The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24
... Jesus's birth is not a central tenet in Barth's dogmatics. However, he opposed Schleiermacher's view on "the God-consciousness in Jesus" and in his followers (Barth 1982). He also did not agree with his father, Fritz Barth (1918, 256-273), for whom the virgin conception of Jesus was neither relevant nor historical. ...
In order to be born fully human (Latin: vere homo) X and Y chromosomes are needed. Without the involvement of chromosomes, Jesus of Nazareth would have had no ties to humanity. Aristotelian (" On the generation of animals " / " Peri zōōn geneseōs ") and ancient Hellenistic (Galen on the Hippocratic Corpus) views on how the vere homo came into being differ much from today's knowledge of biology. In the Hebrew Scriptures, rabbinic traditions and Graeco-Roman literature, vere homo was the result not only of a male and female contribution; the third component was divine involvement. This article revisits the textual evidence of the conception of Jesus in the New Testament. The results are compared to propositions in the Athanasian Creed (Quicunque Vult) and the exegetical and/or dogmatic/socio-cultural views of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. The article explores the ethical and cultural relevance of the Christian belief that Jesus was both vere homo and vere Deus, and enters into critical discussion with British New Testament scholar Andrew Lincoln and his idea of " DNA in antiquity. " Key Terms Jesus's birth; Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA
Pentecostal spirituality emphasizes experiential emotionalism, as individuals and communities holistically experience the Holy Spirit, creating a non-dual reality where the material and supernatural overlap and interact. In this chapter, Daniels argue that Pentecostal non-dualism offers potential ecological solutions, returning to human emotion as the key to decision making that leads to change. He begins with a brief outline of Pentecostal cosmology and then moves to emotions. Pentecostals claim that it is the Spirit moving in and through the world, inviting people to experience and participate in creation, providing potential resources for our ecological reality.
Friedrich Schleiermacher is now regarded as among the most influential figures in the history of Christian thought for his contributions to theology, philosophy, and theories and methods in religious studies. The German-language critical edition of his work beginning in 1980, Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe, and English translations of key portions of his corpus beginning in the late nineteenth century, have allowed scholars to investigate the richness of his thought. German scholars have often focused on Schleiermacher’s ties to early modern philosophy, his aesthetics, hermeneutics, and theory of religion, while English-speaking scholars have often focused on the theological influences and implications of Schleiermacher’s work. Over the last thirty years, both German and Anglophone scholars have been at work translating and analyzing key texts. This volume gathers authoritative interpretations of Schleiermacher’s work from both German and English-speaking scholars, bringing together the best that Schleiermacher scholarship has to offer. The first part, “Schleiermacher in Context,” offers a clear and nuanced understanding of Schleiermacher’s own historical and intellectual context. The second part, “Schleiermacher’s Thought,” presents a close analysis of the structure and content of Schleiermacher’s thought, in relation both to questions of method and particular theological themes and to broader inquiries in philosophy and the humanities. The third part, “Thinking after Schleiermacher,” provides an examination of the reception of his thought and of its contemporary implications for theology and the study of religion.
Friedrich Schleiermacher's (1768-1834) theological essay on the doctrine of election - in which he claims to stand squarely within the Reformed tradition - was an attempt to aid church unification in the 19th century Prussian church of which he was a member and a minister. In this essay Schleiermacher resists a narrow focus on individual election and particularly on how election was worked out in the direction of double predestination. The gift of God's electing grace is worked out historically and is therefore Christological and communal. He argues that God's will is neither twofold nor divisible - into two parts, concerning the elect and the reprobate - but one, indivisible, unconditional decree governed by the logic of electing grace. This article explores Schleiermacher's doctrine of election as part of a 250th commemoration of Schleiermacher's birth, and suggests how Schleiermacher's essay on election may contribute to theological interpretations and portrayals of the doctrine of election today.
