Reformed Dogmatics in Dialogue

Sujets

• Calvinist
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• History of religions
• Calvinism
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683596189
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

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REFORMED DOGMATICS in DIALOGUE
The Theology of Karl Barth and Jonathan Edwards
Edited by UCHE ANIZOR & KYLE C. STROBEL
STUDIES IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
Reformed Dogmatics in Dialogue: The Theology of Karl Barth and Jonathan Edwards
Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology
Copyright 2022 Uche Anizor and Kyle C. Strobel
Lexham Academic, an imprint of Lexham Press
1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from ESV ® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ® ), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public Domain.
Print ISBN 9781683596172
Digital ISBN 9781683596189
Library of Congress Control Number 2022933921
Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Andrew Sheffield, John Barach, Mandi Newell
Cover Design: Brittany Schrock
We would like to dedicate this volume to the numerous theologians at Biola
University who have helped to create a rich and vibrant context for theological
reflection. Thank you for your continued willingness to pore over difficult texts ,
wrestle through the implications of Christian belief, and bear witness to the
calling of a theologian as a theologian for the church.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Edwards and Barth in Conversation
An Introduction
Uche Anizor and Kyle C. Strobel
1. God
Kyle C. Strobel
2. Scripture
Doug Sweeney and Kevin Vanhooozer
3. Election
Christina N. Larsen
4. Christ
Darren Sumner
5. Holy Spirit
Seng Kong Tan
6. Creation
Uche Anizor
7. Aesthetics
Amy Plantinga Pauw
8. Philosophy
Kenneth Oakes
9. Humanity
Kyle C. Strobel
10. Sin
Marc Cortez and Daniel Houck
11. Atonement
Adam J. Johnson
12. Moral Theology
Kirk J. Nolan
13. Church
Matt Jenson
14. Last Things
Nathan Hitchcock
Citations: Works of Jonathan Edwards
Subject Index
Name Index
Scripture Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to begin by thanking Biola University, and more specifically Talbot School of Theology, for creating the space and providing the release time (in Uche’s case) to wrestle through the great theological minds of the Christian tradition. It is rare to find a place where you can walk out of a class on Aquinas to a reading group on Maximus to a faculty discussion on Pseudo-Dionysius, but those sorts of interactions are not unusual at Biola. More specifically, the Classical Theology program has provided a place to read the great texts of the Christian tradition with eager-minded students and collaborative faculty, and we are both encouraged that this sort of recovery is still taking place within a distinctively evangelical context. We hope that this volume encourages this sort of dialogue as we seek to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in this present evil age.
We would like to thank Lexham Press for catching the vision of this volume and all the contributors who were willing to put two difficult thinkers into conversation. We hope that it was a fruitful endeavor personally and that it will bear fruit in the minds of students and scholars alike. A special thanks goes out to Todd Hains at Lexham for working with us on this volume, as well as those individuals who were willing to read material for us. Thanks to Ty Kieser and Scuter Koo, for your willingness to read drafts for Kyle and provide meaningful and insightful feedback; it is a blessing to have seen you both develop as scholars. We would also like to thank Barnabas Kwok for his willingness to carefully edit a draft of this volume. And thanks to Georgio Khachadourian for compiling our many indexes.
All but two of the chapters of this volume were written explicitly for this project, and so we would also like to thank the publisher and journal that allowed us to reproduce edited and adapted versions of two pieces. We thank Blackwell Publishing for allowing us to reproduce Kyle’s chapter “ Barth and Edwards ” from The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth , edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 495–506 (in this volume reworked as chapter 1, “ God ”), as well as Pro Ecclesia for allowing us to reproduce portions of Matt Jenson’s “  ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There Is Freedom’: Barth on Ecclesial Agency ” in Pro Ecclesia 24:4 (2015): 517–37 (found here in modified form as chapter 13, “ Church ”).
Finally, we’d like to thank our families for their constant support as we pursue the joyous task of writing about and reading theologians like Edwards and Barth.
ABBREVIATIONS
CD
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics , 4 vols. Edited and translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975.
KD
Kirchliche Dogmatik
WJE
Works of Jonathan Edwards , 26 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–2008)
WJEO
Works of Jonathan Edwards Online . Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. http://edwards.yale.edu/archive/ .
EDWARDS AND BARTH IN CONVERSATION
An Introduction
Uche Anizor and Kyle C. Strobel
Trailed by controversy, heralded and revered as giants in Reformed theology, and yet questioned regarding their true commitment to it, Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth remain two of the most influential theologians of the modern era. A case could be made for Edwards being the greatest English-language—not just American—theologian ever, and for Barth as the greatest German-language theologian to date. A cursory glance at the sheer volume of writings produced by both men is testimony enough of their importance. However, it is the not mere volume of work that makes one great, but the range, quality, depth, sophistication, timeliness, and prophetic insightfulness of that work. On these points, few, if any, surpass these two modern theologians.
Regardless of its importance in weighing the impact of each thinker, the volume of their output is certainly a reason for the breadth of secondary literature. For both thinkers, their corpus has raised questions concerning development and radical shifts and has led to schools of interpretation based on these possible trajectories. The online edition of Edwards’s Works housed at Yale numbers seventy-three volumes, composed mainly of sermons but covering notebooks, letters, and a variety of other works. Edwards’s interests and work cover the whole range of thorny theological issues— The End of Creation , The Nature of True Virtue , Original Sin , Freedom of the Will , The History of the Work of Redemption , and Religious Affections , to name a few—not to mention his penetrating analyses of the religious awakenings of his day. Not much in Edwards’s work was rote or simplistic, narrow or detached; there was a pastoral care and intellectual seriousness to his writings that few of his heirs have been able to replicate. As for Barth , the voluminous Church Dogmatics is the clear reference point for the range, depth, and insightfulness of his theology. However, to capture fully his powers as a theologian, one would also be directed to his Romans commentary; his astute analysis of nineteenth-century Protestant theology; his readings of Calvin, Anselm, and the Reformed Confessions; and Evangelical Theology , not to mention his countless occasional pieces and shorter studies such as Nein! , Credo , Christ and Adam , and The Humanity of God . His “letter of commendation” is the various influential theologians stimulated by serious engagement with his thought: T. F. Torrance, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Hans Frei, Colin Gunton, and John Webster, to name just a few.

