Barth, Karl

Barth, Karl (1886–1968). Christian theologian, of dominating importance in 20th cent. Beginning his career at the end of the long 19th-cent. ascendancy of liberal and reductionist theology in Germany (e.g. Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, and Strauss), epitomized for Barth in the figure of Harnack, Barth entered his first and massive protest against this in his Der Römerbrief (1919). This introduced what came to be known as ‘dialectical theology’, or ‘the theology of crisis’ (Gk., krisis, ‘judgement’). God cannot be found by humans as the conclusion of an argument, or as the experience at the end of a religious or mystical quest. God, rather, speaks his Word through the words of ‘the strange new world of the Bible’. Although he published many works, his major commitment was to the many-volumed Church Dogmatics. The first volume appeared in 1932; 13 volumes later, it was unfinished at his death. He increasingly stressed the human vocation to co-operate with the initiatives of God in creation, and saw a place for human wisdom and knowledge as a prolegomenon to the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God.