Meditation from McDonalds

Again I’m taking a break from my Church Dogmatics blog to write a little meditation from a McDonalds in St. Petersburg.

I am writing today from a McDonalds on the second floor overlooking the Alexander Nevsky Square which is the eastern end of Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of the city.

Alexander Nevsky is one of the most celebrated of Russian heroes. He may be most famous for leading a small band of Russians who turned back an invasion of Swedes in the Battle of Neva in 1240 when he was only 19-years-old. Due to this crucial victory, Alexander was given the sobriquet “Nevsky” which means Neva.
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Alexnder Nevsky is also famous for the dramatic Battle on the Ice in 1242. A group of Teutonic Crusader Knights along with knights from Denmark and Germany plus Estonian infantry was drawn onto the frozen Lake Peipus by cunning Alexander. In the fierce battle on the ice, Alexander’s troops defeated the over-confident Crusaders who never again were able to push east into Russian territory. I believe that it is this battle which is depicted in a large mural inside the entrance of the Alexander Nevsky Square Metro station.The heroic Alexander was glorified (canonized) by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547. By order of Peter the Great, Nevsky’s relics were transported to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg where they remain to this day. (I had to look up the word lavra and found that in Orthodox Christianity it refers to a type of monastery consisting of a cluster of cells or caves for hermits, with a church and sometimes a refectory at the center.)

From the window in McDonalds I can see the large statue of Alexander Nevsky clad in what looks like knight’s armor astride a horse in the center of a traffic circle. I can also see the dome of the church in the background.

(There is a bakery in the refectory of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra where Tanya and I have sometimes purchased the fresh, tasty bread.)

In the distance I can see main river on which St. Petersburg was founded, the River Neva.

Across from Alexander Nevsky’s statue I see the entrance the the Alexander Nevsky Lavra which was established by Peter the Great in 1710 just seven years after he founded the city on the banks of the Neva. I can see the dome of the church in the background. I also see a yellow wall across the street and know that beyond that wall lies two of the more remarkable cemeteries I’ve ever visited. The name of the cemetery is Tikhvin. It is referred to as a necropolis, literally a “city of the dead.”

One side of this cemetery some of the first famous residents of the city are buried. The other side is reserved for famous Russian artists. The first time I wandered through it, I was astonished to see the decorative monumental grave sites of so many Russian artists who are well-known worldwide. Just inside the gate to the cemetery I found the grave site of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who lived and wrote in in St. Petersburg and used the city as the setting for novels including Crime and Punishment.

Several events of Dostoyevsky’s life stick in my mind. One is the time he was arrested by the Tzar’s police and accused of some sort of anti-government crime. After spending some days in a dank prison in the Peter-Paul Fortress, he and others were taken out and placed before a firing squad. There he faced the prospect of an immanent violent death. But at the last minute a soldier rode up and declared that the prisoners had been granted a reprieve by the Tzar. Dostoyevsky was sent to Siberia for years, but was eventually able to return to St. Petersburg. I also recall two other related aspects of the writer’s complex life. Like many Christians of his time, Dostoyevsky disliked Jews and often expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in his novels. He also suffered from an addiction to gambling and lost a great deal of money due to this vice. He struggled to free himself from his gambling habit, but was only cured when he happened one day to drop into a Jewish synagog.

The artist’s cemetery also contains the graves of more famous musical composers than any cemetery in the world. Here I’ve seen the final resting places of Alexander Glazunov, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Rubinstein, Mily Balakierev, Cesar Cui, Alexander Borodin, and my favorite – Pyotr Ill’yich Tchaikovsky. This little cemetery is a striking reminder of the cultural heritage of Russia which has enriched the world with its literature and music.

Tchaikovsky is my favorite Russian composer. My late parents told me that when I was just a baby, they would play his music for me on old 78 rpm records. Many times I have thrilled to his 1812 Overture especially when I have attended a live performance with booming canon and flashing fireworks. Many times I’ve enjoyed the Nutcracker and Swan Lake ballets. Last summer I was thrilled to see my Christian friend, Xander Parish, dance the lead role of Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake at the prestigious Mariinsky Theatre here in St. Petersburg.

Only late in life did I discover that Tchaikovsky was most likely a homosexual and that his shame about his sexual orientation may have led to his death. That makes me wonder how many good and talented people have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries who considered being a homosexual a shameful, sinful condition.

