Barth

I’m finally retiring an old set of TextExpander snippets I built up during my Ph.D. work. Before I delete them, I wanted to keep a record, because a person’s text-expansion abbreviations turn out to be a surprisingly honest map of what was constantly on their mind. Mine were almost entirely about two theologians, their books, and one stubborn question: can you be scriptural without being religious? Here’s the archive. The people I couldn’t stop typing Snippet Expanded to xdb Bonhoeffer xddb Dietrich Bonhoeffer xkb Barth xkkb Karl Barth xnietz Nietzsche xSlot van ’t Slot Bonhoeffer’s works Snippet Expanded to xab / xas Act and Being / Akt und Sein xcf / xsf Creation and Fall / Schöpfung und Fall xdisc Discipleship xlpp Letters and Papers from Prison xlt Life Together Barth’s works Snippet Expanded to xcd Church Dogmatics xrom2 / xröm2 Romans / Römerbrief xderr Der Römerbrief The concepts at the heart of the dissertation Snippet Expanded to xpor / xoffenb positivism of revelation / Offenbarungspositivismus xtcr / xttcr theological critique(s) of religion xtis / xttis theological interpretation(s) of Scripture xvra vicarious representative action xsp Schriftprinzip (the Scripture principle) xbbr the Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship xkge / xge knowledge of good and evil / good and evil The biblical and theological furniture Snippet Expanded to x10c Ten Commandments xsom Sermon on the Mount xot / xnt Old Testament / New Testament xbt biblical theology xst systematic theology The workflow scaffolding Snippet Expanded to xcn [[[CITATION NEEDED]]] (in alarming red) xpara ¶ xs § xreadingnotes a full reading-notes template (bibliographic data, interpretation, critique) The links I kept reaching for xproposal → the elevator pitch for my dissertation proposal xwsample → my writing sample on Barth, Bonhoeffer, and religion Looking back What strikes me now is how narrow and deep the list is. Just Barth and Bonhoeffer, their major works in both English and German, and a tight cluster of concepts (revelation, religion, Scripture, good and evil) that I evidently typed so often I couldn’t bear to spell them out one more time. Even the [[[CITATION NEEDED]]] snippet, flashing red, says something about the anxieties of that season. ...

I received word yesterday that the Ph.D. Committee voted to approve my request for “Excused Program Leave” beginning in January 2021 and lasting until January 2022. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, 2020 has been a particularly difficult year. Attempting to complete my “Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Bible” dissertation has taken a toll on my mental health as I ran into some major research and writing roadblocks right before and during the COVID pandemic. ...

What does “religion” mean? Great question! I’m writing my dissertation on Barth, Bonhoeffer, the Bible, and “religion.” However, getting clear on just what Barth and Bonhoeffer meant by “religion” is a huge challenge. It’s what I devoted my entire writing sample to examining, and I plan to devote an entire chapter of my dissertation to the topic. Neither Barth nor Bonhoeffer used the word “religion” in the way that we’re prone to use the word in everyday speech today. According to Merriam-Webster, “religion” means: ...

I’m trying to parse out the relevance of Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Scripture for making sense of the “Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship.” Specifically, I’m trying to, at the very least, add some biblical content and context to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s theological critiques of religion. As I put it in the “elevator pitch” for my dissertation proposal: Why does Bonhoeffer in prison, after adopting Barth’s theological critique of religion as idolatrous unbelief… ...

Perhaps it’s just the global COVID–19 pandemic, but I’ve been really discouraged about my dissertation lately. My normal reading/writing workflow has ground to a halt because (1) we are temporarily without childcare and (2) my wife, a Family Nurse Practitioner is still working full-time from the office. That leaves me home alone with our 1.5-year-old during the week and, while she is a wonderful child, she’s not really jazzed about dad sitting quietly in a corner getting some reading and writing done during the day. ...

I’m still very much in the weeds, taking a closer look at how Bonhoeffer and Barth read the Sermon on the Mount. Given the importance of the Sermon on Mount for Bonhoeffer’s life and work, I’m persuaded that there’s something important to be found here—something that will hopefully shed some light on the Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship re:their theological critiques of religion. Additionally, there are at least two other tidbits that have me interested in how Barth and Bonhoeffer read the Sermon on the Mount. ...

