In the comments on my post here, I mention Karl Barth's famous dictum that theology is to be done "with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other." My good friend ER replies that he is skittish, as that is a method employed by many a pre-millenialist to "discern the signs of the times" especially in reference to the long-awaited return of Jesus in Glory. I responded that Barth's dictum was short-hand for his view that theology is to be relevant to our lives today, right now. It is an attempt to listen to God's Word to us in the midst of our lives, not a search for timeless truths.
I also lamented the fact that too many "Barthians" forgot that what the great Swiss dogmatician was doing was speaking to his own time and place; in fact, what he said changed drastically over the course of a career that spanned from just after the First World War until the 1950's. Because of his erudition, the forcefulness of both his arguments and his personality, his novelty, and the huge outpouring of words, it is all too easy to treat Barth as an icon, giving reverence to his words without considering that Barth often said he was "not a Barthian". That is, he did not laminate his books as truths, but offer them as prolegommena to any future theology.
This is not to say there is not either wisdom or truth in his vast volume of work; it is to say that such as is there should always be a starting point, not the conclusion, of a continuing struggle with the witness to the Word in the Bible and our lives as we experience them today. I rather think his idea of how we should be doing theology - and while Barth viewed the theological task as "sermon preparation", I think it is safe to say he also understood it as a way of making sense of what it means to be the Church, living our lives faithfully between those two realities that shape our perceptions and reactions - should be emulated, rather than the content. Read it, by all means. But move forward without fear.
This is the gist of my complaint with Marcus Borg's rather limp public response to our current situation in Iraq. It is also the source of my discontent with too much that passes for contemporary "theology"; we too often are too far behind the curve, or too gung-ho about some trendy contemporary intellectual force to seriously grapple with what we are supposed to be about. Borg's response would have been great four years ago. Today, it is irrelevant, and in fact counter-productive. He just hasn't had a newspaper in his hand lately as he has read the Bible.
We should not look for another Barth. We should not mimic his words, or echo his sentiments, except for his dogged insistent that God is indeed speaking a Word to us today, and it is our task to hear that word and live it out faithfully and without fear. The answers we get will be different, perhaps even contradictory, to those the revered Swiss Churchman arrived at, but that confirms rather than negates the usefulness of his method. Let us, therefore, grab our Bibles, and our newspapers (which one you choose is irrelevant), and get busy.