Well, with all this writing, I’ve worked up the appetite for a Big Mac, so now I’ll go to lunch.
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How Russians and Americans See Each Other

Today I’m taking a break from my observations regarding Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics to make a simple observation about Russia and America.

Since 1989 I have been visiting Russia – usually staying a month or more each time. I have lost count of how many times I have made trips to Russia, but I know its over 20. I’m well acquainted with Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as the small town of Borovichi. Several times I have journeyed to Ukraine. I’ve met all kinds of Russians: rich and poor, well educated and barely educated, old and young. I’ve had extended conversations with Russians in their own language.

Based on my personal experience, I can make the following generalization: Americans tend to see Russia through the lens of politics while Russians tend to see America through the lens of culture.

When I discuss Russia with Americans, the conversation inevitably focuses on the latest conflicts or agreements between the American government and the leaders of Russia. Right now that relationship is strained by conflict over Ukraine and the economic sanctions President Obama and his administration have placed on Russia. There is evidence that these economic sanctions have hurt the Russian economy and have made the life of the average Russian harder. Given the current political tensions between the two countries, I wondered if this year when I came to Russia I would experience some level of hostility to me as an American. I am glad to report that that is not the case. This summer I have been welcomed everywhere here as warmly as in the past. When people ask, “Where are you from?” I usually say, “California,” and the responsive is always positive. I sometimes apologize to people that I don’t speak fluently and they invariably say something like, “No, you speak well enough.” No matter that I garble their grammar and can’t find the vocabulary to express myself. They are flattered that an American is trying to speak their language.

When my wife and I walk down Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of St. Petersburg, I notice that the movie theaters are showing all our American first run movies. I hear American pop music in the street. Last week my wife and I went to a jazz concert not knowing what would be played. It turned out to be all American jazz favorites. The Beatles are adored here. Venders in the street now sell hamburgers and hot dogs. In brief, Russians have embraced nearly all aspects of American culture.

We Americans, on the other hand know very little of the riches of Russian culture. How many Americans could identify Alexander Pushkin or name one Russian rock group? (It is hard to find a Russian who cannot recite many lines of Pushkin’s poetry.) How many Americans have tasted blini or pelmeni? When Americans envision Russia, they may picture parades of soldiers marching through Red Square. When Russians picture America, they think of the soap opera series “Santa Barbara” and living the good life on the Pacific Coast in California.

I am grateful that I have discovered the Russian people with all their warmth, hospitality, and good humor. I have grown to appreciate the enormous contributions have made to world culture in music, literature, dance, and art. I wish more Americans would come to know the Russia I have discovered.

Fleeing to God’s mercy

My eyes are tired and my brain numb today after reading ten pages of small print in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I wish Barth had had a more readable style or a good editor who would have made him trim down his wordiness. I wish the esteemed Swiss theologian had heeded the words of Augustine which he quoted (in Latin) at the end of Volume 1.1 of Church Dogmatics: “Free me, God, from the wordiness which afflicts me in my soul and which, wretched in your sight, flees to your mercy.” I wish Barth had made that prayer his own. Instead he inflicted his readers with an additional 8,000 pages of dense wordiness often in tiny print. It is Barth’s readers who now have to flee to God’s mercy.

Ebionitism

In my last post I wrote about Docetism which is basically the denial of the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. Ebionitism is the opposite heresy – the denial of the divinity of Jesus.

Ther term Ebionites is derived from the Hebrew word אביונים ebyonim, meaning “the poor” or “poor ones” and refers is to a Jewish Christian movement that existed during the first centuries of the Christian Church and still survives today. In my research on the Internet I was surprised to discover a website devoted to advocating Ebionitism: www.ebionite.org. The site declares, “Our desire is that you know we were the first and the only real ebionite site. We are not Christian, Messianic, and reject Jesus of Nazareth as a savior, a god, or messiah.”

Ancient Ebionites regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah while rejecting his divinity and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish law and rites. The Ebionites used only one of the Jewish Gospels (perhaps an edition of the Gospel of Matthew), revered James the Just, and rejected Paul the Apostle as an apostate from the Law.

As their name suggests that they placed a special value on voluntary poverty. Ebionim was one of the terms used by the sect at Qumran that sought to separate themselves from the corruption of the Temple. Bible scholars can be thankful that the people who lived in Qumran near the Dead Sea preserved and protected scrolls of the Scriptures as well as commentaries and sectarian writings. We know this ancient library as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The nature of Ebionite beliefs and practices is dependent almost entirely on secondary sources, the writings of early Christians who deemed them to be heretical. Consequently, very little about the Ebionite sect or sects is known with certainty, and most, if not all, statements about them are conjectural.

