Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth

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Barth's theology is a breathtaking, daring vision of a universe in which tragedy, demonic evil and chaos have been met and defeated in the figure of Jesus Christ."

Barth feels free to reject the writings of the church fathers where he feels they may have mistaken the meaning of God's Word; even his admitted master, John Calvin, is not exempt. Once, when someone questioned the unorthodox way in which he was commenting on Calvin, Barth retorted: "Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright."

One orthodox dogma that Barth has tried to set aright—much to the dismay of other theologians in the Reformed Church —is the best-known and gloomiest of Calvinist tenets: predestination. In his Institutes, Calvin argued that God has already determined both those who will be saved at the Last Judgment and those who will suffer the eternal pangs of Hell. Barth says that this belief does not pay sufficient heed to the fact that Christ's death was intended for all men: Man's ultimate fate is shrouded in mystery, but Barth believes that Christ, the loving Judge, could indeed reconcile all the world to the Father. "I do not preach universal salvation," Barth insists. "What I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment."

Plenty of Critics. Earth's Dogmatics, says Langdon Gilkey of Vanderbilt University's divinity school, "is the most impressive and most complete statement of the Christian faith in this century." Other theologians complain that if anyone tried to read all that Barth says about the Word of God he would have no time to read the Word of God itself. Barth's interpretation of that Word has plenty of critics. Both Niebuhr and Tillich think that he is too critical of the cultural disciplines, such as philosophy and anthropology, which attempt to give man an insight into life's meaning. Princeton's best-known systematic theologian, Presbyterian George Stuart Hendry, says Barth's Christocentric approach forces many church doctrines into an artificial mold. Wilhelm Pauck of Union Theological Seminary thinks Barth pays insufficient attention to the history of how Christian dogma developed.

Quiet on Communism. A different category of criticism of Barth attacks his enigmatic political views. During World War II, Barth urged the church to stand up and be counted in the "holy war" against Hitler; in the cold war against Communism, he has urged ministers behind the Iron Curtain to live peacefully with Red regimes. In 1956 Barth was perhaps the only important Western theologian who refused to condemn publicly the Communist repression in Hungary.

Barth thinks that Marx sincerely tried to correct injustice in industrial society, but he has no desire to live under a totalitarian government. He argues that Naziism attempted to defeat the church by perverting its doctrines with cultural heresies, whereas Communism is an atheistic political system based upon philosophical ideas that must be countered with other ideas. And God, Barth insists, is not an idea, "not a banner for human ideas and intentions. For many people Christianity is a kind of moral, religious and political idea, against what they call an atheistic idea." To