Barth Blog Conference

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The 2009 Barth Blog Conference starts on Sunday – Stay Tuned!

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Abortion, Authoritarian Self-Deception, Evangelicals, and Trump: a collected Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop

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I was kickin' it on Twitter last Wednesday night while doing some grading and then some editing, and I caught a Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop in my feed that leaped off the screen at me. It pulls together a number of issues that have been bouncing around in my head, many of which I fit in the title. Stroop's reflections merge political and psychological analysis, and helps us understand how there could have been "good Germans" and how we might end op with "good Americans." Let us hope that we do not, and work to make that hope a reality.

Anyway, I wanted to share this Twitter essay with you, gentle readers, because there are enough people who read DET or follow me and DET on social media who are within or close to evangelicalism and will be aided by this analysis. Stroop was gracious enough to allow me to collect his tweets and make them available. If you've made your way here on a mobile device, however, you would probably prefer to read this …
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Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

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You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road.

But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go!

All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation, with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine.

Hell
“Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from the coh…
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So, You Want to Read Wolfhart Pannenberg? A guest post by Andrew Hollingsworth

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[Ed. Note: Andrew Hollingsworth, PhD, is an adjunct professor of theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He tweets: @andrewh_mc11. He writes at Theology and Stuff, and Trinityhaus.]

So you want to read Wolfhart Pannenberg? Great! Why, you ask? I’ll tell you. Wolfhart Pannenberg was one of the most important theologians in Germany (and the world!) in the 20th century. Several theologians, such as Philip Clayton, Ted Peters, and Fred Sanders have noted in their obituaries for him that the world lost a theological giant on September 4, 2014. His three-volume Systematic Theology, though not as many volumes as Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, is one of the most significant contributions to the field, having one of the vastest scopes and one of the most ambitious aims of any before it. Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology is perhaps the most interdisciplinary one written to date. He is well known for a statement he made in an interview once: “Because God is the creator of everything…
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Types of Theology

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I have been thinking lately about how to classify different types of theology. This is what I have come up with thus far. Don’t be shy in terms of leaving feedback as I would love to hear whether or not this sort of typology rings true.

What I am interested in here is only secondarily connected to the sorts of theological positions taken by those doing theology in any of the modes that I will explicate. The modes themselves are what interest me. It seems to me that one can fall anywhere on the continuum between orthodoxy and heterodoxy while working within any of these modes. Of course, some modes may make it easier than others to lean toward one or the other pole on this continuum, but that is beside the point.

Also, I don’t think that any theologian is working exclusively within any single one of these modes. Every theologian operates in combinations of these modes, with certain of them being primary and others secondary. Furthermore, the various modes within which a cert…
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Why am I still a Theologian? - Terry Eagleton on Theology

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For a while I taught a class called “Faith & Reason.” It was a good class that tackled the intersection of revelation and reason in the Western tradition (inclusive of some Jewish and Muslim thinkers), and I enjoyed teaching it. But then some administrative reorganization happened and the course was redundant, etc.

But one of the things that I liked most about that course was ending the semester with Terry Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Those who follow me carefully on social media (blessings be upon you, since you clearly need them if you’re following me carefully on social media), or spend time with me offline talking about theological things, know that I’ve come to really enjoy Eagleton, and this book is where that started. I need to figure out another place to work this book into my teaching, or else find a way to resurrect this class. But, alas, administrative duties mean that I don’t teach all that much anymore.

Changing tack…
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