Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy

Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer was born in 1953. He has been a minister in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands since 1982. In 1988 he defended his PhD dissertation at the University of Amsterdam on the Marquardt-thesis on socialist elements in the thinking of Karl Barth. From 1997 onwards he has taught as a senior lecturer in the History of Christian Doctrine at the Theological University of Kampen; since 2009 he has been editor of the Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie; and in 2012 he became Professor at the Miskotte/Breukelman Chair at the Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam. He is the author of Dutch books on Spinoza and Reformed Theology (1998), Calvin (2004), and a textbook on the History of Systematic Theology (2009). He edited Frans H. Breukelman, The Structure of Sacred Doctrine in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2010).

’In six close studies of Barth’s engagement with particular figures and movements (ranging from early scholasticism to covenant theology to rational orthodoxy), Reeling Brouwer has given us a richly detailed history of Barth’s years of apprenticeship in the school of Reformed dogmatics. What emerges is not only a careful demonstration of the seriousness with which Barth took die Alten - and the strengths and weaknesses of his reading of them - but also a more differentiated understanding of post-Reformation Reformed theology than can be found in studies driven by the question of the relation of the Calvinists to Calvin. Reeling Brouwer is a master historian of doctrine. I recommend his work highly.’ Bruce McCormack, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA

• Introduction; Chapter 1 Karl Barth’s Conversation with Amandus Polanus; Chapter 2 Karl Barth’s Elaboration of a Series of Disputations from the Leiden Synopsis; Chapter 3 Johannes Cocceius and Karl Barth; Chapter 4 Karl Barth Reading the Reformed Doctrine of the Church in Heppe; Chapter 5 Karl Barth and the Janus Face of the Doctrine of Justification in ‘Reasonable Orthodoxy’; Chapter 6 Some Consequences of Barth’s Encounter with Heppe for the Order of the Church Dogmatics;