Karl Barth

Theologian of Christian Witness

Joseph L. Mangina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351924375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The thought of Karl Barth (1886-1968) has undergone a remarkable renewal of interest in the past twenty years. Joseph Mangina's Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness offers a concise, accessible guide to this important Christian thinker. Uniquely among introductions to Barth, it also highlights his significance for Christian ecumenism. The first chapter describes Barth's extraordinary life, from his youthful break with liberalism during the First World War, to his mature theology in the Church Dogmatics. Subsequent chapters offer a detailed reading of this magisterial work, and place Barth in dialogue with five contemporary thinkers: George Lindbeck on revelation, Michael Wyschogrod on election, Stanley Hauerwas on creation, Robert Jenson on reconciliation, and Henri de Lubac on the church. These ecumenical conversations not only set Barth's thinking in greater relief, but serve to demonstrate its continuing theological fruitfulness. The book concludes by examining Barth's wider significance for the church in our time.

Chapter 1
The Laughter of the Angels: On Reading Barth

A Theological Existence: Barth's Life

Karl Barth was born on 10 May 1886, in the Swiss city of Basel, the first of five children.¹ His mother, Anna Sartorius, was descended from a long line of clergymen and academics. His father, Johann Friedrich (‘Fritz’) Barth, had received his degree in theology from Tübingen, and represented what was then called ‘positive’ theology – a moderate form of conservative Protestantism.² At the time of Karl’s birth he was an instructor at the College of Preachers in Basel, but soon thereafter accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Berne.

The Barths were bookish, outdoorsy – summer holidays were spent in the mountains or at the lake – and fond of music. Not only did young Karl take violin lessons, but he had the example of his father: ‘I must have been five or six years old at the time … My father was musical and was fond of improvising on the piano … One day he was playing something by Mozart. I can still picture the scene. He began a couple of bars from The Magic Flute (“Tamino mine, what happiness”). They went right through me and into me, I don’t know how, and I thought, “That’s it!” ’³

Karl settled early on a career in theology, and began the grand tour of universities typical for European students of the day. He studied first under his father’s faculty at Berne, and then moved on to Berlin – where he heard the great church historian Adolf Harnack – and later Tübingen. But his great ambition was to study at the University of Marburg, then known as a breeding ground of theological liberalism. Understandably, Fritz Barth opposed this move. But in the end Karl overcame his father’s objections. It was at Marburg that he attended the lectures of Wilhelm Herrmann, whose synthesis of Christian faith and neo-Kantian philosophy stood at the cutting edge of contemporary Protestant thought. Barth finished his studies in 1909, a convinced member of the Herrmann school.

Following university, Barth spent a valuable year as assistant editor at Die Christliche Welt, an influential liberal journal, and then moved on to an assistant pastorship at Geneva (where he preached from Calvin’s pulpit). In 1911 he accepted a call to be pastor of the Reformed Church in Safenwil, an industrial town in the region known as the Aargau. Just before accepting this post, Barth became engaged to eighteen-year-old Nelly Hoffmann, who had been a pupil in his confirmation class at Geneva. They were married on 27 March 1913.

No sooner had Barth arrived in Safenwil than he found himself embroiled in a bitter dispute between factory workers and owners. With startling swiftness he aligned himself with the cause of the workers – a move that alienated many in his congregation, and earned him the title ‘the Red Pastor’. By 1915 he had become an active Religious Socialist. Yet the labour struggle was not the only challenge Barth faced. Week by week, he found that he was expected to mount the pulpit and say something about God. This was a task for which his high-culture university training had not prepared him. Liberal theologians were convinced that to talk about the highest achievements of the human spirit – religion, morality, culture, value – was to talk about God. Barth came to believe otherwise. Talk about God was something different, something startling and strange and new. How is the preacher to fulfill the congregation’s expectation that he will preach God’s Word, when all he has at his disposal are mere human words? Looking back on this period, Barth often cited his terror at preaching as a major factor in his break with liberalism.

