Book Review: Malcolm Brown (ed. Anglican Social Theology: Renewing the Vision Today
Barth's Nein! illuminates the importance of understanding Barth in context. Brian undoubtedly shares this concern, but chooses to lean more on Barth's autobiographical statements than the social and historical contexts which shaped Barth's theology the opposite, Brian suggests, to McCormack who believes Barth's context plays a 'much greater role than Barth himself will admit' (p. 44) Irrespective of the potential warrants of Brian's argument, more deliberate engagement with the relationship between Barth's theology and his context would both aid the reader and likely support Brian's argument for the situated nature of Barth's dialectical theology. It may be, for example, that Nein! remains a testimony to Barth's contextualized theology a passionate response to natural theology on the eve of Hitler. And so it is equally worth asking how Barth's 'mature' theology reflects similar contextual underpinnings.