When future historians look back on the developments in theology over the course of the 20th century, there is little doubt that the name of Karl Barth will tower above the others as the most prominent and influential theologian. Yet, as recently as the beginning of the past decade, George Hunsinger was able to write with justification that although Barth is often acknowledged as the greatest theologian of the century, he has also "achieved the dubious distinction of being habitually honored but not much read."1 This has perhaps been particularly true in the English-speaking world.

Today, however, there is ample evidence of a revival of interest in the study of Barth. Books, articles, and dissertations on Barth's theology appear with great regularity; the Karl Barth Society of North America is flourishing; and the newly established Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary is promoting scholarly and ecclesial engagement with his thought. In the midst of all this activity, John Webster notes that the most important development has been that "Barth is read, and read in extenso."2

At least two reasons account for this resurgence of interest in Barth's thought. The first is simply the concern of historical scholarship to gain a more accurate conception of what Barth was in fact attempting to say in his work. Over the past 25 years, the Swiss edition of Barth's collected writings has made generally available a large quantity of important and previously unpublished material such as lectures, sermons, and letters. Of particular importance are the lecture cycles from the early years of Barth's career as a theology professor. The availability of these writings has led to significant revisions in the standard account of Barth's development, particularly the notion that he abandoned the dialectical thinking characteristic of his early theology. And this, in turn, has suggested new perspectives on the precise contours of Barth's mature theology contained in the Church Dogmatics.

The second reason for this renewed interest in Barth may be found in the new opportunities for theology arising out of the shifting cultural climate. Theology in the 21st century is in a state of transition and ferment brought about by the breakdown of the assumptions of the modern world spawned by the Enlightenment. Surprisingly and somewhat ironically, the thought of Karl Barth has come to be closely associated with the attempt to rethink theology after modernity. Indeed, the perceived affinity of Barth's theology with postmodernism has led some interpreters to suggest that Barth, who considered himself both a child and a critic of the 19th century, may find his greatest influence in the century to come.

How plausible is this new reading of Barth, and what are its implications for evangelical theology? With respect to the use of Barth's work to fund theological proposals that may be broadly construed as postmodern, we can identify two recent approaches: the nonfoundational "postliberalism" advocated by Yale theologians Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, and the postmodern themes of "otherness" and "non-givenness" espoused by Walter Lowe, Graham Ward, and William Stacy Johnson.

Postliberal theology is marked by two distinctive tendencies. The first is the rejection of philosophical foundationalism, the tendency to resist any attempt to find a neutral and ultimate vantage point from which to assess the truth and coherence of theological statements. This nonfoundational approach to theology leads to a second tendency, that of understanding Christian theology primarily as an act of communal self-description. The most significant figure in the development of the nonfoundational perspective in theology is Hans Frei, who was also, not coincidentally, one of the foremost Barth scholars in America. Frei's book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974) established him as one of the leading defenders of "neo-orthodoxy," a movement commonly associated with Barth's theology, during a period when its influence was at a low ebb in America. In Types of Christian Theology (1992), an edited and fragmentary book based on his lectures and published after his untimely death, we are able to glimpse Frei's understanding of Barth and his relationship to the developments in theology during the 20th century.

In this work Frei attempts to sort out the approaches of various modern theological alternatives to the perennial question of the relationship of theology to philosophy. He achieves this by posing a spectrum of opinion ranging from strong foundationalism (the belief that Christian theology is subordinate to the discipline of philosophy which sets forth the rules of correct discourse for all fields of knowledge) to strong nonfoundationalism (the belief that Christian theology is an internal, contextual exercise in self-description that rejects in principle the notion of general, universally valid theories of knowledge that apply to all intellectual disciplines). The question that Frei seeks to address concerns the very nature of the discipline: Is Christian theology primarily a philosophical discipline that is open to external description (that is, explication from outside the believing community) or is it primarily an internal act of Christian self-description (that is, faith seeking understanding)? In the former, theology is subject to the current canons of reason in philosophy and is therefore best done in the context of the academy, while the latter account suggests that theology is subject only to explicitly Christian discourse and is thus best pursued in the context of the Church.

