Karl Barth

Karl Barth was a Swiss pastor whose commentary on Romans, written in a village parsonage during the First World War, fell, a Catholic critic said, like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians, ending the liberal Protestantism that had accommodated Christianity to culture. God, he insisted, is wholly other, known only in his own revelation. The Word of God and the Word of Man collects the lectures of those years. He drafted the Barmen Declaration against the Nazi church in 1934, was expelled from his German chair, and spent the rest of his life on the thirteen volumes of the Church Dogmatics, unfinished at his death.