Tag Archives: Barth

Barth on the Simplicity of the Gospel

“Basically, the gospel is a very simple thing.  The gospel is no system of this or that truth, no theory on life in time and eternity, no metaphysics or the like, but simply the sign that God has blessed the world, this poor world in which we live, with all its difficulties, with all its misery, with this whole ocean of death.  And in this world we dare to live in the knowledge that God loves us, but not only us Christians who believe that God loves the whole world [cf. John 3:16].  Every person, even the most miserable, the most evil, is loved by God.  This is the privilege: to be commissioned and enabled as a Christian to proclaim that.”1

  1. Karl Barth, Barth in Conversation: Volume 2, 1963, ed. Eberhard Busch (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018, 216.

Every Christian is a Politician

In 1962, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth made his one and only trip to the United States.  The visit was a whirlwind tour, eagerly followed by the media, that saw him deliver lectures at the University of Chicago and Princeton that would be published as Evangelical Theology and even visit San Quentin maximum security prison seven years before Johnny Cash would make it there.  On several occasions Barth spoke out about the wretched conditions he witnessed in American prisons.  He knew a thing or two about prison conditions from his regular preaching to the inmates in Basel.  Continue reading Every Christian is a Politician

Reading Barth Together

What the church will look like after the COVID pandemic has run its course is hard to say.  Will modern society’s confrontation with its own mortality lead to genuine pursuit of deeper truth or will it lead to a doubling down on the human project of getting out of life alive?  Will social distancing cultivate a hunger for more meaningful forms of community and authentic relationships or will the move that many congregations have made to online platforms further reinforce our worst consumerist proclivities?  It is perhaps too early to tell. Continue reading Reading Barth Together

A Lifetime Project (Series on “Minding the Web”)

“One of the great advantages of being a Christian is that we are in a lifetime project to discover how to confess our sins. To be able to confess our sins is a theological achievement that our baptisms have made pos­sible. For sin, as Karl Barth maintained, is only known in the light of Christ. Thus from Barth’s perspective, our fundamental sin consists in the presumption that we can know our sin without having become a dis­ciple of Christ. In short, to be a Christian means we must be trained to be a sinner. Continue reading A Lifetime Project (Series on “Minding the Web”)

Some Delectable Morsels on Preaching from Robert Farrar Capon

In addition to teaching two theology courses at Tyndale Seminary in the upcoming fall semester, I am also going to be teaching the “Basics of Preaching” course at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.  In preparation for my foray into the homiletics classroom, I’ve been revisiting many of the preaching books I’ve read over the years.  One such book is The Foolishness of Preaching: Proclaiming the Gospel against the Wisdom of the World by the late Episcopalian priest Robert Farrar Capon. Continue reading Some Delectable Morsels on Preaching from Robert Farrar Capon