Trinity and Election: The Christocentric Reorientation of Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology, 1936–1942

Description

Challenging Bruce McCormack’s paradigm of post-Kantian Barth scholarship, this book builds on the interpretative model that Sigurd Baark developed in 2018. This model interprets Barth’s innovative adoption of an Anselmian mode of theological speculation, against the intellectual-historical background of the idealist tradition of speculative metaphysics that culminated in Hegel. This book argues that Barth adopted the Anselmian mode of speculation in which immediate self-identity between subject, object, and act is found in the triune God alone, while the speculative identity that enables human knowledge of God is none other than the identity between God-in-and-for-Godself and God-for-us. Exploring the nationalistic dimension of speculative metaphysics in 19th-century Germany, Tseng identifies this as an important aspect of the context of Barth’s development of a Christocentric form of speculative theology. Cover Contents Preface Abbreviations: Works by Karl Barth Introduction Chapter 1 Sketching the Background: The Post-Kantian Paradigm Reexamined Chapter 2 Sketching the Background: Barth and the History of Speculative Theology Chapter 3 Sketching the Contours: Actualistic Ontology and Speculative Theology Chapter 4 Painting the Portrait: Jesus Christ as Speculum Electionis (1936) Chapter 5 Painting the Portrait: Jesus Christ as Speculum Trinitatis (1940) Chapter 6 Painting The Portrait: Jesus Christ As Electing, Elected, And Election (1942) Chapter 7 Framing the Picture: Election and Nationhood— Christocentric Reflections from 1936 to 1938 Epilogue Bibliography Index