How to Read Karl Barth
Green, Garrett
BOOKS What Barth does best I f there are prizes for how-to books, George Hunsinger's should win the chutzpah category hands down. Getting Americans to read any theologian, let alone one...
...More than anyone else writing in English, Frei was responsible for rescuing Barth's reputation from the vacuous and misleading label "neo-orthodoxy" that unsympathetic reviewers attached to his earliest writings...
...As our libraries, our journals, and our college and seminary courses fill up with "special-interest" theologies (theology of this, theology of that), even sophisticated readers among us need to be taught once again how to read a theologian whose first priority is really theology...
...Paulos writes as both a mathematician and an educator...
...So it is that Hunsinger, a professor at Bangor Theological Seminary, dedicates his book to the memory of Frei, who taught generations of Yale students how to read Karl Barth without the distortions either of his many detractors or of the "array of residual Barthians" who claimed to be his authorized interpreters after the demise of"neo-orthodoxy" in the radicalism of the 1960s...
...It is organized as a collection of seventy short, independent essays, each about three to four pages long...
...And for those who are so motivated, the book contains a few problems to ponder (with answers usually provided at the end of the entry...
...It is significant that the first of these, Hans Urs von Balthasar, was one of this century's leading Roman Catholic theologians...
...Consequently, many people lack the ability to perform basic mathematical calculations necessary to function well in society, and there is a dearth of students choosing fields that require advanced mathematical knowledge, such as engineering, statistics, and mathematics itself...
...George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth his thought--the possibility of God's revelation can be known only from its actuality...
...Finally, educators are making more of an effort to incorporate the human side of mathematics into its technical, or problem-solving, aspects...
...Or call for more information: (800) 225-5800...
...For Barth, the particular always takes precedence over the general and--to the continuing frustration of students of Barth's theology in the Church Dogmatics could be compared to the cathedral at Chartres...
...You'll know how good it feels to help those who are...
...instead, it is intended for those who have a basic mathematical literacy, and who want a broad introduction to essential concepts of the subject...
...There has also been an attempt to broaden students' perspectives of the questions and content of mathematics...
...The motif of personalism emphasizes that this revelation encounters us not as abstract doc618: Commonweal trine but always in the form of personal address...
...Hunsinger, who has written previously about the political implications of Barth's thought, now gives us something salutary and timely: a solid, scholarly overview of Barth doing what Barth does best~ogmatic theology--and what the church especially needs today...
...Late in life Barth, who always maintained a lively interest / HOW TO READ KARL BARTH The Shape of His Theology George Hunsinger Oxford University Press, $32.50, 298 pp...
...My phone number is Send ~ormation about how J can help to: NAME A~D~ 0xfamfj STATE A rnencaJ BEYOND NUMERACY: Ruminations of a Numbers Man John Allen Paulos Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 285 pp...
...Whereas Barth made his own modem German translations of the biblical passages he cited, the translators substituted the venerable but inadequate English of the King James Version, giving Barth's English a misleadingly archaic flavor...
...Though a lifelong opponent of the "analogy of being," which he took to be the common error of both classical Roman Catholic and modem Protestant dogmatics, Barth always insisted that theological language is neither literal nor equivocal but grounded in the biblical "analogy of faith...
...You'll not only learn what it's like to go hungry...
...Elsewhere he applies the concept of partial orderings, wherein one can linearly rank some pairs of objects, but not all pairs, to measures of human intelligence...
...It is his fourth / book, and in some sense is a sequel to Innumeracy, a surprisingly well-received book published in 1988...
...In Karl Barth we see a churchman engaged in the great political and ecclesiastical events of his day: he was REVIEWERS GARRETT GREEN, author of Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Harper), chairs the Religious Studies Department at Connecticut College...
...620: Commonweal...
...Though not explicitly invoked as principles by Barth, these underlying features of his theology nevertheless constitute its definitive pattern or characteristic shape...
...And that monumental work represents only a small proportion of his prodigious literary output...
...John Allen Paulos's BeyondNumeracy is one attempt to address these liberal arts aspects of mathematics...
...In each Paulos explains the mathematical concepts and, where appropriate, identifies their practical applications...
...There is irony, perhaps, in the fact that the most powerful passages in How to Read Karl Barth are quotations from Barth's own prose--though it is to Hunsinger's credit that he is willing to step back and let Barth speak in his own voice...
...Green in Catholic theology, visited Rome during the Vatican Council II and conferred with a number of church leaders including Pope Paul VI...
...For Barth, theology is the human attempt to articulate the ratio fidei, the "human logic of the divine Logos," as he expressed it in the lectures he gave on his one visit to the United States near the end of his career...
...The Church Dogmatics in English is marred not only by infelicitous and sometimes erroneous diction but also by the occasional omission of entire passages...
...How to Read Karl Barth, odd as it may strike us at first glance, is just the fight title for this book, and for our time...
...The last two motifs Hunsinger calls foundational...
...Yet he responded not with political or economic or moralistic ideology but with Christian theology in the classic sense: he studied and wrote about the Bible, the doctrines and dogmas of the church, and the long and distinguished tradition of theological reflection...
...Both our knowledge of God and our salvation in Christ have their basis not in human subjectivity but in God's objective revelation...
