Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936

About this book

This book is a major intellectual biography of perhaps the most influential theologian of the twentieth century Karl Barth. McCormack offers the first full-scale revision of the well-known theologian Hans Urs von Balthasars seminal interpretation of Barth which was first published in 1951. Drawing on a wealth of material much of it unpublished during Barths lifetime as well as a thorough acquaintance with the best of recent German scholarship McCormack demonstrates that the fundamental decision that would control the whole of Barths development--the turn to a new critically realistic form of theological "objectivism"--was already made during the years in which Barth was at work on his first commentary on Romans. He further argues that the most significant decisions--both material and methodological--were made in Barths Gttingen Dogmatics of 1924/5 and not later in the 1931 book on Anselm as has often been alleged. This unique and important work provides not simply a fresh interpretation of Barths development but a new paradigm for understanding the whole of Barths theology.