Karl Barth the fundamentalist

Karl Barth is a pleasure to read. I guess I should add my fundamentalist caveat here and say that I have strong disagreements with him in certain areas (for example, we differ on inerrancy). Nonetheless the bit of his Church Dogmatics that I have read I found quite enjoyable (though at times he was not particularly lucid). I was quite startled, for example, to find a couple comments that resemble very much something a fundamentalist would say. I have included them for your pleasure here.

"Because in heresy, [unbelief] appears simultaneously as a form of faith, here it becomes serious, and there may and there must be conflict, between faith and heresy" (Church Dogmatics I/1.2).

"So different is the Church's interpretation from that of heretics that the question threateningly enough arises, whether what is involved on each side is not some quite different theme, whether the opposing difference of belief ought not perhaps to be regarded merely as unbelief" (I/1.2).

I find militancy so refreshing.

And just to realign myself with the fundamentalists in our audience, how about we close with a similar line from J. Gresham Machen's Christianity and Liberalism:

"Truth cannot be stated clearly at all without being set over against error" (174).

Karl Barth the fundamentalist

Karl Barth is a pleasure to read. I guess I should add my fundamentalist caveat here and say that I have strong disagreements with him in certain areas (for example, we differ on inerrancy). Nonetheless the bit of his Church Dogmatics that I have read I found quite enjoyable (though at times he was not particularly lucid). I was quite startled, for example, to find a couple comments that resemble very much something a fundamentalist would say. I have included them for your pleasure here.

"Because in heresy, [unbelief] appears simultaneously as a form of faith, here it becomes serious, and there may and there must be conflict, between faith and heresy" (Church Dogmatics I/1.2).

"So different is the Church's interpretation from that of heretics that the question threateningly enough arises, whether what is involved on each side is not some quite different theme, whether the opposing difference of belief ought not perhaps to be regarded merely as unbelief" (I/1.2).

I find militancy so refreshing.

And just to realign myself with the fundamentalists in our audience, how about we close with a similar line from J. Gresham Machen's Christianity and Liberalism:

"Truth cannot be stated clearly at all without being set over against error" (174).