Frei identifies three representatives of positions that seek to navigate between these extremes: revisionist (or liberal) David Tracy, 19th-century liberal Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Barth. Tracy is on the foundationalist end of the spectrum but allows, at least in theory, for a serious accounting of the explicitly Christian religion that is to be correlated with common human experience. However, the result of his procedure, given his assumptions concerning the nature of human experience as universal and therefore its priority in the task of correlation, leads inevitably to the eclipse of distinctively Christian theology. This is because the specifically Christian content of theology is thoroughly subsumed by philosophy on the basis of a general and supposedly universal theory of integration, in this case that of philosophical anthropology.

The main difference between Schleiermacher and Tracy in Frei's reckoning is that Schleiermacher attempts to correlate the external, philosophical description of theology, which is subject to accepted criteria of universal validity, with Christian self-description apart from any general theory that would predetermine the outcome of the process. The two are seen as bearing equal weight in the task of theological correlation. In this sense Schleiermacher is technically not, contrary to the standard portrait, a foundationalist. However, in his definitive theological work, The Christian Faith, his application of the formal principles of his theological method gives the appearance of foundationalism. This is due to the significant alterations he makes to the historical content of Christian theology on the basis of his conception of the "essence" of Christianity as a particular communal expression of the universal human condition (the feeling of absolute dependence). Given the material content of his teaching it is hardly surprising that Schleiermacher has been viewed as being at the headwaters of foundationalist theology.

In his presentation, Frei maintains that Barth agrees with Schleiermacher's conception of Christian theology as a nonsystematic correlation of Christian self-description and general philosophical method, but does not regard them as equals. Barth places greater priority on Christian self-description than Schleiermacher and reverses the procedure of Tracy by arguing that self-description governs and limits the use of philosophy in theology rather than vice versa. According to Frei, Barth affirmed that "absolute priority be given to Christian theology as Christian self-description within the religious community called the Church, or the Christian community"3 and thus conceived of theology as "normed Christian self-description or critical self-examination by the Church of her language concerning God, in God's presence."4 In this understanding, Christian theology can be viewed as being primarily concerned with teaching the particular language and concepts that shape the beliefs and practices of the community with little concern for the pressing question of truth.

In locating Barth on the more nonfoundational side of his typology with the emphasis on self-description as the principle task of theology, Frei implied a reading of Barth that concentrates attention on the internal logic of theological assertions within the Christian community at the expense of questions concerning reality-reference. Frei's Yale colleague, George Lindbeck, extended and developed the approach to theology suggested by this reading of Barth in his highly influential book, The Nature of Doctrine (1984). While Lindbeck did not attempt to offer a critical reading of Barth's theology his use of Barth, based on the interpretation offered by Frei, and his significance in the development of postliberalism has provided the basis for an increasingly common postmodern, nonfoundationalist reading of Barth's theology.

A second postmodern interpretation of Barth develops the theme of God as "wholly other" found in his early writings. The basic thrust of this approach suggests that finite human beings are simply incapable of describing the infinite God within the context of a single linguistic context, much less a particular theological system within a particular linguistic context. Both Walter Lowe, in his book Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (1993) and Graham Ward, in his work Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (1995), bring Barth into conversation with the French postmodern linguistic and literary theorist Jacques Derrida and attempt to draw out affinities between the two. William Stacy Johnson develops this theme more generally in The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (1997). The picture of Barth's theology that emerges in these books is one that calls into question not only the standard interpretations of his work, but also the very notion of theology as traditionally conceived.

Lowe focuses his attention on the second edition of Barth's Romans commentary, published in 1922, in which Barth calls into question all human theological complacency that assumes to have definitively settled the question of God and his relationship to the world. Lowe extends this early Barthian theme in tandem with Derrida in order to develop a revised metaphysics that effectively renders the historical reality of the Church's conception of God as fundamentally ambiguous. However, in developing his thesis, Lowe departs from standard interpretations of Derrida as a deconstructive nihilist with little interest in the question of truth. He devotes an entire chapter to Derrida's understanding of the truth-question in an attempt to demonstrate that Derrida is not a relativistic nihilist and that his thought cannot properly be employed in support of such purposes. Lowe suggests that the mistaken turn in much postmodern thought is that in its realization that truth could not be finally and completely grasped, it concluded that the very question of truth must be abandoned. He maintains that the question of truth should not and indeed cannot be disposed of, but rather needs to be recast in light of the contextual nature of the finite human condition. Thus, for Lowe the purpose of his interpretation of Barth and Derrida and the radical otherness of God is not simply deconstructive, but rather to open up new critical and constructive possibilities for theology on the basis of a metaphysically chastened view of God that thoroughly contextualizes all human thought.