I believe that a form of Ebionitism exists today when people refer to Jesus as a great teacher and moral model who lived and taught in ancient Israel during the time of Roman occupation, but deny that he was God in the flesh. For all of its history the Christian Church has consistently taught that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and is true man and true God. To deny either the humanity or divinity of Jesus is to slip into heresy.

The Ancient Heresy of Docetism

Early in my project of reading all of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, I encountered two terms that I was aware of from my theological studies in seminary, but now couldn’t define or describe. Since Barth assumes that his readers will know these terms, he doesn’t bother to define them. The terms I’m referring to were identified as heresies in the first centuries of Christianity. They are Docetism and Ebionitism. In this post I’ll discuss Docitism and in the next post, I’ll write about Ebionitism.

The word Docetism is derived from the Greek word “dokeo” which means “to seem.” Docetism is the teaching that Jesus of Nazareth only seemed to have a physical body, that his physical body was either absent or an illusion, that Jesus only appeared to have a body.

This early Christian heresy grew out of a popular Greek philosophy called Gnosticism, the dualistic idea which viewed matter as inherently evil and that only spirit as good. Gnostics believed that God could not be associated with matter and that God, being perfect and infinite, could not suffer. Therefore, God as the word, could not have become flesh as stated in the Gospel of John 1:1, 14 (Common English Bible), “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God . . . The Word became flesh, and made his home [literally: “tented”] among us . . . ” This denial of the incarnation would mean that Jesus did not truly suffer on the cross and that he did not rise from the dead.

As the message of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus spread to the Greek world, early believers may have been tempted to embrace it as a form of super-spiritual Christianity. The letters of first and second John may include a direct refutations of Docetism. “This you know if a spirit comes from God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come as a human is from God, 3 and every spirit that doesn’t confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and now is already in the world” 1 John 4:2-3 (CEB). Also, 2 John 7 (CEB), “Many deceivers have gone into the world who do not confess that Jesus Christ came as a human being. This kind of person is the deceiver and the antichrist.”

Docetic teaching was attractive to a minority of believers in the first centuries of the Christian Church. However it was unequivocally rejected by the First Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 and from that time on it has been regarded as a heretical teaching by all branches of the Christianity.

However, his ancient heresy reemerged in the teaching of Islam which has a docetic understanding of Jesus. The Qur’an views Jesus as a prophet and divine illuminator rather than the Redeemer. Islamic Docetism focuses on a denial of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Sura 4:157–158 reads: “And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger — they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them; and lo! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But Allah took him up unto Himself. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise.”

Personally I have Muslim friends and neighbors whom I respect and admire. Muslims have participated in Bible study groups in my home. I have been enriched by frequent conversations via Skype with wonderful Palestinian Muslims living in Gaza City and in Hebron. There are many aspects of Islam that I find appealing, especially their devoted prayer practices from which I have much to learn. But we clearly disagree about the person and work of Jesus Christ.

I believe that docetic tendencies continue to persist among Christians to this day. When we think that our bodies with all their appetites are evil compared to our spirits which are pure, we are being docetic. When we emphasize Jesus’ divinity more than his humanity, we are in danger of embracing the ancient heresy in our thinking.

The creation narratives of Genesis assert that God created everything and declared that it was very good. That includes our bodies. When the eternal Word of God revealed himself to humanity, it was as a real human baby born to human mother and father in the real town of Bethlehem in Roman occupied Judea. Jesus was no phantom pretending to be a man. He was a flesh and blood human being who new hunger and fatigue and all the temptations we face. He was nailed to a real Roman cross, but was raised bodily from the grave. That reality is at the heart of the Christian message. And that’s why Docetism is regarded as a heresy.

Luther

In my first few hundred pages of reading Church Dogmatics I kept encountering passages in the small print sections that were clear, clever and vividly expressed. I thought, Now Barth is writing in a way I can understand. Then, at the end of these statements, I would see that they were attributed to Luther. (The reason I initially thought that these statements came from Barth was that they were usually not marked off by quotation marks.) As with the name John Calvin, Barth always uses just the last name of these prominent Reformers: Luther and Calvin.

Two things became readily apparent in these quotes from Luther:
-Barth was very fond of Luther whom he seems to quote on nearly every other page.
-Luther was a much better writer than Barth.

