Dialectical theology (sometimes called Crisis Theology) arose in the 1920s against nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, which had domesticated God into the highest human ideal and reduced theology to ethics. Karl Barth (Epistle to the Romans, 1922) reasserted God’s radical otherness and the impossibility of reaching Him through human reason or religious effort — the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and man. Major figures: Barth, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, Rudolf Bultmann (early). The movement recovered important truths — God’s transcendence, the inadequacy of natural theology, the necessity of revelation — but the Reformed tradition critiques its tendency to relativize Scripture’s propositional content and to make revelation a perpetual event rather than a written deposit. Useful as corrective; insufficient as foundation.