Have you been “baptismally throttled”?

Your baptism is nothing less than grace clutching you by the throat: a grace-full throttling, by which your sin is submerged in order that ye may remain under grace. Come thus to thy baptism. Give thyself up to be drowned in baptism and killed by the mercy of thy dear God, saying: “Drown me and throttle me, dear Lord, for henceforth I will gladly die to sin with Thy Son.”

Martin Luther, as cited by Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 194.

I loved this quotation from Luther, though I wonder how in the world it fits with the conception of infant baptism that he sought to maintain? If baptism is an “invitation to be grace-fully throttled by God,” how does that fit with paedo-baptism? It seems to me that Luther’s prayer here is better suited to a theology of “believers’ baptism.”

A fabulous definition of sin…and grace

Barth isn’t generally known for saying something with an economy of words. But this sentence on the nature of sin seems to get it just right:

[S]in is that interchanging of God and man, that exalting of men to divinity or depressing of God to humanity, by which we seek to justify and fortify and establish ourselves.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., 190.

As for grace:

Grace is the act of God by which the new man shall be and is, and by which also he is free from sin. Our negative, known, human existence, so little conformed to Jesus, is filled with hope by the positive and secret power of the resurrection.

Romans, 197.

Barth’s Credo – We’ll be back…!

I’m sure some of you are waiting with bated breath (ya right!) for the next installment on Barth’s Credo which I have been trying to send out on Monday mornings. It will still hopefully come this week, but illness over the weekend, and an impending trip have kept me a bit more preoccupied this morning than normal. I haven’t forgotten!

Lethbridge School of Discipleship article

Here’s a short article (on Briercrest College & Seminary’s website) highlighting the teaching I and two other colleagues did last weekend in Lethbridge, Alberta. I’ve been told that there will be a feature article in the Lethbridge Herald this Saturday on my own course on Marriage and Illness. I’ll keep you posted if/when there is a link.

Preaching Isaiah and Proverbs course – March 22-26, 2010

I’d like to commend the following course to you for serious consideration. Also, if you know of people who could benefit from this, please forward this on to them.

BT/CM 819 Preaching Old Testament Poetry

March 22-26, 2010

3 credit hours

Instructors for this course are the father and son team, Dr. Ray Ortlund, Jr. (Pastor, Immanuel Church, Nashville, TN, and former professor of OT at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Dr. Eric Ortlund, Assistant Professor of Old Testament, Briercrest Seminary).

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course is intended to give students practical, step-by-step methods in preaching from Old Testament poetic texts in ways which are exegetically responsible, powerful and illuminating in application, and gospel centered. Our time will be spent considering and practicing deep ways of reading OT poetic texts and methods of analysis of the poetry, structure, theology, and literary, canonical, and salvation-historical contexts of different OT poetic passages, all for the sake of speaking the gospel responsibly and powerfully in the pulpit.

COURSE INTEGRATION

Isaiah and Proverbs are two OT poetic books which pose special problems for preachers. In addition to the difficulties of interpreting any given line in Isaian poetry, the book evinces a large-scale structure which forms an indispensable context for individual claims which Isaiah makes. Isaiah also ties different chapters together by echoing images or phrases (perhaps the most significant occurring in Isaiah 35.4, 10; 40.9-10; 51.11; and 62.10-12). But how can one move from text to sermon in ways which take these larger poetic and theological structures into account, and in ways which deepen and nourish the sermon? The preacher of the book of Proverbs faces similar challenges: in addition to questions concerning parallelism and poetic imagery in individual proverbs, chs. 10-31 of the book present the preacher with a bewildering and almost staccato-like series of maxims. How to preach the book in a way which is both responsible to the ancient text and helpful for modern audiences is not at all clear. This class is designed to furnish students with methods, approaches and tools which can guide them from text to sermons in which the complexities and richness of the ancient text nourishes and deepens, rather than dampening or clouding, dynamic, visionary, and helpful preaching.

Although skill with Hebrew is naturally helpful for this course, it is specifically geared for students who work from English translations in sermon preparation.

If you are interested in signing up for what promises to be an exciting course, please contact Academic Services at Briercrest Seminary. (academicservices@briercrest.ca).

