It isn't often a writer combines fairness in judgement and exposition of ideas, with critique that clarifies and allows the reader to give complex ideas a hearing that is both fair and well informed. Published first in English in 1969, it's really about Protestant Theology in the first half of the 20th Century.
But for all that has been published in the past 50 years, this book has an excitement and enthusiasm for these great thinkers, perhaps due to the proximity contemporary and continuing influence of such seminal and provocative thinkers. Bultmann was still alive, Barth, Tillich and Gogarten all died in the previous few years, and Bonhoeffer was in vogue and being exploited to serve various emerging and radical theological agendas.
Zahrnt has read deeply and widely in these writers and their interlocutors. This is historical theology as it should be written; by a theologian both respectful and lucid in interpreting both the theology and the religious, historical and intellectual context of Protestant theology in the first half of the 20th Century. The actual period covered is from 1919/22 (Barth's Romans 1st and 2nd Editions) till Tillich's 'On the Boundary', an autobiographical sketch and self-summing up, published in 1968. Almost exactly 50 years.
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