It’s interesting, Barth takes the historical-literal stuff of Holy Scripture more seriously than many who are nowadays rejecting such things in very pseudo ways. Even so, when you read through Barth’s Church Dogmatics what becomes immediately clear is that he rejects the historicism that plagued the modernity he was raised on through his university training. He reads the Bible as a Christian. He takes Scripture at face value, as far as its historical reporting etc. But he operates with what he calls Saga, which is his way of reading suprahistorical passages of Scripture; i.e., like the creation narrative in Genesis, or the resurrection sections in the Gospels etc. He even sees those as more real than “historical history,” insofar that saga sets the boundaries or limits by which and for which historical history unfolds. It isn’t that Barth thinks that the resurrection or original creation didn’t happen in this history. It’s just that he thinks the tangent of the inner reality of created creation, both protologically and eschatologically, has a deeper and more concrete depth dimension than the things that historical history tells us on its own supposed naked narratival force. He is a revelational theologian after all. Barth’s theology is also deeply grounded in the miracle of the Gospel and all of its interesting and far reaching implications.

A longer companion piece.