BT/CM 819 Preaching Old Testament PoetryMarch 22-26, 2010This course is intended to give students practical, step-by-step methods in preaching from Old Testament poetic texts in ways which are exegetically responsible, powerful and illuminating in application, and gospel centered. Our time will be spent considering and practicing deep ways of reading OT poetic texts and methods of analysis of the poetry, structure, theology, and literary, canonical, and salvation-historical contexts of different OT poetic passages, all for the sake of speaking the gospel responsibly and powerfully in the pulpit.COURSE INTEGRATIONIsaiah and Proverbs are two OT poetic books which pose special problems for preachers. In addition to the difficulties of interpreting any given line in Isaian poetry, the book evinces a large-scale structure which forms an indispensable context for individual claims which Isaiah makes. Isaiah also ties different chapters together by echoing images or phrases (perhaps the most significant occurring in Isaiah 35.4, 10; 40.9-10; 51.11; and 62.10-12). But how can one move from text to sermon in ways which take these larger poetic and theological structures into account, and in ways which deepen and nourish the sermon? The preacher of the book of Proverbs faces similar challenges: in addition to questions concerning parallelism and poetic imagery in individual proverbs, chs. 10-31 of the book present the preacher with a bewildering and almost staccato-like series of maxims. How to preach the book in a way which is both responsible to the ancient text and helpful for modern audiences is not at all clear. This class is designed to furnish students with methods, approaches and tools which can guide them from text to sermons in which the complexities and richness of the ancient text nourishes and deepens, rather than dampening or clouding, dynamic, visionary, and helpful preaching.Although skill with Hebrew is naturally helpful for this course, it is specifically geared for students who work from English translations in sermon preparation.

What do you expect from the Bible?

The Bible gives to every man and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more: high and divine content if it is high and divine content that we seek; transitory and “historical” content, if it is transitory and “historical” content that we seek —nothing whatever, if it is nothing whatever that we seek. The hungry are satisfied by it, and to the satisfied it is surfeiting before they have opened it. The question, What is within the Bible? has a mortifying way of converting itself into the opposing question. Well, what are you looking for, and who are you, pray, who make bold to look?

Karl Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 32.

95 Theses Rap

Lyrics compliments of  Per Crucem Ad Lucem:

If you havin’ Church problems then don’t blame God, son …
I got ninety-five theses but the Pope ain’t one.

VERSE 1

Listen up, all my people, it’s a story for the telling
’bout the sin and injustice and corruption I been smelling:
I met that homie Tetzel, then I started rebelling
Once I seen the fat Indulgences that he been selling.
Now the Cath’lics of the world straight up disgracin’ me
Just because I waved my finger at the papacy.
My people got riled up over this Reformation …
That’s when Leo threatened me with Excommunication.
I warned y’all that Rome best agree to the terms.
If not, then you can eat my Diet of Worms!
You think you done something spectacular?
I wrote the Bible in the vernacular!
A heretic! [What?] Someone throw me a bone.
You forgot salvation comes through faith alone.
I’m on a mission from God. You think I do this for fun?
I got ninety-five theses but the Pope ain’t one.
Save me!

CHORUS

Ninety-five theses but the Pope ain’t one.
If you havin’ Church problems then don’t blame God, son …
I got ninety-five theses but the Pope ain’t one.

VERSE 2

One Five One Seven… that’s when it first went down.
Then the real test was when it started spreading around.
Sixty days to recant what I said? Father, please!
You’ve had, what? Goin’ on fifteen centuries?
“Oh snap, he’s messin’ with the holy communion.”
But I ain’t never dissed your precious hypostatic union!
“One place at one time.” Well, thank you Zwingli.
Yeah, way to disregard that whole “I’m God” thingy!
Getting’ all up in my rosary … you little punk.
Your momma shoulda told you not to mess with no monk.
What you bumpin’ me for? Suddenly you sore.
Keep that up, you’ll have yourself another Peasant War.
You blame common folk for the smack they talkin’ …
You ain’t even taught them proper Christian doctrine.
With my hat, my Bible, and my sexy little nun,
I got ninety-five theses but the Pope ain’t one.
Save me!

