WHO IS KARL BARTH?
Crucifixion, by Matthias Grunewald. Public domain.
They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. ‘Under judgment’ is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face.
– C. S. Lewis, in Yours, Jack, pp. 61-62
I have always read C. S. Lewis’ description of Barthians at Oxford with a mixture of joy and chagrin. There is, I admit, much in it that I recognize about why I find Barth’s work such a gift to the Church and to me in my own faith. Simply put, I find it invigorating and hope-filled in a way that draws me closer to God in love and praise. I love Barth’s realism about human nature as well as his wonder at God’s active work for our salvation. But there is also much in Lewis’ anecdote that is uncomfortably accurate about why some people find Barth (and Barth’s readers they may have met) off-putting. In this brief introduction, I hope that I can convince you that some of Lewis’ account is unfair, and that Barth deserves a closer look even if you never intend to become “a Barthian,” a type of person that not coincidentally Barth himself would have despised!
All theology comes from somewhere. Trained in the German liberal tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Barth was grounded in the combination of historical-critical interpretation of Scripture, confidence about the human capacity to reason our way towards God, and skepticism about the miraculous. In his book What is Christianity? for example, Barth’s teacher Adolf von Harnack wrote of the need to separate and preserve what he called the “kernel” of the Christian faith from a husk that he saw as primitive, superstitious, and unscientific. For Harnack, the kernel of Christianity was a feeling of dependence on the Fatherhood of God and a love of one’s neighbors, especially the neighbors closest to us.
At the outbreak of World War I, Barth discovered the depths to which the approach represented by Harnack and his other professors was intellectually and morally bankrupt. Harnack, along with 96 other leading German intellectuals, signed a manifesto enthusiastically supporting Germany’s war project. He saw how easily an appeal to “brotherhood” unmoored from the truth of cross and resurrection and an approach to Scripture that placed scholarship in judgment over the Word led to a religion of the nation. In Harnack’s What Is Christianity, he argued that the Christianity of the Reformation uniquely “display[ed] the German – German man and German history.” (1) (2) It was in this context that Harnack argued for a Protestantism in which “the Christian sense of brotherhood must give practical proof of itself” in “the social province.” (3) A vague sense of experiential connection to God as Father is all too easy to project onto a political leader, whether Kaiser or Fuhrer. A message of self-sacrificing brotherhood among one’s nearest neighbors can easily become a call to arms. As a young pastor in the small Swiss town of Safenwil, Barth realized that he had to begin again. In conversation with his friend Edward Thurneysen, he developed the ideas that would become his epoch-making commentary on Romans and lead to the rest of his intellectual project.
Let’s look at three aspects of that project, which will give you a taste of Barth’s thought. First, when we as Christians say “God,” we mean the Triune God - Father Son and Holy Spirit - who acts in loving freedom. For Barth, the word “God” refers precisely to the Trinity, and there is no other God-concept or idea that stands behind the Triune God revealed in Scripture and confessed in the Creeds. In other words, God cannot be known apart from this biblical revelation, and hence cannot be described or controlled by any other ideology – including German militarism. In addition, Barth’s insistence on God’s action stands in contrast to modern approaches that center the thinking, believing, religious human subject. His theology stands resolutely in opposition to “religion,” by which he means the action of humanity reaching towards God. At the same time, Barth maintains that theology must exist within the Church, and act in service to the Church. Only by so doing can it guard the integrity of its proclamation. (4)
That proclamation can be summed up succinctly in Barth’s advice to students at Princeton Seminary: “that God is not against [humanity] but for them.” (5) It can also be summed up by John 12:31-32: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Lewis was right insofar as God’s judgment of the world is important to Barth. But although judgment includes the divine “No” to everything contrary to God, it is always enveloped in God’s gracious “Yes” to us. It is the good news that in freedom, God chooses to create a world whose deepest reality is the covenant of grace between creator and creature. In freedom, God chooses to reveal Godself in Jesus Christ, as attested in the witness of Scripture. In freedom, God chooses to be God for us in Jesus Christ, and on the cross Jesus does in our place what we cannot do for ourselves. From the point of the cross are all things reckoned, and all things seen.
The result is a radical re-thinking of how many readers might expect theology to work. For example, Barth rejects any notion of defining sin by an appeal to natural law or any standard other than person and work of Jesus Christ, who reveals the truth about sin. In the second volume of his doctrine of creation, he writes,
We have only to cease trying to ignore the free grace of God in Jesus Christ. We have only to cease trying to make use of "natural" theology and therefore anthropology. Illusion always results when we seek light on human nature from any other source than the man Jesus Christ. To do so is to trifle with the fact of sin. It is to dig leaking wells. It is to entangle ourselves in conjectures and reinterpretations. It is again to seek final refuge in oblivion. (Church Dogmatics III.2, 520)
This rejection of natural theology, or the idea that God is revealed in sources other than Scripture including the natural world, is a second notable feature of Barth’s thought. He knew all too well the demonic ends to which an ideologically captive church could deploy natural theology – including, eventually, painting genocide and racial superiority as God’s will. The human heart is a factory of idols, as Calvin knew, and reading God out of nature is an especially efficient way to run that factory.
Finally, Barth is a theologian of witness, arguing that the duty of the Christian is to point to the truth of Cross and Resurrection, to be a signpost of the change of the world that has already taken place – not to change the world themselves. We cannot save ourselves, much less the world. In fact, to believe that we can is a species of idolatry. But just as Barth locates sin in the pride of humanity (the human delusion that we can be our own savior), he also locates it in humanity’s sloth. We cannot do what God alone can do, and we cannot put ourselves in the place of God. Yet we are not absolved of the duty to love our neighbor, to be witnesses in a world that does not yet know that it has conclusively been changed by God in Christ.
As he wrote the Church Dogmatics, Barth kept a copy of Matthias Grunewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece above his desk. I keep a copy in my office, too. According to Barth, John the Baptist’s anachronistic presence in the painting is a reminder of the task of theology: to point to the one who reigns from the cross and to say “He must increase, and I must decrease.” That relentless pointing to the person and work of Christ is, I think, the greatest gift that a reading of Barth brings to mainline Protestants. It is as true now as it was in his own day.
Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, 2nd English edition (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 49
Ibid., 302.
Ibid., 321.
One impediment to Church-going first-time readers of Barth is his denunciation of religion, but it’s important to remember that this is about his opposition to human-initiated projects and not about the Church as such.
“In His Own Words,” Center for Barth Studies, https://barth.ptsem.edu/in-his-own-words/, accessed May 8, 2023.
