Category Archives: Book Reviews

God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil / A Book Impression

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Just finished. It is a good provocative read. It is written in a nice narratival theological style, which definitely works within the spirit and ambit of the Barth style (i.e. engagement with Holy Scripture throughout). Philip re-places a doctrine of the devil into the second article, so, Christology and Soteriology (think Apostle’s Creed) versus the traditional placement as found in the first article with reference to original creation and God’s providence. This reorients thinking the devil from emphasizing him as a fallen angel, and instead sees him primarily in the scenery of the wilderness, as the adversary (of Christ), as adventitious, and anarchic. These three themes serve to organize the way that Ziegler seeks to place the devil within a dogmatic location of the second article. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Ziegler is doing all of this work as a type of revitalization of a satanology for and within Reformed theology, proper.

One question I had going into this book was to see if Philip would hold to the idea that the devil is “personal,” or if the devil has an ontology of diabolical sorts. In the long and the short of it: yes, Ziegler affirms a type of nothingness beingness (my phraseology) which pairs well with Barth’s doctrine of sin or “nothingness” (das Nichtige)—which you can read about in CD III/3 (I also have some passages on that in my Barth Reader).

As a North American evangelical, like myself, I am conditioned to think of the Devil in the first article. As someone who reads Barth and Torrance and Calvin a lot, I am re-conditioned to think within the second article. And so, this clash continues for me, particularly when it comes to such matters as a satanology represents. Beyond that, as a basic evangelical Christian, there are too many real-life encounters that I have had with the demonic—ones that mirror those in the Gospels etc.—that experientially keep me from falling into any type of crass physicalism when it comes to the dark spiritual realm. Even so, the themes that Ziegler develops, therein, don’t contradict that reality, it just textualizes them in ways that some readers might think envelopes this matter into a purely intellectual exercise; but that would be wrong. Take it up and read for yourself.

Book Impression: The Bible: A Global History

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Just finished. This is the third book of Bruce Gordon’s I have read over the years (his other books: on Calvin and Zwingli respectively). Overall, a good and informative and interesting read. It appears to me that, Bruce, at points, has imbibed too much of the higher critical palate when it comes to thinking of the supernatural nature of Scripture. His chapter on the Pentecostal appropriation of the Bible isn’t the strongest. But again, overall, I would commend this book to you. It will give you a greater appreciation for the Bible’s reception across the millennia and across the globe.

Book Impression: Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages

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I think I am going to start writing more ‘Book Impressions’ in the days to come, for the blog. I won’t be writing full fledged reviews, but just presenting my raw impressions as I finish this or that book. By the way, I do read a lot of theology books as time passes by; I just rarely share any of that here (you mostly get my Barth readings and reflections these days). Anyway, I just finished another book, and below is my reflection on it. The book: Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages.

I started this one a couple of years ago. It got tedious at points, but glad I picked it up again and finished. It ended strong. Books like this help put things in perspective. Christian people, in the case of this book’s examination, all the way from the 5th to the 16th centuries have always presented fanciful ideas about why they believed their time in history was in fact the end; and that the arrival of Jesus would be in their lifetimes. But beyond that this book shows all of the schism present in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Further how apocalyptic prophecy etc. was taken up by self-proclaimed prophets to announce the end of this or that evil Pope. Also, in this book theories of history are presented, primary of which is Joachim of Fiore’s three statuses view of the history of the church and the world, climaxing in the coming of Christ. Also, in this book, we see how millenarianism was an early development of parts of the church, and how later among the Hussites, apocalypticism was deployed in a way to justify political revolution so on and so forth (much like we see today). What Left Behind theology or more specifically, Dispensational premillennialism foments in the American evangelical churches today, in regard to apocalyptic speculations and its application to current events, is nothing new, and was done even that much more substantively in the past. Indeed, Jesus is coming again, and it could be today (please Lord), but we will never know exactly how “this is that” until He in fact comes again. Maranatha

