Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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which faith in God is grounded. The historical Jesus in a Herrmannian sense is not to be equated with the historical Jesus in historical-critical research because a historian deals only with outer or external history. Therefore, it would be devastating to establish the basis of faith by way of historical-critical investigation.
However, for Herrmann, inner or internal history plays a more significant role for establishing faith. The historian as historian has no access to this history of spiritual effects. The inner life of Jesus is present to us as the objective fact rather than as the facticity of Jesus that the church requires. The inner life of Jesus becomes a part of our own sphere of reality. Moreover, Jesus himself becomes a real power to us when he reveals his inner life to us. What the gospel offers as the guiding principle is the inner life of Jesus himself. Revelation is not doctrine: “The inner life of Jesus is the ‘saving fact.’”39 As Herrmann stated, “historical research cannot confront us with the Savior Jesus Christ. It cannot help us to find the historical Christ whom Christians assert to be their salvation. The inner or spiritual life of Jesus which it is necessary for us to see is never in any sense a minimum of the historically demonstrable; it is a fact ‘in experiencing which one sees his own existence as bound up with the Omnipotent.’”40 The ground of faith must be in Jesus’s inner life in a historical sense that touches human hearts by evoking human trust in God.
Karl Barth’s Earliest Writings
In the autumn of 1908 Barth took up a post as an editorial assistant to the Christliche Welt, which was published under the editorship of Professor Martin Rade. Working as an assistant editor of Die Christliche Welt in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche at Marburg, Barth contributed his article titled “Modern Theology and Work for the Kingdom of God” (“Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 1909).41 It appeared in a section of “theses and antitheses” in the Zeitschrift. (Barth’s article met opposition from two professors of practical theology, Ernst Christian Achelis at Marburg and Paul Drews at Halle.42) Herein Barth observed that his colleagues who were trained under the influence of liberal theology at Marburg and Heidelberg experienced difficulties in the beginning of parish ministry compared with those trained under a more conservative and orthodox influence at Halle and Greifswald. Barth described the reason for this difficulty by way of religious individualism and historical relativism. For Barth, conservative students drew upon authoritative doctrine as normative statements of faith, but modern theological students had no such normative statements of faith. Liberal theology stood for theory while a work for God’s kingdom stands for praxis in the form of the pastorate. In Barth’s view, liberal theology stood in contrast with the praxis of God’s kingdom. Two decisive elements (religious individualism and historical relativism), which Barth detected as the essence of the modern liberal theology, became obstacles when students trained in liberal theology encountered church praxis.43
Both the individualism of religion and the relativism of history homogenize and undermine the claim to revealed truth, whereas the concept of God’s kingdom and its praxis make a claim for the universal validity of revelation. In the framework of liberal theology, divine revelation is no longer at the center because of human claims for the truth as an individual center. Religion is grounded on personal rather than universal validity. As far as the Christian faith does not formulate the universal, responsible, and theological axiom, it strives to explore the content of the truth in terms of the personal ground of religion. Therefore the religious experience comes to the fore, and the relativity of all human knowledge precedes Christian faith, which is grounded in divine revelation.
From this basic principle of liberal theology, Barth anticipated the consequences of pluralism emerging out of the concept of Christian faith in that there takes place a subjective and religious trustfulness. All things are relative. Barth in this regard stood before the problem of value-relativism. The university-educated student of modern theology, equipped with religious individualism and historical relativism, faced a disadvantage in the ministry compared with a student of the more conservative school. The dilemma of theological value-relativism sharpened itself in regard to the problem of church praxis and its theological legitimation.
If the witness of all religious experience is accepted as the criterion of Christian discourse on God, theology must abandon an objectively true and obliging knowledge of God and claims to the truth of universality. How is it possible to come to a responsible church action in the Christian community with respect to forms and contents of various religious experiences? Would every church action and every action of religious trustfulness become legitimate in the same way on the basis of religious individualism and historical relativism? The two primary characteristics on which liberal theology is based suggest an inevitable tension between theory and praxis. In the end, liberal theology makes theologians incapable of praxis.
According to Barth, liberal theology is incapable of creating a bridge between theory and praxis. Because of its confrontation with modern science and modern culture-consciousness, liberal theology neglects the churchly character of theology.44 In order to make claims for universality in the church, liberal theology needs to be actualized in the context of church praxis and Christian faith. To overcome the limitation and dilemma of liberal theology, that is, the lack of connection between theory and praxis, Barth proposed an idea of coexistence between a more theoretical way of faith and the more practical way of faith. What he noticed in liberal theology was a problem of value-relativism and a problem of the relation between theology and praxis. This perspective remains significant for the development of Barth’s theological work.45
In his response to the aforementioned two critics of his article, Achelis and Drews, Barth regarded religious individualism to be bound to Jesus Christ as its norm and authority. On the question of how Christ is present to us, Barth found the true objectivity in Christ as the objectivity and norm in Christian religious experience. This is not at human disposal. The presence of Christ lies in “affection,” in the sense of Schleiermacher’s term. Christ is known in the depths of human consciousness: “The normative, objective, eternal lies only in the ‘affection’ of this inner experience. Everything which is set forth in thoughts and words belongs itself once again to the relativizing stream of history and is, as that which passes away, only a parable.”46
Barth was ordained in the Reformed Church in Berne in 1908. In mid-August 1909, Barth left Marburg to begin to work as an associate pastor at the German–speaking congregation of the église nationale in Geneva. In Geneva his teaching and preaching reflected his learning from Marburg and from the circle of the Chrstliche Welt. His attempt was “to foist all that historicism and individualism on the people in Geneva.”47 In his essay “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte” (“The Christian Faith and History,” published in 1912),48 which was delivered to a gathering of pastors at Neuchatel on October 5, 1910, Barth made continuous attempts to develop a theoretical framework for the justification of the praxis of God’s kingdom. What was at stake for Christian theology at that time was the problem of the relation of faith and history. It constituted “the indispensable presupposition and theoretical basis” for pastoral praxis. 49
Faith presupposes the revelation of God in history, but a historical investigation rejects God’s historical interventions by showing the impossibility of verifying revelation and miracle in history. Therefore, God disappears from history. The work of historians of religion serves as a “profane propaedeutic”50 for theological work by clearing