1.

BARTH THE CATHOLIC

by Peter J. Leithart2 . 13 . 15

Donald Norwoods Reforming Rome is a study of Karl Barths contributions

and responses to Vatican II. At the outset, Norwood has to establish that
Barth, polemical as he was, was truly a catholic theologian.

He offers several lines of argument: In his first teaching post at Gottingen in

1921 [Barth] was appointed to teach Reformed Dogmatics but declined to do
so. Barth reasoned, If theology is about God and about expounding the
Word of God, can there be such a thing as Reformed Theology? This
reservation and the ensuing argument Barth had with the Faculty about his
title suggests that from the start of his teaching career Barth intended to do
theology for the whole church, not just elucidate and defend his own
tradition (15-16).

He was, Norwood claims, a great ecumenical theology, not despite his

polemical tendencies but because of them. Nrwood quotes this from CD I/2:
We meet a theological adversary in a manlier and more worthy way, the
more it is recognized on both sides that in this clash ultimate things are at
stake, not merely fortuitous inclinations and disinclinations, not merely
things in which one side or the other could think differently, but is prevented
only by the laziness and arrogance of the flesh. . . . In theological conflict, the
opponents are still together in Christ and therefore still within the Church
when it is clear they are separated in Christ and that they contend, not about
the respective rights of their Churches, or tendencies within their Churches,
or only their own personal opinions, but about the right of the Church
against heresy, which makes the dispute necessary (18-19).

Karl Barth (1886-1968)

Table of Contents

1. Background
2. Works (Selected List)
3. Themes
4. Outline of Major Works
5. Relation to Other Thinkers
6. Bibliography and Works Cited
7. Internet Resources
8. Related Topics

1. Background

Universally recognized as among a very select few who have profoundly

influenced all of Christian theology, Karl Barth remains perhaps one of the
least understood theologians of the modern period. He is often acknowledged
as the greatest Protestant theologian of this century. His major contribution
was a radical change in the direction of theology from a 19th-century
orientation toward progress to an orthodoxy that had to cope with the grim
realities of the 20th century. His rejection of liberal theology led to an
emphasis on the eschatological and supernatural in Christianity. He refused
any synthesis between the church and culture, and emphasized the radical
disjunction between God and human beings. An extremely voluminous
writer, the sheer size of Barths corpus is intimidating. More significantly, his
thought is dialectical. Barths theology oscillates back and forth from the
radical discontinuity between God and creation (no) and the equally radical
love of God for creation (yes).

Early Biography

Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 10, 1886. His father, Fritz
Barth, was a Swiss Reformed minister and professor of New Testament and
early church history. From 1904 to 1909, Barth studied theology in Bern,
Berlin, Tbingen, and Marburg. He studied under Adolf von Harnack and
Wilhelm Herrmann and was attracted to the work of Friedrich
Schleiermacher. From 1911 to 1921, Barth was a parish minister. In 1913, he
married Nelly Hoffman, and together they had five children.

Career & Principal Works

In 1914, Europe ignited. Soon after the start of WWI, Barth was shocked when
many of his teachers signed their allegiance to the war plans of the German
government. Barth thought that their openness to culture (philosophy,
history, and the sciences) had made them turn their backs on the gospel.
Liberal theology failed to stand up against culture and it failed to reach
Barths congregation in Safenwil. Disillusioned with the liberal theology of his
youth Barth sought a completely new theological foundation by rereading
scripture. By 1919, Barths research on Pauls Letter to the Romans yielded
the first edition (of six in the original German) of his Rmerbrief (ET, The Epistle
to the Romans). The following two years of study (which included Overbeck,
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen and Kierkegaard in addition to the Bible) lead to
a lecture entitled Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas delivered in 1920.
With the great liberal theologian, Harnack in attendance Barth proceeded to
expound on his new appreciation for the wholly-otherness of God. In 1922,
the second edition of Romans was published. This new edition, divided the
theological world into advocates and detractors (Livingston 2000, 65).
Though largely rebuked by New Testament scholars Romans found
acceptance among the younger generation of theologians including Brunner
and Bultmann, who saw Barth as fighting on two fronts, against both the
psychologizing and historicizing of Christian faith (Livingston 2000, 66).
Barths commentary stresses the otherness of God and the importance
therefore of revelation and salvation as acts of God, not
humanity. Romans draws heavily on the existentialist philosophy of
Kierkegaard, with his characteristic emphasis on the infinitely qualitative
distinction between God and humanity.

On the basis of the publication of Romans (he had never earned a doctorate),
Barth was appointed professor at the universities of Gttingen, Mnster, and
Bonn, successively (1922-1935). In Gttingen, he did an exhaustive study of
the great Protestant scholastic theologians. During his time as a professor, he
sought to rid his theology of the last residue of natural theology. Barth sought
a theology that would stand on its own feet, so to speak, free of the support
of other philosophical or anthropological sources (Livingston 2000, 97). In
1927, Barth published a prolegomena to dogmatics, Die Christliche
Dogmatik (Christian Dogmatics). After being reviewed as grounded in
existentialist philosophy Barth decided to rewrite his Dogmatik, this time
under the less autonomous title of Die kirchliche Dogmatik (Church Dogmatics).
This move toward unambiguously Church-oriented theology was anticipated
by Barths Romans, but was, perhaps, confirmed and strengthened by his
study of the medieval theology of Anslem.

Barths increasing engagement with epistemological issues made him

dissatisfied with what he had done. He became aware that he was still
working within a liberal, anthropocentric framework. When he moved to
Bonn, he was forced to rethink his theological method completely in order to
avoid grounding his theology in an existential anthropology. His theology
represented a significant break with his earlier dialectical thinking. In 1931,
Barth published his celebrated Anslem: Fides Quarens Intellectum (Latin: Faith
Seeking Understanding) in which he concurs with the great scholastic that
theological knowledge is nothing but an extension and explication ofthe
Credo of the Church (Livingston 2000, 98). From this point on through the
several volumes of the monumental Church Dogmatics, Barths method reflects
this Anselmian approach. In contrast to liberal theologians, Barth relies only
on the beliefs of the Church rather than also drawing on philosophy, the
sciences, and culture in general.

In addition to the Bible, Barth draws on the ancient creeds of the Church. In
1935, Barth wrote Credo, an exposition of the Apostles Creed, and only eight
years later, his Confession de la Foi de lEglise elaborated on the same topic.
During this time, Barth also wrote several small commentaries and
expositions of the Heidelberg and Geneva catechisms.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Barth became a staunch opponent
of the Nazis plans to use the German Church to legitimate their racist and
idolatrous agenda. Reacting to the creation of the state-sponsored Evangelical
Church of the German Nation, Barth wrote a pamphlet published
in Theologische Existenz Heute in June of 1933. Perhaps most revealing of
Barths character and commitment to God above all else is the fact that a copy
of this pamphlet was sent by Barth to Hitler himself.

