Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth

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Barth, the capitalist West is as materialistic as the Communist East—and represents a serious temptation to the church, since it tries to cloak its political ambitions in religious and moral terms.

He has asked the West to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally; such a gesture would help the West regain the "confidence" of the Soviet Union, and start it on the road toward a peaceful democratic regime. The vast majority of U.S. theologians regard such views as politically naive at best and irresponsible at worst. Says an old friend and theological colleague, Emil Brunner of Zurich: "If President Kennedy were to adopt Barth's pacifist doctrines, the United States would soon be swallowed by the Soviet Union. A Communist regime would make short shrift of men like Barth."

In other days. Barth would undoubtedly have hit back at such criticism with a barrage of satire, scorn and scriptural learning. "I was hard then," he says. "Now that I am older, I am softer." This older, mellower Barth seems eager only to get on with the fourth section of Volume IV of Dogmatics. At his stucco house on Basel's Bruderholzallee, day begins around 8, when Barth's wife, or his longtime secretary. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, tiptoes to the phonograph and puts on a record. The music that serves as his alarm clock is always by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work Barth describes as a "constant of my existence." "When the angels praise God in Heaven," Barth once wrote, "I am sure they play Bach. However, en famille they play Mozart, and then God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them."

He usually retires early, lying awake to read military history or detective stories, from which he first learned English at the age of 40. Says he: "My friends claim that I have a criminal vocabulary." Barth has little taste for modern novels, poetry or art. "What I object to," he says, "is the disappearance of the object. In art, as in theology, it is the object that counts, not the subject."

For many years, Barth's only preaching has consisted of occasional sermons to the prisoners in the Basel jail. He takes great pride in this spiritual work, writing out the prayers for the service and choosing hymns for the prisoners. "When I come before these men," he says, "I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner."

"God Is for You." Does Barthian theology have anything to tell a world in which persistent doubt seems to be man's real condition? Because of its roots in an unchallengeable faith and its reliance upon the truth of a book that many men now regard as a volume of interesting poetry rather than a divine revelation, his theology has been described—by Reinhold Niebuhr—as "designed for the church of the catacombs." Barth himself believes his work contains "a missionary call." It provides no easy, immediate, specific answers to man's daily worries—but summons him to learn that all questions are ultimately theological, and that the ultimate theological answer has been given. Translated into elementary pulpit talk, Karl Barth's rich and complex theology might appear to resemble the exhortations issued by