Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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alienated from the religious socialists. Barth was not regarded as a committed supporter of either Kutter or Ragaz. In coming to terms with Kutter, however, Barth was concerned more about holding for a period of tranquil growth than having time for organized activities. In addition, there occurred an emotional conflict between Ragaz and Barth. Barth wrote a review of Blumhradt’s Hausandachten (House Prayer) in an issue of Neue Wege with the title “Wait for the Kingdom of God.” In his review Barth expressed his critique of religious socialists with the following words: “Our dialectic has reached a dead end, and if we want to be healthy and strong we must begin all over again, not with our own actions, but quietly ‘waiting’ for God’s action.” Ragaz refused to publish it, regarding it as quietistic. This episode severed any contact between Barth and Ragaz. Barth mused, “Ragaz and I roared past one another like two express trains: he went out of the church, I went in.”235 Although Barth was alienated from religious socialism, he still served as a delegate to the SPS Party Congress in Bern (June 8, 1917).
God as the New World in the Bible
In “The Righteousness of God” (“Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes” [1916]), which was given in the Town Church of Aarau in January 1916, Barth elaborated on the social question in light of God’s righteousness. Herein we see Barth’s contrast between God’s righteousness and human righteousness. The former is based on Christ’s way, while the latter depends on the Tower of Babel. What is the deepest and surest fact of life for Barth is that God is righteous.236 Human effort to do righteousness would lead to human construction of the Tower of Babel. Eritis sicut Deus (“You will be like God” [Gen 3:5]) would sound in our attempt at taking divine righteousness under our own management.237 “Apart from God’s righteousness, all clever newspaper articles and well-attended conventions are completely insignificant,” because “the primary matter is a very decided Yes or No to a whole new world of life.”238 In critically dealing with the righteousness of the state and religious righteousness, Barth determines that the righteousness of the state will fail in touching “the inner character of world-will at any point.”239 The state is dominated by this will and the war stands as a striking illustration. Likewise, Christianity as a religion does its job in its uninterrupted way, “in the midst of capitalism, prostitution, the housing problem, alcoholism, tax evasion, and militarism”240 Barth’s critique of Christianity as a religion sounds so hostile because it is regarded as a comforting illusion and a self-deception. It is a product of a human attitude of “as if,” full of pride and despair that come from a Tower of Babel.241
However, in wartime, God’s righteousness becomes a problem and an issue for discussion. Where the human Tower of Babel falls to pieces we look for righteousness without God and a god without God and against God. However, such a god is not God, and is not righteous. “The god to whom we have built the tower of Babel is not God.”242 This god is a dead idol. According to Barth, the righteousness of God can be found only in a wholly other way. God’s will is not a continuation of our own, but God approaches us “as a Wholly Other . . . not a reformation but a re-creation and re-growth.”243 In the presence of God’s righteousness what is needed from us is humility and childlike joyfulness, which are called faith in the biblical context. “Where faith is in the midst of the old world of war and money and death, there is born a new spirit out of which grows a new world, the world of the righteousness of God.”244 The righteousness of God becomes our possession and our great hope in that the way of Christ as “the inner way of simple faith” shows us the love of God.245
In his article “The Strange New World within the Bible” (“Die neue Welt in der Bibel”), which was delivered in the church at Lentwil in the autumn of 1916, Barth finds the Bible to be the canon of theological discourse on God, humans, and the world. In other words, the development of Barth’s theology results from the discovery of the new world in the Bible. The Bible is a witness to the new world in which Barth finds the being of God extra nos and speaks of the transcendence of God in a theologically positive way. Whoever wants to interpret the Bible must speak of the new world in it. Barth materializes concepts such as the absolute and the new from the standpoint of God in a biblical-theological manner. In the biblical discourse on the new world, Barth defines the Jenseits of the existing society as knowledge of God. The Bible qualifies a contrast between the human/relative and the absolute/divine as a verifiable position. The standpoint of God, which is to be shown in the Bible, is not the image of the individual-relative standpoint of humans, but the example toward which an explicit and univocal action of human being must orient itself.
Barth’s discovery of the Bible enables him not only to make progress in his theological thought but also to deepen his political thought. In these two articles we see how the Bible for Barth begins to break itself out of the encapsulation of modern, bourgeois thought-forms and opens anew knowledge of God beyond churchly self-understanding, and enters into dispute with social idols.246 As Thurneysen states, from the message of the biblical witness Barth saw God’s intervention as the new world in the Bible in the midst of war and revolution.247
Given that Barth understood his lecture activity in connection with his parish work, we notice that Barth arranged the manuscript of a funeral sermon on Safenwil worker Arnold Hunzinker under his “Socialist Speeches.” In other words, for Barth, party and parish work belong together. His funeral sermon was published in the New Free Aargauer (on Monday, September 3, 1917), which was the official publication organ of the Aargau Social Democratic Party and of the cartel of workers’ unions. This sermon interpreted the socialist understanding of death and resurrection in the workers’ particular struggle against capitalism, in light of Barth’s theological subject matter. Here Barth accepted and applied the interpretation without contradiction.
One lives on in one’s matter—in the worker’s matter—and in the end the mourning congregation is requested to “Take care that you understand and grasp the living that was in our dead comrade, and let go of the transitory, human affairs, that lies now over there. Take care of it, you of his sons and daughters, you of his colleagues and comrades, all of you that have known him—and not known him! Then it does not go backwards from this grave into human sadness and desolation, but forwards to new greater victories of life.248
Barth portrayed Arnold Hunziker as an exemplary worker, i.e., as unselfish socialist, not directed by egoistical interest, who has understood “that one cannot live just only for oneself and also only for one’s family, that there is a higher duty, which nowadays unswervingly commands the workers to hold together and to vouch for each other.” 249 Barth saw divine effectiveness in the life of the worker Arnold Hunziker and all the workers. On the eve of Swiss general strike (from November 12 to 14, 1918), Barth wrote to Thurneysen: “It seems to me that we come just too late with our bit of insight into the world of the New Testament. . . . if only we had been converted to the Bible earlier so that we would now have solid ground under our feet! One broods alternately over the newspaper and the New Testament and actually sees fearfully little of the organic connection between the two worlds concerning which one should now be able to give a clear and powerful witness.”250
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