I agree, Peter, that Barth has at least initiated a pendulum swing that has never again returned to its precise point. I’d go further and say that postliberal and postevangelical exegesis have their roots firmly in neo-orthodoxy and that the emerging paradigm of the Bible laid out, for example, in Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity and the richness of the approach of a Walter Brueggemann is Barth’s legacy.

I’m interested, though, in the starting point of the swing. It seems to me that what Barth did was to repristinate the understanding that reason is fallen and that natural reason’s instinct is always to create idols. Faced with his teachers’ support of the Kaiser and the German Christian support for Hitler, Barth desperately needed to create a space for the divine “No” to human idols which held the gospel in ideological captivity. This is the motivation behind the reassertion of revelation.

Barth’s understanding of the relationship between culture (or socio-cultural conditioning), reason and revelation is nuanced. He believes in the possibility of and necessity for the transformation of reason - its redemption. Hence his delight at the rediscovery of Anselm’s Fides Quaerens Intellectum. Barth’s attacks on human reason are essentially polemical and need to be taken as somewhat tongue-in-cheek. After all, there is an obvious irony to the fact that the critic of human reason produced such a rigorously tight theological framework of the monumental scope and stature of the Church Dogmatics! Yet this makes more sense if you grant his strong belief in the power of redeemed reason. If Barth’s lifelong opponent is the Schleiermacher of the Speeches, then his answer is the submission of faith: Credo ut intelligam. Belief leads to genuine understanding - and reason is deployed as vigorously and rigorously as anywhere else in Christian theology.

This was a thought provoked from the thread and your posts, rather than a criticism. I feel that it is an important aspect which has been absent from the discussion - important precisely because its legacy has provided a genuine break from the impasse of the post-Enlightenment historical-critical dominance of exegesis.