DET (Die Evangelischen Theologen) is the theological version of a digital news magazine. The DET authorial team provides insightful, thought-provoking content on a wide range of theological, religious, and even political subjects from current events and culture as well as from the Christian and other religious traditions.
*stage whisper from Scott in the wings* “Who cares? Just get on with it, already.”
*clears throat*
Welcome to 2018, folks! DET is awakening from its holiday slumber, and we’re looking forward to another great year of blogging! What will that year hold? What exciting new highs or lows with DET achieve? Only time will tell!
One thing I do want to apprise you of, gentle readers, is that Scott and I are a little uncertain about this year. It has become increasingly difficult for us to keep up our usual posting pace as other demands mercilessly encroach upon our time. So, sadly, I must tell you that DET blogging this year is likely to be much more of an ad hoc sort of thing.
But, we’re not dead yet (*chuckles*), so make sure you’re subscribed whether through email or in some other way (like Facebook), follow us on Twitter (WTM / Scott / DET contributor’s list) if you want to hang out in between blog posts, as it were, and consider submitting a guest contribution. In the meantime, here are some things that we DET folk have been up to since you last heard from us.
Third, speaking of Richard, he also included my book in his recap list, Good Reads: 2017. This guy has good taste in books.
Fourth, I appeared on episode 133 of the Thinking Religion podcast, along with some friends from the interwebs (click the podcast link to get the first cast list). It was fun, and I even got to talk about Gollwitzer a bit at the very end! More importantly, though, I got to wisecrack through the whole thing so…you probably want to just skip to the bit at the end. We’ll see if they invite me back.
Fifth, my Lindenwood colleague, Nichole Torbitzky, and I filmed and posted another installment on our series exploring process theology and Barthian theology together. Click below to watch!
Sixth and finally, you may have missed it but DET awoke briefly from its holiday slumber to offer you an advent reflection from our own Alex DeMarco. It’s never too late or too early for a good advent reflection, so here you go: Looking Back to See Ahead: An Advent Reflection .
Ok, that should have you all caught up on DET goings-on. Now, here’s the list of links from around the interwebs that you’ve been waiting for!
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s...
“You Wonder Where the Spirit Went”: Jenson and Barth on the Hiddenness of God By Peter Kline I am entering into a conversation that Jenson has already begun with Barth. In a constructive essay on the hiddenness of God (Jenson 2000), Jenson considers Barth’s position on the matter only to find it lacking. I want to explore why Jenson has problems with Barth on this issue, as well think critically about his constructive alternative. I will suggest that Jenson is only partly right in his diagnosis of Barth; he in fact overlooks the heart of Barth’s teaching on divine hiddenness. The reason is that he looks in the wrong place for Barth’s pneumatology. Jenson can’t find the Spirit in Barth not because the Spirit isn’t there, but because the Spirit is hidden . These considerations will open out into a comparison of Barth and Jenson on the logic of revelation. By “logic” I mean: what is discourse about God’s revealedness and hiddenness supposed to accomplish? Part I Jenson focuses his a...
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri...
"Statue of Justicia (Justice), by Walter Seymour Allward, outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons William Stringfellow – the incisive, trenchant, and often quirky lawyer, activist, and Episcopal theologian – died 40 years ago this weekend (on March 2, 1985) in a Rhode Island hospital. Though death claimed him at age 56, after two decades suffering from chronic disease, it never defeated him. By the accounts of people close to him, he lived in the radical freedom of his calling in the Word of God. Indeed, one might profitably read his 15 books (including three co-written with his lover and partner, the poet Anthony Towne) as one sustained broadside against the rule of Death (the capitalization seems apropos to me) – that mysterious, penultimate, all-pervasive moral power reigning in a fallen cosmos, in society, in politics, and in our very bodies. The academic theology and ethics guilds have been slo...
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that...
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