KJV’s Mere Christian Hermeneutics

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Just finished. As an after Barth, Torrance, Calvin, Athanasius (and patristic theology), John Webster (on Scripture) person, I would say that Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s book fits well with what us Evangelical Calvinists (after our books and my blog work) call a Dialogical Theology and reading of the text of Scripture. It is more about the encounter, transformation, and instrumentality of the reading of Holy Scripture versus the academic slicing and dicing of things; the latter often being under higher critical antisupranaturalistic pressures. This is not to say that the grammatical historical has no place, but that such a frame is only as real as the humanity of Jesus Christ is real (which has ultimate real-ness); as the veil, indeed torn, by the illuminating power and transfiguration of resurrection. I would say that KJV has put to words a hermeneutical frame that I have been engaging the text with myself for the last many decades. Although I would say, as Richard Muller has referred to Calvin’s christological reading of the Bible, that on a continuum, KJV’s offering fits with Calvin’s soteriological-extensive christocentrism rather than Barth’s principially-intensive christocentric frame of reference for reading Scripture. That notwithstanding, I don’t think these distinctions must be held in a competitive frame of understanding either. I commend, Vanhoozer’s work to you.

Who Is a True Christian? And AAR

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Dr. David Congdon has written a new book. Published by Cambridge University Press (2024), it is titled: Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture. I have some history with ole’ Congdon, particularly from back in the good old days of the blogosphere. Anyway, his new book might sound provocative; but I don’t think it does, really. Congdon, these days, rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; the bodily return of Jesus Christ; a conscious afterlife (eschatological life), so on and so forth. With these identifiable positions, what in God’s green earth qualifies someone like Congdon to write a book on identifying ‘who a true Christian is?’ He has already walked away from any semblance of what the biblical identifier, “Christian,” had come to mean; particularly in the book of Acts. At best, Congdon’s tools for identifying who the true Christian is are going to be those provided for him through sociology. But then in what sort of meaningful way would this give him privy to be a self-proclaimed identifier of who the true Christian is? Being a Christian isn’t a sociological category; it is a revelational-apocalyptic category, indeed, a biblical category. Thusly, its contours and themes, as those might be successfully and intelligibly understood, are purely theological and biblical. As a good Bultmannian, Congdon would and should know all of this. And yet he remains in the mode of deconstruction that he has seemingly been in for years now; long before I came to know him (circa 2006).

Here is the blurb from Congdon’s book:

‘No true Christian could vote for Donald Trump.’ ‘Real Christians are pro-life.’ ‘You can’t be a Christian and support gay marriage.’ Assertive statements like these not only reflect growing religious polarization but also express the anxiety over religious identity that pervades modern American Christianity. To address this disquiet, conservative Christians have sought security and stability: whether by retrieving ‘historic Christian’ doctrines, reconceptualizing their faith as a distinct culture, or reinforcing a political vision of what it means to be a follower of God in a corrupt world. The result is a concerted effort ‘Make Christianity Great Again’: a religious project predating the corresponding political effort to ‘Make America Great Again.’ Part intellectual history, part nuanced argument for change, this timely book explores why the question of what defines Christianity has become, over the last century, so damagingly vexatious – and how believers might conceive of it differently in future.[1]

Call me skeptical. That isn’t to say that Congdon might not offer any good insights or critiques say of evangelical Christianity; or even, mainline Christianity (and yet, Job’s “friends” thought they had good insights on God too). But it is to say, that I find it extremely ironic for someone who is no longer a professing Christian (at best he is a pluralist, something like we find with the late John Hick), to uplift himself as someone who might have the capacity to construct a mechanism that might tell us “Who Is a True Christian.”

The American Academy of Religion (AAR) is having its national-international meeting in San Diego, CA this next Thanksgiving week; along with the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). At these types of theological conferences, they have breakout and panel sessions, devoted to various groups and fellowships within the AAR. There is going to be a panel engaging directly with Congdon’s book, and apparently the panel is made up of critics, at one level or the other. In my view, Congdon’s book doesn’t warrant a panel review and engagement. Now, the AAR is expansive, and as such, has latitude in regard to its membership and focuses. Even so, just because something is published, even if it has acuity and academic eloquence, for my money, this doesn’t in itself warrant a response. I say this because whenever something is responded to in academia it elevates the subject matter, and amplifies its ostensible credibility. I don’t see how Congdon’s book achieves this level of credibility for a theological organization. If anything, it maybe could be paneled at some academic sociological conference, or something; this would be much more fitting. But such has the AAR become.

