Section 49 of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, ‘God the Father as Lord of His Creation’, begins with this summary:

God fulfils His fatherly overlordship over his creature through sustaining, accompanying, and directing the course of its life. He does this by manifesting in creation His loving-kindness which operates mightily in it through Jesus Christ so that the splendour of His Son may be made known.

The long section of 260 pages is the development of this theme, concluding with the treatment of the place of the Christian under the world-sovereignty of God the Father. Experience, however, shows that the divine sovereignty is apparently limited; hence, Barth says at the beginning of §50:

There is found by the ordering of God a menace to the world-process and an actual corruption of it through the inimical principle of Negation (das Nichtige) which is opposed to the will of the creator and therefore to the essential goodness of His creation.

This hostile principle Barth calls das Nichtige, which, because of its frustrating opposition to the divine will, is more than the merely negative. It is a problem for theology in that it is evidence of a ‘foreign body’ within God's providential scheme, to which it is opposed at every point.