By the close of 1933, Pastor Martin Niemller was the leader of the Pastors
Emergency League, an organization opposed to the so-called German
Christians. Barth joined with Niemller and this group soon formed the basis
for the Confessing Church in Germany. In May of 1934, the first Confessing
Synod of the German Evangelical Church was held in Barmen. Most notably
the meeting produced the Barmen Declaration. Owing to Barths authorship,
the declaration was a statement of theology applied to the current political
and social situation. In response to the idolatry promoted by the Nazi regime,
the declaration affirms the sovereignty of the Word of God in Jesus Christ
(Livingston 2000, 100). Furthermore, the Declaration condemns the racist
policies of the government and calls for the independence of the Church.
Importantly, the Barmen Declaration demonstrates Barths commitment to an
ethics wholly subservient to the Word of God (Livingston 2000, 101). As
Livingston notes, Barths social ethics is an ethics of divine command and
human obedience as these are apprehended in the hearing of the Word of God
in the context of a concrete situation (Livingston 2000, 101). Moreover, ethics
is not for Barth the reduction of particularity to general principles or laws.
Rather, one must discern Gods will in the concrete situation one finds
themselves in and this theme is one that persists throughout Barths career
(Barth, 1993, 11; Lovin 1984, 32-42).

Soon after the Declaration, Barth responded to Brunners defense of human

capacity to receive natural revelation with his (in)famous Nein! For Barth,
the deity of God and the reality of human sin mean that theology must start,
proceed, and end with the self-revelation of God. Using natural theology,
philosophy, or any of the sciences can lead only to anthropocentricism and
idolatry (for a brief overview of the Barth-Brunner debate see McGrath 1997,
191-3). Although he would later qualify this kind of extreme separation
between God and humanity, Barth always saw that theology could easily, and
dangerously, become a mere tool of a thoroughly human agenda (Barth 1960).

In 1935, after refusing to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to Hitler,

Barth was dismissed from his chair in Bonn and settled in his native Basel.
Barth's refusal to comply with an instruction by the rector of the University of
Bonn to end each lecture with the German salute put a provisional end to
Barth's professional career in Germany. Barth himself described why he
refused to comply: "I have begun my lecture (in summer at seven o'clock, in
winter at eight o'clock) for the past two and one-half years with a brief
devotion consisting of the reading of two Bible verses and the singing of two
or three verses of a hymn by all present. The introduction of the Hitler salute
in this context would be out of place and diversionary." (Prolingheuer, Der
Fall Karl Barth, 240: Letter to Rust, 16 December 1933).

By the late 1930s, Barth was completing the second volume of his Dogmatik.
The theme continued to be that of God being known only through Gods self-
disclosure. Church Dogmatics II includes extensive discussion of Barths idea,
central to his ethics, that Gods gift of freedom and obedience are one,
because Gods command is given not as a demand but as a gracious offer
(Livingston 2000, 103). Human beings must continuously receive from God
the answers to their questions about right and wrong. Ethical principles as
such do not exist for Barth. Instead, Barth places emphasis on the Word of
God. Hence, Barths ethics may be called theological in a literal sense. Barths
higher standard of the Word of God made him slow to take sides on many
social issues because he could (rightly) criticize both from above as it
where. Rather than take sides between capitalism and communism, for
example, Barth saw them both as idolatrously materialistic and called for the
Church to follow its own path of reconstruction (Livingston 2000, 103).
Nuclear war, however, did receive strong disapproval by Barth in the 1950s
(Livingston 2000, 104).

After the war, Barth was invited back to Bonn, where he delivered the series
of lectures published in 1947 as Dogmatics in Outline which followed (more or
less) the presentation of the Christian faith found in the Apostles Creed
(Barth, 1947). In contrast to more conservative orthodox biblical positivists,
Barth conceived of the task of theology as human reflection on what is given
in scripture but only in so far as the Bible is endowed with grace (Livingston
2000, 98). He spoke at the opening meeting of the Conference of the World
Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948. Following the Second Vatican
Council (1962-65), he visited Rome, a visit of which he wrote in Ad limina
apostolorum. He was regular visitor to the prison in Basel (Deliverance to the
Captives, 1959). Barth remained at Basel where he taught and wrote
extensively until his retirement in 1962. He continued to work on his magnum
opus the Church Dogmatics from 1932 until shortly before his death, December
10, 1968 at the age of 82.

2. Works (Selected List)

Rmerbrief (1919, 1922; ET The Epistle to the Romans, 1933); Fides Quaerens
Intellectum: Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of his Theological
Scheme (1931; ET 1960); Kirchliche Dogmatik (1932-1967; ET Church
Dogmatics); The Humanity of God (1959).

3. Themes

Neo-orthodoxy

The main characteristic of Barth's work, known as neo-orthodoxy and crisis

theology, is on the sinfulness of humanity, God's absolute transcendence, and
the human inability to know God except through revelation. The critical
nature of his theology came to be known as "dialectical theology," or "the
theology of crisis. This initiated a trend toward neo-orthodoxy in Protestant
theology. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth reacted strongly against liberal
Protestant neglect of historical revelation. He wanted to lead theology away
from the influence of modern religious philosophy, with its emphasis on
feeling and humanism, and back to the principles of the Reformation and the
teachings of the Bible. He viewed the Bible, however, not as the actual
revelation of God but as only the record of that revelation. God's single
revelation occurred in Jesus Christ. In short, Barth rejected two main lines of
interest in Protestant theology of that time: historical criticism of the Bible and
attempt to find justification for religious experience from philosophy and
other sources. Barth saw in historical criticism great value on its own level,
but it often led Christians to lessen the significance of the testimony of the
apostolic community to Jesus as being based on faith and not on history.
Theology that uses philosophy is always on the defensive and more anxious
to accommodate the Christian faith to others than to pay attention to what the
Bible really says.

In the fall of 1922, Barth, Thurneysen, Gogarten, and Merz started a journal
entitled Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times) which was to be the organ of
the new "theology of crisis. This journal played an important role in shaping
German theology for the next decade, until it was discontinued in 1933.

Methodology

Many scholars debate the presence of methodological phases in Barths work.

There are, however, prominent themes from the first edition of Romans to the
end of his career. Chief among these consistencies is his dialectical approach
(in the sense of yes and no). Where Hunsinger distills Barth to motifs
based on content, this theme is mainly a formal observation but, an
informative one nonetheless. (Hunsinger 1991 identifies six motifs in Barth,
actualism, particularism, objectivism, personalism, realism, and rationalism
and develops these at length. For a brief review of Hunsingers argument, see
Molnar.) Owing to his disillusion with the liberal theology of his youth, Barth
sought to balance the two sides of God and the human. This balancing act is
seen most clearly by contrasting his early emphasis on God, that is, Gods
wholly-otherness and distance from humanity as well as the created world
with his later emphasis on the humanity of God. It is important to notice,
however, that this apparent change over time is one of emphasis only.
Beginning with Romans Barth placed strong emphasis on the otherness of
God. In contrast to the liberal theology he was taught by Harnack and
Hermann, Barth saw that, the Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from
men. Salvation comes to them from him [God], and because they are, as men,
incapable of knowing him, they have no right to claim anything from him
(Barth 1968, 28; Cf. Church Dogmatics I/1). This dualism between God and the
world had several prominent consequences for Barths understanding of
doctrine including, in particular, revelation and interpretation of scripture
(See McGrath 1997, 306-8 on Barths move to start his Church Dogmatics with
the Trinity, reversing the order of Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre). It is
important to note that, as Torrance points out, the dualism at work in Barth
does not imply the absence of an active relation between God and the world
(Torrance 1995, 85). Rather, Barths position rests upon an immense stress on
the concrete activity of God in space and time, in creation as in redemption,
and upon his refusal to accept that Gods power is limited by the weakness of
human capacity or that the so-called natural reason can set any limits to Gods
self-revelation to mankind (Torrance 1995, 86).

