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Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness

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As a graduate student in Divinity School, there are a handful of modern Protestant authors who can truly be called seminal. Although the prejudice among academics is to read primary texts, there is also in my opinion a need for secondary texts that illuminate the thoughts of great theologians. Althought I do not believe Mangina wrote this book with the idea of it being an "introduction to Barth" in mind, it does serves as an unequalled summary of Barth and some of his more important ideas. Mangina has the rare gift of being able to translate complex ideas into clear, lucid, well written English. As a divinity student who has read upteen texts, both primary and secondary, this book gets my highest recommendation.

There are good introductions to Karl Barth, such as H. Hartwell, T. F. Torrance, G. Bromiley. Mangina takes his place among them. This is a beautifully done book--and covers Barth's thought nicely. As an introduction to Barth's thought, this is perhaps the best for the beginning seminary student, although one will want to consult the others previously mentioned. Fans of Barth's work owe Mangina a hearty "thanks!"

I agree with the review above who called this book "seminal." Mangina never beats around the bush in his elucidations of Barth's incredibly dense prose. While I find Barth enlightening but incredibly difficult to read, I absolutlely savor Mangina. If you're curious at all, Mangina is well worth exploring.

When I was studying foundational theology as a grad student in 1971 Karl Barth was featured among the theologians who gave Protestant theology a new look and a new energy for the twentieth century. My Catholic professors had great respect for the daring of Barth but generally supported the methodology of Rudolf Bultmann with greater enthusiasm. It took me over 35 years to get back to Barth, and Joseph Mangina's introduction to the man and his work appeared to be the freshest and most accessible way to understand Barth and where he stands today. This was no easy task for Mangina, for Barth, among his other qualities enjoyed an eccentric sense of humor. His very life's work reflects this soft irony: his theology is built upon the simplest of principles, and yet required thousands upon thousands of pages of explication, notably his multi-volume "Church Dogmatics." In addition to introducing a very complex man, Mangina must also convince the reader that the significant plunge into the Dogmatics is worth the time and trouble.

Karl Barth was born in Switzerland in 1886. Barth's father was a professional theologian of what Mangina calls the "moderate conservative Protestant" tradition, and young Barth would later study under Adolf Harnack and then at the universities of Tubingen and Marburg, the latter described by Mangina as a "breeding ground of theological liberalism." He became pastor of a Reformed Church, married, and became something of a social activist. His attempts to affect reform from the pulpit, and the significant religious/psychological trauma of World War I jolted the young minister/theologian into a radical rethinking of the theological process itself.

It is critical to remember here that much of the fuel of Barth's passion was dissatisfaction with philosophy, theology, and Church practice. From Mangina's analysis I came to sense that Barth was more interested in reforming theological practice than the local parish. He came to believe that the Enlightenment had steered theology and the attendant arts toward a subjectivism that made human experience the measure of secular and religious reality. To right this wrong, Barth developed a theology (one might even say an ontology) in which the center of all reality is God, but specifically the God who acts graciously but justly in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Barth, of course, has specific villains in mind. Roman Catholicism is a de rigueur target, though Barth has affection for both the steadfastness of the Roman tradition and some of its outstanding thinkers such as Anselm. More specifically he is critical of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant whose philosophies separated the religious from the real and made subjective human experience the measure of all things. For Barth such tendencies created the confusions of nineteenth century Protestantism and the disillusionment of the Social Gospel. In his own time he veered sharply away from Bultmann's existential theological method.

Although Barth authored a number of works, the Dogmatics is his most famous, and Mangina outlines his work around the four extant volumes [a fifth was planned but never completed due to Barth's death]. The author does a respectable job in putting forth the general outlines of Barth's thought as set forth in the Dogmatics. His strength is exposition of basic tenets and the radical theological impact of Barth prior to World War II. Part of Mangina's task, a difficult one, is squaring some of Barth's more controversial corollaries with "men of good will" in different camps.

Given Barth's insistence that the cosmos centers about the historical cross of Christ, what does one say about Israel? Even with the help of Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, the best Mangina can say about Jewish election is that the role of the Chosen People in Barth's Scriptural analysis was [is?] to serve as the prototypical unfaithful people, a kind of necessary precondition for the salvific work to follow. [80] For as much attention as Barth devotes to the Hebrew Scriptures, this conclusion is interesting but theologically unsatisfying, not to say rather offensive to the ears. Here the weaknesses of a one-dimensional theology are best exemplified: complex theological systems, the type despised by Barth, reflect the complexity of Revelation and life. It is not always a case of theologians having "itching ears."

Mangina's other professed task is to induce the reader to consider a deeper reading of Barth himself, particularly the Dogmatics. The author notes that the Dogmatics is immense, even by academic standards, though he is quick to point out that Barth is not elucidating a systematic theology as much as a commentary on God's actions. Mangina notes the interesting eccentricities of Barth's style, including the admission that Barth's skills of orderly exposition are not exactly polished [24]. Barth employed side bars called "excursus," a favorite feature of Barth admirers where the master apparently let his hair down on a wide range of theological and Scriptural opinions. Unfortunately, examples of such humanity from Barth are rare in this introduction.

The author also concedes that Barth has little to say about two critical facets of a life of faith: worship and ethics. The latter topic is particularly surprising when one considers that Barth lived through both World Wars, the Holocaust, and the birth of the atomic age. Barth's given reason for the systematic omission of ethics is his desire to avoid legalism, but from this work what emerges is a kind of situational ethic--to live as witnesses to God's saving deed. I take it on faith from Mangina, then, that I can expect to be inspired, if not necessarily instructed, by the grand master.