Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics

by Faye Bodley-Dangelo, Paul Dafydd Jones (Editor), Paul T. Nimmo (Editor)

Overview

This volume is a critical and constructive analysis of the sexually differentiated self in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatic. It secures in his Christocentric pattern of human agency an untapped resource for unsettling and reimagining the heteropatriarchal structure of human fellowship at the heart of his theological anthropology.
Moving through Barth's doctrines of revelation, creation, theological anthropology, and special ethics, Faye Bodley-Dangelo locates the human agent in his broader project aimed at re-habilitating the subject of modern protestant theology. She argues the human actor comes into view as the recipient of Christ's redemptive activity, which redirects it out of self-aggrandizing isolation and into relationships of dependency, responsiveness, and ethical responsibility to multiple sites of divine and creaturely alterity. The book debates that Barth's model of human agency cannot on its own terms sustain his version of female subordination nor his repudiation of same-sex relationships. Rather, it contains ethically-oriented, critical and reflective mechanisms that resist the sexist heterosexist dimension of his theological anthropology and lend themselves to an anti-essentialist performative account of gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780567698285
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/22/2021
Series:	T&T Clark Explorations in Reformed Theology
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Faye Bodley-Dangelo is Managing Editor at Harvard Theological Review, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Rehabilitating the Agent of Theological Discourse
Chapter Two: Playing the Neighbor in an "Order of Praise"
Chapter Three: Re-orienting the Agent in the Doctrine of Creation
Chapter Four: Playing Adam and Silencing Eve
Chapter Five: Re-Orienting the Agent of a Theological Anthropology
Chapter Six: An Ethic for the Sexually Differentiated Self
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Bodley-Dangelo's searingly acute analysis reveals the breadth and depth of the problems in Karl Barth's theology with respect to sex, gender, and sexuality, as well as pointing a way beyond them. This book is a crucial new reference point for any adequate theological reception of Barth's thought.
David Clough, Professor of Theological Ethics, University of Chester, UK

Of the many excellent studies of Barth on gender and sexual difference this one stands out as the best . Leading us through the complexities and ambiguities of Barth's position, Bodley-Dangelo offers a compelling account of what Barth actually said along with convincing reconstructions of what he might have said but regrettably did not. I recommend it enthusiastically for anyone who is interested in the theology of gender or the theology of Barth.
Gerald McKenny, Walter Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame, USA

This is by far one of the most sophisticated and nuanced analyses of Barth on Gender and Sexuality we have in the English language. Dr. Bodley-Dangelo's powerful intervention might finally pull Barth Studies out of the quagmire of obsessive defense or impatient dismissal of Barth's Theological Anthropology.
Willie James Jennings, Yale Divinity School, USA

From the Publisher