DET

Alexander Massmann reviews Matthias D. Wüthrich’s "Gott und das Nichtige: Zur Rede vom Nichtigen ausgehend von Karl Barths KD § 50" (TVZ, 2006). The review is available in English and auf Deutsch .

Well, that’s it. The highlight of my blogging year has come and gone. The excitement of anticipation has flow to be replaced by the satisfaction of rousing success. What sort of success, do you ask? Well… 6 excellent posts and 5 great responses. Vastly more comments, and therefore critical engagement with people and ideas, than last year. This is really the heart of the matter, and though we may not all have finally reached agreement, I believe that we have all been bettered by thinking through these things together. If in real estate the dictum is "Location, Location, Location;" in blogging it is "Traffic, Traffic, Traffic." And we got some serious traffic. This year’s blog conference saw more than twice the amount of traffic than did last year’s. While I certainly do not consider traffic to be more important than good content and critical engagement through comments, what this tells us is that there are a lot of people reading and not commenting, but hopefu...

Contributed by David W. Congdon . Page numbers in the text refer to Jüngel’s God's Being is in Becoming unless otherwise noted. Subtitle: Jüngel’s Gottes Sein ist im Werden as an Attempt toward a Rapprochement between Karl and Rudolf The debate between Barth and Bultmann has long since passed into the realm of myth. Today, we all too often hear caricatures of each position: Barth was a theologian of the Word of God, while Bultmann was a theologian of humanity’s word; Barth upheld the objectivity and realism of Jesus Christ, while Bultmann collapsed everything into subjectivity and existentialism; Barth was captive only to God’s Word, while Bultmann was captive to Enlightenment rationalism and the idols of modernity. But, to echo Eberhard Jüngel’s question, “Why then are the most questionable interpretations of Bultmann preferred to an interpretation of Bultmann in good part?” (41). While a much more complete analysis would need to look at the historical context for this ...

Contributed by Jon Mackenzie . Theology is an intellectual endeavour. To this end, it requires certain basic structural suppositions on the behalf of the subject attempting to manoeuvre within this theological sphere. These suppositions range from the rudimentary (the need for a language by which to communicate and conceptualise the theological endeavour) to the complex (full-scale philosophical edifices which can be used to support certain theological approaches). These basic structural suppositions are the foundations upon which the theological task is supported. However, although the study of theology must seek to operate in a manner that is continuous with other areas within the academy, theology can never fail to take into account its object of study – God. Deus non est in genere .[1] In this sense, the basic structural suppositions upon which the theological endeavour rests can never bear upon that which they seek to reflect. If this were to occur, God would cease to be Himself, ...

Contributed by Jason T. Ingalls . Page numbers in the text refer to Jüngel's God's Being is in Becoming , unless otherwise indicated. Good day, and welcome to my post. I hope you’ve been enjoying this year’s DET Karl Barth Blog Conference. I, for one, have found it rather engaging. So, I should start with a statement which I will then unpack: Jüngel’s idea of revelation lends itself to an Evangelical humanism . It might be better to say a “revelatory” humanism because its ‘mechanism’ is tied to the dynamic of revelation, of God’s self-giving on our behalf. It is precisely in the way that Jüngel unpacks Barth’s doctrine of revelation (and, therefore, the doctrine of God) that drives the connection I would like to make more explicit here. It should be said from the outset that the argument I will unpack here is based on a reflection of Jüngel’s argument in God’s Being is in Becoming , not on a reading of the Church Dogmatics . It is only a reading of Barth insofar as...

Contributed by Halden Doerge . Introduction: The Prison of History? A specter is haunting contemporary theology: the specter of Hegel. The much-touted renaissance of Trinitarian theology has come under heavy critique on the basis of its purported Hegelianism. An exhaustive examination of the theological implications of Hegel’s philosophy is far beyond my competence, and I suspect, beyond the competence of almost everyone. However, in regard to contemporary Trinitarian theology, the key issue regarding Hegel is centered on the question of the relationship between the eternal being of God and the unfolding of human history. Trinitarian theologians who have followed the lead of Karl Barth in stressing a radically Christocentric and revelation-centric mode of doing theology have come under critique on the basis of an alleged Hegelianism. To utterly define God by the historical figure of Jesus seems to be to claim that God’s being is dependent on created history, that God comes to be G...