Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George Hunsinger is McCord Professor of SystematicTheology at Princeton Theological Seminary and therecipient of the 2010 Karl Barth Prize from the Union ofEvangelical Churches in Germany.

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Thy Word Is Truth

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................ixAbbreviations....................................................................................................................xIntroduction.....................................................................................................................xi1. Scripture and Tradition in the Theology of Karl Barth Robert McAfee Brown....................................................32. The Doctrine of Inspiration and the Reliability of Scripture Katherine Sonderegger...........................................203. Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation: Rudolf Smend on Karl Barth George Hunsinger..........................................294. Scripture as Realistic Narrative: Karl Barth as Critic of Historical Criticism Hans W. Frei..................................495. "A Type of the One to Come": Leviticus 14 and 16 in Barth's Church Dogmatics Kathryn Greene-McCreight........................676. "Living Righteousness": Karl Barth and the Sermon on the Mount A. Katherine Grieb............................................867. The Same Only Different: Karl Barth's Interpretation of Hebrews 13:8 George Hunsinger........................................1128. Barth's Lectures on the Gospel of John John Webster..........................................................................1259. "Thy Word Is Truth": The Role of Faith in Reading Scripture Theologically with Karl Barth Paul D. Molnar.....................15110. The Heart of the Matter: Karl Barth's Christological Exegesis Paul Dafydd Jones.............................................173A. On 1 Samuel 25: David and Abigail.............................................................................................199B. On the Gospel of John: The Prophetic Work of Christ...........................................................................213C. On the Barmen Declaration: How Scripture Continually Saves the Church.........................................................223List of Contributors.............................................................................................................233

Chapter One

Robert McAfee Brown

Of all Protestant theologians on the contemporary scene, Karl Barth has taken Scripture with greatest seriousness, and he has thereby been forced to deal with the problem of Scripture and tradition with greatest fullness.

Barth is ecumenically important not only because Hans Küng has written a book about him, nor even because he may succeed in writing more words than St. Thomas Aquinas, but also because he has genuinely tried to reclaim a distinctively Christian faith for our day. When one reads his massive twelve volumes of Church Dogmatics, now well over six million words, one does not feel a sense of oppressiveness but of liberation. One is not trapped within "Barth's system," but released from any system — liberated to take seriously and yet joyfully the central affirmations of the gospel. If Barth emerges as the great heretic of our day, it will not be for emphasizing the dark side of the gospel (as was true of so many of his Calvinistic forebears), but precisely for being (if such a thing is really possible for a Christian) too hopeful.

I. The Central Christological Fact

Here is a man who really believes that something quite monumental happened back in the first century, and that it makes all the difference. The Christian message is that God is for us; that he has declared himself on our behalf; that he has taken what Barth calls "the journey of the Son of God into the far country" so that we might know, once and for all, what his disposition is on our behalf, namely that he loves us unconditionally; and that in Jesus Christ he has declared and enacted this love and grace. To be sure, there are powers and forces of evil at work in the world, but there is nothing more powerful than the grace of God. Indeed, in his latest and twelfth volume (which has the barbarous subtitle "Volume Four, Part Three, Second Half") he says that it is not enough to talk of "the triumph of grace," for that sounds too impersonal. The way we must characterize the message of the gospel is with the words "Jesus is Victor" (a phrase adopted from the Blumhardts) — victor over sin, over death, over all that could possibly threaten us.

Secure at that point, Barth does not find himself confined and tied down, but liberated and freed to look at absolutely everything else in the light of that one blazing fact. Creation can be accepted and enjoyed as the arena, the theater, in which this divine drama of victory has been enacted. Men can be seen not as dust destined for extinction but as those for whom Christ made the long journey, so that he could lift them up with him into the presence of the Father. Sin we have always with us, but in the light of the conviction that "Jesus is Victor" it cannot be taken with final seriousness, only with provisional seriousness. The life of the Christian is the life of gratitude, the life of joyful obedience, of glad thanksgiving, in which, as Barth says, charis can only lead to eucharistia, grace can only lead to gratitude. So it goes for volume after volume; secure at this central point — Christ as Alpha and Omega, as beginning and end — Barth can see everything afresh in the light of this fact.

Including Scripture and tradition.... The old Protestant orthodoxies until recently were imprisoned within Scripture. Roman Catholicism, it could be argued, until recently was imprisoned within tradition. Barth is imprisoned within neither; rather, he is freed by both, freed for the gospel, which comes to us through the agency of Scripture and through the channel of the church that brings Scripture to us. We are beholden to tradition as it explicates the meaning of Scripture for us, and we are beholden to Scripture as it sets forth the nature of what God has done.

This means that Barth can take tradition more seriously than any contemporary Protestant thinker has done, and yet not be constricted by it. One never finds him repeating the old orthodoxy simply because the tradition sanctions it. While he aligns himself at many points with the old orthodoxy, notably in his claims about the nature of the virgin birth and the resurrection, he also displays a remarkable freedom from it whenever that freedom is necessitated by his allegiance to the Word of God mediated through Scripture.

II. The Authority of Scripture

In order to clarify Barth's position on tradition, it is necessary to say something about his doctrine of Scripture.

Barth has been called every name in the book on this matter. Critics on the left accuse him of "biblicism" (whatever that means), and assert that he is so tied down to the Bible that he really lives in a private world of conventional orthodoxy where the air is stale and where there is no contact with living, breathing, twentieth-century man. But Barth is also under attack from the right, from those thinkers who find him even more dangerous than Nels Ferré finds Paul Tillich — and Ferré finds Tillich more dangerous than Father Tavard does. These critics find Barth dangerous because he...