Preface

Arrangement and Structure

Barth shared his original plan for the lectures with Thurneysen, but a month before the semester began he realized that he could not carry it out and that he must focus on Calvin's theology, especially his dogmatics. He would perhaps turn to the ethics in the winter semester, he: wrote to his friend.!5 This scaling down did not affect his intention of laying a twofold foundation by surveying medieval theology and comparing Calvin to Luther and Zwingli.!© These two sections, along with a sketch of Calvin's life, would make up the first chapter (“Presuppositions”). Four more chapters would follow with the emphasis on the last, that is, Calvin's preaching in ch. 2, exegesis in ch. 3, polemics in ch. 4, and finally theological system (1559 Institutes) in ch. 5. This is what he told the class the first hour,!7 and even on May 19, when he had spent more than three weeks on the first two sections of ch. 1 and was only just taking up Calvin's life, he still thought his plan was feasible, though he expressly regretted he could not adopt the better method his father had once used, namely, that of embodying the theology in a running account of the life. 18 Even if we cannot track down in the manuscript the exact moment he changed his mind, he did indeed switch to the method he admired in his father. His breadth of outlook and pleasure in detail, however, meant that he could not by a long way reach the end of Calvin's life, but could cover it more fully only up to the summer of 1538 and then in the last three lectures give a mere summary of the Strassburg years (1538-1541) under three selected topics. Compared to the original plan, then, the course breaks off when Barth had completed only a small part of his first chapter, and he never even started the chapters that were to be the heart of the work.

If in dealing with Calvin’s life Barth at first concealed this fact from himself, or at least from his audience, it came home to him with a shock in the Pentecost vacation. During these days he read all the Calvin material available at least to get some knowledge of the main part of the course. which he would now never reach, having to remain stuck in the prolegomena. At best he would carry the life far enough, and give a genetic account

15. Ibid., 60.
lGwlocacit:
17. See below, 9f.
18. See below, 131.