One of the critical things I'm recognizing from Brunner is that the divide, the critical watershed (which is as subtle and snaky in real life as the Continental Divide), between a living and a 'liberal' theology is simply this: whether God is alive and speaking/revealing, or whether theology/religion is reactive.

This is the tie between the heirs of Schleiermacher, and what Nygren characterized as religion of 'Eros' (not sexual, go read his stuff, you pervs [Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, or his Romans commentary, or Essence of Christianity]) -- Shinto is the most direct living presence of this, in some ways: reacting to the world, and to elements of transcendence, people create markers, monuments, reins, bargaining chips, warnings, festivals, poetry. This motion outward (inward) is invented, and constitutes the core of worship.

[I hesitate, for the evangelical and charismatic reader, to point out how familiar this heated numinosity may seem, if you have a typically gushy contemporary church [High churchers, see me after class...]]

In any case, the talking is all being done here, under the cloud cover, if you will -- we generate out own heat, and not much light.

The point, of course, is to change history...

Though evangelicals and fundies like to think of the killer divide as being "inerrancy", they're wrong. Infallerrancibility is doctrinal supererogation. Knowing God, that is, knowing God who speaks to us and provides self-revelation that's personal (as I, Guruzilla, know Him), is the divide. Barth, Brunner, the Pope (at least this Pope), Stott, Packer, the other Orthodox Patriarchs, John Wimber, Ackerman of Quincy, and a lot of weirdos in between, all fall on this side of the divide.

So while the fundycostals are correct to talk about revelation as being the key category, it doesn't mean we have to restrict ourselves to whatever they want to tack down as what "counts" as revelation. In particular, I'd like to avoid the almost purely cognitive model of revelation that spews forth from the Barthian stream. The question, which shows up in the doctrine of Justification vividly, is as McGrath formaulated is: Does the Cross and Resurrection change the existing state of affairs, or merely make visible a pre-existing/underlying set of facts?

I believe, what happens matters.

This, bye the bye, is my continuing quibble with Robert Farrrar Capon's work: He seems mainly to be interested in your realization of something independently true, that Jesus just demonstrates a fact, instead of making a new reality full of facts pulled through into a redemption by his death and resurrection.

(What I would love to be able to formulate, or be able to point at, is a usable description of this movement beyond the Aesthetic and Ethical spheres and catapulting to Religiousness B, in terms of the relationship to oneself (possiblity and necessity), and how the self-relating is now (re-?)established in the Cross.)