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Juliane Schüz, Glaube in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik: Die anthropologische Gestalt des Glaubens zwischen Exzentrizität und Deutung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), pp. xii + 426. £91.00/€99.95.
It is a truism to say that Karl Barth's theological oeuvre is as long as it is complex. Much of twentieth-century theology, Protestant and Catholic alike, defined itself over against this theological giant. From the very beginning of Barth's theological career, with the first edition of his commentary on The Epistle of the Romans in 1919, the Swiss theologian has been at the center of much controversy. His early prominence on the theological scene resulted not least from his uncompromising attacks on what he perceived as the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century school of liberal theology in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher, including its most prominent representative in the early twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack. Later, Barth engaged no less ferociously in debates with his one-time allies of the dialectical theology movement. Against Emil Brunner's attempt to find a connection point (Anknüpfungspunkt) for revelation in natural theology, Barth uttered his famous ‘Nein!’ When Rudolf Bultmann ventured into his dual programme of demythologisation and existential interpretation, Barth made a no less notorious ‘attempt to understand him’ (in Rudolf Bultmann: Ein Versuch ihn zu verstehen). And to Catholic theologian Erich Przywara's defence of the analogy of being, Barth polemically responded by likening the notion to ‘the invention of the Antichrist’!
If Barth developed his theology over against that of others, many theologians alongside and after Barth have defined themselves no less critically over against his own work: from early sympathetic critics, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to the next several generations of theologians on both sides of the Atlantic, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel, James H. Cone, Dorothee Sölle and Stanley Hauerwas, to name just a few well-known figures. While their...