My own response to Martin Luther is mixed, even conflicted. I have always admired Luther’s courage to question the Church with his 95 Theses posted on the door of a church in Wittenburg, Germany. I admired his heroism in refusing to recant from his teachings when he appeared before before Emperor Charles V. I’ve appreciated Luther’s understanding of the Christian message of the Good News that we are justified in God’s sight by grace through faith, and not on the basis of our good works. I was impressed to learn that the prior monk abandoned his vows of celibacy to marry Katharina von Bora who left a convent to be his wife. Together they had six children. Luther was familiar enough Hebrew and Greek to translate the Bible into German. Thanks to the newly invented printing press, Luther’s translation was widely read in Germany and is credited with standardizing the German language. Luther’s theological insight and personal boldness began the Protestant Reformation. The fact that Barth quotes Luther so frequently is an indication of Luther’s lasting impact on the Church and the study of theology.

It was not until some years after I graduated from seminary that I discovered something about Luther that was extremely unsettling. Martin Luther wrote one of the most terrible essays against Jews imaginable. In an treatise called “On the Jews and their Lies” Luther used shockingly vulgar language to advocate setting fire to Jewish synagogues and schools, taking away their homes, forbidding them to pray or teach, or even to utter God’s name. Luther wanted to “be rid of them” and requested that the government and ministers deal with the problem. He requested pastors and preachers to follow his example of issuing warnings against the Jews.
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Defenders of Luther try to excuse the great reformer by explaining that he wrote his terrible essay toward the end of his life in 1543, three years before his death at the age of 63, and that he suffered from multiple debilitating illnesses during the last 15 years of his life. Others point out that Luther lived in a time when antisemitism was common.

I do not find these excuses persuasive. Luther’s antisemitic essay is serious blotch on his career and Christians today should repudiate it, not excuse it.

Not surprisingly, the Natzis quoted Luther’s essay as part of their propaganda against Jews. It is terrible to realize that the vile words of the revered reformer were used to support the Holocaust that consumed over six million Jews.

I’m left with haunting questions: How could someone who was so right about understanding the basic Christian message be so wrong in his antisemitism? To what extent can I regard Luther’s writings as useful? Should I ignore all that he has to say or be selective in my appreciation? I also wonder to what extent Barth was aware of Luther’s antisemitism. As I continue to read Church Dogmatics, I will pay attention to Barth’s use of Luther and remember that even the admirable followers of Jesus, can be deeply flawed.

Archeology

Reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and writing about it is a lot like doing archeology. During the ten months I lived and studied in Jerusalem from 1975 to 1976 I learned about the science of archeology, visited many tels in Israel/Palestine, and participated as a volunteer in an excavation just south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Throughout the Holy Land are many mounds called tels beneath which often lie  layers of past civilizations. When archeologists first approach a tel that has not been excavated, they will initially dig quadrants in places where they think it is most likely that they will discover hidden structures. Nearly all archeological excavations or “digs” are seasonal, using volunteers only in the summer months. As digs carefully progress, discoveries of physical remains such as coins and pottery are analyzed and compared to known samples. Specialists measure structures, take photographs and make drawings. Others record their findings in meticulous field notes. It is often years before all these findings are assembled in a coherent way and published for the general public to read.

One important rule I learned about archeology is that responsible archeologists will never try to excavate an entire tel. They are aware that technical advances to their science will enable archeologists of the future to do a better job of digging and interpreting their findings.

To me Barth’s massive Church Dogmatics is like an enormous tel. I have made some initial probing excavations with my first attempts to write something meaningful about what I’ve read. Since I began this project on April 8, 2015, I have managed to read at least ten pages of the 14 volume work every day. I began this website about a month later. Now I’m discovering that my reading has far outpaced my writing. It has become apparent that I will not be able to comment on everything I read or even make observation on all the subjects of Barth’s work. So I’ve decided to work like an archeologist and pass over many parts of Church Dogmatics for now with the possibility that I may be able to return to them later when I have a greater understanding of Barth’s theology.

In upcoming posts, I plan to write about the following diverse subjects: Luther, the humorous end of vol.1, Docetism, Ebionitism, Christian music, Barth’s style compared to Zen “koans,” and Mary. Soon I hope to be able to comment on what I read while it is fresh in my mind. I don’t know what I will unearth in Barth’s big tel, but I’m looking forward to the discoveries.