I simply wanted to acknowledge that this is happening. Congdon still has some influence on various Christians out there, and not for the good. I used to point some of my readers, here at the blog, to some of Congdon’s work in the past. I regret that. And so, I feel like I have some responsibility for alerting folks to what Congdon is doing these days, if only to keep them from falling into the trap of his neo-Gnostic maneuverings within the broader frame of the ‘body of Christ.’

[1] See Congdon, Who Is a True Christian?

The Secular Background Behind the, Shepherds For Sale

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If you hadn’t noticed, I deleted my last post in support of Megan Basham’s new book: Shepherds For Sale. Here is something else I have written in its place.

While exposing the darkness is what we ought be about I’m having second thoughts on putting too much stock into Megan Basham’s book, Shepherds For Sale. What she is confronting is clearly a problem in the evangelical churches, and one that has been present long before the expose. But I’m afraid her book is relying too much on making some type of forensic case in regard to following money-trails and backers. Ultimately, what matters is what is being introduced into the Christian world by the folks Megan is highlighting, and many others who she is not. It seems people on the side she is exposing are attempting to claim that if all the details of MB’s work aren’t inerrant, then her recognition of the broader problem is in fact errant. But of course this isn’t the case.

In other words, it isn’t that I think MB’s book is reporting things that aren’t true, per se. But ultimately the problem remains an ideational one, as communicated by these mainstream evangelicals. The case, at an ideational level could be made that the real problem that stands behind evangelicalism is the fact that it is built on a turn to the subject anthropology and thus, epistemology. Evangelicalism’s foundations, as those took shape under American Fundamentalist pressures, are rationalist, romanticist, and positivist just as much as are the leftists’ and progressives’. Until the pastors and churches who are against the progressive agenda realize this no amount of pietism and moralism will be able to finally stave off the very foundations that ground the whole evangelical experiment.

Conversely, I think an unintended consequence of Basham’s book might be to allow her opponents (in her book) to deflect away from the real ideological and theological issues by arguing against the details of her reporting (i.e., following the “money-trail”). But I don’t think that is where the argument is at, even to start with. Whether or not Soros, and others like him, are behind the funding of the mainstream evangelicals, particularly as we find that at Christianity Today, and other like outlets, (and I think they are, in many demonstrable ways) is not where this argument should terminate. It only counts further against these types of operatives within the churches. But the better way to counter them, as in any spiritual war, is to undercut the very rootage of their beliefs and agendas at the ground level. At best, Basham’s work can expose some of the financial compromise that is happening behind the scenes, which then ties into identifiably secular (and satanic) agendas. But the “argument” need not rise or fall on that point in itself.

Addendum:

I am continuing to read through Megan Basham’s book. She is writing as a reporter should write, and simply following the leads as they present themselves. This type of work needs to be done so people in the churches can, at the very least, understand better where their tithes are going; and with what “other monies” it is being mixed. This is no small matter since tithe money is collected as unto the LORD, and ostensibly being used to execute the work of His ministry through the Church. The problem though remains; as Os Guinness titled one of his books, evangelicals in the main, “have fit bodies but fat minds.” Until the pastors stop fleecing the sheep—by not teaching them deep and stretching biblical theology etc.—I’m afraid Basham’s work will fall on mostly deaf ears. Even so, the work itself needed to be done.

The problem remains though, there isn’t a “stable” place to return to for “evangelicals.” Evangelicalism in the main hasn’t ended up where it has in a vacuum. I’m not exactly sure what the antidote is, but staying within the “intellectual” milieu that funds evangelicalism will only result in a full circle cycle of movement. Once again, these matters are not purely binaries of us/them-them/us. That is too shortsighted, and too pietistic to think this way.

1/ Reviewing Bruce McCormack’s: The Humility of the Eternal Son

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I am going to attempt to write a series of blog posts that will be sections of what potentially could be turned into a review essay on chapter 7 (the final chapter) of Bruce McCormack’s book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon. Chapter 7 is where McCormack presents his constructive proposal on what he considers to be the needed ‘repair’ of Chalcedonian Christology. As the reader will see, he doesn’t abandon Chalcedon, he constructively engages with it offering an interesting proposal that I believe might be a way forward for thinking the Divinity and humanity of the eternal Son together in the singular person of Jesus Christ. I plan on sharing what I take to be key passages from McCormack’s chapter 7 and engaging with his thinking from there. The first passage presents McCormack’s general proposal, which he develops throughout the rest of the chapter.

