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The first part of chapter 4 addresses several of the most pressing critical challenges to Frei's work leveled by evangelical theologians. The first is that he forgoes all concern for whether or not the biblical accounts of Jesus do, in fact, truly correspond to actual historical events. The second is that Frei reduces the biblical witness to a self-contained literary world. The second part of chapter 4 reassesses the Barthian dimensions of Frei's work in light of the potentially devastating criticism that Frei's reading of Karl Barth is decidedly undialectical, inordinately stressing the role of analogy therein, and that this deficiency has been transmitted to many of the so-called "American neo-Barthians" (or "postliberals") influenced by Frei. The argument critically retrieves material from Frei's dissertation, his earliest publications, and recently circulated material from his unpublished archival papers in order to make the case that Frei identified a complex interrelation of dialectic and analogy in Barth's theology dating back as far as the second edition of Barth's Romans commentary and reaching forward into the Church Dogmatics.

This chapter examines the moment of protest and cultural crisis initiated by Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gogarten was one of the intellectual fathers of the movement that came to be called “crisis” or “dialectical” theology. He challenged the notion of a “continuity” between modernity and Protestantism and insisted, like Barth, that theology must include logos, rational investigation and discourse. Bultmann is concerned to show the significance of God's status as both wholly other and yet in contact, through the divine Word, with the world of man. This chapter considers how these three thinkers assessed the situation of modernity (as it unfolded over some four centuries from 1500 to 1900) and how they expressed their rejection of this situation in order to offer a new approach to religion and God.

In 1920, it became clear to Barth that in his Epistle to the Romans he had taken for granted that he knew something of God, and he concluded that he needed to rewrite the entire work. He now stressed even more that there is no passage from human beings to God. Even when God is revealed, God does not enter this world. God is known in Jesus Christ as the unknown God. Human faith is the impossible possibility. This new version drew widespread attention, both critical and supportive, in the theological world. The 1923 controversy between Barth and Harnack was representative of the critical reactions. Barth began to clarify his Dialectical Theology in several lectures. For a few years, Barth worked with several other theologians, esp. Brunner, Bultmann, Gogarten, Thurneysen. This work gave Dialectical Theology new prominence and impact.

This is the second of two chapters on Heidegger’s progression from a theologically motivated phenomenology to a consciously a-theistic method, focusing onmethodological innovations during the period 1925-7.In particular, the chapter discusses the relevance of Heidegger’s developing distinction between philosophy as ontological science and theology as ontic science. This shift occurred in proximity to dialectical theology, and the chapter breaks new ground in appraising Heidegger’s complex relationship to that movement – particularly in contesting Barth’s and Thurneysen’s reading of Dostoevsky and Overbeck.The chapter ends with an appraisal of Heidegger’s seminal lectures ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ (1927) and ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (1929).

Chapter 7 takes off from the discussion of the conflict between community and dissent by examining Protestant theology in its quest to reconcile human freedom with the Christian community of believers. It looks most closely at the works of German Protestant theologian Huber, who takes his point of departure from the so-called Barmen Declaration of 1934 drafted by Karl Barth. The declaration denounced co-optation of Christian churches by the fascist totalitarian state and at the same time vindicated faith as a source of freedom and as a leaven in the cultivation of genuine social solidarity. Unlike Barth and his other predecessors, however, Huber has been willing to embrace some recent philosophical and intellectual innovations. This chapter also discusses how this embrace has led Huber to the formulation of the principle of a “communicative freedom,” where human freedom emerges in engaged communication or dialogue with others without being submerged in a mindless collectivism. Moreover, this chapter describes freedom as denoting a communicative openness to society, world, and the community of believers.

This chapter explores how Karl Barth responded to the social crisis in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Barth’s experience as a pastor and professor early in the twentieth century led him to seek an alternative to nineteenth-century theological liberalism, which he had imbibed during his own education. Many of Barth’s critics, as well as his supporters, have mistakenly assumed that Barth’s rejection of theological liberalism entailed and included a matching rejection of political liberalism. This chapter argues that Barth supported democratic liberalism even while rejecting theological liberalism. Focusing primarily on his early lectures, the chapter examines how Barth’s vision of the legitimacy of modern politics was not in tension with his theological project; on the contrary his politics afforded him the theological freedom to work toward a renewal of dogmatic orthodoxy.

