I would like to respond to your entire post, but only have time for one quick thing. Your worry about the wisdom of God from the Spirit being immune to the critique of reason seems to stem from perhaps a misunderstanding of what it means to have ‘foolish’ wisdom in comparison to that of the ‘world’.

Worldly wisdom is that which tells you to gather wealth. While Godly wisdom tells you the riches you gather are not of ultimate concern and will not last.

The world tells us to fight back, while Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek; to be blessed in sorrows, while others curse them; to find strength in weakness, and so forth. This is the difference between worldly wisdom and the wisdom of God. It can be critiqued rationally. If, for example, you feel the Spirit is telling you to build concentration camps, you can critique that and say “That’s not what my bible and experience with God has led me to believe…”, can’t you? I think you can.

Barth seems to dislike man-vs-God, or body v. spirit (“Carteisan”?) dualism. But his own comments presuppose it. They recall the (semi-) biblical notion that humans are by nature depraved, and cannot save themselves by their own “works.” But are only saved when one day, a God who is rather wholly different in nature from man, extends or attaches himself, his spirit, into our lives, in a moment of Grace.

Barth is therefore still Cartesian-dualistic himself. He is still himself implying among other things, that our nature as man, is quite different from (and all but dualistically opposed to) God; and has almost nothing of God in it. God comes later, being moreover 1) absolutely different in nature from man, dualistically. And 2) probably arriving only some time after our birth, in the salvific “event.”

Maybe your temporary adoption of the word “oblique” gets at the major problem I see with Barth. He is obviously the master of the classic “poetic” style; which is to say, of a (to be sure, classic, even biblical) theological style, that never firmly says any one thing, but that is perpetually oblique, evasive, ambiguous, polysemic, and equivocal.

Probably the positive virtue of this style, is that ultimate truth,”God,” is infinitely complex; and therefore we need to avoid typifying him in all-too-simple utterances. Still, on the other hand, regarding a style where “blessed are the poor” might mean that 1) being poor is good as such; or might mean the opposite? That 2) the poor are about to be blessed …by becoming rich?

Or here. Is Barth 1) merely repeating a preachers’ cliche: bemoaning our lack of native/”subjective” ability to apprehend (or even create?) God; a gift which is “grant”ed only by the Grace of God? Or is he 2) about to hint later that however, even classic theology (and even God?) fails us? Since God never understood us, and never corrected our subjectivity?

Utlimately, the classic poetic style – that simultanously entertains even exactly opposite conclusions – while useful in that it evades dogmatic oversimplifications, is still reprehensible, in that it ultimately says nothing at all. It cancels itself in 1) obscurity, and even 2) by self contradiction. And it therefore cannot be used as a positive guide through life.

The very greatest virtue of the poetic style is, at best, the cancellation of all simplistic, univocal dogmatism about god. Or is its greatest virtue, its own self-cancelation/deconstruction? The disappearance of both theology and God too, by way of indecision, or obvious self-contradiction?

He was obviously a drug (tobacco) addict.

Every time he sucked on his pipe (like a child sucking its thumb) he was drawing toxic poisons into his lungs, and hence into his body altogether.

By doing so he was slowly and systematically undermining his health and destroying his body. In effect committing suicide.

Do you think that anyone to whom The Divine was or is an all-pervading Living Reality would be actively (and effectively) destroying his body?

For Barth, preachers are really only preaching insofar as they are pointing, like John the Baptist, at Jesus and saying, “He must increase; I must decrease.” Many evangelical celebrity preachers claim to be working at that project, but the things that they do often speak otherwise. They are very talented, but have they traded in the mustard seed for their ability to create their own coconuts?