Interest in Karl Barth is running at unprecedented levels in the English-speaking world, and it is high time that his excellent survey volume of formative eighteenth and nineteenth-century thinkers (first published in English by SCM Press) was once again made available to theological students and readers. With a comprehensive and extensive new introduction by Colin Gunton, in which the volume is recontextualised, the book can be used as a set text for courses in the history of Christian thought and doctrine as well as supplementary reading for students of continental intellectual history. All the mist significant figures are here, in addition to several lesser known thinkers, with the translations of Barth's major essay 'On the Task of a History of Modern Protestant Theology' and his original German preface of 1946 also included. 'Nobody but Karl Barth could have written this book. It has his footprints all over it: the rhetorical style, the humour, the sheer volume of writing. It is above all an exercise in the history of ideas which is yet resolutely theological; in otherwords it is historical theology in the best sense, a history of theology which uses theological criteria for all the varied judgements that it make.' From the Introduction
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century.
Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century Protestantism. Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy -- a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election.
Barth tries to recover the Doctrine of the Trinity in theology from its putative loss in liberalism. His argument follows from the idea that God is the object of God's own self-knowledge, and revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling to humanity of the God who cannot be discovered by humanity simply through its own efforts.
... Show more