Karl Barth

History

Life

Barth was born in Basel on 10 May 1886, the eldest child of Fritz Barth, a Reformed minister who later taught New Testament and church history at Bern, where Karl grew up. He studied theology at Bern, Berlin, Tübingen and Marburg under the leading liberal teachers of the day, Adolf von Harnack in Berlin and Wilhelm Herrmann in Marburg among them. After ordination he was a pastor in Geneva (1909–1911) and then for ten years in Safenwil, a village of factory workers in Aargau, where he took up the workers’ education and social rights and was known as the “Red Pastor”. In 1913 he married Nelly Hoffmann; they had five children (Center for Barth Studies, “Biography”).

The Romans commentary made him famous, and in 1921 Göttingen appointed him professor although he had no doctorate. He moved to Münster in 1925 and Bonn in 1930, where he began the Church Dogmatics. In 1924 he met Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who became his assistant and collaborator; from 1929 she lived in the Barth household, a strained arrangement among the three that lasted some 35 years. Letters published by his family and studied by Christiane Tietz in 2017 show it was a love relationship that Barth never resolved (Wikipedia, secondary).

He opposed National Socialism from 1933. His pamphlet Theological Existence Today! (June 1933) warned the church against serving the new regime, and in 1934 he was the main author of the Barmen Declaration. In 1935 he refused to swear the oath of loyalty to Hitler without adding “to the extent that I responsibly am able as a Protestant Christian,” lost his Bonn chair and was expelled from Germany. Basel gave him a chair at once, and he taught there until 1962 (Center for Barth Studies).

After the war he pressed the German church toward confession of guilt (he co-wrote the Darmstadt Declaration of 1947 with Hans Iwand), gave the main address at the first assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, and refused to join the Western anti-communist consensus. From 1954 to 1964 he preached almost only in the Basel prison; the sermons were published as Deliverance to the Captives (Center for Barth Studies, “Preaching in the Basel Prison”). He was on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962, the year he lectured in Chicago and at Princeton. He died in Basel on 10 December 1968 with the Dogmatics still unfinished.

Causes

The break began with a document. In August 1914 Barth read that Harnack and others among his teachers had signed the “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three,” German intellectuals’ public support for the Kaiser’s war policy. He concluded that a theology which could bless that war had confused God with its own culture, and that he could no longer follow their way of reading the Bible and history (Wikipedia, secondary). Weekly preaching in Safenwil sharpened the problem: he and his neighbouring pastor and friend Eduard Thurneysen found that their training had not prepared them to say anything from God to a congregation.

He went back to Paul. The Epistle to the Romans came out in 1919 and, entirely rewritten, in 1922 (Hoskyns translation, Archive.org). The second edition set what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity (preface to the second edition) against every attempt to tie God to human religion, culture or progress. The Princeton center sums up its message with Barth’s line that Scripture gives us “divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God” (Center for Barth Studies, “Major Works”). The Catholic theologian Karl Adam said the first edition fell “like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground” (Wikipedia, secondary). Barth, Thurneysen, Friedrich Gogarten and for a while Emil Brunner and Rudolf Bultmann were grouped as “dialectical theology”; English-speakers later called it neo-orthodoxy. Early lectures from this period are collected in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928, Archive.org).

Influence

Barth is generally counted the most important Protestant theologian since Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of the liberal theology he attacked. The Church Dogmatics (13 part-volumes, 1932–1967, over 9,000 pages; English edition by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, T&T Clark) restored dogmatic theology as a serious discipline in Protestant universities, and its opening with the Trinity reversed Schleiermacher’s ordering (see God and Trinity). His Christ-centred account of election reshaped the Reformed debate about predestination, and his lecture on baptism in 1943 gave paedobaptist churches their strongest internal critic (see Infant Baptism and Believer’s Baptism).

His reach went beyond Protestants. Hans Küng’s dissertation argued that Barth’s doctrine of justification and Trent’s were compatible, and Barth’s preface agreed (see Catholic Justification); he later wrote on the Second Vatican Council in Ad Limina Apostolorum (1967, Archive.org). James Cone wrote his doctorate on Barth’s doctrine of humanity before founding Black Theology. Barmen remains part of the confessional standards of several churches.

Key ideas and contributors

The Word of God. Barth’s theology begins from revelation, not from human religious experience or reason. God’s Word comes in three forms: Jesus Christ, the Word revealed; Scripture, the Word written by the prophets and apostles; and the church’s preaching, the Word proclaimed (Church Dogmatics I/1, 1932). Only the first is revelation itself. Scripture and preaching become God’s Word when God speaks through them, so revelation is never something the church holds and controls (Center for Barth Studies, “Theology”). In I/2 (1938) he treated the Bible as a fully human witness to revelation, written by fallible people whom God uses. This let him accept historical criticism while insisting the Bible must be read as God’s address, the view behind his preaching and his commentaries. It also set him against both liberals, who treated the Bible as a record of human religious experience, and those who identified revelation directly with the biblical text (see Scripture and Inerrancy).

No natural theology. If God is known only where God reveals himself in Christ, there is no second road to God through nature, conscience or philosophy. In the preface to Church Dogmatics I/1 Barth called the Catholic analogia entis “the invention of Antichrist” (see Thomas Aquinas). The 1934 exchange with Brunner, below, was the sharpest form of this claim.

