October 29, 2010: the Day Brian LePort Called Me a Hipster

I do not know Brian LePort.  He also does not know me.  One way or another we have become Facebook friends, and I do at times peruse his blog nearemmaus.com, where he posts along with a couple other bloggers about theology, biblical studies, historical Jesus studies, and so on.  The other day I was googling Karl Barth and seeing what was around the blogosphere when I came upon this post.  The intentionally-funny piece is entitled "Karl Barth Madness" and lists ten reasons why Brian has no interest in reading Karl Barth.  Since the writing of this piece in 2010, he has posted a number of blogs about Barth, but that is beside the point.  I thought Brian's list was clever, at times very accurate, and (perhaps because of it's accuracy) somewhat insulting all at the same time.  And, as can be expected, a debate ensued on his blog.  I am not really a "get into debates on blogs" kind of guy, and I was over two years late to the game, so I did not get involved.  But I did ask Brian's permission to mention him and his post and to interact with it.  He very graciously said ok.

The title of this present piece gains it's title from his sixth reason for not reading Barth:

(6) There seem to be more people reading Barth than Scripture these days so I think I’ll buck the trend. It is very theologically hipster to read Barth. We’ll see where that is in ten years. [emphasis mine] 

So there it is.  Without ever meeting me, and two years before we somehow inadvertently became Facebook friends, Brian LePort called me a hipster.

Brian is also painfully correct.  He states as another reason not to read Barth that it is unnecessary for him to since he has no intentions of ever attending Princeton.  Well, in my experience, these two observation collapse into a painful truth.  For a few years my wife and I attended University Presbyterian Church in Seattle under the preaching of Earl F. Palmer.  Earl was an excellent preacher and theologian and an out-and-out, no-apologies Barthian.  The first sermon of his we ever heard included him busting out his old, tattered copy of Dogmatics in Outline and reading from it for five minutes or so.  And Earl made Barth fun.  Barth was relevant, reminding us to read our Bibles to see Jesus and to see everything as centered on Jesus.  He also was heavily involved in Princeton Seminary, having gone there himself, and UPC as a congregation probably shipped half a dozen seminarians off to Princeton single-handedly each year.  (I was almost one of them!)  But while attending UPC, I also got to know for a brief time a young man who embodied Brian's reason #6 sickeningly well.  This young man went to Princeton, was brilliant, loved Barth and Moltmann, and essentially disdained everything and everyone else (he was one of those, "all Christians are suckers but me" kinda guys).  In remarkably un-Barthian fashion, he considered the Bible there to be questioned, doubted, picked at, and of little value beyond being a source document for Jesus.  He was Barthianism gone sour.  He was also, absolutely, a theological hipster.

Not on to my other point...

In the comments section of the blog, Brian writes,

"Yes, it is a bummer he didn’t get to discuss the Holy Spirit. I may have been interested in at least reading that point."

Well, I am sure that by now Brian realizes that Barth wrote a LOT about the Holy Spirit, even if he passed away before completing his massive Church Dogmatics.  And, interestingly enough, it was precisely Barth's pneumatology that set me on this wild Barthian-Pentecostal goose chase.  I had always loved Barth and considered myself Reformed, but God seemed to be irresistibly (darn Calvinists!) drawing me back to my old AG congregation.  My spiritual life has included what could be called "Pentecostal experience," but I was having a very hard time being Pentecostal theologically.  And it was Barth's pneumatology, particularly in his Gottingen Dogmatics, that gave me a theology that both critiqued and (probably contrary to what Barth would have wanted) affirmed my Pentecostal experience.  For Barth, the Spirit's role in revelation is what he calls "the Subjective Reality of Revelation."  And since, for Barth, salvation does not happen over here in me but over there in Christ, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to illumine within the believer the reality of his or her salvation which is true in Christ.  And the work of the Spirit is a work that creates real response.  Barth even goes so far as to admit that it could be called experience.  I knew I had found something.  This was something that could both critique some of the bogus-ness I and other Pentecostals have been guilty of in understanding our experiences of the Spirit and could also affirm and even help clarify what exactly the Spirit is doing in and with us when he fills us, gives us gifts, and makes us aware of the reality and otherness of the God who loves us.

I have been on that road every since.  If it makes me a hipster, I guess I need to trade in my wire-frame glasses for some nice, thick black plastic frames that I see on the face of so many (*ahem!*) people, particularly all these Seattle hipsters...

My Book Idea's Outline as of 1/13, with Some Explanation

For those who perhaps do not know, this blog started out as a project to pick up the pieces of a book idea that I have struggled with for about a year.  Barth is a heavyweight and not without his flaws.  Every time I read him I am simultaneously inspired and frustrated.  Whenever I take a break from him, I find myself utilizing his conclusions (even the frustrating ones!) in some pastoral context - usually in preaching.

The following outline actually dates back several months, since the last season of life when I wrestled with the book project idea.  It is the product of an incomplete thought running up against the patient and friendly wisdom of Barth scholar Marty Folsom, an adjunct at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington.  (He may or may not want his name attached to this, but oh well.  Hopefully he's a forgiving chap.)

So here is my outline thus far.  If you are familiar with Barth, you might (but only might!) already see what I am doing with some of these chapter divisions...

1. The Resurrected Christ – Acts 1:1-11
2. The Apostles – Acts 1:12-26
3. The Outpouring of the Spirit – Acts 2:1-13
4. Scripture and Preaching as Witnesses to Jesus Christ – Acts 2:14-36
    A. Scripture
    B. Preaching
5. The Disruption of Pentecost upon Gender, Class, and Politics – Acts 2:17-21
6. Election and Predestination – Acts 2:22-32
7. Pentecost as Trinitarian Reality – Acts 2:33
8. The Real Response of Free Humanity – Acts 2:37-40
9. The Church as the Place of Revelation – Acts 2:41-47
10. Reflection: The Sacramentality of “Pentecostal Experience” and Some Necessary
      Correctives

Out of my afternoon spent with Marty many months ago, the idea to give the book an exegetical structure came into being.  Specifically, of course, the narrative/text over which the book would lay would be the Pentecost narrative.  In that way I would be in a better position to actually put Barth into dialog with Pentecostalism as I know it, allowing them to discuss a key text together.  Of course, the danger of working with scholars (a danger which Marty did not necessarily impose but which others who also displayed brief interest in the idea did) is that they generally want a rather exhaustive study done on the topic.  After talking with academics, putting Barth into dialog with Pentecostalism doesn't seem possible without having both a thorough historical and sociological comprehension of every stream of Pentecostalism worldwide and a complete understanding of German academic theology since the enlightenment, including why exactly Barth took the positions he did and which European philosophers lay the groundwork for his epistemology.  Needless to say, I could never produce that book, and if I did produce it the only way I would get anyone to read it would be to teach a seminary class and require all my students to buy it.

As a pastor in the trenches of ministry, I think it is important that my book (if God allows it to be written, and I get myself to write it) reflect 1. my own knowledge and experience, with all their limitations, and 2. the practicality of what I am talking about.  I want this book to be doable and honest, and to answer real pastoral and theological questions.

I will expound a bit more in the future on each of these particular topics/chapters, hopefully making it even clearer where my "Barthianism" and my Pentecostalism meet.

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...