Karl Barth was right, I think, to translate two “natures” into understandings of the “divine” and the “human” that arise out of close attention to “the history of God in his mode of existence as the Son.” Both “divine” and “human” being are “defined” by this history, for this history constitutes the “essence” of each. And so, in the place of two discrete (substantially conceived) “natures” subsisting in one and the same “persons,” I am going to posit the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what I will call the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to the “act of being” proper to the human Jesus as human. “Ontological receptivity,” it seems to me, is the most apt phrase describing the precise nature of the relation of the “Son” to Jesus of Nazareth as witnessed to in the biblical texts we treated.

I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s “ontological receptivity” that makes an eternal act of “identification” on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second “person” of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. This is what I believe to have been missing in Jüngel and Jenson. The “Son” has as “Son” an eternal determination for incarnation and, therefore, for uniting through “receptivity.” He is, in himself, “receptive.” To say any more than this at this point is impossible in the absence of a more thorough reconstruction of Chalcedon, so I will stop for the moment. Suffice it to say that “ontological receptivity” on the part of the Logos does all the heavy lifting that the genus tapeinoticum would have done (had the Reformed accepted it). And it does this without requiring acceptance of the classical metaphysics that made both the genus majesticum and the genus tapeinoticum to be (logical) possibilities. In any event, the reconstruction that follows will in no way violate the fundamental commitments of classical Reformed Christology. It will, in fact, extend essential commitments while breaking with non-essential commitments.

What is essential to any genuinely Reformed Christology is (again) the emphasis placed upon the integrity of the divine and human elements in their uniting. And I will secure that emphasis. The unimpaired integrity of the divine will be secured by means of the stress laid on a determination for incarnation that is essential to the eternal Son. The unimpaired integrity of the human will be secured by the Son’s receptivity that prevents instrumentalization of the human. What emerges will be in the spirit of Chalcedon even if it is not according to the letter.

So much by way of introduction.1

I have been reading Bruce for a long time. When I read his ‘repair’ or proposal it doesn’t fall on fresh ground. In other words, I have heard this from him, and some of his students, for decades now (one in particular, Darren Sumner; see his work Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God). These first inklings of what McCormack is only bringing together now (in this book, and we can assume the following two forthcoming in this trilogy) I was first introduced to in McCormack’s essay/chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, “Grace and Being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology.” This chapter from McCormack represented, at that point, a type of watershed moment, which ended up being known quaintly as the “Companion controversy,” and/or the “Barth Wars.” Without getting into that, the controversial nature of what McCormack was proposing then in certain ways seems to be the seedlings of what is now blossoming in his ‘repair of Chalcedon.’

The critique has always been (by George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar et al.) that McCormack’s reading, and “revisionist” appropriation of Barth’s themes works against the grain of Barth’s textual theological offering. Be that as it may, that hatchet, for McCormack has been buried; he has moved on, and is developing here, not an intentionally “Barthian” account of things, instead, his is simply an offering of constructive Christological imagination. If the reader is familiar with modern theology, what the reader senses, if they do, and they’d be right, is a type of so-called postmetaphysical or post-Barthian analysis by McCormack. The reader might pick this up merely by reading the passage I offered from McCormack above. But if the reader had indeed read McCormack previous to this final chapter, they would have understood that McCormack is distancing himself from unqualified post-Barthian readings of the Christological history of ideas. He proffers what he along with his colleague Alexandra Pârvan identify as a ‘psychological ontology,’ which fits well with what he describes for us above as ‘ontological receptivity,’ to which we now turn.

When McCormack writes the following, “I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s ‘ontological receptivity’ that makes an eternal act of ‘identification’ on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second ‘person’ of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs …,” one gets the type of ‘narratival’ feeling you might get when reading Robert Jenson’s own “Barth” inspired oeuvre. I would suggest that it is this thesis offered by McCormack that serves most controversial for his proposal, and yet I find it rather compelling in certain ways (which I will have to address in a later post). It is this theory, in regard to ontological receptivity, that has been inchoately present in McCormack’s thinking (at least in published form) since at least his ‘Companion’ piece. The controversial aspect of this comes back to the fear that McCormack is engaging, at the christological level, in some form of adoptionism or Ebionism. But McCormack attempts to elide this charge by emphasizing, as we see in the second paragraph above, the notion that the eternal Son has always already been Deus incarnandus (God to become flesh); which fits with McCormack’s understanding of Barth’s doctrine of election, to a point (McCormack does not think Barth’s doctrine of election goes far enough to allow McCormack to speak in the ways he now is with reference to “ontological receptivity,” which you can read about here).