It is a misconception to identify modernity with secularization. When modernity simply creates the potential platform for secularization. On the one hand, modernity lessens the influence of piety to a minimum, and on the other hand, it restores piety and even modernizes piety without secularization. This essay focuses on telling the story of modernity in attempting to build a knowledge of God through the lens of piety. It centers on the work of two modern theologians: John Wesley and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The juxtaposition of Wesley and Schleiermacher is not without reason. Both of them are strongly influenced by the Moravian Brethren, which heavily emphasized a pietistic element in their community. This essay, however, will not explain the teaching of Moravian Brethren other than presenting their pietistic emphasis that was retained in Wesley and Schleiermacher's works. This essay argues that Schleiermacher's notion of a feeling of absolute dependence’ fills the rational gap of Wesleyan pietistic concept. It also discusses how the ‘Evangelical Revival/First Great Awakening’ and ‘Romanticism’ shaped Wesley and Schleiermacher, respectively, as they formulated their concept of piety. This essay is structured as follows. First, it presents the Evangelical Revival/First Great Awakening as the historical backdrop of Wesley's thought and continues with exhibiting Wesley’s concept of piety. Then, the essay describes the Romantic era and Schleiermacher's idea of piety.
Adalah sebuah miskonsepsi untuk mengidentifikasi modernitas dengan sekularisasi, ketika modernitas hanya sekedar menciptakan panggung yang potensial untuk sekularisasi. Di satu sisi, modernitas mengurangi pengaruh kesalehan hingga taraf minimal, namun di sisi lain, modernitas memulihkan kesalehan. Makalah ini berfokus dalam menceritakan ulang kisah modernitas dalam upaya membangun pengetahuan akan Allah melalui lensa kesalehan. Makalah ini memusatkan diri pada karya dua teologi modern: John Wesley dan Friedrich Schleiermacher. Penjajaran Wesley dan Schleiermacher bukan tanpa alasan. Keduanya sangat dipengaruhi oleh Persaudaran Moravianyang sangat menekankan pada elemen kesalehan dalam komunitas mereka. Makalah ini, bagaimanapun, tidak menjelaskan pengajaran Persaudaraan Moravian selain menyajikan penekanan kesalehan yang dipertahankan dalam karya Wesley dan Schleiermacher. Makalah ini berupaya untuk menunjukkan bahwa gagasan Schleiermacher tentang perasaan akan ketergantungan absolut mengisi celah rasional dari konsep kesalehan John Wesley. Makalah ini juga membahas bagaimana Evangelical Revival/First Great Awakening dan Romantisisme membentuk Wesley dan Schleiermacher kala mereka merumuskan konsep kesalehan mereka masing-masing. Untuk mendukung argumen ini, makalah ini disusun sebagai berikut. Pertama, makalah ini menyajikan Evangelical Revival/First Great Awakening sebagai latar sejarah dari pemikiran Wesley dan dilanjutkan dengan menyajikan konsep kesalehan Wesley. Kemudian, makalah ini menjelaskan era Romantis dan konsep kesalehan Schleiermacher.
The first part of this article argues that David Brown and Gavin Hopps’ most recent book, The Extravagance of Music, makes a significant contribution to the theological scholarship on music. At the same time, it suggests that, by allowing Jeremy Begbie to serve as their primary interlocutor, Begbie’s work tends to over-determine the terms, conditions, and scope of their text. By way of response, the second part focuses on the field of inquiry known as ‘empirical aesthetics’, and considers whether empirical testing might provide the basis for mediating between the different positions outlined by Brown and Hopps, and serve as a means for moving beyond the present impasse within the conversation on the theological significance of music.
Karl Barth defines “natural theology” as any approach to dogmatics in which claims about God are grounded on an account of divine revelation other than God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Barth's theology of crisis makes natural theology impossible because no union between God and humanity exists other than the union God establishes in and through the risen Christ who remains beyond creaturely history at every moment. He believes the only union between God and humanity is the saving union that God establishes in Christ and the Spirit; and due to the effects of sin, humans have no capacity to know God rightly apart from God's saving grace in Christ and the Spirit. For Barth's claims about the analogy of faith and participation in Christ to work, he must presuppose an already existing analogy of being between God and humans.
This article forms part of the commemoration of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who died 185 years ago on 12 February 1834. It focuses on the aspects of Schleiermacher’s life and work that have influenced the author the most. The article consists of personal annotations, Schleiermacher’s understanding of ‘divine’ hermeneutics, his notion of congeniality and his ‘subscription’ to creedal Christianity while promoting the freedom of the exegete to interpret the Bible and ecclesiastical confessions robustly and critically.
