Preface

may set this underlying theme of the lectures in the context of Barth’s own situation as an academic beginner and outsider on the Lutheran faculty at Géttingen. In the letter to Thurneysen dated May 22, 1992, he spoke with painful irony of the path he had to take in interpreting Calvin, beginning with the Psychopannychia, then going on to the sudden conversion, then to the Cop address.8 He added that there would be constant allusion to ethics in contrast to the idle soul sleep of Lutheranism, naturally from the perspective of eternity, but in such a way as to dumbfound the Swiss? in particular. He was glad he had found what his ranking would be last fall.!° It was essential that he be differentiated from Stange.!! Distance must be kept.

!2

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For the summer semester 1922 Barth announced three hours a week on Calvin and three on Hebrews. But some months earlier he was very worried about this double load and in April he said a crisis had arisen that caused him to drop Hebrews and focus on four hours for Calvin.!3 He gave the classes from April 27 to July 28, with a week’s break for Pentecost, lecturing from 7 to 8 a.M. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays to some thirty or forty students.!4 The original manuscript, now in the Barth Archive at Basel, is on both sides of 235 pages in black ink. The archive also has a typed copy from the same period possibly owed to his friend Rudolf Pestalozzi in Zurich. There are many mistakes in the copy, not surprising since the manuscript is so hard to read. Barth himself corrected some of these mistakes in his own hand. In the present edition we have compared the copy and the original and purged out most of the remaining errors.

8. See below, 146ff.,, 136ff., 141ff. See Bw.Th. II, 79.

9. The reference is to Swiss students in the class.

10. The reference is to the exposition of chs. 12ff in the 2nd edition of Barth's Romans, in which he found a new approach to ethics in continuity with existing exposition.

11. Carl Stange (1870-1959) and Georg Wobbermin (1869-1943) were the professors of systematic theology at Géttingen.

12. Bw.Th. Il, 79.
13, [bide 295-65.
14. Ibid., 71.