Karl Barth more satisfying than the evangelical theology in which I was raised?

I referred last Monday to a comment by Kim in MT. "My world and my God are much larger now that I'm not trying to do the mental gymnastics to make them fit in the young earth, evangelical box," she had written.

Though it dismayed me, her comment did not come as too much of a surprise.

But I was blown away a few hours after my post when I received a note from Perry Marshall, a friend of mine, a guy I recognize as an outspoken and zealous advocate for Christian faith both publicly and privately.

I think you may be outgrowing both evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Congratulations.

???!!!!???

"But Perry is an evangelical, according to everything I know!" I protested within myself. "What's going on? Am I to be the last evangelical among my peers?"

Perry's next few sentences blew me away even more:

IMHO Karl Barth had a much more useful and accurate understanding of inspiration and inerrancy than the likes of Ken Ham. And he never made the mistake of elevating scripture above the Holy Spirit.

Nor did he turn his interpretations of scripture into a bully pulpit.

I wish there were enough question marks and exclamation points to allow me to indicate my complete astonishment at such statements.

"Karl Barth [bart]?!?!? Why would you want to follow Karl Barth?" Everything I have ever heard from the evangelical sources has always told me to distrust Barth.

I wrote back:

I don't know if or that I am "outgrowing" evangelicalism. If I am, it doesn't feel like something for which I want to be congratulated. Indeed, because I often think in relational and metaphorical terms, your congratulations make me think it would be like someone saying, "Congratulations for outgrowing your marriage to your wife." --Not a happy thought! . . .

As for Barth: . . .

--And here I suddenly thought: "Maybe Barth and his thinking and teaching are indicators of another group of questions that are out-of-bounds. Forbidden." So . . .

I think you are encouraging me (finally?) to read him . . . or SOMETHING of him. (Any suggestions?) At the same time, as I imagine you realize, his viewpoints are definitely NOT appreciated or found attractive in evangelical circles. . . .

Again, the thought of forbidden questions:

Whew! I find the POLITICS of all of this very difficult/unpleasant.

Perry replied shortly afterward:

This is the journey as I have experienced it.

Evangelicalism is well and good but it's just one expression of Christianity in one part of the world in a limited time. I think the church of Jesus is bigger and broader than that.

One aspect where I have most definitely departed from evangelicals is their denial of the gifts of the Holy Spirt - healing, prophecy, tongues. They have a theory, I've had an experience. Many experiences actually. (See www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles.)

I find it incredible that people who insist that I take "day" in Genesis literally will cut out 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 and declare them irrelevant for today. I also find it interesting that they believe that all life on earth is a series of innumerable miracles that happened before we had a chance to see them, yet they deny that miracles happen today.

I say, if God used natural engineering processes to evolve life then that means we can study what He did. If he only did miracles there is nothing for us to study, only the results.

I say, if God works miracles through gifted people today then we are likewise much more empowered to do the work of Christ than if miracles have ceased.

Karl Barth has what I feel is the most coherent explanation of inspiration I've heard. It's basically this:

The Bible is not the Word of God, it is the word of God. Jesus Christ is the Word of God and the Bible is man's testimony to the actions of God and of Jesus.

Inspiration is what the Holy Spirit does inside you when you read the words of the scriptures. Those words themselves are just ink on paper.

I think many evangelicals raise the role of the Bible above that of the Holy Spirit (refer back to the miracles discussion). Thus they create huge divisions over tiny things like the meaning of one word.

Barth is often labeled as liberal but that is a very misleading label. He is actually very orthodox and he is a rigorous expositor of Scripture. See his Commentary on Romans, or perhaps read Evangelical Theology. He has the most Christ centered theology of anyone I have ever read - and the highest view of Jesus of anyone I've read.

Barth doesn't believe in inerrancy. Neither do I. One can say that the original manuscripts are inerrant and that's fine but it gets you nowhere because we don't have them.

