Witness to an Ancient Truth

Friday, Apr. 20, 1962
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Testament in liberal hands became not so much a record of God's unique intervention in human history as an "inspiration" to Christians on how to live a good life.

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Parish Parson. Barth spent a year grappling with Von Harnack's historicism. absorbed more liberal theology at the universities of Tubingen and Marburg before being ordained in 1908 by his father at the Reformed cathedral of Bern. He served his ecclesiastical apprenticeship as an assistant pastor in a French-speaking parish near Geneva. Then, in 1911, he was called to the Reformed Church of Safenwil, a small mill town in northern Switzerland, where he married a sprightly young violinist named Nelly Hoffman.

Faced with the problem of how to give meaningful sermons. Barth as a minister discovered that the liberal theology of the universities held out no real message to people. He also found that expression of Christian belief, in the minds of his rich parishioners, was perfectly compatible with economic exploitation. Shocked by the low wages paid to Safenwil's textile workers, Barth became an active socialist, earned the nickname of "the Red pastor" for his role in organizing unions, and for such deadpan japes as passing out free frankfurters to rich and poor alike one Christmas morning at church.

An even more severe test of Barth's theological assumptions was World War I, which ended man's cocky dream of inevitable progress toward a reign of universal peace. Barth, who disapproved of Switzerland's vacillating neutralist politics, was shocked when the church in Germany approved the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II; not one of his theological teachers protested. Barth's contempt for this display of their social thinking led him to a reappraisal of their theology. In company with another disillusioned liberal pastor, Eduard Thurneysen, Barth went back over all his past theological and philosophical reading, finally returning to the Bible—a book, he discovered, which contained "divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God." He found some of the text of those divine thoughts in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, began work on a commentary that would bring that letter alive to modern man.

Bomb on the Playground. Published in 1918 and rewritten completely for the second edition in 1921. Barth's Epistle to the Romans, as Karl Adam, a Roman Catholic put it, "felt like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians." Barth attacked the liberal assumption that the Bible expressed man's religious experience of God; instead, he said, it contains God's Word to man. This God—the real God of revelation—is a being "wholly other" than man, a God who shouts a divine No to all of man's efforts to reach him through inner emotion or reason.

There is, as the great Dane Sören Kierkegaard wrote, "an infinite qualitative difference" between time and eternity, between man and God. The only bridge to God is the one that God provides—the bridge of faith that can come to man only after he has recognized the futility of his own efforts to meet his Creator.

Barth granted the service that liberal theology performed in emphasizing the genuine humanity of Jesus, but charged that in the process it had all but forgotten Christ's divinity. So, too, in speaking of the dignity