In keeping with his distaste for natural theology Barth held theology to be, in
contrast to the liberal theologians of his day (and today), a science of the
Church (Barth 1995, 21-22; Church Dogmatics I/1, 1). Theologys object of
study is therefore the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ, scripture, and the
proclamation of the Church. Jesus Christ, as the inspiration for scripture and
the Church, is the ground of the witness to Gods Word. Scripture and the
Churchs proclamation are however human creations and activities and as
such become the Word of God only by grace and through the power of the
Holy Spirit. There is nothing special therefore about the language used in the
Bible (per se) nor the skill of the preacher, for the Word of God comes to
humanity from God alone by grace (Church Dogmatics I/1, 191-4).

Despite the recognition of scripture as a human book, it is through the grace

of God and by the Holy Spirit, also the revealed Word of God and therefore
exegesis and interpretation of scripture are critical for Barths dogmatics. He
discusses these at length in his Church Dogmatics(I/1; I/2). As a science of the
Church dogmatics presupposes not the objective exegesis of the Romans
but rather a completely interested theological exegesis, that is informed by
the history of the Churchs hearing of Gods Word in scripture and hopes,
through faith, to hear Gods Word themselves for their own time. This
interested exegesis is further developed in Church Dogmatics I/2 under the
title of Freedom under the Word of God (695-740). Principally, Barth calls
for the recognition of humanitys relative standing with respect to Gods
Word. Human beings, while not forbidden to bring to bear their tools of
philosophy and critical exegesis, are always required to subordinate the text
and the meanings found there to Gods self, who is always other than the
words we humans use to express Gods will (Livingston 2000, 105-6). Barths
formulation of exegesis and hermeneutics has lead to broad criticism but is
perhaps as far as one can go while maintaining the wholly-other character of
God and the reality of revelation from such a God.

As early as the second edition of Romans the reader can find traces of the
profound connection between God and humanity fully elaborated only later
(37-8, for example, speaks of Gods no being the ground of the yes of
salvation). By 1956 Barth explicitly recognized that his early emphasis on
Gods distinctiveness as wholly other had been (and remained) necessary to
counter the immanence of nineteenth-century liberal theology but that it was
incomplete. In his lecture, entitled The Humanity of God Barth
acknowledged a correction that had developed in his Church Dogmatics to the
radical otherness of Romans (Barth 1960, 37-65). This shift in thought is often
called Barths Christological concentration and involves the notion that God
cannot be understood without Christ and, of course, Christ cannot be
understood without humanity and vice versa. After 1935, all of Barths
theology is focused on Christ. His doctrines of God, creation, election,
anthropology, and reconciliation are all Christological (Livingston 2000, 107).
True to his dialectical pattern, Barth saw all of theology as concerned with the
work of God in Jesus Christ. As the ground, or source, and the goal of all
creation, Christ is the model for humanity. Not only is Christ the revelation of
God but he is also the source of human nature. Through Christ we learn our
relationship to God and we receive the grace which God planned for us from
the beginning (Barth 1960, 46-65; Church Dogmatics, I/2, 347; II/1, 319f; II/2,
4f, 94f; III/2, 160f; III/3, 186; IV/1, 3, 17f, 161-3). Moreover, since Christ is the
ground and goal of humanity, evil and sin are not the final necessary fate of
humanity (Livingston 2000, 107). Rather, although a human being may
withdraw from relationship with God and therefore sin (idolatry), one is
powerless to undo what Christ has done. As the author of creation and
salvation, Christ restores covenant with God, so all of creation lies in
essentially positive relation to God. That is the first and the last word of
God (Livingston 2000, 107). Barth therefore calls sin and evil an ontological
impossibility (Church Dogmatics II/1, 503f; II/2, 165f; III/3, 353f). Evil and sin,
though real, exist only relatively and transitorily for nothing can prevent God
from receiving humanity with the divine yes! (Livingston 2000, 108).

Barth reconceived the Protestant doctrine of election. For him, God elected
Gods self for suffering and death in Christ and elected humanity for eternal
life, simultaneously condemning Christ and raising up humanity. Barth stops
short, however, of proclaiming universal salvation. Rather, God has extended
unlimited love to all and it is up to human beings to accept this through faith.
Those who believe are saved and those who do not are damned. The saved
have only one appropriate response to the charis of God and this is eucharista
or thanksgiving (Barth 1993; Livingston 2000, 109; Church Dogmatics IV/2, 733-
51; IV/3, 99-103).

As has been seen in this brief overview of important aspects of Barths

dogmatics, his dialectical, yes/no, approach informs every aspect of his
thought. It is therefore, perhaps, unfair to cast Barth as a theologian of
judgment without also recognizing the important place given to grace and
election. For Barth humanity is both radically not God and (even more)
radically called to covenant with God.

Revelation and God's Relationship to the World

In the first part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth proposed a radical
question to biblical interpreters and Christian theologians What if God
exists? What if God really has revealed himself in the Christian revelation?
How would this change the way theology and interpretation should be
approached? As a result of what he perceived to be the failure of the ethics of
the modern theology of the time, with the outbreak of the First World War
(Barth 1960, p. 40), which he thought was caused by nineteenth-century
theologys preoccupation with anthropology, Barth set out to do theology
from a new vantage point, a vantage point that assumed God is. (Barth
1977, p. 257)

When Barth was seventy years old he gave a speech to a group of pastors in
Switzerland. The year was 1956, and his days of impact were mostly behind
him. Looking back on the theological climate he had inherited and what he
and those around him had accomplished in the early 1910s and 20s, he offered
the following assessment:

Evangelical theologyhad become religionistic, anthropocentric, and in this

sense humanistic. What I mean to say is that an external and internal
disposition and emotion of man, namely his piety which might well be
Christian piety had become its object of study and its themeWhat did it
know and say of the deity of God? For this theology, to think about God meant
to think in a scarcely veiled fashion about man, more exactly about the
religious, the Christian religious man.There is no question about it: here
man was made great at the cost of God the divine God who is someone
other than man, who sovereignly confronts him, who immovably and
unchangeably stands over against him as the Lord, Creator, and
Redeemer.The stone wall we [young theologians] first ran up against was
that the theme of the Bible is the deity of God, more exactly Gods deity
Gods independence and particular characterGods absolutely unique
existence, might, and initiative, above all, in His relation to man. Only in this
manner were we able to understand the voice of the Old and New
Testaments. Only with this perspective did we feel we could henceforth be
theologians, and in particular, preachers ministers of the divine Word.
(Barth 1977, 39-40)

