Karl Barth
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics. Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.
Like many Protestant theologians of his generation, Barth was educated in a liberal theology influenced by Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Schleiermacher and others. His pastoral career began in the rural Swiss town of Safenwil, where he was known as the "Red Pastor from Safenwil". There he became increasingly disillusioned with the liberal Christianity in which he had been trained. This led him to write the first edition of his The Epistle to the Romans, published in 1919, in which he resolved to read the New Testament differently.
Barth began to gain substantial worldwide acclaim with the publication in 1921 of the second edition of his commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, in which he openly broke from liberal theology.
He influenced many significant theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who supported the Confessing Church, and Jürgen Moltmann, Helmut Gollwitzer, James H. Cone, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Thomas F. Torrance, Hans Küng, and also Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, and novelists such as Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Miklós Szentkuthy.
Among many other areas, Barth has also had a profound influence on modern Christian ethics, influencing the work of ethicists such as Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Jacques Ellul and Oliver O'Donovan.
Early life and education
Karl Barth was born on 10 May 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, to Johann Friedrich "Fritz" Barth and Anna Katharina Barth. Karl had two younger brothers, Peter Barth and Heinrich Barth, and two sisters, Katharina and Gertrude. Fritz Barth was a theology professor and pastor and desired for Karl to follow his positive line of Christianity, which clashed with Karl's desire to receive a liberal Protestant education. Karl began his student career at the University of Bern, and then transferred to the University of Berlin to study under Adolf von Harnack, later transferring briefly to the University of Tübingen before finally settling in Marburg to study under Wilhelm Herrmann.From 1911 to 1921, Barth served as a Reformed pastor in the village of Safenwil in the canton of Aargau. In 1913 he married Nelly Hoffmann, a violinist. They had a daughter and four sons, two of whom were Biblical scholars and theologians; Markus and . Karl Barth went on to become a professor of theology in Göttingen, Münster and Bonn in Germany. While serving at Göttingen he met Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who became his long-time secretary, assistant and lover; she lived in the family home for 37 years and played a large role in the writing of his epic, the Church Dogmatics. He was deported from Germany in 1935 after he refused to sign the Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler, going back to Switzerland and becoming a professor in Basel.
Break from liberal theology
Liberal theology was a trend in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant theology to reinterpret traditional beliefs in two ways. First, it adopted an historical-critical approach to the sources of Christianity. Second, it engaged with the questions that science, philosophy and other disciplines raised for the Christian faith. Barth's striking out on a different theological course from that of his Liberal university teachers Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann was due to several significant influences and events. While Pastor at Safenwil, Barth had an influential friendship with neighbouring pastor Eduard Thurneysen. Troubled that their theological educations had left them ill-equipped to preach God's message effectively, they together engaged in an intensive quest to find a "wholly other" theological foundation than that which Schleiermacher had proposed.In August 1914, Barth was dismayed to learn that his venerated teachers including Adolf von Harnack had signed the "Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals to the Civilized World". As a result, Barth concluded he could not follow their understanding of the Bible and history any longer. In 1915, Barth and Thurneysen visited Christoph Blumhardt, Leader of the Bad Boll Christian Community and Social Democratic politician. Their conversation made a deep impression on Barth. He later commented that "Blumhardt always begins with God's presence, power, and purpose," which indicates a likely influence in shaping his own theocentric starting-point. Barth also found in Blumhardt's pro-Socialist politics an inspiring encouragement for his own advocacy for the rights and unionization of Safenwil textile workers and alignment with Social Democratic values. These activities, and a public disagreement with a local factory owner, earned him local notoriety as the 'Red Pastor'.
Barth's theological response was to adopt a Dialectical approach in which he deliberately sought to interrupt and destabilize the assumptions of Liberal theology by a method of negation and affirmation. In a lecture delivered in Arau in 1916, Barth argued that "God's righteousness is revealed like a trumpet blast from another world that interrupts one's obligation to nation, and also interrupts the nurturing of religious thoughts and feelings. A 'No' to these assumptions knocks one to the floor, but a 'Yes' to God's righteousness and glory sets one on one's feet again." Although in one sense it is accurate to say that Barth's Dialectical approach sought deliberately to destabilize the assumptions of Liberal theology; in another sense it is important to acknowledge that Barth never totally repudiated the historical-critical approach to the Scriptures. In addition, he continued to engage with the questions that other disciplines raised for the Christian faith, typically responding with a robust theological and Christ-centered approach.
