Reading Barth at the Beach

Jami, my beloved beautiful wife, loves it that I bring a theological library to the beach and that I sit in the sun, wearing my old panama hat, pouring over Barth's Church Dogmatics 4.3.2. I can't think of anything better to do. Barth continues to be the most engaging theological mind available to us. Note that my nubby pasty knees are beginning to look reddish.
Today, during the examination committee, Martha asked me, other than Barth, which theologian I would take with me - I suppose in some kind of bomb shelter situation or else some kind of exile where I couldn't take much. She wouldn't let me take Barth. I said, "you'd let other people take him." And she insisted. So I responded Eberhard Jungel. Jungel has said, "God's way of being himself is by being God for us." And "God's entry into history in the incarnation and the cross, his historicality and his impassibility, is his own chosen goal." This is related to Barth's statement that God's freedom is expressed in God's limiting and directing his activity - that is: it is the Greeks who speak of God as limitless, but limitlessness is a unique prison, where God becomes predictable to philosophers as an abstraction but not much help to particular human beings in particular circumstances. Jungel extends Barth and brings up some interesting discussions: particularly in writing about parables as descriptions of the kingdom. His magnum opus is God the Mystery of the World.
When I was talking to my cousin Cheryl after all this, and I told her Martha asked me this question, I mentioned how my response had thrown her. Jungel is not a typical response. I had thought about James Cone. But speaking with Cheryl it occurred to me that I should have responded '"Charlotte von Kirschbaum." That would be the smart aleck response. Von Kirschbaum was Barth's secretary. They wrote the dogmatics almost in tandem - and she's given little credit. CvK is buried with Barth and his wife, Nellie - it was a strange relationship. A book could be written about strange relationships of Christian writers: CS Lewis, Charles Williams, Tillich. To outsiders these relationships appear strange, but to those inside they probably seemed OK. Karl and Charlotte were undoubtedly productive. I could have said Von Kirschbaum and still carried my volumes of the Church Dogmatics with me - at least up to 4.1 or so when she came down with Alzheimers.