The One Who is Three, and the Three Who is One

In an effort to make headway on my Barth studies and to find a way to navigate Barth while pastoring a church and studying towards my MA in Theology and Culture, I have decided to tag along with another blog that is heading through the Church Dogmatics in a little over a year.  I will undoubtedly miss some readings (in fact I already have), but having a ready made reading schedule provided for me that appears doable and that provides a little camaraderie will, I hope, help me achieve my goals of interfacing Barth with Pentecostalism.

Having said all of that...

Last week's readings were from the end of CD I/1 and covered Barth's doctrine of the Trinity.  This aspect of Barth is actually quite controversial.  The reasons for this are Barth's insistence on the absolute unity of God and also on his decision to use the term "modes of being" rather than "persons" when discussing the three, ummm...., well, persons of the Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  (There are more recently other controversial readings of Barth that also argue that in some sense Barth believed the Son was at some point, so to speak, "created."  I both disagree with this and also do not believe it touches on what I am looking at here - it usually is based on Barth's later writings than volume 1).

Barth's trinitarianism is, however, from my reading profoundly orthodox.  He interacts extensively with both the church fathers and the biblical text.  His central concern is the biblical doctrine that there is only one God and that the God whom we meet in Christ is not another.  In detailed manner he dismantles Arianism and tri-theism (saying that either approach, which he looks at together, would make whoever worships the Son an idolater).  He also speaks extensively against modalism (which he is accused of teaching) as really being a theology of One in Four rather than One in Three (because in modalism the "true" God is not Father, Son, or Spirit, but another person altogether who merely appears as these persons at various times).

For Barth, one way of looking at the Trinity (and the main way for the purposes of volume 1, on the doctrine of revelation) is to see God's three "ways of being" as Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness.  In revelation, the One True God reveals himself in his eternal Son and is "seen" when his Spirit creates faith in the believer.  This God which we meet in revelation is the eternal God, and thus we can deduce that the God who comes to us as the Father through the Son by the Spirit must therefore eternally also be Father, Son and Spirit.  We only know God as he reveals himself, but we can trust that whom God reveals himself to be, he truly is.  Thus God exists eternally in three ways, related to one another in love - the Father begetting the Son and the Father and Son together spirating the Spirit between them.  But, despite this eternal three-ness, there is only One God.  And more importantly, the Bible never says that God has three personalities.  There is only One God and this God is One Person.

Here is where Barth's theology gets tricky.  We are accustomed to think in our day and age, if we thin of the Trinity at all, as three individual persons not unlike three human beings sitting at a table.  From Barth's perspective, today's popular trinitarianism would border dangerously close to tritheism.  But it is important to note that Barth is expressly not a modalist, nor is he denying God's eternal "three-ness."  In fact, after adding signficant qualifiers and reservations to the term "relationship" to describe how the three "modes of being" in God are connected, he then goes on to use the term himself.  What Barth is careful to do is to maintain the mystery of the Trinity.  God is not three "persons" relating to one another in a tritheistic sense.  He is One God existing eternally as Father, Son and Spirit, and the only way we know that is because God meets us in his revelation as Father, Son, and Spirit.

If anything, I see Barth's trinitarianism as walking in step with ancient trinitarian thought precisely because he is so careful to avoid making the Trinity easy.  Barth keeps the One and the Three so closely connected that the doctrine remains mysterious and overwhelming, as it should be.  Barth does not, as his critics claim, sacrifice the Three for the sake of the One.  Nor does he, like many modern preachers and writers (including myself at times) sacrifice the One for the sake of the Three.  And how do I see this as helpful for us as Pentecostals?  Precisely in this: without slipping into a Oneness error, Barth's doctrine of the Trinity in divine revelation helps us to avoid pitting Jesus the Savior against God the Judge.  It also helps us to realize that the Spirit who dwells within us is not a force but the Eternal God himself - and not less of a God than the Father or the Son.  The Spirit in our midst is causing us to see Jesus, whom to see is to see the Father.

