“ALWAYS teach about things you feel enthusiastic about, never those you just want to criticise.” This was the advice given to me by a very wise colleague when I started as a new and somewhat clueless tutor at a theological college.

I wonder whether this advice would have been helpful to the distinguished philosopher and theologian Keith Ward, as he gives the 20th-century giant of reformed theology Karl Barth a 188-page pasting.

Ward’s charges against Barth are many and various, and to some extent aimed not at Barth alone, but at all conservative Protestants and, indeed, conservative Christians. Ward argues that Barth’s exclusivist approach to other religions is both untrue and uncharitable, given the universality of religious experience, and the work of the Holy Spirit. He robustly questions whether Barth’s conception of human and divine freedom is coherent or, indeed, supported by biblical evidence. And, given the inconsistencies and morally dubious passages in the Bible, he argues that Barth’s emphasis on the givenness of revelation is untenable.

Where he finds himself in more agreement with Barth, as on the latter’s statement that no theological limits can be set on the kindness of God, he finds him incoherent: “my judgment is that he really wanted it to be true that all would be saved, but could not bring himself to affirm this unequivocally as a truth of faith.” The questions that Ward opens up are thus pertinent and well-aimed.

The book obliges us to piece together a picture of Ward’s own approach out of his largely negative responses to different points of Barth’s theology. Ward is confident in his own ability to teach about religion from a non-ideological standpoint, free of any “unconscious bias”, and describes himself as having “a very rationalistic cast of mind”. Although he is careful to stay within the bounds of orthodox Christianity, he essentially adopts a relativist position that all religions are mixtures of truth and falsity.

There are surely questions about all this. Ward takes Barth to task for claiming that only an unequivocal assertion of the Lordship of Christ could provide sufficient ballast against demonic political ideologies such as Adolf Hitler’s. In contrast, Ward contends that the problem with the German liberal theologians who endorsed Nazism was that they were not liberal enough, since “true liberalism is opposed to tyranny and persecution of minorities or of the socially disadvantaged.” But the rationalistic and relativistic approach that Ward espouses seems likely, through equivocation, argumentation, and qualification, to lose any prophetic edge.

Barth, as Ward represents him, comes across as a somewhat desiccated figure, rolling out a series of unappetising and indefensible conservative assertions that require stringent analysis and rebuttal. To read Barth’s work, however, is to gain a different experience as one is drawn into the panoptic vision of the revelation of God in Christ: its poetry, its energy, and its joy. Ward has very justifiable questions about the basis of many of Barth’s assertions, but I wonder whether this critique fully addresses the whole. 

The Very Revd Dr Edward Dowler is Dean of Chichester.

Karl Barth on Religion: A critique
Keith Ward
Cambridge University Press £23.99
(978-1-009-55541-8)
Church Times Bookshop £21.59