Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth

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On a hill outside Jerusalem, a carpenter from Nazareth, condemned by the Roman Procurator of Judea and the high priest of the Jews, died upon a cross. Four historians of the time soberly reported that he was buried, and that on the third day the carpenter, Jesus, rose from the dead. Since that first Easter, his followers have defied all reason to proclaim that the Jew of Nazareth was the Son of God, who, by dying for man's sin, reconciled the world to its Creator and returned to life in his glory. Christianity has always been content to stand or fall by this paradox, this mystery, this unfathomable truth. "If Christ has not been raised," wrote St. Paul to the young church of Corinth, "then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins."

In the 20th century, no man has been a stronger witness to the continuing significance of Christ's death and Christ's return than the world's ranking Protestant theologian, Swiss-born Karl Barth (rhymes with heart). Barth knows that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are not coherent, but he refuses to make the mystery more palatable to human reason by suggesting—as did the great 19th century Theologian D. F. Strauss in his Life of Jesus—that the story of the crucifixion is a "myth." Instead, Barth argues that the subject of this unique event is God, not man; and only God can know the full truth of his own history. Man's only road to understanding of this divine history is through faith—faith in the reality and truth of what the Evangelists so incoherently describe.

"Do you want to believe in the living Christ?" says Barth. "We may believe in him only if we believe in his corporeal resurrection. This is the content of the New Testament. We are always free to reject it, but not to modify it, nor to pretend that the New Testament tells something else. We may accept or refuse the message, but we may not change it."

Love & Scorn. Last week, at the age of 75, the author of this challenge to modern skepticism was enjoying his first visit to the U.S.—a country whose history he loves and whose way of life he professes to scorn. Arriving in Chicago, Barth quickly found time to check theatrical versions of that life, saw performances of two plays by Edward Albee, and the current review of the iconoclastic troupe that performs in a coffeehouse-nightclub called The Second City. Among Protestant theologians, Barth's arrival has caused as much stir as would a visit by the Pope to a Jesuit convention. At the University of Chicago, Barth will receive an honorary doctorate of divinity, deliver five lectures on evangelical theology. Busloads of theologians and ministers are coming from as far as New Mexico and California in hopes of hearing him. A week later Barth will repeat the lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. Oddly enough, Barth is as interested in seeing battlefields as debating with his fellow theologians. An amateur expert on the Civil War, he has insisted that his travels include a stop at Gettysburg.

Barth has been variously damned as a heretic, a narrow-minded Biblicist, and an atheist in disguise—and praised as the most creative Protestant theologian since John Calvin. President James McCord of Princeton