'gloat' - to dwell on with smugness or exultation.
'admire' - to regard with esteem, respect, approval or pleased surprise.
'covet' - to wish, long or crave for
'bibliophile' - to admire a book, then covet a book, and then gloat over its acquisition at a fraction of the cover price.
'Confession' - the act of telling people on this blog that today, this bibliophile has moved from coveting and admiring to gloating.
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The picture is a detail from the Issenheim Altarpiece, and shows John the Baptist pointing to the cross and to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. A reproduction of this detail hung on Barth's study for years, reminding him that as a theologian all he could ever do was point towards the revealed mystery of Christ crucified. What fascinates me about this magnificent volume is the approach, which takes two of the most influential and 'epochal theological figures' and expounds their understanding of our knowledge of God, but without making them cancel each other out, and without feeling compelled to affirm one at the expense of the other. Like a two panel diptych, the theological portrait of each is displayed, and the hinge which joins them is the equally towering figure of Immanuel Kant. Calvin's theology was hammered out against the background of Renaissance humanism, reformation tumult and pre-modern culture; Barth's theology was a response to 'post-Kantian culture inclined to agnosticism', and to those forms of liberal theology that had declined to acknowledge the transcendent otherness of the Eternal Word; - and between them one of the stellar figures of the Enlightenment, whose own views of how we know, what we know, and how we know what we know, have shaped western philosophy for centuries.
Some books you don't read till you have time not only to do it justice, but to let it do justice to that part of us which recognises that, sometimes, the deepest and most satisfying truths are not to be had piecemeal. They demand, and repay, the costly labour of prayerful attention; they invite us into a conversation where we need all our wits about us; they satisfy, if only for a while, that hunger to know more about what it means to know God.
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