I am now in possession of the unabridged version of Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Incidentally, I read in the preface that he refused to write an introduction to the partial version that we have in the Dordt Library — he wrote that,
I cannot alter the fact that I see the whole affair [the whole book] with a certain amount of head-shaking. I have looked at the book again recently and am more than ever convinced that the whole is indeed a fragment — but, as a fragment, nevertheless a unity, in which the two chief parts (Background and History) form unities. The reasons which have moved you to present this united fragment in still more fragments, you will have to explain to the English reader yourself: I cannot, because I just do not understand it.
The Dordt version of the book did not include this letter.
At any rate, in the prefatory essay “The Task of a History of Modern Protestant Theology” Barth lays out his own ideas of the proper method for history of theology.
At Dordt, there is one professor who likes to say “theologians should not be left in charge of writing their own history.” Barth addresses the concern that fuels this quip head-on:
We hear the voices of the ancients in order to give an answer by our own attitude and decision. But we do that for or against ourselves, not for or against them. With our own personal decisions we cannot associate judgments upon our forefathers, whether it is a case of pronouncing canonizations or settling accounts and carrying out funerals. . . . An explicit judgment, the feeling that for better or for worse we can be ‘finished’ with this or that, always means the closing of a door that ought to remain open, the silencing of a voice that ought to continue to speak, and that is not only to our detriment, but also to the detriment of the Church.
A bit later he continues this theme:
History writing cannot be a proclamation of judgment. In that case, it would seem that prophetic inspiration warranted us to presuppose not only that our age could be right, but that it was right. We shall do well not to claim this possibility too hastily or too often. It is appropriate for us to leave on one side what the Son of Man will do in his future, namely, to divide the good from the evil. . . . The condition for a legitimate concern with the theology of the past is rather that we should escape again from the unavoidable intoxication of the moment of our own theological recognition as quickly as possible and with the utmost speed meet up again with our fathers, with those whose voices we think that we have heard often enough before.
It remains to be seen how well Barth carried this project out himself.