What Barth maintained which he boldly stated in his early text, The Epistle to
the Romans was that what mattered for Christian theology and practice was
the revelation of a God who was completely Other to human beings. The
theological climate that Barth grew up in had been dominated by the rise of
historical criticism. At the time of the First World War biblical studies
involved mostly the scientific study of the texts without any attempt to
understand them, and particularly, without any attempt to understand them
in the way in which the author intended to be understood. For example, if an
author believed that he had been encountered by the living God in a
profound, unique way, and that he was therefore authorized to speak about
this God, then an interpreter who did not read the text with a corresponding
understanding would be missing something absolutely crucial. Barths
fundamental criticism of the biblical interpreters of his time was not that they
were attempting to be too truthful about the text in their zeal for historical
accuracy; but rather, that they were not being truthful enough. Though [an
interpreter] may here and there follow his author, he does not feel bound to
wrestle with the understanding of him, for the simple reason that he has
never made up his mind to stand or fall with him. (Barth 1933, 18)

Specifically, Barth thought that the writers of the New Testament texts took
seriously the notion that they, as apostles or their followers, were entrusted
with a heralds call, an announcement from God to humanity. Thus, the
only way to engage these texts accurately was to stand inside this conviction.
To engage them under any other understanding would not be ultimately
truthful to them. If the interpreter did stand within the conviction that
revelation was occurring through the announcement, she would soon realize
that the unveiling of God meant other approaches to the text were invalid.
Barth writes,

Because Deus non est in genere [God is not a kind], every theological method is
to be rejected as untheological in which Gods self-revelation is apparently
recognized, but in fact is subsumed beneath a higher term, whether that of
truth, or that of divine revelation in general, or that of religion, or that of
history, so that it now has to be interpreted in the light of this higher
comprehensive idea.With whatever earnestness and sincerity we may
attempt to speak of the God who is embraced by such a system, in the last
analysis we are not speaking of God but of the higher synthesis furnished by
our controlling idea. The absoluteness of God permits of no such
systematizations. (Barth 1977, 311)

Thus for Barth the method of standing under the assumption of the writers as
revealers of God would in fact release that fact into existence and would make
obvious the revelatory nature of the texts. But Barth was not a closet
fundamentalist; he did not believe that the truth of God was revealed by the
texts as texts. For Barth, God reveals (note reveals, not revealed) himself once,
in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That revelation is
ongoing, continuous, permanent (Barth 1977, 262). The biblical authors, and
the texts they wrote, were and are only vehicles for that ongoing revelation.
Thus for Barth, historical criticism, while useful for discovering the history of
the text as a text, is a demonstration of exactly the wrong method of trying to
find God through the texts. By making the texts the object of human study,
historical criticism necessarily takes the human person outside the place
required to experience the revelation of God. This exemplifies Barths basic
approach: human attempts to reach God must fail; the only way to succeed in
reaching God would be to put oneself in the position of receiving revelation.
Barth contrasted his notion of revelation with another notion, that of human
striving to know God, either through philosophy or religion. For Barth, these
strivings could not possibly reach the God who can only reveal himself. In the
end, the strivings of philosophy and religion only teach us about human
beings, and not about God. A few short quotes by Barth highlight this
approach:

Thus we have here no universal deity capable of being reached conceptually,

but this concrete deity real and recognizable in the descentgrounded in that
sequence and peculiar to the existence of Jesus Christ. (Barth 1960, 48)

What does it mean to say that God is? What or who is God? If we want to
answer this question legitimately and thoughtfully, we cannot for a moment
turn our thoughts anywhere else than to Gods act in His revelation. (Barth
1977, 261)

Philosophico-theological thinkers of the nineteenth centurywere not

capable of the insight that by the glorification of an absolute spirit they served
a God who, measured by the biblical revelation, was alien, and who indeed,
measured by the same standard, was not divine but created. (Barth 1977, 289)

What Barth is arguing is that Christian theology can by taking seriously

what the authors of texts believed they were doing, heralding the Good
News understand itself in terms of itself, and not in terms of outside
influences. In fact, Barth believed this was the only way that theology could be
done.

Why did he think this was so? It is helpful to investigate one of the absolutely
crucial metaphors that Barth turned to again and again the image of a
tangent, i.e., a line touching a circle at only one point. This image, Barth
thought, captured the theological reality of Gods relation to the world.
Graphically:

The first detail worth noticing in this picture is that God is totally other, not
in any way a part of or knowable apart from his choosing to make himself
known. Second, all of humanitys strivings about God are doomed to fail,
since they are situated within a horizon that does not in any way include God.
And third, God made and makes himself known in one point and in one point
only in the God/man, Jesus.
Barth used the analogy of a tangent many times, and even when he did not
use it explicitly, one can feel it not far from the surface. In reviewing the
slogans he and his compatriots used in the heady days after the First World
War, he wrote, What expressions we used in part taken over and in part
newly invented! above all, the famous wholly other breaking in upon us
perpendicularly from above, the not less famous infinite qualitative
distinction between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and
the tangent in which alone they must meet. (Barth 1960, 42) In his early
work, The Epistle to the Romans, he wrote, In the Resurrection the new world
of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a
tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. (Barth 1933, 30)

Notice how this idea also lies just beneath the surface in the following
excerpts from his writings:

What God is as God, the divine individuality and characteristicsis

something which we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with
us as Lord and Savior, or not at all. (Barth 1977, 261)

They changed the glory of the incorruptible for an image of the

corruptible. That is to say, the understanding of what is characteristic of God
was lost. They had lost their knowledge of the crevasse, the polar zone, the
desert barrier, which must be crossed if men are really to advance from
corruption to incorruption. The distance between God and man had no longer
its essential, sharp, acid, and disintegrating ultimate significance. (Barth 1933,
49; bold original)

In all this mist the prime factor is provided by the illusion that it is possible
for men to hold communication with the God or, at least, to enter into a
covenant relationship with Him without miracleapart from THE truth
which lies beyond birth and death. (Barth 1933, 50)

God himself propounds the problem of God and answers it. (Barth 1933, 69)

