Witness to an Ancient Truth

Friday, Apr. 20, 1962

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and natural goodness of man, it had all but eliminated from Christianity the sense of sin. He also challenged the liberal suggestion that there was a natural alliance between God and the men who were building Western civilization—not because Earth opposed culture, but because man had no right to "domesticate" God in the name of progress.

Awakening the Town. In his Epistle, Barth wrote a declaration of independence on behalf of the God who stands in judgment over all human culture; the message made an immediate hit. Barth later compared his experience to that of a man who climbs the church tower at night and grabs a rope for support, only to discover that he has struck the church bell and awakened the whole town. "I did not know," he says "that it was so great a bell." On the strength of the book's success, Barth accepted a chair in Reformed theology at the University of Gottingen in 1921. There, besides teaching, he helped to edit a new magazine that continued his onslaught on liberalism; among the contributors were such rising young theologians as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann.

As a teacher, Barth found that theology needed reconstruction as well as criticism, and during professorships at the universities of Münister and Bonn he began to study the writings of the church fathers and the Reformation confessions. Totally absorbed in the Word of God, Barth had little time for the word of man. Politics, he wrote then, was "essentially a game," and "fundamentally uninteresting."

Politics suddenly became interesting for Earth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new "German Christian" churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma. "This was a nationalist heresy,"he says, "confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation." He launched a new magazine to attack the "heresy" and in 1934 wrote nearly all of the Barmen Declaration—an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed by 200 leaders of Germany's Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Unionist churches.

"Seducing Minds." As a professor at the University of Bonn, Barth was technically a civil servant. But he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Führer or open his classes with the Nazi salute. It would be bad taste, he told them, "to begin a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with Heil Hitler." At the end of 1934, Barth was brought before a Nazi court, found guilty of "seducing the minds" of German students. For his defense. Earth pulled a copy of Plato's Apology from his pocket, read Socrates' argument to the court of Athens that he should be given a pension for his services to the city's youth rather than be condemned to death. Something like that, Barth suggested, ought to be done for him. "It seemed like a good idea before going into court," he says sadly, "but it made no impression on the judges."

In 1935 the German Minister of Education decreed that there was no place in the new Germany for Barth. He accepted a professorship of theology at the Uni versity of Basel. Later he tried once more to