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A Roman Catholic Interpretation of Karl Barth1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Giovanni Miegge
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Extract

I do not think that I am doing an injustice to anyone in writing that the book that Balthasar has devoted to Karl Barth constitutes the largest, most unprejudiced and most intelligent attempt that has hitherto been made to set forth clearly the thought of the master of Basel, by identifying his deep-lying connexions with modern Protestant theology, and by setting forth with precision his opposition in regard to Catholicism. One should not lose sight of the fact that Father Balthasar writes as a Roman Catholic theologian. One can easily imagine that a Roman Catholic is sensitive, more than we Protestants, to a determinate intellectual atmosphere, a certain family likeness, which is beyond doubt common to all modern Protestant theologians and which distinguishes the lot of them from the tradition of scholastic ontological thought; and it is a situation that we may enjoy when, although in the realm of Protestantism Barthians and Liberals have for a quarter of a century been exchanging fierce blows in a duel which each imagines to be to the death, a sensitive and cultured theologian can come from the other side with a smile of kindly irony and say: ‘And yet at root you are all very much alike: you are all moderns.’ Balthasar is one of a small group of Roman theologians who have taken upon themselves as their life's mission the study of the theological positions of Protestantism, in order to put the discussion between Catholicism and Protestantism on a serious footing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1954 , pp. 59 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1954

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References

pege 59 note 2 Barth, Karl: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie. See the review on pp. 108 ff.Google Scholar

pege 60 note 1 Cf. Berkhof's article, H., ‘Die Bedeutung Karl Barths für Theologie, Kirche und Welt’, written on the occasion of Barth's sixtieth birthday (1946) and published in Evangelische Theologie, 1948–1949, pp. 254–268Google Scholar.

pege 60 note 2 Cf. the relation between Barth's concept of theology as a practical science in the service of the Church and the thesis of Schleiermacher in his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studitims (1821).

pege 62 note 1 Balthasar, op. cit., p. 226.

pege 63 note 1 op. cit., pp. 71 ff.

pege 64 note 1 ‘A singular crust of Platonico-Kantian thought’, writes Barth of himself (Credo, P. 159).

pege 64 note 2 Balthasar, op. cit., p. 228 f.

pege 64 note 3 op. cit., p. 229.

pege 65 note 1 op. cit., p.212

pege 66 note 1 op. cit., pp. 212–14.

pege 66 note 2 op. cit., pp. 229 ff.

pege 67 note 1 op. cit., pp. 235 ff.

pege 67 note 2 op. cit., p. 238.

pege 67 note 3 Kirchliche Dogmatik, 3/3, p. 618.Google Scholar

pege 67 note 4 Balthasar, op. cit., p. 224.

pege 68 note 1 op. cit., p. 248.

pege 68 note 2 op. cit., pp. 250–1.

pege 70 note 1 See the interesting discussion of Luigi Pareyson on the ‘ambiguity’ of Hegelianism, which is resolved into the alternatives of Kierkegaard and Feuerbach (Esistenza e persona, Torino, 1950, pp. 197 and 1–52Google Scholar).

pege 71 note 1 Balthasar, op. cit., p. 211.

pege 71 note 2 op. cit., pp. 364, 278.

pege 71 note 3 op. cit., p. 273.

pege 72 note 1 Evangelische Theologie, 1948–9, p. 272.