CHORUS

VERSE 3

When I wrote the ninety-five, haters straight up assailed ‘em.
Now they only care whether or not I nailed ‘em or mailed ‘em.
They got psychoanalytic. Now everyone’s a critic,
And getting on my case just because I’m anti-Semitic.
I’ve come back from obscurity to teach y’all a lesson,
Cuz someone here still ain’t read their Augsburg Confession.
I said Catholicism brings a life of excess,
And we all remember what went down with Philip of Hesse!
But you forgot about me and my demonstration?
Like you can just create your own denomination?
“We don’t like this part, so we’ll just add a little twist.”
Now we Anglican, Amish, and even Calvinist.
I gave you the power, you gone and abused it.
I gave you God’s truth, you just confused it.
Don’t you never underestimate the s*** that I done …
I got 95 theses but the Pope ain’t one.
Save me!

CHORUS

Shout out to Johann Gutenberg … I see you baby.

Barth – Credo – “Creator of Heaven and Earth”

The confession of belief in God as “Creator of Heaven and Earth” (Latin: Creatorem coeli et terrae) is not meant to be a statement of a Christian “world view,” Karl Barth argues. Rather, it is a statement about God, and most specifically, about God’s relation to us and our world. The doctrine of God as creator captures the belief that were it not for the Father Almighty, we would not exist. Therefore, we are “completely and absolutely bound” (29) to the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Interestingly, the doctrine of Creation has traditionally placed “man” at the centre of the creation account, as if humanity were to be understood as “the creature and the partner of God” (30). Yet the creed is strangely silent here about the creation of the humans. Why is this the case? As Barth puts it:

Will [man] recognize, fear and love God as God the Creator, without at the same time recognizing, as he looks down to earth and up to heaven, his own littleness and insignificance, both in body and soul, even within the creaturely sphere? Without indeed mentioning man, and significant in its failure to mention man, the statement that God created heaven and earth says the decisive thing even about him, and precisely about him. Of these two worlds he is the citizen, encompassed in truth with a special mystery, or the wanderer between these two worlds which indeed in God’s sight are only one world, the created world. (30)

[In other words, the absence of a statement about "humanity" in the first article is not a fatal omission, but an implicit setting of humanity into unity both with the rest of creation and with God the Creator. Humans are both included in "heavens and earth" as "created,"--"Not-God"--and also as possessed and owned by God.]

There is, Barth says, a “double content” arising out of the statement, “God is the Creator of the World”:

1. God is related to the world, not in a manner of equilibrium or parity, but one in which God has absolute primacy over it in freedom. “Heaven and earth are not themselves God, are not anything in the nature of a divine generation or emanation, are not, as the Gnostics or mystics would again and again have it, in some direct or indirect way, identical with the Son or Word of God” (31). The world is characterized as: not God, not eternal, not a movement of God himself. [It's hard not to hear the dialectical echoes of Römerbrief here!] Rather, the world is a “free opus ad extra, finding its necessity only in His love, but again not casting any doubt on His self-sufficiency: the world cannot exist without God, . . . but He could exist very well without the world” (31-2). Therefore, Barth insists, the meaning and end of the world “is not to be sought in itself.” Rather, “We must believe that the world as he created it is appointed to serve His glory, and we must not allow ourselves to be misled here by our feelings and reflections over good and evil, however justified” (32-3).
   
2. Though there is an asymmetrical relationship between God and the world, the world nevertheless has a reality of its own, willed and upheld by God. That is to say, the world is both dependent God for its existence and yet has a relative independence given it by God. Simultaneously, the world stands bound to God who is its Creator, and yet never does the world become a “part” of God; never does the world and God fuse together: “God never and nowhere becomes the world” (34).

   This raises the question of the doctrine of Providence. How does God remain both sovereign over the world as its Lord, and yet allow the world its “relative independence”? Barth rejects the “Pelagian doctrine of freedom, the fatalistic doctrine of necessity, the indeterminism of the old Lutherans and Molinists and the determinism of Zwingli” because they represent “misreadings” of the doctrine of the human freedom of the will (35). He is more comfortable [not surprisingly] with Calvin’s answer in this regard, which allows a degree of human freedom, but not in such a way that it sets it alongside the “freedom of God” as if human freedom was a “god alongside of God” (35).

Barth concludes this chapter by describing what he sees as two limits of the doctrine of Creation.

