Barth's Ontology of Sin and Grace

Barth's Ontology of Sin and Grace PDF

Author: Shao Kai Tseng

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0429680783

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In recent Barth studies it has been argued that a key to understanding the theologian’s opposition to natural theology is his rejection of substantialist ontology. While this is true to an extent, this book argues that it is a mistake to see Barth’s ‘actualistic ontology’ as diametrically opposed to traditional substantialism. Probing into Barth’s soteriological hamartiology in Church Dogmatics, III-IV, a largely neglected aspect of these volumes in recent debates on his understanding of being and act, it shows how his descriptions of sin, nature, and grace shed light on the precise manners in which his actualistic ontology operates on both a substance grammar of being and a process grammar of becoming, while rejecting the metaphysics underlying both grammars. Looking at issues such as original sin, universal salvation and human will, Barth is shown to be radically redefining the relationship between humans, their actions and the divine. This book argues that human ‘nature’ is the total determination of the human being ‘from above’ by God’s grace in Christ, while the existential dimension of the human being is also totally determined ‘from below’ by the Adamic history of sin. This serves to demonstrate Barth’s endeavours in eliminating the vestiges of natural theology within the Western tradition handed down from Augustine. By exploring these issues this book offers a fresh insight into Barth’s relationship with his theological forbears. As such, it will be vital reading for any scholar of Barth studies, the problem of evil, and theological ontology.

The Gravity of Sin

The Gravity of Sin PDF

Author: Matt Jenson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-02-08

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0567577880

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Matt Jenson argues that the image of being 'curved in on oneself' is the best paradigm for understanding sin relationally, that it has sufficient explanatory breadth and depth to be of service to contemporary Christian theology. He looks to Augustine as the Christian source for this image in his various references to humanity's turn to itself, though the threads of a relational account of sin are not drawn together with any systematic consequence until Martin Luther's description of 'homo incurvatus in se' in his commentary on Romans. Luther radicalizes Augustine's conception by applying this relational view of sin to the totus homo and by emphasizing its appearance, above all, in homo religiosus. The Western tradition of sin understood paradigmatically as pride has been recently called into question by feminist theologians. Daphne Hampson's critique of Luther on this front is considered and critiqued. Though she is right to call attention to the insufficiency of his and Augustine's myopic focus on pride, the question remains whether 'incurvatus in se' can operate paradigmatically as an umbrella concept covering a far wider range of sins. Karl Barth's extension of 'incurvatus in se' to apply more broadly to pride, sloth and falsehood suggests that incurvature can do just that.

Disruptive Grace

Disruptive Grace PDF

Author: George Hunsinger

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780802849403

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Among the studies of Karl Barth's thought, no other work covers, as this one does, the areas of political, doctrinal, and ecumenical theology in single compass. Written by a leading Barth scholar, Disruptive Grace is unique not only for its range of study, depth of insight, and accuracy of presentation, but also for the way it displays the heart as well as the mind of the great Swiss pastor and theologian. Each of the book's three main sections consists of five major essays. Part 1 relates Barth to contemporary issues of social justice, war, and peace. Part 2 covers christology, pneumatology, the Trinity, scriptural interpretation, and the question of universal salvation. Part 3 discusses the Reformed tradition as Barth understood it in relation to Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, modern liberalism, evangelical conservatism, and the postliberal theology of the contemporary Yale school. The book concludes with a meditation on the saving significance of Christ's death, a theme that runs throughout the book. The result of more than twenty-five years of intensive Barth research, this volume provides scholars, teachers, and students with a thorough discussion of the twentieth century's most significant Christian thinker.

Commanding Grace

Commanding Grace PDF

Author: Daniel L. Migliore

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2010-08-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0802865704

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this seminal volume, contemporary theologians revisit the theological ethics of Karl Barth as it bears on such topics as the moral significance of Jesus Christ, the Christian as ethical agent, the just war theory, the relationship between doctrines of the atonement and modern penal justice systems, the virtues and limits of democracy, and the difference between an economy of competition and possession and an economy of grace. Book jacket.

