Keith Ward is no fan of Karl Barth – at least not of what Barth writes about religion in paragraph seventeen of the second part volume of his Church Dogmatics. Barth’s engagement with the concept of religion in CD I/2, and more specifically with ‘The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion’, is, for Ward, ‘shocking, distressing, and deeply alien’ (p. 1). Barth’s engagement, further, ‘seems to impugn the sincerity and authenticity of many religions, and to restrict the grace of God’ (p. 10). This restriction, regarding as it does ‘all religions other than the Christian as ineffective for salvation’ (p. 42), is, moreover, ‘extraordinarily insensitive’ (p. 89); it is, in fact, to account for Christianity in a way that is ‘fundamentally flawed’ and even, according to Ward, ‘an actual heresy’ (p. 76) – a heresy that, in the contemporary world of diverse religious and philosophical belief, is not only ‘alienating and harmful’ (p. 11), but also ‘ignorant and abusive’ (p. 23), and, at root, ‘dangerous’ (p. 26). Barth has thus been ‘a bad influence on much modern theology’ (p. 1) and Ward’s book is conceived as ‘a critique’ (p. 3) in the strongest possible terms.

Ward begins to unfold this critique by exploring (in chapter 2) what he sees as ‘the limited scope of Barth’s idea of religion’ (p. 12). For Ward, religion is not, as Barth has it, ‘the realm of man’s attempts to justify and to sanctify himself before a capricious and arbitrary picture of God’ (CD I/2, 280), but instead the sincere human search for truth. This means that all religions are ‘an honest attempt to worship God in sincerity and truth’ (p. 16); it also means that Christianity is but one subspecies of religion among others and not ‘the religion by which all others must be judged’ (p. 9). Ward is clear that he wants to uphold and commend in his critique both theological liberalism and liberal Christianity, and (in chapter 3) dismisses what he describes as Barth’s ‘questionable’ condemnation of nineteenth-century German liberal theology (p. 54) and questions his failure to recognize (in CD I/2, §17, at least) that ‘[t]here are spiritual truths to be found outside the Christian faith, and human persons may begin effectively to turn to the ultimate reality which is God in many different ways’ (p. 46). Indeed, for Ward, the only non-negotiable dogma in a world of diverse religious and philosophical belief is, it seems, that there is an ‘ultimate spiritual reality’ and ‘many varied beliefs about how this reality should be described’ (p. 11). To speak of Christianity as ‘a revealed truth’, or of Jesus Christ as ‘a unique and one-time revelation of God’ (p. 41) and ‘to distinguish sharply between human religion and divine revelation’, (p. 72) as Barth does, is, therefore, ‘wholly misleading’ (p. 77).

