The first half-volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics, in English, has been available since 1936. The corresponding half-volume, which completes the Prolegomena, is now in print. Decency demands that any fanfare which seems appropriate to an enthusiastic reviewer should be sounded on muted trumpets, and Barth himself has made it clear in this volume that no teacher of the Church should become for us an angelic power to whose weak and beggarly influence we are glad to enslave ourselves. Nevertheless the Church has been given a teacher in this generation whose stature has not been obviously exceeded by any of the great servants whom God raised up for the same task in earlier days, and it is time that his voice was properly heard in Britain. Experts on theological fashion assure us, with all the confidence of Athenian spermologoi, that the time, mercifully, has passed; other voices, more interesting and less exacting, are carrying the discussion forward to a post-Barthian stage. Only the years will show whether what these experts say is true. And each of the next five or six years will bring two part-volumes of substantial dogmatics, as distinct from prolegomena. Those are the volumes which contain the work which most obviously effects the transition from Bible to sermon. The first volume serves principally to diagnose and to heal our ‘permanent or passing, but always radical, incompetence with regard to the whole business’. It does so, of course, in the most non-arrogant and robustly human way.