Witness to an Ancient Truth

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Theological says that "he bestrides the theological world like a colossus." Harvard's German-born Paul Tillich, the contemporary religious thinker whose stature most nearly rivals Barth's, has often disagreed with Barth —: "shouting at each other over a glass of wine" —but calls him, "the most monumental appearance in our period." Roman Catholic theologians, notably in Europe, have praised his thinking in terms they usually reserve for St. Thomas Aquinas. Once, upon hearing that Pius XII had paid tribute to his work, Barth smiled and said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope." More seriously, he insists that the best critical work on his works—over 500 titles so far —has been done by such Catholic thinkers as French Jesuit Henri Bouillard and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar of Basel.

By contrast, Reinhold Niebuhr regards Barth as a "man of infinite imagination and irresponsibility" writing "irrelevant theology to America. I don't read Barth any more," he says. And Dr. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary speaks for a host of U.S. fundamentalists in charging that "Barthianism is even more hostile to the theology of Luther and Calvin than Romanism."

The Yardstick. Barth is a theologian's theologian, whose work in "that beautiful science" by which man seeks to know God is the yardstick that measures what other men do. His treatment of Christian dogma has soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church. Preachers read him, and his thought probably affects a good share of the sermons spoken in U.S. churches any given Sunday, but laymen hardly know his name. He has far fewer disciples in the U.S. than either Niebuhr or Tillich; and even in Germany, young theologians find more impact in the Christian existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann (TIME, April 14, 1961). All this is fine with Barth himself, who dis owns the idea of a school — "except for my two sons" — meaning Markus, 46, a New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, and Christoph, 44, who teach es Old Testament in Djakarta.

In a way, this lack of a following is a tribute to the originality and individuality of Barth's accomplishments. His kind of God-thinking has been commonly called "neo-orthodoxy" and "theology of crisis" — labels that Barth rejects, since they scarcely define it at all. Essentially, Barth is a Christological theologian, whose uniquely modern thought centers around ancient realities: faith, the Bible, the church. He has a philosopher's knowledge of philosophy, but unlike such contemporaries as Tillich or Bultmann, Barth is wary of restating the dogmas of the church in nontraditional language. His thought is complex, but he nonetheless writes of doctrine in prose that is not far removed from that of the pulpit. Above all he writes of the mysterious history of Christ. Knowledge of God is knowledge of God through Christ. Faith is faith in Christ; the church is the Church of Christ; the Bible is the witness of Christ. Theologian Hans Frei of Yale calls him "a Christ-intoxicated man."

Dogmatist Greets Dog. In person, Barth looks like a Hollywood type-cast of a German professor, right down to his

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