Religion: The Death of Two Extraordinary Christians

• Share

(2 of 4)

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."