...The closely related motif of particularism emphasizes that God's truth takes place in uniquely particular ways that always elude every analogy to our prior experience...
...he writes clearly without sacrificing the essence of the mathematics he is communicating...
...from anecdotes about mathematicians to an analysis of the fairness of different voting systems...
...Once one ~ eyes get used to the light, one discovers that one is inside an awesome and many-spleJutored structure, soaring with vaulted arches, arrayed with intricate passageways, adorned with exquisite statuary, and crowned above all by rose windows dancing with fire...
...Hunsinger compares the resulting conceptual whole to a Gothic cathedral and a many-faceted crystal, both images that combine unity and beauty without the implications of philosophical systematizing...
...Don't eat a thing on the Thursday before Thanksgiving...
...Instead of attempting a summary or paraphrase (already available in Geoffrey W. Bomiley's Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth), Hunsinger gives us a conceptual map of Barth's thought, structured around six motifs: actualism, particularism, objectivism, personalism, realism, and rationalism...
...Its title notwithstanding, How to Read Karl Barth is addressed primarily to scholars and theological professionals already convinced that Barth is worth the time and effort to read seriously...
...Please join Oxfam America's annual fundraising fast so that others may eat...
...Garret...
...In view of Hunsinger's fine sensitivity to Barth's language, one wonder's why, without comment or justification, he has followed current academic fashion by avoiding all personal pronouns for God in his own prose--a practice surely at odds with Barth's stress on the concrete particularity of God's revelation of himself in the unique person of Jesus Christ...
...They cover topics ranging from classical to recent developments...
...Most readers of Barth in English would be astonished to learn that he was once awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for the eloquence of his prose...
...Budde i t is widely recognized that the mathematical education provided by schools, from primary grades through college, is inadequate...
...Rational reflection is the necessary mode of theology...
...The first motif, actualism, means that Barth conceives of truth as an event rather than a static proposition or conceptual abstraction...
...He also remarked that the Church Dogmatics was studied more intensively by Catholic theologians than by his fellow Protestants...
...Had he not been a theologian," Hans Frei once commented about Barth, "he would have been more widely recognized as one of the towering minds of the twentieth century...
...I'd hke to get 5 or more people to FAST with me on Nov...
...He "thought systematically about the subject matter of theology," Hunsinger writes, "but he did not think in terms of a system...
...The final motif, rationalism, is Hunsinger's way of stressing that for Barth there is "no knowledge without faith" but likewise "no faith without knowledge...
...from biographical and historical sketches to the philosophy undergirding mathematics...
...Getting Americans to read any theologian, let alone one who writes in long Germanic sentences interspersed with untranslated Greek and Latin quotations, is surely a quixotic undertaking...
...Then join the six million Americans who, since 1973, have mailed us the money they saved to support our life-giving projects...
...Paul...
...But once they do, no other architecture, no other theology, is likely to be quite the same...
...The problem, then, is for one's" eyes to get used to the light...
...In the earlier book Pautos described basic mathematical concepts to help illuminate the social problem of mathematical illiteracy...
...JOHN C. CORT is a Boston-area writer and frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...In the prologue Hunsinger sets his interpretation of Barth in context by reviewing the works of five previous interpreters...
...THE MAN WHO I~IEW INFINITY A Life of the Genius Ramanujan Robert Kanigel Charles Scribner's Sons, $27.95, 438 pp...
...Karl Barth, unquestionably the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, left behind thirteen volumes of Church Dogmatics when he died in 1968...
...25 October 1991:619 the chief author of the Barmen Declaration, a confession of faith designed to resist the nazification of the German church in 1934, and he lost his teaching post and was exiled from Germany for his efforts...
...Please write: "Fast for a World Harvest," 115 Broadway, Dept...
...4000, Boston, MA 02116...
...For example, he uses the multiplication principle to calculate the number of different license plates a particular pattern of numbers and letters might produce...
...As grateful as we must be for the prodigious work of the translators, Barth will not truly speak English with an eloquence and clarity matching his German without the aid of future translators...
...The book is saved from the inevitable abstraction occasioned by this practice only by Hunsinger's generous use of quotations from Barth, whose highly personal, particular, and--yes--gender-specific language he fortunately has not "revised...
...The third motif, objectivism, separates Barth from all those theologians (including most of the other modem giants of the field) who want to ground theology in immediate experience...
...I'd hke to FAST to help end world hunger...
...But the main focus of Hunsinger's book is neither historical influences nor previous interpretations but rather the text of the Church Dogmatics itself...
...PAUL E. BUDDE is assistant professor of mathematics at Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan...
...Proposals to remedy this situation have called for, among other things, a more "lean and lively" curriculum--one in which emphasis is placed on the fundamentals, but in a more engaging manner than in the past...
...The motif of realism describes Barth's view of theological language...
...MATHEMATICS AS ART fast November21...
...Hunsinger is particularly effective in showing how Barth's dogmatics can manifest so stunning a coherence while eschewing the label "systematic theology...
...That voice is all the more forceful due to Hunsinger's judicious revision of the published translation of the Church Dogmatics in many of his quotations...
...He is true to his field as he tries to demystify and demythologize it...
...BeyondNumeracy is not a book for the innumerate...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 18
