I’ve been having a little exchange with Craig Carter on Twitter. He clearly has great animus towards Karl Barth; which he has been verbalizing pretty frequently for at least the last few weeks on his feed. My latest little volley with him occurred as a result of my response to this originating tweet from him:

In reply to Bruce McCormack’s Barthian critique of classical theism as not beginning with Christ, Michael Allen writes: “The creeds do not begin with the second paragraph – the Bible does not begin with the apostles – and the economy does not begin with the incarnation.”[1]

I retweeted the above with the following superscription:

Allen’s thinking merely represents his theory of salvation history. The problem is that the NT problematizes his theory to the breaking point. As Christians we read the OT in light of the NT. Ie In the Beginning was the Word (Jn 1.1) / In the Beginning God created (Gn 1.1). Etc.[2]

And then Carter responded thusly to me:

Nothing you have said even demonstrates an understanding of Allen’s point, let alone constitutes an adequate response.[3]

He made the further troubling tweet:

Barth has a changing deity who evolves by election. The tradition say “No.”[4]

I responded by retweeting the above with the following superscription:

What rubbish! Maybe some people shouldn’t comment on things they don’t have expertise on. This is patently false, and any good primer on Barth’s theology dispels this sort of assertion with ease.[5]

I provided some other responses, and then he responded in kind with the following tweets:

At some pt, you are going to have to accept that Barthianism is dead. No church has accepted his revision of Ref. theol. It is kept alive today in the acad, not the ch, not even in Lib. Prot’ism. Pannenberg, Jenson & co. take KB’s thot to its logical destiny & it’s a dead end.[6]

Well, there is a little problem with claiming to be a Protestant while rejecting the confessions of the Protestant Churches. That is the definition of a liberal. When you can affirm 2LC or the 3 Forms of Unity or the WCF or the 39 Art or Augsburg let me know.[7]

Let me attempt to respond in broad terms to the plethora of topics covered in this veritable tweet-storm.

Bobby’s Genius Responses

Carter’s originating tweet, with reference to Michael Allen, and his almost dilettante level response to my response to him needs further explication. As gestured in my tweet response: theory of revelation and history has everything to do with making an intelligible response to Allen’s assertion contra Bruce McCormack’s rightful emphasis on Christ as the Key to EVERYTHING. This is why I assert that Carter’s response to me is almost at ‘dilettante level.’ Allen’s riposte to McCormack’s Barth pivots on the idea that the ‘progressive’ and linear order of the Bible, from the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ ought to be the methodological order for how the theologian engages in the theological task. In other words, there is an a priori commitment to the idea that theology ought to be done from the abstract oneness of God (in the OT, ostensibly) to the concreteness of the threeness of God (as disclosed in the NT). This is the practice that Katherine Sonderegger likewise endorses all throughout her Systematic Theology, Volume 1, contra Barth. This is also the way most of the Reformed Confessions, particularly, the Belgic, Dordt [not a ‘confession,’ per se], and the Westminster Confession of the Faith parse God. At a methodological level, at one vector or another, all of the folks and confessions we are considering start with an abstract conception of God’s oneness, and then move to His threeness (all things I have critiqued here and here and elsewhere). And they base this sort of prolegomenon on what they take to be the organic order of the canonical text of Holy Scripture (again, from the OT to the NT understood in linear and progressive fashion). This is what stands behind Allen’s critique of McCormack’s Barth; i.e. the antecedent of God prior to the consequent; the immanent of God prior to the economic. Which is why I focused on a theory of history-revelation in my tweet. Which is also why if anyone doesn’t understand what’s going on with the Allen critique, it isn’t me, but Carter.

But my contention is that a genuinely Christian theology starts with Christ; that seems to make the most immediate sense. As Christians we come to appreciate the Old Testament for what it is, not by getting into a DeLorean and transporting ‘back to the future,’ as it were; no, we appreciate the Old Testament for what it is because of our prior relationship with Jesus Christ. It is as we receive the Holy Spirit (cf. Rm 8.9), and declare that Jesus is Lord (cf. I Cor 12.3) that any of this matters to us; that the Old Testament comes to figure brightly in our lives, because along with Jesus we recognize that these all testify to and of Him (cf. Jn 5.39; Lk 24.25-27). Along with the Evangelist we reread the OT in light of the NT witness in Christ. We see this, hermeneutically unfolded most pointedly when John rereads Genesis 1.1 in John 1.1; he reifies the first Moses’s account in light of the second Moses, and understands that God’s life is deeply eschatological even as it looks back to the protology of the Word found in Genesis. In other words, the NT witness informs the Christian that God’s relation to the world is ‘apocalyptic’ in orientation, disrupting what appears to be a rather natural affair of things (in regard to the way history appears to the naked eye or phenomenologically) with the blinding reality and in-breaking of creations’ rightful and always already reality as understood as the advent of Jesus Christ. So, I contend, that the Christian way of thinking about a God-world relation (which is what Allen is most definitely referring to in his critique of McCormack) starts in the economy of God’s life in Christ, and in stratified mode, works its way back to the inner life of God (think TF Torrance’s ‘stratified knowledge of God’ from the evangelical to the theological or from the economic to the immanent). Without further development, I also have Philip Ziegler’s[8] work on apocalyptic theology in mind; Carter and Allen would do well to internalize the insights being articulated there.

