I read books by J. I. Packer long before I read Barth, and his work was an important component of learning to think through theological issues, including doctrine of Scripture.
Barth comes as a shock to someone trained in (what Barth called) a neo-Calvinist environment. His unfamiliar usage of familiar terms, his approach to theology, his habit of turning assumptions on their heads, etc., all disconcert the newcomer. The few times I have read Brunner, his work felt like a walk in familiar territory, as if he were doing much the same thing as American reformed evangelicals even while coming to different conclusions. He seemed farther to the left, perhaps, but on the same spectrum. Barth is working in a different dimension altogether—no, in fact, several different dimensions, all at once.
How does one compare Barth to Packer? With a lot of work, of course, and eventually one’s head may stop hurting. Here I compare the first four sections of Church Dogmatics to a very small sample of Packer that I think and hope represents him fairly: specifically, the first two chapters of God’s Words: Studies of Key Bible Themes (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1981), where he discusses “Revelation” and “Scripture” in turn.
Both in general orientation and in detail Packer discusses revelation and Holy Scripture almost exclusively in terms of information given and received. God tells us about himself. Revelation means that God shows us what was previously hidden. Specifically, in the OT and NT God was revealing himself, his kingdom, his covenant, his law, and his salvation. The action of the Holy Spirit is to help us understand that information. By our study and the Holy Spirit’s work illuminating our hearts we not only understand, we emerge through knowing about God to knowing God. The propositional produces the personal, as it were: “it is precisely by making true statements about himself to us that God makes himself known to us,” says Packer.
Barth doesn’t even handle Church proclamation simply in terms of information. This Good News that the Church proclaims does emphatically include information, yes, but it also at every point carries Christ’s demand to follow him. So even the message has branched out of the indicative dimension to move in the imperative. But we almost miss this syntactic breadth because Barth emphasizes the presence of God himself confronting us in this proclamation, so that not only does the message inform and command, but God is also in the midst of it, in the here-and-now event of revelation, taking hold of the listener. So, according to Barth, revelation is foremost the presence and action of God confronting us with himself, so that all words fall flat without that action, but they hit home when he abides in them. Packer comes close to saying that our encounter with the propositional produces an encounter with the personal, and Barth almost echoes this by saying, “The Bible is God’s Word as it really bears witness to revelation, and proclamation is God’s Word as it really promises revelation” (p. 111). But Barth carries this farther, making his theology more dynamic, more present, when he says, “Because revelation engenders the Bible that attests it, because Jesus Christ has called the Old and New Testaments into existence, because Holy Scripture is the record of a unique hearing of a unique call and a unique obedience to a unique command, therefore it could become the Canon, and again and again it can become the “living” Canon, the publisher of revelation, the summons and command of God, God’s Word to us” (p. 115). This is harder to pin down, because Jesus is harder to pin down than the book that bears faithful witness to him.
Packer’s strength lies in paying more attention to what the Bible says about itself than Barth has done so far, at least up through section 4. Barth has dug deeper in theology, Packer has dug deeper into exegesis up to this point. Would examining the presuppositions behind Packer’s exegesis undo his work? I don’t know. I want to think about that more. Any help from the other Barth bloggers would be greatly appreciated.
No comments:
Post a Comment