A christological treatment of sin is, for Karl Barth, the only possibility for those who wish to know something of that which opposes life in Christ. Such a treatment must be christologically ordered in so far as Christ remains the arche, teloas, and nomos of theological thought. It is not coincidental, then, that his treatment of sin is proper to the doctrine of reconciliation and ordered by the christological assertion that Jesus Christ is truly God, truly human, and the unity of these as the ‘guarantor and witness of our atonement.’ Indeed, the knowledge of sin is only possible in the light of the revelation of God and humanity in the God-man Jesus Christ. Consequently, the doctrine of reconciliation is the proper place for the knowledge of sin in so far as Jesus, the one who knew no sin, was made to be sin ‘so that we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). To know sin one must face the one who became sin for our sakes.

Usually one does not include Karl Barth in contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue. Unlike his Protestant theological contemporaries, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, there in no evidence that during his long theological career Barth had any real contact with Jewish thinkers. The only contemporary Jewish thinker whom he engages, to my knowledge, is Martin Buber, but in his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, Buber is discussed almost en passent and with a rather hurried dismissal. Barth's relations with Judaism are seriously complicated, but one gets the impression from reading what he says about Judaism that he is doing typology, engaging a type already created in his mind largely by Paul and those who followed in his path. He does not seem to be dealing with Judaism as a living tradition, indeed a current rival religious option to Christianity. After all, how can one engage Judaism as a living tradition, let alone as a current rival, if one has no serious contact with living Jews during the most productive years of one's thought? For that reason it would seem an engagement of Barth's thought by a contemporary Jewish theologian could only be, at most, an arcane academic exercise having no real Jewish significance.

Why did Jesus die on the cross? Ask this question of a theologian, and the answer will likely be something to the effect that Jesus died so that our sins might be forgiven and the world might be saved from sin, death and evil eternally. Ask this question of a historian, however, and the answer will be quite different: Jesus died because his activity created conflict with the authorities of his time, and therefore they had him crucified.

One of the axioms of modern church history in Britain is that whereas Anglo-Saxon thought was on the whole impervious to the appeal and achievement of Karl Barth, it was among the Scots alone that the Swiss theologian's theories found any real resonance and creative response. Stephen Sykes in a 1979 volume of studies in Barth's theological method, mentions the somewhat bewildered response to his publications in Britain and the United States between 1925 and the mid-1980s and goes on to say that ‘from now onwards it is in Scotland that Barth is taken with the greatest seriousness in the English speaking world’. In a later volume of centenary essays, R. H. Roberts traced the reception of the theology of Karl Barth ‘in the Anglo-Saxon world’ by quoting the evidence of such late 1920s and early 1930s figures as J. H. Morrison, John McConnachie, H. R. Mackintosh, Norman Porteous and A. J. MacDonald to claim that ‘it is clear from an early stage that enthusiasm for Barth's work … was primarily a Scottish attribute’. In another essay in the same volume, Colin Gunton contrasted the usual English attitude to Barth with that of theologians from other lands: ‘For the most part and despite exceptions’, he claimed, ‘the English find it difficult to come to terms with the theology of Karl Barth’, while in a companion volume Geoffrey Bromiley noted that this was hardly the case for theologians and pastors ‘in such diverse lands as Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland’. Again and again, it is Scotland which is emphasised as being the place within the British Isles where Barth's ideals took root.

Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?