stuck in. Admitting that does not suddenly fix the problem, but it brings us closer to the source of the problem. Ed writes,

If the audience is culturally, geographically and historically far away from Jesus' fresh footprints in the sand, then it's yours to also bring them to that understanding, place and time. As some put it, we are to incarnate the Word, bring it/Him to life. Absolutes were never possible from the moment of the Fall, so don't fret. God expects obedience. Surely that assumes what He expects of you He will put within your reach? What other purpose is there for calling you into His Kingdom? Theology from a Spiritual viewpoint embraces your best understanding of what Old and New Testaments testified.

I think he is right that we need to try to read the Bible from the perspective of its authors, but I would argue that in doing so, we are trying to establish a particular critical framework, we are not abolishing the work of the prolegomena altogether. The traditional views of Higher Criticism, from which Barth is working, actually argues that we should ground the text historically.

Ed's contention is that we must quit just focusing on using our reasoning abilities and actually live the Gospel. I agree. However assuming we want to understand what we are living, I think a good first step is to analyze our mode of interpreting what it is we are to live. We will live differently if we proceed under Schleiermacher's assumptions than if we proceed under Barth's. But not only that, but consider if we read the Bible under Pentecostal assumptions? Clearly living the Gospel takes on a very different light in that context. Barth's observation that we must focus on the living Word of God (Christ) as revelation is critical to that, because Christ's self-revelation to us gives us the confidence to then live what we believe.

To some extent, it is absurd to live out any text, because we cannot ever completely understand the text. Here we have our paradoxical absurdity for our inner Kierkegaardians to delight in. But the Christian is not living a text, but living in the eternal revelation of God in Christ.

Semester est Perfectus

Well, I turned in my last project of the semester today, and I am now off for a whole three weeks! More Greek starts in June, but I have at least a few weeks to catch up on things outside of Covenant, which is good. It has been a joy to be there this last semester, but I'm happy I can take care of the things I've let lapse.

Like reading the blogs of my fine blogosphere friends. And publishing articles. And… well, lots of things. I'm also reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling at the moment, which is nice (as odd as it sounds to say fear and trembling is nice). It feels good to read something of substance that is not for an assignment. I have a ton of books I want to read this summer, though I probably won't get them all, top on my list of projects would be: Christ and Culture (H. Richard Niebuhr), the Brothers Karazmov (Fydor Dostoyevsky), the Four Quartets (T.S. Eliot), and Purgatorio (Dante). What are y'all reading at the moment?

But, for now, I think a good thing to do would be to enjoy getting some sleep, so good night.

War Requiem

I saw Benjamin Britten's War Requiem tonight. I wasn't feeling so well, so I didn't enjoy at as much as I should have, but it was quite good. And I am feeling much better now, so I can think back on it with happily enough. I'd never heard it before, but it was a real feast for the ears, with the Latin for the Mass for the Dead interspersed with Wilfred Owen's English poetry reflecting on World War I. Owen is best known for his graphic poem Dulce et Decorum Est, which you can read here.

Uplifting? Mostly depressing, but in a way uplifting with the return to “Kyrie, Kyrie, Elison.” Beautiful. And it sounded like paradise at the end though when the choirs were singing and (in as much as I could tell), I believe the soldier had arrived in heaven.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

It is a blessing to have a symphony of the caliber of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in this town.

To Someone I Have Written

Sometimes I should just speak plainly, but I am too fearful to do so. Such a case happened this week; instead of saying what I wanted to say directly, I did so subtly. It might surprise some of you who see me in polemic mode on my blog, but I am often told I'm too subtle (I can be extremely, extremely subtle at times). Sometimes it does not matter, other times I regret terribly not saying something directly when I had a chance. Like I said, this was the case with someone this week (who may or may not see this, and who may or may not realize who I am referring to). I regret my lack of boldness, but even now am merely using this post as a less subtle, but still subtle message. I think the thing that makes me so regretful today is that it reminds me of another time I was too subtle almost precisely two years ago, and what I said too subtly then, I never had a chance to really say again.

So, I was kicking myself all day today contemplating this occurrence from the other day. “What if, what if, what if.” Between that and some other troublesome events, it seemed a melancholy day in many ways. I suppose it is the poet's curse (not that I claim to be worthy to wear the mantle of poet); one who dabbles in that type of magic known as words is like the prophetess Cassandra of Greek mythology, speaking things in ways that do reveal the intended meaning in one way or another but nevertheless are often doomed not to be picked up on. In some ways, I wish I didn't have the ability to be subtle, so I would have to just say what I should say when I should say it. Instead, I am like Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man or T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, unable to quit making revisions so as to actually just say the thing. To make matters worse, I do not always pick up on subtlety returned to me, so sometimes, maybe the message gets through but I do not realize it. That is even worse. Maybe that is what happened this week. Maybe it did get through and it was politely ignored. Who knows. I don't.

Perhaps this is good; I overanalyze things, yes, but sometimes I analyze them correctly. Maybe there is good reason for favoring the subtle approach, and instead I'd be regretting not having used subtlety here now had I been direct. Sometimes, though, I wish life was a “Choose Your Own Adventure” where you could look and see how both choices turned out and pick the best one. But, of course it is not.

Well, even those this post is about a cryptic as any I have posted and really doesn't resolve my dilemma, I feel a bit better writing it out. No wonder I like Kierkegaard and, really, Barth; both were skilled at indirection, vagueness and subtlety as a method of writing. If only I could put it to such good use as they did! If you've talked to me this week, you can go back and read through the stuff to look for “the Da Butler Code,” I suppose. No promises it is worthwhile though.