Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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clash between the Word of the transcendent Creator God, and the word of man which he seeks to project into God out of the depths of his own self-consciousness. It is the Word of God directed to man that brings a message that is utterly new, and at the same time reveals the nature of man as the creature directly addressed by God and summoned within his historical existence to live his life not out of himself but out of God.
The other discovery was the infinite love and compassion of God, who in spite of his infinite transcendence and distance, condescends to man in order to share his deepest agony and hurt, and to heal and reconcile him and restore him to the Father. The Word of God is certainly the Word of judgement, that searches us out to the roots of our being, and pierces through all artificiality, and thwarts every attempt on man’s part to make himself out to be divine or to deck himself out in divine clothing. But it is above all a Word of reconciliation—and a mighty victorious Word at that, the Word of the all-conquering love of God that will not be put off, but that insists on achieving its end. For that very reason it is a Word with a total claim upon the whole of man’s existence, and one that will not allow any part of it to elude God’s creative and redeeming purpose. Far from being an abstract Word, it is the Word that strikes into the depths of human existence, that encounters man in the midst of his actuality, and approaches him as the concrete act of God in human history.
Barth took both these two poles of his discovery with deep seriousness, and bent all his energies and talents to bring the Word as he heard it to bear directly upon the life and thought of his people as he understood them. It inevitably meant a clash with the idealistic conceptions of the social democrats—not that he was any the less concerned with their social passion, but that he could not go with them in identifying the Kingdom of Christ with the social order of life for which they struggled. This very alliance of his revealed all the more intensely the deep malaise of the Church, its assimilation of the Gospel to the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and showed him that the message of the Gospel could only be brought to bear upon man in that condition when a hiatus was torn between the Gospel and culture, when God could be heard in his divine Word in such a way that it did not imperceptibly become accommodated to a word that man had already heard and could just as easily tell to himself.
Out of this pastorate at Safenwil came Barth’s notorious Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, in two editions, one following hard on the heels of the other. It was designed to bring the Word of God heard through the mighty voice of St Paul home to the Church in such a way that it was allowed to storm its way through the barriers and ramparts built up against it by the self-assertion of man clothed in the garb of historic Christianity. It was an attempt to wrestle with the Gospel of the New Testament in such a way that the walls of history that separated its writing from the present became transparent and the Gospel shone through directly in its uninhibited and apocalyptic force upon Church and world, and above all upon civilized, cultured, religious man.
The first edition aroused such attention that it brought—to his utter surprise—the call to the chair of Reformed theology in Göttingen, which he could not avoid, much as he would have liked, but meantime he had been rewriting his Commentary, which he completed just as he left for Göttingen. It was with the publication of this second edition that the storm broke, for the commentary was an all-out assault upon Neo-Protestant Christianity and Theology.
It succeeded far beyond Barth’s expectations, for it created, or rather was the means of creating in God’s hands, the seismic disturbance that changed the whole course of modern theology, and made it face as never before since the Reformation the basic message of the Bible. From beginning to end it challenged theology to consider the sheer Godness of God and the downright humanity of man. Therefore it penetrated down to the foundations of modern religion and theology, laid bare its accommodation to the pantheistic and monistic background of romantic-idealistic philosophy and culture, and sought to cut the strings of that connexion wherever it found it in every shape and form, in order to make it possible to think cleanly and soberly of God in a way appropriate to God, and of man in a way appropriate to his nature as man and child of God. It had to assert, therefore, the infinite qualitative distance between God and man, the sheer transcendence of the Word of God addressed to man plumb down from above, the absolute newness of grace, and therefore the judgement and crisis that it brought to all human religion.
The Commentary created upheaval for Barth as well as for his contemporaries—and that was necessary, for he, too, needed still to be uprooted radically and replanted by the Word of God. Much of the criticism he let loose bounced back upon him, and he was not slow to see its relevance to his own position, for he did not flinch to wield the same sword against himself. But in the midst of the upheaval and ferment, he was able to see the way ahead, and to start out upon the work of clearing the ground that occupied the next ten years, of ploughing and sowing, and reaping and ploughing again. And all the time the academic debate was being matched by engagement with the developing crisis in Germany, in the struggle of a resurgent naturalism, empowered by natural theology, against the Gospel which flung the Church up against the wall, where it had to learn again the meaning of the majesty and uniqueness of God: ‘I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me’, and also the majesty and uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the Son of God: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’
It was during these ten years that the essays and lectures published in this volume, Theology and Church, were written and delivered. In them we can see how Barth’s mind moved as he set out from the second edition of the Romans to travel the road toward his life-work, the construction of the Church Dogmatics, in which evangelical and reformed theology of the Word is given its most massive and formidable expression, not only over against the Church of Rome, but within the context of the growth and development of all theology in ancient and modern times, in the East as well as in the West. Whether or not contemporary theology agrees with Barth, it cannot avoid the questions he has raised, or avoid dealing with the situation he has created. If advance is to be made, it will not be by going round him, but only by going through him and beyond—and yet since Barth’s theology is so deeply integrated with the whole history of dogma, any attempt to go through and beyond him must ask whether it may not be trying to leave the Christian Church behind. It may well be that Barth’s ultimate influence upon the whole Church will be comparable with that of Athanasius.
The purpose of this introduction is not to expound the positive content of Barth’s mature theology, but to reveal the context in which it is to be understood, to show the direction in which it has moved, and to indicate the great concerns in connexion with which it has been elaborated. In order to do that we shall have to consider the movement of his thought through the period covered by this volume up to the point where, in 1931, he made his final orientation before settling down to the writing of his Church Dogmatics. But to map out the road he has travelled and to make clear the difficulties he had to overcome, as well as to show the relevance of his theology for the whole of modern life and thought, we shall consider his theology in relation to Culture, to the positive task of the Church in proclaiming the Word of God, and then the relation, as Barth sees it, between theology and philosophy, and between theology and science.
1. Theology and Culture
Barth was nurtured in the positive evangelical theology of the Reformed Church, and from end to end his thought continues to reveal the masterful influence of Calvin upon him, and from behind Calvin, the influence of Augustine, the two greatest ‘idealist’ theologians, as he has called them, in the history of the Church. And yet, as we shall see, Barth’s own theology is basically realist.
Early in his University training Barth came under the spell of Kant and Schleiermacher, and began to find congenial the theological movements which in the first decades of this century fell within the orbit of their influence. But in Germany Barth had to come to terms with the teaching and influence of Luther and Aquinas—with Luther because of the great revival of Luther studies and the dominating influence of the Lutheran Church; and with Aquinas because he had to think his way through the theology of the Reformation over against Roman and Thomist theology. There can be no doubt that Kant, Schleiermacher, Luther, and Aquinas—with a strong dash of Kierkegaard—constantly came into his reckoning, not only because of their exposition of ethics and