June 19-22, 2016 at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Conference description from The Center for Barth Studies:

Karl Barth’s Pneumatology and the Global Pentecostal Movement

Karl Barth’s pneumatology is a contentious subject, especially when read in critical relationship to his conception of divine and human agency and his consequent understanding of the church. But how might Barth’s pneumatological contribution be interpreted in another ecclesiological context, and against another set of concerns regarding the acting of God in relation to the human? This conference sets Barth’s work within the context of world Pentecostalism and examines the potential of his pneumatology for a God wondrous and beyond all controls, and for the church as a pilgrim people gathered and send by the Spirit to witness to this God.

Speakers include: Christian T. Collins Winn, Daniela C. Augustine, Frank D. Macchia, Nimi Wariboko, and Terry L. Cross.

For more information, see the 2016 Conference webpage: http://barth.ptsem.edu/event/2016-annual-karl-barth-conference

PneumaReview.com: You have been working with the theology of Karl Barth for many years. What has drawn your long-term interest?

Terry Cross: I began reading Barth seriously in 1980 while working on the MDiv thesis. I was comparing Karl Barth and the evangelical theologian, Carl Henry, on their views of revelation. Henry was quite adamant about some of Barth’s errors in relation to the Word of God—as were a number of evangelical scholars. However, when I actually read Barth himself, I realized that the caricatures made of him by many evangelicals did not hold water. Barth actually said in numerous places the direct opposite of what Henry thought he said. I began to wonder, ‘If Henry can read this incorrectly, what else has been written by Barth that deserves closer attention?’ That started my journey through the 13 volumes of the Church Dogmatics. It also fueled the flame to learn German well enough to read Barth in the original language he wrote. Over and over I have discovered that rather simplistic thumbnail sketches of Barth’s ideas on any one theological position have missed the complexity and nuance of Barth’s own words. In addition, as a Pentecostal theologian I became fascinated with some of Barth’s ideas as related to Pietism and, by extension, to Pentecostal thought. For example, in Church Dogmatics I/1, Barth expounds his idea that the Word of God has a threefold form—Jesus Christ (Word in flesh); Scripture (Word in writing); and Preaching/proclamation (Word of God in preaching/teaching). Barth has a rather “occasionalist” view of what occurs. The Scripture, for example, becomes the Word of God but may not be the Word of God (in some fundamentalist sense) because such equation of God’s Word in revelation with written Scripture can make the Bible into a “holy” book that has almost magical qualities instead of a record that becomes God’s Word when God’s Spirit enlivens it to our hearts. Indeed, Barth is the only theologian I know who has a pentecostal-like theology of preaching: our human words are taken up by God’s Spirit and are made clear and powerful as it becomes the Word of God to individual believers in the community of faith. In many ways, this seemed reminiscent to me of the high respect for preaching that Pentecostals have whereby a “word” from the Lord becomes clear and really rings true when the Spirit drives it home in our hearts.

PR: Some argue that Barth was the most important Protestant Theologian of the Twentieth Century. Do you agree?

Terry Cross: Barth is the only theologian I know who has a pentecostal-like theology of preaching: our human words are taken up by God’s Spirit and are made clear and powerful as it becomes the Word of God to individual believers in the community of faith.

Terry Cross: Yes, I do. While others have had long-lasting impact from the 20^th century (e.g., Tillich, Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Juergen Moltmann), Barth’s herculean shift of the balance of the weight off of the old Protestant liberalism of his professors (like Harnack and Herrmann) that signaled the immanence of God in human lives and onto a view of the transcendence of God in which God is entirely other than humans. The old liberal school had proposed that Jesus taught a valuable morality that we should follow, but was not divine. For them, God’s Spirit was to be equated with the human spirit—the human personality. Faith, then, was some psychological commitment that connected on a deep emotional level with God. Into this situation that seemed to glorify humans, Barth became frustrated with the easy manner in which his German professors rushed to support Kaiser Wilhelm going to war in 1914. Barth was a pastor in a small village in Switzerland at the time (Safenwil) and gave himself totally into the socialism of the day, working as the “red pastor” in assisting laborers to form unions and more equitable wages. By 1915, his excitement for socialism began to run dry and his theological source for preaching was no longer effective. Into this setting in 1915, Barth and his close friend (a nearby pastor named Thurneysen) began to study Scripture again, but this time not through the lens of historical criticism or psychological critique of the authors. They studied the book of Romans, all the while Barth wrote his thoughts about each verse in a notebook. In a later lecture, he described this encounter with Scripture as a “new world of the Bible.” What was this? He tried to listen to and read Scripture as if God himself were speaking to him today from this long-ago text. The result was a vivid freshness of his preaching and interpretation. Some called this a “pneumatic exegesis” because of the emphasis on the Spirit but also because of his sense that the Spirit operates with the text and with the hearer. The freshness of letting God be transcendent and speak to the Church through the Scriptures today was so powerful that one theologian described his commentary on Romans as a “bomb on the playground of theologians.” Instead of starting theology from the human dimension and attempting to build one’s way up to the divine (a la Schleiermacher), Barth began theology from the divine dimension and asked what God was saying to us through his revelation. While some folks during the decade of the 1920s called Barth’s theology “dialectical,” Barth himself preferred to speak of it as “a theology of the Word of God.” Almost singlehandedly Barth turned the theological trajectory away from the old Protestant liberal school of thought to a new, fresh way of viewing God that tended to sound more like the Protestant Reformers of the 1500s. To be even more precise, some felt they saw in Barth a simple rehashing of old Protestant Scholastic Orthodoxy of the 1600s and 1700s. For this alone, he could be considered an important theologian of the 20^th century, but add to that the depth of his understanding of the connections between Christology and various doctrines as well as his dogged determination to keep Christ as the center of the revelation of the triune God and we have someone who is not only innovative and interesting, but paradigm-setting for the future of the theological task.

Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 272 pages, ISBN 1451470142

Stephen D. Long, professor of systematic theology at Marquette University, presents a remarkable rendering of the long ecumenical discussion and theological friendship between Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth. While Balthasar received significant backlash for this friendship, he felt that in Barth he had discovered a Protestant theology grand enough to enter into a discussion with Catholic theology. Long primarily follows the younger Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth and traces the influence of Barth’s theology—albeit not uncritically—on Balthasar. This relationship allowed both theologies to interact, challenge, and shape the other at their strongest and most divisive points. While disagreements continued to exist, Long suggests ultimately a stronger theology emerged.

The work begins with a description of Barth’s and Balthasar’s largely unknown friendship that involved not only Balthasar’s book on Barth, but vacations, participation in each other’s seminars, and extensive letter writing. Balthasar rarely made the friendship public due to both Catholic and Protestant disagreement with his Barthian preoccupation. This chapter alone will be of interest to scholars. The second and third chapters set out Balthasar’s reading of Barth and the contemporary rejection of that reading from both Catholic and Protestant theologians. The remainder of the work rehabilitates Balthasar’s reading of Barth for contemporary theology. In turn, Long examines Balthasar’s interaction with Barth on the realm of God dealing with the question of natural theology and revelation, the realm of ethics dealing with the move from a propositional ethic to one that spreads the glory of the Incarnation to creation, and the realm of the Church as means for both renewal and unity.

Barth and Balthasar agreed that the incarnation, rather than a conception of God constructed from within the realm of natura pura (a state of pure nature), was the starting point of theology. Theology radiates outward from the incarnation into nature to define nature in light of the person and work of God-in-Christ becomes the challenge and beauty of the theological enterprise. To first discover God from nature and only then move towards the Incarnation and Trinity, places the unity of God ontologically prior to the Trinity and risks constructing a god from abstraction that inevitably conforms to the image of man rather than the particularity of the revealed God. Barth argued a natura pura does not exist for there is no place that exists into which God has not spoken in Christ (3); as such there is no need for an analogia entis (analogy of being) to bridge the creature-Creator gap. The dividing difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, therefore, was to be found in the analogia entis dogmatized in the Vatican I’s duplex ordo cognitionis (two-fold order of knowledge) that asserted a natural realm in which God could be known via reason outside of God’s revelation in Christ (155).

The “conflict” between science and faith within North American evangelicalism continues to rage, unfortunately. This book will no doubt further fan the flames, even if it is intended to shed some light on these matters, largely because it sets out a position defending “theistic evolution” as compatible with evangelical commitments, and detractors of this view are resolutely resistant and aggressively opposed to it. My hunch is that readers of The Pneuma Review who have already made up their minds that evolution is anti-Christian will not find much of value here, and they might even be upset that the editors of this periodical have agreed to review this book. My hope, though, is that those who are genuinely looking to understand the issues will give this very accessible book a fair read. I do not necessarily agree with all of what is in here, but I do think that books like this do raise the literacy of the broader public, and we certainly need more, rather than less, literacy. Pentecostal pastors and church leaders who are concerned about their students and the next generation of pentecostal faith in our thoroughly scientific world need to be equipped to help their church members navigate these waters.

Francis Collins is the world-renowned geneticist who spearheaded the human genome project and Karl Giberson teaches physics at Eastern Nazarene University in Quincy, Massachusetts. Both have written other books on science and faith that have been well received by the wider public. Most important for our purposes is that few, I think, can doubt their evangelical commitments. Yet they are probably among a minority of evangelicals who publicly advocate embracing the consensus of mainstream science, including the neo-Darwinian synthesis, as being consistent with a robust Christian faith. Collins founded The BioLogos Forum (http://biologos.org) in large part to provide a vision for how Christians can not only be at peace with but also support the contemporary scientific enterprise.

Of course, since much of the book emerged from the FAQs on the BioLogos website, the treatments are short, perhaps in some cases, a bit too short for some readers who may be ready for more. Further, I can imagine that some readers will wonder what all the fuss is about within the evangelical world. In many cases, the volume compares and contrast the BioLogos model with alternative positions held by evangelicals, including young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and intelligent design. Those looking for a sort of “four views” point-and-counterpoint will need to keep waiting.