The Death of Two Extraordinary Christians

One was a Protestant theologian who labored quietly in university towns of Switzerland and Germany for half a century. The other was a Roman Catholic monk who worked hermitlike on his writings in the hills of central Kentucky. But while Karl Barth gave his life to scholarship and Thomas Merton to contemplation, both men were Christian activists who found in the Word a command to do. Barth stood courageously against Nazi totalitarianism. Merton drove himself endlessly in championing the cause of the poor and oppressed. On their journey toward their deaths last week, each brought to his age, and to his fellow man, a message of love that was ardently Christian.

KARL BARTH

To believe in Christ has always been, as Kierkegaard put it, an inexplicable leap of faith. The most profound preacher of that mystery in the 20th century was Karl Barth, who died last week at the age of 82. Eulogized as the century's most significant religious thinker, Barth changed the course of Protestant theology in his lifetime almost singlehandedly. Though he abhorred theological systems, he produced, in his 14-volume Church Dogmatics, the most powerful exposition of Protestant thought since Calvin's Institutes.

Like the mysteries that he plumbed, Barth himself was rich in paradox. He was a theologian who almost belligerently proposed the "wholly otherness" of God, yet he lived long enough to write a book mellowly asserting the "humanity" of a loving Creator. Though a critic of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II renewal, Barth had to concede that some of his most astute interpreters were Catholic theologians. He mixed profound spiritual insights with a wit that could be caustic or self-critical; a friend called him the only Swiss with a sense of humor. He was aggressively anti-Nazi, yet strangely unconcerned about Communist aggression. An ordained minister of the Reformed Church, he delivered his best sermons before those whom he called his fellow sinners--the prisoners in the Basel jail.

Idolatrous Counterfeiters. The son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, Barth studied theology at the University of Berlin under Church Historian Adolf von Harnack. Perhaps the greatest of Protestant liberals, Harnack stressed the importance of Jesus as a supreme ethical teacher more than as God's son, and Christianity as the culmination of mankind's spiritual aspirations. World War I destroyed Barth's faith in secular optimism; he was also appalled that his teachers supported the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm. While serving as a pastor of a Reformed church in the Swiss village of Safenwill, Barth returned to the close study of Scripture. In 1918, he published a modest little book called The Epistle to the Romans. Rewritten and expanded in 1921, the work, in the words of Roman Catholic Scholar Karl Adam, "fell like a bombshell on the playgrounds of the theologians."

Against the liberals who assumed the partnership of God and man, Barth proclaimed a radically transcendent Creator whose message had been hurled like a stone at humanity. In contrast to an ethical, teaching Jesus, Barth preached a divine Christ who was, in his person, God's message to man. Rejecting the higher criticism that reduced the Bible to human wish fulfillment, Barth proclaimed the objective authority of Scripture. The Bible, he wrote, was not man's word about God, but God's word about man. Barth's thinking, which came to be known as "crisis theology" or "neo-orthodoxy," stressed a God who stood in constant judgment against idolatrous counterfeiters of faith who sought to create him in their own image.

It was just such an idolatry that Barth saw in Nazism, which sought to impose Hitler's ideology on the Protestant churches of Germany. As a leader of the so-called "Confessing Church," Barth, then a professor at the University of Bonn, was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, which opposed the Nazi infiltration of Christianity as a heathen profanation of God's message. Expelled from Germany in 1935, Barth continued his war of words against Hitlerism from the University of Basel. Later he volunteered for the Swiss home defense force and served as a border guard during World War II.

Catacomb Christianity. The prophetic critic of Nazism mellowed into an enigmatic neutral during the cold war. In 1945, he defended the return of political freedom to the German people, who, he said, had been Hitler's first victims. He consistently refused to condemn the aggressions of Russia with anything like the same vigor with which he had challenged Hitler. Unlike Nazism, Barth argued, Communism was a totally materialistic philosophy whose frank atheism represented no threat to the internal authenticity of the church. He thus refused to protest the Communist invasion of Hungary--although when a friend visited him in the hos pital last summer and asked about his health, Barth growled: "I'm fine, but the Czechs are not."

Barth grandly overlooked secular and theological developments that displeased him. Although he was one of the founders of the World Council of Church es, and his writings in the 1930s had helped create the climate for ecumenism, he later came to criticize the organization as "too institutionalist." Such aloofness from trends others thought relevant inevitably won him criticism. Reinhold Niebuhr, once something of a follower, dismissed Barth's politics as naive and his theology as suitable only for catacomb Christianity. Other contemporary theologians charged that Barth paid too little attention to the role of history and sociology in the development of Christianity and that he spoke a Biblicist language to modern men crying for a fresher mode of revelation. Yet even his critics had to acknowledge that theology could never be the same again. "He is a mountain," admitted Dr. Benjamin Reist of San Francisco Seminary. "To get beyond him you have to climb over him."

