Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Theologians for a Post-Christian World

Wolf Krötke, Burgess, John P., John P. Burgess

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780801098178
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493416790
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Wolf Krötke, a foremost interpreter of the theologies of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, demonstrates the continuing significance of these two theologians for Christian faith and life. This book enables readers to look with fresh eyes at the theologies of Barth and Bonhoeffer and offers new insights for reading the history of modern theology. It also helps churches see how they can be creative minorities in societies that have forgotten God. Translated by a senior American scholar of Christian theology, this is the first major translation of Krötke's work in the English language. The book includes a foreword by George Hunsinger.

Part 1:
Karl Barth

1
Karl Barth as Theological Conversation Partner

Personal Experiences between East and West, and the Challenges of Barth’s Theology

1. Beginning with the Beginning

In the last century, the Swiss thinker Karl Barth, more than any other theologian, determined the course of the German churches. His insights shaped the theological landscape of the universities and the church. His name is associated with the so-called dialectical theology that erupted after the First World War and framed the theological debates of the 1920s. His influence in Germany as professor of systematic theology in Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn made him the leading figure of the Confessing Church, which emerged at the beginning of the 1930s to resist the penetration of the German Christians into the Evangelical Church. He was the principal author of the Theological Declaration of Barmen, which today belongs to the confessional foundations of the Reformed and United Churches in Germany. He also issued an almost singular call for a theologically based political resistance against the Nazi regime, a resistance for which he tirelessly appealed as a “Swiss voice” from Basel after he was removed from his professorship in Bonn in 1934.1 During the debates of the 1950s about a nuclear armament of West Germany, his name stood for a decisive no. He was no less controversial politically when he refused to join the anticommunist propaganda of the “West” against the “East”—a refusal that for many in his homeland gave him the reputation of being a “communist” (whatever that meant). His disagreements with Rudolf Bultmann’s program of “demythologization” of the New Testament determined the theological battle lines in theology and the church into the 1960s. He made himself unpopular in the churches again toward the end of his life when he rejected infant baptism, calling it “profoundly irregular” (CD IV/4, 194).

All that and more is now history since Barth’s death in 1968. The same is true of the works that he left behind: his monumental thirteen-volume Church Dogmatics and the writings, sermons, letters, and conversations that are still being collected into the Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), already at volume 47. On my bookshelves, Barth takes up more than twelve feet. Much is demanded of anyone who would know his theology. It is not only a matter of understanding the different era in which it arose but also of getting used to Barth’s language and style of thinking. It is a language that feels its way ahead, and it is a self-reflexive thinking that moves, so to speak, in spirals, always taking up its insights anew to develop them and give them greater precision and nuance. We see this style of thought and language even in his manuscripts. They are a kind of running text almost without paragraphs, which were added only later at the time of printing. The writing in the first drafts looks like a gushing stream, yet one into which Barth regularly introduces obstacles and detours that slow it down. “We must now drill down deeper” is one of the expressions that regularly occurs in the Church Dogmatics when Barth introduces a new line of thought. This dogmatics assumes an almost epic breadth. You have to take time when you read Barth. His texts do not lend themselves to the technique so popular today in fast-paced bachelor’s and master’s programs: to make a couple of pages available as a handout. No, it is not easy for young people to acquire Barth as a conversation partner through his texts.

Moreover, those who do step into the stream of Barth’s thinking face the danger of simply swimming along and forgetting to “drill down deeper.” That has to do with the kerygmatic, proclamatory, even confessional character of his language. The Church Dogmatics aspires to be a critical examination of the proclamation and practice of the church, but it also makes a certain kind of proclamation and calls for a certain way of life. Especially at a time in which the very existence or nonexistence of the church was at stake, as was the case under National Socialism, the Church Dogmatics lifted up the binding character of particular theological insights that help the church truly be the church of Jesus Christ. As a result, here and there in the German regional churches after 1945, Barth’s theology became a sort of “house theology” or “court theology,” resulting in the phenomenon of Barthianism. But in this case Barth was no longer a conversation partner but rather the head of a theological school whose pupils merely repeated his insights. That was not at all the intention of the man from Basel. Asked what he thought of the “Barthians,” he answered, “I myself have never been a Barthian.”2 He wished to be a conversation partner for theology and the church who, like John the Baptist with his long, outstretched index finger in the Isenheim Altarpiece, would again and again point the church to the foundational event that should orient its life. Barth did not intend to establish the “right” theological principles or systems. What was needed, he believed, was a shared theological and ecclesial understanding of the event that is in every respect their very source. Not religion as the practice of human piety, not ritual, not the hand of God in history, not ethics with its values, and certainly not politics—while each of these has its rightful place, none of them can guarantee the church’s life or determine the church’s tasks. Instead, what is decisive is the event of the coming of God into human history, an event that occurs in the man Jesus Christ and that remains an event by virtue of God’s Word and Spirit. Barth liked to say that the church and theology have the task “to begin anew at the beginning” “every hour.”3 They must not allow this beginning to be undermined or halted by any sort of “-ism,” including “Barthianism.”

