Theological Existence To-Day!. Karl Barth
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concern can be more pressing, no hope more moving than the concern and hope of our ministry. No friend can be dearer than one who helps us in this ministry, no foe more hateful than he that wants to hinder us in this ministry.
We are agreed about this too, that alongside of this first business, as the meaning of our labour and our rest, our diligence and relaxation, our love and our scorn, we brook no second as a rival. But we regard every second or third thing that may and should incite us as included and taken up in this first concern, and condemned or blessed thereby. On these things we agree or we are not preachers and teachers of the Church. And this is what is meant by what we term our “Theological existence,” viz. that in the midst of our life in other aspects, as, say, men, fathers and sons, as Germans, as citizens, thinkers, as having hearts ever in unrest, etc., the Word of God may be what it simply is, and only can be to us, and taxes our powers, particularly as preachers and teachers, to the full as the Word alone can and must do.
THE MINISTER’S TEMPTATION TO-DAY
To-day we can lose our existence as theologians and teachers, which consists in our attachment to God’s Word and plying our calling particularly to the ministry of the Word. To put it in other words, to-day, more than ever, we can neglect to affirm our life’s calling. Or, better expressed still, it is possible for us to find that our theological life will no longer be allowed to us, as it ought to be granted us anew every day, just because we forget to pray and reach out for it, and now to-day, more than ever, we should do our part so that it may be given to us. For the mighty temptation of this age, which appears in every shape possible, is that we no longer appreciate the intensity and exclusiveness of the demand which the Divine Word makes as such when looking at the force of other demands: so that in our anxiety in face of existing dangers we no longer put our whole trust in the authority of God’s Word, but we think we ought to come to its aid with all sorts of contrivances, and we thus throw quite aside our confidence in the Word’s power to triumph. That is to say, we think ourselves capable of facing, solving and moulding definite problems better from some other source than that from and by means of God’s Word. By doing this we show that we do not esteem God to be a working factor in anything as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. That our hearts are thus divided between God’s Word and all other sorts of things which, avowedly or tacitly, we invest with Divine glory. By so doing we demonstrate that our hearts are not in contact with God’s Word. And this means that under the stormy assault of “principalities, powers, and rulers of this world’s darkness,” we seek for God elsewhere than in His Word, and seek His Word somewhere else than in Jesus Christ, and seek Jesus Christ elsewhere than in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. And so we become as those who do not seek for God at all And all this, though the very opposite is what is agreed upon within the Church!
How, then, ought we to be in the Church? The special form of this temptation to us, the Church’s preachers and teachers is, that possibly and actually there can be something like rivalry between our vocation within the Church and this or that other calling which is different: in such a way that we feel driven and forced to let this or that different calling be played off against or parallel with our Church vocation, or let that other interpret and shape our proper Church vocation. That we see ourselves and the men to whom we are appointed standing and falling under utterly different conditions from the condition that rightly directs our ministry. So that the secondary or the third thing, which we well know ought to be absorbed in the first concern, as an operative factor, comes to be first, coincides with it, and finally steps into the place of the first. And thereby, the really first concern, and our particular vocation, become hopelessly lost. Although we, as preachers and teachers within the Church, in a quite different sense were in accord! We are then no longer preachers and teachers of the Church; we are politicians, and Church politicians at that! It is no disgrace to be a politician or even a Church politician; it holds a special esteem: but it is something else to be a theologian. It can always denote damage to the theologian’s existence as such, when he becomes a politician or a Church politician. To-day this seems to be pre-eminently the case. And therefore it is time to say, that under no circumstances should we, as theologians, forsake our theological existence and exchange our rights as “first-born” for “a mess of pottage.” Or, said positively, that now, one and all, within the Church as she has borne us by means of the Word, and within the incomparable sphere of our vocation we must abide, or (if we have left it) turn back into the Church and into the sphere of our vocation, at all costs, by putting all regards and concerns behind.
THE PROBLEMS DISCUSSED
While I am writing this on the eve of June 25th, 1933, I will try to illustrate what I mean by taking as examples three of the problems that occupy us to-day. It happens quite fortunately that these problems, severally and collectively, deal preeminently with the decisions reached to-day, viz. the establishment of a State-Commissioner for the Church, and his first orders, have entered upon a quite different stage. My remarks may not be actually “to the situation,” i.e. the attendant circumstances, but “to the business,” ad rem. I may perhaps be better understood according to the problem by which I illustrate my thesis. The problem, certainly, has not been solved by those decisions which, however, in its form hitherto has, so to speak, become an historical problem.
I—THE CRIES FOR CHURCH REFORM
When the political movement of this year had already passed beyond the first decisive steps of its triumph, there was taken up from different quarters at once, the cry that the German Evangelical Church must now proceed to a far-reaching new-ordering of its external relationships. Corresponding advances have been made which were accompanied by a varied taking part by theologians and Church members in speeches and counter-speeches. The initiative and leading in this new ordering, judging from what has happened to-day, was taken out of the Church’s control. In order to discuss and analyse the situation now arisen, it is necessary to raise the question: “How did those outcries for reform of the Church comport with legitimacy, particularly at that time?”
This statement may be ventured, that even a reform of the Church, chiefly affecting its external aspect, ought to spring from the internal requirement of the Church’s life itself: it ought to issue from obedience to the Word of God, or else it is no reform of the Church. In any case, we shall have to admit, that all of us who have any share in the life of the Church, were well aware of the most serious need for improving so many Church relationships, and aware too, of the projects in the air everywhere from of old and from recent times. But still, at the commencement of this remarkable year we had no inkling of such an acute necessity for proceeding to action. That is to say, on the one hand, aware of the existence of problems and requirements of Church life which had been so burning, and on the other hand, aware of the existence on the spot of the deep insights, and of the great forces, which would seem to have made this undertaking now to be our own responsibility, and one full of hope. At that time, at any rate, we did not think of or know of any command to act in this way issuing as God’s Word to us. If a change has come over what existed in the early part of the year, and since, how did it happen?
The proceedings since then, as regards the so-called Church of the Reich and what is connected therewith, have neither been settled speedily, nor been carried through with purpose, decision and unanimity, nor (as this has been glaringly illustrated by the event of to-day, June 24th) has it been very successful. If, on account of a burning necessity, and consequently with adequate force, a Reform of the Church had been undertaken, a Reform under the constraint of the Word of God, then would it not have worn a different look, in its development during the past few months? I might attribute this defect to the fact that it was not so: not at all due to the personalities of the Churchmen who took part therein! But let it also not be said too hurriedly, that in the Evangelical Church, as a “Church under the Cross,” that it is impossible for it to be otherwise than obviously human, all-too-human, even in its palmiest ages, and that, in consequence, the manifest weakness of what has been done up till now, may be regarded, so to speak, as a normal phenomenon. The real Church under the Cross is the Church of the Holy Ghost whose activities must still in themselves, amid all the feebleness and foolishness of men, possess something profoundly gladdening and peaceful, something Sabbatical, reverential. An invisible yet subduing light never really altogether departs from the spiritual decisions of the Church—the light of a good conscience and