I’ve been reading Karl Barth as part of my on again, off again process of re-reading the Church Dogmatics. As he does throughout the CD, he is busy taking his old teachers to task. They had wandered too far from the biblical text, and Barth was calling the church back to the text. The generation …
As I have mentioned within the last month, I am reading Karl Barth’s university lectures on Ephesians. This is “early Barth,” since the lectures were given in 1919-1921. “Early Barth” and “late Barth” are important to distinguish because early Barth was part of a school of thought called Dialectical Theology, a primarily Lutheran movement that …
About fifteen years ago (although I just discovered it) Karl Barth’s lectures on Ephesians were published in English translation as part of a doctoral dissertation by Ross Wright (found here). In the third and fourth lecture he discusses the word “faithful” (“To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1b). …
One of the most significant prophets of the new non-dualistic manner of thinking was Michael Polanyi. A chemist who began his illustrious career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin shortly after WWI and emigrated to England just before WWII, Polanyi was in the thick of the new scientific approach pioneered by Einstein. Einstein’s theories …
Since I've gotten back to the first half part of vol. 4 of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics and have been posting about it, a friend sent me a note pointing me in the direction of Adam Neder's book, Participation in Christ: An Entry Into Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. Since both Eastern Orthodoxy and Adam Neder …
Continue reading Christ as Theoretical Construct Rather Than Person
I got some push back on my previous Anselm post. So first, let me clarify what I did and didn't say. What I did say is that Anselm is unfairly disparaged, especially among the Orthodox for all the theological sins of the West. I did not say that his doctrine of salvation was adequate. I …
So I’m back to reading Karl Barth after a hiatus of several months reading Orthodox theology. I’m in his volume on Reconciliation and in the section on judgment. Barth’s method is to look at Divine Reconciliation from a half dozen or more different perspectives. Being a Reformed theologian, Divine judgment is one of the many …
[Note: This essay is background information to my two previous essays, Sometimes We “May Not Even Notice” and Knowing About vs. Knowing.] I once taught a Bible survey class in a midweek adult education setting. One emphasis was that the Gospels were stories and I argued that if we read them as theology, or as …
The blog has been silent for a while because I've been busy working on a much larger project related to 1 & 2 Corinthians. One of the preliminary "aha" items is Paul's description of divine power (which Paul says looks like human weakness) and divine wisdom (which is foolishness). What has struck me most powerfully …
Continue reading Objective Truth, the Living Word, and Divine Wisdom
Over the next few weeks I would like to revisit some of the big words that relate to our salvation. Many of them are hard and even frightening words, so we have a tendency to ignore them, or in the case of a word like “wrath,” leave them to the very conservative Christians who seem …
Just Another Jim 