DIVERGENT CONTEXTS
But the better and more pertinent question facing readers of this book is this: why bring these two theologians into conversation? At first glance, these two giants could not be more different. Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in the early New England colonies. Karl Barth was born on the continent, in Basel specifically, on May 10, 1886. These were two men inhabiting two quite different times, countries, and cultures. Edwards lived in that early modern period punctuated by the Enlightenment and plied his trade in an environment increasingly saturated by au courant British and continental philosophy. Barth’s life and career straddled two eras: the waning years of the late modern period and the contemporary period that followed the Second World War. While history would come to see Edwards’s day as one of relative peace, Edwards’s own home was used as a barracks housing soldiers, protecting his town from Native American raids in a period of fluctuating tension. Almost the entirety of Barth’s work was done against the backdrop of war—including some of the bloodiest wars in human history. Although not always directly so, his theology is a political theology. Edwards’s theology, similarly, was political, but the similarities are merely formal. Reading along the history of redemption, as he understood it, Edwards’s politics saw God’s hand protecting and guiding Britain and her colonies against the Papists and her allies.
Not surprisingly, both came from religious households, but of a different cast. Edwards’s father, Timothy, was a successful revival preacher and pastor of East Windsor, Connecticut, where he served for over sixty years. 1 A Puritan in outlook, he was the strict but loving father of eleven children—ten girls and one boy, Jonathan. He was also, notably, the son-in-law of the influential Solomon Stoddard, minister of Northampton (which would become Jonathan Edwards’s own long-term pastorate). Barth’s father, Fritz, was chiefly a professor, first at the anti-liberal College of Preachers in Basel and later at the