This conclusion charts the downfall of theology as science and the project of theological encyclopedia. As the nineteenth century lurched forward, theology’s academic standing faced an ever-increasing number of challengers, especially in fields connected with religious studies: the ‘science of religion’; ‘comparative religious history’. In the onset and aftermath of the First World War, radical disciplinary specialization, a crisis of historicism, and the attacks of dialectical theologians dimmed its star. Ultimately, the project’s idealist superstructure, committed to the unity of knowledge, disintegrated. The collapse of the prevailing system of Protestant learning in the German university left a cavernous crater. Theology in the university, it appeared, could no longer continue as a single science, one discipline whose parts formed an organic unity. Nevertheless, the project of theological encyclopedia shaped nearly all facets of modern theology in and beyond Germany, and continued to make its appearance into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In this chapter, situates Bonhoeffer’s dissertation in relation to broader tensions between liberal and dialectical theology in early twentieth-century Germany, as exemplified by the work of Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth. While situating Bonhoeffer in this way is relatively uncontroversial, this chapter indicates some specific ways in which Bonhoeffer is moving beyond Troeltsch and Barth with Sanctorum Communio. In particular, it is argued that he moves beyond them by turning to the church. Against Troeltsch and the early Barth, Bonhoeffer sets forth an explicitly ecclesial approach to theology, an account of how theology is to proceed from and attend to the existing church as simultaneously a fully human community and a reality of God’s revelation.

This chapter investigates the influence of the Swiss pastor and academic Karl Barth (1886–1968) upon three important Scottish theologians active in the twentieth century: John McConnachie (1875–1948), H. R. Mackintosh (1870–1936), and T. F. Torrance (1913–2007). Each of these thinkers bears a measure of responsibility for Barth becoming a central conversation partner for theology in Scotland from 1930 onwards, although each had a rather different relationship to his work. This chapter exposits the influence of Barth upon each theologian in detail, attending to their significant publications on Barth as well as to wider contextual factors. It concludes by offering one possible reason for the different influences of Barth upon each of their work and a brief reflection upon the ongoing influence of Barth in Scotland.

This chapter theologically engages both the challenge and the internal problems of Heidegger’s phenomenology. It analyses the early theological responses to Heidegger’s work by dialectical theologians (Bultmann, Barth, Brunner) on the one hand and neo-Scholastics (Przywara, Stein) on the other.Noting that Heidegger exposes the inadequaciesboth of a certain kind of Neo-Scholasticphilosophia perenniamarked by a static account of Being, and of the ‘two-tiered eschatology’ of Luther and Kierkegaard, the chapter concludes by arguing that aspects of both Catholic metaphysics and Protestant epistemology are required to give a response to Heidegger that is at once sensitive to his criticism and resolutely Christian.

The support of prominent theologians for the First World War made Barth understand that their premises were false. How instead could a pastor rightly speak of God? Barth returned anew to the biblical text, becoming convinced that it can still speak to people today. The result was Barth’s first Epistle to the Romans (1919), a commentary to Paul’s letter. Barth stresses that the kingdom of God comes about solely through God, while all human activities, including religion, belong to the world. Barth’s cultural critique reflects the spiritual situation of the wartime and postwar period, yet without any hope on cultural renewal. In his 1919 Tambach lecture, Barth further developed his insights of the difference between God and religion. For God one can only wait. Jesus Christ’s resurrection is the wholly other. Therefore theology needs to think dialectically. Barth’s new ideas found great resonance, but he was also accused of arbitrary exegesis.

The French reconnaître was already employed by Calvin to depict normative approval. The English ‘acknowledge’, as used by Hobbes and Locke, is a translation of Latin agnosco. While the German anerkennen has strong roots in Hegel, it was used before him by the Enlightenment theologian Spalding. Spalding’s understanding of religious recognition as the first act of believer has influenced the later use of the concept by Schleiermacher, Bultmann, and Barth. These theologians claim that the primary act of recognition is a precondition of later cognitive understanding of religious truths. The ecumenical movement of the twentieth century first adopted the political concept of diplomatic recognition. After Vatican II and Catholic theologians revived the older understanding of recognition as conversion and primary attachment, ecumenists began to speak of mutual recognition as a theological and spiritual event.

This chapter develops our understanding of existing before God, now on the occasion of communion, when the edifying is affirmed in the divine commitment to active life and love. The purpose of highlighting these occasions, places and practices is to identify the edifying and polemical dialectic of religiousness with concrete and embodied existence expressed in the place and practices of church. Through confession and communion (sin and love), Kierkegaard explores the human experience of dependence and freedom expressed in the proximity between God and creature, and which characterizes the human–divine encounter. From here, there is a return to the societal space of the city where individuals seek involvement in a mutual process of edification. The movement ‘back’ to the societal still requires continual and repeated movements to and from the sacred space of the church (in inwardness), and to and from the secular space of the city or ‘the world’.