A Roman Catholic Interpretation of Karl Barth

Extract

I do not think that I am doing an injustice to anyone in writing that the book that Balthasar has devoted to Karl Barth constitutes the largest, most unprejudiced and most intelligent attempt that has hitherto been made to set forth clearly the thought of the master of Basel, by identifying his deep-lying connexions with modern Protestant theology, and by setting forth with precision his opposition in regard to Catholicism. One should not lose sight of the fact that Father Balthasar writes as a Roman Catholic theologian. One can easily imagine that a Roman Catholic is sensitive, more than we Protestants, to a determinate intellectual atmosphere, a certain family likeness, which is beyond doubt common to all modern Protestant theologians and which distinguishes the lot of them from the tradition of scholastic ontological thought; and it is a situation that we may enjoy when, although in the realm of Protestantism Barthians and Liberals have for a quarter of a century been exchanging fierce blows in a duel which each imagines to be to the death, a sensitive and cultured theologian can come from the other side with a smile of kindly irony and say: ‘And yet at root you are all very much alike: you are all moderns.’ Balthasar is one of a small group of Roman theologians who have taken upon themselves as their life's mission the study of the theological positions of Protestantism, in order to put the discussion between Catholicism and Protestantism on a serious footing.