Oda Wischmeyer, Love as Agape: The Early Christian Concept and Modern Discourse (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021), pp. xvii + 317. $69.99

Abstract

indeed have much to say to these issues, but they are, at best, unevenly developed in relationship to the Swiss theologian’s own thought. Nevertheless, Hauerwas helpfully pushes back against the view that Barth’s critique of the liberal tradition, including liberal theology, meant that he was an anti-humanist. Barth wanted to promote a more radical humanism rooted in who God is in Jesus Christ, and thus who human beings are called to be, and Hauerwas certainly draws out aspects of this dimension of Barth’s thought. Even if this has become a well-worn counter-argument by those sympathetic to Barth, it is gratifying to see how one of the most influential and provocative theological voices of the last forty years is able to work in the spirit of a giant of twentieth-century Protestant thought, to not only illuminate that figure, but to offer an arguably more nuanced, christologically explicit account of Christian engagement with the world.