In apologetics, as soon as I stopped trying to defend the inerrancy of scripture I gained a huge amount of power. I'm not going to chase down every Biblie inconsistency anymore. It's just not necessary. Scripture is highly accurate - that's enough - and it wields enormous power in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

A lot of liberals - United Church of Christ for example - have twisted Barth's view of scripture way out of context and built a liberal theology around it. But Barth should not be blamed for that.

My 2 cents.

"Thank you for the detailed response," I said.

et me note: I do not consider the anti-charismatic/anti-Pentecostal crowd as evangelical. They are fundamentalist. I consider (at least the more mainline charismatics/Pentecostals--Assemblies of God, Foursquare, etc.) to be evangelical.

You are correct about creating huge divisions over meanings of even single words. But then--as I intend someday soon to mention it--what do you do with verses like Luke 16:17 or Matthew 5:18? --THAT's the source of the focus on minutia.

I will look up the Barth books you recommend.

I'm not really "up" on this stuff (but, obviously, about to become so!). Still, I think I can say with some confidence that the problem with the "definition" of inspiration you suggest is that inspiration, as it were, is not "in" the book or "in" the words of the book, but "in" the person who READS the book. Which doesn't accord too well with the classic Scriptures that speak of the inspiration and authority of Scripture . . . most particularly 2 Peter 1:19-21 and 2 Timothy 3:16-17.

"I do believe that inspiration has been breathed into Scripture and that it is very special," he replied.

But the inspiration is in the imparted meaning not the individual words. That's why Christians are free to translate Old Testament/New Testament into other languages and Muslims are not. Ultimately it's the connection between the intended and received meaning which requires the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

In fundamentalism, "all scripture is inspired" often comes along with an implied "and so is my interpretation, so SUBMIT!"

"I appreciate what you are saying . . . on both points," I said:

1) About the meaning of WORDS (and the concomitant difference, then, in the way in which Christians--PROTESTANT Christians, anyway!--have approached Bible translation as opposed to the way in which Muslims have approached translation of the Q'uran; and, 2) about the implicit interpretive perfection found among so many fundamentalists.

A short time later, he added,

I don't really have words for what has happened as I've slowly and in my stumbling way learned to listen to the Holy Spirit. It really does move things from black and white to color. It also erases the fear which is so deeply embedded in the fundamentalist mindset.

John, you really have nothing to fear. This is a fascinating journey. I just want to encourage you to dive into it and experience all of it and discover the new things that await you.

Well, I had said I would look up Barth. So I did.

I checked out his The Epistle to the Romans. Didn't look like a promising introduction to Barth. Maybe later.

So I turned to Evangelical Theology: An Introduction and, since Amazon offered to let me read the first chapter free on my computer-based Kindle reader, I decided to give it a try. (Not only to read the chapter, but to see whether I could stand reading a "heavy" book on Kindle! --I doubt it. Brief passages, okay. But whole books, with highlighting and notes? Maybe on my computer, but definitely not using Kindle's tiny chicklet keys.)

Anyway.

So I decided to read the first chapter. Not easy reading. Barth's writing, honestly, reminds me of the little bit of reading we were required to do in Cornelius Van Til at Westminster Seminary: way too elliptical and philosophical.

But what I read certainly shocked me!

Barth opens by suggesting that "There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology. . . . Even . . . apparently 'godless' ideologies are theologies," he says.

But then he seems to disarm himself:

The purpose of these remarks is not to introduce the world of these many theologies with their many gods. We will not compare them historically or offer critical conjectures regarding them. No position will be taken on behalf of one against all the others, nor will the others be subordinated and related to this one. . . .

I thought, "So if he doesn't plan to take anyone on, why is Barth writing?"

It gets worse. "In one of his plays," Barth writes,

the German poet Lessing compares the claims of the Jewish, Mohammedan, and Christian religions to the claims of three brothers. Each one of them had received a precious ring from the hands of their dying father. Each claimed to have received his father's one and only precious ring, rather than an exact copy of it. The warning contained in this fable is obvious, even if we do not choose to follow Lessing's opinion that perhaps the genuine ring was lost and nothing else but imitations were left in the brothers' hands.