Election in Christ. In Church Dogmatics II/2 (1942) Barth recast the Reformed doctrine of double predestination. Jesus Christ is both the electing God and the elected human. God chose himself for rejection, the destruction of sin and death in Christ’s cross, and chose humanity for salvation and blessing in him. There is no hidden decree behind Christ that sorts individuals into saved and damned. The Princeton center’s summary says Barth “turned ‘double predestination’ into good news” (Center for Barth Studies, “Theology”). In this reading, reconciliation is already real for all in Christ; faith wakes people to what is already true of them. He claimed to be carrying John Calvin’s tradition forward rather than leaving it, but he openly revised Augustine and Calvin on the point (see Calvinism).

The image of God as relationship. In Church Dogmatics III/1 (1945) Barth read Genesis 1:26–28 through its last clause: “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” He argued that the image is not a quality humans possess, such as reason or a soul, but a relation: the capacity for relationship, whose basic form is man and woman together. The same volume sets creation and covenant in relation to each other (overview, secondary; compare Covenant Theology). The Wikipedia article on the image of God (secondary) places Barth and Brunner among the main “relational” interpreters.

Barmen. The Theological Declaration of Barmen, adopted by the Confessing Synod at Wuppertal-Barmen on 29–31 May 1934 by Lutheran, Reformed and United delegates, is the creed of this theology under pressure. Its first thesis reads: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” It rejects as “false doctrine” the idea that the church could acknowledge “other events and powers, figures and truths” as God’s revelation besides this one Word (EKD English text). The target was the “German Christians,” who treated the nation, race and the Führer as a second revelation. Barth mailed the declaration to Hitler personally (Center for Barth Studies).

Other contributors: Eduard Thurneysen, his closest early partner; Charlotte von Kirschbaum, his collaborator on the Dogmatics; Eberhard Busch, his last assistant and biographer (Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 1976, Archive.org); and T. F. Torrance, who brought him into the English-speaking world.

Key controversies

The “No!” to Brunner. Emil Brunner, his fellow Swiss and early ally, had argued since 1929 that the gospel needs a “point of contact” in its hearers. In Nature and Grace (1934) he held that the fall had not erased everything of the image of God: sinful humans remain responsible beings whom God’s Word can address, and God is truly, if dimly, revealed in creation. Barth answered the same year with Nein! (No!), an acerbic reply. He denied any revelation apart from Christ and any human capacity for God; if there is a point of contact, God creates it in the act of revelation (Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology, “Emil Brunner”, secondary). The timing explains the heat: in 1934 the German Christians were using “orders of creation” such as nation and race to justify the Nazi church, and Barth saw natural theology as the door they came through. Both essays appeared in English as Natural Theology (1946, Archive.org). Most later readers think Brunner was treated unfairly, and Catholic and many Protestant theologians still hold that some knowledge of God from nature is biblical (Romans 1:20). Barth’s defenders reply that his point was about where theology starts, not a denial that God made the world good.

Was he a universalist? If all are elect in Christ and Christ bore the rejection of all, it seems to follow that all will be saved. Brunner said so, charging Barth with a soft universalism. Barth refused the label. Eberhard Jüngel records him saying, “I do not teach it, but I also do not teach it.” In Church Dogmatics IV/3 (1959) he wrote that though “theological consistency might seem to lead our thoughts and utterances most clearly in this direction, we must not arrogate to ourselves that which can be given and received only as a free gift.” He left universal salvation as something Christians may hope for and pray for but not claim. Oliver Crisp argues that this answer is incoherent: if all humanity is already elect and atoned for, their destiny cannot also be uncertain (Themelios 29.1, “On Barth’s Denial of Universalism”). G. C. Berkouwer’s The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (1956, Archive.org) pressed a related question from the Dutch Reformed side. Defenders answer, as Joseph Bettis did, that Barth was holding God’s freedom against any system, including a universalist one, and that this is why calling him a universalist misreads him. See Christian Universalism.

Scripture and inerrancy. Conservative Reformed critics charged that Barth’s view of Scripture left the Bible a fallible human book that only sometimes becomes God’s Word. Cornelius Van Til called the dialectical theology The New Modernism (1946, Archive.org) and returned to the attack in Christianity and Barthianism (1962, Archive.org), arguing that Barth’s God is never directly revealed in history and that his theology is liberalism in orthodox words. Martyn Lloyd-Jones made similar criticisms. American evangelicals defending Biblical Inerrancy generally took Barth’s admission of error in the biblical writers as the point where he went wrong. His defenders reply that Barth held Scripture to be the authoritative witness to Christ precisely because it is not under human control, and that inerrancy makes the opposite mistake of identifying revelation with a text.

Barmen’s silence. The declaration says nothing about the Jews; the word does not appear in the EKD text. Critics have long noted that the Confessing Church defended the church’s freedom more boldly than it defended Jewish neighbours, and the Center for Barth Studies notes that Barth himself felt the church neglected the declaration’s political side (Major Works).

Man and woman. The same reading of Genesis that made the image relational also led Barth, in later volumes of the Dogmatics, to describe an ordered relation in which man precedes and woman follows. Old Testament scholars raise a different objection to the exegesis itself: Phyllis Bird ("‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation", Harvard Theological Review, 1981) argued that in Genesis 1 the phrase belongs with the blessing of fertility, not with the definition of the image, and many read the image as a royal role, humans as God’s representatives over creation.

What remains unresolved

Barth’s admirers and critics now argue mostly about how to read him. Evangelicals remain split between those who see him as an ally against liberalism and those who see a liberal in disguise. The questions he forced are still open: whether there is any knowledge of God outside Christ, whether election in Christ can stop short of universal salvation, and whether the image of God is something humans have or something they live in relationship.