Barth in England

A theologian's theologian, one of the most famed in the world, is Dr. Karl Barth. Exiled three years ago from Germany, his adopted land and spiritual home, he has settled in Switzerland, his birthplace. U. S. Protestants have been slow to approve and understand this Calvinist, although. Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the ablest of Protestant theologians, has been influenced by him. and Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian stronghold, has shown leanings toward Barthianism. Of European conditions upon which Barthianism battens. Manhattan clergymen lately were given a vivid picture of Dr. Adolf Keller, Swiss colleague of Dr. Barth. Declaring that a new church based upon faith, poverty, persecution and meekness is arising in Europe. Dr. Keller said: "We may see the end of Christianity and the church as it exists today in the face of [Nazi and Communist] forces." The end of such a church, and the birth of a new -one, would be no surprise to Karl Barth.

The theology which lank, twinkling-eyed, pipe-smoking Karl Barth has been preaching for nearly 20 of his 51 years is not, on its face, adapted to evangelism. Yet Dr. Barth, a dynamic pulpit orator, filled chapels when he taught at the Universities of Muenster, Goettingen and Bonn, today fills the chapel at the University of Basle. And his sermons are of the oldtime hour-long variety. Earth's "crisis theology" can best be appreciated by people who believe the Church is complacent, self-assured, temporizing with crucial issues. Earth preaches that God is "wholly other," not to be comprehended by man nor to be expressed in man's life. With God outside him, man can only listen when God speaks--a form of dialogue, mostly one-sided, which gives Barthianism its alternative name of "dialectic theology." God's speech, or the Word, looms large for Karl Earth. He believes in an invisible rather than a visible, institutional Church, and for him this Church is the custodian of a revealed, written or preached Word. Earth is not a Fundamentalist as U. S. divines understand Fundamentalism. Barthians accept modern Biblican criticism freely. To them the Word is something apprehended in man's conscience, often understood in spite of, rather than because of, the interpretations of preachers and theologians.

Last week reports reached the U. S. of a visit by Theologian Earth to the British Isles, where he received an honorary D.D. from Oxford. At Oxford, Dr. Earth told how in 1933--before he was suspended from his professorship at the University of Bonn for declining to swear allegiance to Realmleader Hitler--the Evangelical Church in Germany was offered a chance to take part in ''the universal renewal of life and prosperity" of the Third Reich, and in return proclaim that the events of 1933 were ''a Divine revelation," to be taken as seriously as the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Subsequently, at a meeting of churchmen in Lord Noel-Buxton's house in London, Dr. Earth turned from the past to the future, said: "It is Hitler's intention to cut youth off from the Church so that it will become a society of old men and women, which in two or three decades will die. ... In the future there will be no Christian education in Germany. The Church will therefore have to begin all over again, and its efforts to recapture the interest of the new Godless Germany will have to be those of the missionary."

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