The Doctrine of the Trinity

Christians are monotheists; we believe in one God. We believe that the one God is a triune God existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The earliest formal creed of the Church dating from the Fourth Century is called the Nicene Creed. It asserts belief in one God who is known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This belief that God is three in one is referred to as the Trinity.

The Trinity a problematic doctrine. For one thing the word Trinity never appears in the Bible. The term is not even used in the earliest creeds of the Church. The first use the word Trinity I can find in an official creed of the Church doesn’t occur until the Second Helvetic Confession in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the doctrine of the Trinity opens up Christians to the accusation that we are really tritheists.

Since the doctrine of the Trinity is so difficult to understand, it is rarely addressed from the pulpit. If you’ve gone to church most of your life and listened to countless sermons, as I have, you have most likely heard very few sermons on the Trinity. This year I was present for one sermon on “Trinity Sunday” and read another. Neither sermon tried to explain what is meant by the word Trinity other than mentioning that we understand one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I don’t recall ever reading a book about the Trinity.

In spite of these difficulties, fearless Karl Barth, the man who was a street fighter as a teenager and who later, as a university professor, publicly opposed Hitler, is not afraid to write at length about the Trinity. Starting with Chapter II in volume one of Church Dogmatics Barth writes 194 pages about the Triune God. In Volume 2 (which I’m reading now) he continues his writing about the Trinity for at least 400 more pages as he focuses on the incarnation of the Word and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

One of my main take aways thus far from reading Church Dogmatics is a new understanding and appreciation of the Triune God we Christians worship. Here are a few things I think I understand from Barth’s view of the Trinity:

1) He says that revelation is the basis of the Trinity and in a full page (p. 313) of small print he references the following Biblical verses which support the idea of the Trinity: Isaiah 61:1f, Matthew 28:19, Romans 1:1-4 and 11:38, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, I John 5:7f, 1 Peter 1:2, Revelation 1:4, 2 Corinthians 13:12, Mark 1:9f, Jude 20-21, 1 Corinthians 12:4f, Ephesians 4:4f. These are among the biblical passages that suggest that God is a triune entity. They are not proof texts, but part of the evidence that led theologians to use the term Trinity. For instance, Matthew 28:19 is a statement from Jesus instructing his followers to go into all the world and make disciples baptizing them “in the name [not names] of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

2) Barth acknowledges that the doctrine of the Trinity is a problem.

3) He says that there is no good analogy to the Trinity, but the best analogy is the Word of God which comes to us in three forms: spoken word in preaching, written word in the Bible, and revealed word in God’s specific acts of unveiling. (I always thought that water, H2O, was a good analogy to the Trinity because it exists in three forms – solid, liquid and gas. But I think Barth doesn’t approve of this analogy because he persistently and radically asserts that there is no continuity between our human thinking and God’s being.)

4) Barth prefers to speak of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes of being rather than three persons.

5) Professor Barth sides with the Western Church regarding the clause “from the Father and the Son” (Latin: ex Patre Filioque) in the Nicene Creed. This little phrase is the center of a huge theological dispute between the Eastern (Orthodox) Church and the Western (Catholic) Church. If I can muster sufficient courage, I will write about this phrase in the future.

6) “God is always a mystery” (p 321). I remember my college pastor, Don Williams saying, “You think you understand the doctrine of the trinity? Oh, no you don’t.”

Finally, in one of his long small print sections, Barth quotes (in Latin) one of the early Protestant Reformers named Melanchthon who wrote, “We will have done better to adore the mysteries of the divinity than to investigate them.” Although Barth doesn’t agree with this cautionary statement, I think it is sound advice.

The Word of God Revealed

As I try to understand what Barth is saying in Church Dogmatics and write something meaningful about it, I become painfully aware of my limited ability to understand and more limited ability to articulate what I barely understand. This is particularly true regarding what Barth calls the Word of God revealed.

I have had to read this section again and parts of it multiple times; and still I’m still not confident I can pin down what Barth is saying about the Word of God revealed.

Barth begins his section on “The Word of God Revealed” by adding more thoughts about the Bible and Proclamation. He says, “The Bible, speaking to us and heard by us as God’s Word, bears witness to past revelation. Proclamation, speaking to us and heard by us as God’s Word, promises future revelation.” (p. 111). Later he says, “…revelation is originally and directly what the Bible and Church proclamation are derivatively and indirectly, i.e. God’s Word” (p. 117).

