history and culture was most in need of Christian witness and had instead aligned itself with the concerns and aspirations of the world. In retrospect, Barth commented that for him this represented the end of liberal theology: “An entire world of theological exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which up to that point I had accepted as basically credible, was thereby shaken to the foundations, and with it everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.”4 For Barth,