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

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.

“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

“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

“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

“Faye Bodley-Dangelo has tackled afresh the contentious subject of Barth's attitudes to women and gender in the Church Dogmatics, and given the subject a completely new hermeneutical and critical twist by a focus on Barth's christological account of human agency. This is a book of great sophistication, clarity and insight, and its lessons will need to be absorbed not only by Barth scholars but by all theologians who work on contemporary issues of gender and the Christian tradition.” —Sarah Coakley, University of Cambridge, UK, and Australian Catholic University, Australia

“By exploring Barth's Dogmatics through the lens of human agency rather than the ordering of central relationships, Bodley-Dangelo locates resources within Barth's theology that resist and challenge his sexist and heterosexist matrix. This close reading of Barth's construal of agency in his christocentric theological anthropology is a vital and compelling contribution to Barth scholarship, that neither overlooks nor overdetermines the gender trouble in Barth's theology.” —Brandy Renee Daniels, University of Virginia, USA