Finding God in a punk rock record

It has been said that spiritual formation happens through human experiences.

It is in the ordeal of living the whole of human existence that one comes into contact with this dynamic encounter with the God who transforms us via the agency of our lives, to which the experiences that our sensory faculties (like seeing, feeling, and hearing) functions as the arena where transformation takes place. In this case I would like to highlight the sense of hearing as an arena to which I discover God and His loving identification with people in the midst of human pain and anguish.

As it is no secret to those who know me that a lot has been going on in my mind lately. Life and all its complexities that come along with aging and varying circumstances leads one to question so many things and to lose hope –to despair, get angry, cry out to for and against God.

I would write of the details of this pain and struggle but I am at the same time afraid to lay bare my soul as well as space cannot be enough to put what I am feeling into words that would make sense. It is in the middle of these things that I find myself clinging once again, in consolation to the music of my adolescence –to punk rock.
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Prayer, Belief and Control

"Faith is at once the most wonderful and the simplest of things. In it a man opens his eyes and sees and accepts everything as it - objectively, really and ontologically - is." - Karl Barth1

Why do we pray?

I cannot help but ask this question over and over.

If God indeed knows everything, and administers everything according to His will why then speak about our desires to this all-knowing, all-powerful God upon whom all things and its existence out-and-out depend on?

I cannot say that I know the answers to all these things.

T-Shirt Theologians 2 | Invoking the radical in Karl Barth

I was reminded of Karl Barth, when I passed by Popular Bookstore on the way to the seminary. There was a huge tarp poster with a posterized profile of the late labor leader, Crispin Beltran, that somehow resembled the face of Karl Barth.

There must be something in posterized images of revolutionaries that seemed to invoke the radical in passionate youths as I remember myself wearing such shirts that back then were deemed to be subversive as it gives a hint of our political tendencies –that was sad to say against that which is implemented by the state, I mean what does the face of Mao inscribed beside a phrase that reads: “Serve the People!” say about me and my beliefs, surely the t-shirt speaks a lot –and the same goes for those who opted to wear Che Guevarra or Uncle Ho instead...

Karl Barth on church growth

“The true growth which is the secret of the upbuilding of the community is not extensive but intensive; its vertical growth in height and depth. If things are well—and there is no reason why they should not be—this is the basis. The numerical increase of the community indicates that it is also engaged in this very different increase. But the relationship cannot be reversed. It is not the case that its intensive increase necessarily involves an extensive. We cannot, therefore, strive for vertical renewal merely to produce greater horizontal extension and a wider audience. At some point and in some way, where it is really engaged in vertical renewal, it will always experience the arising of new Christians and therefore an increase in its constituency, but perhaps at a very different point and in a very different manner and compass from that expected. If it is used only as a means for extensive renewal, the internal will at once lose its meaning and power. It can be fulfilled only for its own sake, and then—unplanned and unarranged—it will bear its own fruits. As the communion of saints takes place, the dominant and effective force is always primarily and properly that of intensive, vertical and spiritual growth.”

- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2, 648.

Karl Barth on Fundamentalism

If I had to rewrite this volume, I might not be so polemical, although the heresies would be the same. I might have a more irenic spirit. I could look out on the present situation and ask: what should the Christian proclamation be in view of all these denominations in Ecumenical movement, etc? But maybe the way I said it is clearer. Liberalism is coming back today, especially in Europe. Look at Rudolf Bultmann; he stems from Father Schleiermacher! And look at the situation in Switzerland! And the old snake in Rome is still there! I might have mentioned a third heresy: Fundamentalism, Orthodoxy. In 1932 I did not know the Fundamentalists so well. The Fundamentalists says he knows the Bible, but he must have become master over the Bible, which means master over revelation... I consider it just another kind of natural theology: a view of the modern man who wants to control revelation.
John D. Godsey, Karl Barth's Table Talk, 40-41.

The Church and the Gospel

'The appointment of Jesus to be the Christ takes place in the Spirit and must be apprehended in the Spirit. It is self-sufficient, unlimited, and in itself true. And moreover, it is what is altogether new, the decisive factor and turning-point in man's consideration of God. . . . To the proclamation and receiving of this Gospel the whole activity of the Christian community — its teaching, ethic, and worship — is strictly related. But the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only insofar as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell that seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. The people of Christ, His community, know that no sacred word or work or thing exists in its own right: they know only those words and works and things which by their negation are sign-posts tot he Holy One. If anything Christian (!) be unrelated to the Gospel, it is a human by-product, a dangerous religious survival, a regrettable misunderstanding. For in this case content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave, positive for negative, and the characteristic marks of Christianity would be possession and self-sufficiency rather than deprivation and hope. If this be persisted in, there emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, and ineffective peace-pact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of the resurrection. Christianity would then have lost all relation to the power of God."

– Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans

Through the Veil: Karl Barth Should Be Allowed a Place in ‘Doctrine of Scripture’ Discussions

I have recently stumbled upon this blog from a more conservative Christian sighting the importance of Barth (especially his view on God's sovereignty) in deeper discourse about the Doctrine of Scripture. Below is an excerpt from the blog entry:

This view of God and the sovereignty of God is what drives Barth’s theology. Such a high view of God is indeed refreshing in this time of scholarship where individuality leads many a well-meaning preacher to deduce for himself the meaning from the text instead of letting the text reveal God to him.

Click this link to read the entire article: Karl Barth Should Be Allowed a Place in ‘Doctrine of Scripture’ Discussions