Quotes on recorder made in August 2008, mostly from Bernard Ramm, ”After Fundamentalism” and a book by N.T. Wright but I don”t know which. One was ”New Testament and the People of God” so maybe all are from that.
The difference between Barth and the historic view of inspiration is that Barth consciously builds the diastasis into his theology of revelation and inspiration so that matters of the humanity of scripture are taken in stride.
N.T. Wright interview in the advertising section of Christianity Today says, ‘Things like what to do with asylum seekers or education policy has crept into my preaching.’ It demonstratates how your theology impacts your preaching, as compared to a disembodied eschatology which causes Paul Jackson’s preaching to be devoid of any sort of engagement with things like that. ‘Love your wife’ and domestic concerns like that.
This approach is an excellent illustration of Barth’s split-ticket theology. He does not follow the old orthodox route and defend biblical history no matter what. He does not try to even out the unevenness of the historical record. He does not try to defend some version of the historical perfection of Scripture. On the other hand he does not believe that historical difficulties in Scripture invalidate its theology. Barth has attempted to come to terms with equal rights for all. One, historical science as understood in modern times, two, the actual nature of biblical history as it stands in the text, and three, the theological integrity of the historical element in Scripture. Both liberalism and orthodoxy fail to develop such a workable synthesis. Liberal Christianity grants too much to scientific history, and orthodox Christianity defends the perfection of biblical history.
Barth’s thesis creates a distance, an interval, between the Word of God and the text of holy Scripture. By creating this interval, Barth is able to grant historical and literary criticism of the text its rightful place, but at the same time manages not to surrender the theological integrity of holy Scirpture.
But if the controlling criterion for a particular story is its ability to legitimate a particular stance, whether Christian or not, we have collapsed the epistemology once more in the opposite direction, that of phenomenonalism. The historical evidence is only to be used, provided it functions as a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we wanted to see ourselves. This would be to deny the possibility of new stories, of subversion or modification to the stories we already tell ourselves. That way philosophically lies solipsism, as we have already seen, that way historically lies the closed mind. That way theologically lies fundamentalism, the corporate religious solipsism, that cannot bear the thought of a new revised story.
They believed strongly that the events concerning Israel and her fate were not bare events but possessed an inside meaning which transcended mere chronicle. Their interpretative grid for understanding inside events had to do with belief in a creator God and the fulfillment of his purposes for the whole world by means of actions concerning his covenant people. They believed, oddly from the perspective of modern western positivism, that the events in question were charged with a significance that related to all humans and all time. Whatever we think of their particular viewpoint we must say that they understood more about the real nature of history – that is, about the complex interaction of event and meaning – than has been grasped by the ardent proponents of scientific history in relatively recent times.
Symbols often function as social and/or cultural boundary markers. Those who observe them are insiders; those who do not are outsiders.
One distressing modern phenomenon is the spectacle of a would-be Christian positivism which imagines that God language is clear and unequivocal, and that one can have the kind of certainty about it which logical positivism accorded to scientific or even mathematical statements. This sort of fundamentalism is simply the upside down version of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic.
Claims to be telling a story about the creator and his world. If it allows this to collapse for a moment into a story about a god who is rescuing people out of the world, then it has abandoned something extremely fundamental in the world view. Many of the early fathers saw this very clearly. That is why they rejected Gnosticism. In fact even if Gnostic dualism were true, the story would still be public since if the world is a place of ruin and there exists a god who can save people from it, this is news that ought to be shared. But if this dualism is avoided, as it has not always been in various forms of post-enlightenment Christianity, not least fundamentalism, the publicness of the Christian claim is the more manifest. On this whole topic, see particularly Nubingen, 1989.
Antiochus decided (this was not an odd thing to do at that period) to ensure their loyalty by changing the function and direction of their central religious symbol so that it ceased to make them think independently and turned them in the direction of service to himself. He took over the Temple on December 25, 167 BC. Deliberately desecrating it so that Jews would no longer think of it as the place where they were reaffired as a unique people, he established worship of himself there instead. Page 158 of N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God
The temple became de facto the cultic shrine organized by those who had made a somewhat unsteady peace with Rome, while the rigorists looking on in impotent anger determined that they at least would be faithful to the covenant god by keeping his covenant charter to the utmost of their ability. If anyone was to be vindicated when the covenant god finally acted, it would surely be those who had thus demonstrated their unswerving loyalty to him.
Granted this mood it was perhaps inevitable that Herod the Great, 37-4 BC, would never be accepted as the genuine King of the Jews.