“The will of God for his people, Israel, from the beginning and at every stage of its history is revealed in the fact that according to the New Testament Jesus Christ is born, suffers, dies, rises from the dead and takes His place at the right hand of God, assuming his earthly form in His Church for the time that remains.”
II.2 226.

Gone

“The election of Jesus Christ is his own election through the mediacy of His community. His determination is be its witness, this is the purpose which God has for him, and in execution of which the meaning and order of his being consist. The gracious good-pleasure of God is not merely achieved in him but through him, and it is in this way that it is effectively achieved in him. he is its real object as he is it witness, and therefore its subject.”
CD II.2 page 414.

Where have Cabe and I gone? We are both still reading, although slightly off pace (the summer’s are never easy for those in youth ministry.) I would like to get back to writing and summarizing Barth again, as more and more when I preach and write I find myself living in conversation with him but is this blog dead? Should Cabe and I both blog about Barth on our personal blogs? Is anybody still out there?

As we have read through CD II.2 the thing that has struck me the most in Barth’s response to individualism and the role of the community of faith preceding individual conversion. I think I knew that Barth was not in favor of individualism but given at times his existential bent I wasn’t quite clear how he would he would move around that in his doctrine of election and I find myself surprised at how convincing this section is.

In this section both of us have struggled with the 5 pages a day method. At the beginning it seemed easier to break his thoughts into about 5 pages but now it seems he is working with larger themes that aren’t quite as focused into 5 page groups but at times spanning 20 or more pages to really clarify a thought. I enjoy reading more this way because I can spot that I trying to grab larger themes rather than minuscule thoughts, but it is frustrating our reading method.
Any suggestions?

Beginning II/2

To think of the contents of this volume gives me much pleasure, but even greater anxiety. The work has this peculiarity, that in it I have had to leave the framework of theological tradition to a far greater extent than in the first part on the doctrine of God. I would have preferred to follow Calvin’s doctrine of predestination much more closely, instead of departing from it so radically. I would have preferred, too, to keep to the beaten tracks when considering the basis of ethics. But I could not and cannot do so. As I let the Bible itself speak to me on these matters, as I meditated upon what I seemed to hear, I was driven irresistibly to reconstruction. And now I cannot but be anxious to see whether I shall be alone in this work, or whether there will be others who will find enlightenment in the basis and scope suggested. It is because of the rather critical nature of the case that I have had to introduce into this half-volume such long expositions of Old and New Testament passages. For the rest, I have grounds for thinking that to some my meaning will be clearer in these passages than in the main body of the text. (From the preface of II/2)

Yesterday we started v. II/2 of the Church Dogmatics, which contains Barth’s (in)famous doctrine of election. I’ve been looking forward to this part-volume since before I knew what a ‘part-volume’ was. A few years ago, a certain American-born, Scottish-educated theology professor named Chelle Stearns would from time to time say things about election that seemed profound and significant in spite of the fact that I didn’t really understand what she was talking about at all. It was apparent that there was some profound reworking of election that she had learned under the tutelage of certain Barthian elements at St. Andrews. The closest we got to an assigned reading on the topic was TF Torrance’s The Mediation of Christ, of which we were asked to read only the chapter “The Mediation of Christ in Our Human Response.” I read the chapter (and a few other chapters, if I recall) and reported back to her in class that I had no idea what that chapter had to do with its alleged topic – it seemed to be all mediation and no human response. I think that now, 2,050 pages of Church Dogmatics later, I would be able to understand better what Torrance was up to, and that is because I have already come to see that the mediation of Christ is the crux, the sine qua non of our human response. Because the mediation of Christ is always already the human response.

The relationship between the action of God and the action of humans is of ongoing interest to me, and it looks like that’s where II/2 is headed. Barth is keeping his sight firmly fixed on Christology, while making the transition from writing about the Doctrine of God to the Doctrine of Creation. Wedged between the two, as the back-half of the former, is the doctrine of election, wherein the living God who loves in freedom freely elects humanity for His love. And after exploring election Barth will turn to ethics for a ‘chapter’ (a.k.a. book length treatment). A lot of people claim II/2 as their favorite part-volume of the CD, and others even recommend this place as the place to start reading Barth’s lengthy opus. But for now, I need to stop writing about looking forward to reading II/2 and make a transish over to my reading chair where I can actually read the thing. There should be more about what Matt and I are learning from II/2 posted here in the coming weeks and months.

from ashes to Glory

It is, of course, true, as Rom. 3:23 says, that all men are in the position that they all inevitably come short of the glory of God, and the reason is because they have all sinned, and face to face with the glory of God must confess that they have come short because they are closed to it, and that they are closed to it because they have closed themselves to it and resisted it. But the other side is even truer, and the first truth can be rightly understood only as we look back at this other side. And the other side is that in Jesus Christ sinful, blind and disobedient man has as such been so encircled by the light of God’s glory that he can and must see it and he will lack nothing in Jesus Christ. (CD II.1, pp. 645)

Today is Ash Wednesday, where, with a simple thumb motion, someone will remind us of the most obvious sign of our sinfulness and our creatureliness. That we are from dust and will return to dust, that we will die, is the most indelible mark of our humanity, the starkest and most unavoidable reality signaling the chasm between who we are and who God is. And yet, at the other end of the season, we have Good Friday and Easter.

