Thinking After

Tag: 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. 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.  (more…)

  • “Of First Importance”

    I preached the sermon below this afternoon in the Providence Seminary chapel as part of the ongoing sermon series “Christ and the Pandemic.”  The Scriptural text for my message was 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. (more…)

  • 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. (more…)

  • 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. (more…)

  • 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. (more…)

  • Theology as Thinking After

    Last night, I kicked off my winter semester “Systematic Theology I” course at Tyndale Seminary.  It seems like a quite wonderful group of students called together from a wide cross-section of locales, denominational backgrounds, and life experiences.  Some of the ground I covered last night reminded me of the inaugural post I wrote for this blog a little over a year ago. Since it was posted before things really got rolling on the blog and because it might be of interest to my newest batch of students, I thought I’d re-post a large excerpt from that first post.  The original post was entitled, “Beginning in the Middle.”
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  • Fire is Still Coming!: Some Josh Ritter for Advent

    The one year anniversary of Thinking After is fast approaching.  Right around the time I started the blog, I preached an Advent sermon at Tyndale Seminary for the MDiv In-Ministry students.  The sermon was one of my first blog postings.  The theme of judgment sounds forth mightily from many of the traditional texts for the first week of Advent.  Having been encountered afresh by these Scriptures, it seemed like it might worthwhile to re-post last year’s sermon, both for those who may have missed it and those who might like to read it again.  I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a sermon on 2 Peter 3, much less one that includes appearances by the Toronto Blue Jays, Westboro Baptist Church, Karl Barth, Glen Soderholm, a Pizza Pizza theologian, and that has the music of Josh Ritter as its soundtrack. (more…)

  • Beginning in the Middle

    Mountainside Stairway

    Theological reflection always begins in the middle. After all, theological reflection is the work of a people who find themselves on pilgrimage (in via) as a result of being claimed by the address of the Triune God. There is no getting back to square one – to some primal location – for we are historical creatures who cannot escape our positioning in a good, but fallen world that started long before we arrived and, God willing, continue for long after we’ve died. Furthermore, if God is truly God, then God is not simply there to be discovered like helium or hydrogen, mites or mandrills. If theological reflection is to be truly theological it can only be, as Karl Barth famously maintained, a “thinking after” (Nachdenken in German) the reality of God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ. (more…)