How to read Karl Barth

“[R]eading Barth nearly always involves us in reading against our expectations of what Christian theology ought to be like.... Part of what makes Barth so demanding of his readers is the requirement that they keep alive their capacity for astonishment, for that overwhelmed sense that the gospel takes us to some very surprising places and leads us to think and say very surprising things. Good readers of Barth are usually those who have not fallen into reading ruts.... Bad readers, by contrast, are those who know what to expect.”

—John B. Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 81.