The metaphor of the tangent shows that Barth specifically rejected both
human spiritual experience and self-consciousness as a guide to God, and
regarded both Christian and non-Christian religion as failed attempts to abide
at the point of tangency. The job of Christian community is a negative job only
to seek to be a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. Barth used the
analogy of a crater in the earth: a crater points away from itself towards the
explosion or impact that caused it. Similarly, the Christian Church should
exist only as testimony to the God that formed it. Otherwise, it falls into the
trap of being Christendom which negates the Gospel (Barth 1933, 36-7). Non-
Christian religion, though having pieces of God given through Gods
freedom, is confused and does not have the key to unite its palette of brush
strokes into a unity this is what the revelation of Jesus offers (Barth 1977,
317-9). All of these missteps occur because human beings, while trying to
remain safe under the arc of the circle of human life, try to reach out and
touch God. Only in the eternal present of the moment of Jesus Christ can the
revelation of God occur, the Moment when men stand naked before God
and are clothed upon by Him. (Barth 1933, 111)

Barth uses these two ideas the notion of Gods revelation in Jesus Christ and
the metaphor of a tangent to talk about the personhood of God, a doctrine
that Barth felt was given short shrift in the nineteenth century. Barth argues at
length that theologys problem during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was that it made the mistake of accepting the Enlightenments claim that
man is the measure of all things. Since the rationality of man was the theme
of the Enlightenment, all other things including God had to find their
place under that theme. Barth argues that the thought of God as infinite
substance or Spirit most definitely not as a person permeated the
philosophical theology of this period and was appealing because it made God
perfect, yet perfectly safe to the all-knowing I of eighteenth-century man.

Yet the problem was, and always has been, that the God of the Bible addresses
human beings as the I, and is heard by the ones who are addressed (Barth
1977, 267). The God of revelation, revealed in Jesus Christ, is not an It or even
a He, but always an I always the supreme subject who addresses us as our
Measurer. Barth makes the interesting claim that in fact, we only know
ourselves as we are addressed, as we are named, by this I. He is not the
personified but the personifying personWhat do we know of our own
selfhood before God has given us His name and named us by our name?
What do we know of what it means to say Thou before God has named us in
this wayWe are thinking and speaking only in feeble images and echoes of
the person of God when we describe man as a person, as an individual.
(Barth 1977, 285) God, in actuality, gives us the model of personhood; by
being impacted by God, we become persons ourselves.
Gods personhood is most shown in his acting and in the fact that his acting
creates fellowship. It is the agency of creating fellowship that shows us what
love is, and defines for us what a person is (Barth 1977, 284). Doesnt this
create a logical tension with the idea that God is the impersonal absolute?
Isnt love language just anthropomorphism applied to something that is
beyond personhood? Barth answers No. He argues that the tension
is not between two concepts personhood and absoluteness which we in
fact know completely and can therefore say, Contradiction! Neither concept
is truly known except by a God who reveals himself as both love and as
absolute. The (to us) inexplicable paradox of the nature of God is the fact that
He is primarily and properly all that our terms seek to mean, and yet of
themselves cannot meanyet allowing and commanding us to put or
concepts into the service of knowledge of himIt is the paradox of the
combination of His grace and our lost condition, not the paradox of the
combination of two for us logically irreconcilable concepts. (Barth 1977, 287)

The sum of the issue is that the personhood of God so intimately linked to
the revelation of God in Jesus Christ witnessed to in the Bible is the
exemplar of what personhood is; without that revelation, our conceptions of
personhood would be very different. This perspective needed to be
resuscitated from nineteenth-century theology because that theology was
predicated not on revelation, but rather on the claim that human rationality
the transcendental I of the human being had the power to name all things
as under its control. And anything under the control of our own I could not
be perfect, absolute personhood, but only perfect, absolute substance,
something that was ultimately controllable. This safe, perfect God of Spirit or
Idea did not challenge or threaten. It is no wonder, according to Barth, that in
contemplating the situation, Feuerbach concluded that Christians were guilty
of the greatest idolatry for creating God in the image of Man (Barth 1977, 292).

Barths discussion of the personhood of God is representative of his larger

attempt to reintroduce classical Christian concerns into the theological
discussion. The idea of revelation the authoritative self-designation of God
through Jesus Christ became for Barth the lens through which he saw all
historical and philosophical discussion as merely human activity that paled in
comparison to the Moment when God touches humanity in love. Barths
task was to do two difficult things at once to avoid the trap of confusing the
texts of scripture with the revelation and truth of God, and yet to find a pivot
point of authority that allows human beings to be lifted up into a new
reality.

The question that might be asked of Barth is whether or not this is an honest
way of doing theology. Is it valid to simply claim revelation as a brute fact,
and that faith in revelation as such is the key to theology and the Christian
life? What about those who want a rationale for why they should accept the
idea of revelation from God at all? I think Barth would respond that the very
nature of God requires the claim of revelation as brute fact, whether it is
legitimate by the standards of human rationality or not. Judging the
legitimacy of concepts of God by any human standard apart from received
revelation is exactly what Barth opposed. These standards define God and the
knowledge of God in human terms, and end up producing a safe,
inconsequential and incorrect picture of God. Whatever else these human
standards might give us in theology, Barth argued that they do not give us the
living God revealed in Jesus Christ. For Barth, evidence of whether this
theological strategy is valid is found in the results such a strategy makes in
the individual and the Church. A living God leaves an impact, and a Church
vitally connected to such a living God should, like a crater, point not to itself
or to a successful philosophical system, but to a living God.

4. Outline of Major Works

The Epistle to the Romans

Barth went into the parish ministry in 1911 (first an assistant pastor in
Geneva, then pastor to the working-class parish of Safenwil). In 1913, he
married Nelly Hoffman, a talented violinist; they had five children. The 10
years in Safenwill were the formative period of his life. Here Barth
experienced conversion away from culture Christianity. Barth quickly
noticed that he often preached to no more than a dozen parishioners. One day
he visited a sick, elderly man in the parish. When Barth asked him to which
church he belonged, the man responded resentfully: "Pastor, I've always been
an honest man. I've never been to church, and I've never been in trouble with
the police." Barth recognized that this man was representative of majority of
people in that society with the same basic pattern of scant attendance at
worship services and disinterest in church religion. In this context Barth was
convinced to reconsider the "culture Christianity" represented by the liberal
theology in which he had been trained.
It was in Safenwil during World War I that Barth reviewed his theology along
with a neighboring pastor and student-friend, Eduard Thurneysen, who was
experiencing a similar crisis. Barth was shocked at the conduct of his liberal
teachers when they were confronted with the social and political situation of
wartime Europe. He read the "Declaration of German Intellectuals," calling for
loyalty to Kaiser and Vaterland. How could this happen? It happened, he
argued, because of a fatal alliance between Christian faith and cultural
experience.

He began working through the problems posed by the war and the failure of
liberal theology to account for such a dark episode in human history. He
initiated a radical change in theology, stressing the "wholly otherness of God"
over the anthropocentrism of 19th-century liberal theology. He questioned the
liberal theology of his German teachers and its dependence on the rationalist,
historicist, and dualist thought that stemmed from the Enlightenment. Barth
believed that liberal theology had accommodated Christianity to modern
culture, and it had to be changed.