While Lowe looks to the early Barth to develop his thesis, Graham Ward engages with the later Barth of the Church Dogmatics to discuss the challenges for theology created by an awareness of the inadequacy of human language to provide immediate access to reality. It is this "crisis of representation" that raises the question of God and the possibility of theology for Ward and provides the context from which he views the emergence of Barth's thought. He argues that the central challenge for Barth was to provide a theological account of the meaningfulness of language in general and to address specifically the question concerning the way in which the Word of God comes to expression in human words. However, according to Ward, Barth's attempt to resolve the problem of theological language, while suggestive of a way forward, finally ends in incoherence. Ward appeals to Derrida as the thinker who supplies a "philosophical supplement" that may be added to Barth in order to give greater coherence to his conception of theological language. This linking of Derrida to Barth results in the construction of the conditions necessary for the development of a postmodern theology of the Word and human language.

The result of this for Ward is a postmodern Barthianism in which the presence of God in human language is that of absence. In other words, what finite human beings are really able to "know" about God is his fundamental hiddenness and incomprehensibility. Interestingly, Ward has become one of the prominent voices in the "radical orthodoxy" movement associated with Cambridge University and situates his interpretation of Barth as leading to a conservative postmodern theology, albeit one in which the emphasis on the radical otherness of God suggests significant alterations to traditional conservative accounts of the theological task.

William Stacy Johnson offers another attempt at bringing Barth into conversation with postmodern themes and provides a fresh rethinking of Barth's theology as a whole. Johnson also develops the notion of the hiddenness and mystery of God, but with a different nuance. For Lowe and Ward, God is hidden due to the limitations of the finite human condition. Insights concerning cultural anthropology such as the situated nature of all human knowledge and the limits of human language are developed to suggest the inadequacy of all human knowledge of God and so to "decenter" theology primarily on anthropological grounds. Johnson moves beyond this claim by asserting that for Barth it is God himself who decenters theology. The "foundations" of the theological task are not to be sought in anthropological, linguistic, or philosophical categories but only in the being-in-act of the Triune God in his self-revelation.

These foundations are postmodern in that they are not construed as providing self-evident, noninferential, or incorrigible grounds for theological claims. Johnson maintains that for Barth, the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ nevertheless remains an unfathomable and ultimate mystery. The reality of this divine mysteriousness means that to study the living God of Christian theology is to "converge upon the untamed and uncoercible" being who calls human beings "fundamentally into question" and overturns "all that was previously stable and secure."5 According to Johnson, Barth's understanding of the mystery of God, even in the act of revelation, unsettles all doctrinal affirmations and suggests that such statements be viewed as open-ended and subject to continual revision in accordance with the nature of the God to whom they seek to bear witness. In this conception, theology becomes a "fragile and provisional venture" in which no claims of certainty can prevail and no one can have the final word in the face of the intractable mystery of the living God.

Each of the works mentioned thus far seeks not simply to interpret Barth but to make use of his work to further a particular approach to theology in the postmodern situation. Clearly these efforts have provided fresh and compelling reasons to engage in the study of his theology with renewed interest. Yet even as these appropriations of Barth are fueling new theological paradigms aimed at addressing the postmodern context, other interpreters have been suggesting that before Barth is pressed into the service of such proposals, theologians would do well to gain a greater purchase on the actual contours of his thought. These scholars maintain that Barth's theology has been largely misunderstood in the English-speaking world—by his supporters as well as his critics. As a result, much of the potential significance of Barth's thought for the current theological situation has been obscured. This perspective, coupled with the new materials made available through the Swiss edition of Barth's collected writings, has produced a renewed interest in historical interpretation that seeks a more adequate comprehension of Barth's thought before attempting to either critique or make use of his work in the task of constructive theology.

