Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth's Göttingen Theology offers a fascinating and nuanced reading of Barth's lectures produced in the course of his first academic appointment at the University of Göttingen (1921-1925). This was a massively important time for Barth, as he wrote the first and only dogmatics cycle he ever completed, lectured on theologians like Calvin and Schleiermacher, and wrote exegetical treatments (e.g., 1 Cor 15) that were massively important to his theological program.

Asprey's book depicts Barth's theology in the Göttingen period from the perspective of his eschatology, arguing that, as an inheritance from his studies with Wilhelm Herrmann, Barth's early theology understands the relationship between God and humankind as normed by the eschatological event of revelation. God freely and graciously encounters the creature, truly making his presence known within the world of creaturely existence and directing the creature to its proper end and goal. As such, this is an eschatological event in the sense that its occurrence is radically contingent and depends entirely upon conditions that exist outside the realm of creaturely existence in the gracious will of God.

By critically examining Barth's commentaries on Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, Asprey begins his study by illustrating how Barth understands the nature of Christian existence in comparison to Bultmann (ch. 1). For Barth, the resurrection serves as the ground of Christian existence and ethics only in virtue of its historical particularity. To render Christ's resurrection, like Bultmann does, as a horizon of possibility that God gives to each new moment reduces the historical particularity of Christ, and to that extent it threatens the creature-Creator distinction that is essential to the gracious character of revelation. And yet, along with Bultmann, Barth thinks of the event of revelation as radically contingent and non-assimilable, and therefore he construes Christian identity as what is given in the event of revelation.

This radical contingency is intended to offer a serious challenge to natural human subjectivity, and this has significant consequences for how religion is conceived. This can be illustrated, as Asprey shows, in the roles Barth assigns to preaching and dogmatics (chs. 2-3). For Barth, the event of revelation communicates a novum, something genuinely new, which is given by God and which “makes a disruptive arrival” into the present with the purpose of reorienting and redirecting the creature into a new form of existence (p. 93). Preachers and theologians are tasked with doing what they cannot do of themselves: speak the Word of God. And so while they may consent to this end, they can never guarantee it or prepare for it; the Word of God remains radically free.

Chapter four discusses Barth's lecture cycles on Calvin, Schleiermacher, and the theology of the Reformed Confessions. Asprey shows that Barth treats the sixteenth-century eucharistic debates within the frame of the doctrine of revelation because the basic contents of these debates (divine immanence and transcendence understood in terms of Christology) are the very themes that Barth regards as basic to the question of the nature of religious subjectivity in the event of revelation. In light of Barth's expressed interest in protecting the creature-Creator distinction, it is not surprising that as a way of explaining this he gravitates to Calvin's Christology, which focuses on the bodily ascension of Christ and the Spirit's mediation of participation in Christ. This enables Barth to protect the event of revelation as a differentiated participation rather than an undifferentiated identity with Christ.

This Christology enables Barth to continue to emphasize the contingent nature of revelation as well as the ontology of the church as what is constituted “from above.” And yet, as Asprey argues in chapter five, Barth's interest in Christology as a way of grounding his eschatological moral ontology leads him to stress the moral significance of the resurrection and lordship of Christ to the exclusion of the nature of its objective existence. Because Barth worries about how a doctrine of the resurrection might be used to control God, and reify his grace, he renders an attenuated account of the objectivity of the resurrection that results in a Christian ethics that lacks sufficient teleology. Asprey thinks it may finally be this reductionistic doctrine of the resurrection and royal office of Christ that yields the problematic upon which Barth's theology in this period is based: the problem of religious subjectivity.

Chapter six seeks to show how a shortened account of the resurrection and lordship of Christ unduly stresses Barth's pneumatology, which Asprey finds increasingly difficult to distinguish from creaturely subjectivity. The radical contingency of revelation forces him to choose between the prospect of a human subject that is always slipping just out of reach, or of delivering God over into the hands of sinners, to be controlled by them. Barth recognizes that, at some point, the “movement of grace” must be overcome by a “state of grace.” As Asprey notes, Barth might have found the stability he sought in a fuller account of the resurrected humanity and heavenly session of Christ as the basis of his theological anthropology-something Barth would go on to do much more considerably in his CD IV.2. Instead Barth seeks to ground it in the event of baptism, which, grounded in Christ's command, proclaims the identity of the creature but does not deposit it with him, as such. Rather, as an event of the Christian's past, it can proclaim only that identity that must continually come into existence in the act of revelation, though in God's grace it truly does proclaim it.

Asprey's argument is relatively simple: Barth's theology in the Göttingen period is oriented around the eschatological encounter between God and humankind, but this preoccupation with the subversive form of God's grace-the eschatological encounter-tends to relativize it from the objective content of God's grace, consequently subverting all knowledge of grace. This is the best kind of research. It concerns itself with a discrete body of literature; it proceeds by a close reading of those texts; its writing is clear; and its judgments are sensible. And while it will likely be of interest only to Barth specialists, those who make use of it are certain to be helped by it.

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