Sometimes I get excited about Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. I'm usually let down by the actual books, but I try to tell myself it's okay, that it's just really hard to write short, coherent, clear introductions to difficult topics. And then I go and read an old Pelican mass-market paperback that blows all my hope away and I realize that actually, yes, we are once again living in the dark ages of popular humanistic and social scientific work.

I had some acquaintance with the main figures in this book--Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, about 8000 other German theologians whose names start with B (e.g., Brunner, Bethge etc etc...)--but mostly considered it dry and impossible to comprehend. Still, I occasionally get excited about reading theology, and about learning something new, and thought I'd give this a god, since it was a dollar.

And then I devoured it. The story Nicholls tells isn't just interesting, it's *gripping* (granted, it's gripping if you're interested in theological hair-splitting, but still, that's a few people). He starts with liberal theology's method: describe what 'religion' is, then how Christianity fits into/is the pinnacle of 'religion.' Show that Christianity is perfectly compatible with the world we know through science. Work out who the 'real' Jesus was, so we can ignore everything said by anyone between 30AD and 1871. Use historical criticism to better understand the bible.

Then along comes Barth (and his teachers) to point out that maybe something is lost when you do that. Maybe Christianity (and, to stretch the point, Islam, Judaism, Hindusim, Buddhism etc) isn't a 'religion' like other religions, but something of its own sort? Maybe the world the liberal theologians wanted Christianity to be compatible with was *really pretty shitty*, and we shouldn't try to be like it? Maybe theology should be about God, though there's little we can legitimately say of it, and not people? Nicholls also tells us a bit about Barth's later, more systematic, theology, in which he found a way to speak about God and to admit more reason into his thought.

Bultmann seems to have had two projects, one of which seems sensible (demythologizing, that is, try to work out what's important in religious texts, which can be separated from the historical particulars required by the text's original audience), the other of which seems a bit silly (i.e., existentialism, so that theology becomes a phenomenology of religious life). Tillich is much more straight-forwardly existentialist, and optimistic.

I read a biography of Bonhoeffer last year, which was utterly awful; Nicholls does a much better job in about a tenth of the pages. Bonhoeffer's most famous idea is the need for 'religion-less Christianity,' which Nicholls reads as a move from Christianity as concerned with "the inner life of man and his problems of conscience" to a contemporary form of Christianity "concerned with outward action and [our] relationship with others," [216]. Again, "religion is the concern for individual salvation... Christianity is not a religion of salvation, because it is not concerned with the salvation of individuals as such." For Christianity to survive atheistic times, Christians must 'hide' the true content of the Gospel, because it is above and beyond what contemporary people can understand.

I'm a kind of fellow-travelling, non-church-going, interested-in-religion guy, and Nicholls makes these ideas fascinating. Barth ends up sounding like Adorno/Heidegger to Bonhoeffer's Benjamin/Levinas, except Barth's not quite as smart as Adorno, and Benjamin's not quite as inspiring as Bonhoeffer. There's a dissertation in there somewhere.

Also, if academics refuse to write clear, compelling introductions to their own subject areas, let's just fire the bastards and replace them with people who will. ( )