Karl Barth in a nutshell

Kornelis Miskotte once said that Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics was as tough of a read as Moby-Dick. This may be unfair to Moby-Dick. I’ve made repeated attempts to infect seminarians with my love of Barth, and student course evaluations said that I mostly failed.

The fact that Barth has been more admired or criticized than read is mostly his own fault. He doesn’t just do theology; he attempts to rewrite readers into a whole new world where God in Jesus Christ matters more than anything. It takes him 6 million words to do this, and he dies before finishing what he wants to say. Barth reads scripture carefully but creatively, believing it to be the judge and sole source of all we know of God. (Only Barth would highlight Judas, with 90 pages of exegesis, as the prime exemplar of God’s gracious election!) Church Dogmatics defiantly, notoriously resists abridgment or summarization. Every paragraph depends on every other, and the whole ought to be read in order fully to understand any part.

Undaunted by the obstacles presented to readers of Barth, New Zealander Marty Folsom does what no previous scholar has done: make Church Dogmatics available to all. In this volume, the second in his series, Folsom offers a gracious and perceptive invitation into volume 2 of Church Dogmatics, The Doctrine of God. Although Barth despised synopsis or condensation of his work, Folsom boldly presents volume 2’s 1,500 pages in 370, covering paragraphs 25–39, no small feat. (Some of Barth’s “paragraphs” are a couple hundred pages long.)