This chapter seeks to clarify the nature and scope of God’s involvement in the making of community. Two major approaches seem to be at the forefront of the contemporary ecclesiological conversation. The first approach—imitatio Trinitatis—focusses on the concept of church as an image or icon of the triune God. The second approach—participatio Trinitatis—examines the relationship between Trinity and church in terms of the believer’s participation in the divine life as unveiled in history, with an emphasis on dynamic personal interaction, indwelling and sharing, both among the believers and with God. Upon assessing the main proposals, prospects and limitations of these two Trinitarian approaches, this chapter recommends the participatio Trinitatis approach as a more promising methodological route for Adventists to pursue in their ecclesiological construction. According to this participatory vision, the ecclesially constitutive, Spirit-mediated activity of God in Christ is seen as a pivotal factor in determining the shape and orientation of believers’ common participation in him.
Karl Barth's understanding of Luther and Calvin is not best illumined by an examination of his direct citation of their work, but by a consideration of his description of their vocation as church fathers as outlined in Church Dogmatics, I/2, a position held with remarkable consistency over the course of his career. Barth's discussion of Luther and Calvin there not only sets forth his understanding of the Reformers in a historical genealogy of revelation and its witnesses, but places them in an ordering of church authorities. Moreover, his description of their unique vocation sheds important light upon his understanding of the modern discipline of church history itself. His treatment of the Reformers thus both exemplifies and follows from his conviction that church history is not an independent theological discipline but can only accompany the central disciplines of exegetical, dogmatic and practical theology.
South African homiletics is in a crisis and it has – contrary to our expectation – nothing to do with either the presence or the influence of the great 19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. In fact, this article shows that his absence stretches even deeper and wider than is often assumed. What makes this state in scholarship even more strange and remarkable is that the practice of preaching played an immense and crucial role in Schleiermacher’s own life and theology. By coming to know how this famous theologian as a preacher embodied the blending of different voices – preacher, church, Scripture and the Triune God – into the mystery of the one living voice of the gospel that speaks to us in the preaching event, this article tries to show why it is necessary and relevant to engage with Schleiermacher as a preacher who primarily thought about himself as a servant of the Word. Reading one of his sermons on sermons may stimulate theological thought beyond the borders and confinements of discipline and context.
In the present literature, understanding and interpretation of spirituality has moved from the transcendent to the relational aspect of the human being. This movement has been necessitated by shortcomings in understanding spirituality as transcendent. The idea of transcendent is unverifiable and subjective. Moreover, it is possible in the context of specific cultural and religious traditions, but not in a multicultural context. Spirituality in its relational sense is interpreted as a process of developing an intrinsic human capacity that motivates people to search for meaning, purpose, and contribution to life in a social context. The relational aspect of spirituality can be understood as ‘thoughtful love of life’ leading to what may be termed ‘naturalized spirituality’. However, understanding the relational aspect of spirituality has its own problems. This paper indicates some limitations to understanding spirituality as relational and argues that, rather than aiding an understanding of the concept, it creates more confusion. This is because the notion of ‘relational’ (i) does not exclude the transcendent, and (ii) does not distinguish between what is spiritual and what is not.
This article proposes a way of reading Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics backwards or ‘from the end’. Employing this method to explore The Doctrine of God and The Doctrine of the Word of God highlights two aspects of Barth's theology. The first is the importance of communion to Barth's account of the immanence and economy of God, especially in his understanding of God as the ‘Lord of Glory’. The second is Barth's careful balancing of christology and pneumatology across the first two volumes of the Dogmatics through the use of a chiastic structure that underpins his construal of divine election and his account of divine revelation.
This is my conclusion, where I summarize my argument and suggest further ways of extending the argument.
This article can serve as an overview of the work of Yolanda Dreyer, or as an introduction to her work, by conversing with her as a public theologian in the tradition of Schleiermacher. The article highlights her passion to listen to the voices that are normally ignored or to hear what needs to be heard to transform discourses. It investigates the contribution of Yolanda Dreyer to public theology with regard to the newspaper columns she has been writing for more than 17 years. It compares aspects of her public theology with the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which can be characterised by an internalised spirituality and a critical hermeneutic of suspicion towards the abuse of power. Gender injustice and cultural criticism are prominent themes within Dreyer’s public theology. She emphasises the vocation to speak out, but also the necessity to listen. These contributions also characterise Dreyer as a pastor-theologian.
Karl Barth (1886–1968) was a Swiss Protestant, widely considered to be the leading Christian theologian of the twentieth century. He was active in German and Swiss Church and public life from 1920 until shortly before his death, was a leading figure in the German Confessing Church which resisted Hitler, and was expelled from Germany in 1935 after refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler. His theology represented a significant break with the liberal theology of his university education and became known as “neo-orthodox.” It emphasized the importance of starting theology with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, rather than with the human experience of God that had characterized the approach of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the liberal Protestant theology that he inspired. Barth adopted the Reformed framework for ethics as divine command as best able to convey his sense of the importance of seeing ethics as response of the human subject to the address of God. The fullest development of his ethical thought is in his unfinished major work Church Dogmatics, especially focused in volumes II/2, III/4, and IV/4 (2009), but earlier sources exhibit key aspects of the shape of his later ethical thought.
