God Here and Now

Book summary

Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was one of the most important religious thinkers of the twentieth century. His landmark works include The Epistle to the Romans and his unfinished four-volume Church Dogmatics. He’s also known for coauthoring “The Barmen Declaration” as part of the German Confessing Church – the Protestant group that opposed the Third Reich. Barth’s writings have been translated into multiple languages, and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1962.

Barth’s theology centers on the idea that faith and the knowledge of God arise solely through divine revelation, not human effort or innate ability. Drawing from Kant, Barth acknowledges humanity’s inability to fully comprehend God but emphasizes that God bridges this gap through revelation, most profoundly in Jesus Christ. This act of revelation, which divides history into "before" and "after," is the foundation of Christianity, with scripture and preaching serving as means to witness and communicate this miracle. Barth rejects attempts to separate Christianity’s eternal truths from their historical context, arguing that its essence is inseparable from its concrete roots. Influenced by his upbringing in a religiously and philosophically rich environment, Barth opposed both the silence of unknowable divinity and the experiential focus of Schleiermacher, instead placing revelation at the heart of theology. For Barth, God’s grace, revealed through Jesus, scripture, and preaching, transforms the impossible into the possible, allowing humanity to engage with the divine.

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