Digital Verbum Edition
Karl Barth saw Chapter 15 as the center of 1 Corinthians, arguing that a misunderstanding of the resurrection underlies all the problems in Corinth. In this volume, he develops his view of biblical eschatology, asserting that chapter 15 is key to understanding the testimony of the New Testament. Barth understood the “last things” not as an end to history but as an “end-history” with which any period is faced.
Get Barth's Church Dogmatics, this title, and more with the Karl Barth Collection (49 vols.).
“It is not truth that is threatened, but men in their relation to truth” (Page 126)
“God always remains the subject in the relationship created by this testimony. He is not transformed into the object, into man’s having the right to the last word: otherwise it is no longer this testimony, this relationship.” (Page 16)
“nothing accidental and peripheral, but the foundation and the centre, by virtue of which they are Christians” (Page 125)
“and even the angels, to test and distinguish spirits, to recognize” (Page 29)
“The dead: that is what we are. The risen: that is what we are not.” (Page 108)
Karl Barth (1886–1968), a Swiss Protestant theologian and pastor, was one of the leading thinkers of twentieth-century theology, described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. He helped to found the Confessing Church and his thinking formed the theological framework for the Barmen Declaration. He taught in Germany, where he opposed the Nazi regime. In 1935, when he refused to take the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, he was retired from his position at the University of Bonn and deported to Switzerland. There he continued to write and develop his theology.
Barth’s work and influence resulted in the formation of what came to be known as neo-orthodoxy. For Barth, modern theology, with its assent to science, immanent philosophy, and general culture and with its stress on feeling, was marked by indifference to the word of God and to the revelation of God in Jesus, which he thought should be the central concern of theology.