Karl Barth, the Bible, and 3-D Movies

Karl Barth talks about the Bible "becoming" the Word of God. What does he mean by this? I think it something like the experience of a 3-D movie. When you put on those funky glasses and start to watch the movie, suddenly one or more of the characters seems to come out the screen and confront you face-to-face! It is as if you are in their story and are required to respond. The movie has "become
" real and compelling in a way it never could in 2-D.

We can read the Bible in 2-D all day long and it will do us little good (other than perhaps keeping us out of the trouble we might otherwise have gotten into!). But then there are those moments when the Bible "becomes" 3-D and the story leaps of the page and confronts us face-to-face, calling on us to respond to it in faith and embrace its story as your own (or not)!

The difference is that there is no magic pair of glasses that create this experience for us with the Bible. It "becomes" God's Word to us in this way when and where God so chooses. But our God is a loquacious God who loves to talk to us and fellowship with his people. God's Spirit will be present and ready to speak to us if we are present to the Bible and ready to wait and eager to respond to the Word we hear! At these moments the Bible too "becomes" 3-D in its compelling reality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more