Summary of AAR/SBL

As most readers of this will know, the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting was held in Washington, D.C. this year. I went to attend the Karl Barth Society meetings primarily, and whatever else I heard was just a bonus. I left on Friday at noon for the capital. We arrived at the 4 pm meeting a few minutes late but in time to hear Philip Ziegler begin his paper on Wolf Krötke’s theology of freedom and concreteness—free for the movement of Word and Spirit while concretely located in the situation of Gottesvergessenheit, or “mass atheistic indifference,” which currently plagues the land of east Germany. Ziegler is a rising star in the theological world whose presence at Aberdeen alongside John Webster is another reason to study in Scotland. (Those of us who know Mark Husbands of Wheaton College will recall that Husbands and Ziegler co-edited a volume of essays by George Schner entitled, Essays Catholic and Critical.)

Following Ziegler was the much anticipated paper by Wolf Krötke himself in his first ever appearance in the United States. He spoke on Karl Barth’s theology of religions, a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. According to Krötke at the end of his talk, we cannot afford to avoid the subject any longer. He did a very fine job explicating Barth’s understanding of other religions/gods through a careful analysis of the excised paragraph from Church Dogmatics III, entitled “God and the gods” (originally §42, I believe). He explained the removal of this paragraph as evidence that Barth did not think his treatment of the subject was sufficient. He also related that missing paragraph to Barth’s discussion of Light and the “little lights” in CD IV/3, §69: The Light of Life.

(For example, consider the following quote from Barth in the §69, p. 156: “The positive thing which takes place in the confrontation of the little lights of creation with the great light of its Creator is that they are not passed over or ignored, let alone destroyed or extinguished, but integrated in the great light.” Krötke suggests that Barth would have us understand these “little lights of creation” as connected with the gods of religion. They have a real identity, so they are not simply nothingness, and yet they have no identity apart from the Light which gives them their reality. Cf. Eberhard Jüngel, God's Being Is in Becoming, pp. 20-22, n. 25. Jüngel very nicely summarizes Barth’s discussion of the Light and the lights from CD IV/3.)

On Saturday morning, we heard Walter Lowe present a paper on “Apocalyptic and Discipleship – Explaining Christianity.” In this paper, Lowe did a fine job exploring the need for an apocalyptic in our modern age, one that is grounded in Barth’s own theology. Lowe contends that a proper apocalyptic balances the concreteness of the gospel with the contextual-existential situation of the believer. Apocalyptic provides the means by which the gospel carries an existential bite without falling into the existentialism which Barth so harshly criticized. Apocalyptic is the existential contextualization of the concrete gospel which grips us. Faith, Barth says, is a state of “being suspended”—connected with the biblical notion of “the fear of the Lord”—which disrupts us while at the same time offering us the assurance of the good news in Jesus Christ. Lowe concludes by arguing that, for Barth, the apocalypse has already occurred in Jesus Christ, but this apocalypse includes both past and present, both the concrete reality of Christ and the existential reality of the believer. Apocalypse holds these together while adamantly denying the temptation of triumphalism (cf. Left Behind), which rests comfortably in the final conclusion of history while avoiding any kind of contextualization or being-suspended.

Finally, in the grand finale, George Hunsinger and Archie Spencer critiqued David Bentley Hart’s theology of the analogia entis. I will spend more time on this in another post. As Hunsinger said to my friend, Chris, “I think I held my own.” Indeed, he did. But so did Hart, who showed a measure of patience and courage in the midst of a room that without doubt sided almost entirely with Hunsinger. Spencer gave a very fast and complex paper on Hart’s misunderstanding of Thomas Aquinas and his lamentable participation in the “colonization of history,” which characterizes the entire R.O. movement. Hunsinger made the simple yet spot-on argument that Hart’s theology is simply non-christocentric, that the only mediator between God and humanity is Jesus Christ. Hart essentially rejected this claim, though he never said so directly. Hart stated that if we are indeed created by God (creatio ex nihilo), then there is an analogy of being between creation and the Creator—as he said, this is simply a given and we cannot get around this fact. While I hope to spend much more time on this debate, we can see the basic disagreement here: Hart views the analogy between God and creation as one grounded in the act of primal creation; Hunsinger views the relation between God and humanity as one grounded in the act of re-creation or new creation.

After the KBS sessions were over, I went to the book exhibits and purchased some great books. More on that later. We also heard Richard B. Hays give a paper on narrative interpretation of the Bible. He argued for the rehabilitation of the doctrine of Scripture’s unity by arguing that Scripture should be understood as a “coherent dramatic narrative,” in which we understand the unity of the Bible “from the end point.” Finally, shortly before leaving for Princeton, we stumbled upon N. T. Wright responding to two papers for the Evangelical Philosophical Society. I usually do not care much for Wright, but his comments in this session were quite provocative and profound. It was a great way to close out an excellent day.