The dissertation offers a new reading of Karl Barth’s hermeneutics in relation to the task of the church in reading the Bible as Scripture. The study argues that the distinctiveness of Barth’s hermeneutics lies in its complex coordination of several doctrinal loci in construing biblical hermeneutics. In this reading, the church’s interpretation of the Bible is theologically located in the reality defined by the Trinitarian decision to be God in Jesus Christ. The relationship between the Word of God and the word of man is decided by God’s election of God’s being in Jesus Christ. As a contribution to Barth studies, the work offers a corrective reading of Barth’s earlier account of biblical hermeneutics in the doctrine of revelation by drawing the insights of Barth’s later theological ontology in the doctrines of election and Christology. The church’s reading of scripture is reformulated in the ontology of being in becoming in which the freedom of God in revelation is coordinated with the history of God in Jesus Christ. As such, it maintains the continuity and the discontinuity between the biblical natural history and the divine address to the church. The practical implication of this approach is not a method of interpretation but an ethics of biblical interpretation as a human response to God’s communicative presence. As an activity of listening to the Word of God, the church’s reading of the Bible is marked by moral freedom in obedience and responsibility to the Word of God. But the divine presence is not only communicative but also commanding, and it remains “a disruptive presence” that challenges the church to be faithful to her calling as a creature of the Word of God.
The German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, is important in hermeneutic history for at least two reasons. First, he initiated the transition of hermeneutics from rule-governed interpretation in particular disciplines-such as theology, law, and philology-to a comprehensive analysis of human understanding as such. Second, he is not only the father of general hermeneutics, but also of modern theology. In developing his hermeneutic principles, Schleiermacher steers a middle path between the rationalist Enlightenment interpreters, and the historical-critical philologists. The third extreme he eschews is dogmatic biblical exegesis that, when it emphasizes the text's divine inspiration, results in disregard for historical particularity. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics tries to integrate the pre-given ontological structures of language that shape an author's mind with the spiritual element. Every linguistic expression contains both the objective structural and subjective psychological aspects, which require the interpreter's corresponding grammatical (or comparative) and divinatory (or psychological) skills for determining meaning.
To begin, a story concerning devils, shadows, and geographical knowledge. The story I have in mind is entitled “The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl,” a novella published in 1814 by a poet, botanist, and sometime-Romantic named Adelbert von Chamisso.1 As the story opens, the eponymous narrator has just arrived in a nameless port town. Schlemihl seeks out a wealthy contact, hoping to ingratiate himself to the man, and soon finds himself joining a company of lively companions on an afternoon stroll. They wind up on a hilltop overlooking the ocean. As the group grows increasingly festive and celebratory, Schlemihl notices a mysterious thin man lingering at the edge of the group, unacknowledged by the other members of the party. The man wears a long gray coat, and Schlemihl marvels as he pulls from his pocket an enormous telescope after someone expresses a desire to view the expanse of the ocean more closely. No one remarks upon the strangeness of the occurrence. But the wonders continue, for shortly thereafter the man pulls from his pocket a Turkish rug woven with gold filaments, that the party might have a picnic upon it. When the weather takes a threatening turn, the man pulls an entire canopy tent from his pocket to shelter the party. Finally, at the end of the episode the strange man pulls three black horses from his pocket, evidently to transport the party to a different location.
In the twentieth century, the attention to theological hermeneutics has reached a new height. The reasons for this can be found both in the intense discussion between theologians and contemporary philosophers and in a new departure in the practice of biblical interpretation itself. These reasons are, of course, related, since the search for new exegetical methods in the twentieth century has directed theological attention by necessity again towards philosophical reflection on the principles of text-interpretation. But in order to understand the influence which philosophical reflection has had on theological thinking we must take into account especially the enormous impression which Martin Heidegger’s philosophical insights have made on protestant theologians such as Bultmann, Ebeling, and Fuchs.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher has been described as the Father of Modern Theology. Heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Schleiermacher made two key assumptions. First, the classical arguments for the existence of God are unhelpful. Second, Schleiermacher assumes the Kantian account of knowledge. Religion is beyond the institution, the Bible, and doctrine. For Schleiermacher, one finds religion within; it is an encounter with the universe. Schleiermacher challenged all the conventional aspects of Christianity. The doctrine of the Trinity emerges out of Schleiermacher's account of God in his book, The Christian Faith. According to Schleiermacher, one should not see Christianity as a belief in miracles of the Bible; instead it is engagement with the transformative power of redemption through Jesus. Modern talk about “spirituality” rather than “religion,” which pervades many of the mainline denominations in Europe and America, has its roots in the thought of Schleiermacher.
