Preface

I am also grateful to my former assistant Achim Reinstadtler, who stood by me so well when at difficult junctures not only industry but also élan and academic knowledge were needed. Work could hardly have begun in the late 1980s without his close cooperation both on the work itself and as professor and assistant at Wuppertal.

I am also indebted to the Wuppertal school and to the Rhineland Evangelical Church for practical help. In particular, the Wuppertal secretary, Christel Ebert, typed an essential part of the manuscript from the copy.

Work on the edition coincided with the introduction of computers, and Joachim Lenz, the Wuppertal assistant for development, deserves thanks for the technical help given on the notes with his computer. Carmen Birkholz and Martin Heimbucher helped with proofreading, and the former also supplied the index of scripture passages, the latter the index of names. All who read and use the book are in their debt.

Many others, colleagues, scholars, experts, and nonexperts, helped with information and references, and it is in gratitude to my contemporaries that I offer this volume to the world today. I do so in the conviction that these lectures are still important for three reasons even seventy years later.

First, this first great historical work of Barth is significant as a stage in his own theological development, bearing impressive testimony as it does to his ability to combine detailed study with a distinctive insight into epochal connections and also resolutely to bring together in his thinking, as well as to differentiate, time and eternity, as he then liked to say, or knowledge of God and knowledge of history.

Second, this almost improvised essay is not only astonishingly fresh and full of life as compared to the Calvin literature of the period, but even today it can be a gripping and reliable introduction to Calvin’s work and theology, and it displays a sympathy with the Reformation cause, and a sensitivity to it, that are seldom reached in our century.

Finally, the lectures deserve to be evaluated in their secular context. On the basis of his own theology, so strikingly set forth in the second edition of his Romans, Barth opens himself to the impact of the person and thinking of the reformer, and brings this to expression in a way that gives readers of a later generation a feel for that age which manifested itself expressionistically in other theological and literary works of the day. “Absolutely Chinese, marvelous, mythological, demonic,”2> this was how

25. See below, n. 25. See above, XIV.