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…