Yesterday I attended the Pacific Northwest Regional Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting, held at Western Seminary in Portland, OR. After the last paper for the day was presented, by a genuine and true blue philosopher genius just PhD’d out of the University of Birmingham in the UK, I was introduced to another guy who is a professor of theology, did his PhD at the University of Edinburgh on Karl Rahner’s Trinitarian theology, and who thinks Barth and Torrance are essentially heretics; so this of course made for some fun discussion/debate (for about an hour and a half or so). I shared a bit of how that discussion unfolded on my Facebook wall, so I thought I would share what I wrote there, here.

According to my flesh and blood interlocutor yesterday Barth rejected a verbal revelation from God. For the life of me I couldn’t, at first, figure out what he was getting at. After a moment I realized that he was asserting that Barth rejects propositional truth; i.e. that Barth fundamentally rejects Holy Scripture as a mode of God’s Self-revelation. This was the primary basis upon which my interlocutor attempted to skewer Barth’s theology in general. Yet, I had to remind him over and again that Barth does not reject “verbal Revelation”, it’s just that he sees God’s Revelation as personally mediated in the eternal Son of God, the Logos; that from this Revelation we have “verbal” Revelation provided for both in Written and Preached form. This was not good enough for my interlocutor.

Further, my interlocutor kept hammering the idea that there was no way for true knowledge of God to be present in Barth’s theology, as corollary to his point in re to lack of “verbal Revelation,” because there was no place for information about God to be gained; i.e. there are no propositional means by which we can know that God is Triune. 1) I responded that the very fact that God comes to us as the Son (in good Athanasian logic) presupposes that the Father is present etc. 2) Once again, I reiterated that for Barth, his theology of the Word is of apiece, and a complex tied into his broader theory of revelation. That the Living Word of God (Jn 1.1) provides the context for the Written Word, and following, the Preached Word, and as such all the information one would need for knowledge of God is present and reporting for duty. It’s just that Revelation, as the broader category for Barth, is grounded in the Triune life of God and graciously Self-given (which is what love is) in the enfleshment of the Son.

My interlocutor was not having it; he was in apologetics mode, and attempting to save my soul I think. 🙂

Engaging in theological discussion on the fly and within the flow of personal conversation is some of the most enjoyable stuff I ever get to engage in (I could do it for hours on end, but rarely get to do that in persona). I thank my interlocutor from Edinburgh and Tacoma, WA for taking the time to provide critical push back I rarely ever get in person. I was actually edified and encouraged by it (even though he told me that he enjoys turning Barth’s theology into a pretzel—and anyone who affirms it—and crushing the pretzel). Pax. 

PS. We discussed much more, the above represents the introductory nub that kicked off much more exchange.