Yes & No in Basel

The bright, modern auditorium was packed to the last seat with notables and students--Swiss and Germans, Americans and Japanese--and the air was electric with expectancy. About to make his farewell lecture last week was Basel University's professor Karl Earth, at 74 the Grand Panjandrum of Protestant theologians, whose multivolume work-in-progress, Kirchliche Dogmatik, may well ride out the centuries as a theological landmark, whose post-World War I sermons on Paul's letters to the Romans lit a cannon cracker under Europe's bourgeoisie, whose resounding no to Hitler stiffened intellectual resistance to Naziism, and whose casual shoulder shrug to Communism in recent years has stiffened Western resistance to Barth.

Christ or Caesar. As Theologian Barth strode in, wearing his usual rumpled summer suit without a tie, his shock of grey hair was its customary bird's nest. Barely acknowledging the thunderous ovation that greeted him, he began his lecture on ethics where he had left off the day before, on the phrase of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come." Christians, he said, should act not according to rigid principles, but only according to what their faith tells them is God's will in Jesus Christ. "Christians should be free," he said, "to give an attenuated yes or no--according to circumstances--whenever an absolute categorical position is expected of them and a categorical yes or no whenever no such stand is being asked for." In other words, a Christian should feel free "to say yes today when he said no yesterday."

Mascot or Saviour? At the end of the lecture, his audience had expected Earth to announce his successor--Dr. Helmut Gollwitzer, Professor of Systematic Theology at West Berlin's Free University. But instead, he peered owlishly at his audience and said: "My successor, Mr. X or Mr. Y, will not be here in time for the next semester, so it has been decided that I'll have to do a little more work this winter. In view of my age, however, I'll be doing even less than I have done so far --one hour of ethics a week."

Behind the delay was a name-calling hassle between Switzerland's two traditional city rivals, Zurich and Basel, over the politics of Gollwitzer, a onetime pupil of Barth who was imprisoned for five years in a Russian P.O.W. camp. Gollwitzer, screamed Zurich papers, was a "proCommunist" who opposed West German rearmament, atomic weapons and Adenauer's policies in general. Basel's National-Zeitung jumped to Gollwitzer's defense: "This man is a radical Christian in the original sense of the word, who believes that Christ did not die on the Cross to serve as a mascot for political parties in the 20th century."

Almost unknown in the world of scholarship, Gollwitzer was emerging as a man after Neutralist Barth's own heart, whether or not Basel's nervous municipal authorities, who have the final say, decide to swallow their unease. "Gollwitzer," said one Barthian, "is not out to support those who would like to sweeten their political coffee with the sugar of Western Christian culture."

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