Retooling: I Do a Rapid Re-Read of Romerbrief --
To Be Coupled with Meticulously Close Reading--
In an Effort to Effect Understanding/Verstehen--
A Long Day's Journey Into Night Seems to Ensue


PRELIMINARIES

In a way that is both congenial to my reading habits, give or take, as well as to be true to the method of Schleiermacher, I have done just now a swift-- prone to error-- rapid overview reading of Epistle to the Romans. This will have been accompanied by a consumately careful (slow) reading of this book, parallel to a reading in Deutsch.

SUMMARY

I should have done this on receipt of this book some days ago, but was relying on the memory of my 1965ish reading, as well as every wish to put the best and most-positive slant on Barth, with whom I think I may have fundamental disagreement.

Simply, reiteratively from every reading I have done of Barth, he put-into his interpretation of a text what is his own, not the author's material. This would be about as problematic as any other highly subjective commentary IF the content is sustainable in a convincing-- authentically owned here-- way; if I persist in reading the same essentialism from fraudulence as bemarks a 'cry-baby,' this will show in all ways. Barth's 'commentary' may be problematic in this last-designated way; his approach to the What-- and the How-- so I speculate to the How-of-the-What by a method well known to preachers, i.e. to start with the Bible-- and by exposition put in every kind of personalized opinion to 'bless out' opponents of some sand-castle or sin or another in theology. The Expositor's Bible as far as I have heard is certainly of the literary genre akin to this work by Barth. As such, with considerable indulgence for creativity, what for Barth for some reason has done is use Romans as a pre-text for a work that para-textually is not far from a long and repetitive sermon about 'bad guys,' the liberals not-too-secretly cast as sinners for following in the footsteps with digression from Schleiermacher.

This criticism to which Barth expresses is veiled for the most-part; clearly Barth is writing with a high level of negative critique at someone sinful, and says at every turn of paratext something bad about these malefactors. Psychologically, for long there has been a word for such veiled hostility-- not quite reaching the point of proper-noun nomenclature. To psychiatrists and psychologists, this veiled kind of referential hostility is called passive-agression. Whether Barth indeed 'wears this hat' is now a conjecture open for investigation; prior to this now, I had taken Barth from the Preface(s) to mean that he intends a straightforward presentation of Paul's true propositions in Romans; now the table has turned perforce of getting into the 60s of pages for this work by close-read, and all the way through this work a second time with a rapid-reading.

I know not the Deutsched original wording; indeed only with utmost superficiality do I know the whole text at all. But this is a text that in English goes over and over the same theses with the same points, each point a replication of something said several times in the text. In a whopperjawed kind of way, its need for a 'blue pencil' of editorial work would be an inviting comment to make, as a person who likes relatively non-redundant writing. This sort of say-again-and-again writing is witnessed in Nietzsche; the work Thus Spake Zarathustra is of this apparently telling needs-editing style. Barth likes Kierkegaard, but the Dane is marked by a something-different at each turn of phrase; one must follow Kierkegaard closely as this penetrating innovation is easily lost, and hard-to-attain first of all. On the contrary, one can pick up Barth at almost any point in a random-read and in a few minutes get the very same sort of message as anywhere else in Romerbrief, with very little sense of progression.

PLAN

I do need to get Romerbrief in German; that I think can happen tomorrow, not much later. While this still increasingly is seeming to be a narrowing tunnel with only a hopelessly deceitful promise of light at the narrowest-neck, I need for my own benefit to see with extremity of charity where all this Barthian tunneling leadeth. With the texts I have, and can get, about Barth's vita, and the texts by this now-established Church Father, I can begin to magnificence decipher Barth's beloved What (in every way it can be meant), his How, and the How-of-the-What. For such tasks, the hearing out of the well-established to the point of folly, and for putting the best-face on this hearing, then proceeding with truth I am conditioned by much social justice work in the context of State bureaucracies; in these dimensions, from here now it would appear that Barth differs only in kind, not in quality.

--Vernon Lynn Stephens, Culdee
Time of Compline
Day of St. Maxmillian Kolbe (Roman Catholicism)
Day of the Prophet Micah (Orthodoxy)