Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Reading Karl Barth
Rhetoric and Theology
Readings of Karl Barth
Barth and Expressionism
A Closer Look at the Expressionist Analogy
2. Toward a Tropology
Three Theories of Tropes
Max Black on Mataphor
Paul Ricoeur and Language
Ricoeur and Metaphor
The Tropics of Hayden White
3. Metaphor of Crisis/Crisis of Metaphor
Metaphors and Models
The Origin of Crisis
The Supporting Cast
The Indirection of Theology
The Crisis Defined?
The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis
The Crisis of Crisis
4. Magic of the Extreme
A Lesser Trope?
Nietzsche as Exaggerator
A Necessary Excess
An Other Otherness
A Church Destroyed
The Limits of Extremity
5. Web of Irony
The Varieties of Irony
The Ironology of Kierkegaard
The Irony of Theology
An Ironic God
An Unstable Corrective
6. Retreat and Reconstruction: Re-Reading Barth Today
Retreat from Rhetoric
Another Other
Toward a Reconstruction
Notes
Index