The 2008 Karl Barth blog conference has kicked off with an appropriate and juicy post by Jon Mackenzie entitled Introduction: The Impossible Possibility? Philosophy and Theology in the Work of Eberhard Jüngel.

For those who are unaware of this conference (where have you been?), its concern will be the conversation between Barth and his most distinguished student, Eberhard Jüngel. Huge thanks to Travis for coordinating, encouraging and hosting this ongoing conversation on theirs.

Here’s a few tasters from Jon‘s contribution:

‘Faith is not a type of knowledge but instead the very reconstitution of one’s being. Undoubtedly, the holistic nature of this reconstitution of being must include the faculties of reason, but to simply juxtapose faith against reason is to reduce faith down to mere epistemology’.

‘Jüngel is keen to highlight the event-character of faith because it reduces the risk of conceptualising faith as a metaphysical state or attribute. Were this the case, then the identification of God in Jesus would be conceptualised simply as the highest instantiation of a more general metaphysical principle and, thus, God would merely become a part of this world’.

‘It is precisely the fact that faith gives itself to be thought that faith needs theology … The existential nature of faith makes it impossible for faith to be self-reflective. If it could be so, then faith would cease to be what it is: a correspondence to the word of Jesus Christ’.

‘There is in Jüngel … a carefully developed notion of the relationship between philosophy and theology; a dissimilarity in similarity. Whilst both philosophy and theology are formally acts of thought, they still differ materially in that theology remains parasitic upon the event of the word of God appearing in history whereas philosophy is self-justifying. In this sense, it becomes obvious how the relationship between philosophy and theology can only be conceptualised with recourse to the person of Jesus Christ in history. “Theological critique is materially the orientation of theology to the ‘word of the cross’ as the ‘word’ (logos) which is constitutive for all talk about God, and this orientation must be constantly renewed.”’

Check out the full post here.

[NB. The scary picture is from Jon’s Myspace page, where you can also listen to some of his funky music. What a talented guy … though he does actually look older and less handsome in real life]