The term neo-orthodox, in a pejorative sense, connotes a theology of resorting to a one-sided emphasis on biblical revelation and dogmatic reaffirmation of Christian confessions and dogmas. As a twentieth-century theological movement, neo-orthodox theology is understood as a radical break with the heritage of nineteenth-century liberalism. Karl Barth is counted as one of the most important representatives of the neo-orthodox movement.
44. According to Barth, a dogmatic theology that understands itself as theologia viatorum must necessarily be the reflection of the church and the task of the church that engages itself concretely in its time and always for a particular time (CD I/1:281). Christian thinking and discourse must lead to its own responsibility for the present time. Thus, Barth is perplexed when both Ragaz and Tillich look upon their work as dynamic while regarding his as static for no reason (CD I/1:74–75).
45. Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 82.
46. Ibid., 82–83.
47. Ibid., 148.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Torrance, Karl Barth, Biblical and Evangelical Theologian, 147.
51. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.13.4.
52. Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, 260. Furthermore, Otto Weber states that the logos asarkos can in truth be only a pure boundary concept for Barth. See Weber, Grundlagen der Dogmatik II, 143.
53. Quoted in Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, 263.
54. Ibid., 264. “Judaism is for Barth a witness to the kernel of truth of the natural theology within the revelation of grace.” Marquardt, Entdeckung des Judentums, 316.
55. Of the typology of Adam and Christ in Romans chapter 5, Barth emphatically says, “Jesus Christ is the secret and the truth of sinful and mortal humankind and also the secret and the truth of human nature as such” (Barth, Christ and Adam, 50).
56. Kraus, Theologische Religionskritik, 50. Cf. Pangritz, Karl Barth in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 137.
57. Diem, “Karl Barth as Socialist,” 135.
58. According to Diem, Marquardt’s thesis of “expanding and completing the christological anhypostasis through an anthropological enhypostasis” “undercut the Christian sacramentum and destroyed it or made it superfluous” (ibid., 131).
59. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 306. Barth understands the Reformed rule of finitum non est capax infiniti as a way of “rejecting any view which would seek to quantify revelation, making God partly hidden and partly revealed in case of all traditional natural theologies” (ibid., 352).
60. Cf. Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 147–50, 227–37. See also Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, 385–91.
61. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 391.
62. Przywara, Was ist Gott, 75. Cf. Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 249. Balthasar cites the words of Przywara: “The way to God and the image of God is only a shadowy hint of something which is brightly revealed by Christ alone. . . . By his own decision, God is revealed to us nowhere else but in Christ. All the flourishes that present God to the creature are flashed out and explained in Christ. They are features of the one and only real God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is no other God beside him, and any other general features of God are merely the foreglow or afterglow of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
63. Küng, Does God Exist? 517.
64. Ibid., 527.
65. Iwand, Glauben und Wissen, 290–91. Cf., Moltmann, Experiences in Theology, 70.
66. Ibid., 76.
67. Ibid., 72.
68. “It is indeed unfortunate that the question of the truth of talk about God should be handled as a question apart by a special faculty. . . . Philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, or pedagogy, whether individually or in conjunction, all working within the sphere of the church, might well take up the task of measuring the church’s talk about God by its being as the Church, thus making a special theology superfluous. . . . All sciences might ultimately be theology. . . . The separate existence of theology signifies an emergency measure on which the Church has had to resolve in view of the actual refusal of the other science in this respect” (CD I/1:5.7).
69. Klappert, Israel und die Kirche, 11.
70. Lapide and Moltmann, Israel und Kirche, 16–17.
71. Klappert, Israel und die Kirche, 18.
72. Käsemann, “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” 75.
73. Against Käsemann’s anti-Jewish implication in his understanding of justification, see Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles.
74. Marquardt, Entdeckung des Judentums, 253. According to Marquardt, Barth retains the significance of biblical idea of the Israel-remnant and its idea of representation.
75. Schellong notices a certain narrowness in Marquardt’s presentation, a tendency toward “the restriction to the biographical.” However, “this sociological, political, yet non-reductionist approach is what gives Marquardt’s book its significance” (“On Reading Karl Barth from the Left,” 150, 142).
76. Gollwitzer,
