Beyond Rivalry

(If you're an Eddie Izzard fan, "affirming and denying" -- or "confirming and denying" -- automatically conjures a dynamic rendition of the U.S. National Anthem... Tried to find a clip of "God Attack the Queen" on YouTube but couldn't)

Two things interested me in this post today by Richard Beck at Experimental Theology:

1.  This side comment, from John Franke's Barth for Armchair Theologians; seems to relate to my previous post, Why Church?, and the slippery slope Merton identifies between 'clean peace' and self-righteousness, which comes from a need to prove to myself and others that I am right:

"One of the chief places where [Karl] Barth identified contemporary idolatry was in the practice of 'religion.' It is particularly in religion that we see most pointedly the tendency to confuse the distinction between God and human beings. Human beings desire power and security along with an assurance that their activities and pursuits are right and above reproach. In order to secure a sense of divine blessing, human beings create gods in their own image from the resources of their own imaginations and create religion to serve the gods they have made. Religion is then pressed into the service of its creators in order to provide justification, sanction, and self-legitimation for their decisions and actions. Even a cursory reading of human religious history, Christian and otherwise, provides numerous examples of such attempts at justification and self-legitimation along with the establishment of power and oppression that often attends it. When human beings talk about God in such a way as to make their beliefs and aspirations the locus of ultimate truth or to claim divine sanction for institutions that are all too human and flawed, they become guilty of idolatry and ungodliness."

 

 

2. Beck's main point for this post is about Barth's concept of a theological dialectical. That's a mouthful just to say that it's easy to cling too firmly to our own descriptions of God, and just as easy to cling too firmly to the view that what we can't describe doesn't exist: 

"On the one hand, we have the Fundamentalist Mistake. The Fundamentalist Mistake is made by those who feel that their statements about God correspond directly to the reality of God. This stance is self-evidently problematic in that one's understanding of God is taken to BE God. Which is, essentially, a form of idolatry.

"In contrast to the Fundamentalist Mistake we see the Mystical Mistake. (BTW, these terms are my own. Barth called the Fundamentalist Mistake and the Mystical Mistake the 'dogmatic' and 'self-critical' approaches respectively.) In the Mystical Mistake one concludes that no positive statements about God can ever be made. Again, this stance is self-evidently problematic. If NOTHING can ever be properly said about God then God becomes an empty concept, devoid of any meaning.

"How, then, are we to proceed to speak about God? ... Barth suggests that we follow what he calls the dialectical method. Specifically, in the dialectical method we balance between the Fundamentalist and Mystic by both affirming and denying the descriptions we make of God. What is critical in this method is that it remains dynamic. If we settle too much with affirmation we fall into the abyss of the Fundamentalist. By contrast, if we settle too much with negation, where nothing can be said of God, we fall into the opposing chasm of vacuous Mysticism."

As Barth himself says, we need to understand that "all such information, whether it be positive or negative, is not really information, but always either dogma or self-criticism. On this narrow ridge of rock one can only walk."

Even self-criticism seems to me a kind of dogma, a view one holds, a view that can seem as true and real as an object we touch -- though that object is made up of atoms and, mostly, space, and it doesn't really 'have' a colour.