BOOK REVIEW:
Hope in Barth's Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy. By John C. McDowell. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2000. xi+263pp. ISBN 0754615421.

It is often said that Karl Barth abandoned eschatology after the second edition of Romans: in the Church Dogmatics everything is known and already complete in Christ. John McDowell seeks to set this rumor aside, and demonstrate that the mature Barth retains a robust and weighty doctrine of Last Things. McDowell frames his argument with a study of tragedy as a genre that recognizes the frailty, ignorance, and tentativeness of all human striving. Can Barth’s eschatology “incorporate the tragic vision. . .and take the tragic tragically” (p. 39)?

The book unfolds chronologically. Barth’s early work occupies the first two chapters of exposition, heavily dependent, unfortunately, on secondary works. The meat of McDowell’s analysis appears in chapters 4-7, and comes into its own in the last two chapters, dedicated to Christ’s prophetic work in CD IV.3, 4. It is refreshing to read a work that recognizes that some of the old interpretations of Barth are often little more than caricatures—that Barth has only a “noetic” doctrine of salvation, that he cannot take sin and evil seriously, that his doctrine of election is “universalistic” or that his work suffers from “Christomonism.” McDowell offers a balanced reading of Barth, drawing out the complex elements of a Christology in which the past governs but does not exhaust the future. Christ’s work is perfect and complete, yet still not manifested in its fullness: “Christ’s prophetic action is only moving towards its fulfillment” (p. 153). Despite notes of triumphalism, McDowell argues, Barth does preserve an open future in which the tragedy of eternal reprobation and the call to ethical agency remain real and unscripted. “Barth’s eschatology logically requires both nescience [of the shape of the Future] and the entertaining of the possibility of damnation” (p. 221).

Nevertheless, McDowell’s insights are undermined by a style fond of abstractions—the book stems from a dissertation—and a scope that attempts to cover too much. Almost every major secondary study of Barth is mentioned, so none can be covered at great depth. We would benefit from hearing more about Donald MacKinnon as counterweight to Barth—MacKinnon’s view of the tragic seems to satisfy McDowell’s theological aims—yet MacKinnon’s work occupies a scant 12 pages. He concludes: “MacKinnon comes to serve as a reminder to Barth of the theological complexity of the tragic dimension, of a hope without the secure enclaves of even pious talk of triumph. In MacKinnon is put into practice the profound sense of eschatological provisionality and hubristic brokenness of thought and action, culminating in the almost tortuous, tentative, and stammering bringing of Christ’s reconciling action to speech and practice” (p. 232). It may well be that McDowell sees too much of MacKinnon in Barth when he defends the tragic in Barth’s CD. The light, joy and infectious energy that radiate from the CD are unmistakeable, and lead most readers to confirm Hans Frei’s judgement that “the one form of the imagination of which he really had little sympathy was the tragic” (p. 216).

This book appears in a series dedicated to “monographs with specialist focus.”’ True to this aim, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology is a thicket of technical concepts, methodological observations and dense abstractions. In summarizing an important quarrel with R. Robert’s interpretation of Barth, McDowell can write: “As well as misconceiving Barth’s dipolar categorization of eternity, Roberts problematically presses Barth’s model by identifying it as CD’s hermeneutical key, and thereby he surmounts the confines of its intended boundaries. All overarching hermeneutical keys are suspect, and care must be taken not to overlook Barth’s diverse and revisionistic forms of expression” (p.126). Still, this is an important topic in Barth studies, and the extensive research, bibliography and notes on this important topic will serve Ashgate’s readers well, the “student, academic and research readers.”

Katherine Sonderegger
Professor of Theology
Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, WINTER 2004, VOL. 4, #1.