Last things first: Karl Barth's theological exegesis of 1 Corinthians in The Resurrection of the Dead

Abstract

Retrieving Karl Barth's theological exegesis of 1 Corinthians is essential both for historical reasons (it sheds important light on the crucial period between the Römerbrief and the early Göttingen lectures on dogmatics) and for theological reasons: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ was the starting point of Barth's theology. This paper addresses historical concerns about the development of Barth's thought by locating his work on 1 Corinthians in recent discussions by David Ford and Bruce McCormack. As to theological issues, it defends Barth's exegesis of 1 Corinthians against those NT scholars who claimed that Barth's reading of Paul was determined by his own theological concerns and could therefore tell us nothing about Pauline theology. In fact, the opposite is the case: Barth's reading of 1 Corinthians remains exegetically interesting today (while those of his contemporaries do not) because he took the historical Paul seriously as a pastor and understood the pastoral implications of Paul's theological argument for the resurrection of the dead. Barth's ‘theological exegesis’ enabled him to hear the theologian Paul and protected him against the historicizing tendencies of the NT scholars of his day.