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Although Barth's Romans sought to separate faith from the realms of inner-worldly history and culture it can with hindsight be seen as a text directly and passionately engaged with the world crisis of its time and has often been cited — in a perhaps unlikely triangle — with Spengler's Decline of the West and Heidegger's Being and Time as one of the most characteristic works of the 1920s. Although Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was to declare, contra Barth, the necessity of contextualizing theology in its contemporary thought-world, his own work, paradoxically, seems far less obviously "engaged" than that of Barth. Indeed Bultmann himself said of his work, "On the question of the origin of our theology, I am of the opinion that the internal debate with the theology of my teachers plays an incomparably greater role than the experience of war or the reading of Dostoevsky."¹ It is perhaps doubly striking that whereas Gogarten speaks of the gulf separating his generation from that of their teachers, Bultmann refers to his critical response to their teaching as part of an "internal debate".

DOI: 10.1057/9780230377813_7

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