Clearing a Space for Human Action: Ethical Ontology in the Early Theology of Karl Barth

Clearing a Space for Human Action demonstrates how Karl Barth’s concern for ethical description cannot be separated from his concern for a proper theological description of the God-human relationship. Early in his career, Barth attempted to describe human ethical agency in terms that respected the co-inherence of dogmatics and ethics, but in such a way that neither human nor divine agency suffered absorption into the other. This book’s conclusion calls for a treatment of Barth’s Dogmatics as a sustained theological ethical ontology. Only then can we hope to understand Barth’s treatment of the human and the Divine in other parts of the Dogmatics.