As I said in my previous post, “Interpretive Approaches to the Sermon on the Mount,” I’m working on how Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer read the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, when interpreting the Sermon on the Mount, the best place to start is at the beginning! This means beginning with the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1–12. The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1–12) 1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: ...

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!

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. (Again, Amazon affiliate links.) ...

I’m narrowing my focus to Genesis 1–3 and the Sermon on the Mount. Originally, my dissertation proposal cast a very wide net. I was going to have the following chapters: Introduction (5,000 words) Chapter 1: Creation and Fall (Genesis 1–3) (16,000 words) Chapter 2: The Prophets (16,000 words) Chapter 3: The Gospels (16,000 words) Chapter 4: The Epistle to the Romans (16,000 words) Chapter 5: Completing the Biblical Critique of Religion (16,000 words) Summary and Conclusion (5,000 words) However, after doing survey work, and spending most of the previous academic year working on Barth and Bonhoeffer’s reading of Genesis 1–3, I’ve decided to narrow my focus down to Genesis 1–3 and the Sermon on the Mount. ...

In short, if I am inhuman, I am also stupid and foolish and godless. The great crisis in which all worship and piety and adoration and prayer and theology constantly finds itself derives of course from the question whether and how far in these things we really have to do with the true and living God who reveals Himself in His Word, and not with an idol. But this question is decided concretely in practice by another one which is inseparable from it—whether and how far in these things we come before God together and not apart from and against one another. True Christianity cannot be a private Christianity, i.e., a rapacious Christianity. Inhumanity at once makes it a counterfeit Christianity. ...

Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics Original Publication Dates, courtesy of PostBarthian.com. If you’re trying to grasp the contours and contents of Karl Barth’s massive Church Dogmatics, it helps to have an outline! Here’s a helpful PDF version, with subheadings included, from Princeton’s Center for Barth Studies. Barth_Outline of Church Dogmatics Below is a version that I’ve created from my Logos edition of Church Dogmatics. It’s the version found in the Index (CD V/1, 1–13). ...

This summer, I’ve spent most of my reading/writing time working on a paper on Barth’s Römerbrief reading of Romans 10. This paper is for the 2019 Barth Graduate Student Colloquium, and it has taken way longer than I originally anticipated. Will I get to use this paper in my dissertation? I’m not sure. At first, I got excited, because, in my work on Genesis 1–3 last school year, I discovered some differences in how Barth and Bonhoeffer handled Genesis 1–3 vis-a-vis the subsequent history of Israel. Namely, while Barth takes care to work his way from Eden to the Church only after moving through the history of Israel and Jesus, Bonhoeffer jumps right from Eden to the Church via Christ. This difference in what I’m provisionally calling “Christological immediacy”—which is perhaps a confessional one that parallels some of the exegetical differences between Calvin and Luther—has me wondering whether Barth and Bonhoeffer differed in important ways on Israel. ...

UPDATE: Here is the paper that I gave at the 2019 Karl Barth Graduate Student Colloquium at the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. INTRODUCTION: “GENTILES” = “WORLD” IS WORSE THAN “ISRAEL” = “CHURCH” On at least one level, Karl Barth’s Römerbrief reading of Romans 9–11 is supersessionist. In general, especially in the second edition, when Paul refers to “Israel” in Romans 9–11, Barth refers to the “Church.”1 He replaces Israel with the Church. That’s supersessionism, case closed. Right? Well, yes and no. It has become increasingly common to at least mitigate or nuance the charge of supersessionism against Barth’s reading of Romans 9–11. Various scholars have broadly argued that, yes, Barth’s handling of Romans 9–11 at least leaves the door open for at least a certain kind of supersessionism, but, no, he wasn’t being quite as careless with Israel as it might initially seem.2 By and large, I agree with these assessments. Barth should have said more about the actual people and history of Israel, but he wasn’t trying to merely displace Israel with the Church, as if the latter were superior and the former were forgotten. He was trying to bring Israel and the Church together in solidarity, in opposition to the arrogance of the Church. ...