Jesus Christ's Self-Attestation

³⁹ Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. ⁴¹ And because of his words many more became believers.
⁴² They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” - John 4:39-42

As I continue my foray into Church Dogmatics IV, I am deluged by things I want to write about.  But something jumped out at me today that both reminded me of the above scripture in John's Gospel and of the Pentecostal emphasis on the need for a personal encounter with God.  

In the early pages of the section "The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country" (p.157ff in the T&T Clark Edition), Barth begins his threefold division of redemption that he has just spent 150-plus pages "introducing."  For Barth, the incarnate Son of God cannot be abstracted from the event of atonement.  The incarnation of the Son is the atonement.  But Barth does say that the event of atonement can be examined on three different levels: the God who reconciles, man who is reconciled, and God-and-man in reconciliation.  He begins his exploration of the God who reconciles with an examination of how Jesus appears in the New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels.

In the Synoptics,

"He [Jesus] is not simply a better man, a more gifted, a more wise or noble or pious, in short a greater man.  But as against all other men and their differences we have in the person of this man One who is their Lord and Lawgiver and Judge." (p.160)

Barth goes on,

"The New Testament community does not merely think, but lives and acts in the knowledge and on the presupposition that in this man 'dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily' (Col. 2:9)" (p.160)

After spending some time reinforcing this, particularly in his own context, deeply important point, Barth makes some comments that are both very typical of his theology of revelation but also very significant for we Pentecostals who see ourselves as above all a missional community of Christ.

"He is to them [i.e., to the New Testament community] the Christ, the Kyrios, the Son of Man and the Son of God, the One who is absolutely different and exalted, even before they describe Him in this way.  And when they do describe Him in this way, they appeal in some sense to Himself - that He Himself continually attests to Himself as such.  And in relation to others they count on it happening that they too may accept - not their own representation and appraisal of a man honoured by them - but the Word of Jesus, His self-attestation of His majesty, of his unity with God...

"When the New Testament attests Him to be such, it speaks of His resurrection from the dead.  Only secondarily, and in this way, does it speak of the records of it.  And in relation to others His witnesses expect that the same Holy Spirit who has revealed this to them will not be silent to others." (pp.162-163, emphasis mine)

Within these observations by Barth, the first thing that can be seen is Barth's theology of scripture as a "witness to the Word of God" rather than the Word of God itself (or, himself).  The New Testament, for Barth, is the authoritative collection of documents by the community of Jesus' original witnesses.  But it is not the Word of God.  It is a witness to the Word, and by the Spirit can become the Word of God afresh.  But while the text is authoritative, ultimate sovereignty is not in the text but in the God who is witnessed to in the text and who is Lord over the text.  The Spirit witnesses to Jesus who shows us the Father.  Only God himself can be the Word of God.  Only God can reveal God.  Revelation is a trinitarian event.  And so the Bible becomes the Word of God only in the power of the Spirit of God, and only as it reveals Jesus. 

As Pentecostal Christians, we are people of the Spirit.  We believe that the Spirit of God is sovereign, active, and powerful.  We also believe that salvation is not simply adherence to particular doctrinal formulas or participation in particular sacramental rituals.  Doctrine matters, and the sacraments are beginning to be more deeply appreciated, but nothing takes the place of personally encountering Jesus Christ by faith.  Like the Samaritans, everyone needs to "hear for themselves" the voice of Christ by the Spirit.  And Barth reminds us not only that this is so, but that we can trust Jesus and the Spirit to introduce themselves to those who don't yet know their Lord.  He does so, first and foremost, through the Bible, but also through faithful preaching and witnessing.  But it is not ultimately us who reveal Jesus.  The self-revelation of God only happens when people personally meet this God.  And they meet this God when he introduces himself in Christ and by the Spirit.

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...

Karl Barth, "the World," and Evangelism

I am continuing to take a break from my study of Hell in Barth's though, but look for a third installment soon(ish).  If you missed parts 1 and 2, they can be read here and here.  For now I am foraying into volume IV of the Church Dogmatics, the Doctrine of Reconciliation.

The Pentecostal movement, from the very beginning, has been a missionary movement.  Whenever Spirit-empowered missions and the planting of indigenous churches is lost from view, I think that the true essence of Pentecostal Christianity is lost.  The tongues, the healings, the miracles, and the exuberant worship, are simply pieces of this larger goal: the church, in the power of the Spirit, preaching the gospel to the ends of the earth, that every nation, tribe, and tongue may hear, believe, and so be saved.  So the preaching of the gospel is central to Pentecostalism.  So is the belief that hearing the gospel and responding to the gospel is needful for redemption in Christ.  I will not go so far as to say that the early Pentecostals were uniform in their views on the eternal fate of those who have never heard the gospel.  They may or may not have been.  I don't know.  But I know that what was central to the Pentecostal vision was the "lost-ness" of the world and the need people had to hear about Jesus.  If Barth's theology cannot speak to this missions mindset, then it is a poor companion to Pentecostal experience.