Although many scholars have made contributions to the development of Barth research in the past several years, two in particular have produced works that stand out as among the most influential in reshaping the discipline of Barth studies: George Hunsinger, with How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (1991), and Bruce McCormack, with Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (1995). Taken together, these two works provide a way of reading Barth that does greater justice to the nuances of argument he develops and sustains in the Church Dogmatics. In so doing, they also bring the internal coherence of his thought into greater relief as well as correcting some common misunderstandings of his thought found in the scholarship of the English-speaking world.

Hunsinger offers a new approach to reading Barth's Church Dogmatics that diverges from previous attempts to set forth and analyze Barth with its focus on "pattern recognition" rather than the explication of his theology by means of a "single overriding conception" that functions as the interpretive key to his thought. Hunsinger's aim is to help readers of Barth develop a "set of skills" which will enable them to more effectively discern the argument of the Church Dogmatics. He suggests that Barth's theology is shaped by the recurrence of several "dialectical and often counterintuitive" patterns or motifs that interlace the argument of the Dogmatics.6 While these are often experienced as elusive and strange to readers of Barth, Hunsinger maintains that they are "fully capable of clear and distinct formulation" and can serve as "felicitous categories of discernment" in the reading of the Dogmatics. Since these motifs recur in various contexts and combinations in Barth, the reader who has come to recognize and master them will be better able to grasp the nuances of Barth's argument throughout the Dogmatics and will also be in a position to more fully appreciate the distinctiveness of his theology.

Hunsinger's approach preserves the truly dialectical character of Barth's work and avoids the flattening tendency of systematization characteristic in many interpretations that tend to place emphasis on a particular aspect of his thought while distorting its general shape. It is the dialectical character of Barth's thought that makes him seem, at various turns, frustratingly complex, slippery, and even incoherent. Indeed, Hunsinger maintains that nothing is more likely to lead readers of Barth astray than a "nondialectical imagination."7 The great strength of his book lies in his ability to explicate the dialectical patterns of Barth's theology in ways that show those patterns to be both comprehensible and coherent, at least within the confines of Barth's particular presentation.

The detailed discussion of Barth's use of dialectic implicitly raises questions concerning the legitimacy of the standard paradigm for interpreting his work. According to the most commonly accepted account of Barth's theological development, articulated by the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in his work on Barth's theology first published in German in 1951, there were two major shifts in his thinking.8 The first occurred in 1918 with his rejection of liberalism and move to a dialectical method of setting theological statements over against counterstatements without allowing a synthesis of the two to emerge. This approach led to Barth's highly influential commentaries on Romans (first edition, 1919; second edition, 1922) and is said to characterize his thinking until 1931. The publication of his work on Anselm in 1931 is then viewed as marking a second shift, this time from dialectic to analogy. The so-called "turn to analogy" marks the point at which Barth abandons his dialectical method and adopts a more "objective" and "positivistic" approach to theology that comes to be known as neo-orthodoxy. Thus, we are presented with three phases in Barth's intellectual pilgrimage: the early, liberal Barth; the dialectical Barth; and the mature, neo-orthodox Barth of the Church Dogmatics who repudiated the dialectical method of his earlier work. While this overall sequence has been nuanced in various ways, its basic form became established as the standard account of Barth's historical development and as the crucial background for interpreting the shape and content of his definitive theological statement in the Church Dogmatics.

This reading of Barth has dominated the Anglo-American reception of his thought in fundamental ways, and may be said to be largely responsible for the labeling of Barth as a neo-orthodox theologian. Hunsinger implicitly questions this consensus when he suggests that before responsible criticism of Barth can take place, "a more reliable depiction of the overall terrain, as well as of the proportional relationships among the various segments" must be secured.9 While Hunsinger seeks to offer a fresh reading of Barth's theology, Bruce McCormack's work proposes a revised understanding of its historical genesis and development that funds the interpretation offered by Hunsinger.

In what is perhaps the most groundbreaking study of Barth in English-language scholarship, McCormack has produced a detailed, meticulous, and erudite exposition of Barth's early works and the context in which they emerged that has the potential to significantly reshape the discipline of Barth studies. McCormack, building on the work of several German scholars, argues that after Barth's break with liberalism and the development of his dialectical conception of theology there were no subsequent major shifts or turning points in his thinking. Dialectic was never simply left behind as the formula suggesting a "turn from dialectic to analogy" implies. McCormack maintains that the great weakness of the Balthasarian formula is that it conceals the extent to which Karl Barth remained a truly dialectical theologian, even in the Church Dogmatics. Thus, while Barth's theology certainly developed as he took on genuinely fresh material insights, these were always maintained in the context of a fundamentally dialectical theology.

