Christiane Tietz’s lecture on “Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum” from the Karl Barth Society of North America 2016 meeting was published in Theology Today’s July 2017 edition, and in recent weeks, this essay has invoked many unhelpful moralistic and voyeuristic responses to it—despite Tietz’s extensive warning. The relationship constellation (as Tietz calls it) between Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum has been known to the Barth academic community since its beginning, and has been extensively studied. Tietz’s essay caused a controversy in the blogosphere this week, because she included English translations of Karl Barth’s private letters in it, that were not easily accessible beforehand, and this invoked a firestorm of responses from bloggers who were not informed of the bleaker aspects of Barth’s personal life and familial relationships. Many people have asked me to comment on this essay and the reactions to it, so here are my thoughts on this matter. Moralistic and Voyeuristic Reactions to Tietz’s Essay In her essay, Christiane Tietz says (for good reason) that “I was afraid of getting into two different, but both wrong perspectives: into voyeurism on the one side and into moralism on the other. I asked myself … Continue reading A Bright and Bleak Constellation: Karl Barth, Nelly Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum