BARTH, KARL

BARTH, KARL (1886–1968), Swiss Reformed theologian, described by Pope Pius XII as the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas, and certainly the most influential of the twentieth century. Barth stands as a prophetic voice in the tradition of Athanasius, Augustine, and Calvin, calling the Christian church back to the Bible and to its foundation in Jesus Christ. This message sounded forth powerfully in his first book, Romans (especially in the largely rewritten second edition of 1921), which drew widespread attention. Barth later said that in writing this book he was like a man in a dark church tower who accidentally trips, catches hold of the bell rope to steady himself, and alarms the whole countryside. As a result, he was called to university chairs in Göttingen (1921), in Münster (1925), and in Bonn (1930). From this latter post he was dismissed in 1935 because of his refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler and because of his leading role in the Kirchenkampf, the struggle against the Nazi attempt to control the German Evangelical church. He returned to his native Switzerland to a professorship in Basel, where he taught for the rest of his long life until his death in 1968, drawing students from all over the world to his classrooms and publishing his lectures in his massive Church Dogmatics.

Barth was born in Basel on May 10, 1886, the son of Fritz Barth, a professor of church history and New Testament in Bern. In Bern Barth received his earliest education, and there, on the eve of his confirmation, he "boldly resolved to become a theologian" out of an early eagerness to understand his faith and see its relevance for the twentieth century. He commenced his university studies in Bern, where, while receiving a solid grounding in Reformed theology, he began to study the theoretical and practical philosophy of Immanual Kant, whose "Copernican revolution" in the theory of knowledge and ethics awakened Barth to an acute awareness of the question of our knowledge and service of God. At the same time he developed his early and lifelong interest in the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose analysis of religious experience and desire to commend religion to its "cultured despisers" had dominated German theology since his death in 1834. Like Schleiermacher, Barth was later to interpret Christian dogmatics as the function of the Christian church, scrutinizing scientifically the content of the Christian faith, but unlike Schleiermacher he saw, not religious experience in general, but the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, attested in holy scripture, as the criterion of truth.

Barth expressed a desire to study at Marburg with Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922), the leading Kantian theologian in Europe, but under his father's influence he went first to Berlin to spend a semester under Adolf von Harnack, the most outstanding church historian and liberal theologian of the day, before returning to complete a third year in Bern. In 1907 he enrolled in Tübingen to study under the conservative New Testament theologian Adolf Schlatter, before spending a final year in Marburg. Herrmann defined faith in terms of "inner experience" which has its "ground" in the "inner life of Jesus" and is awakened in man's conscience by the influence of Jesus, the so-called Jesus of history of the nineteenth-century liberal quest. Although influenced by Herrmann, Barth came to feel that his conception conflicted with the New Testament and Reformed understanding of the Christ of faith and with the church's creeds, and that it was more the product of modern individualistic bourgeois liberal idealism and Kantian philosophy than of sound New Testament scholarship. He also felt that the very nature and possibility of a scientific approach to Christian theology was being called into question by the philosophical and historical presuppositions of the "culture-Protestantism" of the day, wherein theology and relativizing historicism, religion, and culture were fused, obscuring the gospel through "reverence before history" and reducing Christian theology to a branch of the general philosophy of religion.

These questions assumed acute importance for Barth once he was ordained to the pastoral ministry and sought to take seriously the exposition of the Bible and the preaching of the gospel, while also taking full account of critical biblical scholarship. It was during his time as a pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland (1911–1921), that his theological position underwent a drastic change. On the one hand, when World War I broke out, he was deeply disturbed by the "Manifesto of the Intellectuals," "the black day" he called it, when ninety-three scholars and artists, including his own teachers Harnack and Herrmann, supported the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which seemed to him to call into question his colleagues' understanding of the Bible, history, and dogmatics. Was this where the synthesis of (German) culture and religion was leading the Christian church? On the other hand, in his industrial parish, he became acutely aware of the issues of social justice, poor wages, factory legislation, and trade union affairs. In 1915 he became a member of the Social Democratic party, but unlike his Christian Socialist friends, he refused to identify socialism with the kingdom of God.

