10% of Karl Barth

A friend told me how amazing Word 2007's AutoSummarize feature is. I decided to try it out. I used my long post on Barth. I know some people don't have the patience long blog posts, so here's a merciful summary at 10% the original length. I didn't make any corrections to the summary. Word did pretty well.

My colleague responded this way, “Barth [pronounced “Bart” without the -th] was a liberal theologian who couldn’t explain man’s capacity for evil in two world wars.” Barth’s major purpose is to help us learn about and learn from 19th-century theology’s interaction with contemporary worldviews. He believes 19th-century theology was intent on being relevant to contemporary philosophy. Theology got caught in 19th-century philosophy’s whirlwind of change. Upon a secular foundation, theology attempted to build a sacred house. Barth is not endorsing a particular worldview though. Rather, he’s saying that all worldviews obscure Christian theology.

Nineteenth-century evangelical theology assumed that this was so” (23). When Barth gave this lecture in 1957, he said theology was still paying for its errors from the 19th century. Barth grasped this. “What if by talking about Christianity as a religion these theologians had already ceased to speak of Christianity…? In doing so, it is no longer Christian faith.

Barth was pointing us not to another man-made worldview. For me at least, 19th-century theology no longer held any future” (14).