Religion: 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."