The Spirit of God and the Christian Life: Reconstructing Karl Barth's Pneumatology

by Jinhyok Kim

Interpreters of Karl Barths theology have long noted a limited role for the Holy Spirit in his work. JinHyok Kim challenges this prevailing paradigm, reconstructing Barths pneumatology and proposing the possible contours it would have taken in the final volumes of Church Dogmatics left incomplete at Barths death.Within this reconstruction, Kim explores the contexts of Barths work and demonstrates the connection of Barths doctrine of the Spirit with the realities and practices of the Christian life. Here a new standard for understanding Barths Trinitarian theology opens up and offers fresh reading of an important topic in modern theology.

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2014

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredible work and a massive undertaking. My brain feels fried from the amount of information I gained from Kim's book on Barth's pneumatology. He is upfront that this is a reconstruction as Barth did not thoroughly outline a pneumatology in the same way he did with other aspects of Christian theology, but I think this is a worthwhile effort. You become more familiar, not only with Barth's thinking, but the thinking of various theologians and philosophers Barth contended with and learned from. This is a book I wish I owned (and didn't merely borrow) so I could dive back into it depths for a refresher (I greatly appreciate Kim's summarizing of his arguments as it was a nice refresher upon finishing sections which required a deep dive into the intricacies of interpreting Barth and the debates around his theology).

I guess my only critiques are that Kim's reconstruction of a theology around aesthetics and the Spirit's role in that felt confused. I think this is because of Barth's rather inconsistent writing on this topic, but it felt that Kim should have just embraced the inconsistency or more boldly given shape to it. I felt rather confused leaving that chapter. My other critique is that sometimes his portrayal of Christological issues seem confusing. These are typically minor and usually only in his footnotes, but when I tracked them they often brought up more questions and distracted me the larger argument he was trying to make.

All-in-all an incredible piece of scholarship that I'm thankful to have read. As I continue to wrestle with Karl Barth, this is another great volume that has deepened my understanding.