The best theology (not to speak of the only right one) of the highest, or even the exclusively true and real, God would have the following distinction: it would prove itself--and in this regard Lessing was altogether right--by the demonstration of the Spirit and of its power. However, if it should hail and proclaim itself as such, it would by this very fact betray that it certainly is not the one true theology.

"You've got to be kidding me!" I said to myself. "So the one true theology is not permitted to make any exclusive claims about itself?"

That certainly didn't (and doesn't) sit too well with me!

"We are supposed to view the Christian faith as a co-equal faith with Islam and Judaism? And we are all supposed to view each other--Christian, Jew and Muslim--as holding imitation copies of the real faith?

"In the first place," Barth continues,

it was not Lessing who originally forbade evangelical theology to award itself the prize in comparison with other theologies or, what is more, to pass itself off in any one of its forms as divine wisdom and the doctrine. For the very reason that it is devoted to the God who proclaims himself in the Gospel, evangelical theology cannot claim for itself that authority which belongs to him alone.

The God of the Gospel is the God who mercifully dedicates and delivers himself to the wife of all men--including their theologies. Nevertheless, he transcends not only the undertakings of all other men but also the enterprise of evangelical theologians. He is the God who again and again discloses himself anew and must be discovered anew, the God over whom theology neither has nor receives sovereignty. . . . Other gods do not seem to prohibit their theologies from boasting that each one is the most correct or even the only correct theology. On the contrary, such gods even seem to urge their respective theologians to engage in such boasting. Evangelical theology, on the other hand, . . . should base its thought and speech on the decision and deed by which God lets his honor pale [beside] all other gods; however, it . . . can give only [God] and not itself . . . glory. Evangelical theology is modest theology, because it is determined to be so by its object, that is, by him who is its subject.

About this time, I realized Barth is likely to force me to "go deep." I don't honestly know where he goes with the thoughts I have presented here. I "just" realize that he is saying something 1) with which I am unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but, 2) that strangely "sounds right" in an extremely paradoxical sense. Is it, indeed, possible that God--the God who humbled Himself to become a man and live among us and die the death of a common criminal (Philippians 2:5-8), the God who was silent when it came time for Jesus to be led to the slaughter like a sheep: Is it possible that that God might, indeed, want to be represented in this world by some sort of (what does it mean, really?) modest theology that makes no--or very, very few--claims about itself? A theology that would refuse to compare itself historically to other theologies? A theology that offers no critical conjectures regarding any of the opposing faiths? No position against its rivals? No attempt to subordinate the others?

Sounds very disturbing to me!

But maybe I need to read him further to see what he's really getting at.

And so I intend to.

Meanwhile, Perry wrote me one more time:

My brother-in-law got his bachelor's degree at Liberty (Fallwell's school) and his Master's in theology at Dallas Theological Seminary. Then he went to Iowa State for his PhD in church history. He went there because they had the best library he could find. But most of his professors were atheists and he had to subject his beliefs to the most rigorous of scrutiny.

For him, the tautological nature of Dallas Seminary theology quickly crumbled under the weight of higher criticism and secular scholarship. This is the exact place where a lot of intellectual Christians shipwreck, and my brother-in-law hit some rough waters with that.

He discovered Barth and Barth gave him the tools to counter that kind of thinking. (Another author that was very helpful was Stanley Jaki, a science historian / physicist / catholic priest.) Barth moved the focus from the Bible to Christ Himself, which is really the only foundation you can build a theology on.

Again, my own version of this was suddenly realizing that I didn't have to defend the inerrancy of the Bible.

I'll never forget a fierce argument I had with an atheist where he tried to pin me down by pointing out inconsistencies between the gospels.

I said "Yeah there's inconsistencies. So? What would you expect from four partially independent historical records? You can argue that they're inconsistent or you can argue that they were doctored but you can't make both arguments. Clearly they weren't doctored to all agree, yet they still match extremely well. Which lends credence to the fact that all this really did happen. The authors all are unanimous that you are a sinner and Jesus died for you. So what are you going to do about that?"

I think I'd better quit, here.

There will be time enough in the future to talk through more of these issues.

Thanks for "listening."