Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

38
Gottingen, Munster, Bonn, and Basel), Barth never forsook
preaching, either in theory or in practice. He intended
his theological work to serve preaching.
Thus, preaching claimed a prominent place in his
writing. In his monumental Church Dogmatics, he began
and finished the foundational first volume--The Doctrine
of the Word of God--with a discussion of proclamation,
with an emphasis on preaching. That first volume
provides Barth's most comprehensive writing on preaching.
But Barth not only gave his life to writing for
preachers, he preached. Even as a world leader in
Christian thought, he often turned down speaking
invitations from around the world, preferring to preach
to inmates of Basel Prison.'
In his early pastorate, Barth found the humanistic,
anthropocentric theology he had learned in university
inadequate for either the questions of his congregation
or the answers of the Bible. So he turned to the God he
saw in Scripture one much more than man writ large, and,
in fact, beyond any comparison with man. In revelation,
Barth found a God outside man's natural knowledge.
Between God and us there stands the hiddenness
of God, in which He is far from us and foreign
to us except as He has of Himself ordained and
created fellowship between Himself and us--and
this does not happen in the actualising of our
capacity, but in the miracle of His
good—pleasure.
Only in God's choice to reveal Himself does man know God
at all. And revelation is equally necessary to enable
human understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy