My intention is to inspire readers of this blog to tackle Barth’s text on their own. Barth engages the real arguments, the ones that matter. His critique is startlingly pertinent in a new century characterized (on every side) either by extremist orthodoxies that are completely unwilling to take other points of view seriously, or by a lazy and totalizing “inclusiveness” unwilling to take any past seriously, or to engage in any future which will have to account for evil as well as good. The conflation of Christian faith with evangelical pieties and right-wing politics is a feature as serious and ominous in our times as was the rise of the Deutsche Christen in Barth’s – and the two phenomena are connected and amazingly consistent. Responding to the heresies of the “court evangelicals,” and the right-wing independent Pentecostalist prosperity gospel, requires any serious reader to take a costly stand in resistance.
These comments from time to time allude to scholarship about Barth, both his thought and times, but do not engage the scholarly conversation. As a librarian, I am well aware of the vast scholarship on Barth, some of which I have read. At every turn I could festoon the page with footnotes in the best Princetonian tradition, but I demur. This blog is simply my response to reading Barth, not a scholarly introduction or contribution. (My scholarship has (or will have) to do with Carolingian liturgical history and hymnody.)