Tweeting Christine Tietz's "Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict"

By -
It took me longer than I would have liked to take it up and read, but I have now worked my way through Christine Tietz's Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict.

It is very good.

In fact, reading it prompted me to update my guide to reading Barth (which I origianlly wrote in 2007 and haven't updated since ~2013) in order to include it: So, You Want To Read Karl Barth?.

Very early in the process of reading Tietz's book I realized that I would want to share about the volume. So I decided to tweet my way through it. And below I have pulled together all those tweets for folks who may have seen one or two and wondered about the rest, folks who might be interested but aren't on Twitter, etc. Enjoy reading, and then go but the book!





==================================



Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

Comments

J. Scott Jackson said…
This is great! Your ad hoc reflections seem spot on to me. Tietz's account of Barth's struggles with his father really shed light on the other fraught relationships, personal and professional, he would have later in life. And who even knew how much tension there was between Karl and his mother? My gut reaction to reading the extremely painful accounts of the Karl-Nelly-Lolo triangle was neither to dismiss or bracket the problems nor to be censorious in an uncomplicated way. That said, of course, it seems to me that both Nelly and von Kirschbaum both received a pretty crappy deal in the interest in promoting the vocation of the "great man." Reading in depth about that business made me sad. Barth's cluelessness in dealing with the evolving role of women in the ecumenical movement, which you point out in your thread, also struck me as significant -- and maybe along with the other relationships I've mentioned is revelatory of Barth's overall difficulties in dealing with women -- or at least, in dealing with them as equals. For my part, I still admire and respect Barth and his intellectual contributions to the church -- the account of his recalcitrance in standing up to Nazis, capitalists, and cold warriors, and the canniness and deft with which he navigated these encounters, makes him, still, in many ways a very appealing figure for me. Thanks to Tietz, at last, some of the common distortions of Barth, both in hagiography and in caricature, are stripped away and the figure of a real human being begins to emerge.
October 05, 2022 12:01 PM
J. Scott Jackson said…
(Sorry, but I'm just too verbose to post all that on Twitter. -- ;-) )
October 05, 2022 12:06 PM
Post a Comment

Popular Posts

So, You Want To Read Karl Barth?

By -
Image
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri
Keep reading

So You Want to Read….Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

By -
Image
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 1, Day 5

By -
“You Wonder Where the Spirit Went”: Jenson and Barth on the Hiddenness of God By Peter Kline I am entering into a conversation that Jenson has already begun with Barth. In a constructive essay on the hiddenness of God (Jenson 2000), Jenson considers Barth’s position on the matter only to find it lacking. I want to explore why Jenson has problems with Barth on this issue, as well think critically about his constructive alternative. I will suggest that Jenson is only partly right in his diagnosis of Barth; he in fact overlooks the heart of Barth’s teaching on divine hiddenness. The reason is that he looks in the wrong place for Barth’s pneumatology. Jenson can’t find the Spirit in Barth not because the Spirit isn’t there, but because the Spirit is hidden . These considerations will open out into a comparison of Barth and Jenson on the logic of revelation. By “logic” I mean: what is discourse about God’s revealedness and hiddenness supposed to accomplish? Part I Jenson focuses his a
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 3, Day 1

By -
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that
Keep reading

Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

By -
Image
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from
Keep reading