A Step Backwards to Get Further Forwards

“Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately…. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin.”

—Karl Barth to Eduard Thurneysen, 8 June 1922; in Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964), p. 101.

Karl Barth's historic commentary on the book of Romans won him a spot teaching Reformed theology to seminary students in a Lutheran school.  This teaching spot is what gave us his Gottingen Dogmatics, of which I am a fan.  As I said in the last post, Gottingen is an incomplete precursor to Barth's famous Church Dogmatics.  Having been assigned the task of lecturing on Reformed dogmatics, Barth ventured into the writings of the orthodox scholastics and of the eminent reformer John Calvin.  Gottingen, and later Church Dogmatics, became the product.  The above quote reflects Barth's reaction to Calvin.  Having been schooled in theological liberalism, Barth clearly didn't know entirely what to do with Calvin, but he was intrigued with him. 

Arguably, Barth's own theology could be viewed as an attempt to do for 20th century theology what Calvin did for theology in his own day.  Barth did not agree with Calvin on every point of his theology.  He famously reworked Calvin's doctrine of predestination/election, for example.  But Barth's theology was an effort to recapture what he believed was the message of the Protestant Reformation.  Barth was less concerned with or impressed by Reformed Orthodoxy as it developed in subsequent generations, and at times in CD lamented Orthodoxy's loss of the original vision and theology of the Reformers.  Barth's rejection of the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of scripture, for example, was as much the product of his reading of the first generation of the Reformers as it was his choice to retain some of the presuppositions of biblical criticism.  The Reformers tended to emphasize the gospel which was found "in" the Bible or "through" the Bible.  Luther called the Bible a cradle in which Christ lay.  This laid the groundwork for Barth's doctrine of the Bible as a "witness" to divine revelation.  Whether he read the first generation of Reformers correctly or not I have yet to discern.

As I journey into this blog, I have decided I need to take a detour that I never really planned on.  The promptings of the Spirit and of conscience tell me I need to go back a stage in my theological explorations of Barth.  My love for Barth is not an uncritical love, just as Barth's love for Calvin was not without its rather vocal disagreements.  And since my goal is to dialog with Barth and to contextualize what is helpful of his theology into my own context as a Pentecostal pastor (and a rather "orthodox" one at that), I have decided I need to step back and take up John Calvin's master work The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Most of my exposure to Calvin is through his commentaries and his followers.  I would even call myself a "Calvinist," though it's not a popular term.  My own "Calvinism," however, comes from Bible reading and not from reading the great reformer's own magnum opus.  So I have, out of respect for Barth and my own theological shortcomings, decided to expand my mission.  I need to broaden the theological focus of this blog before a clearer picture of "Pentecostal Barthianism" can come into view for me.

For the next few weeks or more I will be powering through Calvin's Institutes and commenting on my impressions, parallels with what I know thus far of Barth, and how Calvin's theology can function as a dialog partner with Pentecostal spirituality and practice.  I will also occasionally bring in Pentecostal theology and scholarship and set the three into conversation.  I know this will be an interesting journey for me - with God's help eventually producing a book.  I hope you can be patient and follow me on this journey.  It should prove to be fruitful, and I will try and keep it interesting.

Let's Begin at the Beginning

There is something about interacting with Barth that makes a person feel in over his head.  As I stated in my last post, this blog is an attempted resurrection of a book project that I felt unprepared and under-qualified for.  The idea was to propose a marriage between the theology of Karl Barth and the spiritual experience of Pentecostal Christianity.  I am not sure which topic I am less qualified to write about, Barth or Pentecostal experience.  I am in many ways a novice in both arenas.  I also have my reservations about both Barth and Pentecostalism, to be perfectly honest.  My default theological mode is evangelical conservatism, which tends to be critical of what it perceives as liberalism/unbelief in Barth and fanaticism in Pentecostalism.  But evangelical conservatism can become a stifling fortress, not without it's own sins of unbelief and fanaticism.  And so the marriage seems to be going forward as planned.