''The Epistle to the Romans''
Barth first began his commentary The Epistle to the Romans in the summer of 1916 while he was still a pastor in Safenwil, with the first edition appearing in December 1918. On the strength of the first edition of the commentary, Barth was invited to teach at the University of Göttingen. Barth decided around October 1920 that he was dissatisfied with the first edition and heavily revised it the following eleven months, finishing the second edition around September 1921. Particularly in the thoroughly re-written second edition of 1922, Barth argued that the God who is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus challenges and overthrows any attempt to ally God with human cultures, achievements, or possessions. The book's popularity led to its republication and reprinting in several languages.Barmen Declaration
In 1934, as the Protestant Church attempted to come to terms with Nazi Germany, Barth was largely responsible for the writing of the Barmen Declaration. This declaration rejected the influence of Nazism on German Christianity by arguing that the Church's allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ should give it the impetus and resources to resist the influence of other lords, such as the German Führer, Adolf Hitler. Barth mailed this declaration to Hitler personally. This was one of the founding documents of the Confessing Church and Barth was elected a member of its leadership council, the Bruderrat.He was forced to resign from his professorship at the University of Bonn in 1935 for refusing to swear an oath to Hitler. Alongside Kurt von Fritz, he was one of only two professors who refused to take the oath. Barth then returned to his native Switzerland, where he assumed a chair in systematic theology at the University of Basel. In the course of his appointment, he was required to answer a routine question asked of all Swiss civil servants: whether he supported the national defence. His answer was, "Yes, especially on the northern border!" The newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung carried his 1936 criticism of the philosopher Martin Heidegger for his support of the Nazis. In 1938 he wrote a letter to a Czech colleague Josef Hromádka in which he declared that soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany were serving a Christian cause.
''Church Dogmatics''
Later life and death
After the end of the Second World War, Barth became an important voice in support both of German penitence and of reconciliation with churches abroad. Together with Hans Iwand, he authored the in 1947a more concrete statement of German guilt and responsibility for Nazi Germany and the Second World War than the 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. In it, he made the point that the Church's willingness to side with anti-socialist and conservative forces had led to its susceptibility to Nazi ideology. In the context of the developing Cold War, that controversial statement was rejected by anti-Communists in the West who supported the Christian Democratic Union of Germany course of re-militarization, as well as by East German dissidents who believed that it did not sufficiently depict the dangers of Communism. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. In the 1950s, Barth sympathized with the peace movement and opposed West German rearmament. Barth was exempted from a regulation that limited the tenure of a professorship at the University of Basel to the year they were 70 years of age, which he would have reached in 1956.Barth wrote a 1960 article for The Christian Century regarding the "East–West question" in which he denied any inclination toward Eastern communism and stated he did not wish to live under Communism or wish anyone to be forced to do so; he acknowledged a fundamental disagreement with most of those around him, writing: "I do not comprehend how either politics or Christianity require or even permit such a disinclination to lead to the conclusions which the West has drawn with increasing sharpness in the past 15 years. I regard anticommunism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than communism itself."
In 1962, Barth visited the United States and lectured at Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, Union Theological Seminary and San Francisco Theological Seminary. He was invited to be a guest at the Second Vatican Council. At the time Barth's health did not permit him to attend. However, he was able to visit the Vatican and be a guest of the pope in 1967, after which he wrote the small volume Ad Limina Apostolorum.
Barth was featured on the cover of the 20 April 1962 issue of Time magazine, an indication that his influence had reached out of academic and ecclesiastical circles and into mainstream American religious culture. Pope Pius XII is sometimes claimed to have called Barth "the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas", though Fergus Kerr observes that "there is never chapter and verse for the quotation" and it is sometimes attributed to Pope Paul VI instead.
Barth died on 10 December 1968, at his home in Basel, Switzerland. The evening before his death, he had encouraged his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen that he should not be downhearted, "For things are ruled, not just in Moscow or in Washington or in Peking, but things are ruled – even here on earth—entirely from above, from heaven above."