Burgess opens with a year he spent at an East Berlin seminary in the 1980s, when Marxism-Leninism claimed total interpretive authority. Forty years later, he hears the Barmen Declaration's refusal of competing 'lords' speaking again to a church tempted by every ideology offering easier answers than Christ.
Confessing the FaithNinety years ago a small group of pastors and elders in Barmen refused the Nazis' attempt to colonize the gospel. Working revisits Karl Barth's text and finds a confession that still names the temptation: any blood-and-soil ideology that asks the church to add another word to the one Word of God.
Wisdom summarizes Burnett's keynote at the 2020 TM conference: confessing Jesus as the truth has always been provocative, always contested, and never confessed for long without a cost. Burnett works the claim through Barmen and into our own moment.
Part two of Burnett's keynote on Barmen Article 1: Jesus Christ as the one Word of God we have to hear. The talk takes seriously the 'events and powers, figures and truths' that compete for that role in our own time, and how the church learns to refuse them.
Calvin once wrote that he would gladly cross ten seas if it would help mend the church's torn body. Burnett puts that ferocity in conversation with Karl Barth, and asks what the two together have to say to a denomination tempted to treat division as routine.
Karl Barth once described Calvin as 'a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power.' Goodloe doesn't disagree but finds, like Barth, that one could profitably spend a lifetime there. The piece reads Calvin on church unity for what he still has to teach a fragmenting PCUSA.
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