Background to Barth's Encounter with PaulBarth's Encounter with PaulBarth's Conflict with the Guild over PaulConclusion
References
No single term has been so misunderstood or so debated in the history of Schleiermacher interpretation as Gefühl (“feeling”). The intensity of the controversy surrounding this term is testimony to the critical role it plays in Schleiermacher's entire theological program. Indeed, as evident in his magnum opus The Christian Faith (1830/1831), where Gefühl attains its final formulation as “the feeling of absolute dependence” ( das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl ), few other terms play as important a role in his account of religious experience and his doctrine of God. Not only is Schleiermacher's theological system at stake, but also the foundations of modern theology itself. Ludwig Feuerbach's assessment of the consequences of emphasizing Gefühl was unequivocal; most critics of Schleiermacher, Karl Barth foremost among them, have followed Feuerbach's pattern of interpretation:
If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling.…
But the object of religious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion,…feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling.
“One is never done with Schleiermacher,” Karl Barth once wrote, and those who have read Church Dogmatics know just how true that is. Schleiermacher's work presents a constant task for theology to incorporate fully and critique its sophisticated method; to follow its rigorous passion for ethics; to imitate, if only palely, its synthetic power and breadth; to stand open-eyed before its beauty and elegant simplicity. Barth knew this well. To read his Church Dogmatics carefully is to hear Barth's respect for Schleiermacher on every page. The dispute with Schleiermacher's method and doctrine, far from being dismissed, courses through the Dogmatics , paying tribute to the gift and the burden of Schleiermacher's thought to his descendents.
Suspicion raised by the Neo-orthodox movement concerning Schleiermacher's theological enterprise continues to cast its shadow. Karl Barth framed this suspicion perspicaciously in terms of an “either/or” in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher”:
Is Schleiermacher's enterprise concerned (a) necessarily, intrinsically, and authentically with a Christian theology oriented toward worship, preaching, instruction, and pastoral care? Does it only accidentally, extrinsically, and inauthentically wear the dress of a philosophy accommodated to the person of his time…? Or is his enterprise concerned (b) primarily, intrinsically, and authentically with a philosophy…indifferent as to Christianity and which would have wrapped itself only accidentally, extrinsically, and inauthentically in the garments of a particular theology, which here happens to be Christian?
Karl Barth's gender perspective is often analysed with reference to his so-called "theoethics" or "creational theology". This perspective perpetuates an asymmetry in gender relations that was prevalent in Biblical times, throughout Christianity and to some extent still is visible today. He based his view on the subordination of women on an exegesis of Genesis 1:27 as "intertext" of Ephesians 5:22-23. Barth's asymmetrical gender perspective is a product of his embedment in Western Christian tradition which in turn, is rooted in early Christian patriarchal theology. The aim of this article is to focus on Barth's ontological reframing of the traditional understanding of the Biblical notion of human beings as created in the "image of God". The article consists of four sections: (a) Luther's and Calvin's gender perspectives; (b) the Enlightenment failure to achieve emancipation; (c) gender disparity in Reformed theology; and (d) a feminist alternative.
Since Schleiermacher’s lifetime there have been three prominent ‘school-interpretations’ of his understanding of religion, each of which has misrepresented him in important ways. I briefly describe the contents of the three traditions of Schleiermacher-interpretation before turning to a reconstruction of his understanding of religion. Schleiermacher described religion as a complex cultural and social process, grounded in a central feature or ‘essence’ which determines its ideal character. Properly understood, his account of religion was neither an attempt to describe all religions as fundamentally the same nor an attempt to shield religion from scientific scrutiny. Rather, the account was calculated to serve the interests of the peaceful coexistence of religion and science by displaying religion as a phenomenon capable of adapting in the face of advancing knowledge concerning the natural order and concerning religion itself.
