Here they are...
So last spring I had about $215 left over on my Cokesbury account. Northmont paid me for preaching Sunday nights in Cokesbury gift cards (hey, I got all my books paid for, I wasn't complaining). At the time Cokesbury ran a sale on Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics @ 35% off. Given the fact that when the paperback editions came out they were 39.99, and less than a year later TandTClark had raised them to 49.99 I figured that I should finish off my collection while I could get the discount. So I did. Since September I've been putting contact paper on them to help them stay together and this morning I finished putting the contact paper on IV.4 and the Index. So there they are, all 13 volumes and the index. I also figured out I've read a little over 16% of the church dogmatics. I've read all of IV.1 (779 pages), some of IV.2 (114 pages), some of 1.1 (74 pages), and some of III.4 (210 pages) for a grand total of 1177 pages out of the whole 7000 page work. Yes, I'm a dork and you can keep laughing at me...
posted by Brian @ 12:26 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
You are not so secretly in love with Karl Barth. I thought I should state that for the record. :)
I've been trying over the past several weeks to brush up on my 20th century theology. Reading through various pages I can't help but be struck with Emil Brunner. I might try to pick up his dogmatics around Christmas.
Barth obviously had a heavy hand in Neo-orthodoxy, but sometimes I wonder if his name is sometimes bigger than his theology.
Though I must say that anyone that can write that much is insane on many different levels. 7000 pages! Good grief man!
I actually think Barth's name is bigger than his theology because people just don't know what Barth said.
Barth was hit hard by both classical liberals, who disagreed with his focus on Jesus Christ as the Word of God, and by classical conservatives, who found him too universalistic and felt he had a low view of scripture.
The problem is that most people never get around to reading Barth himself. The Church Dogmatics is difficult reading and he doesn't have a 30 page chapter on a doctrine that you can just give to someone. His chapter on Sanctification is over 100 pages long, and these are large pages with small type. To get the flow of Barth you've just gotta read him. The introductory books that are well done can be helpful, but to understand him you've got to read him, not one of his interpreters. As I noted, even with all that I've read I've only read a fraction, and haven't read any of Barth's comments on major areas of theology.
Good on you for putting in the effort to read the Church Dogmatics, even if you haven't read the whole lot yet. Barth himself always had great respect for people who had actually taken the trouble to read his Dogmatics, since even in his own lifetime it was very common for people to criticise him without bothering to read him.
In case you're interested, I have been posting (very) short summaries of each of the volumes of the Church Dogmatics over at my blog.
Post a Comment
<< Home