Hopeful Fridays: Introduction

This is an idea I have had bouncing around for a long time, to deal with the thought of some of the "theologians of hope" on a regular basis. I'm a huge Pannenberg fan, so he will be showing up a lot, but there will be a decent mix of my take on Moltmann as well. Eschatological hope and prolepsis have become really interesting thoughts to me lately, so I'm going be reading and sharing every Friday.

Barth on Mondays: What I'm Doing

So I have recently bought a set of Barth's Kirchliche Dogmatik, thanks to my wonderful wife who found a quite inexpensive used copy. Although I'm not a Barthian, I am a fan of many things in Barth; like it or not he's one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.

A popular thing that I have seen online is the attempt to blog through Barth's 10,000+ page work, so, hey, why not. I'm going to give it a shot. I have read large chunks of several of the volumes for other projects, so I'm going to give it a go systematically. Ideally, I should then be updating every Monday with my thoughts on the section of Barth that I have read. These will be thoughts, impressions, and connections that pop into my head, not a well-researched attempt at Barth-interpretation. Feel free to disagree, in fact, please do so in the comments.

I'm not using the translation, so I will either refer to what he says in paraphrase with my own translation for this blog, or quote in German. I will try to avoid the latter, in order to not exclude anyone.

Let's see how this works...

Worrying about the Worrying

I have some pet theological problems that I worry about. These are the things that I'm pretty much thinking about all the time. Things like the nature of revelation, our knowledge of God, agency in sanctification, and B-time vs. A-time for a proleptic kingdom.

But there's something even more worrying for me than these problems that I think about all the time, and if you are a non-theologian, it probably happened when you read that last sentence. I worry even more that these things that I just have to pick at are marginalized as ivory-tower problems. Not because I think I get marginalized by that; I could care less. Rather, it worries me because the hands-on has such a disconnect from the academy, because I get answers like "who cares, as long as we believe in Jesus?"

Let me give an example from my own life. I was a Southern Baptist for a long time, a serious conservative. I did a theology undergrad, and we cared a lot about knowing that we had the right answers. While I was serving as a "teaching pastor", I literally told someone the following about salvation: "God doesn't really know what would convince you to accept Him, because that would be like forcing you. What He actually does is calculate probabilities so well, that it's almost as if He knew. So you really do have freedom, and God only knows with, like, 99.999999999% probability what you will do, even in the next minute. That's why He's God. But you have to work together with Him to get saved."

It shouldn't take much to see the problems here. I thought that Open Theism was "bad", but I clearly wasn't sure what it was. I knew Pelagianism was "bad" (or maybe I didn't, I'm not sure - I can't be certain I could have defined the term!), but again, I clearly wasn't sure what it was that was bad. As a team I think we re-created a whole bunch of the major heresies in that church; on top of that, it was a mission church that almost constantly had seekers - those who did "make a decision" usually left within a few months, either to attend somewhere else that cared more about the Christians or to fall away.

You may think, "Ok, well, you were young, and untrained, that can happen." This happened during my theological education. Not before. I should have known better; I was never taught.

But how many say "I don't understand all of that, I just want to preach Jesus"? How many say "all that's not for me" and craft their own private heresies? How many of those, when they are told "oh, by the way, what you just said has been judged by the Church universal to be, uh, not orthodox Christianity" just reply "I don't want to deal with all that academic theology?

It worries me that no one worries. It worries me that so many are content with milk instead of meat, and that even those who are to shepherd often never made it past toddler food.

So my worries worry me. But more, it worries my that they are only my worries, or at least the worries of the few.