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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Barth’s Lectures on John (chs. 1–8), which he himself did not publish, came at the important period when he was turning his attention more fully to dogmatics. Their significance will be immediately apparent to students of Barth, for, although he displayed a keen linguistic and even textual interest, theological interpretation formed his primary concern in keeping with his deepest hermeneutical convictions. In this regard he found only the slightest use for the Mandean materials that he borrowed from Bultmann, for he believed that the author, like himself, bent to his own purposes the things that he took from other sources. Of more interest to Barth was the relation that he discerned in the Gospel between revelation and the witness to revelation, for this helped to shape his own formulation of the role of the written (and spoken) Word vis-à-vis the incarnate Word. The exposition of ch. 1, to which the present translation is restricted, and which covers almost half the book, lies at the heart and basis of his own equation of revelation and incarnation, which gives to Christ, Revealer and Revealed, a crucial position in God’s revealing and reconciling work, and which involves the paradox of the incognito whereby revealing is concealing except for those who by the Spirit and in faith behold the glory of the Logos. For Barth, of course, the prologue seemed so self-evidently to vindicate christological orthodoxy that he could ground his own christology in the Nicene statement and find illumination in patristic exposition. Incidentally, his discussion of the meaning of the Word’s taking “flesh” exposes the emptiness of the objection sometimes raised against the Dogmatics that Barth impugns the sinless perfection of the Son.

Inevitably the gap between the delivery of these Lectures and their publication means that they cannot profit by the able scholarship that has been devoted to John in the intervening period. Yet they add so much to our understanding of the younger Barth and his development, and they offer such valuable insights to students of this seminal Gospel, that little excuse is needed for their belated appearance. With slight modifications (including references to English translations where available, transliterating the Greek, and some rearrangement of the paragraphs), the present translation adopts the apparatus described and used in the Swiss edition, and it takes over the Swiss indexes insofar as they relate to the first chapter of John.

Pasadena, Ascensiontide 1984

Geoffrey W. Bromiley