From a Facebook Conversation

Essay for Bill LaBarre on “Method” for determining what to believe.

I can only interpret "method" as "what I do."  It does not produce proof or utter certainty in the Cartesian sense:  those are forms of control, and as described above regarding the respective positions of 1) God and 2) creatures [us], control of any sort is out of the question.  But, such as it is, this is my “method”.  I listen to the gospel proclamations of the church and meditate on them.  Yes, I have a Bible, but in order to get somewhat beyond my own cultural limitations regarding “what it means to read this book,” I listen to others in the body of Christ (i.e., the Church) who have gifts of understanding and ministry that differ from mine.  They see things that I don’t see until they show me.  Further, I listen to (read) what other Christians from other places and times have written.  Further again, I listen to what non-Christians say regarding their objections to the faith.  This also involves the application and continuing reapplication of reason and observation.  Theology must be tossed back into the refining furnace again and again.

In the complexity of the gospel message there are threads that are more central and others that are more peripheral.  I try to see the harmonies and the dissonances that are in my understanding of the message, and then occasionally pick apart my construct and re-weave to produce a pattern that is more faithful to the central themes.

The most central theme is Jesus the Christ, not a doctrine, but a person.  Of course there are doctrines about Him, but even they point away from themselves back to this person.  Listening here means prayer and getting away from my internal noises.  Listening also means writing small essays like this one, listening to the resonance of these words and whether they faithfully echo my faulty perceptions through the Spirit of God in Christ.

Faith is less a content of belief (although it is that, also) than it is a mode of perception.  The passage from Hebrews 11 that you quoted does not oppose faith to knowledge, but to grasping for control.  It opposes my conceptual control with trust.

Faith thus described still ought to make sense.  We should expect that it does.  God commands us to worship Him with our minds as well as with heart, soul, and strength.  This means that we use them, not leave them at the door of the church.

But faith, as a mode of perception and thinking, also conforms to the nature of our position relative to God.  Demands that God meet our cultural (largely Cartesian) requirements for certain knowledge are inappropriate at several levels.  Aside from being personally insulting and presumptuous, they miss the nature of the object being studied.  If our seeking after knowledge does not conform to the nature of the task at hand, we can no more expect correct results than if we take a magnifying glass to the smell of roses to find what musical key it is in.  Again, this is a category error. 

Instead, the exercise of faith brings the entire man both physically and spiritually into the appropriate place of perception and thought, namely into the activity of worship where God promises to meet His people.  There we hear the proclamation of the gospel from the pulpit (as described in a comment above), and we hear God’s words riding on the words of the liturgy, on the music of the hymns, on the words of the sermon.  God confronts me in my sin, and even more so in the proclamation of forgiveness that we hear in worship.  He confronts me in my incapacity to meet the demands of life, but even more He appears in the prayers of the people as the faithful One who gives us not only the obvious blessings but also the sometimes painful blessings of growth.  He appears in my hunger to touch and hear Him, but He appears even more in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a fore-taste and promise that He is with us spiritually now and will return physically.

This exercise of faith is not mere credulity.  It is an experiment, like sitting in a garden and letting the scent of the flowers approach you so that you can savor them before you make decisions about them.  It asks not merely about the structure of the rose, but about its beauty as such.  It does not merely examine behaviors, but asks if those behaviors betoken a deeper significance.  It is an exercise in humility and openness.

Nor can we, by our actions and attitudes, force God’s hand.  Again, that is to strive for control.

You can probably see why “method” is an awkward word to apply here.  What method do you use for having fun with a friend, or to get to know a prospective friend better?  It’s more like that than physics or biology or geometry.  I can’t construct a satisfactory theology from first principles (after the manner of Euclid) or force God to open up so I can study him (as if He were an oyster).  All I can do is present myself and see what happens.  Sometimes I’m very disappointed with the results.  And then He puts before me a glass of water, or the color red, or a friend’s smile, and these non-proofs, this utter lack of philosophical evidence, convinces me again.

Does The Son Elect? A Partial Response to Daniel Kirk

Daniel Kirk is reading through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and asking some interesting critical questions.  Regarding §33.2,”The Eternal Will of God in the Election of Jesus Christ,” he asks, “Question 1:  Is it faithful to Scripture to say that the Son, Jesus Christ, elects, such that in the God-man the one who elects and the one who is elected are one?”

The article makes several good points.  The NT writers tend to mean the Father when they use the word “God,” and “when election is assigned to a person, it is most often the Father (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1-2) rather than the Son.”  Ephesians, as he says, presents election as the action of the Father.  He says,

I don’t think that John 1:1, “the Word was God,” provides the kind of leverage Barth demands of it to assign to the son what is clearly assigned to the Father throughout scripture.

Dr. Kirk treats Barth’s doctrine of election as a re-reading of the New Testament documents through somewhat anachronistic Trinitarian lenses: 

It’s all well and good for us, in our more developed Trinitarian Theology, to think “Father, Son, and Spirit” when we think “God.” However, this is not what the NT writers were thinking. For them, when they say “God” they mean the one to whom we refer to as “Father.”