1. There are some questions of  faith that are not to be answered from the perspective of the doctrine of Creation, “as least not unequivocally and completely” (36). Barth includes the questions of sin, evil, death, and the Devil as “impossible possibilities” that cannot be explained from the perspective of God as Lord and Creator; “it cannot be said that God willed and created these possibilities as such” (36). Barth insists, “Dogmatics must not at this place carry the Creation-thought right to the end of the line. It must rather explain these possibilities as being such that we have indeed to reckon most definitely with their reality, but are unable better to describe their real nature and character. . . . These possibilities are to be taken seriously as the mysterium iniquitatis ["mystery of uneveness or injustice"]. The existence of such a thing, however, is not to be perceived from creation, but only from the grace of God in Jesus Christ” (37).

   [Aha! Barth finally returns to the question of the "chief problems of Dogmatics" and makes a bold pronouncement: You cannot answer the question (at least not satisfactorily) of why sin, evil, death and devil exist on the basis of a doctrine of Creation or providence. Yet, this has precisely where the bulk of systematic theology seems regularly to go! What is surprising, of course, is that Barth does deal with his famous doctrine of "Nothingness" in §50 entitled, "God and Nothingness" in the third part volume of his doctrine of Creation, written some 15 years after Credo (1950). An interesting question is: Is this a departure of Barth's against his own good advice?]

2. There are also some answers to the faith that should not be sought within the framework of the doctrine of God as Creator. These include the doctrines of miracles, prayer, the Incarnation, and the Church. Barth is insistent that it is inappropriate to develop these doctrines as an extension to the doctrine of God as Creator. This is because they are “very special forms of divine immanence in the world” (38). Here Barth’s argument is worth hearing in full:

These things [miracles, prayer, etc.] pass beyond our range of vision because they are all bound up with the central mystery of the Incarnation, which is most assuredly misunderstood if with Schleiermacher it is understood as the completion and crown of creation. It is not that in Christ creation has reached its goal, but that in Christ the Creator has become–and this is something different–Himself creature; the creature has been assumed into unity with the Creator as first-fruits of a new creation. Projecting our thought ‘consequently’ along the ling of the creation dogma, we should have in one way or another to deny the Incarnation, Miracle, prayer, the Church.  . . . In truth it is just in the knowledge of Jesus Christ that we stand at the source of the creation, faith and dogma. (38)

[Barth's christocentric method come to the fore in this chapter. As for me, I find his argument quite convincing: prayer, miracles and even the Church are special forms of divine immanence that cannot be understood in terms either in light of God as Creator, nor even in a doctrine of providence, but only in light of Incarnation. Though I can't even begin to spell the implications of this out in full, let's take "prayer" as an example. The prayer which Jesus taught his disciples, of course, begins with "Our Father." But such a prayer is a strictly novel in the Jewish context of his day, not an extension of the doctrine that God is Creator (even though God as Father in the OT does sometimes stand in as a shorthand expression for "God is the Creator). On the contrary, our ability to know what is "meant" by saying, "Our Father" can only be discerned in and through the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father, in whose name we pray. Prayer, in other words, to God is not possible just because God is the one who created all things--a deist theology of God as creator has no real room for prayer because God is "absent" and "removed;" rather, prayer is possible to the Father only in light of the fact that Jesus is His Son in the flesh. Overall, a fascinating chapter!]

Marriage and Illness – A few thoughts

This weekend I am presenting my first ever seminar entitled, “In Sickness and in Health: A Biblical Perspective on Marriage and Illness.” It will be held at Lethbridge Evangelical Free Church January 22-23,  in conjunction with their “E-Free School of Discipleship.”

This is an area that is really outside of my “technical” expertise. It’s not as if I have formally studied the topics, even though I have had long interest now in the theology of marriage (largely due to the influence of Douglas Farrow, my Doktorvater, who has written passionately about it for a number of years now. If you haven’t read his Nation of Bastards yet, you should!).  However, the idea of relating marriage and illness came to me late last fall after having a pretty long conversation with one of my seminary students whose spouse has a long term, serious illness. It then occurred to me that out of 20 years of marriage, my wife has struggled with one form or chronic illness or another for almost 16 or 17 of those years, and maybe I had a few things to say about it. It was then I volunteered to do this topic in Lethbridge, even though in the past few weeks I’ve wondering what in the world I got myself into!

