A Preface to Reading the Biograph Re Barth & Kirschbaum--
The One Best Biograph I Can Find
About this Church Father

I have a copy of Suzanne Selinger's Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth (1998); it may have some interest for me, as I study the Church Dogmatics to greater proficiency (meaning I have only read the Outline... thus far.) I have said that the relation between the two subjects is not of immense interest to me, in part because I have never been one to tease the unknown from known in the form of 'muckraking,' and further because I am pivotally more interested in Barth's earlier years-- for which no biograph competently exists, as far as I can determine.

Reading this work will thus be a requirement for understanding/Verstehen; I am more interested in spiritual/noetic/motivational matters than in 'physics' and whether-there-was-impure-lust in this Church Father amounts to an almost irrelevant question for now.

In short, while it is even theoretically impossible to accomplish, I wish to aspire to a tabula rasa on Barth. I shall no doubt proffer recapitulative opinion about Barth, but knowing my objectives and my personality and my experiences, I shall likeliest put these conjectures into abeyance until a fuller Gestalt emerges. The message to which Barth would wish to give me as one of his readers may not be agreeable, but I shall desire to postpone conclusiveness until far into this ongoing digest of reading-- indeed from the Schleiermacherian model I can but be somewhat uncertain about the motivational factors for Barth or any 'utterer.'

One of my biases is that I am somewhat detached from gender issues which seem to be all the rage in academia. I like women, wish to promote their agendas to the degree that these are not succinctly un-Christian. But I am not a woman, cannot see or be like a woman; my disdain for men in general comes from my perception of cultural male violence. That is about all I can muster for thoughts about sexism-- feminism-- or all the -isms associated with the madding crowd of late. "Good and bad in everything and everyone" seems to be a truism to me.

I am only contributing this input for reference. I want to go on record as having a 'tuned null' attitude with regard to Barth and his attitudes about women. I simply do not know enough save for what I have read on Internet and may hear in 'gossip' about this potentially sensitive part of Barth's life. This reading therefore simply amounts to background material for a protracted study-- then an empirical assay based on sound understanding.

Those who would expect diatribe or yet-more-gossip on a great man or a lesser man will likely be disappointed herein. Everyone according to my own dogmatic is a 'sinner'-- a tell-all-attitude is not what I wish to do now. Instead, the What in the context of the How of Barth's 'soul' has become the Ding an Sich for examination. This, I believe, will be the-most-interesting, but if it emerges that somehow Barth colors his writs with inconsistency, I shall by all means convey that surmise.

--Vernon Lynn Stephens, Culdee
Time of Midnight (Coptic Daily Office)
Day of St. John Eudes (Western Church)
Day of Great Martyr Andrew Stratelates (Orthodoxy)