Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict
CHRISTIANE TIETZ
(oxford university press, 480 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

You wouldn’t expect the biography of an academic theologian (a Swiss Calvinist to boot) to be a page-turner. And you would be right. Another day, another seminar …

Even by the standards of normal academic routines, however, Karl Barth’s became especially routine when, in 1929, in his mid-forties, he began his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics. His Epistle to the Romans, published in 1919, was a defiant denunciation of liberal theological orthodoxy, and won him huge attention. But it was his 40-year labour on the 9,000 closely printed pages of the (unfinished) Church Dogmatics which established his pre-eminence amongst Protestant theologians of the twentieth century – and his single-minded devotion to it accounts for a life short on incident.

There are two main exceptions to this life behind a desk. First, Barth was a major and clear-sighted actor in the German Church struggle. Although a Swiss national, he was teaching in Germany as Hitler rose, and before and after he was deported in 1935 he fought for the establishment of the so-called Confessing Church, which opposed the state’s efforts to unify the Protestant denominations into the pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. Barth would later regret that he had not spoken out even more clearly, especially on the Jewish question, but in the rather sorry tale of this rather ineffectual struggle, he emerges with honour.