This book is perhaps the best introduction for readers who are new to Karl Barth, while Barthians will find it a valuable biographical source, since it is, among other things, a chronicle of Barth's transition from country parson to theologian. It is a collection of 8 sermons from 1916-23, in the midst of which years he published his seminal commentary on Romans (1918). A century later we stand in the smoldering ruins of liberal theology and look back at Barth as a prophetic figure. His mission was not unlike that of the prophet. The prophet is God's emergency man for a crisis hour. His message is just what the prophet's compatriots need to hear, and just what they do not want to hear. Liberal theologians of Barth's day were not blessed to hear that, "Our disparagement of 'doctrine' is the fox's disparagement of the grapes. Had we something more essential and authoritative to say, had we a theology convincing to, and accepted by, definite and increasing groups of people, had we a gospel which we had to preach, we should think differently." Fundamentalists, meanwhile, found their prized doctrine of "biblical inerrancy" passed over as merely a stage along the way to a truly evangelical theology. Barth's Crisis Theology is perfectly suited to the 21st century. He tells how he approached the Bible from a standpoint of skepticism but then, like Paul on the road to Damascus, found himself captivated and irresistibly thrust into a new course-the way of faith. "We all know the curiosity that comes over us when from a window we see the people in the street suddenly stop and look up - shade their eyes with their hands and look straight up into the sky toward something which is hidden from us by the roof. Our curiosity is superfluous, for what they see is doubtless an aeroplane. But as to the sudden stopping, looking up, and tense attention characteristic of the people of the Bible, our wonder will not be so lightly dismissed. To me personally it came first with Paul: this man evidently sees and hears something which is above everything, which is absolutely beyond the range of my observation and the measure of my thought. "And if ever I come to fear lest mine is a case of self-hallucination, one glance at the secular events of those times, one glance at the widening circle of ripples in the pool of history, tells me of a certainty that a stone of unusual weight must have been dropped into deep water there somewhere - tells me that, among all the hundreds of peripatetic preachers and miracle-workers from the Near East who in that day must have gone along the same Appian Way into imperial Rome, it was this one Paul, seeing and hearing what he did, who was the cause, if not of all, yet of the most important developments in that city's future. And this is only one of the Biblical company, 'Paul' by name. "Whether it be the prophets in the prolific middle line of Biblical descent, or the priests nearer to the margin where the Bible ceases to be Bible, whether they speak in psalms, proverbs, or in the comfortable flow of historical narrative, their theme in all its variations is equally astonishing. What matters it whether figures like Abraham and Moses are products of later myth-making - believe it who can! There were once, a few centuries earlier or later, men who lived by faith like Abraham, who were strangers in the promised land like Isaac and Jacob, who declared plainly that they were seeking a country, who like Moses endured as seeing him who is invisible. There were once men who dared."