Once I began preparing (by, of course, going to the library! that’s how a theologian does it!), I realized just how very little has been written in this area specifically. Yes, there’s tons written on marriage, and tons written on illness, but I could hardly find works that explored exactly what illness does to a marriage and how the Scriptures might inform how not only to “survive” but to “thrive” in a marriage where chronic (or even terminal?) illness is the reality.

So in the end, I found myself having to work out a lot of the concepts and content for my seminar on my own. And to be sure, Maureen has been my sounding board and encouragement for lots of the concepts I’m trying to work out. Thanks, Bub!

If there are a couple of items that stand out as central there are probably two really important things (though now I could write a whole lot more than a few weeks ago!)

1) The concept of marriage being created (even before the Fall) with a prelapsarian mandate to battle chaos–a reflection of the Creator’s driving out the “formless and void” of Gen 1:2 (“chaoskampf” for those who need the technical word!). The male and female were mandated to “Be fruitful and increase, to fill the earth and subdue it” (a chiasm in the Hebrew). Fruitful marriage is marriage that has figured out how to subdue chaos, my thesis goes.

All couples, of course, have to contend against the chaos that seeks to break up their relationship. The forces seeking the destruction of marriage are varied, including the “expected” things like sexual impurity, workaholism, financial stability, the stresses of raising a family, and the like. Yet for a couple struggling with chronic illness in the mix, the “chaos” is just a little more evident and “in their face” than perhaps couple who do not need to contend with it. The “blessing of illness,”  if I can put it that way, is that it serves as a very physical, concrete reminder that we are all travelling the road to death and decay, and if viewed properly, can be an opportunity to learn to “live well” in light of the “grieving” that all couples will eventually face when death separates them. But really, all couples really are tasked with this important task–to “order the chaos” as a reflection of the good Creator’s creative and redeeming activity.

2) The importance of “lamenting hopefully.” I stumbled across Michael Card’s A Sacred Sorrow in my research in which he states that too many Christians suffer in a “harmful silence” in the face of disease, death, sin, and destruction. In marriages where illness is a factor, hopeful lament can become a spiritual salve: It doesn’t heal the illness, but it allows couples to give word to the frustrations they both face by directing their hopeful lament to God. Thus, biblically, lament is (almost always–there are exceptions, like Psa 88) coupled with hope. So, I argue  that:

Lament without hope leads to despair and fatalism.

and

Hope without lament leads to unrealistic optimism.

I’ve been tempted in both directions (though frankly, somehow I find that Maureen seems to have a better balance here, even though she is the one with the sickness!) Sometime illness can lead a couple into a perpetual spiral of despair, and lament comes out sounding more like resignation to fate than submission to the Creator. On the other hand, there are those who hope so much in a potential cure (either through hoping for divine intervention, or looking for the next great medical cure) that they ignore the reality of the sickness and fail to lament. This unrealistic optimism is, finally, an idolatrous activity that hopes “in the created rather than the Creator–who is forever praised” (Rom 1:25).

Anyways, for those who know me personally, I’d appreciate your prayers on my behalf for this weekend–that it would be fruitful, that the right people would come, and that I’d be pastorally sensitive to the Spirit.

Barth, Credo – “Father Almighty”

In the third chapter of Credo, Karl Barth discusses what it means to confess belief in God the Father Almighty (Latin: patrem omnipotentem).

First, Barth notes, it is important to note that “the conception ‘Almighty’ receives its light from the conception ‘Father’ and not vice versa.” That is, it is “an act of divine omnipotence through which God makes Himself known to man as Father” (19). In other words, the revelation of God as Father is the act of God by which we come to know what it means to say that God is “omnipotent” (or “all-powerful”). We do not, Barth argues, start with an abstract or theoretical definition of omnipotence (e.g., “the limitless ability to do anything and everything”) and then apply it to God as Father.

So what, then, does it mean for the “Father” to be “omnipotent”? In short, “the revelation of God the Father is the revelation of God in His Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. . .  [I]n the sense of the symbol, . . . ‘omnipotence’ is identical with the revelation of the Father of Jesus Christ through the Spirit” (20)  To know the Father is to know Jesus Christ–and more specifically, Jesus Christ who died, rose again and ascended to the right hand of God Father. To know the omnipotent Father, then, is to know that he is the one who circumscribes life and death; he alone is the one who encloses (cf. “omini) all things as Creator. God the Father alone is the one who has power over life and death, and is thus spoken of as, omnipotent.

