The past two days on holiday the weather has been wet and cold. Didn't stop us going out for a walk along the front at Aberdeen, getting soaked and cold but doing it for the coffee and bacon roll at The Pavilion cafe afterwards. As well as walking in the rain, I was putting up a couple of new blinds which needed the width adjusted before hanging them.
That's where Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics came in handy. During Holy Week I'd left my favourite volume IV.i lying around the living room so I could pick it up and browse in it at random when I had free time or coffee, or nothing on the TV I wanted to pay any attention to. It was an interesting experiment in spiritual reading piecemeal, or ad hoc theological reflection. It was well worthwhile – not the same as a determined, steady, continual reading through one of those impressively heavy volumes with their pages packed with granite theology mined from the deepest quarry of divine mystery.
A brief read at a paragraph became a page, then a bit more, then …the phone rang, or the tea was ready, or I was engaged in conversation. Over the week I probably had it in my hand several times a day. Sometimes it was like looking at Everest, the height of the Divine love. Other times it was like looking at Niagara, a cataract of passionate exposition of the cross. Or like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, vast, spacious, deep and utterly there, as that which puts us in our place. Times too when a line or two was quite enough to be going on with – and I wrote it down in the wee notebook, and thought about it – a lot.
Pages 259-273, are on the meaning of Jesus' temptations, indeed Jesus' temptability, from his baptism to Gethsemane. Reading these pages none of the metaphors above are exaggerations of Barth's theological capacity – Everest, Niagara, Grand Canyon – none of them answers fully to Barths exposition of the mysterious depths and wonders of the Divine reconciling love, or to the fixedness of the determined Yes of God in Christ, or to the height and majesty of the Divine purpose to redeem and reconcile and renew the image of God and the gift that is Creation and New Creation. Not many theologians compare with Barth when he takes off his shoes to stand on the holy ground around the cross. His interpretation of the Gethsemane prayer, "Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done…" was, for me, breathtaking, a masterpiece of imaginative hermeneutics and constructive Christology.
From the sublime to the ridiculous – remember the new blinds – well, cutting them to the right width is tricky, and it needs the end of the blind anchored so that it won't move as it's measured. Volume IV.i, still lying to hand on the coffee table, served perfectly. But all those jokes about big books and door-stops are mostly the words of the ignorant. It's no disrespect to Barth that one of his volumes comes in handy as a make-do weight. My real estimate of the Church Dogmatics is that while I was doing DIY, a volume was to hand!
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