Barth – Page 2 – An und für sich

Back in the summer, I posted an announcement regarding my forthcoming book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission. I am pleased to announce that the book has now been released in the United States through Cascade Books, in their Theopolitical Visions series. Ben Myers has graciously posted an excerpt from chapter 5 of the book entitled “John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History” on his Faith and Theology blog. Should you wish to have the book ordered for your own personal or institutional libraries, U.S. readers can now purchase the book at a web discount from the publisher here. Outside of the U.S. the book will be released at the end of this month by SCM Press as part of its Veritas series, and can currently be ordered at a discount here.

Here are the endorsements for the book as provided by Stanley Hauerwas, Graham Ward, and Nicholas M. Healy:

“A rare gift—a critic from whom you learn. Though I do not agree with all of his criticisms of my work, Kerr—drawing imaginatively and creatively on the work of Troeltsch and Barth—has rightly framed the questions central to my and Yoder’s project. We are in his debt for having done so. In this book, Kerr not only establishes himself as one of the most able readers of my and Yoder’s work, but he is clearly a theologian in his own right. We will have much to learn from in the future.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

“This is a timely book that traverses twentieth century theology to develop a distinctive understanding of church engagement with the world. Finely executed and acutely discerning, it opens up an ecclesiology that is neither culturally accommodating nor counter-cultural. Conceiving the church as fundamentally dispossessive and missionary, Kerr announces a genuinely apocalyptic Christian politics. This is excellent theology for the up and coming generation.”
—Graham Ward, Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester

“This is a really exciting book: engaging, provocative, and—above all—constructive. Kerr seeks to reaffirm the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history in the face of modernity’s attempts to subsume Christ into our history. In spite of the complexity of its material, this fascinating book is so remarkably clear throughout that I found it hard to put down. It should not be ignored.”
-Nicholas M. Healy, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Associate Dean, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. John’s University, Queens, New York

For those interested, I am also reposting the book description and table of contents in hiding.

Continue reading “Christ, History and Apocalyptic released in the U.S.” →

With my post-Agamben eyes, and more recently in light of Anthony’s suggestion at the AAR that “God” should be aligned with the “never-living,” I took particular note of the places in Barth’s (rather laborious) exposition of the attributes of God where he talks about God’s life. In the section on God’s constancy, the main move that Barth makes to distance his concept of God from the traditional notion of impassibility is to understand God’s constancy as his life. We can’t think of God’s impassibility as a lack of movement, since that would mean that God is dead. He also wraps up the section on God’s eternity by saying that we must understand God’s life as eternal, to keep us from veering back into an abstract concept of eternity, etc. (I haven’t read the “glory” section yet — the end of the eternity section is what prompted this post.)

My question: Why not treat God’s “life” as a separate attribute?

Category: Barth

Christ, History and Apocalyptic released in the U.S.

Barth on the Attributes of God

Althusser on Barth