For McCormack, thus far, he believes that Godself’s choice or election to be enfleshed in Christ, makes His reception in the man from Nazareth the most fitting and organic outcome that Godself eternally pre-destined for Himself as the fundamentum or foundation of the Divine identity. One could argue that this escapes adoptionism insofar that in this choice to be incarnate, God has always already been the eternal identity, or the inner-reality for which creation itself had been fitted in its own independently contingent and ordered way. As such, the Christological heresy of adoptionism has no air to breathe insofar that the type of abstract creation required for such a notion to exist never obtains; that is, the condition for an abstract notion of humanity apart from its predetermination to be what it is vis-á-vis God is a counterfactual with no factual basis in the economy of God as revealed in His history for the world in Jesus Christ. This might seem to lend itself towards a failure to secure a proper Creator/creature distinction in a God-world relation, thus resulting in some type of panentheism through a christological malaise. But McCormack will attempt to rebuff this error by appeal to a robust reposition on a Pneumatological-Christology forthcoming. If the Divine identity is contingent on God’s life for the world in Christ, the Spirit will need to do the type of “heavy-lifting” that McCormack is wont to stress as “ontological receptivity.”

Even as I write this, I am still processing whether I can co-sign with Bruce, and say amen. His reception and constructive engagement with Barth’s doctrine of election has always been intriguing to me. His Christological proposal in this book is no less intriguing; indeed, it seems to take his form of thinking, in regard to his constructive imagination with Barth, to another level. To be sure, his proposal here is not intended to be a “Barthian” proposal, per se; McCormack makes this clear throughout the book. His primary modern interlocutors are Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jüngel, Sergius Bulgakov, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is not slavishly committed to any of his ‘teachers,’ but the reader can see bright pieces throughout, informing his ‘repair’ work as he attempts to harvest the best from them and imaginatively bring them into a concerto of his own rhythmic orchestration.

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 252-53.

 

The Great Peace of the Barth Wars: McCormack’s Recanto to Hunsinger and Molnar

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Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘Companion Controversy,’ which later came to be called The Barth Wars, by some. I have been published, a wee bit, on this here; as far as some commentary. In nuce, it entails an embroilment within Anglophone Barth studies; that is, between, in particular, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger/Paul Molnar respectively. It has to do with the way McCormack reads Barth’s doctrine of election as a sort of organizing dogma for his doctrine of God; in a highly actualistic sense. Hunsinger/Molnar demur and claim that the ‘textual’ (Hunsinger’s word) Barth, and his doctrine of God, has an antecedent reality (which is the classical position), and as such the economic God cannot be fully read back into the immanent (in se) God, as McCormack proposes. That’s a very rough sketch of the matter.

In general, Hunsinger’s critique, in particular, has been that McCormack offers a revisionist Barth; and thus, doesn’t actually offer Barth’s theology at all—at least when it comes to a doctrine of God proper. McCormack has maintained that he has been offering something of the logic of Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis God proper, even if Barth didn’t follow through with the logic itself. Even so, at the end of the day, McCormack has claimed to be reading the grain of Barth’s theology faithfully; more so than his ‘opponents,’ Hunsinger/Molnar. And now, in his most recent work,1 McCormack seems to finally admit that he is doing something different than Barth when it comes to Barth’s textual doctrine of election (although read me below, as I’ve been thinking this through, even as I write this, I’m developing). In other words, as I’ve been reading McCormack’s new book (which is excellent thus far), a rather striking thing gets communicated. He acknowledges that he disagrees with Barth, or that Barth’s doctrine of election represents “the limit of how far I [McCormack] can follow him.”2

Here is the full passage from McCormack:

