This book is a close reading of Karl Barth's shifting treatment of feeling in conversation with Friedrich Schleiermacher's 'feeling (Gefühl) of absolute dependence'. Affect, defined as changeable disposition and environmental attunement, provides an initial orientation and periodic parallel for this study.

Templeton argues that Barth had four different theological responses to feeling. First, as a student of modern theology influenced by Schleiermacher, Barth embraced human feeling as the indicator of Christian truth. Second, as a pastor faced with the demands of preaching and the First World War, Barth critiqued feeling, along with experience, as liable to mislead. Instead, he sought a dynamic objectivity in the wholly other God revealed in Jesus Christ. Third, as a professor of theology, Barth repurposed feeling as a self-determination, alongside knowing and willing, by which a person corresponds to the determining Word of God. Fourth, as a theologian influenced by Anselm's combining of apologetic proof with affective response and aesthetic form, Barth reorientated feeling by centring it in God's triune being.

The Church's self-determination of joy is the agency that corresponds to God's determining perfection of glory. However, the Church that holds itself in readiness for joy also opens itself to be affected by suffering.