In Church Dogmatics IV/1, "The Doctrine of Reconciliation," Barth begins his book with the assertion that the Christian message can be summed up in the name Emmanuel, "God With Us."  He goes on to make clear that this "God With Us" is true, not because of us, but because of God.  Reconciliation with God is based on covenant.  God covenanted with mankind.  It was his purpose in creating us.  He created us to love us, but we broke faith with him.  We disobeyed and cancelled our "right" to the covenant relationship with God, but since God had already determined to have us, he kept both sides of the covenant, and he did this through Jesus Christ.  In Jesus Christ, God and man are reconciled.  And this is where Barth's implicit universalism appears (not so much in this section of the Dogmatics as in the logic).

But universalist or no, Barth is making a valuable point.  Redemption Proper, that is, redemption itself, takes place "over there" in Christ, not so much "over here" in us.  We have forfeited the covenant, but outside of us and on our behalf, God in Christ has restored and maintained it.  Later on, in volume IV/4, Barth will explain Christian experience of the Spirit (which he calls "baptism in the Holy Spirit") as being brought into, or made aware of, what has happened for us in Christ.  A strong case can be made from Barth's thought that what we generally mean by "being saved" doesn't take place until this conversion, or Spirit baptism.  But because Barth wants to downplay the subjectivism which he saw as the great enemy to the gospel, Barth threw all his weight on the actuality of the redemption that happened in Jesus.  Salvation really happened when Jesus lived, died, and rose again.  And because Barth rejected a classical Calvinistic view of "limited atonement" (Jesus only died for the elect), actual salvation has happened for the whole world and for every man in it already in Jesus.  He didn't make salvation possible, he saved us.  But what does this do with the need to preach the gospel to people, and to actually believe it ourselves?...

On pages 70-78 of Church Dogmatics IV/1 (T&T Clark edition), Barth spends time exegeting two important passages for his understanding of the gospel, John 3:16 and 2 Corinthians 5:19.

In the first passage, of course, we are told that God has "loved the world" by sending Jesus Christ, and for Barth this love is effective.  God has loved the world, which is to say, he has kept the covenant on behalf of the world in Christ.  And Barth emphasizes that, in John, "the world" is the wicked world.  God has loved the wicked world in Christ.  The whole thing is loved.  Is there any distinction then between believers and unbelievers?  Yes, it seems there is:

"Those who believe on the Son are the members of the cosmos who, while they necessarily participate as such in its opposition, and are therefore subject to perishing and have forfeited eternal life, in the sending of the Son and therefore in the self-offering of God can and must recognise [sic] God as God, and His will as a will of love, a will to rescue and to save...

"They are those who without being in any way different from others are under the forceful permission and command to affirm God and the will of God as it has been revealed to them.  This is not because, as distinct from others, they are disposed and able of themselves, but because God is too strong for them...

"What happens to them, and as such is only theirs, applies to the whole world, as we see from the verse which immediately follows [i.e. John 3:17], and is connected to v. 16 by a "gar" [Grk. for "for"]: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved" (v. 17).  Within the world, and therefore as a witness directed and appointed to it, there are men who belong to it, yet do not perish but have everlasting life.  In the setting up of this witness within the world the atonement is shown to be an atonement for the world." (p.73, emphasis mine)

So Barth's understanding of the distinction between believers and unbelievers is not one of righteousness (we are all rebels), or of personal qualities (if anything, we believe because we're weaker than our neighbors).  Those who believe are those who have actually entered into what is the real situation of the whole world.  The atonement that has taken place in Jesus really is an atonement for the whole world.  Using Barth's logic of sin and damnation as "nothingness" and "absurdity," then, I would conclude that Barth is saying that when we believe we enter into truth as opposed to continuing in the lie of sin and lost-ness.  Our salvation in Christ is true, and our continuing in an unreconciled state is a ridiculous lie.

And what is fascinating and beautiful about Barth's though here is the role believers thus take.  Because salvation is for the world, to be a believer is to be a witness.  This is evident from the above quotes, but comes out even more forcefully in Barth's exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5:19.  In typical Barthian fashion, and in keeping with his view of reconciliation in Christ, Barth takes the apostle Paul's statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" and "not counting their sins against them" with utmost seriousness.  God has reconciled the world!  He has not counted our sin!  He has made us righteous in Jesus!  So where does preaching the gospel come into this?  In the "ministry of reconciliation":

"Between the apostle and the rest of the world there is the decisive difference that he has eyes and ears for the atonement which has been made, and therefore for the conversion of the world to God, for the new thing which has come and therefore for the passing of the old, whereas the world is still blind and deaf to it. . .But it is not this difference, and the tension of it, and the dynamic of this tension, which makes him an apostle.  What moves him in this difference, what prevents him from evading the tension as a kind of private person reconciled with God, what forces him to make it his own, to bear it in his own person, is the fact that what has come about for him in Christ as his reconciliation with God has come about for him for the sake of the world." (p.77, emphasis mine)

So for Barth, the salvation of the individual in Christ is part of the bigger whole: the real salvation that has taken place once and for all in Jesus Christ for every single person.  The individual's salvation is the actualization of this salvation, the entering by grace into a fact that is (potentially) true of all.  But when we enter into this fact, the joyful burden of being a witness to the world of it's salvation which has taken place in Christ becomes ours as well.  And in this way, Barth becomes a happy ally to the Pentecostal cause of missions and world evangelization.  Glory to God in the highest, and to his Son who has made salvation real.  Amen.

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.

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...