Being aware that the theology which he had been taught gave him little to say
to his congregation, Barth reviewed his philosophy and theology. Thus
started a period of theological study, particularly of the Bible. He discovered
in the Bible a "strange new world": the Bible was not about our religion or
morality or history, but about the Kingdom of God. This biblical reality can be
understood only by inhabiting it.

It was in this context that Barth began a careful study of Paul's Letter to the
Romans in 1916. The result of these efforts was his first major work, The Epistle
to the Romans (first published in 1919 and then completely rewritten in 1922.),
in which he contradicted the liberal theologians who considered Scripture
little more than an account of human religious experience and who were
concerned only with the historic personality of Christ. According to Paul,
argues Barth, God condemns all human undertakings and saves only those
people who trust not in themselves but solely in God. Barth argued that in
Scripture we find "divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about
God." God is God and he has wrought our salvation.

Romans is a huge, breathless, exciting sermon rather than commentary. In it,

Barth reflects on what he would later call "the Godness of God." What God
thinks about people is more important than what they thing about God.
Human knowledge can lead us to a void, a longing, and dissatisfaction. God,
the living God, had come to deliver confused, self-contradictory human
beings like himself from their sin. In this book, Barth stressed the
discontinuity between the Christian message and the world. God is the
wholly other, and known only in revelation. Human task is to reshape himself
or herself to God's design, rather than the other way around.

This study brought him to the attention of theologians everywhere. The book
divided the theological world of Germany and Switzerland into advocates
and bitter detractors. This book initiated the revival of orthodox Protestantism
based on the Bible. There were numerous younger theologians who saw in
Barth's Romans an expression of their own theological program. Among those
were Emil Brunner, Bultmann, George Merz and Friedrich Gogarten.

Church Dogmatics

From 1932 to 1967, Barth worked on his Church Dogmatics, a multivolume

work that was unfinished at his death. It consists of 13 parts in four volumes,
running altogether to more than 9,000 pages. Although he changed some of
his early positions, he continued to maintain that the task of theology is to
unfold the revealed word attested in the Bible, and that there is no place for
natural theology or the influence of non-Christian religions. His theology
depended on a distinction between the Word (i.e., God's self-revelation as
concretely manifested in Christ) and religion. Religion, according to Barth, is
human attempt to grasp at God and is opposed to revelation, in which God
has come to humans through Christ. "Religion is the enemy of faith." "Religion
is human's attempt to enter into communion with God on his own terms."

The printed volumes of Barths Church Dogmatics in English translation are as

follows:

Volume I Part 1: Doctrine of the Word of God: Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics

Volume I Part 2: Doctrine of the Word of God

Volume II Part 1: The Doctrine of God: The Knowledge of God; The Reality of God

Volume II Part 2: The Doctrine of God: The Election of God; The Command of God
Volume III Part 1: The Doctrine of Creation: The Work of Creation

Volume III Part 2: The Doctrine of Creation: The Creature

Volume III Part 3: The Doctrine of Creation: The Creator and His Creature

Volume III Part 4: The Doctrine of Creation: The Command of God the Creator

Volume IV Part 1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation

Volume IV Part 2: Doctrine of Reconciliation: Jesus Christ the Servant As Lord

Volume IV Part 3, 1st half: Doctrine of Reconciliation: Jesus Christ the True
Witness

Volume IV Part 3, 2nd half: Doctrine of Reconciliation: Jesus Christ the True
Witness

Volume IV Part 4 (unfinished): Doctrine of Reconciliation: The Foundation of the

Christian Life (Baptism)

5. Relation to Other Thinkers

Criticism and Influence

Barths theology has been widely criticized by many theologians. Beside the
liberal Protestant reaction, his neo-orthodoxy has been criticized for not being
open enough to non-Christians, ignoring culture, employing Biblicism, for the
density of his writing, and the sheer size of hisChurch Dogmatics. It should be
noted in regards to the first criticism that Barth is, on at least one occasion, just
as critical of Christian religion (as opposed to faith) as he is of other religions
(Church Dogmatics I/1, 280-300). Overall, however, the fundamental criticism
of Barths theology boils down to a questioning of his (albeit somewhat
qualified) dualism.

In terms of revelation, he is accused of denying any significant role for

humanity in the reception of Gods Word (Bultmann, Brunner, Tillich, and
Pannenberg). Criticism is this area would seem to ignore statements such as,
In Him the fact is once for all established that God does not exist without
man (Barth 1960, 50). Regarding history, he is said to have no place for the
historical and supra-historical event of Jesus Christ to happen. In other words,
salvation history happens for Barth neither entirely with God nor entirely
with humanity (or perhaps at all in some respects). Concerning the
relationship between the world and God, many have been critical of Barth
because his dualism ignores the actions of humans and that he does not
adequately account for the connection linking God and the world between
revelatory events. Although these criticisms are not without merit, there is a
strong tendency to take isolated statements of Barths and to extend them
logically to a level of abstraction that he himself avoided while ignoring (due,
perhaps, to the immensity of his work) the balancing statements he makes.

Barth's theology was subjected to deep criticism during his lifetime and in the
following decades. Some have argued that he was too negative in his
description of humankind and too narrow in limiting revelation to the biblical
tradition, thus excluding the non-Christian religions. Some accuse him of his
intellectual narrowness. He took little interest in other disciplines and no
interest at all in other religions. Barth is also accused of excessive biblicism.
Although he claimed to accept the legitimacy of critical biblical scholarship,
he made practically no use of it. The very size of the Dogmatics has been a
source of criticism too. Mascall, in particular, has said that it takes so much
time to read this theologian of the word that no time is left to read the Word
itself. Barths style is indeed majestic and difficult as well.

Barths positive influence can be felt in the current work of the so-called
postliberal theologians. Among these are Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley
Hauerwas, Ronald Theiman, William Placher, Kathryn Tanner, and Charles
Ward. Barths continues to provide a negative influence for the work of
theologians of correlation such as Paul Tillich, David Tracy, Hans Kng,
Rosemary Ruether, and Schubert Ogden.

Barths theology reacted to the profound challenges of the twentieth-century.

In light of the mass destruction of the World Wars, the Holocaust(s), and
countless other tragedies, Barths call to know our collective place under
heaven while not denying that we do in fact have a significant relationship
with God seems to have been a crucial one. Moreover, as Robert McAfee
Brown says in his foreword to Credo, The reader has the privilege of
disagreeing with Barth. He no longer has the privilege of ignoring him
(Barth 1962, xi).
6. Bibliography and Cited Works

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1971. The Theology of Karl Barth. New York.

Barth, Karl. 1928. The Word of God and the Word of Man. Weston, WV.

Barth, Karl. 1936. Credo.

Barth, Karl. 1936-1975. Church Dogmatics. [Kirchliche Dogmatik] Translated by

T.H.L. Parker, W.B. Johnston, Harold Knight, and J.L.M. Haire. Edited by
G.W. Bromiley and G.T. Thomson. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Barth, Karl. 1949 [1947]. Dogmatics in Outline. Translated by G.T. Thomson.

