This is an authoritative collection of studies from the hand of one who has few peers as an interpreter of Barth. All written after McCormack's Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, they pursue a number of lines of investigation, chief among them being Barth's relationship to the theology of the nineteenth century; Barth's epistemology; trends in the interpretation of Barth, especially in English-language literature; and Barth's ontology as it surfaces in his doctrine of the Trinity and his christology. Each is a commanding performance: scrupulously researched, cogent, confident and often provocative. Some of the essays have already established themselves as key texts in the canon of contemporary Barth reception and evoked considerable debate, most of all the Cambridge Companion piece on Trinity and election, ‘Grace and Being’. Others may well be a little less studied, especially those devoted to analysis of Barth's relation to his nineteenth-century forebears, of which two pieces (those on election in Alexander Schweitzer and Barth, and on the continuity between Schleiermacher and Barth) stand out as profoundly impressive reassessments. Rereading the essays in a single volume, it is impossible not to feel their cumulative power.

The various pieces can be read as a set of material claims about the setting and content of Barth's theology, and as a corresponding set of recommendations about ways in which Barth's œuvre ought properly to be read. The material claims are several: that Barth is most fruitfully to be understood in terms of his place in the larger project of Protestant thought after the Enlightenment, that of figuring out how the Christian gospel is to be articulated in the changed conditions of modernity; that in his understanding of leading Christian doctrines – Trinity, Christ, humankind – Barth works with an anti-metaphysical, actualist ontology leery of the category of substance; that, accordingly, some elements in Christian dogmatics, such as the theology of the inner divine processions in relation to the outer divine missions, or the status of the Logos anterior to the act of incarnation, are significantly reconfigured by Barth in ways which distance him from Western scholasticism, whether medieval or post-Reformation. In the last decade, these and other material claims advanced in the essays have already been much debated, con brio, and a brief review is not the occasion to report on those unresolved discussions.

McCormack's material interpretation is bound up with some convictions about the way in which Barth is to be read; the semi-autobiographical introduction to the book outlines how McCormack came to acquire these convictions. It is a reading of Barth deeply informed by European (especially German) traditions of interpretation. This has meant, inter alia, bringing genetic interests to bear upon the Barth corpus, reading Barth with the tools of the modern historical theologian, and especially setting him in the wider development of Protestant thought in the wake of critical idealism and the rise of historicism; a tendency to think that Barth shows (or ought to show) a high degree of internal consistency; a concentration upon the Church Dogmatics, especially upon major conceptual innovations in the doctrines of God and Christ in volumes II and IV; a comparative lightness in treating Barth's exegetical and ethical interests as formative elements in his development; a perceptible reluctance to make much use of Barth for constructive projects before spending a long time thinking through Barth on his own terms.

The results are imposing: no one who has tried seriously to write about Barth can fail to register the sheer penetration of these interpretations. As with any reading of a thinker of Barth's stature, McCormack's presentation is bound up with judgements which could have been differently made. It would be possible to read Barth as a less tightly coherent thinker, as one having a dominant direction yet possessing the freedom to operate at a distance from it when occasion demands. Some readers might align Barth more closely with the concerns of classical Reformed divinity, especially in Trinity and christology: in some ways, McCormack's Barth has a rather Lutheran appearance, the fruit of sympathetic attention to the breathtaking virtuosity of Jüngel's early presentation of Barth's doctrine of God in Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Others, again, might wonder about the sharpness with which McCormack draws a distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘act’ in ontology, and by the range of tasks which this distinction performs in the interpretation of Barth. But in sheer intellectual energy, determination and command of its material, this collection effortlessly outdistances most of what is written about Barth. May we, perhaps, hope for another set of studies to illuminate other parts of the Barth corpus: his doctrines of creation and providence, his pneumatology and ecclesiology, and his theology of the Christian life?