Matters became even more pressing when war broke out in 1914, and each side claimed to be defending the cause of ‘God’ and ‘Christian civilization’. Barth now found the equation of these two to be blasphemous. An important event in this period was a declaration signed by ninety-three intellectuals in support of German war policy. Among the signers were many of his former theological teachers. He entered on an intense period of intellectual questioning, much of it in dialogue with his close friend Eduard Thurneysen, the pastor in the village just across the valley. While the guns pounded away on the Western front, Barth and Thurneysen sat, smoked their pipes, and debated the current situation in both theology and politics (both men were involved in the Religious Socialist movement). At one point Thurneysen remarked that what was needed was something ‘quite different’ (ganzanders), a phrase that could also be construed as ‘totally other’. Looking for inspiration where they could find it, the two men decided to undertake a fresh and serious reading of the Bible.⁴

The fruits of these labours became evident in an extraordinary series of lectures and addresses Barth delivered in the years following 1915. Most striking of all was the book he now began to write: a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. The first edition of Der Römerbrief appeared in 1918, followed by a much revised second edition in 1921. It was this second edition that made Barth famous. What, according to Paul, is Christianity all about? Not, said Barth, the upward human striving toward morality and religion – the answer he would have given in his liberal days. Rather, the apostle proclaims a God who is ‘totally other’ than anything in our imagination or experience. Far from being the reliable guarantor of our values, Paul’s God is the God who smashes idols – especially idols with names like ‘religion’ and ‘Christian culture’. God is not man, Barth said in a thousand variations. God is God. The phrase became something of a motto for his theological revolution.

A Roman Catholic observer of the day said that The Epistle to the Romans ‘fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians’.⁵ The theological establishment saw it partly as an expression of brash youth, partly as an invitation to barbarism; Barth seemed to be rejecting all that was enlightened and progressive in the modern world. But some of his contemporaries responded with enthusiasm. Quite to his surprise, he found himself the leader of a small movement. It included Eduard Thurneysen, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Friedrich Gogarten, and Paul Tillich, along with a host of lesser-known figures. For a few years these theologians formed a loosely-configured school, identified by its flagship journal Zwischen den Zeiten (‘Between the Times’). By the early 1930s it became clear that, while all opposed the older liberalism, they could not agree on a common constructive programme. The group fell into disarray, though Barth and Thurneysen remained lifelong friends and allies.

In 1921 Barth accepted his first teaching post: an honorary professorship in Reformed Theology that had just been established at Göttingen, outside the regular faculty. While the post was proffered on the basis of the Romans commentary, those who expected Barth to continue hurling bombshells would be disappointed. In Göttingen, he devoted himself to mastering the classical tradition of Christian theology – he had not prepared to be an academic – and to working out his approach to doctrinal questions. It was in Göttingen that Barth delivered his first series of lectures in dogmatics.⁶ In 1925 he moved to the University of Münster, where his course on prolegomena – questions concerning revelation and theological method - formed the basis for a Christian Dogmatics in Outline (1927). While this work was planned to be the first in a projected series, Barth never got beyond the first volume. In 1932 he would make a fresh start with his Church Dogmatics.

In Münster, the Protestant faculty was an island in a sea of intellectually and culturally vital Roman Catholicism. This was Barth’s first serious exposure to Catholic thought. In a gesture unusual for the time, he invited the Jesuit theologian Ernst Pryzywara to participate in his seminar.⁷ It was also in Münster that Barth began his long collaboration with Charlotte von Kirschbaum, known to generations of his students as ‘Lollo’. Though content to remain in Barth’s shadow, Kirschbaum made a profound and lasting impact on his thought.⁸ She was the virtual co-author of many of the famous passages in small print, where Barth does his exegesis and engages in debate with other thinkers. She contributed decisively to his account of the male–female relation in his treatment of human nature in CD III/2.

In 1930 Barth moved on to the University of Bonn, where he enjoyed generally good relations with his Protestant colleagues (including Ernst Wolf, who became a close friend and theological companion). Barth’s deepening appreciation for medieval theology led to the publication of Fides Quaerens Intellectum, a study of St Anselm’s proof for the existence of God in his Proslogion.⁹ His work on Anselm may not have occasioned the doctrine of revelation one finds in the Church Dogmatics, as he later implied; he certainly found Anselm a welcome ally in his quest for ‘faith seeking understanding’.