Certainly the use of these or any other anachronistic lenses, whatever they might reveal, would obscure the first century context of the texts and produce a lopsided exegesis.  Wrenching the texts from their own era does them no service.

But Barth does not, as it were, funnel 4^th century Trinitarian formulations through John 1 to deconstruct traditional doctrines of election and then construct his own.  He starts, instead, with the New Testament’s own pervasive view of Jesus as the full revelation of God, asking whether the traditional doctrines of election departed from this view as their starting point.  That is, if Jesus Christ is the revelation of who God is, then is he not also the revelation of the electing God?  If he is God incarnate, is he not also the incarnation of the electing God?

If it is not the biggest question in Barth’s theology, then there is at least none bigger than this:  Is there some other Word of God besides Jesus of Nazareth?  Barth’s consistent answer is:  No!  (emphasis his, repeatedly through his works)

The very best of the older theologians have taught us that in the word which calls and justifies and sanctifies us, the word which forms the content of the biblical witness, we must recognize in all seriousness the Word of God.  Beside and above and behind this Word there is no other.  … Again, they have warned us most seriously that in respect of the knowledge of god and man we must not turn aside in the slightest degree from the knowledge of Jesus Christ, either to the right hand or to the left.  (C.D. II/2, 150)

And yet, when it came to the doctrine of election,

Suddenly there seemed to be some other eternity apart fro the eternity of the eternal life whose revelation and promise and gift in the promised and temporally incarnate Word they elsewhere attest loudly and impressively enough.  And in this eternity there seemed to be some other mystery apart from the mystery whose proclamation and disclosure they can confirm elsewhere with clear texts from the New Testament.  … In the sphere of predestination there arose all at once a different order, even though it had appeared elsewhere that according to the biblical testimony upon which the Church is founded there can be no question of the recognition of any such order. (C.D. II/2, 151)

It is not by beginning with a Trinitarian structure in which Jesus is the Son, but with the claim that Jesus is the full and only Word, i.e., Revelation, of God that Barth argues for the view of Jesus Christ as electing God as well as elect man.

Barth is not imposing 4^th century Christology on the NT but using the Christology of the NT itself.  In addition to John 1:1 f., Barth could well have cited John 1:18, John 14:6 (interpreted not only as a soteriological claim, but also an epistemic one), Col. 1:15-19, Heb. 1:3, and Mt. 11:27.

Still, given that the doctrine of Revelation, and not per se the doctrine of the Trinity, is Barth’s starting point, we are left with a multitude of perplexing questions, not least of which is:  Even if we grant that Jesus is the electing God, what are the relations within the Trinity in the action of election?  Dr. Kirk continues to give insightful discussion regarding such matters.

Blogging Barth

Several people are blogging through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 in six months! Daniel Kirk instigated this project and has the list of bloggers on his web site, Storied Theology.

Summary of content:

§01 The Task of Dogmatics

1. The Church, Theology, Science

Dogmatics is theology as a science, i.e., as the Church’s self-examination of its speech about Jesus Christ. Like other sciences, it has a definite object of knowledge, it treads a definite path of knowledge, and it must give an account of this path to itself and to others. Although the label “science” is not necessary or especially important, we claim it because we thus 1) bring theology into line with other human concerns for truth, 2) protest the usual pagan concept of science, and 3) reckon the other sciences as part of the Church in spite of their protests.

2. Dogmatics as an Enquiry

We presuppose that dogmatics as enquiry is both possible and necessary. I.e., we can know the true content of Christian talk about God because Jesus Christ is the revealing and reconciling address of God to us. And that content must be known humanly, i.e., in creaturely form which is never clear and unambiguous. Thus dogmatics is always humble and always having to make a fresh start. The Church is challenged to know itself and to ask what to say today.

3. Dogmatics as an Act of Faith

Dogmatics is impossible except as an act of faith in obedience to Jesus Christ. Since faith is God’s gracious address to man, then by presupposing faith dogmatics also presupposes at every step God’s free grace, which he may at any time give or refuse. Thus we can only proceed by saying, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

Note on translation:

The paragraph at the bottom of p. 13 begins, “2. Dogmatics as an enquiry presupposes that the true content of Christian talk about God must be known by men.” I found this confusing, since the ensuing paragraph does not explain why men have to know the content of Christian talk about God. But the G. T. Thompson translation ends the sentence, “… must be known humanly,” i.e., we can’t know it in any other way than in a human mode of enquiry. The ensuing paragraph makes more sense with this beginning.

At times like this I wish I had a copy of the German.

Comments:

From the beginning of section 1 Barth displays the resiliency of a theology that is truly and thoroughly based on God’s revelation of himself to us in Jesus Christ.

Is theology a science? Who cares what scientists think? Their concept of science is pagan, their certainty is quasi-religious, and their Aristotelian tradition is only one among others. And we only call theology a science as a favor to them! LOL!