As far as Carter’s assertion that Barth has a ‘changing deity who evolves by election,’ I mean this seems very uninformed. Has Carter never heard of the so called ‘Barth Wars’ or ‘Companion Controversy?’ This is the internecine controversy that has been taking place, primarily, between the Princetonian Barth theologians: George Hunsinger (Paul Molnar is on this side) and Bruce McCormack. Hunsinger argues that McCormack’s ‘revisionist’ understanding of Barth does indeed fall prey to the sort of claim that Carter is making tout court contra Barth simpliciter. Hunsinger offers an alternative (to McCormack’s) reading of Barth; a reading Hunsinger identifies as the ‘textual Barth.’ Even in all of this, when we read McCormack’s constructive proposal in regard to Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis a doctrine of God, I think, it can be maintained, on the McCormack side, that his offering does not collapse God’s being into creation; but this requires a hard emphasis on a doctrine of Divine Freedom that most seem to ignore when considering BLM’s proposal. I’m not necessarily persuaded by BLM’s proposal, or that he gets Barth right (he knows that he is moving beyond Barth’s own words, but believes that he is working within the spirit of Barth’s logic), per se. But be that as it may, even within these knotty circles, among those who know Barth best, Barth himself does not offer a doctrine of God that is a ‘changing deity who evolves by election,’ as Carter recklessly asserts.

Is ‘Barthianism’ dead, as Carter proclaims? Of course not! Is it purely an academic thing? Nein. I’m not an academic, proper; I’m simply a dude out here on the streets, living in the byways and highways of the eclectically formed church catholic, who is living in the ‘mundane’ and simplicity of the everydayman of the unelite in the church and world. The only churches that have outright rejected Barth’s theology are the ones that Carter laughably claims to be the only true Protestant ones; the ones who are absolutely in submission to the magisteria of the various confessions and creeds of the Reformed (and Lutheran) churches. But of course, this is all historically dubious! Even in the history and development of the Westminster Confession of Faith there were plenty who opposed it, and this in the Reformed churches of that time (see the work of Janice Knight and Ron Frost for example; not to mention the work Myk and I have done in our books). Even so, it is an unbelievable claim to assert that to be genuinely Protestant one must be in conformity to the Reformed confessions as superordinate even to Scripture (in function). What of the Radical Reformation; or those who dissented to something like the WCF; or other strands that have developed in the Reformed world that see the WCF as simply a regional document with no force other than the sort that is ad hocly imposed in the way that Carter is attempting to do that? Interesting, isn’t it: to follow the ecclesio-logic of Carter, we might as well all be back in the care of the Pope! This is not the Protestant way; it may be for some, but not those of us who operate in and from the spirit of the Reformed faith originated by Martin Luther.

Conclusion

There is always more to say, but in short: Carter seems out of touch with what Barth actually teaches; and more, with how Barth scholarship has been developing even over the last decade in the Anglophone world. What irks me most is that he simply buys into and then reinforces (by his stature, for those who are overly impressed by such things) the well-worn caricature of Barth; viz. that Barth is simply a Liberal theologian who has become amenable to some evangelical thinkers. All Carter is doing is resurrecting the Van Tillian and Henryian caricaturing of Barth; neither of these figures understood Barth’s theology, and now neither does Carter. I would suggest that people look elsewhere to get an accurate reading of Barth, Carter is not a reliable guide in this environ.

[1] Carter, T1.

[2] Grow, T2.

[3] Carter, T3.

[4] Carter, T4.

[5] Grow, T5.

[6] Carter, T6.

[7] Carter, T7.

[8] The work on so called ‘apocalyptic theology’ started even earlier than Ziegler in the work that Nate Kerr produced some years ago.