Chopsticks

In a recent email correspondence, I was telling a friend that I have a dead German boyfriend, and his name is Deitrich Bonhoeffer—that I’m reading him and Karl Barth for a class.

Her response...

I regret that I did not study enough Bonhoeffer in school. But I definitely fell in love with good ol' Karl. I think some of his writing keeps me a Christian when I become disillusioned or dismayed by the church. What do you think of Barth? Sometimes I find his writing so opaque that I have to read passages of it out loud, slowly and deliberately until that "ah ha" moment hits. To be perfectly honest, that ah ha moment sometimes takes three or four vocal readings. But you know, when you hit that breakthrough, it feels like Handel's Messiah ... HALLELUJAH!

To be honest, with Barth, I sometimes never hear Handel's Messiah!

Well, this is one of the reasons we're friends. Some people fall in love with sexy movie stars. Me and my friend? We like the studious theologians...preferably wearing glasses, probably sporting cardigans, usually at the pub—not to get plastered but to smoke pipes and talk philosophy over a few pints. And I guess they can be dead, too.

She's right. Barth is opaque. You know when you have more question marks than exclamation points in your annotations, you've got yourself an opaque one. And if you ever start thinking you're smart, just start reading Barth, and you’ll quickly discover you know nothing. Barth's not messin' around. Don't think for a second that you can casually skim through his Dogmatics—all bajillion trillion pages of it. Oh no.

From last night's homework, in honor of my friend, here's a little Barth on ethics:

"Before he [man, woman] was, before the world was, God drew him to Himself when he destined him to obedience to His command. But, strangely enough, it is just because of this that the impossible—sin—presses so insistently. For man is not content simply to be the answer to this question by the grace of God. He wants to be like God. He wants to know of himself (as God does) what is good and evil. He therefore wants to give this answer himself and of himself. So, then, as a result and in prolongation of the fall, we have ethics, or, rather, the multifarious ethical systems, the attempted human answers to the ethical question. But this question can be solved only as it was originally put—by the grace of God, by the fact that this allows man actually to be the answer."

What the heck, you ask, is he saying? It’s interesting. Ethics always sounds good. To pose the question, "is this ethical?" makes you sound like you’re very moral and very good. And I think what Barth is saying is...um, no. Try again. We only need ethics because of our sin in the first place. With ethics, we think we can somehow determine what's right and wrong, which means we think we can be God, who is the ultimate judge of right and wrong. This shouldn't really come as a surprise. We were told this would happen.

In Genesis 3:5, the serpent tells Eve that she will certainly not die if she eats the forbidden truth. Rather her "eyes will be opened," she will be "like God, knowing good and evil." Which is so not a good thing, evidenced by the world we live in.

It's a shame we need ethics at all! I'd rather not have to be ethical.

Barth goes on to say that Jesus doesn't give the answer, but "by God's grace, he is the answer to the ethical question put by God's grace."

I'm not sure I really hear Handel's Messiah. Maybe more like Chopsticks...but...babysteps.