As a Swiss citizen, Barth had refrained from participating in German politics throughout the 1920s; also his academic responsibilities left him little time for such involvement. All this changed when the National Socialist party assumed power in January 1933. Barth was an early critic of the ‘German Christians’, the group that saw the hand of God at work in Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. His famous pamphlet Theological Existence Today! (1933) became a manifesto for the Protestant opposition to Hitler. In 1934 Barth served as chief author of the Barmen Declaration, in which the Confessing Church affirmed the sole lordship of Jesus Christ in opposition to the new idolatry:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine that the church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures, and truths as God’s revelation.¹⁰

Barth’s activities in the Confessing Church spelled the beginning of the end of his time in Germany. In 1935 an oath of loyalty to Hitler became mandatory for all civil servants, including university professors. Barth agreed to sign only if he could add a proviso: ‘I could be loyal to the Führer only within my responsibilities as an Evangelical Christian’.¹¹ But the die had been cast. Barth was banned from speaking, dismissed from his teaching post, and eventually placed on a train headed for Switzerland. His parting exhortation to his students was ‘exegesis, exegesis and yet more exegesis! Keep to the Word, to the scripture that has been given us.’¹²

On returning to Switzerland in June, 1935, Barth accepted a chair in theology at the University of Basel. He remained in close contact with colleagues still active in Germany (including his young friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer), and sought to popularize the cause of the Confessing Church to the outside world. He also resumed work on the Church Dogmatics. In 1938 he was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures on natural theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland – an irony, in that Barth had denounced natural theology as a hopeless project in a 1934 pamphlet directed at Emil Brunner, titled Nein! He justified his acceptance on the grounds that this theology can only benefit from a direct encounter with its chief rival, the Reformers’ doctrine of God’s unmerited grace.¹³

After the war Barth travelled twice to Germany to teach at Bonn, the University from which he had been dismissed in 1935. Standing literally amid the bombed-out ruins, he delivered the lectures that would become Dogmatics in Outline. It is one of the small masterpieces of modern Christian thought.¹⁴ The postwar years also saw Barth actively engaged with the ecumenical movement, both as severe critic and active participant. He was a chief architect of the report ‘Jesus Christ, the Hope of the World’, which set the agenda for the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1954. He also urged the Assembly to address the church’s relation to Israel and the Jews, the first and and most wounding of divisions within God’s people.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Barth became notorious for refusing to join the crusade against Communism – for example, criticizing the NATO decision to re-arm West Germany, and inveighing against Christian support of nuclear weapons. While Barth opposed Communism, he believed Western reaction to it to be overblown, hypocritical, and often counterproductive. (He was equally suspicious of left-wing movements such as his friend Josef Hromádka’s Christian Peace Conference.)¹⁵ He also encouraged Christians in Soviet-bloc countries like Czechoslovakia and East Germany not to become lost in envy for the West, but to seek creative forms of witness in their own societies.¹⁶ He walked a fine line in the political realm, arguing that believers had a duty to be involved in politics even while avoiding rigid ideological commitments.

In 1951 Barth set about writing his doctrine of reconciliation, a massive account of the person and work of Jesus Christ. The work was in some ways a response to the influential theology of Rudolf Bultmann, whom Barth had known since their days as students of Wilhelm Herrmann. He believed that Bultmann’s existentialism was not that different from Herrmann’s stress on human religiosity. Far more satisfying was his dialogue with Roman Catholic theology, a source of fascination for Barth since his time at Münster. He felt better understood by Catholic critics such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Hans Küng than by many of his fellow Protestants. Unfortunately, illness prevented his accepting an invitation to be an observer at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). But he later spent an entire summer mastering the major conciliar documents – these were the days when even Protestant theologians could read Latin – before travelling to Rome for discussions with the Council fathers. The little book Ad Limina Apostolorum offers a delightful, sometimes moving account of this experience.¹⁷

Barth retired from teaching in 1962. That spring he made his first and only journey to the United States, lecturing in San Francisco, Chicago, and Princeton. He took time off to visit some of the major battlefields of the Civil War (he was an avid student of the conflict). These lectures were later published as Evangelical Theology...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Dedication
• 1 The Laughter of the Angels: On Reading Barth
• 2 Speech and Mystery: Revelation
• 3 Lord of the Covenant: God
• 4 Heaven and Earth: Creation
• 5 Into the Far Country: Reconciliation
• 6 Christian Existence: Church ana Ethics
• 7 The Finger of the Baptist: Barth and the Christian Witness
• References
• Index