Karl Barth

• 1: "I Belong To Basel": 1886-1904


• Guildmaster, Pastors and Scholars: Barth's Ancestors


• A Strict Love for Truth and Christian Discipline: His Parents


• "A Great Great Joy": Childhood and Youth


• 2: "This Obscure Desire toward a Better Understanding": 1904-1909


• The Decision to Study Theology


• Student in Bern


• Wearing the Colors and Noncombative: In the Zofingia Association


• "Very Diligent and Quite Capable": Student in Berlin


• Once More in Bern and Then Tübingen


• Finally in Marburg


• His Work for Die Christliche Welt


• 3: "Stumbling Up the Steps to Calvin's Pulpit": 1909-1911


• Vicar in Geneva


• Quite Demanding: The First Confirmation Instruction


• Theologian in the Congregation


• "In Such a Dreadfully Pious Environment"


• A Daughter from a Good Home: The Engagement to Nelly Hoffmann


• Farewell to Geneva


• 4: "The Red Pastor": Safenwil, 1911-1921


• "This System of Employment Must Fall": Workers and Socialists


• A Theological Friendship: Eduard Thurneysen


• "The WorldWithout Gods": The First World War


• "An Open House": Family Life


• 5: "A Book for Those Who Were Also Concerned": The First Epistle to the Romans, 1919


• Human Religion and the Divine Word


• "Like a Bomb on the Playground of the Theologians"


• "Without Windows to the Kingdom of Heaven": The Tambach Lecture


• 6: "To Always Work Somewhat Faster": Göttingen 1921-1925


• From Swiss Pastor to German Professor


• "Unavoidable Nonsense of the Academic Business"


• "Almost Like a Buddy": Barth with His Students


• "Lively Combat": Emanuel Hirsch and Other Colleagues


• "Stranger from a Neutral Place": Karl Barth and the Germans

Christiane Tietz studied Mathematics and Protestant Theology in Frankfurt/Main and Tübingen. She worked as assistant of Eberhard Jüngel and did her PhD with him on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her PostDoc thesis was on a Christian concept of self-acceptance. She was awarded a Heisenberg Stipend by the German Research Foundation. From 2008 until 2013 she worked as Full Professor for Systematic Theology and Social Ethics at the University of Mainz/Germany. Since 2013 she has been Full Professor for Systematic Theology at the Institute of Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Zurich/Switzerland. She has been a visiting lecturer or research scholar in Cambridge, Chicago, Heidelberg, Jerusalem, New York, and Princeton. She is a member of the editorial board of numerous journals and book series, and a judge for the Karl Barth-Prize and a member of the Advisory Board of the Karl Barth-Foundation, Basel.


Victoria J. Barnett (Translator) was Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, from 2004 to 2019. She also served as General Editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition from 2004 to 2014. She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest under Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999). She is the translator of several works, including Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent and Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters.

This is a maginificent, engrossing lucid and comprehensive treatment of the most important theologian of the modern era. Tietz has given not only to Barth scholarship but also to the history of theology in the twentieth century a great gift. We are in her debt. She reminds us of Barth's abiding preoccupation with God, and specifically with Jesus Christ who is "the event God's grace, a new beginning between God and humanity that is grounded solely in God". She also helps us undertsand something of the conflicts that this preoccupation encouraged. Christopher R. J. Holmes, Pro Ecclesia