Thunder and Lightning in a Pen

By Richard N. Ostling

Theologian Karl Earth's last letters mix vitriol, compassion

He was typecast for the role of European professor: hair askew, glasses perched precariously on nose, rumpled suit flecked with bits of tobacco from an omnipresent pipe. At the University of Basel, where he taught for 27 years, students adored him. But amiable Karl Barth was anything but indulgent when he talked of man's relationship with God.

In his epochal commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, after World War I, Barth thundered that the biblical God was "wholly other," powerful, mysterious. Man's task was to reshape himself to God's design, rather than the other way around. Almost singlehanded he established what came to be known as "Neo-Orthodox" theology, demolishing the 19th century--style liberalism that had tried to domesticate the Deity. During the next several decades, in his 9,000-page Church Dogmatics, he sought to make God's nature and activity a bit more accessible to mortals.

He was not only Protestantism's preeminent theologian, but a public figure. In 1934 he drafted the creed of the anti-Nazi "Confessing Church," which organized German Protestantism against Hitler's puppet church. That same year he was fired from his professorship at the University of Bonn for refusing to take the ritual faculty pledge of allegiance to Hitler. Returning to his native Switzerland, the archfoe of Nazism often perplexed Westerners--including America's Reinhold Niebuhr--with his live-and-let-live attitude toward Communism.

Fascinating facets of Earth's life and thought have been revived in the English edition of Letters 1961-1968 (Eerdmans; 382 pages; $18.95). Written late in his life, the 325 letters are full of typical Barthian barbs directed at the Allies' policy of rearming the West German "empire" and "the rabid mob of anti-Communists." Among the aging theologian's enthusiasms: Mozart (Barth proposed him for beatification), American Civil War battles, and the contemporary U.S., which he visited for the first and only time at age 75 ("a fantastic affair").

The pen that dashed off vitriolic criticism to academics became compassionate when everyday folk asked for spiritual advice. To a German prisoner contemplating suicide: "Regarding your prayers. How do you know they are in vain? God has his own time, and he may well know the right moment to lift the double shadow that now lies over your life."

Publicly, Barth kept berating the West for its nuclear buildup and its cold war mentality. But privately, as the book reveals for the first time, he wrote to fellow-traveling Czechoslovak Theologian Josef Hromadka, saying: "My hair stands on end" at the concept of "freedom and peace" through "Nikita, Mao and even Fidel." Hromadka's association of the Christian Gospel with the political cause of Communism, he said, was a mirror image of the sin committed by Niebuhr and other anti-Communist "Western fathers."

The most extraordinary letter was written to Pope Paul VI in 1968, only seven weeks before Earth's death. Discussing the Pope's encyclical against artificial birth control, Barth told the Pontiff that he would not debate the conclusions but rather the decree's mistaken theology. He could not accept, as he said Paul had, "the estimate of natural law as a kind of second source of revelation" alongside the Bible. But Barth concluded, "You may be assured of my great respect for what might be called the heroic isolation in which, Holy Father, you now find yourself."

Barth wrote to his Basel colleague Oscar Cullmann that "the best way of fighting theological opponents--apart from a few brief flashes of lightning--is to let them be." But in his comments on leading theologians, lightning flashed often.

To one correspondent, he described as "abominable" Paul Tillich's theories about God, which all but reduced Christ and the Bible to important examples of mankind's philosophical quest. Inviting Tillich for a visit, Barth suggested they discuss "my own difficulty in reading your books." After the visit he wrote, "We understand one another so well and cordially at the human level, but we can only contradict and oppose one another from the very foundation up."

What most stirred Earth's theological ire was the spread of German Theologian Rudolf Bultmann's celebrated effort at "demythologizing," with its radical skepticism about the historical accounts and miracles in the Bible. Barth described this as a "return to the darkest 19th century" and wrote: "We should quietly affirm the unmistakable poverty, thinness and even futility of this whole undertaking." When Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson popularized Bultmann's notions in Honest to God (1964), Earth's verdict was characteristically blunt: "O abyss of banality!" As for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic theologian-scientist, Barth dismissed him as a Gnostic heretic.

Barth was less contemptuous of his friend, Roman Catholic Theologian Hans Kueng, who later became so critical of the papacy that he was removed from a Catholic faculty in West Germany. Especially in the last two years of his life, Barth feared that Kueng, and other Catholic liberals were repeating the errors of the old Protestant liberals. In 1968, shortly before he died, he wrote Kueng, of his "deepseated uneasiness" about Kueng,'s latest book, Truthfulness: The Future of the Church. "The true church is hardly mentioned," he noted, "let alone the true ground of the existence and essence of the church, Jesus Christ himself." Barth predicted that "sooner or later," church authorities would have to act against Kueng,

--By Richard N. Ostling

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