Looking back at Barth’s early appropriation of Calvin’s exegesis of Phil. 2 in support of a Reformed Christology, which laid its emphasis upon the preservation of the “natures” of Christ in their original integrity subsequent to their union, Barth’s understanding of the divine kenosis in his later Christology clearly points in the direction of providing an explanation for the susceptibility of the eternal Son to the human experiences of suffering and death. His way of upholding divine immutability was to anchor the existence of the Logos “in the form of a servant” in the divine election — understood as a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung). Barth’s later Christology thus became the epistemological ground of our knowledge of election. Election then was posited as the ontological ground of Barth’s later Christology. Clearly, he wanted to understand the human experiences of suffering and death as essential to God in his second mode of being. Whether his doctrine of election was fully adequate to this task is debatable — which marks the limit of how far I can follow him.3

So, what is rather interesting about this development is that McCormack seems to be affirming his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, the one that Hunsinger says is a revisionist reading, but then coming to the conclusion that he cannot follow Barth down this path; i.e. of reading human suffering and death into the second mode of being of the triune God into the essential or ‘eternal’ or in se being of God. As I reflect on this, even in this moment, it almost seems as if McCormack says he cannot follow Barth here; and yet on the other hand Hunsinger/Molnar are saying you don’t have to, because you never were to begin with. In other words, it’s almost as if McCormack is de facto agreeing with Hunsinger/Molnar, in the sense that if one were to follow through on McCormack’s “revisionist” Barth, that that theologian would be the pantheist, or panentheist that Hunsinger/Molnar have said “McCormack’s Barth” indeed reduces to. So instead of admitting that he has been misreading Barth’s doctrine of election, which would be a sort of recanto to Hunsinger/Molnar, he continues to maintain that he has indeed read Barth’s doctrine of election correctly, but that he cannot follow Barth in that direction. He seems to be making a “classical turn,” potentially, albeit one that seeks to repair Chalcedon’s Cyrillian misstep with the resources that he seems to have found in a burgeoning ‘Spirit Christology’ (I’m still reading, so we’ll see).

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

2 Ibid., 121. 

3 Ibid., 120-21. 

Book Review: The Epistle To The Ephesians Karl Barth

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The Epistle to the Ephesians: Karl Barth

(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2017) ISBN 9780801030918 (hardcover) – 182 pp. Price $18.33

Edited by: R. David Nelson

Translated by: Ross M. Wright

I wanted to first off say thank you to Baker Academic for sending me an unsolicited review copy of Karl Barth’s Ephesians commentary. This review will offer entrée into the current volume under consideration by engaging with the editor’s and translator’s thoughts, and then by engaging with the two forwards written respectively by Francis Watson and the late John Webster. In closing I will give a my brief impression of this book, and impress upon the reader what I think about its value.

As the editor, David Nelson notes in regard to the origin of Barth’s commentary on Ephesians, as well as its offering in English translation in this current work, “Karl Barth’s lectures on Ephesians from 1921–22 are published for the first time in English in this little volume. The lectures provide a window into Barth’s developing theology during the critical period of the early 1920s and right around the publication of the second edition of Der Römerbrief (1922)” (p. 1). Indeed, Barth did this work as he taught Ephesians in his role as professor of Reformed theology at Göttingen University; which was his first professorial post following the publication of his first volume of Der Römerbrief. As the translator Ross Wright notes in regard to the development of these lectures and what became Barth’s commentary on Ephesians, “…The exposition consists of a detailed exegesis of the Greek text of Ephesians 1:1–23, originally delivered as thirteen lectures, including a summary of Ephesians 2–6 in the final lecture” (p. 7). The reason Barth had to compress chapters two through six was simply a lack of time; he of course had many other pressures placed upon him, not to mention the publishing of his second Romans commentary. But what he did produce in his more detailed exegesis is quite impressive, and what you would expect from the capaciousness of Karl Barth.

As noted previously Francis Watson and John Webster, respectively, wrote introductory essays for this publication of Barth’s commentary; both valuable pieces of reflection in and of themselves. As David Nelson notes, as a former PhD student of Webster’s: “Barth’s Epistle to the Ephesians turned out to be my final opportunity to work with my erstwhile Doktorvater, John Webster, who passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday, May 25, 2016. From what I have been able to gather, it is also his last word on Barth, with whose thought he had wrestled his entire career” (p. 6). For those of us who were “students” of Webster’s from afar, this makes his contribution to this volume that much more significant.

In order to get a taste of how both Watson and Webster engaged with Barth’s Ephesians, and for purposes of time, I am simply going to offer quotes from each of them as provided for in the concluding summative remarks of their respective essays. Hopefully you’ll be able to get a sense of the whole of their essays by reading a small part of them here. We will hear from Watson first, then Webster.

