Barth has been variously criticised for his unsophisticated ‘hermeneutical principles’, or praised (especially by post-liberals) for concentrating on ‘actual exegesis’ rather than methodological problems. Focusing on texts from Church Dogmatics, I/2, some early lectures, and especially on the prefaces he wrote to the Römerbrief commentaries, Burnett's book (originally published in 2001 by J. C. B. Mohr) argues that Barth took the questions of modern scientific exegesis seriously. As well as the prefaces that were published with each new edition, it turns out that Barth had previously toyed with six draft-prefaces before finally settling on the preface to Romans 1. His wife, and his friend Edward Thurneysen, persuaded him to suppress these drafts in order to let his exegesis speak for itself. Burnett regrets this, for it left Romans vulnerable to a host of misunderstandings – witness its reception in the reviews of his contemporaries – which might have been avoided if the seriousness with which he reflected on his own hermeneutical principles had been plain from the outset. Although they number only twenty pages of the Gesamtausgabe edition, the draft prefaces are important, because they show both that Barth was interested in hermeneutical problems, and that he had already developed a sophisticated response to objections he anticipated being raised against him.

Burnett writes,

In fact, Romans created a stir because it challenged the canons of a vibrant hermeneutical tradition.

Burnett is conscious of sailing close to the wind here. He agrees that Barth ‘was always more interested in interpreting the Bible than discussing methods of how to interpret the Bible’ (p. 13). Barth does not have a set of ‘a priori hermeneutical principles’ (p. 6) which determine his exegesis in advance. What makes his ‘method’ different is what Bruce McCormack has called ‘a single material insight’, rather than a further methodological claim. Nevertheless, ‘the immediate consequence of this material insight was a new understanding of the exegetical task which is reflected in the first edition of his Römerbrief, and although they are ‘not hard and fast rules’, a set of principles follow which are ‘sufficiently formal to warrant attention’ (p. 6). To have such ‘principles’ was important to Barth because, like the liberal exegetical tradition, he was concerned ‘to avoid arbitrary, idiosyncratic, privileged interpretation of the Bible’ (p. 53). Barth wished to overcome (aufheben) that tradition not by evading its problems, which he took seriously, but by showing that its putative solutions were inadequate to the task. It emerges that modern exegetical practice was often not as ‘scientific’ as it supposed, since it worked with a series of undisclosed presuppositions, which determined the possible range of its findings in advance, restricting and distorting what a biblical text could be allowed to say.

In fact, Barth had two targets: first, historical-critical methodology, with its radically empiricist assumption that the task of interpreting the Bible was limited to fact-gathering. Second, the Romantic tradition – Burnett refers to this as the ‘empathetic tradition’ – including figures such as Herder, Schleiermacher and Dilthey. During the course of an important discussion about ‘the parts and the whole’ Burnett observes how ‘the dominant science of biblical exegesis . . . tried to pile up more and more information about the parts, more and more historical data, as if this could suffice as an interpretation of the whole or as if this could “replace explication itself”’ (p. 83). If Barth was closer to the ‘empathetic tradition’ which saw that the parts could only be understood in the light of the whole (p. 83), he diverged from it when he thought that the principal problem for exegesis was not human understanding as such, but the being of God. The ‘whole’ that would make sense of the disparate parts of scripture was not total insight into the conscious and unconscious events surrounding textual production, but the revelation that God is ‘whole’ (etwas Ganzes). Divine ‘simplicity’ is the theological rationale behind Barth's conviction about the unity of the biblical testimony, since the theme (Sache) of the Bible is God (and not the religious individual). Given this, the biblical authors must be treated as witnesses rather than objects of independent interest (p. 126). The reader ought not to take a critical distance from them, but enter into ‘the most intense form of participation and personal engagement’ (p. 115) with their concerns.

Burnett shows a dogged persistence in mining Barth's texts, and refuses to settle for only one of the variety of metaphors Barth uses to describe what he is doing. The strength of the book lies in its conviction that Barth's ‘hermeneutical principles’ are not simply ‘naïve’, but worth taking seriously because they are based on a powerful theological insight. The hermeneutical problem is more basic than the mere difficulty of ‘translating’ an ancient text to a modern world. It lies in an ‘inattentive and loveless approach’ (p. 185) to the biblical authors, an inability or unwillingness to hear rightly what they will tell us (p. 246).

One could, however, question the value of isolating the Romans prefaces as Burnett can tend to do. This is not the post-liberal claim that it is only the exegesis itself that is worth examining, but that hermeneutics has its legitimate place within a rather broader economy of revelation. Even Burnett's forays into CD I/2 do not really bring this out, to the extent that they focus on the act of reading, rather than on an ontology of the texts and their place in the wider sphere of the trinitarian God's reconciling acts. It is true that there is little of this in the Romans prefaces. Perhaps this is a weakness, or perhaps they were simply intended as polemical tracts, rather than any comprehensive articulation of a set of ‘hermeneutical principles’.