Barth Renaissance soon? Yes please!

With the new $100 Hendrickson version of the Church Dogmatics being published, I'm excited to see how this affects Barth's role in American theology. A whole bunch of friends of mine are thinking about buying it, and the theoblogosphere is already teeming with planned group readings.

I hope Barth has a big impact, and I especially hope that Barth-buyers read and discuss Barth's lengthy discussion on the relationship between scripture, freedom, and authority in CD 1/2. Barth takes his starting point from the fact that, theologically, Christians who believe in the work of the Holy Spirit have to believe that God's Word has been present in Church history, not only present in one church group or in some kind of landmarkism that finds a true Church hiding among a false tradition. At the same time, the Word of God stands over tradition, and can challenge it or critique it in surprising and deep ways. God, through scripture and the leading of the Holy Spirit, may challenge tradition or even lead an individual towards a particular conviction - but this is a pneumatological reality, not an expression of individual conscience.

There has to be a kind of respect for one's forebears as preachers and stewards of the Word of God in the past, and Barth expresses this:

In what I hear as the confession of the Church, I will certainly have to reckon with the possibility of falsehood and error. I cannot safely hear the voice of the Church without also hearing the infallible Word of God himself. Yet this thought will not be my first thought about the Church and its confession, but a necessarily inserted corrective. My first thought in this respect can and must be a thought of trust, and respect which I cannot perhaps have for the men as such who constitute the Church, but when I cannot refuse to the Word of God by which it lives and Jesus Christ who rules it. How can I know Jesus Christ as the Lord who has called me by his Word if in relation to the rest of the Church I do not start from the thought that despite and in all the sin of the men who constitute it it too has been called and ruled by the same Word?"

This also applies well to some of the blog spat going on over "Bapto-Catholics" and a proposed revision of CBF NC's faith statement that included some rethinking of language on Priesthood of the Believer and the centrality of individual conscience in reading Scripture. Lengthy discussions on this topic here, here, here, and here. (Image borrowed from Faith and Theology.)

Theology? in my University?

I've been teaching theology to Freshman students for about three weeks now, and I'm thankful for it for giving me all kinds of new thoughts, both on the place of theology in the University and on some of the topics we're discussing.

Hopefully I'll have more articulate and theological thoughts soon, but for now I thought it might be useful to share a quote by John Webster, a theologian I'm liking more and more these days, on teaching theology in the University as an "eschatological reality." As part of a larger essay on the place of theology in the University, Webster makes the following statement after a quick run through of critical thinking by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on how the “Life of the Mind” in Universities is a “customary” institution, and noting that theology can contribute to this critique:

“theology is a contrary – eschatological – mode of intellectual life, taking its rise in God’s disruption of the world, and pressing the academy to consider a quite discordant anthropology of enquiry.”

Two interesting things from this: (1) Theology in the University, as a discipline that presupposes the work of the Holy Spirit in eliciting faith in the theologian and the sanctification of scripture, can only be understood as an "eschatological" reality, a kind of snuck-in presence of the kingdom of God, among the other disciplines. And (2), this position puts theology on the side of critical theory and other approaches that find presuppositions behind supposedly "objective" academic knowledge or the idea of a "universal reason."

This is a really interesting idea to me, one I might even dare to share with my students. What I'm doing when I teach theology is something that would be, in the eyes of faith anyway, impossible without Jesus Christ's presence. My students' work in reading and participating in class - we're reading Augustine's Confessions next week, for instance - is a proleptic share in Christ's Kingdom. We're teaching and learning under God's time, established in Jesus Christ, right in the midst of the regular time of the University, the time of preparation for careers, of engineering and business schools.