“As Barth”: Entry #5

The fifth entry in the “As Barth” contest comes from Jon Mackenzie, a third-year theology student at St Andrews University who admires the work of Karl Barth and his pupil, Eberhard Jüngel. Check out the nascent website created by Jon that is devoted to Jüngel’s theology.

An Ode to Clarity
Make of me no Barthian
With crazy jargon overlaid
But make me more like Eberhard
Who likes to call a spade a spade.

Help me to not use vocab like
e.g. Urs und Grundentsheidung
Instead, stay simple, don’t go mad
Use words that do not twist the tongue

And also words like “that-ness”, “what-ness”
Don’t make sense - they drive me witless.
Try to make me understand;
Inventing words is underhand.

So make of me no Barthian
or even aesthetician
But make the words I write to be
Wonderous in their clarity


The contest will end on July 4, at which point we will have a poll to decide who is the winner. If you wish to enter the contest, email me here. See the original post for more information.

Comments

A solid entry - 3 out of 5 stars.
Ben Myers said…
Nice one, Jon. But do you really think Jüngel (of all people) "called a spade a spade"? I reckon he'd describe a spade more like this: "the event in which the identification of the one who digs with the instrument of digging becomes thinkable through the thinkability of dig-ness as such..."
Jon said…
Exactly! That's what I mean by spade as a spade...

Barth would have called it "spade-ness" which doesn't help anyone out because we are still wondering what the blinking norah a spade is in the first place! Basically Barth didn't know what he fully meant - he had to wait for Jungel to explain it more fully!

But yeah - I reckon you've missed out how he'd refer to the possibility of digging and also the differentiation of the God who digs and the world that digs... It is as other that God comes into this world - after all...

God's Being is in Digging...

Or something...

No wait - I'm the one who's digging now!
Ben Myers said…
And of course the parable is the speech-event in which digging comes to speech precisely as the speakability of digging....