A 23-minute reading from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 4, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 374–381.
Barth is hard to read, which is why I use him in the vocal batting cage to expose my flaws. I recorded my last session, and you can listen if you must.
Download it (11 MB). Or stream it:
The November/December issue of Books & Culture will be its last.
The loss is symptomatic of a decline in serious reading by Christians, and that’s worth a lot of time and thought. But today I’m thinking happy thoughts, being reminded again of my gratitude for the world-class editor behind it all, John Wilson.
In 2011 Wilson invited me into a blog conversation with Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, the Chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Liberty University. It was the first time we met.
As a first-time author the invitation was immediately intimidating because, first, it’s Books & Culture(!), and second, I was certain then, as I am certain today, that Karen can intellectually roundhouse kick me back and forth across the literary mat without breaking a sweat, if she wanted to. I was assured she didn’t want to, this was no debate, and I would be left unharmed, so I agreed. It turned out to be a brief but very enjoyable dialogue about books and reading.
Karen quickly became, and remains, a friend.
I’m certain others will have more profound stories to tell, but I wanted to tell mine, and to say it in public: Thank you, John Wilson, for your decades of service to book readers and authors and for networking us all together like you have!
And in case you want to read it for yourself, the four-part conversation is online:
J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, page 14:
Few of us, I think live daily on the edge of eternity in the conscious way that the Puritans did, and we lose out as a result. For the extraordinary vivacity, even hilarity (yes, hilarity), with which the Puritans lived stemmed directly, I believe, from the unflinching matter-of-fact realism with which they prepared themselves for death, so as always to be found, as it we’re, packed up and ready to go.
It’s time to finalize my preliminary list of books to consider for best of 2016 (xian, mostly evangelical, nf, in english). Once again, this is going to be a tough decision. The list, as I have it so far, is below. So what books have I missed? (* = newly added suggestion.)
Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgement (2008), 183-184:
Nationalism is a posture of demand or recrimination: demand for a political order based on national identity, or recrimination for threats made against an existing one. Its mood is very different from conservatism, the revolutionary or protectionist note sounding discordantly against the harmonious conservative resonance with tradition. And to single out national identity as a uniquely important cause repudiates the conservative faith that the totality of existing practices creates national identity.
Yet for all these differences there is a deep affinity between nationalism and conservatism, which should not be missed. Both adhere to the vision of the state as expression. Conservatism is necessarily nationalist in a weak sense, in that it regards all social institutions as contributing to an organic whole which finds expression in the state. The strong nationalist is, one could say, a conservative who has lost his faith, for whom the sense of identity is no longer given immediately and on the surface of things, but must be recovered from the depths in which it has been buried. So nationalism stands to conservatism as a warning of dissolution, a constant reminder that a political vessel launched on the calm waters of self-satisfaction may founder in the neurotic waves of insecurity.
Michael Reeves, writing about Karl Barth’s loquaciousness in his new book: Theologians You Should Know: An Introduction: From the Apostolic Fathers to the 21st Century (Crossway, 2016), page 280:
Barth believed that the task of theology is the same as the task of preaching, and thus preaching is just what he does in the Church Dogmatics. But preaching is not about merely conferring information: it is about winning hearts, and thus involves the sorts of persuasion and repetition that take time. Points must be reinforced, the readers won. The result is that Barth can be deeply moving to read. It also means he is peculiarly resistant to being quoted. Context is needed, and this is why, when he is quoted, he usually sounds impossibly complicated and so off-putting. Perhaps most important of all, though, the fact that Barth writes in such a sermonic, almost story-telling style actually means the reader can relax. Failing fully to grasp a few pages really will not matter, for the sweep of the argument is larger than that.
Looking for the bigger picture is the main thing. Colin Gunton put it like this:
Barth is an aesthetic theologian. Barth worshiped before he theologized. His love for Mozart is to be noted here. The structure of Barth’s theology is assertive, it is not argumentative; it can be considered as a sort of music. In the sense that Barth is not concerned to argue any more than Mozart is concerned to argue, Mozart just plays. I think that is Barth’s aim: to play on the revelation of God so that its truth and beauty will shine.
Of course, that does all mean that Barth demands you give him time. He will not dish out theological fast food. But giving him time does make one a more thoughtful theologian.
Related:
Tony Reinke 