Ray Bakke ( A Theology As Big As the City ) wonders how the apostles, and the gospel, could have made such a rapid transition from rural Galilee to the cities of the Mediterranean. He suggests that Jesus discipled the disciples in an urbanized Palestine. He writes, “Rome . . . reorganized and centralized these Greek social and cultural realities, and the milieu spread throughout Palestine and in the whole Near East. There was no place to hide from these... Read more
A number of sections of Eberhard Busch’s The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology deal with Barth’s criticisms of natural theology. In one section, Busch helpfully puts this in the context of Barth’s reaction to Nazism and his effort to trace the roots of violence and tyranny to the early modern period. Busch summarizes: “first the interpretation of the covenant of grace in terms of the creation, and then creation without reference to this covenant, and ultimately without... Read more
I’m feeling supralapsarian today, and here’s why: As Barth said, God’s Yes to man precedes creation (in Barth’s terms, covenant precedes creation). How could it be otherwise? If God had said No at the beginning, how could we exist at all? Once God says Yes, can He then change to No? Can we say of God what Paul’s Corinthian opponents said of him: With God it is always “Yes and No.” Or, “Maybe.” Must we not say, on the contrary,... Read more
Zizioulas offers a thoughtful defense of the Cappadocian notion that there is “causality” in the relations within the immanent Trinity. He notes that “the issue of causality was introduced as a response to the Platonists, who believed that the procession from one to another, particularly in Plotinus’ system of emanations, was a natural evolution outwards from the One, in a process of degeneration or disintegration.” The Cappadocians insisted that there was no leakage or degeneration of deity from the Father... Read more
Barth, along with much of the Western tradition, defends the filioque on the basis of coherence of the economic and ontological Trinity. If God is not as He appears, we have no revelation of God. John Zizioulas responds by opening up a rather surprising gap between economy and ontology. He acknowledges that “we cannot say that the immanent Trinity is one thing and the economic Trinity is entirely another.” Yet, the focus of his remarks is on the difference between... Read more
Several years ago, I posted at length about Barth’s discussion of the filioque clause. One point I left undeveloped was: “If the Spirit is also the Spirit of the Son only in revelation and for faith, if He is only the Spirit of the Father in eternity, i.e., in His true and original reality, then the fellowship of the Spirit between God and man is without objective ground or content.” Perhaps worse, without the filioque , God’s revelation in history... Read more
Barth’s problems with natural revelation and with creation seem to have a root in his trinitarian theology. The reconciling Son, he says, comes onto the field that has been created by the Father, yet “we must obviously distinguish them in such a way that we perceive and acknowledge the relation of subordination that is present here. We must say, then, that the Reconciler is not the Creator, and that as the Reconciler He follows the Creator, that He accomplishes, as... Read more
A neat statement from Barth regarding the Triune root of creation and revelation: “the intradivine possibility in virtue of which God can be manifest to us as the Creator and as our Father is not a self-grounded and self-reposing possibility. It rather presupposes a possibility of this kind and it presupposes an event in God in virtue of which it is posited as a possibility. It arises out of a self-grounded and self-reposing possibility in God.” Specifically, this is rooted... Read more
We cannot, Barth insists, read off the relations of the persons from revelation. In comprehending the distinctions between the persons in revelation we “do not comprehend the distinctions in the divine modes of being as such.” That would lead to tritheism. To be sure, the distinctions that are evident between Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer in redemptive history hint at eternal distinctions within God; they provide “an analogy” and in this analogy the triunity of God is presented, but presented precisely as... Read more
Zechariah begins and ends with horses. In the first night vision, the horses are in a glen (1:8ff). They have returned from patrol, and the world is at peace. That’s not good; sometimes peace is complacency and established evil, and war needs to begin. By the end of the night visions, the horses are heading out “between the two bronze mountains” (6:1), and are heading out to conquer. A similar scene ends the book – again there are two mountains,... Read more
Leithart
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