Throughout his life Barth endeavored to interpret the gospel and examine the church's message in the context of society, the state, war, revolution, totalitarianism, and democracy, over against the pretensions of man to solve the problems of his own destiny, without the judgment of the message of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Toward the end of his life he could write, "I decided for theology, because I felt a need to find a better basis for my social action." The fundamental question was how to relate what the Word of God in the Bible says about the sovereignty and transcendence of God, grace, the coming of the Kingdom, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the dead with human problems. Barth voiced his concern over the bankruptcy of much contemporary religion and theology in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief, 1919), where the influence of Kierkegaard, Dostoevskii, Franz Overbeck, Johann Christian Blumhardt, and Christoph Blumhardt in their attacks on institutionalized Christianity is evident. In this book, which was described by a Roman Catholic theologian as "a bombshell in the playground of the theologians," Barth seeks to summon the church back to the living God of the Bible, before whom are exposed the pretensions of human religion or piety, the proud sinful attempts to assert oneself without God. Salvation is God's gift, and the Kingdom must break in "vertically from above," summoning humankind to radical response and decision, that God's righteous purposes might be fulfilled in the world.

Barth used Paul's letter to the Romans for a critique of philosophical idealism, romanticism, and religious socialism. If his concern was that the church should listen to the divine word of judgment on our political and intellectual towers of Babel, his concern throughout his life was also to assert "that there is joy with God … and that the Kingdom on earth begins with joy." Together with his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen (1888–1974), he discovered in the Bible "a strange new world, the world of God," which is the kingdom of God, established by God and not man. Like Luther, he was gripped by the Pauline message of the righteousness of God, which calls into question all human righteousness.

Only by listening to the Word of God and recognizing God's prior righteousness can we regain a proper foundation for culture, morality, state, and church. Theologically this means we must ground Christian dogmatics in the Word of God and seek to interpret God out of God, as he reveals himself in Christ in the scriptures, and not subsume him under our prior generic concepts, categories, and ideologies. The task of theology is to allow revelation to shine in its own light. The inner meaning of the resurrection of Christ, who as creator and redeemer is lord over all, is not just a word of hope for the future, but the action of God in vindicating his righteous purposes in history and giving us a pledge of the triumph of God's righteousness in the world. Far from belittling the need for social action, the resurrection, as God's act in establishing the Kingdom, should be for us a summons to participate in this event and engage in social action with a passion for God's righteousness. There must be no divorce between justification and justice.

There were distinctive stages in Barth's theological development, in each of which he wrestled with the polarities of God and man. Nineteenth-century liberal thought too readily presupposed an inward continuity between the divine and the "highest" and "best" in human culture, positing that knowledge of God is given in the depths of the human spirit in human self-understanding and inward religious experience. Barth rejected this view early in his ministry, saying that we do not talk about God by "talking about man in a loud voice." At first, like Herrmann, he identified conscience with the voice of God, but increasingly he argued that the voice of God is heard only in scripture, in encounter with Christ, the living Word. During the period of the so-called dialectical theology or theology of crisis, stemming from the second edition of Barth's Romans, and under the influence of Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel, Barth stressed "the infinite qualitative difference between God and man." God meets us in the moment of crisis and decision, creating his own point of contact and summoning us to radical obedience. As he wrote in his preface, "If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: 'God is in heaven, and thou art on earth'" (Barth, 1933, p. 10).

The chasm between God and man can be bridged by God alone, and not by man. The Word of the cross means that God says no to our human sin and pride and pretensions, while in grace God says yes to his own good creatures in a word of forgiveness. If in this early period Barth, like the early Luther, stressed God's "no" (i.e., God's righteousness as God), his later message, like that of the later Luther, became more powerfully a "yes": God's righteousness as a triumph of grace through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. In the manner of the great medieval theologians, Barth saw that there are elements of negation and affirmation in all human knowledge of God, leading him to see an analogy of "relation," but not of "being," between God and man grounded in grace.

In 1927 Barth began writing Christian Dogmatics, intending to expound all the main Christian doctrines, by grounding all he had to say on God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The first volume was entitled Christian Doctrine in Outline, Volume I: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Prolegomena to Christian Dogmatics. In it he argues that possibility of Christian knowledge of God is grounded on the actuality of the revelation in Jesus, as he makes himself known to faith by the Holy Spirit. Such a revelation is trinitarian in character, having a triadic pattern. God makes himself known as Father in Jesus Christ the Son, and to us by the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity thus unfolds from the fact that "God reveals himself as the Lord." As such, this doctrine is the starting point and grammar for all Christian knowledge of God, and not merely an appendix, as in Schleiermacher.

Within this self-revelation of the triune God we can distinguish three forms of the one Word of God: the eternal Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, the written Word in the witness of the Bible to that primary Word, and the Word of God as proclaimed in the church. The task of Christian dogmatics is to be faithful to this Word, and therefore to examine the content of the church's preaching by tracing it back to its source in God, by the standard of holy scripture, and under the guidance of its creeds and confessions.

