The New Barth

"It is many years since I rode horseback through field and wood or performed modest soldierly duties," wrote Switzerland's famed, 73-year-old Protestant Theologian Karl Barth* recently in the Christian Century. "Climbing uphill no longer tempts me. And even my work pace at the desk has become perceptibly slower. [But] air, water, substantial nourishment and moderate exercise still help me to keep my vigor; and even my faithful pipe still agrees rather well with me." Another sign of youthfulness that Septuagenarian Barth might have added is his continuing ability to change his mind.

One of the 20th century's most publicized theologians, Karl Barth is popularly known more for his leftish political pernicketiness than his theological thinking, most of which lies buried in his verbose Church Dogmatics (twelve volumes so far). Especially valuable, therefore, is a book of Barth lectures just published, The Humanity of God (John Knox Press; $2.50). The book is a short, readable indication of recent developments in Barth's Bible-centered theology, and points up some conspicuous changes in his thinking.

Wide-Open Windows. In analyzing Protestant theology of the 19th century, Barth sets forth the context of his own.

The theologians of that peaceful, optimistic era, says he, were a surprisingly anxious lot. "Serenity is not the strongest impression we gain from their writings . . . We have lived through harder times, have endured worse things than they did, and we are thereby, strangely enough, made more free."

The weakness of 19th century theology, as Barth sees it, was that it tried above all to confront and adapt itself to the times. Through theology's wide-open doors and windows "came so much stimulation for thought and discussion that there was hardly time or love or zeal left for the task to be accomplished within the house itself. With all its energies captivated by the world, 19th century theology achieved little in terms of a new and positive understanding of Christian truth."

This conforming to the world, says Barth, lowered theology's prestige. "Man in the 19th century might have taken the theologians more seriously if they themselves had not taken him so seriously."

Clearing Away. Barth feels that Christian theology must explore God's dealings with man, whereas 19th century theologians reversed the matter and concentrated on man's relationship to God. And Christianity as an "inner experience" is a poor ground on which to take a stand. "How naively did the Church subscribe to political conservatism in the first half of the century, and in the second half to the preservation of the liberal bourgeoisie, the growing nationalism and militarism!''

Rebelling against this kind of rudderless, over-humanistic Protestantism, Karl Barth first achieved fame after World War I with his radical insistence on the transcendence of God. His terms for it--e.g., the "wholly other" and the "infinite qualitative distinction"--became slogans for a new school of theologians. "How we cleared things away!" he reminisces. "And we did almost nothing but clear away! Everything which even remotely smacked of mysticism and morality, of pietism and romanticism, or even of idealism, was suspected and sharply interdicted or bracketed with reservations which sounded actually prohibitive! What should really have been only a sad and friendly smile was a derisive laugh!"

God's Togetherness. Today Barth emphasizes a different aspect of divinity; instead of being "wholly other," God's deity, he feels, has meaning and power only in the context of "His dialogue with man, and thus in His togetherness with man . . . Who God is and what He is in His deity He proves and reveals not in a vacuum as a divine being-for-Himself, but precisely and authentically in the fact that He exists, speaks, and acts as the partner of man, though of course as the absolutely superior partner."

This gives Barth's book its title--the humanity of God. "It signifies the God who speaks with man in promise and command. It represents God's existence, intercession, and activity for man, the intercourse God holds with him, and the free grace in which He wills to be and is nothing other than the God of man.''

No Private Christianity. A major consequence of this conception for Barth's theology is a newly positive attitude toward the church. "It was a part of the exaggerations of which we were guilty in 1920," he admits, "that we were able to see the theological relevance of the Church only as a negative counterpart to the Kingdom of God which we had then so happily rediscovered. We wanted to interpret the form of the Church's doctrine, its worship, its juridical order as 'human, all too human,' as 'not so important . . .' In all this we at least approached the theory and practice of a spiritual partisanship and an esoteric gnosticism."

But now Barth holds the orthodox view of the church as essential for salvation.

Any word critical of the church "must be spoken with the intention of serving her in her gathering together, her edification and mission . . . The Lord's Prayer is a we-prayer and only in this way also an I-prayer. 'We' are the Church . . .

"For this reason there is no private Christianity . . . Theology cannot be carried on in the private lighthouses of some sort of merely personal discoveries and opinions. It can be carried on only in the Church--it can be put to work in all its elements only in the context of the questioning and answering of the Christian community and in the rigorous service of its commission to all men."

*A private in the Swiss home guard in World War II.

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