I don't approach Barth's Church Dogmatics from the perspective of a trained systematic theologian, or Reformed-tradition pastor.

My academic training is as a church historian. While I respect theologians (at least thoughtful ones!), I am not one. Church historians are sometimes the pagans in the temple of ecclesiastical scholarship: we study the history of the whole church,  especially those who act and speak outside of the confines of the academy.  We also teach on behalf of the church, studying wider history as one instance of communities of historical inquiry. (Other such communities are military historians, legal historians, historians of science --all committed to service to particular wider communities of inquiry, action, or common interest.)

I am not a historical theologian  Historical theologians try to retrieve the insights of a thinker or writer in the past with an eye towards advocating a theological point of view or procedure in the present.  Barth was an historical theologian when he studied St. Anselm so carefully.  By contrast, a church historian would study St. Anselm in his context as one voice (an interesting voice!) of 11th-century Europe.  For church historians, Barth is still too recent to be properly historical (by the standards of most church history, which has a very old set of sources and disciplinary history). Historically speaking, the jury on Barth hasn't even convened.

On the other hand, Barth's own historical insights, sprinkled throughout the Church Dogmatics, are frequently interesting or even provocative, but hardly settle once-for-all historical inquiry and debate.  I cannot regard Barth's own insights about historical figures (St. Anselm, for example) as conversation-stopping.  Anselmian studies will go on, with majority voice really going to historians such as Richard Southern.

In the past decade, the context for reading Barth and "Neo-orthodox" Protestant theologians has changed significantly.  A generation ago it was fashionable to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer's insight that the secular world was a "world come of age," that a 20th-century secular human need for God could not now be assumed. While Bonhoeffer did not address a global "future of religion," occupied as he surely was with the nadir of Germany, often implicit when citing him was an assumption that the future of the globe belonged to secular, democratic culture, a kind of "end of history" (to cite a fashionable, empty phrase by Francis Fukuyama).

With all respect to the martyred Bonhoeffer, the past decade has witnessed emphatically that the world has not come of age. If anything, the worst excesses of religious passion seem ascendant, and from all quarters: Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, each in several historical varieties.

I write this blog as a contemporary North American Protestant (Episcopalian) Christian deeply aware that some other Christians exhibit no concern at all for reasonable and humble self-scrutiny regarding their motives, purposes, and actions. Barth provides a devastating critique of Christian arrogance in all its historical forms.  In North America this critique was often associated with Reinhold Niebuhr.  Barth's own critique goes much further.

Institutionally, I write from the professional, academic vantage point of a librarian in a lay-led Roman Catholic university. Catholic higher education is not my native habitat, and I have learned much about it since I arrived at Sacred Heart University in 2006.  I am constantly reminded assumptions and habits which I learned in Protestant institutions are not shared in my current professional domicile.  While I deeply respect my Catholic colleagues here, I am also aware that the current incumbent of the See of Rome regularly reminds me of every reason I ever had to remain Protestant. I respect his point of view as serious and well-argued, but I find I must still dissent from his teaching for the only worthwhile theological reason: for the sake of the Gospel.

I suspect that Karl Barth and Joseph Ratzinger would have had a spirited conversation as intellectual equals.  Barth would never have dismissed Ratzinger's point of view.  He would have taken it very seriously, disagreed vehemently, and raised him one, in poker terms.

Finally, although my earlier training  as a Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister continues to inform how I read the Scriptures, and although I am married to a United Church of Christ pastor, officially I am a member of the Episcopal Church, and attend an Anglo-Catholic parish in New Haven. This parish is "left-wing" Anglo-Catholic, and welcomes both the ministries of gays and lesbians and the faithful scholarship of professors at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. The parish of Christ Church, Broadway (in a marvelous building by Henry Vaughan) reminds me of the mystery and otherness of God.  Yet I am finally more at home in worship informed by the Liturgical Renewal (Book of Common Prayer (1979) Rite II, for example) than in historical Anglo-Catholicism.

My experience of some of Barth's readers is that they find in Barth the means to address anxieties evoked by previous experience in evangelical protestantism.  I am emphatically not from a North American evangelical background of any flavor --I am less concerned whether Barth's view of Scripture if sufficiently "high" than I am whether his view of the Sacraments is sufficiently "high."  My concern is dogmatics in the Church --not by any means Josef Ratzinger's church, but not the Southern Baptist Convention, either.