Well Stranger,
the enlightenment era is a product of the Protestant Reformation. My church is rather proud of the fact that it was Luther and the Reformers who paved the way to enlightenment’s “sapere aude” (dare to know/dare to think for yourself).
Why do you think enlightenment is a bad thing? Your very own nation is a product of enlightenment, the notion of universal human rights is a product of enlightenment, and that you and I can communicate via the internet whilst I’m sitting in Europe and you are sitting across the Atlantic in the Southern States of the US is product of enlightenments’ scientific revolution. And imho philosophers of enlightenment such as Kant provide us with rather good arguments when we try to explain to our atheist friends why faith in God is reasonable.
The main theologian associated with enlightenment is Friedrich Schleiermacher. Much of US-American Fundamentalism is a result of opposition to Schleiermacher and Higher Criticism. So in a way your own beliefs about the Bible are indeed just a product of the negation of enlightenment. Barth also developed much of his theology in opposition to Schleiermacher and his successors, but – unlike abovementioned fundamentalists - when doing so Barth managed to stay in touch with reason and Christian orthodoxy when proclaiming the Gospel for people in the 20th century.
I think it’s great that a Catholic Pope praises Barth, a Protestant theologian who incorporated both Lutheran and Calvinist thought into his work. Let’s not forget that Luther never intended a church chism when he wrote his 95 theses. It is good to see that the body of Christ is finding a shared voice again after centuries of painful divisions and animosities. After all we are called to a “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:11-18).
I don’t project my 21th century notions of science and history into ancient writings that obviously weren’t concerned with such matters.
Well, you seem to be quite ignorant of what Christians outside the US/ your own Christian circles in the US believe. And one thing your branch of Christianity seems to share with many branches of Islam is a disdain for enlightenment.
See below
Yes, Stranger, I’m Trinitarian. And I am slightly surprised by your first sentence in this paragraph. It comes across as almost Barthian:
“God’s Word, he says, is addressed to us in “a threefold form”. It is the word preached, the word written, and the word revealed or incarnate. All three forms of the divine Word are required if anyone is really to “hear”—as the Hebrew might put it, “hearingly to hear”—the gospel that brings faith into being and sustains it. Each of the three forms of the Word needs the other—in almost a way that parallels the doctrine of the trinity. We do not meet the incarnate Word, the Logos of God in Jesus Christ, apart from hearing the written word as it is made present to us through the preached word. Nor have we really heard the biblical word or the word of proclamation until they have become the means through which we are encountered by the living Word. Apart from that encounter, the biblical word and the preached word remain mere words, even though they are themselves indispensable to the encounter. Something almost comparable to a transubstantiation must take place if these scriptural words are to become for us God’s word to us.”
http://www.ucalgary.ca/christchair/files/christchair/Hall_BarthOnBible.pdf