Karl Barth and the Purification of Divine Simplicity

Johnson investigates Karl Barth's critical appropriation of the doctrine of divine simplicity. While Barth is critical of traditional formulations of the doctrine, he understands himself to be refining the doctrine rather than rejecting it. Barth notes that Scripture attributes a diverse set of perfections to God in describing his salvific actions. These diverse perfections, however, have a fundamental unity: God does not contradict himself, but rather his perfections describe his unified, trustworthy agency. For this reason, we can know that in God's inmost being, God is not self‐contradictory but utterly unified or simple in his self‐fidelity. Johnson points out that a key element of Barth's doctrine of God is that it can never be the mere deduction of an abstract, transcendent entity; rather, it must begin with the transcendent God's relationship to creation, and therefore must begin with Jesus Christ, who reveals the true being of God. Johnson identifies three guidelines for speaking of Barth's doctrine: each one of God's perfections must be seen as perfections of his one divine being; God's one being does not exist above and behind his revealed perfections; and God's revealed perfections are essential to his divine nature. On this basis, Johnson explores what Barth has to say about the relationship between God's freedom and his self‐fidelity, including as this regards his freedom to live his one eternal life for us.     

Binocular coordination of the eyes during reading: word frequency and case alternation affect fixation duration but not fixation disparity

This experiment investigated whether properties of the text being read affect binocular coordination of the eyes during reading. Readers' binocular eye movements were recorded while they read sentences that contained high- and low-frequency words. In addition, half of the sentences were presented in normal case, and half were presented in alternating case (i.e., AlTeRnAtInG cAsE). Past research has suggested that the visual system tolerates less binocular fixation disparity with alternating than with normal case (Heller & Radach, 1999). While both word frequency and alternating case produced large effects on fixation durations on the target word, neither manipulation affected the magnitude of fixation disparity. It is concluded that linguistic and visual properties of the text being read do not influence binocular coordination of the eyes during reading. Additional analyses also showed no difference in fixation disparity between reading and a nonlinguistic task. Implications of these results for split-fovea models of reading are discussed.