New York: Philosophical Library.

Barth, Karl. 1960. Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm's Proof of the Existence of
God in the Context of his Theological Scheme.

Barth, Karl. 1960 [1956]. The Humanity of God, in The Humanity of God, 37-
65. Trans. John Newman Thomas. Atlanta: John Knox Press.

Barth, Karl. 1960. The Humanity of God. Richmond, John Knox Press.

Barth, Karl. 1962 [1935]. Credo. With a foreword by Robert McAfee Brown.
New York: Charles Scribners Sons.

Barth, Karl. 1963 [1962]. Evangelical Theology, an Introduction.

Barth, Karl. 1968 [1933]. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated from the
6th German edition [Rmerbrief] by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London; Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press.

Barth, Karl. 1977. Church Dogmatics. Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark.

Barth, Karl. 1979. Deliverance to the Captives. London: Greenwood.

Barth, Karl. 1993. The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of
Ethics. Translated by R. Birch Hoyle with a foreword by Robin W. Lovin.
[1st English edition London: F. Muller, 1938] Louisville: Westminster/John
Knox Press.
Barth, Karl. 1995 [1936]. Theology from God in Action. In The Christian
Theology Reader, ed. Alister McGrath, 21-22. Oxford; Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.

Biggar, N. 1993. The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth's Ethics.

Bouillard, Henri. 1957. Karl Barth. Paris.

Bromiley, G.W. 1979. Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans.

Busch, Eberhard. 1976. Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical
Texts. Philadelphia.

Casalis, Georges. 1963. Portrait of Karl Barth. Reprinted 1981.

Hunsinger, George. 1991. How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology.
New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jngel, Eberhard. 1986. Karl Barth: A theological legacy. Philadelphia.

Livingston, James C. Francis Schssler Fiorenza, Sarah Coakley, and James H.

Evans, Jr. 2000 [1997]. Modern Christian Thought Volume II: The Twentieth
Century. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lovin, Robin W. 1984. Christian Faith and Public Choice. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press.

McCormack, Bruce L. 1995. Karl Barth' Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology:

Its Genesis and Development 1910-1936. New York and London: Oxford
University Press.

McGrath, Alister. 1995. The Christian Theology Reader. Oxford; Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.

McGrath, Alister. 1997 [1994]. Christian Theology: An Introduction. 2nd edition.

Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.

Molnar, Paul D. "Review of How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology."
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60(4), 791-6.
Parker, T.H.L. 1970. Karl Barth.

Stroble, P. 1994. The Social Ontology of Karl Barth.

Sykes, S. W. 1979. Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method.

Torrance, Thomas F. 1990. Karl Barth, Biblical and Evangelical Theologian.

Edinburgh.

Torrance, Thomas F. 1995. "The Ground and Grammar of Theology" [1980].

In The Christian Theology Reader, ed. Alister McGrath, 85-8. Oxford;
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Webb, Stephen H. 1991. Re-Configuring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl

Barth. Albany, NY.

Webster, John. 1995. Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

7. Internet Resources

Barth, Karl. Encyclopdia Britannica Online article.

Karl Barth, Wikipedia article.

Barth Literature Search Project, an online searchable bibliography.

Center for Barth Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary, website.

8. Related Topics

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906-1945)

Harnack, Adolf von (1851-1930)

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831)

Kierkegaard, Sren (1813-1855)

Lindbeck, George (1923- )

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971)

Pannenberg, Wolfhart (1928- )

Rahner, Karl (1904-1984)

Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1936- )

Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1786-1834)

Tillich, Paul (1886-1965)

Torrance, Thomas (1913-2007)

Tracy, David (1939- )

Vatican II (1962-1965)

Editor: Derek Michaud, incorporating material by Zdravko Kujundzija (1999),

Derek Michaud (2003), and Paul Cassell (2005).

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KARL BARTH
BIOGRAPHY
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was the most important Swiss theologian of the twentieth century, with an
influence far beyond Switzerland. He is considered alongside Thomas Aquinas, Jean Calvin,
and Friedrich Schleiermacher to be one of the greatest thinkers within the history of the Christian
tradition. Barth gave new impulses to Protestant theology during a critical phase, reshaping it
fundamentally toward a systematic theology that had to cope with the grim realities of the 20th
century. As the principal author of The Barmen Declaration, he was the intellectual leader of
the German Confessing Church, the Protestant group that resisted the Third Reich. Barths
writings have been translated into nearly every European language, as well as Russian, Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, and more.
Early Life
Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, as the eldest child of Fritz Barth, a
Swiss Reformed minister, and Anna Katharina (Sartorius) Barth. His maternal grandmother he was
related to the renowned historian Jacob Burckhardt. Followed by four siblings, Barth spent most of
his childhood years in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, where his father had taken up a position as
professor of New Testament and early church history. A troublesome child, Karli didnt like going to
school and for some time was the leader of a local street gang and engaged in feuds at school and
in the neighborhood. In 1904, Barth set out to follow in the footsteps of his father and started to study
theology at the University of Bern. Later on, he continued his studies in Germany at the universities
of Berlin, Tbingen, and Marburg. Following his ordination he served as a pastor in Geneva (1909-
1911) and in the small village of Safenwil (1911-1921). In 1913, Barth married Nelly Hoffman, a
member of his first-year confirmation class in Geneva, with whom he had five children, one daughter
and four sons.
Years in Germany and Second World War
In Safenwil, Karl Barth was pastor of a small country parish of blue-collar workers and was
advocating for their education and social rights. During this time, Barth wrote the first version of his
commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his commentary on the Apostle Pauls Epistle to the
Romans, which became a cornerstone of his lifes work. As a consequence of the international
attention aroused by his commentary, Barth was appointed a professor at the University of
Gttingen, Germany, in 1921, despite his lack of a doctorate degree.
In 1924, he met Charlotte von Kirschbaum (Lollo) who later became his long-time assistant and
confidante. In 1929 Lollo moved in with the Barth family. This marked the beginning of a difficult 35-
year-long household arrangement between Barth, his wife Nelly, and Lollo, putting a strain on
everyone involved.
From 1925-1930, Barth worked as a Professor of Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis in
Mnster and from 1930-1935 as a Professor of Systematic Theology in Bonn. In Bonn, he began his
work on the Church Dogmatics, his magnum opus, which he left unfinished despite its more than
9,300 pages and thirteen total volumes.
Karl Barth manifested his fundamental opposition to National Socialism even before Adolf Hitlers
seizure of power in 1933 and decried the Nazis plans to use the German Church to legitimate their
racist agenda. In June 1933, Barth published the first edition of his pamphlet Theological Existence
Today!, which was widely perceived as an alarm and a wakeup call. In 1934, Barth was largely
responsible for the writing of the Barmen Declaration, a confession of faith that vigorously
repudiated Nazi ideology. Barth mailed this declaration to Hitler personally. The Barmen Declaration
became one of the founding documents of the Confessing Church in Germany, which led the
spiritual resistance against National Socialism.
In 1935, Barth lost his position as professor in Bonn and was forced to leave Germany because he
refused to swear a pledge to Adolf Hitler without adding the qualification to the extent that I
responsibly am able as a Protestant Christian. The authorities in Basel, Switzerland immediately
appointed him Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Basel, from where he
continued to champion the causes of the Confessing Church, the Jews, and oppressed people
everywhere. Barth stayed at the University of Basel until his retirement in 1962.
Later Life
After the end of the Second World War Karl Barth became an important voice in support both of
German penitence and of reconciliation with churches abroad. In 1948, Barth was asked to deliver
the main address at the first assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam,
Netherlands, and he also played a significant role in the preparations for the second assembly in
Evanston, Illinois, U.S., in 1954.
In the 1950s, Barth made himself as he put it disreputable by his rejection of the nuclear arms
race and by his efforts, in critical solidarity with Christians behind the iron curtain, to overcome the
Cold War between East and West.
In 1962, shortly after retiring, Barth visited the United States for the first time at the age of 75,
encouraged by his son Markus who worked as Professor of New Testament at the University of
Chicago. Barth traveled across the country for seven weeks to deliver a series of lectures at
Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, Union Theological Seminary and San
Francisco Theological Seminary. In Princeton, Barth had an encounter with the courageous Martin
Luther King Jr., which Barth regretted was all-too-brief. That same year Barth was also featured on
the cover of the Time magazine, which manifested that his influence had reached into mainstream
American religious culture.
Karl Barth died on December 10, 1968 in his house on Bruderholz Lane in Basel. On the prior
evening, he had cheered up his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen in a final phone conversation by
saying, Just dont be so down in the mouth, now! Not ever! For things are ruled, not just in Moscow
or in Washington or in Peking, but things are ruled even here on earthentirely from above, from
heaven above.
Written by Barbara Zellweger

