The fulfilment of history in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante

Abstract

On 28 January 1969 a memorial colloquium was held in honour of Karl Barth at Yale Divinity School, 40 days after his death. It becomes clear that Barth’s vision of the fulfilment of history is profoundly open to history, that it is profoundly historical. In Dante’s own life Beatrice was always understood as ‘a miracle sent from Heaven, an incarnation of divine truth’. The secular, sceptical sensibility that Frei identifies is, then, a view of the world remoto Christo , only visible in the light of Christ. It is impossible in an essay of this scope to give Frei’s proposed reading of Barth anything like a comprehensive testing. The abstractions of doctrine are tools in the art of Christian interpretation, but they do not provide a separate object of consideration in their own right, one to which the people could turn when they have penetrated beneath the messy particulars of the Bible or the newspaper.