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Beyond Immanence
The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth
By: Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance
Series: Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker
407 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9780802868039
- Published By: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
- Published: May 2023
$49.99
Review by Heejun Yang forthcoming.
Critical insights into Kierkegaard’s influence on Barth’s theology.
Karl Barth was often critical of Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas as he understood them. But close reading of the two corpora reveals that Barth owes a lot to the melancholy Dane. Both conceive of God as infinitely qualitatively different from humans, and both emphasize the shocking nearness of God in the incarnation. As public intellectuals, they used this theological vision to protect Christocentric faith from political manipulation and compromise. For Kierkegaard, this meant criticizing the state church; for Barth, this entailed resisting Nazism.
Meticulously crafted by a father-son team of renowned systematic theologians, Beyond Immanence demonstrates that Kierkegaard and Barth share a theological trajectory—one that resists cynical manipulation of Christianity for political purposes in favor of uncompromising devotion to a God who is radically transcendent yet established kinship with humanity in time.
Andrew B. Torrance is a senior lecturer in theology at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God. He has also edited several volumes, including Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science (with Thomas H. McCall) and Soren Kierkegaard: Theologian of the Gospel (with Greg Marcar and Todd Speidell).