Engaging with Barth

In their introduction to Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (Apollos/IVP, 2008), editors David Gibson and Daniel Strange express their appreciation for Barth’s work in “awakening a new interest in the Bible” and sparking “a massive recovery of the Reformed tradition within academic theology.” Appreciative though they are, they worry that Barth’s theology is as uncritically accepted as it has been summarily dismissed and that “more cautionary voices” have been drowned out. Their volume aims at “courteous and critical engagement with Barth” that will serve “the wider programme of constructive theological thinking that seeks to articulate the gospel for the contemporary world.”

From the couple of essays I’ve gone through, they have admirably achieved this aim.

Mark D. Thompson of Moore Theological College has an excellent essay on Barth’s doctrine of Scripture. He highlights Barth’s frequent insistence that the Bible is “normative” as well as the extent of Barth’s teaching and writing on Scripture. He finds several primary motivations behind Barth’s doctrine of Scripture - the need to preserve God’s free lordship and subjectivity in revelation, the centrality of Jesus as the Word of God, the personal/dynamic character of revelation, and the humanity of the Bible. Thompson spots tensions and contradictions in Barth’s formulas, and when he holds up Barth’s results to the Bible’s own teaching concerning itself, he finds Barth’s views wanting.

Thompson rightly challenges Barth’s claim that human language is “an unsuitable medium for God’s self-presentation,” which, it seems to me, is a central implication of Van Til’s critique of Barth (which Thompson dismisses as so contrary to the evidence “as to be absurd”). I would only add that Barth’s views on language are of a piece with the problems in his doctrine of creation, a point that comes to the fore in Barth’s characterization of human language as “secular.”

Michael Ovey of Oak Hill Theological College gives a deft overview of Barth’s Trinitarian theology. He finds some things to appreciate, but raises the standard objection that Barth was a modalist. Ovey interestingly focuses on the reflexivity in Barth’s formulations (“God reveals Himself” and “He brings forth Himself and in two distinctive ways He is brought forth by Himself”), and also argues that Barth works with a narrower definition of modalism than the church fathers. He quotes Tertullian’s objection to the reflexive language of the modalists (“He himself, say they, made himself his own Son. Nay, but father makes son, and son makes father, and those who become what they are by relationship with another cannot by any means so become by relationship with themselves”). He also charges that Barth misinterpreted a passage from Anselm, from which he borrows the notion of the persons as “repetitions” of God.

If the whole volume is up to the high standards of these essays, it is an important contribution to Barth studies, and to theology as a whole.