Barth’s engagement with prayer in the second edition of the Romans commentary anticipates much of that which will be developed later as he settles into thinking more deeply about prayer: the link between prayer and ethics, the need to resist Feuerbach as much as the way of the ‘mystic’,24 the unavoidable religiosity of prayer, the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer’s transformation and Christ’s vicarious action as the true ‘pray-er’. Now occupying his first academic post in Göttingen, and therefore