FEARING GOD AND NOT THE WORLD

Readings: CD 1.1 Sec. 1-4

The Church should fear God and not fear the world. But only if and as it fears God need it cease to fear the world. CD 1.1.3,73

It is evident from the beginning that Barth’s chief concern in writing the CD. He is concerned first and foremost with the Church of Jesus Christ. Many of us like to think of ourselves as pastor-theologians.  Barth was the real thing.  From the very first word, his concern is with the church and how it proclaims and lives into the Word of God.  He ends section 3 with one of my favorite quotes, “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.” Loosely translated it means, “It has not pleased God to save [his] people through [theological] arguments.” 

God saves God’s people through faith and our theology is an expression of that faith. One of the most fundamental expressions of that faith is the proclamation of God’s Word in the church.  In other words, preaching is fundamental to the faithfulness of the church.  Barth reaches this conclusion with a winding and often confusing (shocker!) discussion of the failings of both Roman Catholic and Modernist/pietistic preaching. Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that traditional (as opposed to modern evangelical) Reformed and Lutheran theologies of preaching find the Goldilocks place on the spectrum between aloof Catholic preaching and overly-sentimentalized and personalized pietistic preaching. The trouble with Roman Catholic preaching for Barth is that it relegates the proclamation of the word to a backwater behind ritual and sacrament.  For the Modernist/pietistic traditions, the preacher becomes the point.  (Here we see a rejection of Phillips Brooks’ famous description of preaching as “truth communicated through personality.”)

Hidden in the midst of this long discussion of the theological project and the nature of proclamation is a warning to the Church.  The Church should fear God and not fear the world. It is a warning that grows out of the conclusion above that the traditional Reformed and Lutheran churches occupy a unique place where the Word might be most rightly proclaimed.  The inherent danger of being a Church where the Word of God is rightly preached means that it is from that Church that the Word of God might be rightly heard. 

That is a dangerous thing.

The word of God rarely comforts the comfortable.  It does not seek to affirm the self-satisfied and power is given no quarter in the gospel of Christ.  The Word of God rightly proclaimed declares a truth that is God’s and God’s alone and cannot be imitated in the world. To have faith in the Word of God is by definition to reject the words of the World.

            Writing in the context of Europe in the post WWI era and the years of Hitler’s assent, Barth knew what it meant to live under threat from the world and the consequences that might befall the church if it dared to proclaim the Word of God over and against the word of the world.  So he offers his stark warning.

            I wonder how often we really heed that advice? How often do we preachers proclaim the Word of God with Barth’s warning in mind?  We all try to proclaim boldly and let the chips fall where they may, but I would wager to say that I am not the only one who, from time to time, keeps a firm hand on the reigns just in case.

            Now to be fair, the government (the world) is not getting ready to pour through the front doors of the church and clap us in irons and drag us away.  The world is not about to shut down our churches or silence its preachers or outlaw our faith (despite the Chicken-little-esq protests from some of the more hysterical corners of the church).  We do not live under the kind of threat that so many of Barth’s colleagues did, but still we keep a hand on the reigns always ready to pull back a little bit if we run too far afoul of “the world.”

            The reality for many preachers is that the “world” we fear is not government or culture or even society as a whole.  It is that person without whose gift the budget will fall into deficit.  It is that one louder than the others voice in the congregation whose opinions are rarely in line with our own.  It is the fear that we move from preaching to “meddling.”  Those people in our churches are no more of an existential threat than the feds, yet we still fear them and too often preach out of that fear even though we know that we are called to this sort of bold proclamation that is formed by an ethic in which the Church fears God and not the world.

So why not let loose the Word of God and let the chips fall where they may?

Pastoral care.

I agree with Barth that we are called to fear God and not the world. If our unwillingness to push boundaries in our preaching or challenge the assumptions of the age is rooted in fear of the consequences at the hands of the world, then our fear is misplaced. But if our hand on the reigns is there not out of fear of the world but out of care of our people, I think we can safely embrace Barth’s charge while also responding to the needs of the people God has put in our charge.

Part of the Word of God we proclaim is the love of God for all of God’s people.  Our preaching should take seriously those things in the world needing the challenge of the gospel, however we should always remember that there is more gospel to be understood than the gospel we understand.  In other words, there is more to see of the Word of God than what can be seen from where we stand in any given moment.  To respect the differences in our midst and to respect those people who think differently than we do is part of the living out of our proclamation. 

            As a pastor, I have had to learn to trust my listener as much as I trust myself as a speaker and, in doing that, trust the Holy Spirit to move my words in and through the heart of the listener in a way that communicates the Word of God in a loving and hopeful way. Doing that has allowed me to loosen up the reigns and proclaim the Word of God with greater freedom. It has allowed me to fear the world less and God a little more.

Not everyone who hears me preach agrees with me.

That’s ok. 

That’s church.

WHY I AM DOING THIS

This project began two or three stutter starts ago.  For a few years, I have thought it would be both interesting and educational to wade through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics after having let them generally gather dust since graduation from seminary in 2001. 

Like many Presbyterian seminarians, I left seminary with a full set of the Dogmatics, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and an abiding sense that the church really needed me to teach it and save it from…something.  Thankfully nearly 17 years of parish ministry have taught me that it is I who needs the saving and I who has a lot of learning to do.  Thus my return trip to the briar patch of sentence structure that would drive Faulkner to drink (more), Heidegger-worthy density of thought, and enduring beauty that is “The Dog.”

As providence would have it, I am starting this project as I begin my second year in a new call at Fondren Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.  Fondren is an outpost of progressivism in a broadly conservative church culture.  Jackson is the first place I have lived in my ministry with as many Presbyterian churches (or nearly so) as Baptist.  Of course, here they are Presbyterian Church in America rather than Fondren’s Presbyterian Church (USA).  We share the same name but not much else.  Sort of like those cousins who get together for weddings and funerals but otherwise share nothing more than a statistical similarity in their DNA.  Barth is not part of their broadly accepted canon.

This is a dogmatic church culture.  Meaning and convictions are set in concrete and etched in stone for many of my neighbors and colleagues.  And as easy as it is to point at them and declare, “j’accuse,” I recognize that I can be equally inflexible in my own thinking.  Feeling indicted by my own recalcitrance, I remembered one of my favorite quotes from Barth.  “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flue concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog.” [CD1.1.3] In other words, God speaks to us through the things we find beautiful (concertos and flowers) and things we find ugly (dead dogs and even theology other than our own).  I need to open my ears to more than the theology that is beautiful to my ears.

Before I can really hear the theology of the “other,” I need to revisit my own and relearn to articulate it on its own terms.  By returning to this formative text, I hope to see how my mind has changed, my theology evolved, and my understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ has grown.

I have divided the 14 volumes of the Church Dogmatics into 48 weeks of reading.  Grace during Holy Week, my birthday, Christmas, and a wild card week seemed reasonable.  Each week I will post a short reflection on something that captured me in that week’s reading.  If you are reading this, thank you and bless you!  If this post (and the ones that follow for that matter) is just existing unread in cyberspace, so be it.  The point of this project is not to be read but to read.

So, that being said, here we go…