If I understand Barth, he is saying that the Bible is the written word of God and proclamation or preaching is the spoken word of God. And that the Bible and proclamation are both derived from the Word of God which is direct revelation. The closest Bart comes to a definition of revelation is this: “It is rather the event in which the free God causes His free grace to rule and work” (p. 117). He also says, “To say revelation is to say ‘The Word became flesh’” (p. 119).

From what I have read of Barth elsewhere, Church Dogmatics is derived from lectures he gave as a professor of theology at various universities in Germany and Switzerland. If I had been a student in Professor Barth’s class and heard this section on the Word of God revealed as a lecture, I would have raised my hand to ask professor Barth a few questions:

“Dr. Barth, do I understand you correctly to say that Jesus himself is the word of God revealed?”
“Would you include the instances recorded in the Bible when God spoke to the patriarchs and Moses and the prophets as the Word of God revealed?”
“And would you include include God’s revelation to Paul on the Damascus road and John on the Island of Patmos as instances of God’s Word revealed?”
“And if I recall correctly, the book of Hebrews starts out by saying that God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets in a variety of ways. Is this also a reference to the Word of God?”

I can imagine Professor Barth answering me by saying, “Thank you for those questions. It appears you know the Bible well, at least for an American. The general answer to your questions is Yes. God in his freedom has chosen to unveil himself at different times and in different ways. It is this event of unveiling that we call revelation.”

The Bible is the Word of God

One of the battlefields of theology at least in America is the nature of Scripture. Is the Bible inspired, inerrant, infallible? Or is it just an old collection of myths and fantasies written by unenlightened, pre-scientific religious fanatics? Many who call themselves Evangelicals would use the words inerrant and infallible to describe the Bible. They might add that it is infallible in its original autographs. (Since we do not have any of these original autographs, but only copies that differ from each other, that seems to me like a meaningless distinction.) Other Evangelicals who may also call themselves Progressives prefer to describe the Bible as inspired rather than infallible. It may reflect the language and culture in which it was written and may contain some errors of fact, but it is still the Word of God.

In the section I read entitled “The Word of God Written,” Barth doesn’t use the categories of the debate in America. Instead he starts by talking about the Church’s proclamation which is based on past revelation and in expectation of future revelation. He asserts that the basis for this recollection of the Church is Holy Scripture. Barth calls attention to the Canon of Scripture and he reminds us in one of his small print sections that the word canon is from Greek and means rod, then ruler, standard, model, assigned district. He writes that for the first three hundred years of the Church the term Canon (which he always capitalizes) was used to mean that which stands fast as normative, that is apostolic or the Church’s doctrine of faith. Then from the fourth century onwards the term took on the more specialized idea of the Canon of Holy Scripture meaning the list of biblical books which are recognized as normative, because apostolic (p. 101).

At this point Barth doesn’t explore the subject of the formation of the Canon as fascinating as that may be, Instead he focuses on the fact of its existence that is “concretely external” and refers to it as “the working instructions or marching orders by which not just the Church’s proclamation but the very Church itself stands or falls” (p. 101). Later Barth asks, “What is it that makes the Bible of the Old and New Testaments the Canon?” (p. 107). He answers by saying It is the Canon because it imposed itself upon the Church as such, and continually does so” (p. 107).

Barth refers to Holy Scripture as the written proclamation of what was once proclamation by human lips. In that way it is more concrete than the word of mouth tradition of the Church. The Canon, Barth asserts, is what guides the Church, not an oral tradition or apostolic tradition as in the Roman Catholic Church. He says, “The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church” (p. 104).

Barth writes, “The Bible, speaking to us and heard by us as God’s Word, bears witness to past revelation” (p. 111) “The Bible is not in itself and as such God’s past revelation” (p. 111) “Witnessing means pointing in a specific direction beyond the self and on to another” (p. 111). In a small print section, Bart makes the analogy of the Bible to John the Baptist in a painting of the crucifixion. Barth says that the Bible is like John the Baptist’s “prodigious index finger” which points away from himself to Christ. Barth also says that what we have in the Bible are human attempts to repeat and reproduce the Word of God in human words and thoughts and in specific human situations.

aaa GrunewaldI read in Eberhard Busch’s biography of Barth that the prolific theologian constantly had a painting before him as he worked – “The Crucifixion from the Isenheim altar, Colmar, by Matthais Grünwald a detail of which I have copied here. In it you can see John the Baptist pointing to Christ. Barth says that the Bible is like the finger of John the Baptist pointing not to itself, but to Christ.