Faye Bodley-Dangelo argues that in his passive depiction of Eve in the Church Dogmatics Karl Barth truncates the agency of all women, thereby creating conflict between his theology of sexual difference and his theological anthropology, and denying women image-bearing humanity. This article challenges Bodley-Dangelo's characterisation of ideal agency as active self-assertion and self-determination, arguing that for Barth the ideal agent – for which the paradigm is Christ – is one who self-dispossesses in response to the determining claim of the peculiar other.
