Also referred to as dialectical theology or theology of crisis or even Barthianism, neoorthodoxy is a loose term used to designate certain forms of Protestant theology arising out of a reaction to the tide of liberal theology sweeping the western church in the late 19th and early 20th Cent. Generally, it sought to reestablish theology on the biblical rigour of the Reformation. The term was coined by those who do not identify with it, and it expresses the general view that it never quite got far away from the alien presuppositions of the liberalism from which it sought to distance itself and against which it revolted.
The moniker theology of crisis arose from the historical background from which it arose. The pioneering work of neoorthodoxy was Karl Barth's commentary on Romans that first appeared in 1919. The shocking and horrifying evil that the First World War—which had just then ended—displayed that men can do to other men swept the pre-war optimism that had been the hallmark of the dominant liberal theology. Barth saw that as a crisis, a revolt against God deserving of the full measure of the wrath of God, from which men must repent and return to God, to 'let God be God.' Barth continued to develop his thoughts through his magnus opus, his multi-volumned Church Dogmatics.
Its other label, dialectical theology derives from its dialectical method of resolving the tension between the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity, between time and eternity, and between the infinite and the finite, which in this case owed more to the existentialism of Sören Kierkegaard, rather than to the rationalism of G. W. F. Hegel.
The theologians most famously associated with it include Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann and Friedrich Gogarten on the Continent, John A. T. Robinson in Britain, and Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in America.
Bibliography:
Charles C. Ryrie, Neoorthodoxy: An Evangelical Evaluation of Barthianism. Revised ed., Kansas City, KS: Walterick Publishers, 1977.
Further Reading & Resources:
Bruce Ware, Systematic Theology I. Lecture 6: Liberalism, Neo-orthodoxy, Evangelicalism. BiblicalLearning.org.
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