God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar

Abstract: A recent disagreement between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar highlights some of the issues involved in discussing the relationship between God's triunity and determination to be God‐with‐us. Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward‐incarnation? How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God‐with‐humanity? In this article I argue (contra McCormack) that God's triunity logically precedes God's determination to be with us, but (contra Molnar) that this logical precedence entails neither that the pre‐incarnate Son is utterly unknown to us nor that God retains some freedom to be God‐without‐humanity.     

Barth and the Evangelicals – Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques – Edited by David Gibson and Daniel Strange

This review examines twelve conservative evangelical responses to David Gibson and Daniel Strange's Engaging with Barth. Witten in a charitable spirit that gives deference to Barth, the essayists remained uncomfortable with the prospect of rehabilitating Barth's radical neo‐orthodoxy for contemporary evangelical theology. In the article, I summarize the authors' critiques to Barth's exegetical, historical, and theological program, and locate their contributions pertaining to the reading of Barth's dogmatics. The review concludes with a possibility of interrogating the pneumatological‐underpinnings in Barth's theology as a constructive reworking of Barth's trinitarian theology for evangelical theology. There are ‘spaces’ for evangelicals to mine from the Barthian legacy, albeit via the medium of turning Barth's proposals on its head.