But it is probably worth taking the time to explain when, where, and how this whole Pentecostal-Barthian thing began for me.  So forgive the forthcoming bit of biography.  Perhaps it will help put my own theological agenda into a clearer light.  If biography bores you, feel free to read no further and await a more theological post in the (Lord willing) near future...

I was raised in an evangelical home, the son of a preacher.  I was raised knowing and believing in Jesus Christ.  I was loved.  I love my family.  I have no baggage here.  After the typical preacher's kid rebellion in my late teen years, I eventually wound up in a black Pentecostal church as one of about five white people who were welcomed, loved, and discipled, but who in both a visual and cultural sense stuck out like sore thumbs.  It was in this context that I learned to have a deeply emotional and felt faith.  The preaching was almost entirely exhortative, and so I was given no clear doctrine of Spirit-baptism or tongues-speech (I only recently even realized that this church's tradition was Wesleyan Pentecostal and so technically were supposed to believe in three works of grace: salvation, entire sanctification, and then baptism in the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues.  Nothing like this was ever explained to us.).

Eventually the strong emphasis on personal holiness and abstention from sin led to a personal crisis.  The teaching was beneficial in that it caused me to fear God and abandoned at least certain sinful practices, but it failed to ground me in the grace of God and in the "free" nature of salvation (which I don't think they necessarily believed).  Overwhelmed by my own sinfulness, I eventually had a small nervous breakdown.  I moved back home, began attending my father's church, and began a long-term love affair with the epistles of the apostle Paul.  I rediscovered the gospel.

Eventually my grasp of the gospel of God's grace found in Christ led me to Reformed theology.  I essentially ditched whatever Pentecostalism was left in me and became a Calvinist.  But by means of a rather meandering path, God brought me to the place of serving as associate pastor of an Assemblies of God congregation.  God brought me back to Pentecostalism, but I came with my Calvinism and my skepticism toward Pentecostal claims and experiences (including my own).

Over time my experience of God has melted the cold resistance I have had toward the work of the Spirit among us.  I've retained what I hope is a healthy skepticism toward exaggerated claims, but God has humbled me and shown me how he does indeed move through broken clay pots, and how I need to "quench not the Spirit" even when he works through his all-to-human subjects, including me.  Exegetically I have also been convinced of the validity of Pentecostal experience.  Scholars like Gordon Fee and Wayne Grudem have opened my eyes textually (Fee) and systematically (Grudem).  But the calm piety of Reformed orthodoxy and the vibrant spirituality of Pentecostal experience seem always at odds.  It is difficult to spend too much time interacting with writers like Michael Horton, RC Sproul, Benjamin Warfield, and others without feeling that if one were to follow them all the way, one would need to abandon all things Pentecostal and go join the author's congregation.  On the other hand, Pentecostal scholars like Roger Stronstad and Arminian scholars like Roger Olsen leave their reader with the impression that Reformed Christians are mean people who worship a mean god (small "g" on purpose).  Pentecostalism and Reformation Christianity seem to stand on opposite ends of the field holding up signs saying, "Choose ye this day whom you shall serve..."  They are mutually exclusive.  One is the path of life, the other the path of death.  Which is which depends on who you ask.

There is no room to lay out the entire biography of my relationship to Barth.  But I can say that the impasse between Reformation piety and Pentecostal experience began to crumble while I was reading Barth's book whose English title is The Gottingen Dogmatics.  The book itself is Barth's prior attempt at building a dogmatics before embarking on the breathtaking Church Dogmatics for which he is famous, or infamous (again, depending on who you ask).  I had been reading Barth for some time, both his shorter works and the occasional foray into CD.  But his earlier and clearer writing in the Gottingen work rang clear like a bell in my ears.  The only topics which Barth covers in this earlier work are his doctrines of revelation and of God. 

