Introduction

Note to any reader (should there yet be any reader!): After a very long period of inactivity since January 2011 (but not a lack of my interest) I will be reviving this blog starting in January 2012.  I have realized that it would be most helpful use the Church Dogmatics Study Edition (with facing German & English) and so I will begin to cite that edition and, as time allows, will revise citations in previous posts.  In the meantime I have been reading Eberhard Busch's The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth's Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004) which has been extremely helpful in clarifying my thinking and broadening my approach.

This web log (blog) is organized as a running commentary on my reading of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.

This blog is neither systematic, scholarly, nor complete.  I hope that I may make not unintelligent comments, but I'm trained as a church historian, not as a systematic theologian.

This may be a very slow-growing blog.  Barth is not a fast read, and some sections require re-reading and further reflection.

Comments will be listed using the Categories on the left side of your screen, according to the divisions of Church Dogmatics in its part-volumes and section numbers (with the section-sign §).  Because the blog format tends to list entries chronologically, and I am reading the volumes front-to-back, you may have to page down a ways to reach comments on the sections or subsections which occur early in the text. 

At the left are also references to a number of my own excursus about the why and what.

My hope is that readers of this blog might be inspired to tackle Barth's text on their own.  Why do this?  Barth engages in the real arguments, the ones that matter.  His critique is ever-so pertinent in a new century characterized (on every side) either by extreme orthodoxies that are completely unwilling to take other points of view seriously, or by a totalizing "inclusiveness" unwilling to take the past seriously, to engage in a future which will have to account for evil as well as good, and in the present to take any costly stand whatsoever.

The views expressed in this blog are not those of my employer, Sacred Heart University of Fairfield, CT, its Board of Trustees, or any other legal entity with which I am affiliated.

As A Tangent

  • As A Tangent

    The Resurrection is the revelation: the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus. The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor, and Primal History.

    In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier: as the new world. . . . What touches us --and yet does not touch us--in Jesus the Christ, is the Kingdom of God who is both Creator and Redeemer."

    Karl Barth, commenting upon St. Paul's introduction of his letter to the Romans (1.4), The Epistle to the Romans, transl. from the 6th ed. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 30.

    Die Auferstehung ist die Offenbarung, die Entdeckung Jesu als der Christus, die Erscheinung Gottes und die Erkenntnis Gottes in ihm, der Eintritt der Notwendigkeit, Gott die Ehre zu geben und mit dem Unbekannten und Unanschaulichen in Jesus zu rechnen, Jesus als das Ende der Zeit, als das Paradox, als Urgeschichte, als Sieger gelten zu lassen.

    In der Auferstehung berührt die neue Welt des Heiligen Geistes die alte Welt des Fleisches., Aber sie berührt sie wie die Tangente einen Kreis, ohne sie zu berühren, und gerade indem sie sie nicht berührt, berührt sie sie als ihre Begrenzung, als neue Welt.. . . . sondern was uns in Jesus dem Christus berührt, indem es uns nicht berührt, das ist das Reich Gottes, des Schöpfers und Erlösers. "

    Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, (Zollikon–Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1940), 6.