Failure to recognize this has led to the domestication of Barth in the direction of overly positivistic neo-orthodox readings of his theology. Rather than neo-orthodox, McCormack labels Barth as a "critically realistic dialectical theologian," by which he means that the content of Barth's theology is governed by the notion of "indirect identity" with respect to the doctrine of revelation. This means that in his self-revelation, God makes himself to be indirectly identical with the creaturely medium of that revelation.

Such revelation is indirect because God's use of the creaturely medium entails no "divinization" of the medium; and yet at the same time God is indirectly identical with the creaturely medium in that God chooses to truly reveal himself through such media. This is the dialectic of veiling and unveiling that says that God unveils (reveals) himself in and through creaturely veils, and that these veils, although they be used of God for the purposes of unveiling himself, remain veils. Further, the self-revelation of God means that the whole of God, complete and entire, and not simply a part, is made known in revelation, but nevertheless remains hidden within the veil of the creaturely medium through which he chooses to unveil himself. And because this indirect revelation remains hidden to outward, normal, or "natural" human perception, it requires that human beings be given "the eyes and ears of faith" in order to perceive the unveiling of God that remains hidden in the creaturely veil. In this conception revelation has both an objective moment, when God reveals himself through the veil of a creaturely medium, and a subjective moment, when God gives human beings the faith to understand what is hidden in the veil. For McCormack, it is this dialectic of veiling and unveiling that drives Barth's entire approach to theology to such an extent that failure to recognize it will inevitably lead to significant interpretive distortions.

In McCormack's assessment such a failure is precisely the problem in each of the postmodern readings of Barth reviewed in this essay. Barth's dialectic of veiling and unveiling is broken in each instance, albeit broken in different directions. In the case of the particular nonfoundational, postliberal reading of Barth offered by Frei and Lindbeck, the givenness of God in revelation is emphasized in such a way that Barth is potentially made into a revelational positivist who collapses the whole of revelation into the text of the biblical witness. This approach can also lead to the bracketing of questions concerning reality-reference in a way foreign to Barth's concerns. Such a conception bears striking similarities to standard neo-orthodox interpretations of Barth's theology and has sometimes been viewed as merely an updated and refurbished version. In the case of the readings of wholly otherness advanced in different ways by Lowe, Ward, and Johnson, the hiddenness of God is emphasized in such a way as to turn Barth into a theological skeptic. McCormack points out that the difficulty of both approaches is that they end up with an utterly and completely undialectical Barth.10

The need for a genuinely dialectical approach coupled with the vastness and complexity of Barth's writings serves to make the interpretation of his theology a challenging undertaking, resistant to neat summary. John Webster, a leading interpreter of Barth, notes that one of the implications of Barth's approach to theology is that no single stage of the argument is definitive and that it is only the whole that conveys the substance of what he is attempting to communicate. Hence, "Barth's views on any given topic cannot be comprehended in a single statement (even if the statement is one of his own), but only in the interplay of a range of articulations of a theme."11 Put another way, it is very easy to misread Barth, particularly without careful attention to the shape and style of his work as a whole. The works of Hunsinger and McCormack suggest that the postmodern readings of Barth examined here have failed at the task of taking adequate account of the whole, especially its dialectical character, in spite of the fact that they can indeed appeal to particular aspects of Barth's thought in support of the programs they seek to initiate.

Of course, those who have been stimulated by, or have made use of, Barth's theology in the development and execution of new theological proposals can legitimately respond that their intentions are primarily constructive rather than descriptive. One does not have to be a "pure" Barth scholar to gain fresh insights into the discipline of theology from the reading of his work, nor must one appropriate all aspects of his thought in order to make use of some. For that matter, the ideas of an important thinker may take on significance, not as an end in themselves, but as the point of departure for new constructions that go well beyond the original intent of those ideas. The greatest theologians in the history of the Church have always spawned multiple interpretations and theological programs. We need only remind ourselves of the various Augustinian, Thomist, and Calvinist theologies that have emerged as the result of creative reflection on the thought of these seminal thinkers. That said, the close reading of texts and the detailed attention to historical context that characterizes the work of Hunsinger and McCormack is indispensable for the historiographical task of analytical description that provides the most fertile ground for critical and constructive theological engagement with Barth or any other thinker.

