A couple of years ago David Gibson and Daniel Strange edited Engaging with Barth: Contempoary Evangelical Critiques, which David Wells says contains “some of the best essays I have read on Barth.”
An interesting exchange from an interview that Dr. Gibson did with Guy Davies.
GD: Why do you think that Barth’s theology is proving attractive for evangelicals at this time?
DG: It’s probably even harder to generalise here, and I don’t want to steal too much of Carl Trueman’s thunder as he comments on this in his Foreword.
There’s the obvious attraction of Barth’s desire to be creedally orthodox in a way which is just absent in so much of modern theology.
Allied to this there’s probably something of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ approach which sees in Barth both a kindred spirit and superb resource for responding to theological liberalism and cultural hostility to the gospel. Barth is passionate, often quite moving, and he writes about God and Christ and the gospel in deep and profound ways. There’s plenty more things which could be said like this.
At the same time, a complete answer would have to engage with the fact that Barth’s attractiveness to evangelicals is hardly explicable without reference to the increasing fragmentation and diversity within worldwide evangelicalism. When we talk about evangelical theology and Barth, one of the least addressed questions is: what do we mean by ‘evangelical’? To give just one example of the problem, in some quarters today a distinction might be made between being ‘evangelical’, and being ‘an evangelical’. The former is someone committed to the gospel; the second is someone committed to the gospel and its understanding within one particular tribe within a particular cultural world, and so on. The former might be seen as biblical and Christ-centred; the latter might be seen as parochial, sectarian, or even as a relative (modernist) new-comer to the theological scene. As a profound gospel thinker, Barth’s thought lends itself more easily to those who want to describe themselves as ‘evangelical’, but not as ‘an evangelical’ – and I think that’s because this distinction recognises that there are aspects of Barth’s thought that are at odds with how historic confessional evangelicalism has understood the gospel and its various entailments. Where ‘evangelical’ is understood with some of these blurred edges, never mind the massive diversity that exists within the ‘evangelicalism’ tribe, then the answers as to why Barth is attractive to ‘evangelicals’ depends on where we are along that spectrum. Barth himself was fairly hostile towards conservative evangelicalism as he knew it. Doubtless there were caricatures and misrepresentations on both sides, but it is also probable that underlying the antipathy was the recognition of a fundamental clash on certain theological issues. You could argue that where historic confessional evangelicalism is increasingly attracted to Barth it is because, at least in some areas, we see the issues less clearly than either our predecessors or Barth himself.
