Jon Sampson

Seminary’s a weird place. You’re learning a lot about God. Some of it’s even useful and incredibly beneficial. But you also get stuck in this “other world” with terminology and ideas that can separate you from normal, everyday life.

That’s why I love this joke a buddy sent me today. It’s the only seminary joke you’ll ever see on this blog. Trust me.

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Along comes Jesus, and he asks these three famous theologians, “Who do you say that I am?”

Karl Barth stands up and says: “You are the ‘wholly other,’ the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christomonism.”

Following this, Paul Tillich states: “You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogia entis, the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.”

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: “You are the impossible possibility who brings to us, your children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.”

And Jesus looks at them and says, “What?”