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A number of twentieth century theologians built on Kierkegaard's appreciation of
paradox, forming a movement known as neo-orthodoxy, that included the likes of Barth, Bruner,
Bonhoeffer, Otto Weber, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and influenced the Catholic Hans Urs von
Balthasar, and in the present, T.F. Torrance and Eberhard Jungel.
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The most important was
Karl Barth. Reacting against the rationalism and historicism of liberalism, Barth pursued
theological paradox with unusual (and notorious) thoroughness. Throughout the Church
Dogmatics, Barth seemed to enjoy juxtaposing the complementary, yet concurrent truths of
Christianity, including the nature of the trinity, Jesus Christ the God-man, God as one yet
consisting of many perfections, the relation between God's freedom and nature, God's eternality
and temporality, the relation of grace and obedience, and the Scripture as the word of God and of
human beings.
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Barth clearly saw himself as an orthodox theologian, and liberals continue to
reckon him as such (as a critique), though those more orthodox have pointed out some
significant aberrations. Like Kierkegaard, he was not as careful to defend the role of logic in
theology as he should have been, and his views on the fall of humankind, the nature of Scripture,
and the final state of unbelievers were suborthodox. However charity would note he was moving
away from liberalism towards Scripture throughout his life (a pattern analogous to Augustine's),
and his painstaking use of logical argumentation throughout the Church Dogmatics make clear
Barth was no irrationalist or relativist. For Barth, theology meant a "rational wrestling with
mystery."
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Though strongly opposed to both Kierkegaard and neo-orthodoxy (but influenced by the
continental theologians Bavinck and Kuyper), the conservative twentieth century evangelical
apologist Cornelius Van Til similarly made much of the apparent paradoxes of the faith. Van Til