Karl Barth's Emergency Homiletic 1932–1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich. By Angela Dienhart Hancock. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013. xvi + 372 pp. $42.00.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Karl Emergency Homiletic 1932-1933: A Summons Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich . By Angela Dienhart Hancock . Grand Rapids, Mich. : William B. Eerdmans Publishing , 2013. xvi + 372 pp. $42.00.Book Reviews and NotesAngela Dienhart Hancock offers a fascinating and engaging contextual reading of homiletic by setting it into a thick description of the political, academic and theological context of the end of the Weimar republic and the rise of the Third Reich in Germany.The book is made up of two major parts: the setting of the scene and the representation of homiletic lectures. The first part, which makes up more than half of the volume, provides a detailed picture of the setting into which homiletic speaks, narrowing in on the scene from four different angles. In chapter 1, which sketches the trajectory of Karl theological biography from his studies in Marburg onwards, Hancock gives special attention discovery of the threefold form of the Word. Against many a flatfooted reading of (30) which perceive him as one-sidedly pointing transcendence, Hancock aligns with those strands of Barth interpretation reading him as a strongly contextual thinker. She points out complex engagement with culture by the Leitmotifs of Realdialektik and analogia fidei , borrowing a concept from George Hunsinger draw on Bruce McCormack's analysis of Barth (26-30). Chapter 2, a portrayal of the political history of Weimar, highlights the precarious and unstable situation of the young republic after the war, the rise of National Socialism and how it impacted and was witnessed by Barth, the German church, and the theological academy. As a third angle, chapter 3 zooms in scrutinize the political language of the Weimar years. Hancock dismisses the characterization of Germans as unpolitical as a myth. The permeation of the press, propaganda, theology and everyday language by political shows them be hyper-political, if anything (97). In this situation, silence with regard political events has be read as a determined way deprive them of their pathos (121) and, thus, as a strategy of nonviolent resistance (122). As a fourth route of advance homiletic, Hancock presents the homiletic tradition and developments from Friedrich Schleiermacher Emil Pfennigsdorf, professor of practical theology in Bonn at the time when Barth embarks on his own homiletic enterprise. She highlights the war as a new paradigm of preaching as well as the conspicuous absence of studies about the homiletic of the Weimar era. She demonstrates how the theme sermon and the effectiveness of preaching become the call of the hour from Political Theologians (170). turn away from theme preaching towards the biblical text and from a rhetorical and formal homiletic a principal homiletic stands in stark contrast this use, but also in continuity the enterprise of taking the modern listener and the modern task of preaching seriously: Barth's emergency homiletic was born of the conviction that how these novice preachers went about their task as Weimar crumbled mattered (91).The second, somewhat shorter, part of the book (chapters 5-6), is dedicated a re-narration of lectures on homiletics in the winter semester of 1932-33 and the summer semester of 1933. Hancock takes into account not only the published version of 1966, but also Charlotte von Kirschbaum's notes and student protocols, thus providing insight into hitherto unpublished sources. Session for session, she gives a synoptic account of the political developments around classroom and of the content of his teaching.The tumultuous historic events covered start from the electoral campaign for presidential election in July 1932 up the church elections of July 1933. She shows how in this agitated context, homiletic spoke out against fixed schemas of interpretation and application, how he encouraged the students to think for themselves and made a point of engaging their ideas (209). …