Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The sixth volume of the Basel theologian's monumental Dogmatics (Church Dogmatics, Vol. III, Part 2) is not only, like the earlier volumes, a significant work, but like the fifth, and even more than it a work full of surprises. I have no hesitation in associating myself with the judgment of my Danish colleague Prenter,2 who calls it “the culmination so far of the whole powerful work”. Barth devotes several pages of this volume to a notable discussion of my own anthropology, published fifteen years ago (Man in Revolt). In it he puts to me the question whether we mean the same thing or not (p. 155 ff.). There arises thus for me not merely the occasion but also the necessity of abandoning our mutual practice of not reviewing one another's works. The following pages are not intended to provide a survey of the whole work but only to bring out some specially important points. Naturally, then, they will be fully understood only by those who have some knowledge of both works. I have already given a brief affirmative reply to Barth's question in the second volume of my own Dogmatics (p. 95) after a hasty glance through his Doctrine of Man which came into my hands only after the completion of my own MS., but feel myself now obliged to state more precisely the reasons for this assent and to add some qualifications.
2 Theologische Zeitschrift, Basel, May 1950, p. 215.