.
This paper places Karl Barth’s reflections on divine omnipresence and the spatiality of God in the Church Dogmatics in conversation with the queer theorist and literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her geographicized writings on theoretical method in Touching Feeling. Both Barth and Sedgwick use the occasion of writing about space and place to reconfigure the method of the system, insisting upon more responsive and particularist (rather than universalist) forms of reasoning—the irreducible particularities of space and place resisting tendencies of abstraction and universalization. By reading Barth’s reflections on the spatiality of God in light of Sedgwick’s development of “weak theory,” I show how Barth works as a perhaps surprising source for a “weak theology,” shifting beyond a strong theological methodology of the system, universality, and mastery to a humbler, more localized, and more responsible theological sensibility.
In 1939 the first book-length study of Karl Barth’s theology appeared in Chinese. After writing this little volume, T.C. Chao (1888–1979) is often described as becoming more “Barthian” or “neo-orthodox,” although how this actually happened remains unclear. In this paper I propose two ways of looking at how Barth influenced T.C. Chao, who was one of China’s foremost Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. I demonstrate that “christocentrism” would serve as a fitting way of characterizing Barth’s influence and show how Barth’s theology shaped Chao’s view of Christianity’s public witness in China amidst cultural collapse and wartime crisis. It was during the Communist revolution and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949) when Chao saw the Chinese Church as uniquely equipped to bear witness to Christ in the face of opposition and hostility.