Here is how Francis Watson closes his essay:

As evidenced in the Ephesians lectures of 1921–1922, Barth’s relation to the traditions and conventions of biblical scholarship is complex. As we have seen, Barth distances himself from what he (wrongly) regards as extraneous historical questions about author and addressees, yet he devotes significant parts of the earlier lectures to discussing them (I). He works with the Greek text and has internalized the exegete’s awareness that small-scale issues of syntax and sense can have major interpretive consequences (II). Equally characteristic of the exegete are Barth’s concern to analyze the structure of larger units of text and the willingness to engage with and learn from other exegetes in doing so (III). While theological preoccupations are everywhere to the fore, Barth makes serious and successful attempts to show their grounding within the scriptural text (IV). Barth’s radical Paulinism leads him to make unexpected common cause with a scholar already regarded by many as an archenemy of historic Christianity (V). Nearly a century after they were delivered, and from whatever perspective one comes to them, these lectures on Ephesians retain their power to disconcert (p. 30).

Reading Watson’s closing remarks the reader might get the impression that the whole of his essay was largely critical of Barth; but that isn’t quite the case. While he has some serious reservations about Barth’s ultimate conclusions I think Watson’s essay as a whole offers a charitable reading of Barth, and sheds light on Barth’s context and circumstance as he operated as a theological exegete of scripture.

John Webster approaches Barth a bit differently than does Watson. Here are his concluding remarks at the end of his essay:

It would be relatively easy to judge Barth’s lectures, both in what they say about divine revelation and its apostolic media in their presentation of Christian existence in relation to God, as often trapped by the malign contrast: aut gloria Dei aut gloria hominis. Such an opposition is not Barth’s intention: the lectures (along with those on Calvin from the following semester) are in part a struggle to articulate a relation between the “vertical” and the “horizontal” that is neither antithesis nor synthesis. So intense is Barth’s concern to draw attention to the nongiven, nonrepresentable character of God’s presence that he allows himself to say rather little about the human forms and acts by which divine revelation and saving action are communicated and received and about the ways in which they shape and order human life and activity—beyond some highly charged descriptions of the dislocation that they engender. Together with Barth’s instinctive occasionalism and his insistent rhetoric, this intensity runs the risk of denying what, after many qualifications, he is trying to affirm. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth will leave this difficulty behind in his long descriptions of God’s economic acts and the human moral history that they evoke and sustain. Here, however, his principal concern is to refuse to think of God and creatures as reciprocal, commensurable terms; yet in so doing, he sometimes appears to subvert not only commensurability but all relation (p. 49).

Whereas Watson focused more on the biblical discipline aspects of Barth’s approach to lecturing and exegeting Ephesians, Webster, as the quote reveals, focuses on theological thematic themes that he perceives as funding Barth’s theological frames as he engages with the book of Ephesians. While largely appreciative of Barth’s work, Webster also evinces some critical notes as he thinks through what in fact Barth accomplished and communicated in his study of the epistle to the Ephesians.

Impression

In contrast to the esteemed Watson and Webster, while their points are clearly attuned to the finer impulses of Barth’s theology and exegesis, I walked away from my reading of Barth’s Ephesians with the impression that what he did in Ephesians was rather commentarial. In other words, juxtaposed with the work that Barth did in Romans, his lectures/commentary on Ephesians fit much better with a more traditional biblical commentary. For this reason I found it very refreshing, and even surprising; I wasn’t expecting to encounter Barth with this sort of genre attendant to his pen. You will certainly get Barth’s theology, as his exegesis, no matter where that is encountered, is always going to “err” on the side of the theological exegetical combine; but I was impressed with his ability to follow the text-line in an almost expositional manner. He certainly hits upon a variety of themes, one important theme being his doctrine of resurrection, which Webster highlights in his essay, and for that this work is also important as it gives us an insider’s look into Barth’s early theological thought life; again, another reason to pick up this book and read.

All in all, I was very refreshed by reading this book. I commend it to all who are interested in understanding Barth’s theology; not to mention for those interested in getting a unique look at the Apostle Paul’s theology—from one theologian to another. If I was going to rate it on a star system I’d give this volume a five out of five stars. Tolle lege. Â