The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth ed. by Paul Dafydd Jones and Paul Nimmo (review)

The publication of The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth amply demonstrates that interest in Karl Barth’s theology remains alive and well in North Atlantic countries. The editors, Paul Daffyd Jones, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and Paul Nimmo, King’s Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, have gathered contributions from leading Barth scholars and others in Europe and North America. The result is a substantial volume of forty-two chapters on Karl Barth and his theology that will likely become a standard reference book for theologians and clergy.

The book has three parts. The first, “Contextualizing Barth,” offers eleven chapters looking at Barth’s life, his interactions with preceding theological eras, and his involvement in events of his time. Here we get concise, yet thorough, introductions to Barth’s personality and life journey, influences on his theology, his theological career, his relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum, and her contribution to his life’s work. This gives important background for reading Barth. We learn, for instance, that while he sometimes made sweeping judgments about medieval theology, he only knew it through secondary sources. The second part, “Dogmatic Loci,” offers nineteen chapters on significant topics in Barth’s thought. Each follows the development of his thought on its assigned topic from his early work through his initial approaches to dogmatics to his Church Dogmatics. Here we get excellent expositions of central themes in Barth’s theology such as God, the Trinity, and Jesus Christ, and critically appreciative assessments of Barth’s treatment of them. Running through this section is the repeated refrain that Barth’s revision of the doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/2 significantly influenced his subsequent treatment of many theological topics. The third part, “Thinking after Barth,” has twelve chapters examining Barth’s treatment— or lack thereof—of current theological/ethical topics and how Barth’s theology can be a resource for addressing these, or not. Some of these themes, such as gender, Barth discussed at length. Others, such as race or environmental concern, he scarcely discussed at all. Several of these chapters offer very dialectical treatments of Barth. For instance, Joshua Ralston observes in his chapter “Barth, Religion, and the Religions,” that Barth’s comments on religions such as Islam typically demonstrate no in-depth engagement with them and offer negative judgments in which Barth’s Christological focus tends to become triumphalistic. On the other hand, Ralston appreciates how Barth’s criticism of religion in Church Dogmatics I/2 challenges conventions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western theology and suggests that it should be read as a critique of these conventions and not of other religions. For its part, Cornelius Van Der Kooi’s chapter “Barth and Contemporary Theology” might have been strengthened by being more dialectical. He argues that many of the basic characteristics of Barth’s theology, often controversial in his time, have now been accepted within much of contemporary Protestant theology. Here he might have also discussed how many contemporary Protestant theologians, such as Kathryn Tanner or Michael Welker, who follow Barth in certain ways, such as his emphasis on Scripture and the independence of theology as a discipline, also depart sharply from Barth in others by, for example, pursuing a deeper dialogue with other disciplines. Some theologians, such as Jürgen Moltmann with his social understanding of the Trinity, have differed from Barth precisely because they have followed aspects of Barth’s theological approach. It is important to note, as many chapters in this book do, how theology has followed and learned from Barth, but also how, in a different era and different contexts, some have gone a different way, and why.

This book makes an important contribution to the study of Barth’s theology and to current theology. Its breadth of content is impressive and the chapters are substantial in content...