New Center for Barth Studies Book Review

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Melanie Webb reviews Yaroslav Viazovski, Karl Barth's Doubts about John Calvin's Assurance: A Study of Two Doctrines of Assurance (VDMV, 2009). Be sure to check it out.

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2010 KBBC: Week 1, Day 5

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“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...
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2010 KBBC: Week 2, Day 4

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Barth and Hauerwas in Con-verse By Halden Doerge The topic with which I am concerned is what it might mean to bring Karl Barth into conversation with Stanley Hauerwas. As such I will try to avoid simply contrasting the two figures, or lodging a critique of one’s thought based on the other’s. Rather what is vital here is to investigate what it might mean to place these two figures in conversation with one another, and most specifically, as the theme of this year’s conference is “Karl Barth in Conversation,” my central concern will be with determining how we ought to read and appropriate the theology of Karl Barth in light of the work of Stanley Hauerwas. In short, my concern is what impact or opportunities Hauerwas makes for our reception of Barth. Toward this end I will pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I will examine Hauerwas’s own articulation of his theological relation to Barth, showing how Hauerwas seeks to “place” himself and Barth in relation to one another theologically....
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Wild Ideas about Pannenberg's 'Supposed' Hegelianism

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This could be unique to me, but at some point between informal conversations, research, and classes I've gotten the impression that when it comes to Pannenberg, there is a ton of interest in how his work relates to Hegel. For example, it seems that people want an answer to the question “to what degree is Pannenberg’s system ‘Hegelian’?” In one of my courses a couple years ago my professor spent some time on Pannenberg, discussing sections of his Systematic Theology and the reasons for / the rationale behind Theology and the Philosophy of Science . He also took special care to note that while Pannenberg resisted being seen as a disciple of Hegel, the footnotes may have told a different story. In the light of this interest, below is a lengthy quote from an interview with Pannenberg that I have not seen referenced elsewhere. Maybe later I can make an argument, but for now, here is part of his answer to the question put to Pannenberg: “What aspects of your thought do theologians c...
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Diller on Barth, Pannenberg, and Fideism

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DET readers are occasionally treated to reflections on or pertaining to Wolfhart Pannenberg , perhaps more recently when contributor Derek Maris wondered about “Pannenberg’s ‘Supposed’ Hegalianism.” There’s even a mini-series of admittedly dubious value buried among the other DET Serials . So it is fitting that we gather together and harken unto Diller as he raises the question of Pannenberg’s criticisms of Barth’s fideism. Kevin Diller, Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response (IVP Academic, 2014), 72–73 (italics is original; bold is mine). Pannenberg determines that Barth’s rejection of an earthbound scientific epistemology must leave Barth hopelessly mired in subjectivism. Pannenberg believes that if human reason and experience are subjugated, only two options remain: subjectivism and fideism. In explicit agreement with the Enlightenment, Pannenberg states that “a ‘positive’ theology of revelation which does not depend on...
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2009 Barth Blog Conference: Day 4

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Defending Barth’s Commitment to “Let Paul Speak for Himself” [1]: Romans 1 and Paul’s Rejection of the Possibility of Natural Knowledge of God By Shannon Nicole Smythe By the time Karl Barth’s course of extra-mural lectures on Romans, given in Basel during the winter of 1940-41, was published in 1959 under the English title A Shorter Commentary on Romans , the shock waves of the 1918 and 1921 editions of his Romans commentary, Der Römerbrief , had already come and gone with such great force, almost entirely negative, that few scholars took notice of this later and, of course, shorter piece of theological exegesis. The few who did[2] held, to varying degrees, a common opinion that Barth’s own system of thought (at times more softly expressed as a “Barthian emphasis”) was the basis of his reading of Paul. Most specifically in this regard, the reviews found a “rejection of natural revelation”[3] or “arguments against any ‘natural’ knowledge of God”[4] to be one of the most obvious Barth...
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