A couple of Barth blogs perhaps worth following...

I have recently have run across a couple of blogs both of which are doing series called "Wednesdays with Barth."

One is by Able Baker at Think Theology here.

The other is by a Johnny Walker at Freedom in Orthodoxy here.

I hope to follow these along as I do my own posting.

Happy reading!

Contemplative Prayer and Pentecostal Worship

I have been reading Roman Catholic author Hans Urs Von Balthasar's book Prayer. While this book does not directly relate to the intersection of Barth and Pentecostalism, I think some reflections in this forum are appropriate, as Balthasar was a contemporary of Barth and his RC spirituality might have some valuable things to say to Pentecostalism.

Balthasar's book is primarily about contemplative prayer. He grounds the practice both in the Triune God (ch.2) and within the broader, specifically Catholic, church (ch.3). For Balthasar, contemplative prayer is primarily about hearing the Word of God, by which he means both the text of Scripture and the Person of Jesus Christ. He grounds the act of contemplation in meditation on the biblical text and the person of Jesus, and places it within the broader church and tradition both in the sense that as believers we are not alone in our faith and also in that the broader tradition provides limits and direction to what we may or may not believe ourselves to be "hearing" from God.

There are twopoints which I think intersect Balthasar's book thus far with Pentecostal spirituality. First, by grounding the contemplative's meditations in the text and in Christ, and placing it within the bounds of the community and its confession, Balthasar simultaneously sets up the expectation that the pray-er will indeed hear from God while at the same time establishing some focus and boundaries which prevent some of the wilder, subjective, and/or heretical "revelations" sometimes present within Pentecostal, charismatic, and particularly neo-Pentecostal Christianity. 

Second, though Balthasar insists that contemplative prayer should normally be practiced alone for the psychological reason that others will provide a distraction (p.77), it seems to me that what Balthasar's contemplative both expects and experiences is rather akin to what the sincere, hungry Pentecostal experiences during fervent, normally public and corporate, worship.

What do you think? Does providing Christ as the focus and the great tradition of the church as guidelines rob personal spiritual revelation of it's truly revelatory character and freedom? Does the Pentecostal in public worship experience something akin to what the contemplative experiences alone?

Starting with God

Well, it has certainly been a long time since I have blogged anything, either here or here.  Having gone back to school to pursue my Master's in Theology and Culture at Northwest University in Kirkland, WA, I have not even had much time to think, much less read Barth, much less write about him.  But going back to school itself is actually related to my desire to link Pentecostalism and Barth in my own life and ministry, and possibly in the thinking, reading, and praying of others.

All that having been said, I have been re-reading Barth's Dogmatics in Outline these days as a mental break from paper writing and Greek homework.  Today I came across this classic Barthian thought:

"The mystery of creation on the Christian interpretation is not primarily - as the fools think in their heart - the problem whether there is a God as the originator of the world; for in the Christian sense it cannot be that first of all we presuppose the reality of the world and then ask whether there is also a God.  But the first thing, the thing we begin with, is God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  And from that standpoint the great Christian problem is propounded, whether it can really be the case that God wishes to be not only for Himself, but that outside Him there is the world, that we exist alongside and outside Him?  That is a riddle." (p.53)

 Classic Barth.  No room for apologetics.  No room for the question, Is there a God?  As in all Barth's thought, the unavoidable presupposition (not conclusion!) is the triune God - Father, Son and Spirit.  Does creation exist?  Do I exist?  Do you exist?  These are valid questions, but not the question, Is there a God?  The God we meet in Christ is the Great Presupposition which we know because of revelation.  And because of this Great Presupposition, we also know that creation and we ourselves are real too.  How do we know that?  The incarnation.  "Because God has become man, the existence of creation can no longer be doubted" (p.53).

What do you think?  Is Barth's confidence in God's existence and the unquestionableness of the divine revelation overstated?  Mis-stated?  Or profoundly right on target?