The vast Oxford handbooks remain significant. These two volumes do much to maintain the general impression: designed for university libraries and teaching bibliographies, they establish the state of the art in terms of current scholarship and give a solid place to those who are now busily at work. Karl Barth is enjoying some favour today in western departments of theology while Bonhoeffer remains a constant fascination for modern theologians and historians. The question arises as to where these two formidable figures come to rest in the categories of academic life. Both were intellectuals who made decisive contributions to the realm of theology but were also active participants in the history of their times. What value have two such volumes for the ecclesiastical historian?
The Barth Handbook first offers a ‘contextual’ treatment (‘The Young Barth’, ‘Barth in Germany’, ‘Barth the Elder’) by three essential German scholars, Frank Jehle, Eberhard Busch and Hans-Anton Drewes. Then his ideas are firmly set in historical contexts of intellectual thought: chronological (patristic, medieval and Reformation), confessional and political. There follows a substantial section on ‘Dogmatic loci’, which captures Barth's place in a succession of theological themes (God, Jesus Christ, Sin and Evil and so forth). ‘Thinking after Barth’ opens the door to subsequent reflections, some of them bold (‘the racial imaginary’, modern moral philosophy, public life and hermeneutics, preaching, culture and Judaism. At the very end we find Barth's wider significance in the two contexts of Protestant and Roman Catholic theology.
In the Bonhoeffer Handbook, the historical approaches are, predictably, more insistent. A substantial part i offers eight chapters on ‘Life and Context’ (including one on the German church struggle and another locating Bonhoeffer clearly in circles of resistance, often in spite of hagiographical claims). Part ii explores Bonhoeffer's ‘Theology and Doctrine’ (God, the Holy Spirit, Creation eschatology). Then comes a section on ‘Ethics and Public Life’ and then another on ‘Thinking after Bonhoeffer’ (looking to feminism, race, South Africa and global contexts, contemporary philosophy). Finally, a useful section on ‘Studying Bonhoeffer’ navigates the fields of material, primary and secondary, and acknowledges the importance not simply of reading Bonhoeffer but seeing how others have read and represented him. The figures of the International Bonhoeffer Society are very much a presence throughout, and the volume draws fully from that extraordinary, indeed heroic, odyssey of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, in the largely parallel editions produced in Germany between 1986 and 1999 and in the United States between 1996 and 2014.
These two volumes certainly show to what extent Barth and Bonhoeffer continue to inspire new discussions within theology faculties. Both also reveal the extent to which North American scholarship now defines and dominates the field. Of the thirty-two contributors to the Handbook on Karl Barth, twenty-three are to be found there; of the thirty-two contributors to the Handbook on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the number is fifteen. To the Australian Mark Lindsay belongs the distinction of contributing to both volumes. There is much of substance here that confirms the wisdom of those long established as leading lights. Other names achieve much, if not more, in extending the scope of the general reflection. To be sure, the conventional historical picture is not very much altered by anything here. Even so, church historians will certainly take note.