Ward initiates this line of attack by considering (in chapter 4) Barth’s understanding of revelation and its content, and (in chapter 5) the relationship that Barth establishes between ‘religion’ as a human phenomenon and ‘revelation’ as an act of God. For Ward, both the former understanding and the latter relationship are problematic. They are problematic because Ward doubts that ‘absolute certainty’ (p. 65) can ever be established as to what God’s revelation is, or where that revelation is ‘clearly and completely given’ (p. 72). Any human claim to ‘provide objective truth’ or to ‘succeed in describing what God is really like’ (p. 93) – in the Bible or otherwise – must, then, be resisted. As Ward writes: ‘[W]e just have to decide among various alternatives what seems right to us’ (p. 65), ‘exercising human capacities’ of ‘learning, reasoning and deciding’ (p. 67) to test the reliability or otherwise of the content of ‘religious revelation’ (p. 86) against ‘moral, experiential, and rational criticism’ (p. 95), not least against ‘the assured findings of modern science’ (p. 88). This testing subsequently requires traditional Christian beliefs to be ‘adapted’ in the light of ‘evolution and cosmology, and the main moral advances of the Enlightenment like gender equality, human autonomy, and human rights’ (p. 94). It also requires, according to Ward (in chapters 6 and 7), a commitment to uphold natural theology and human ‘efforts to be good’ (p. 106) in opposition to Barth’s radical juxtaposition of God’s grace over against all ‘religionism’ (CD I/2, 298), as well as Barth’s fundamental theological premise that God is ‘wholly Other’, and, as such, unknowable – at least from the perspective of humankind, that is. For Ward, it is instead the case that God is neither ‘wholly Other’, nor totally unknowable: ‘If humans can ever encounter God, it must be possible for them to do so, and that is a human possibility’ (p. 119). Barth’s contention that knowledge of God is impossible independent of God’s revelation and the truth of that revelation coming to us in Jesus Christ (CD I/2, 303) ‘should probably be seen’, therefore, ‘as exaggerated and rhetorical’ (p. 125). Indeed, as Ward maintains (in chapter 8), to advocate for ‘the unique truth of Christ at all costs’ (p. 137), or to speak of Christianity as ‘the true religion’, as Barth does (CD I/2, 325–61), is not only ‘logically inept’ (p. 155), but simply ‘unacceptable’ (p. 176). What is instead needed, Ward avers, is ‘an explicit recognition that there is not one faith that contains (or is ‘the site’ of) the exhaustive fullness of truth, and also that humans can begin to work towards their spiritual fulfilment (their salvation) by their own creative and exploratory responses to the divine’ (p. 163). This conviction thus leads Ward to reject any belief in original sin or a doctrine of the Fall (p. 142), and (in chapter 9) to affirm that God’s saving grace is universally present in faiths other than the Christian, and that ‘the possibility of repentance and spiritual growth’ exists ‘after physical death for those who have turned away from God during their earthly lives’ (p. 171). (How this latter affirmation and the former rejection are consonant with each other remains unspecified in Ward’s thought, however). Ultimately, Ward’s conviction leads him to affirm that Jesus Christ is but ‘one image of a transcendent spiritual reality among others’ (p. 175).

What we make of the content and trajectory of Ward’s critique will no doubt be shaped by the extent to which we are persuaded by his analysis of what is undoubtedly one of Barth’s most polemical pieces of theological writing. The reader may wonder, for example, why Ward engages with so little critical Barth scholarship, or why Ward pays no attention to the location of Barth’s discussion of religion within his overarching dogmatic interest. Barth’s concern in Part III of CD I/2 is with the subjective reception through God the Holy Spirit of God’s objective revelation to humanity in Jesus Christ. Hence, Barth’s engagement with the concept of religion is downstream of his Christological and pneumatological commitments, and its purpose is to address how the proper object of Christian theology – ‘revelation in all its uniqueness’ (CD I/2, 294) – relates to the world of human religion. Therefore, the extent to which it is appropriate to critique Barth for failing to understand different religions ‘on their own terms’, or in terms of a ‘point-by-point’ comparative analysis (p. 82), as Ward does, might be a question that the reader wants to register. The reader might also want to register a number of other questions. By denying that God is ‘wholly Other’ is Ward in danger of collapsing problematically the all-important ontological distinction in Christian theology between God and that which is not God? Are the findings of modern science as ‘assured’ as Ward thinks that they are? Is theological truth to be located on a sliding scale at the end of which stands scientific truth, as Ward suggests it is? Is the Bible ‘able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim. 3:15) in a way that the Bhagavad Gita or the Lunya is not? And will human ‘efforts to be good’ really lead us toward salvation (p. 106)? Or, in claiming thus, does Ward run the risk of offering a repristinated version of the views of Pelagius that were opposed by Augustine and ultimately condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431? Most critically, however, the reader may wonder if, in relativising the unique nature of Christian revelation and the person of Jesus Christ in the way that Ward does, Ward actually denies a central tenet of Christian orthodoxy: ‘Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”’ (John 14:7). Whatever conclusions the reader reaches in relation to these questions, Barth scholars and all theologians interested in the relationship between Christianity and the diversity of religious and philosophical belief that exists in the contemporary world will find in Ward’s study much food for thought.