Hi Folks,
I have not been posting much recently for several reasons. I have been tired after a long year, I have just recently gotten myself engaged and I have been home visiting family and friends for the Christmas period. I am back now.
While I have been home in Taranaki for Christmas I have been making my way through Barth’s Romans again. I have also been cooking my way through my new Jamie Oliver cookbook, which has been both a therapeutic and frustrating exercise! On Barth, I have been thinking about my next few years research. I want to explore the way negation functions in Barth’s thought. I think that it provides a key to understanding the way that Barth’s thought unfolds and develops. Here are a few small bits that have stuck with me over the last few days from Barth:
Precisely because the ‘No’ of God is all embracing it is also his ‘Yes’. (on Rom 1:16, p38)
God, who confronts all human disturbance with an unconditional command ‘Halt’, and all human rest with an equally unconditional ‘Advance’; God the ‘Yes’ in our ‘No’ and the ‘No’ in our ‘Yes’, the First and the Last and consequently, the Unknown, who is never a known thing in the midst of our known things. (on Rom (9:1, p 331)
Key to understanding the way Barth’s dialectical method functions is understanding his use of negation (I think). This is where I want to go. With my work on Gregory of Nyssa which I am undertaking this year I think it would be interesting to see how far Barth maintains a cappadocian apophaticism (after 1936 in particular).
Scott Kirkland
