First, the praise! This is an exceedingly fine monograph written with a level of maturity which can only be acquired through a close acquaintance with a large body of both primary and secondary literature (much of which remains untranslated from the German original). The focus of the book, as the title suggests, is the shape of Barth's theology during the years he spent as an Honorary Professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen (1921–5). Working with a level of energy which surpasses the capacities of all but a few, Barth acquired in this brief four-year period a wide erudition in the history of Reformed theology while also giving exegetical lectures and launching his first cycle of dogmatics lectures. Christopher Asprey is up to date on all of the pertinent materials written in Göttingen – most of it unpublished in Barth's lifetime but now available in the German critical edition of Barth's works. He also is conversant with a number of significant German-language studies, written since the appearance of my own book on Barth's development in 1995, which has given him an appreciation for the differences which cultural location has made in recent Barth scholarship. If anything, the chasm separating English- and German-language research on Barth is widening. Asprey is one of the few who has shown himself able to bridge that divide. As a consequence, he is also well-placed critically to assess the results of prior scholarship (including my own). Most importantly, he has opened up lines of investigation previously untouched having to do with Barth's pneumatology in the Göttingen years and much that it entails: justification, sanctification and sacramentology. There is much here to ponder and I expect to return to this book and engage with it more extensively in the future.

Now for some demurrals. The first is more nearly a quibble than a point of serious disagreement. The red thread which runs through Asprey's study is to be found in moral ontology. How does it come about that the self-grounding human ethical subject is ‘disrupted’ and indeed dissolved so as to be reconstituted as an eschatological subject who finds the ground of her moral agency not in herself but in a revelation which takes place in hiddenness? That is Asprey's guiding question and his special interest. The question is an excellent one and it opens up Barth's writings in a very helpful way. My reservation has to do with the way in which Asprey plays this concern off against issues in theological epistemology.

The primacy of the doctrine of revelation, Asprey says, ‘has little to do with epistemology’ (p. 26, cf. pp. 22, 55, 56, 59). Therefore, Barth has little or no epistemological anxieties; his motivation arises rather from the arena of ethical reflection. It is the disjunctive character of this claim (‘this and not that’) which I reject as an apt description both of Barth's motivations and the purposes of his doctrine of revelation. As Asprey himself rightly says, faith and obedience for Barth are not two acts, sequentially ordered, but are simultaneous in the revelation-event (p. 221). And that means that a situationally located knowledge of God and of his command are given in one and the same moment. But, then, precisely for this reason, one can tell the story of Barth's development through a focus either on the problem of the knowledge of God or on the problem of the constitution of the human ethical subject – and it really doesn't matter all that much which one is chosen so long as the concept of revelation which is both necessary and possible is treated adequately. What is true with respect to the line taken by Asprey is that Barth was indeed motivated throughout the period of intensive reflection on problems surrounding theological epistemology (up through CD, II/2, I would say) by his concern for political engagement. Indeed, my own dissertation told the story of Barth's development from the standpoint of his political concerns (a decision motivated in part by the need felt on my part to counter certain errors in the work of Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt – which was very much in vogue at the time); concerns for epistemology, on the other hand, while certainly not absent were subordinated to that particular end. In fact, the phrase ‘critical realism’ did not appear in the dissertation but was only added later. But it is a testimony to how closely epistemology and politics were related in Barth's thinking that the story of his development could be told unchanged in my book on Barth – but told now with the epistemological issues foregrounded. My point is that it is not necessary to choose between the two. Barth's concept of revelation was devised to address two needs, not just one.

The second demurral is a matter of stronger disagreement: Asprey is well aware that the eschatological stretching of the God–human relation established in a revelation event is overcome in the Church Dogmatics by means of a christological-grounding of dogmatics which entailed a certain ‘stabilisation’ of the God–human relation. No longer would revelation events appear occasionalistic; they would be more clearly and decisively ordered together by a ground and a telos given in the history of Jesus. This much is true – and Asprey is also right to say of the Göttingen dogmatics that in it ‘the doctrine of revelation is not structured around Christology, but around the encounter with God in the Word’ (p. 25), a point already made by Balthasar (and, later, also by myself). And yet, Asprey seems to underplay the significance for Barth's development of his adoption of the anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology of the ancient church. If Barth's theology in Göttingen was more nearly ‘pneumatocentric’ than ‘christocentric’ (given its existential focus on the encounter which takes place between the Word as address and the believer as addressee), it was, nevertheless, already the case that dogmatics was being placed in a positive light by the recognition that the history of Jesus was a ‘qualified history’ (Barth, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, vol. 1, p. 72; English translation, p. 60), i.e. a history qualified by God to be the medium of his self-revelation. Barth also elaborates his doctrine of the threefold form of the Word – a conception which requires a positive relation between revelation in itself and human language (in scripture and preaching) since Barth lays great emphasis on the fact that there are not three ‘Words’ here but one Word in three forms whose unity is made to be analogically related to the perichoretic indwelling of the members of the Trinity in one another. For both of these reasons, I have trouble understanding why Asprey thinks that dogmatics in the Göttingen period is simply critical in nature – indeed, a ‘meta-theological exercise’ (p. 263) which lacks positivity. Moreover, I cannot agree with his thesis that Barth only attains to a ‘positive account of the relation between Word and human witnesses’ (p. 134) in his lectures on John's Gospel in the winter semester of 1925/1926 in Münster (pp. 5, 94, 122–35). Nor can I agree with the claim that Barth lacks a ‘positive understanding’ of ecclesial authority in the Göttingen dogmatics (pp. 118, 120). Nothing that is said in support of these theses is convincing to me.

Such disagreements do not, however, prevent me from welcoming this book wholeheartedly and giving it my highest recommendation. My agreements with Asprey's many interpretative decisions far outweigh the disagreements (more on that another day). Aprey does his work in the right way – in close conversation with the very best Barth scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Hopefully, his book will be given a very wide reading.