17 articles from 16 issues, 1995 to 2026
In the second part of his essay, Richard Burnett follows Bonhoeffer from London to Finkenwalde and on to his warnings about American Christianity, then asks what the visible church owes the world today.
Bonhoeffer was not always bold. In autumn 1933 he fled to London, weary and anxious, and Karl Barth answered with a sharp letter. Richard Burnett asks what that exchange teaches about finding courage to stand.
St. Christina the Astonishing tried to flee the stench of sinners; Isaiah collapsed in terror before the Holy One. Sara Jane Nixon argues that the content of God’s holiness is love, a holiness that draws near to sinners rather than away from them.
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.
Ninety 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.
Should the PC(USA) add the Belhar Confession to its Book of Confessions? Viola Larson compares Belhar with the Theological Declaration of Barmen and argues that it fails to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, leaving room for misuse on homosexuality, Israel and pluralism.
What does the Reformed tradition say a church is, and when may a Christian leave one? Dennis Okholm turns to Calvin and Barth on the church’s nature, its marks, the sin of schism and its mission, and asks what they mean for the PC(USA).
Can a church keep the peace by tolerating every belief? Mark Patterson takes his title from Karl Barth’s reply to Emil Brunner and argues that the PC(USA) is dying of tolerance, because Progressive theology has replaced the gospel of Christ alone with a vague grace.
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