Karl Barth, Homiletics, trans. Geoffrey Bromily and Donald E. Daniels (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 136 pp., paper.

"Now I can preach again." Those were the oft-quoted words of a young Scottish preacher after reading Karl Barth's seminal work, The Word of God and the Word of Man, translated into English in 1928. The volume was the first major work by Barth to be translated into the English tongue, and the first readers to recognize its potency were preachers.

Barth remains the theological titan of the twentieth century. The century began with liberal theology in full flower, and it now appears that it will end amid a fog of revisionist theologies. The neo-orthodox experiment marked the high-water mark of the twentieth century's attempt to meld revealed theology and Enlightenment modernity into an amalgam at home in both the university and the church.

Barth's massive theological project was the most successful of these efforts, but his concessions to critical thought (especially his doctrine of Scripture) doomed his effort to failure. Nevertheless, Barth destroyed the liberal theology he inherited, and his system reveals an architectural beauty and theological engagement unparalleled in modern times.

Barth's theology was not, however, a systematic expression designed for the academic seminar alone. It was intended to be preached. Barth insisted that the proper role of theology was to enrich and undergird the pulpit. A theology which was irrelevant to the preaching event was, to Barth's thinking, not theology at all -- perhaps philosophy or anthropology.

The translation of Barth's Homiletics is itself an event. An earlier volume, The Preaching of the Gospel (1963), was based on student notes from Barth's lectures. The present volume is drawn from the records of a seminar, "Exercises in Sermon Preparation," conducted at Bonn in 1932 and 1933. Barth assisted in the editing of the German material in 1965.

Barth asserted that "theology as a church discipline ought in all its branches to be nothing other than sermon preparation in the broadest sense." But Barth is not satisfied to consider preaching only in "its broadest sense." Homiletics is a focused and concentrated engagement with the theory and practice of proclamation.

The volume begins with a historical review of homiletical theory in continental thought. Figures ranging from David Hollaz and Alaxandre Vinet to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Barth's bete noir) are considered, and the contemporary American reader will quickly discern that the issues are current and constant.

Barth's treatment of Schleiermacher is insightful and contemporary. Schleiermacher, Barth concedes, did bring the Word and the congregation together. Yet Barth is surely correct in asserting that Schleiermacher's emphasis on "pious feeling" confuses the status of the Word, reducing it to the word of the congregation.

Barth then offers his own two-part definition of preaching: "1. Preaching is the Word of God which he himself speaks, claiming for the purpose the exposition of a biblical text in free human words that are relevant to contemporaries by those who are called to do this in the church that is obedient to his commission. 2. Preaching is the attempt enjoined upon the church to serve God's own Word, through one who is called thereto, by expounding a biblical text in human words and making it relevant to contemporaries in intimation of what they have to hear from God himself."