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I spent last Thursday and Friday in Baltimore taking part in the Mid-Atlantic Regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion, a meeting that I have been a part of now for three consecutive years. Just as a bit of advertising, there are always some very interesting papers. In any case, the keynote address this year was delivered by the distinguished and well-known liberation and feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether (hereafter, RRR). It is always interesting when you get the chance to engage with a famed theologian in person as opposed to through their work and reputation only. For instance, RRR looks like your grandmother, or any grandmother that you might run into during your church’s coffee hour. But then she steps up to the podium and the incredible breadth of her knowledge and her grasp of the literature involved astounds. If my memory serves me, there is a passage in Scripture that talks about the possibility of entertaining angles unawares; we should all als...

Curriculum Vitae W. Travis McMaken Assistant Professor of Religion at Lindenwood University e-mail: derevth [at] gmail [dot] com Education PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary , Princeton, NJ, (anticipated) 2011. MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, 2007. BA, Biblical & Theological Studies, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, 2004. Publications Essays “The Impossibility of Natural Knowledge of God in T.F. Torrance’s Reformulated Natural Theology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12.3 (2010): 319-40. “Authority, Mission, and Institution: A Systematic Consideration of Matthew 28.18-20 in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Baptism,” in Ecclesiology 53 (2009): 345-61. “Election and the Pattern of Exchange in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” in Journal of Reformed Theology 3.2 (2009): 202-18. “What Hath Broadway to do with New Haven? Vanhoozer’s Canonically Dramatic Take on Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic Turn,” in Koinonia: The Princeton Theological Se...

Bobby has recently asked about Sharing the Gospel . Here is something of a response. Paul L. Lehmann, Ethics In A Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963): 154-5. Lehman is talking about the way in which his version of koinonia ethics understands the relation between believers and non-believers. Just as a little bit of background, Lehmann basically follows Barth on this point: believers are those who – on the basis of Christ – know what God is up to in the world and what it means to be truly human, while unbelievers do not. He grounds this in a discussion of the first / second Adam material in Romans. This discussion was carried out a few chapters earlier, but he returns to it briefly in this section and applies it in what I think is a very interesting way. We’ll see what you, gentle reader, think. “The common ethical predicament is that compound of circumstantial involvement and human striving for maturity which forces into the open the issue of the fals...

I thought it was time for an update on how the 2009 (Third Annual) Karl Barth Blog Conference is taking shape. For those of you who want to be involved but have not yet contacted me – no worries! There is still plenty of time. Here is the tentative schedule as it stands now: Day 1: Introduction (yours truly) Day 2: Calvin and Barth on the Exegesis of Romans 1.18-20 (yours truly) Day 3: Exegeting Romans 1: A Critical Appraisal (title tentative: Shane Wilkins ) Day 4: Barth’s Exegesis of Romans 1 in his 2nd Edition of Romans (title tentative: David Congdon ) Day 5: Resurrection in Barth’s Rejection of Natural Theology: Romans 1.4 in Barth’s 2nd Edition of Romans (title tentative: Nathan Hitchcock, University of Edinburgh; Response by John Drury ) Day 6: Barth’s Exegesis in the Shorter Commentary on Romans (title tentative: Shannon Smyth, Princeton Theological Seminary) As you can see, there are still 5 slots for respondents available, so let me know (commenting on this post or e-ma...

In case you haven't noticed yet, the people over at T&T Clark in the theology, religion, and other related discipline departments are just about the nicest people you will ever meet. I have interacted with them both as a humble theo-blogger as well as a book review editor, and their willingness to supply review copies of their volumes to those interested in spreading the word about them is amazing. As a meager attempt to repay them some of their kindness, I thought that I would post on one of their titles - Matt Jenson's book, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on Homo Incurvatus In Se. I'm reading this book in preparation for one of my exams and, while the good folks over at T&T probably would have sent me a copy for free had I asked, I thought that I would go ahead and pay for my copy and post about it to boot. The following is comprised of some of my notes on the volume, which is concerned with the concept of sin that Jenson is developing with re...

Trevor Hart, “Christ and God’s Justification of Creation,” in Regarding Karl Barth: Toward a Reading of His Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999): 68. Very briefly we may note two obvious points of difference between Barth and Küng over sola fide . (1) For Küng justification is to be split into two parts: the objective (redemption) which is achieved for us in Christ, and the subjective (justification) which is worked out in us as we are made righteous by God’s gracious activity. While faith is certainly not a condition of the objective aspect (how could it be?), we may and must speak of it as properly a condition of the subjective. Without our response of faith this ‘making holy’ cannot take place. Faith does not earn or deserve it, but is necessary in order for it to take place in us. For Barth, faith is not a condition of the subjective aspect of justification: faith is the subjective aspect of justification; it is the response of human beings in encounter with...