An Explorer's Guide to Karl Barth

David Guretzki

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830894338
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Anyone exploring a new territory knows the benefit of an experienced guide. A guide can make the difference between tiresome drudgery and a life-changing adventure. This is as true for exploring new thinkers and books as it is for places.If ever a theologian required a guide, it would be Karl Barth. His many writings have secured his place as the most significant theologian of the twentieth century. The massive Church Dogmatics alone spans over eight thousand pages and six million words. David Guretzki has been reading and teaching Barth for decades, and he has gathered numerous hints and notes along the way for how best to explore the writings of the Swiss theologian.Inside you will find

• frequently asked questions
• a glossary of key concepts and persons
• a tour guide to Barth's early writings
• tips on how to write a paper on Barth
• a guided tour to the Church Dogmatics

Whether you are a first-time reader or a seasoned student, An Explorer's Guide to Karl Barth will give you the tools and tips to get the most out of your experience. Enjoy the journey!

Books in the Explorer's Guide series are accessible guidebooks for those studying the great Christian texts and theologians from church history, helping readers explore the context in which these texts were written and navigate the rich yet complex terrain of Christian theology.

Part One

Getting to Know
KARL BARTH

- 1 -

Why Karl Barth?

To celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary, my wife and I decided to save up for a trip to Australia. In addition to seeing a travel agent, booking our tickets, and making sure we had vacation time booked, we also engaged in some planning on what we wanted to accomplish while we were traveling. We had only two weeks of vacation, and we wanted to make the best of it. So we bought a couple of those tourist guidebooks you see in the travel section at your local bookstore. It was exciting, and a bit overwhelming, to pore over all the opportunities! In the end, we embarked on our trip and enjoyed it immensely. But in the process we learned two vital lessons: first, two weeks is wholly insufficient to try to see Australia, and second, having those guidebooks saved us a lot of time in trying to figure out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do on our journey.

It’s my hope that this book will serve a little bit like one of those guidebooks—except that this one is designed to guide you on a journey through that continental land mass which I here awkwardly designate “Karl Barth’s Theology.” Newcomers to Karl Barth can find his cartload of books immensely intimidating, and so it is my goal to guide readers gently past some of the initial barriers that might discourage them from pressing on. In other words, I tried to write the book I wish I could have had in my first encounter with Barth. If only someone had tried to give me a basic understanding of what dialectic was, or what it meant when people called him a theologian of crisis. Whether this book will actually make it easier to go on an exploratory journey of Barth will be up to my readers to decide, but I offer it because of how enriching Karl Barth has been to my own theological development, thinking, and indeed, my Christian discipleship.

My Journey with Barth

Karl Barth was someone I encountered on a theological rabbit trail in my seminary education in the early 1990s. The topic I had chosen to research for a historical theology class was Augustine and the filioque. It was during my research that I found out that Karl Barth had written an extensive defense of the filioque in his monumental Church Dogmatics,1 so I checked the first half-volume out of the library and began to read. Let’s just say I was simultaneously overwhelmed by Barth’s complex theological prose, yet unmistakably hooked by the beauty, depth, and breadth of his reflections. In fact, I became so enamored by Barth that eventually I pursued and finished a PhD degree in which I examined in depth the origin, meaning, and implications of Karl Barth’s defense of the filioque.2 Since then, I have continued to teach theology in a Canadian evangelical college and seminary and have found myself returning to Barth’s work again and again. I have written several pieces in journals and reviews on Barth, and I even run a Karl Barth reading group that meets weekly to discuss a portion of his CD. As of this writing, we are celebrating our tenth anniversary as a group!

▸ Filioque: The word filioque is Latin for “and the Son” and refers to a phrase included in certain sixth- century Latin versions of the Nicene Creed that was not in the original fourth-century Greek text. Consequently, Latins began to confess belief in the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, which eventually became a major factor in the split between Eastern and Western Churches. To see Barth’s most complete comments on the filioque, see CD I/1, 473-87.

When I began writing this book, I decided to make one of two fundamental assumptions about you, the reader. Either you are interested in exploring Barth but don’t really know where to start, or you are being forced to read Barth because your theology professor is making you! If you fit best in the former category, then I hope this guide will get you started posthaste. If you fit better in the latter category, I hope that what follows will help you understand why your professor wants you to get interested and learn something about Barth. Which begs the question: Why Barth?

