Mt Barth

I don't normally talk about the landscape much in this blog, being a fairly urban person by nature. But I was most intrigued today to discover that a New Zealand mountain is named after the famous theologian, Karl Barth.
Mt Barth (2456m) is located in the South Island of New Zealand. It is part of the Southern Alps. Named by Captain Cook in 1770, this range extends 550 km and includes 17 summits over 3000 meters, the highest of which is Aoraki/Mt Cook (3754 m).


If you're the first person to climb a mountain you apparently get the privilege of naming it. (So how did Mt Everest get its name, or does this just apply to New Zealand mountains?) The first people to climb Mt Barth, together, were a group of Christians: a Baptist minister named James T Crozier (he also named Anita Peak after his wife); his younger brother, G L Crozier (a pacifist who eventually became a Quaker); Bruce Gillies, who had married into the Crozier family; Selwyn Grave, the then Anglican minister of Kurow. B M Pinder was involved in a third attempt at the mountain, when they named Mt Heim, as well as naming the glacier between Barth and Heim: Thurneysen. In a later trip they renamed another mountain, Mt Calvin.

You can see a bunch of photographs of the mountain, and climbers on it, here.

Theology

I’m continuing to read the History of Christian Thought, and am now into the 20th century, amongst Barth and Bultmann and Bonhoeffer. Light springs out occasionally into the theological darkness, and then the gloom takes over again. The 20th century has not been the great century of theological forward-thinking, even though Christology and the Trinity have made theological headlines again. Theology in the 20th century (and even the 21st) is more likely to make you lose your faith than find it, though that’s not to say that Barth and Bonhoeffer weren’t men of faith; they were. Certainly I’d be happier in their company than in that of some of the late 19th century theologians, who seem to have lost their way almost completely.
I can understand that theology must always be finding its own voice in the midst of each new age, but it must never, to my way of thinking, lose sight of where it all sprang from: the revelation of God through Jesus Christ. Without that, we’re lost. There’s no two ways about it.