The paper explores the cultural context of contemporary educational discourse on spirituality in Great Britain by defending the following theses: spiritual education seeks a universal perspective that transcends any specific cultural context and tradition; it disengages itself from the culture of modernity, which it perceives as a spiritual desert; it finds in the tradition of late 18th and early 19th Century romanticism resources to support the recovery of a lost dimension of spirituality; however the integrity of spiritual education is threatened by the colonisation of romanticism by the tradition of post‐modernity; indeed aspects of spiritual education already embody a post‐modern perspective; an authentic spiritual education requires contextualisation in a plurality of spiritual traditions.
Since Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent. A basic premise of classical moral philosophy, however, was that if we know who we are and what our telos is, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. In his christology, Barth reappropriates this classical view of ethics and situates it christologically. Because Jesus’ human nature finds its being and telos in his divinity, Barth found an ethical pattern in the anhypostasis-enhypostasis doctrine. Restoring people to their proper place as creatures rather than Kantian demi-gods, Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by being obedient to the Father. We cannot divinise individuals or the church, but the church exists enhypostatically. This anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern orders our activities, making worship the first task of ethics. In prayer and in Sabbath keeping, Jesus shows us his utter dependence on God through supplication and rest. In these acts of worship, Christians act as they were created to act. We respond obediently to our Creator. But we also find an orientation towards other people in christology. Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in the telos of human life in being Christ-like.
It has often been remarked by Schleiermacher's critics that his surprisingly high Christology is an awkward interlude in what may otherwise be described as a transcendental philosophy of religion. Schleiermacher's brief intoxication with Romanticism as evidenced in the Speeches, the undeniable influence of Schelling and Spinoza upon his early intellectual development, and the fact that The Christian Faith begins with a general description of the God-consciousness, all contribute to the suspicion that The Christian Faith is primarily an attempt to harmonize Christianity with the prevailing cultural thought forms of the day. This is, for instance, the way that Barth describes Schleiermacher's project: first and foremost, he understands it as an enterprise in apologetics.
What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his “apprenticeship,” and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, our thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. Although McCormack is right to suggest that Balthasar's depiction of a shift from dialectic to analogy is inadequate, in the end McCormack's account of Barth's development over the 1920s conceals as much as it reveals. The following essay attempts to demonstrate the kinds of insights which can be made of the past accounts of Barth's development which focused on the transition from dialectic to analogy. Far from relegating these accounts to the sidelines, McCormack's work helps us see all the more clearly just what was at stake in figures like Balthasar's work. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place.
LifeEarlier WorkThe Church DogmaticsConclusion
Bibliographical Information
Theology as a Subject of StudyFeeling, Consciousness and ReligionHermeneutics and LanguageBarth on SchleiermacherConclusion
The Christmas Eve Dialogue of Friedrich Schleierma-cher in Afrikaans: Background, translation and herme-neutics
In his Christmas Eve Dialogue (Die Weinachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch), Schleiermacher reflected on the theological tension between the quest for the historical Jesus and the dogma of the incarnation of Christ as “true God” and “true human”. In the fashion of his Romantic contemporaries, Schleiermacher presented his theology in the form of a story about friends celebrating Christmas Eve and their thoughts on the meaning of Jesus’ birth in their lives. This story was written in 1805 and printed in Gothic German in 1843. The aim of this article (the first of a series) is to translate Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Dialogue in Afrikaans. This article gives a brief biographical overview of Schleier-macher’s life and discusses the theoretical premises of his hermeneutics. After the translation of the first part of the Christmas Eve Dialogue (pages 465-472 in the 1843 printed edition), the article concludes with an explanation of the reasons why he would write such a story.
Karl Barth’s gender perspective is often analysed with reference to his so-called “theoethics” or “creational theology”. This perspective perpetuates an asymmetry in gender relations that was prevalent in Biblical times, throughout Christianity and to some extent still is visible today. He based his view on the subordination of women on an exegesis of Genesis 1:27 as “intertext” of Ephesians 5:22-23. Barth’s asymmetrical gender perspective is a product of his embedment in Western Christian tradition which in turn, is rooted in early Christian patriarchal theology. The aim of this article is to focus on Barth’s ontological reframing of the traditional understanding of the Biblical notion of human beings as created in the “image of God”. The article consists of four sections: (a) Luther’s and Calvin’s gender perspectives; (b) the Enlightenment failure to achieve emancipation; (c) gender disparity in Reformed theology; and (d) a feminist alternative.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.