Into the Far Country: Karl Barth and the Modern Subject

In Into the Far Country, Scott Kirkland forwards an investigation of Karl Barth's response to modernity as seen through the prism of the subject under judgment. By suggesting that Barth offers a form of theological resistance to the Enlightenment's construal of human subjectivity as "absolute," this piece offers a way of talking about the formation of human persons as the process of being kenotically laid bare before the cross and resurrection of Christ.

Kirkland reevaluates the relationship between Barth and modernity, making the case that Barth understands Protestantism to have become the agent of its own demise by capitulating to modernity's insistence on the axiomatic priority of the isolated Cartesian ego. Entering into dialogue with figures including Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams, Gillian Rose and Donald MacKinnon, an account of Barth's theology is offered that is deeply concerned with the triune God's revelatory presence as that which drives the community into the crucible of difficulty that is the life of kenotic dispossession.