The first week of Barth

One week into the year and I'm already behind. However, I take great comfort in the fact that I am doing this for fun and for personal enrichment and therefore and not bound by course restrictions or time tables for this reading.

I am not used to Barth's writing style yet. That may take a while. And, I often have to go back and reread sections or reread definitions to keep everything straight. I'm quite sure it doesn't really hurt me.

So here are some thoughts from the first week.

1) For Barth, dogmatics is a part of theology, a subset (or specific part) if you will. It focuses on the content of what the Church says about God. So, it would seem that his entire work is a study of what the church says (or how it talks) about God in respect to various aspects such as the Word of God, God, Creation, etc.

2) Barth is obviously engaged in a conversation (whether real or in his own thinking) between the Modern Liberalists and the Roman Catholic Church. This helps put his ideas into historical context, especially when we remember he was writing in the early 20th century. He bounces back and forth between the two groups as he makes his case for his understanding of dogmatics.

3) It was interesting to reflect on the section about the Church and Proclamation the day before preaching a sermon that came quite by the Spirit. I had written an entire sermon and woke up at 4am to wrestle with Spirit, ending in the rewriting of much of it.

I'm still working through exactly what Barth is saying about the above. It's taking some time to get used to his way of thinking and writing after a couple of years away from theological academia.

More to come...