[I think Barth's allusion to omnipotence as something that circumscribes all things is an important qualitative corrective to the typical quantitative view of omnipotence. We've all heard the popular supposed conundrum raised about the attribute of omnipotence: "If God can do everything (a quantitative descriptor of omnipotence), can he create a rock so big (again, a quantitative qualifier) that he can't lift it?" This kind of question is ill-guided, not only because it assumes a quantitative framework for the answer, but because it assumes that omnipotence is first and foremost about force rather than power. God the Father is omnipotent in the sense that he alone exercises the prerogative, the Lordship, over the most powerful of all things known to humanity and from which none can escape: Death. To confess belief in the "Father Almighty" is no mere cognitive affirmation about how much God can do, but is a confession of what kind of power he has: The power to kill and to raise, a power hidden in how he sends his Son to the Cross, but also made manifest in the resurrection from the dead.]

Barth concludes the chapter with three “explanatory” observations about the Father Almighty:

1. God’s Fatherhood is an eternally Fatherhood which does not set him into a super-ordinate position over the Son and the Spirit. Rather, “God, as the eternally Begotten of the Father [the Son], and God, as He Who proceeds eternally from the Father and from the Son [the Holy Spirit - filioque!] are in the same way God as God the Father Himself” (26).  God’s Fatherhood, in other words, is eternal. He always has been Father, and there was no point at which he was not.
2. God’s Fatherhood does not designate the Father as a “part” of God, but as a “person” or “mode of being of the one simple divine being, of one substance with the Son and with the Spirit” (26). [For those interested in the technical details of Barth's view of the "persons" of the Trinity, he designates the word "mode of being" as a translation of tropos hyparcheos, or  τρόπος ὑπάρξεως. For more on this, see Paul M. Collins, Trinitarian Theology West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers and John Zizioulas, pp. 146-50] Thus, by virtue of the fact that Son and Spirit share in the one substance of God the Father, they also are rightly called “Almighty” (27).
3. Even though the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the unified activity of Father, Son, and Spirit is not an undifferentiated unity, but an “ordered unity and in this order the reflection and repetition of the order of his being” (27), i.e., Unified action need not mean undifferentiated persons.

[If we do a quick comparison between Barth's take on "Father Almighty" in his pre-WWII Credo (1935) and his post-WWII exposition in his later Dogmatics in Outline (DIO, 1947), we see definite parallels, yet important developments, of Barth's exposition of the "Father Almighty."  You see, in Credo, Barth is still living with the daily unfolding anticipation of Hitler's regime, while in DIO he sees the devastating results of Hitler's "legacy" in retrospect. In Credo, there is no mention of the political aspects of God as Almighty; in DIO he ties God's power more specifically to God being "Lord of all lords, the King of all kings." Of political powers, he says, "all these powers, which as such are indeed powers, are a priori laid at the feet of the power of God. In relation to Him they are not powers in rivalry with Him" (DIO, 47).  And then, "Perhaps you will recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called Him 'the Almighty'. But it is not 'the Almighty' who is God; we cannot understand from the standpoint of a supreme concept of power, who God is. And the man who calls 'the Almighty' God misses God in the most terrible way. For the 'Almighty' is bad, as 'power in itself' is bad" (DIO, 48).  What I see here is that Barth's explicit theological exposition in Credo was no mere "pie in the sky" exercise, but a "real world" political preparation to confront the naked displays of evil power as it appeared on the European scene at the middle and end of the 1930's and the beginning of the 1940's, personified as it was in Hitler. Barth's confession became, in other words, the very real means by which he was able to speak out against a true "anti-christ" who failed to understand God as the "Father Almighty." This anti-Christ, in fact, proclaimed (to use the phrase from Romans) a "No-God" named, "Almighty" and Barth was right to call him on it.

On the down side, it appears that by this the third chapter of Credo, Barth has forgotten the original purpose of the lectures, which was to bring out "the chief problems of Dogmatics." Hopefully, this will come to the foreground again as the book progresses.]