Andy Rowell

Category: Karl Barth

  • My piece on Barth and Bonhoeffer is up at the Karl Barth Blog Conference

    My piece on Barth and Bonhoeffer is up at the Karl Barth Blog Conference. 

    I am responding to a piece by Matt Puffer, a Religious Studies doctoral student in Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the University of Virginia. 

    My piece is called:

    Response – Supplementing Puffer’s Thesis: Barth’s Growing Appreciation for Bonhoeffer

    The Karl Barth Blog Conference is an online three week conference organized by W. Travis McMaken and David Congdon, two Ph.D. students in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.  

  • Karl Barth on the audacity to write

    “I only ask myself whether you might not and could not do what I have so often done: begin with a certain audacity to write (quite without reflection whether or not what you write is new or good, etc.) without hesitating until you are finished so that you have on paper, a corpus of, let us say, fifteen or twenty chapters, out of which then the remainder could crystallize and which could then be always worked over.”

    36-year-old Karl Barth to his good friend 34-year-old pastor Eduard Thurneysen on February 16, 1923.

    Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925 (Translated by James D. Smart), Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964, p. 132.

    Revolutionary theology in the making : Barth-Thurneysen correspondence, 1914-1925

  • Book Review: Karl Barth: The Word in this World: Two Sermons

    • Karl Barth: The Word in this World: Two Sermons

    Karl Barth: The Word in this World: Two Sermons 
    This slim volume has some great introductory material about the two sermons (Eberhard Busch, Will Willimon, Clifford Anderson) and great blurbs which serve as more introductory material (Geoffrey Bromiley, Donald McKim, James Strauss, Dieter Zellweger). The first sermon in the volume Barth later found embarrassing because the sinking of the Titanic was more of a focus than Scripture. The second is in Barth's classic expositional style but it is also inspiring. The text is Jesus walking on the water and Peter going out to him. 

    Here is a quote: 

    "What is required–what Jesus Christ continually requires–are rocks like this who are certainly not perfectly untainted people, who are perhaps seriously objectionable in many ways and will have much to answer for, but are nevertheless ready to do something quite specific, to render obedience to a specific word by undertaking a specific service." Karl Barth, "The Bremen Sermon (Matthew 14:22-23)," in The Word in this World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth (ed. Kurt I. Johanson; trans. Christopher Asprey; Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2007), 55.

    It made me want to preach. Add this to my recommendation of God in Action: Theological Addresses as a good introduction to Barth.

    See my Karl Barth category for more on Barth.