you learn something new every day

I learned this a year or two ago: Karl Barth was a brilliant exegete.
True, fundamentalists of the status quo stripe would paint him as one of their worst demons: "He doesn't believe the Bible is God's Word. He has heretical friends. He read Kierkegaard."
Despite the ability of men like Norman Geisler and many other to boil him down to short order heresy-soup, I find that Barth was much more than a theologian. He was a careful, respectful exegete of the same Word of God he is accused of minimizing. I found when reading his Church Dogmatics that I was breathing the same air as Calvin's "Institutes," only without all the baggage of Reformation politics. Indeed, the only politics that I can find in Barth is defiance against the false god of Nazi Germany, and his determination to serve God regardless.

Crack the "Dogmatics" open. You'll find a treasure trove of exegetical and philosophical insights. The footnotes alone are worth the reading. True, none of us will ever be able to endorse a "Barthian this" or a "Barthian that." That's beside the point. We aren't going to buy into anyone's system, not if we're careful; and we will work hard to prize the mysteries of God over the definitions of his work. I find that this is easy to do when reading Barth. His presuppositions are on his sleeve, easy to spot, which makes him the easy target that he is. "There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical." Sure, Barth is there in his writing; but he is there educating and postulating and interpreting with the fear and awe of God before him.

I remember reading in his 2nd edition Romans commentary for a paper and finding this fetching line about the transitions that occur between Romans 7 & 8: "Thanks be to God, I am not the wretched man that I am." Somewhere else he said, "Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way."Things like that. They sit right with me.