The reviewers of this first volume criticized Barth for so casting the gospel into the language of an immediate timeless encounter with God that he was in danger of dehistoricizing the gospel and transposing theology into a new philosophical mold. Barth took this criticism seriously, having himself seen this development of dialectical theology in Rudolf Bultmann, and gave himself to examining the question of method in theology by a careful study of Anselm's Proslogion. In 1931 he published his results in Fide quaerens intellectum (Faith seeking understanding). From Anselm he had learned that the Word of God has its own rational content in God. The polarity of God and man must be interpreted, not so much in the language of an existential encounter between God and man in the crisis of faith, but primarily in terms of the given unity of God and man in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Lord, in whom God has come—not simply in a man, but as a man—in a once and for all reconciling act in which we are called to participate through the Holy Spirit.

Barth's approach in the future was to build all theology on the reality of the Word of God in Jesus Christ. This led him to turn from his Christian Dogmatics to a new work entitled Church Dogmatics, which he began in 1932 and which occupied him for the rest of his life (resulting in thirteen part-volumes). In Church Dogmatics he argues that all we know and say about God and about humankind is controlled by our knowledge of Jesus Christ as "true God and true man." From this dogmatic starting point, Barth expounds the four intersecting areas of Christian doctrine: the doctrine of the Word of God (vol. 1), of God (vol. 2), of creation (vol. 3), and of reconciliation (vol. 4). (A fifth volume, dealing with redemption [eschatology], remained unwritten at the time of his death.) Each of these doctrines is expounded in a trinitarian framework in terms of a double movement, a God-manward movement and a man-Godward movement in Jesus Christ, revealing a bipolarity in every doctrine. Fundamental to his whole theology is the axiom by which the ancient church expounded the doctrine of an "ontological Trinity," that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ, he is "eternally and antecedently in himself." By looking at Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, we know the heart of the eternal Father. In Jesus Christ we see the inner meaning of creation as well as of redemption, for Christ is the one by whom and for whom all things were created, and in redemption we see brought to fulfillment God's filial purposes for the whole human race. Consequently, our anthropology as well as our theology must be built on this christological foundation, not on any "natural theology," on any independent concept of "orders of creation," or on any purely empirical concept of man.

Barth was concerned to unpack the implications of this Christ-centered perspective in every area of life. It proved highly significant in his outspoken opposition to Hitler, to the persecution of the Jews, and to the so-called German Christians who sought to justify National Socialism and its racist policies by an appeal to the natural orders of creation. Barth felt that this was a betrayal of the Christian understanding of grace by its appeal to sources of revelation other than that given to us in Jesus Christ. God's election of Israel for a vicarious role among the nations finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the Jew in whom God has broken down the barriers between the Jews and all other ethnic groups (the gentiles). Christ as Lord is head over church and state, and to him alone we owe supreme loyalty in both spheres. The state must be interpreted not just in terms of the orders of creation and preservation (as he had earlier thought), but in terms of the orders of redemption. This found explicit formulation in the Barmen Declaration of 1934, largely written by Barth. For this stand he was deprived of his university chair in Bonn, but his theological insights and interpretation of the political scene gained him enormous prestige. Barth saw himself standing in the tradition of the ancient fathers of the church like Irenaeus and Athanasius, and of the Protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin, engaging in lifelong dialogue with liberal Protestantism on the left and Roman Catholicism on the right, both of which he felt weakened the emphasis of the Bible that God accepts us by grace alone in Jesus Christ.

Bibliography

The best and most authoritative biography is Eberhard Busch's Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London, 1976). On the early period of the so-called dialectical theology, the most influential work was Barth's The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Sir Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford, 1933). The significance of this work is discussed in Thomas F. Torrance's Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (London, 1962). Barth's Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Brian Cozens and John Bowden (Valley Forge, 1973), is invaluable for understanding his European theological background. The book that marked his transition to the later period of the Church Dogmatics is his Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum; Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God, translated by I. W. Robertson (Richmond, 1960). In the Gifford Lectures given in Aberdeen, Barth expounded the 1560 Scots Confession in The Knowledge of God and the Service of God, translated by J. L. M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London, 1938). His massive exposition of Christian doctrine is set out in Church Dogmatics, 4 vols., edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1956–1969). Very readable is Barth's short Evangelical Theology, translated by Grover Foley (New York, 1963).

James B. Torrance (1987)