Before Analogy

One of the casualties of getting a book into a one hundred thousand word limit is the inevitable cut of chapters. This is not to say that the material is sub standard, it's just that something had to go. Whereas film makers have extended DVDs, scholars have journal articles. My essay, "Before Analogy: Recovering Barth's Ontological Development," has just been posted online at New Blackfriars for their September issue. You'll need an Athens or some other institutional login to see it, but here's the link nonetheless: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122399076/abstract. 

What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his "apprenticeship," and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, our thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. Although McCormack is right to suggest that Balthasar's depiction of a shift from dialectic to analogy is inadequate, in the end McCormack's account of Barth's development over the 1920s conceals as much as it reveals. The following essay attempts to demonstrate the kinds of insights which can be made of the past accounts of Barth's development which focused on the transition from dialectic to analogy. Far from relegating these accounts to the sidelines, McCormack's work helps us see all the more clearly just what was at stake in figures like Balthasar's work. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place.

Comments

[Emrys]

Congratulations on being published (again?). I know it's a thrill every time.
Shalom,
em

[EManuel Alvarez-Sandoval]

Congratulations, this is another stepping stone in your career! By the way, the book of Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 comes to mind: “The words of the wise are like goads, and the words of scholars are like well- driven nails, given by the Shepherd. V 12. And further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh.”