Karl Barth

Karl Barth’s Letter to the Romans is the theologian’s best-known and most influential work. In any case, it cannot be ignored when examining theological developments in the 20th century. This presentation will focus on where this epoch-making work can be placed between a hermeneutical manifest and classical commentary literature. Of particular interest are the intertextual aspects of Barth’s work, which this paper emphasizes.

This work presents concisely the theological statements of a Swiss and a Hungarian theologian, Karl Barth and Lajos Erőss, regarding Buddhism. Both theologians belonged to the trend of orthodoxy in their respective countries. While they lived and worked in different contexts of space and time, nonetheless both strongly opposed the view of liberal theology that Christianity was merely one of the many world religions.