Reframing Personalism in Karl Barth

A Philosophical and Contextual Examination

by Sara Mannen

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Extent: 263 pages

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Subjects: Philosophy, Religious Studies

Series: Forschungen zur systematischen und okumenischen Theologie

Series volume number: 180

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2025)

ISBN: 9783525502341

6.3 x 9.25 inches

Price: $163.00

In stock

By examining the intellectual environment after the Pantheism Controversy, Mannen argues that Barth’s theology of divine personhood does not assume the modern autonomous subject but instead indicates that God is freely and personally encountered by humans in the event of revelation.


Sara Mannen in her book rejects the notion that Karl Barth’s theology makes God in the image of the modern autonomous subject and argues that his concept of divine personhood is best understood when reframed through the intellectual context that resulted from the Pantheism Controversy, which explicitly revolved around issues of the knowledge and nature of God and divine personhood. The work of Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, and Schelling created an environment that necessitated theologians address the concepts of divine personhood, divine absoluteness, and modern questions of theological epistemology. Mannen argues that Barth’s distinctly modern conception of divine personhood reflects and responds to this environment by providing the necessary divine ontological foundation that establishes God is capable of self-revelation without detriment to God’s absoluteness and that Barth’s motivation for the occasional use of counterfactual language is to maintain God’s personal nature and identity.

  • By (author) Sara Mannen