A Thinker's Grappling. Despite his acknowledged eminence, Barth's masterwork, Church Dogmatics, is one of the least-read great books of the century, and Barthian neo-orthodoxy now seems almost as old hat as the orthodoxy it displaced. Yet Barth wanted no disciples--except, he said, for his own sons Markus, a professor at Pittsburgh Theology Seminary, and Christoph, a Biblical scholar at the University of Mainz, Germany--and he often told students: "Don't repeat what I have said. Learn to think for yourselves." He tried firmly to shun theological fashion, and his constant goal was to bring men back to the authenticity of God's word. Today, Barth's endless, old-fashioned commentary on this message may appear to be an obstacle to that goal. Tomorrow, it may well be read afresh as a vivid encounter of a great thinker's grappling with the divine unknown.

THOMAS MERTON

"The scenario calls for a quiet death among concerned chipmunks," Thomas Merton once wrote a friend after surviving major surgery, "and I'd like it that way." He did not get his wish. On the very day that Karl Barth lay dying in Basel, the 53-year-old Trappist poet-priest was attending an ecumenical conference of Roman Catholic and non-Christian monks in suburban Bangkok. Returning to his bungalow to rest during the hot afternoon, he reached out to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire. He was instantly electrocuted.

For 20 years Merton had been the most publicly visible Christian contemplative since St. Simeon Stylites took refuge on top of a pillar. Merton's pillar was print, and he had not exactly chosen it for himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing--as he had since the age of ten. Merton was ordained a priest in 1949, the year after his first major book, The Seven Storey Mountain, had become a bestseller and thrust him permanently into a life of books, articles, poems and a massive correspondence with friends all over the world.

Provocative Perfume. The most lucidly honest autobiography since Rousseau's Confessions, The Seven Storey Mountain found a surprisingly receptive audience in the uneasy, searching postwar world. The book was a frank, self-effacing narrative of Merton's peripatetic youth: his dizzying year at Cambridge, his first grapplings with the craft of poetry, his mildly wicked undergraduate years at Columbia (including a one-meeting membership in the Young Communist League), his ultimate discovery of a faith and a vocation. It was a book suffused with spiritual zeal, and was perhaps the last great flowering of Catholic romanticism. Its perfume was provocative. Under its spell, disillusioned veterans, students, even teen-agers flocked to monasteries across the country either to stay or visit as retreatants.

The Seven Storey Mountain also hinted of the Merton to come. Prophetically, he digressed in it to deliver a stinging rebuke to the civilization that could pro duce a Harlem. In a wide range of books and articles, Merton returned again and again to themes of social justice and a quiet, but very absolute pacifism. He lent his name to many antiwar organizations, resolutely opposed the Viet Nam war. Just two months ago, he characterized some student activists he met as "real modern monks."

Fascinated by Zen. Merton's wide-ranging, eclectic mind could touch upon the Beatles or the Bomb, but for a quarter of a century he never left the Abbey of Gethsemani, except for trips to the doctor or drives with visiting friends around neighboring Kentucky hills. In fact, for almost a decade, with his ab bot's permission, he had withdrawn from much of the community life, living Thoreau-like in a small hermitage on abbey property more than a mile from the main buildings. This year he was finally granted a leave of absence from Gethsemani to study Oriental monasticism and its possible application to the Western contemplative tradition.

Merton had long been fascinated by Zen, and he argued that Buddhism was a philosophic discipline that could well be employed by Christians. "Buddhism is not word," a he told religion in friends our at sense of the California's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions on his way to Asia in October. "It's a totally different approach to reality, a psychological thing. I be lieve it's quite possible for a Catholic to enter into the esoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism." He departed for Asia, said W. H. Ferry of the Center, "absolutely bouncing with expectation."

From New Delhi, he wrote of long meetings with the Dalai Lama in the Himalayan foothills and of an eight-day retreat among the exiled Tibetan monks. One lama courteously composed a poem celebrating their meeting, and Poet Merton returned the compliment. There was an added serenity in his final letter to the Center. "In my contacts with these new friends, I also feel a consolation in my own faith in Christ and his in dwelling presence," wrote Merton. "I hope and believe he may be present in the hearts of all of us."

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