Just responding to your points:

1. In referring to the humanness of language, thought forms etc, I was suggesting how Barth might need to be modified - and how reason always plays a part in interpretation (following the drift of previous posts). However, reason itself always brings its own ‘faith’ presuppositions to bear in the things it investigates; it’s never neutral.

2. You see no difference between the function of all text and biblical text - precisely; but I do - and I believe church history, that’s to say how individuals (including myself), societies and cultures have been changed through the power of Spirit acting on text - is against you (which was my point). My other point was that biblical text operates in one sense like all other texts - which is where we agree.

3. I’m no apologist for Barth, but I’m sure he would be turning in his grave if he heard it said that he ‘remains the road to atheism’. In fact he was forcefully propounding a view which is damaging to yours - that God speaks from outside culture. In that sense, Barth was bringing a healthy and necessary challenge to the culturally conditioned methods of bible interpretation in his time - which were limiting its understanding to the realm of scholars, academics and archaeologists. Where I would want to modify things is by saying that God speaks through culture and into culture - but in turn challenging, changing, or endorsing culture. My argument is that church history bears this out.

4. It’s an interesting exercise to say that God is a product of culture. It bears little examination when subjected to factors such as the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ, the worldwide (cross-cultural) spread of the church, and the personal experience of changed lives in believers today.

Like hungertruth, I’ve a suspicion that this thread needs to reconnect with its roots; were you proposing your own response to the original ‘Can we teach an old dogmatism new tricks?’