Learning to be a “contrast community” and living in “companionship with the world” belong together. The church walks among others in the world as a community that inhabits a contrasting vision formed by the biblical narrative, something others can therefore see and taste and grasp. But far from living in a withdrawn or oppositional way among others, the church also walks with a spirit of companionship because of what it knows the good news of God to be. It knows that it shares common life and language and culture with others, and shares common aspirations for wholeness of life. The church thus finds in contrast and companionship the twin qualities that together constitute the way of the church with the world.
Ray S. Anderson’s Doctrine of Humanity as a Contribution to a Theology of Culture: A Case Study Approach
Ray Sherman Anderson (1925–2009), a professor of theology who served as a parish pastor, always insisted that theology and ministry go hand-in-hand. Like Karl Barth, Prof. Anderson articulated a theology of and for the church based on God’s own ministry of revelation and reconciliation in the world. As professor and pastor, he modeled in his dealings with his students and congregations an incarnational, evangelical passion for the healing of humanity by Jesus Christ, who is both God’s self-revelation to us and the reconciliation of our broken humanity to the triune God. His gift of uniting suffering and alienated humans to Christ existing as community was a recurrent motif throughout his life, ministry, and works.
A New Impetus to the Theology of Religions from Karl Barth’s Thought
Attempts to discern Barth’s perspective on the relationship between world religions and Revelation are complicated by the fact that Barth speaks of “religion” almost solely in the context of the proclivity within the Christian Church to define and understand its faith in terms of human capacity for piety and receptivity of the divine. What then can be said of the possibility of Revelation in religions outside the Christian confession? Recognizing that “certain possibilities for adjudicating a theological problem which Barth himself abandoned” may still prove helpful in facilitating and developing this ongoing discussion, this paper examines passages that were deleted from Church Dogmatics in its final form, along with relevant insights from Barth’s other published works which concern themselves with the relationship of religions and Revelation, and the proper posture Christ disciples ought to take toward other worldviews, toward the “gods” and their followers. This paper reads in Barth the conviction that while all gods, all emulations and arrogations of the one God of Israel, are “nothing” insofar as they are subjective products of human imagination, their derivative and creaturely nature not only exerts power over their creators but also in its creatureliness may have some collateral value in testifying to the Revelation of God in Christ since these gods are conditioned by their birth into a world suffused with “little lights.” Accordingly, this paper concludes that, with the love that must attend Christ disciples’ interaction with all creatures, including the “gods,” Christianity in its proclamation of the true Word exposes falsity wherever it is recognized: within and without the Christian Church.