Sorry I haven’t posted for almost a week, it has been a strange and busy week! I have a job, and in this is economy, this is a blessing; but sometimes it seems as if my job has me. I just started working a graveyard shift (2am to 12:30pm), which I have never done before, and I am having a very hard time with knowing how to sleep with this shift. Anyway, it is this job (which I pray for deliverance from! 😉 ) that has been impinging on my out-put here at the blog. Hopefully in the days to come the Lord will hear my prayer in the way I desire; I hope to find a position where I can put to use my training and skill set in a way that most fully helps to advance the kingdom (at least from my more limited perspective). Just consider this something I needed to get off of my chest. Let’s turn to the body of this post.

This post is following my last post on the same issue. In fact, this post will simply build on what I communicated in my last post; so I won’t be providing any of my own commentary with this post. Instead, I will be quoting on Barth in full. Just read my last post, and that will help frame the issues of what Barth is addressing; and really what George Hunsinger is addressing as commentary on Barth’s view of Scripture. Here we go:

[T]he unthinkability of what this Name represented suggested the paradigm by which to interpret other biblical conundrum dialectically. Tensions between the conditional and the unconditional covenants, between the prophecies of doom and of deliverance, between the humanity and the deity of Christ, were certainly not the same as one another nor as the death and the resurrection of Christ. But when the latter was identified as the hidden center, a hermeneutical key was suggested by which the others could be interpreted without resolving the antitheses they represented. Just as Christ’s resurrection was somehow implicit in his cross, and his cross in his resurrection, so each side of the other antithesis was reciprocally implicit, from the standpoint of faith, in the other.

Barth concluded:

These are just some of the great one=sidednesses of the Bible written and received as God’s Word. It is a characteristic of the Bible as a whole when the Word of God is described (Heb. 4:12) as “sharper than two-edged sword” (cf. also Rev. 1:16) and when it is then said to pierce assunder soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and to become judge of the thoughts and intents of the heart, so that no creature can hide from it, but everything is laid bare and held before its eyes. As we must say already at this juncture, it is this external one-sidedness of God’s Word, resting on an inner one-sidedness not apparent to us, that makes faith faith, that makes it apprehended apprehension — moving from the depths to the heights and the heights to the depths — of the ever invisible God who is beyond all experience and thought. From the Word of God faith has not only its existence but also this its nature. (I/1, 181)

To conclude: a great deal of Barth’s biblical interpretation took place by thinking from a center in Jesus Christ. Thinking from Christ’s centrality meant thinking most especially from his death and resurrection. The two together formed, so to speak, the center within the center. All hermeneutics proceeded outward from this center and then back to it again.

On this basis Barth could think typologically about biblical figures like David or Job. On this basis he could interpret the sorrows of Israel, the church, and the world under the signs of judgment and grace. On this basis he could hold out hope even for Judas and avoid moralizing about over confidence in the Psalms. And on this basis he developed an ingenious dialectical hermeneutic that avoided the twin pitfalls of constructing either false harmonizations or false conflicts between diverse and apparently contradictory blocks of Scripture.

What held all these moves together was not a system but a Name. It was this Name and this Name alone that provided Holy Scripture with its unity. No doctrine or set of doctrines, no system or comprehensive scheme, no ideology or ontology, could perform this important unifying role for Christian hearers of the Word. The unity of the totality of Holy Scripture, and through it ultimately of all things, resided exclusively in the mystery of this Name. It was a Name whose utter ineffability transcended, relativized, and fractured every conceivable hermeneutics and every conceivable system of thought. “His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called the Word of God” (Rev. 19:12-13). [George Hunsinger, ed., Thy Word Is Truth: Barth On Scripture, xviii-xix.]

amen.