Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth

(3 of 10)
scholar's stoop and his thick, dark-rimmed glasses planted far down on his nose. His conservative suits are usually rumpled and flecked with tobacco from the pipe that seldom is out of his mouth. Barth is a Calvinist, but not a gloomy one; at home he speaks kindly to large dogs and small children (in guttural Swiss-German), displays a mellow, Dutch-uncle patience with puzzled students. In conversation Barth is full of wisecracks—some pleasantly pixy, some theologian-arch. Once, asked by a stranger on the trolley car if he knew the great Karl Barth, he replied: "Know him? I shave him every morning!"

It was no surprise that Barth came to spend his life in the service of God's Word; theology was as much a part of his family background as history was to the Schlesingers of Harvard. In Switzerland, there have been Pastor Barths since the early 19th century. One of them was Karl's father, Fritz Barth, an earnest, rigorous New Testament scholar who gave up the pastorate to teach Scripture at a seminary at Basel, where Karl, the eldest of five children, was born.

Karl began his theological studies at the University of Bern, but soon found the orthodox Calvinism taught there too old-fashioned for his own taste. He persuaded his father to send him to the University of Berlin, where he could study under the best known of Protestant church historians, Adolf von Harnack. For an embryonic scholar of 20, it was a heady, exhilarating experience. "I was so enthusiastic about him," Barth remembers, "that I missed going to concerts and museums. In the midst of Berlin, I saw little of the city, doing only my work."

Liberal Wind. Von Harnack was Barth's cicerone to theological liberalism, the intellectual wind prevailing in German religious thought after the turn of the century. By then, Protestantism had come a long, hard way from Luther and Calvin. During the 17th and 18th centuries, at the hands of their followers, the creative insights of the great reformers had been hardened into rigid dogmatisms—such as a literal acceptance of Biblical miracles—that were left shattered by the rational attacks of the Enlightenment and the discoveries of natural sciences. By 1850, Protestant thinkers had begun to construct a new and liberal religious synthesis that attempted to reconcile Christianity with man's empirical knowledge.

Instead of starting with a defense of dogma, liberal theology stressed the need for man to respond emotionally to the Jesus of history. Liberalism believed that religion was an expression of man's noblest impulses and that man himself had the freedom to shape his life and his world in accordance with the divine will. Faith in God was made to seem perfectly compatible with an industrial civilization's faith in science, progress and democracy; church and state would work hand in hand for man's final victory over nature, and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Liberalism also accepted scientific study of the Bible, even when it tended to challenge orthodox views of the divinity of Christ. Von Harnack's own major contribution to this "higher criticism" was a historical examination of church dogmas; his aim was to cut through the formulas of faith created by churchmen, reach back to the simple message of love that Jesus had actually taught. The New