Witness to an Ancient Truth

Friday, Apr. 20, 1962
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speak in Germany and was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. After the out break of World War II, Barth issued a flurry of powerful, evangelical epistles opposing Naziism. "The enterprise of Adolf Hitler," he wrote, "with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ."

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In World War II Barth volunteered at the age of 54 for the Swiss army, spent much of the duration guarding a bridge on the German frontier. Barth cheerfully ad mits that, despite his lifelong hobby of military strategy, he showed no aptitude for leadership. Placed in command of a squad patrolling a mountain pass one cold winter night, he distributed his troops, soon found that they had all deserted to a hut for the warmth of a fire and hot coffee. "That," he says, "was the crash of my ambition to be a corporal."

Summa of the Century. After the war, Barth lectured on theology among the bombed-out ruins of his old university in Bonn for a semester, then returned to Basel to carry on with the intellectual job that has preoccupied him since 1932: the writing of Church Dogmatics. Now 9,000 pages and twelve fat volumes long, Dogmatics is Earth's major effort to ex plain what it is that God has revealed. Dogmatics, in Barth's definition, is the critical examination of the Christian mes sage in light of what the Scriptures say. Barth's own examination of this message is garrulous, eye-wearying, and studded with trackless deserts of scholarly foot notes. "Barth is just about the most gabby person that ever hit Christendom," grumbles Robert Hannen of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. But Dogmatics is also wreathed with a knowledge of 1,900 years of Christian writing, and stands as the century's only equivalent to the summa of the medieval scholastics.

The dogmatic Barth, in many respects, is "wholly other" than the angry evangelist who wrote the Epistle to the Romans after World War I. In that early work, Barth says, "I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings." In place of the divine No uttered by God, Barth in Dogmatics writes about the divine Yes spoken to those who accept God's revelation in faith.

What Theology Is. The foundation of Dogmatics is the faith held by the Christian churches: faith in the God who revealed himself through the Scriptures in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith, Barth says, is not an idea about God; it is man's humble, total acceptance of God brought on by God— "the consequences in man of the action of God himself." He flatly rejects all "natural theology," meaning man's systematic efforts to know God through the use of reason alone by speculating on natural mysteries—the "God is in the stars" theory. Barth insists that natural theology can only understand God as a First Cause or a Great Designer or some similar abstract idea that in reality is a product of man's own thinking processes. But God is not an idea dreamed of by man. He is the Supreme Being, who is only