When Everything Seems To Totter

I am reading a lot of Karl Barth for my doctoral dissertation.  Wait!  Before you close the link to this blogpost, let me try to convince you that Karl Barth may not be the preaching dogmatist that you have considered him to be (if you consider him at all:-).  I grew up with a father/pastor who clung to the theological mainstays of Barth's theology like a dryer sheet clings to laundry.  "Karl Barth saved Christianity against the Nazis", I grew up to think.  And then, when I went to seminary, Barth was taught by so many theological hardliners in classes with titles like, "Church Dogmatics", and "Systematic Semiotics" that it nearly drove me away from his writings entirely.  But I have just rediscovered what a poetic person that he was, and also, frankly, a non-systematic thinker in many ways.  Here are some of his great poetical phrases;

"At some point, the fellowship of those who hear Scripture's voice, again finds itself on solid ground, WHEN EVERYTHING SEEMS TO TOTTER." (Church Dogmatics, IV, part 2, p. 673).

Is that not a good definition of our world today?  A place where everything around us is seeming to totter?

Here's another;

"The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes.  They will see all the depths and distances.  They will constantly run up against the mystery before which THEOLOGY IS LIKE TRYING TO DRAIN THE OCEAN WITH A SPOON." (Homiletics, p. 128)

I love this!  The Bible is a mystery, not meant to be understood fully or dissected entirely.  And theology, I have always thought, had the tendency to systematize ("mathematicalize") the most vast concepts in the universe.  The God's truth is an ocean, deep, mysterious, complex and vast.

One of my favorite pictures of Barth is the one above with the late great Martin Luther King Jr.  MLK actually criticized Barth, in his own doctoral studies, about Barth's view that, "God is the unknowable and indescribably God."  But MLK loved the idea that, "man is not sufficient unto himself for life."  The above picture was taken in 1962 at Princeton University just six years before MLK's assassination.

This past week I emailed my friend, Will Willimon, writer of one of the best books on Barth, Conversations With Barth on Preaching, to ask if he thought that Barth was a kind of Samuel Johnson (Dr. Johnson) of his era.  Both thinkers were so widely read, ubiquitous in their thinking.  Willimon had never heard this formulation about Barth, but agreed that, "it fits".

So, the next time you hear Barth's name spoken from a church pulpit, think of him less as an old religious stalwart, and more of a poet, and imaginative genius. He was less the man that modern theologians have wanted to create, and more of the man that he really was.

All For Now,

GB