Barth's doctrine of revelation famously follows two different trinitarian structures.  First of all, God's self-revelation comes to us: 1) in revelation [culminating in Christ], 2) in scripture [the witness of the apostles and prophets], and 3) in preaching [the witness of the church, not just in sermons but in all proclamation].  Secondly, according to Barth, God's revelation (as an event) is trinitarian: God the Father reveals himself through God Son by the Spirit.  God the Father is the revealer, God the Son is the revelation, and God the Spirit is the revealedness of God.  In my own words: God the Father throws the ball; God the Son is the ball; God the Holy Spirit catches the ball within God's people - or, perhaps, causes the ball the be caught. 

For Barth, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is the Subjective Reality of Revelation.  God's self revelation is Jesus Christ.  Old Testament saints and New Testament believers all have believed in Jesus.  God's self disclosure is there, in Jesus.  But the Spirit comes here, in the believer, drawing him or her there, in faith, to Jesus.  For Barth, the ministry of the Spirit has obvious experiential overtones, but not in the sense that the experience is the issue that matters.  When the Spirit works, the believer is not drawn to his own experience of believing, but to the one in whom he believes.  Barth's battle against theological liberalism, for me, created a plausible paradigm for critiquing an unhealthy, individualistic, subjective and self-focused Pentecostal spirituality while at the same time affirming the revelational reality of Pentecostal experience as an experience that draws the individual away from herself and her experience at toward the One who is God's self revelation: Jesus Christ.

I am currently rereading The Gottingen Dogmatics for the sake of this project.  More on this to come, God granting us all another day. . .

Into the Wild

There are a lot of reasons not to do what I am doing.  One thing that cyberspace does not need is another theology blog (everyone has one and no one reads each other's).  But Eugene Peterson once said, in an interview about being a writer, that true writers don't write to be read but because they just have to write.  I suppose that is what I am doing.  But there is also a more concrete purpose...

A year or two ago I set out to write a book entitled, Head and Heart.  The purpose of the book would have been to explore how the theology of Karl Barth, in my opinion, creates a useful paradigm for having a healthy and vibrant Pentecostal pastoral theology.  Perhaps some day the book may appear - perhaps even written by me.  At the time I was totally unaware of how many Pentecostals already were aware of Barth.  This proved my thesis, I suppose, but also proved that others were way out in front of me.  I was no teacher.  I still needed to be a student.  In talking to a small handful of professional Pentecostal theologians, I received quite a bit of positive feedback.  I also received a goodly amount of encouragement to pursue a Master's Degree in theology and transform my book idea into a thesis.  This also may be something that happens one day.  But for today I am a lowly pastor of a lowly church in a lowly town on a lowly island.  God has not called me further into the academic world at this moment (perhaps one day).  He has given me the task of being a pastor.  And this brings me to this blog....

Since I am not yet ready nor knowledgeable enough to author a book, and since calling prevents me from pursuing higher academic work, I have started this blog as a side project.  This idea is dangerous, of course.  I am a pastor, and between family and ministry I probably do not need a theological distraction like another blog (I already keep one blog, which is more pastoral in intent, at www.vicc4life.com/blog).  This idea is also dangerous in that I stand to get very discouraged.  In all likelihood I may look back on this project in a few months, embarrassed that I once thought a "Pentecostal Barthian" blog wasn't a waste of time.  But for now I set out, as God and time allow, to muse about the intersection between Karl Barth and modern-day Pentecost, between the mind-exhausting labor of reading through the Church Dogmatics and the mind-circumventing experience of speaking in tongues (hint: Barth's doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the act of revelation, "the Subjective Reality of Revelation," is what originally set me on this journey...more of that later).  This may be a waste of time.  This may be a dangerous distraction from the joyful duties of wife and community.  But it may also be just what I need to further clarify my thoughts and, sorry Karl, experiences.  And so here I go, for better or for worse, into the wild...