Bruce L. McCormack 
Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology 
Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936

`Mc Cormack is master of this voluminous material. He is scrupulously at home in the intricate, dramatic background of Swiss socialist politics …The result is a masterly study, often as compelling as its theme.’George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement`This meticulous and definitive study … supersedes most previous interpretations.’Colin Gunton, Theological Book Review`it should quickly attain classic status. It is an exceptionally fine and erudite piece of work….The results of this painstaking attention to detail are truly ground-breaking. This is a major intellectual achievement, an interpretative act of great courage, and Barth studies will never look the same.’Graham Ward, Expository Times This book is a new, major intellectual biography of perhaps the most influential theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth. It offers the first full-scale revision of the well-known theologian Hans Urs Balthasar’s seminal interpretation of Barth, which was first published in 1951. Drawing on a wealth of material, much of it unpublished during Barth’s lifetime, as well as a thorough acquaintance with the best of recent German scholarship, Professor Mc Cormack demonstrates that thefundamental decision which would control the whole of Barth’s development – the turn to a new, critically realistic form of theological objectivism – was already made during the years in which Barth was at work on his first commentary on Romans. Professor Mc Cormack further argues that the most significantsubsequent decisions – both material and methodological – were made in Barth’s Gottingen Dogmatics of 1924/5, and not later in the 1931 book on Anselm, as has often been alleged. Finally, he seeks to show that von Balthasar’s description of a turn from dialectic to analogy, which provided the foundation for the neo-orthodox reading of Barth in the English-speaking world, fails to take seriously enough the extent to which dialectic remained a constitutive feature of Barth’s outlook inthe Church Dogmatics. This unique and important work provides not simply a fresh interpretation of Barth’s development, but also a new paradigm for understanding the whole of Barth’s theology.