Sinless Flesh

Sinless Flesh PDF

Author: Rafeal Bello

Publisher: Lexham Press

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1683594061

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Did Christ assume a fallen human nature? "What is not assumed is not healed." So goes the Chalcedonian maxim articulated by Gregory of Nazianzus regarding the nature and extent of Christ's work in assuming a human nature. But what is the nature of that assumption? If Christ is to stand in solidarity with us, must he have assumed not merely a human nature, but specifically a fallen human nature? In Sinless Flesh: A Critique of Karl Barth's Fallen Christ, Rafael Bello argues against the assertion made by Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, and those who follow them that Christ assumed a fallen nature. Through retrieval of patristic, medieval, and Reformed orthodox theologians, Bello argues that a proper understanding of human nature, trinitarian inseparable operations, and the habitual grace-grace of union distinction leads to the conclusion that the assertion that Christ assumed a fallen human nature is at odds with faithful theological and historical understandings of the incarnation. Readers interested in theological retrieval for issues in contemporary theology will find a faithful model and way forward for a thorny issue in modern dogmatics.

Absolute Person and Moral Experience

Absolute Person and Moral Experience PDF

Author: Nathan D. Shannon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0567707385

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Presenting a neo-Calvinist account of human moral experience, this book is an advance upon the tradition of Augustinian moral theology. The first two chapters are theological interpretations of Genesis 2:17 and 3:6 respectively. Chapter 3 approaches the neo-Calvinist notion of God as absolute person through a consideration of theologies of human reason and history. Chapter 4 considers the relationship between absolute person and classical trinitarianism, and the significance of absolute person for accommodation, hermeneutics, and the Creator/creature relation and distinction. The fifth chapter considers the role of the incarnation in Bavinck's thought, and thus provides a backdrop for reflection upon absolute person from a biblical theological point of view. Shannon concludes with the claim that, according to the Bavincks, Vos, and Van Til, human moral experience is the product of a divine self-expression primarily in the Son.

Trinity and Election

Trinity and Election PDF

Author: Shao Kai Tseng

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0567709302

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Challenging Bruce McCormack's paradigm of post-Kantian Barth scholarship, this book builds on the interpretative model that Sigurd Baark developed in 2018. This model interprets Barth's innovative adoption of an Anselmian mode of theological speculation, against the intellectual-historical background of the idealist tradition of speculative metaphysics that culminated in Hegel. This book argues that Barth adopted the Anselmian mode of speculation in which immediate self-identity between subject, object, and act is found in the triune God alone, while the speculative identity that enables human knowledge of God is none other than the identity between God-in-and-for-Godself and God-for-us. Exploring the nationalistic dimension of speculative metaphysics in 19th-century Germany, Tseng identifies this as an important aspect of the context of Barth's development of a Christocentric form of speculative theology.

The Analogy of Grace

The Analogy of Grace PDF

Author: Gerald McKenny

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-03-18

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0191614874

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Once considered inimical to ethics, Karl Barth's theology is now rightly recognized for the central role ethics plays in it. But can Barth be safely placed in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology or does he offer a challenge to the latter? Gerald McKenny argues that the claim that God not only establishes the good from eternity but also brings it about in time is of fundamental importance to Barth's mature ethics. The good confronts us from the site of its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, who has accomplished it in our place. The result is a vision of the moral life as a human analogy to God's grace, a vision which contrasts with the bourgeois vision of the moral life as an expression of human capability. Barth's moral theology is presented here as the attempt to reorder ethical thought and practice in light of this fundamental claim. This lucid and well-argued study is the most comprehensive treatment of Barth's ethics to date, offering a thorough account of the development of Barth's ethical thought and a wide-ranging analysis of its chief concepts and arguments. McKenny explains why certain widespread assumptions about Barth's moral theology are mistaken and explores the rich, complex, and often surprising ways in which Barth's position engages the traditions of Christian ethics and modern continental moral thought. Above all, McKenny shows why Barth's moral theology deserves our attention in spite of, or rather because of, its uneasy fit in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology.

Karl Barth's Analogy of Beauty

Karl Barth's Analogy of Beauty PDF

Author: Andrew Dunstan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1000517128

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of Karl Barth’s view of beauty. For over fifty years, scholars have assumed Barth recovered traditional belief in God’s beauty but refused to entertain any relationship between this and more familiar natural and artistic beauties. Hans Urs von Balthasar was the first to offer this interpretation, and his conclusion has been echoed ever since, rendering Barth’s view of beauty irrelevant to work in theological aesthetics. This volume continues the late-twentieth-century revision of Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth by arguing that this too is a significant misunderstanding of his theology. Andrew Dunstan demonstrates that, through an encounter with fatalistic forms of Reformed theology, Brunner’s charges that his dogmatics were irrelevant and medieval thought, Barth gradually developed an analogy of divine, ecclesial and worldly beauty with all the theological, christocentric and actualistic hallmarks of his previous forms of analogy. This not only yields valuable new insight into Barth’s view of analogy but also provides a much-needed foundation for a distinctively Protestant and post-Barthian approach to theological aesthetics.