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Karl Barth has bedeviled myriad interpreters, from existentialist theologians to orthodox Calvinists, with his tenacious and often strident efforts to keep theology free from the miserable conflict of "worldviews". Timothy Gorringe, in his study Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford, 1999) helps us understand why the Swiss dogmatician was so resolute on this score. Essentially, as Gorringe reads him, Barth equates worldview with ideology, and theology must be bound only to the Word of God and not to any distorting human intellectual constructs. This does not mean, though, that that the issue is preserving theology per se from the fray of human conflicts and controversies; rather, the question is: Does theological ratiocination bind or loose believers for the concrete struggles of social and political life. Gorringe writes: Barth has rightly been described [by Clifford Green] as a "theologian of freedom". From one point of view the Church Dogmatics is a gigan...

Recently I've been reading, marking and inwardly digesting Timothy Gorringe's excellent contextual study, Karl Barth Against Hegemony (New York, Oxford Press, 1999). Copies of this book tend to be pricey, but my wife tracked down a copy -- from somewhere across the pond, I think -- for about $30. The book, part of the Oxford series Christian Theology in Context that Gorringe edited with Graham Ward, offers a genetic-historical overview of Barth's theological development from his student days to his final dogmatic writings in Das christliche Leben ( The Christian Life ). Rather than focusing on paradigm shifts in Barth's thought (as Bruce McCormack does, for example), this text book presents Barth's theological work as, on the whole, exhibiting a more or less unified trajectory. In this vein, Gorringe draws heavily, though not uncritically, from the provocative interpretation of Barth proffered in the early 1970s by the German socialist theologian Friedrich-Wilh...