Reviews of The Barth Lectures by Colin Gunton are appearing all other the place. The latest being by Jason. I've added another one below.
Kim Fabricius
Here's another one written by Paul Goodliff, which first appeared in The Baptist Times
The Baptist Times is not an academic journal, and so the inclusion of this book for review might seem odd to many of its readers, for this is an unashamedly academic book by one the most significant British theologians of recent years on the last century’s most significant protestant theologian: Colin Gunton on Karl Barth.
However, it deserves a place in this newspaper because this is simply one of the best introductions to theology that I have read. Not that it is easy, nor without its idiosyncracies, but if Barth’s towering contribution to Western theological thought is unavoidable if we are to properly grapple with the current state of dogmatic theology, then Colin Gunton’s Barth Lectures are as good a way into that theology as any I know.
I must confess some personal bias here: Colin Gunton taught me twentieth century systematic theology at Kings in the early 1990s when I took a postgraduate degree there. I counted him a friend, who kindly wrote the forward to my first book, and his sudden and untimely death in 2003 affected me greatly. I say this to point out that I have an enormous admiration for Colin Gunton’s work. He always intended to write ‘the book on Barth’ as Barth’s influence on Gunton’s own theology is all-pervasive from start to finish, from his doctorate at Oxford on the being of God in Barth and Hartshorne, to his last writings. It was something I suspect he would have done in retirement from his post as Professor of Christian Doctrine at Kings College, a retirement that his death prevented. So the book on Barth remained unwritten. What has been written in its place is a transcript of the lecture series that Gunton gave each year to an assorted group of keen undergraduates, doctoral students and others. In this case, those delivered in Lent 1999, Michaelmas 2000 and Lent 2001, thirty lectures in all. They were recorded and transcribed by Paul Brazier who has edited them into this series of lectures, and Colin Gunton had read and approved of them before his death, observing that they would provide the basis for the book on Barth he intended to write.
They are clearly lectures, and not the book Gunton would have finally published. That would have been more polished, more considered in some of its more whimsical moments, and Gunton’s first-draft readers would have helped to moderate some of the opinions. It would have been a more elegant book, but in so doing it would have lost the most moving aspect to this lecture series: you hear Colin Gunton’s voice, his way of doing theology, his way of expressing things. Colin would lecture with a nervous energy, at break-neck speed, ideas piling on one another, and this is captured somehow in this book. That is not to say it is any way unreadable, (I found it hard to put down!) but it is what it is, and all the more fascinating for that.
It covers the whole range of Barth’s work, from his background and early theology to Der Romerbrief, his groundbreaking commentary on Romans that was written when he was a pastor, and the book on Anselm. The bulk of the lectures present Gunton’s reading of Church Dogmatics, the magisterial four volumes of dogmatics embracing millions of words and expressing Barth’s evolving and mature theological thought. Gunton is not uncritical of Barth, especially the poverty of Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit, and even if he was a reformed theologian (he was an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church,) Gunton was never ‘a Barthian’ in the sense of an uncritical disciple. Where Gunton quotes Barth, he does so with his own translation, (often better than the published translations,) and those other voices that Gunton knew so well make their appearances: Edward Irving, P T Forsyth and the Cappadocian Fathers, (although not Coleridge!) There is a Foreword by Gunton’s former colleague at Kings, Christoph Schwöbel, and an introduction by another, younger, colleague, Stephen Holmes, both making astute observations on Colin Gunton’s theological method, style and prejudices, together with a full bibliography of Gunton’s published works. This is, then, not just a book on Barth, but equally, a book about Colin Gunton.
What more can I say? It is one of the best books published this year, and deserves a very wide readership by those who want to really engage with the Christian faith and the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Word of God.
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