RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
The Barth/Bultmann cartoon isn’t meant to be funny, I think, it’s meant to illustrate a lack of common notation, language, betwen two supposed theologians. The cartoon is more like a subtle mock of both men for their irrelevance to the needs of man and the churches. They could not talk theology between one another for lack of common terminological meaning. (!) Supposedly both churchmen, surely both professors and German-speakers, they inhabit incompatible linguistic universes and cannot live one in the others’. And both are responsible for promulgating the Faith!
What a disaster!
If churchmen have no common language
amongst themselves, why should anyone else listen to them?
I had to read both men and never liked either, still do not. Two illustrations why not, from guild tradition at Union:
1- When Barth answered a student’s question, it was in Barth’s terms. When Tillich answered a student’s question, it was in the student’s terms.
2- One day, his students arranged Bultmann’s pulpit Bible so that when he opened it to read the lesson he saw only one word: KERYGMA.
Bultmann was the modern Abelard, the Nominalist, and so also the precursor of McLuhan and narrative over nature, aka, what I say and not your lying eyes.
Barth, the hyper-abstract Realist, thought that Bultmann had nothing relevant or helpful for the church’s evangelical (missionary) responsibility. Barth was right about that. Thing is, neither did Barth, as shown by his most prominent American representative, Reinhold Niebuhr, a functioning communist.
Bultmann’s reduction of Christianity to a mere narrative, unhooked from history even, issued in the bathetic Harvey Cox. Barth’s abstraction of Christianity into freezing transcendence issued in the sanctimonious legalism of modern soi-disant evangelicals.
Both men harmed the churches.
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
