Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development

Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development

Bruce L. McCormack

Publisher:Clarendon Press

Published Year: 1997

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 Balthasar’s seminal interpretation of Barth, which was first published in 1951.

Drawing on a wealth of material, much of it unpublished during Barth’s lifetime, as well as a thorough acquaintance with the best of recent German scholarship, McCormack demonstrates that the fundamental decision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 Barth’s 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 Barth’s Göttingen 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 Barth’s development, but a new paradigm for understanding the whole of Barth’s theology.