A Case for Getting to Know Barth

Exploring Barth’s theology is, without question, a daunting task. Most beginners are exposed to his CD and can be overwhelmed by its tiny print, its Latin and Greek citations, and its multiple volumes. Those factors alone can be enough to turn people away from Barth to someone a bit more accessible!3 But that makes me sad. I really think Barth is worth the effort of getting to know, so allow me the opportunity to provide a brief “apologetic” for why those studying Christian theology need to spend some time getting to know him.

There are many theologians who are worth getting to know, and in any case, it has little to do with whether in the end you find yourself agreeing with or aligned to the theologian or not. Far too often, we are too quickly biased for or against theologians on the basis of our theological teachers’ advice. We all make recommendations and warnings based on those biases, including me, so you might think that my case for Barth is just an inevitable part of my own bias. But I hope you will see that my argument for reading Barth is not just a matter of theological preference or style. There are substantial reasons for why Barth must be engaged, even if in the end we may come to radically different conclusions on various issues or even on the value of Barth himself.

EXPLORE FURTHER

For two relatively recent collections of evangelical engagements with Barth, see David Gibson and Daniel Strange, eds., Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques; and Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson, eds., Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism.

I can testify that there was (and still is, in some sectors) a real bias in certain theological circles against Karl Barth. On the one hand, the anti-Karl Barth bias I received in my earliest theological education came from the theologically conservative end of the spectrum, which essentially dumped Barth into the “liberal” camp, despite his clear battle against his own liberal forebears. You see, I was educated in the 1980s at a theologically conservative evangelical Bible college (the same school where I now teach) whose teachers (with one really important exception) either knew nothing about Karl Barth or, if they did, often warned us students to stay studiously away from him, probably because their teachers had told them to do the same. I discovered much later, when I was going through some of my old college notes, that many of their criticisms of Barth, while valid to a point, often echoed the critiques that theologians such as Cornelius Van Til had made against Barth but that today have been either discredited or significantly qualified.4 Fortunately, this bias was eventually overcome in my case through one of my theology professors who actually assigned readings from Karl Barth in a couple of my seminary theology classes.5 This is not to besmirch my earlier teachers (who I am sure were doing the very best for the Lord that they could do) but simply to indicate how very much things have changed in the past twenty or thirty years, even in the Canadian evangelical context in which I now find myself working.

On the other hand, there are those at the other end of the theological spectrum—those who see themselves more aligned with the liberal theological traditions—that have resisted Barth for very different reasons than my teachers did. For those schooled in the historical-critical methods of scriptural interpretation, it seemed as if Karl Barth was simply too theologically and exegetically naive. Although Barth was plainly aware of the findings of the critical biblical scholarship of his day, he often either rejected those conclusions out of hand or wrote as if those findings simply didn’t exist. In contrast to those working in my own tradition who thought Barth was simply too influenced by critical scholarship and was too quick to acknowledge the fallibility of the Bible and the Christian tradition, those working from within the liberal tradition thought Barth was too quick to jump to traditional, precritical, exegetical, and theological conclusions. For example, while many of Barth’s contemporaries had jettisoned the idea of the virgin birth of Christ, Karl Barth continued to defend the virgin birth as “theologically fitting” even in a modern context.6 The point here is that Karl Barth is one of those theologians who seems to have been consistently attacked from both his right and his left, either because he sounded too “liberal” or because he seemed too “theologically conservative and/or naive.”

My argument here is not that everyone in the past was wrong about Barth and that we now understand Barth better from both sides of the theological spectrum and that we must now see Barth as the perfect middle position between liberal and conservative theologies. That would be silly. What I am arguing, however, is that regardless of the conclusions one ultimately makes about whether Barth is friend, foe, or somewhere in between, one cannot claim to be engaged in the study of Christian theology without in some way engaging or becoming at least familiar with Karl Barth. One need only do a survey of major theological works being produced in virtually every quarter of Christianity—Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, Catholic, Anglican, A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Getting to Know Karl Barth
• Part Two: Exploring the Church Dogmatics
• Index
• Notes
• Praise for An Explorer’s Guide to Karl Barth
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright Page