Blogs

I’m working on how Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer read the Sermon on the Mount. In order to help situate my discussion of Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s readings, I’m trying to get a better grasp of the various interpretive approaches to the Sermon on the Mount. So far, the most exhaustive Sermon on the Mount “interpretive taxonomy” that I’ve found has been from Grant Osborne’s Matthew (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 159....

This code of conduct very much relates to Rapoport’s Rules, Adler’s advice, and Alan Jacobs’s “The Thinking Person’s Checklist.” SOURCE: T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, 6th ed (Australia ; Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009), 7–8. 1. The Fallibility Principle Each participant in a discussion of a disputed issue should be willing to accept the fact that he or she is fallible, which means that one must acknowledge that one’s own initial view may not be the most defensible position on the question....

Editor’s Note: Thank you to the Rev. Dr. Emily McGowin for writing this rejoinder to Fr. Blake Johnson’s and Fr. Lee Nelson’s responses to her original blog post about the in persona Christi argument against women’s ordination. While we invite this conversation (about McGowin’s original blog post) to continue in our comments section and elsewhere—and we plan to publish more about women’s ordination in the future—we will not be adding surrejoinder blog posts....

The following checklist, found on pages 155–56 of Alan Jacobs’s excellent book, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (affiliate link), is a worthy addition to “Rapoport’s Rules” and “Adler’s Advice” (mentioned in my previous post, “Help me come up with ‘rules for conversation’!”). Emphasis added in **bold**. When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables....

In my role as Managing Editor for AnglicanPastor.com, I’m realizing the need to develop some “rules for conversation.” We describe the tone that we’re after as “clarity and charity,” which is an excellent summary. However, to guide our blogposts and comments, I think we need something more detailed and concrete. With that in mind, “Rapoport’s Rules” and “Adler’s Advice” seem like excellent starting points. But, if you have any further suggestions, please let me know in the comments!...

In the ongoing debate about women’s ordination (in the Anglican realm and beyond), I keep hearing oversimplified claims from hierarchicalists (or “complementarians,” but that’s not the most helpful term in this debate) that they have the entirety of the Bible and Church tradition on their side. Therefore, we mutualists (or “egalitarians,” but that’s not the most helpful term in this debate), it is argued, have arrived at our positions for various reasons—perhaps capitulation to liberal cultural trends and hermeneutical methods—but not because we’ve read Scripture or studied the history of the Church very carefully....

When it comes to the Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship, there is perhaps no greater conundrum than the meaning of what Bonhoeffer called Barth’s “Offenbarungspositivismus” (“positivism of revelation” or “revelatory positivism”) in his Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8). Now, before we proceed, please note that Bonhoeffer meant something very particular by “religion” in his prison letters. For an overview of how Bonhoeffer and Barth differed on the meaning of “religion,” and what that means for how we interpret their theological critiques of religion, please see my essay: “To Be or Not To Be Religious: A Clarification of Karl Barth’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Divergence and Convergence Regarding Religion....

If you’ve not yet consulted the Oxford Handbook series, you should! The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology is especially useful! I’m very excited because the Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth are both about to be released soon! I just wish they weren’t so expensive!

This is from Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, p. 11: The church has a mission: to see to the speaking of the gospel, whether to the world as message of salvation or to God as appeal and praise. Theology is the reflection internal to the church’s labor on this assignment. (How) does this definition of “theology” differ from the one you’ve been working with?

I really like the timelines of Bonhoeffer’s life that are available in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and in Bethge’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. (Those last two links are Amazon affiliate links.) However, I’m having a much harder time finding comparable timelines for the life of Karl Barth. The information is all there, but there’s no comparable table/list of dates in either The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth or Busch’s Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts....