Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Fictitous interview with Karl Barth

[Debbie Sawczak]

Enjoyed this too. Think I'll save it.   Debbie ----- Original Message ----- From: Caroline Wong To: truthtalk@mail.innglory.org Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 11:08 AM Subject: [TruthTalk] Fw: Fictitous interview with Karl Barth  I sent the Fictitious Interview with Karl Barth to my pastor and here is his response. I asked for his permission to post here and he said sure, what's the worse that can happen. Then he said, don't answer that. I've told him a little about TT.   Just a quickie bio on him. He is a pastor of a conservative baptist church which holds to inerrancy and biblical authority. He says that if you cut him, he would bleed 'baptist'. He has a ThD. and he is a Barth expert.   Enjoy!   Frankly, Barth would turn over in his grave!  This has a hint of the kind of thing that Barth was on about, but only a hint.  This is far more offensive to the inerrantist than I think the real Barth would be.  For Barth it is true, finite things can never contain the infinite.  Therefore human language can never contain God.  Like the incarnation, the Bible has both divine and human reality.  The human reality is like any other human reality; the Bible is specially breathed by God so that the outcome is what He desired, but still it is human language which can never ‘contain’ God.  God must ‘show up’ in the reading of the Bible in order for the Bible to be the Word of God, because God is only truly but definitely revealed in His Word.  It takes God Himself to reveal Himself, in every case.  So God promises to reveal Himself actively in and through the Scriptures, not as the dead word but as the living Word.  But God does this uniquely through the Scriptures.  He does not commit Himself to any other text as He does to the Scriptures.  This is because the Scriptures bear witness to the real revelation of God, the Logos of God, Jesus Christ.  Barth also claims the Scriptures do not need to conform to present day canons of truth in order to be true.  God is quite able to take something written according to the historical standards of a culture three thousand years old and reveal Himself in it.  So by modern historical standards some of what is in the Bible may be inaccurate or erroneous, but only in a superficial and not essential way.  The Bible will speak in older cosmological terms like the sun rising and setting, or the Bible may even not have the accurate location of an ancient city, or a precise genealogy, etc.  But this does not make it untrue.  The Bible may even employ elements of ancient myth to communicate its message, but this does not make it untrue.  But what is crucial in Barth’s distinction is that Revelation must be seen as the genuine revelation of God as he really is, hence revelation must be an act of God Himself in which He reveals Himself—nothing else can do this.  This means that for genuine revelation of God as He is, the Bible must be taken up afresh by God in each instant and made to become the Word of God which effectively reveals God.  Revelation in the Bible is an active and personal event which can be experienced but never ‘captured’.  God’s free subjectivity can not be violated without rendering God something other than God.  Hence the Bible is the primary place we go to see God but not to capture God and force him to become our ‘object.’  A doctrine of revelation and inspiration must preserve the freedom of God in His self-revelation. The role of the Holy Spirit is to reveal Jesus Christ, whose Spirit He is, such that the genuine Jesus Christ is revealed and not ‘just the facts’ about Him.  But this must always be in accord with the real Jesus Christ who was (i.e., affirming the genuine reality of Jesus’ historical essence and existence), but who also is (reference to His risen reality) and who is to come (reference to His final unveiling at the consummation).  The Holy Spirit does not reveal God directly, somehow by-passing the historical existence of Jesus Christ.  This would violate God’s own decision to reveal Himself in the specific manner of taking to Himself human flesh and history.  The ministry of the Holy Spirit is completely consistent with this, hence His ministry never circumvents the historicity of God’s supreme revelation in the history of Jesus Christ.  This rules out all forms of gnosticism—direct revelation from God, unaccountable to the historicality of God’s self-revelation in Christ.  Thus, the Scriptures must be our authority and guide when it comes to claims that God has revealed this or that in our own personal experience.  And further, a thorough knowledge of Scripture is crucial to our proper understanding of the ‘promptings and leadings’ of the Holy Spirit.