Karl Barth
Courageous theologian
"Faith is awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the
qualitative difference between God and man and God and the world."

"The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths."
Karl Barth not only said this, he spent his life setting question marks, in the name of Christ,
against all manner of "truths." In the process, he did nothing less than alter the course of modern
theology.

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Timeline

First Vatican Council declares papal infallibility

1870

Abraham Kuyper starts Free University

1880

Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis

1885

Karl Barth born

1886

Karl Barth dies

1968

Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

1974
Shocking liberalism

He started out life conventionally enough: he was born in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Fritz
Barth (pronounced "bart"), a professor of New Testament and early church history at Bern, and
Anna Sartorius. He studied at some of the best universities: Bern, Berlin, Tbingen, and
Marburg. At Berlin he sat under the famous liberals of the day (like historian Adolph von
Harnack), most of whom taught an optimistic Christianity that focused not so much on Jesus
Christ and the Cross as the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

After serving a Geneva curacy from 1909 to 1911, Barth was appointed to a working-class parish
in Switzerland, and in 1913 he married Nell Hoffman, a talented violinist (they eventually had
one daughter and four sons).
As he pastored, he noted with alarm that Germany was becoming increasingly militaristic and
that his former professors were supportive of this. Barth, dismayed with the moral weakness of
liberal theology, plunged into a study of the Bible, especially Paul's Epistle to the Romans. He
also visited Lutheran pastor and theologian Christoph Frederick Blumhardt and came away with
an overwhelming conviction about the victorious reality of Christ's resurrectionwhich deeply
influenced his theology.

Out of this emerged his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1919). He sounded themes
that had been muted in liberal theology. Liberal theology had domesticated God into the patron
saint of human institutions and values. Instead, Barth wrote of the "crisis," that is, God's
judgment under which all the world stood; he pounded on the theme of God's absolute
sovereignty, of his complete freedom in initiating his revelation in Jesus Christ.
He spoke dialectically, in paradox, to shock readers into seeing the radicalness of the gospel:
"Faith is awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the
qualitative difference between God and man and God and the world."

The first of six heavily revised editions followed in 1922. It rocked the theological community.
Barth later wrote, "As I look back upon my course, I seem to myself as one who, ascending the
dark staircase of a church tower and trying to steady himself, reached for the banister, but got
hold of the bell rope instead. To his horror he had then to listen to what the great bell had
sounded over him and not over him alone." Liberal theologians gasped in horror and attacked
Barth furiously. But Barth had given that form of liberalism a mortal wound.

His theology came to be known as "dialectical theology," or "the theology of crisis"; it initiated a
trend toward neo-orthodoxy in Protestant theology.

In 1921 Barth was appointed professor of Reformed theology at the University of Gttingen, and
later to chairs at Mnster (1925) and Bonn (1930). He published works critiquing nineteenth-
century Protestant theology and produced a celebrated study of Anselm.

In 1931 he began the first book of his massive Church Dogmatics. It grew year by year out of his
class lectures; though incomplete, it eventually filled four volumes in 12 parts, printed with 500
to 700 pages each. Many pastors in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, desperate for an antidote to
liberalism, eagerly awaited the publication of each book.
Fascist idolatry

Barth fought not just with liberals but allies who challenged some of his extreme conclusions.
When Emil Brunner proposed that God revealed himself not just in the Bible but in nature as
well (though not in a saving way), Barth replied in 1934 with an article titled, "No! An Answer
to Emil Brunner." Barth believed that such a "natural theology" was the root of the religious
syncretism and anti-Semitism of the "German Christians"those who supported Hitler's national
socialism.
By this time, Barth was immersed in the German church struggle. He was a founder of the so-
called Confessing Church, which reacted vigorously against the ideology of "blood and soil" and
the Nazis' attempt to create a "German Christian" church. The 1934 Barmen Declaration, largely
written by Barth, pitted the revelation of Jesus Christ against the "truth" of Hitler and national
socialism:

"Jesus Christ is the one Word of God. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church
could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and beside this
one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation."

When Barth refused to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to the Fhrer, he was fired. He
was offered the chair of theology in his native Basel, however, and from there he continued to
champion the causes of the Confessing Church, the Jews, and oppressed people everywhere.

Pastor Karl

After the war, Barth engaged in controversies regarding baptism (though a Reformed theologian,
he rejected infant baptism), hermeneutics, and the demythologizing program of Rudolf Bultmann
(which denied the historical nature of Scripture, instead believing it a myth whose meaning could
heal spiritual anxiety).

Barth also made regular visits to the prison in Basel, and his sermons to the
prisoners, Deliverance to the Captives, reveal his unique combination of evangelical passion and
social concern that characterized all his life.
When asked in 1962 (on his one visit to America) how he would summarize the essence of the
millions of words he had published, he replied, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells
me so."

Though Barth made it possible for theologians again to take the Bible seriously, American
evangelicals have been skeptical of Barth because he refused to consider the written Word
"infallible" (he believed only Jesus was). Others gave up on Barth's theology because it
overemphasized God's transcendance (to the point that some former Barthians began
championing the "death of God"). Nonetheless, he remains the most important theologian of the
twentieth century.