2. A Theology of Partnership between God and Humans

Barth understood himself as a theologian who always began again at the beginning, and it is for this reason that his Dogmatics became so thick. In the light of the event of God’s coming, he constantly rethought what he had said earlier, corrected inadequacies, paid attention to what he had neglected, and reexamined what he had rejected, seeking the best from it. Because I was not at all aware of Barth’s ecclesial and political significance when I began reading the Church Dogmatics as a young man, I could not relate to him in any other way than as a conversation partner. He had worked in an extraordinarily intensive way on what the centrality of the event of Jesus Christ means for the church, society, and indeed for one’s own life.

I remember rather clearly the circumstances in which that occurred. It was the fall of 1961 and the beginning of 1962. I lived as a student in a tiny room on the third floor of the Berlin Sprachenkonvikt in the Borsigstrasse, the quasi-legal seminary of the Berlin-Brandenburg Regional Church. Through my window I could look right across the Gartenstrasse to the newly constructed Berlin Wall. At night it was illuminated, and from the East thundered the so-called sound cannons of Verdi’s Nabucco, to which the West answered with the freedom chorus from Beethoven’s Fidelio. Or maybe it was the other way around; I no longer remember so exactly. But by the light of a weak lamp that ruined my eyes, I read the theological anthropology of the Church Dogmatics III/2. My teacher, Eberhard Jüngel, who was almost as young as I, had just written an essay that many today still regard as the best treatment of Barth’s anthropology but that I as a beginner in theology could not quite grasp.4 So, I grabbed the “primary text” and stepped into its stream of reflection until morning dawned and the “sound cannons” fell silent. That text opened for me new perspectives about us humans that had never come into my head before, and it made my heart feel light. As I looked at the Wall, what fascinated me was Barth’s foundational commitment to the freedom of human beings before God and his sensitivity to reality, which was tempered by a fine sense of humor when he described what we do with this freedom.

Since then, Barth has remained a conversation partner with me on my theological path, although I never got to know him personally. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday he offered me a fellowship to study with him in Basel, but I was unable to accept it because the East German authorities denied me an exit visa. That had to do with the fact that at the beginning of my theological studies in Leipzig I had been sentenced to two years in prison for “agitation and antigovernment propaganda.” As a result, I was expelled from the socialist university, and the East German powers could in no way entertain a period of study for me in the “capitalistic world abroad.” So, I was never able to have more than the kind of conversation that anyone can have by encountering a person through a text that expresses that person’s thoughts and intentions and perhaps even who that person was. I cannot deny that I hold the lifework of this theologian in high regard. For what at first glance sounds so self-evident—namely, that Christian theology is beholden in every respect to the central event of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ—proves not to be so self-evident in view of the history of theology and the church and all the less in view of the kind of theology that is done today not only in the universities but also elsewhere. At the beginning of the 1930s, Karl Barth described his decision for a Christocentric theology with these words: “I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian church in the world, has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ—of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us.”5

At that time Barth had surely not yet anticipated what this insight would mean for Christian theology or for what would be asked of the church. All of Christian theology, beginning with the early church to the churches of the Reformation (and all the more so for the churches and theologies affected by the European Enlightenment and modernity), has depended on arguments from reason and science, from religious and secular experience, to secure Christian faith apart from Jesus Christ. Barth’s theology proceeds without that sort of safety net. It breathes with the trust that God’s coming into the world secures and orients everything that moves and affects humans in heaven and on earth.

As a result, the Church Dogmatics transforms and reconceives almost every dogmatic locus in a way that is doubtlessly unique in the whole history of theology. God in the eternal beginning of all of his ways and works; the cosmos and humanity and humanity’s ways; and the end of this earthly world and death itself—all this is placed in the light of the God who encounters us in Jesus Christ, and is understood in terms of the history of God’s grace with humanity. Barth presents the center of this history in his doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV/1–4), which is a masterpiece just from an architectural point of view. In content, it develops the relationship between God and humanity as the history of a partnership in which the God who is friendly to humans comes among us and makes us capable of being his free partners and of leading lives that deserve to be called truly human.

Barth had begun his theological journey with an interpretation of the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In response to a church that had reduced God to a religious entity within this world, Barth strongly and sharply impressed upon the church the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and man.6 But in the Church Dogmatics, by contrast, he tirelessly reflects on the immeasurable riches that the church and humans receive because God and humanity are together—a togetherness for which the name Jesus Christ stands. Barth’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Translator’s Preface
• Permissions
• Part 1: Karl Barth
• Part 2: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Appendix
• Index
• Back Cover