It will be a century this coming summer that the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth began his revolutionary commentary on St Paul\u2019s Epistle to the Romans. A quiet and studious man of simple tastes, Barth was an unlikely revolutionary. He listened to Mozart, smoked his pipe and read the paper: \u201cTheology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,\u201d\u009d he said. But mostly he sat and wrote. His Church Dogmatics is more than six million words. And no, I haven\u2019t read it all. But his considerably shorter Epistle to the Romans, written earlier, was the decisive turning point in 20th-century theology. It was a book that dropped a bomb on the comfortable assumptions of German liberal thought. And it\u2019s a bomb that needs dropping again \u201d\u201c but this time much closer to home.<\/p>\n
Barth\u2019s target was the sort of theology offered by his tutor, Adolf von Harnack. For the universally admired Harnack, Christianity was a religion of inner morality \u201d\u201c of good people, in their local congregations, who sought nothing more than personal transformation.<\/p>\n