During Lent, we situate ourselves temporally between these two “sides” that Barth speaks of in the passage quoted above. We enter in remembering proleptically our death. We end up recalling Christ’s death, where God in his assumed humanity submits to death only to destroy it from the inside out and leave a mark on humanity more indelible, more real and true, than that of death. On Good Friday we will learn to see our own destiny of dust and ashes properly within the context of God’s assumption of dust and ashes, and on Easter we will even more fully see the other side: that in Christ we, though frail and blind, have been encircled by the potent light of God’s glory, and that the grave isn’t the end of the story, but, in Christ, a new beginning.

But, for now, remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.

Omnipotence, Crucified.

The last few sentences of Karl Barth’s exposition of the omnipotence of God in CD II.1:

The genuine name of Jesus Christ is the name of the One who has been crucified. It is, therefore, the knowledge of Jesus Christ the Crucified which is the knowledge of the omnipotent knowing and willing of God. It is in Jesus Christ the Crucified that that is loosed which is to be loosed here, and that is bound which is to be bound here. Therefore it is the knowledge of Him and this alone which is the real and incontrovertible knowledge of the omnipotent God. (CD 2.1, pp. 607)

A doctrine of omnipotence that takes 1Corinthians 1 seriously. How refreshing.

Goal: to be a less terrible blogger. Probability of achieving said goal: we’ll see.

“The God who is present in Jesus Christ is the one who is enthroned over heaven and earth and therefore the God who is present specially in His work of revelation and reconciliation and generally in the world at large. He does not mere give his creature, as He gives all other creatures, his space, created space, from the fullness of his own un created and creative space. But he also gives him his own space itself. He is with this man. He takes him up to sit at his right hand, to occupy his supra-heavenly throne. And it is in doing this that God is, and reveals himself to be, the one He is, omnipresent in himself and as such outside himself, in his special work, and in his general work which is subservient to his special work, finding its goal and completion and there having its meaning and origin in it, and there in Jesus Christ himself.”

II.1 p.487.

I am not sure if we can declare this blog dead, but it has been dead for awhile. That said I am still plugging along. Maybe I should write something at some point.

The first word

In the Gospel of Israel’s Messiah and His fulliment of the Law, of the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us, of Him who died for our sins and rose again for our justification—in this Gospel the love God is the first word.

…the fact emerges that all these possibilities of divine presence and action have a very definite centre, that is, they have their basis and their consummation, their meaning, their norm, and their law in Jesus Christ. In the first place, the fulfilled union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ is, to be sure, one among other of these various possibilities of divine immanence, but over and beyond that, it must be defined, in its once-for-all and unique aspect, as the possibility of all other possibilities. For the Son of God who became flesh in Jesus Christ is, as an eternal mode of the divine being, nothing more nor less than the principle and basis of all divine immanence, and therefor the principle of what we have called the secondary absoluteness of God.

II.1 p.317.

Love in 1 John

The tempting definition that “God is love” seems to have some possible support in 1  Jn. But it is a forced exegesis to cite this sentence apart from its context and without the interpretation that is placed on it by the context, and to use it as the basis of a definition. We read in v.9: “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son in the world, that we might live through him.” Again we are told in v.10 “Herein is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us, and his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” And finally in v. 15: In this we have knowledge and faith in the love that God has for us that we confess “that Jesus is the Son of God.” The love of God or the God as love is therefore interpreted in 1 Jn 4 as the completed act of divine loving in sending Jesus Christ.

p. 275

The loved become lovely because they are loved

It is as [loved] that the loved of God becomes [lovely]. He does not become [loved] because he is [lovely]. Those who make definitions like this are not thinking of the cross of Christ, of the sin of the chosen and elect people of Israel, of the justification of the ungodly, and of faith in Him who quickens the dead and calls those things that are not as though they were, but of a general concept of love, which in itself is highly controversial. In reality the basis of the love of God lies outside the man loved by Him and in God Himself. (CD II/1, pp. 278-9)