What is the significance of this resurgence of interest in Barth for evangelical theology? On the one hand, he has generally been viewed with a jaundiced eye by evangelicals for a number of reasons, including his perceived failure to provide an adequate account of biblical authority, his openness to the possibility of universalism, and the suspicion that in spite of his break with liberalism his thought remained far too much indebted to that theological movement to be of use to those with more conservative convictions. On the other hand, a few evangelicals have defended Barth and insisted that his theology provides a way forward beyond the standard liberal-conservative impasse that has shaped so much of evangelical theology in the twentieth century.

Both Barth's defenders and his detractors in the evangelical community have generally relied upon the standard neo-orthodox reading, with the effect of negating the dialectical character of his thought. Indeed, the recent scholarship surveyed above suggests that the common evangelical interpretations of Barth are considerably flawed. This is true not only of influential older studies such as those of the highly critical Cornelius Van Til and the more accommodating Bernard Ramm but also of the presentation of his ideas in more recent evangelical textbooks on theology. Evangelicals must correct this shortcoming if they are to engage in intelligent conversation with Barth for either critical or constructive purposes.

The recent scholarship on Barth is also significant for evangelicals in that it suggests why such an engagement might be worthwhile in the first place. Is the idea of a robustly confessional postmodern theology simply oxymoronic, as D.A. Carson and others maintain, or is it a genuine possibility, as Stanley Grenz and others have argued? Barth's thought is highly suggestive of the potential contours of such a theology and may be taken to imply that it is not only possible but also desirable.

Barth did his work as a confessional theologian in the Reformed tradition who was chiefly concerned with exegetical and dogmatic questions. As John Webster notes, he thought and wrote as "a biblical dogmatician."12 Yet, as we have seen, Barth's theology has also been appropriated to address various postmodern issues, and while the precise ways in which his thought has been developed in the works examined may be subject to criticism, the postmodern concerns identified in these works are found in Barth. His thought does raise major challenges concerning the legitimacy of epistemological foundationalism for the theological enterprise. The hiddenness of God and the nongivenness of revelation are themes that recur in his thought. He does raise questions concerning the nature of theological language that serve to unsettle both liberal and conservative approaches to theology. Further, the conclusions Barth draws in his explication of these topics do have some commonality with aspects of postmodern thought. What must be remembered is that Barth's primary focus is theological rather than philosophical. This means that his development of these themes and his approach in addressing them is driven primarily by his concern to produce a biblical dogmatics that faithfully bears witness to the self-revelation of the living God.

To put it another way, the problem with the postmodern readings of Barth on offer is not that postmodern themes and concerns have been found in Barth where they do not exist, but rather that they have not been articulated and developed within the method and framework of Barth's theology as a whole. Nevertheless, the presence of these themes suggests that their rearticulation within the context of Barth's dialectically conceived biblical dogmatics is a project brimming with constructive possibilities for a confessional evangelical theology that seeks to address the intellectual challenges raised by the emerging postmodern ethos.

John R. Franke is associate professor of theology at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Penn. With Stanley Grenz, he is the author of Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Westminster John Knox).

1. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford Univ.Press, 1991), p. 27.

2. John Webster, "Editorial," International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 2000), p. 126.

3. Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 41.

4. Frei, p. 42.

5. William Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Westminster John Knox, 1997), p. 14.

6. The motifs are actualism, particularism, objectivism, personalism, realism, and rationalism.

7. Hunsinger, p. ix.

8. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (KÖln: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1951); The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (Ignatius, 1992).

9. Hunsinger, p. x.

10. For a detailed discussion of this critique, see Bruce L. McCormack, "Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Part I," Zeitschrift fÜr dialektische Theologie, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1997), pp. 67-95; and "Part II," ZDTh, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1997), pp. 170-94.

11. John Webster, Karl Barth (Continuum, 2000), pp. 13-14.

12. Webster, p. 173.

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