In 1918, as A devastating European war was coming to an end, Karl Barth (18801968) dropped his own theological bomb upon Europe’s Protestant churches, namely, the first edition of his famous commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. At the time, the author was an unknown Reformed pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil (where he had lived since 1910), the population of which barely included 1,600 inhabitants. In fact, so marginal was Barth that he had trouble finding a publisher. “Three well-known Swiss publishers,” he confessed, “refused to have anything to do with [the Romans commentary], which was quite understandable at the time .. -” 1 Yet, the Swiss pastor’s reflections on the apostle Paul’s epistle reflected a break within Barth’s own theological outlook and would cast a long shadow over Protestant churches in Europe and beyond.
The new direction in Barth’s thinking came from his own study of the Bible. For instance, in 1917 while preparing the commentary, Barth gave a talk about “The Strange New World of the Bible,” in which he explained that Scripture opened up a world not of history or morality or religion, not “the right human thoughts about God but the right divine thoughts about men.” 2 This theocentric perspective was especially compelling to Barth because of its potential to liberate Christians and the message of the gospel from their captivity to justifying and serving the affairs of nations and progress of civilizations. In a lecture he gave the summer following the publication of the commentary, the Swiss pastor declared that the “wholly otherness of the kingdom of God” was impossible to overemphasize. “The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God,” he asserted. “The new Jerusalem has not the least to do with the new Switzerland and the revolutionary state of the future; it comes to earth in God’s great freedom, when the time has arrived.” 3
Roughly coincident with Barth’s controversial biblical studies, Reformed Protestants in Germany were reeling from revolutionary political developments that disrupted the historic ties among churches, people, land, and rulers. During
the closing weeks of the World War I Germany experienced two waves of revolution, first from the organization of socialist political parties that demanded a new form of government, and second from the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The new regime, the Weimar Republic, replaced the older imperial arrangements with a parliamentary system formed to respond to the demands of industrial workers and introduce a democratic form of government.
The formation of the Weimar Republic was hardly free from conflict, both armed and ideological, but for the nation’s Protestant churches the situation was especially unsettling. According to Reinhard Moeller, one of the highest ecclesiastical officials from the old political and religious order, “the splendor of the German Empire, the dream of our fathers, the pride of every German has departed.” “Therewith,” he added, “the exalted vessel of German power, the ruler, and the royal house that we loved instinctively.” 4 In a highly complex arrangement that accommodated Reformed, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and dissenting or free church bodies, the German monarchy had provided a supportive setting for Protestants to conduct their affairs. But almost overnight, the new political order launched the German churches on a sea of uncertainty. Instead of producing relief from the ongoing meddling of the magistrate, the new order churned up angst over how ministers and congregations would persist without the magistrate’s benevolent patronage. On the one hand, the new German government removed the very structures that had provided stability for Protestant churches in favor of a society indifferent to religion, with voluntary churches and secularized state schools. On the other hand, some church leaders saw the democratic ideals of Weimar as an opportunity to make the church more responsive to the German people and thus invigorate a sleepy institution. Either way, Protestant church leaders were hardly willing to consider a church independent from the German state. Practically everyone was looking for a way to transfer the privileges the churches enjoyed under the German Empire to the Weimar government.
Despite differences between Barth’s idea of an otherworldly kingdom of God and German Protestantism’s nationalism, the Swiss pastor would establish himself as the dominant voice of twentieth-century Reformed Protestant theology from this unstable setting. No doubt, the courageous stands he and other German Protestants would take against the National Socialist regime that emerged in 1933 partly accounted for Barth’s eventual prominence. In fact, for Reformed church leaders in liberal theological settings where the advance of western civilization was virtually identical to the coming of God’s kingdom, the Swiss pastor’s categorical affirmation of divine transcendence was a welcome alternative. The irony was that Barth developed and applied his ideas to an ecclesiastical situation where even his Protestant allies were hard-pressed to abandon the ideal of a German church in the service of a German nation. If Chalmers and
Kuyper recognized the import of giving up ecclesiastical establishment and if Machen saw the problems inherent in cultural hegemony, Barth took the goal of ecclesiastical autonomy to an altogether different level. His appeal was to articulate a Calvinism that was almost mystical, with the sphere of spiritual truth not just separate from politics and culture but even above and beyond the institutional church.
Whither the German Reformed?
In 1921, when Barth accepted an offer to become the honorary professor of Reformed theology at the University of Gottingen, he entered the complicated world of German Protestantism, one that was far removed from the days either when Frederick III had overseen the production of the Heidelberg Catechism or when Reformed Protestants had been forced to heed the demands of the Roman Catholic prince-elector, Charles Philip. An institution founded in 1734 by King George II of England and the elector of Hanover, Gottingen drew inspiration from the intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment. This did not mean a release from the responsibilities that universities had for training ministers of the state churches. Gottingen’s faculty pioneered historical and pragmatic approaches to theology and biblical studies while also examining prospective clergy in the ordination process. This was no less true in Barth’s day, when university faculty conducted theological exams for the territories of Lower Saxony. This meant that Barth had the task of teaching Reformed dogmatics in a setting dominated by the legacy of the merger of Lutheran and Reformed Protestants in the Church of the Old Prussian Union.
Almost a century before Barth moved to Gottingen, on October 31, 1817, Frederick William III celebrated the tercentenary of the German Reformation. He did so by calling for a union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in his kingdom. Instead of subsuming one side into the other, the plan was to forge a single evangelical (read: Protestant) church. Although other rulers would imitate Frederick William’s proposal - such as those in Nassau, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden, and Wurttemberg - the Prussian union blazed a trail for harmonizing Protestants as a means of political centralization and consolidation. The proposed union was not without its critics. The king’s own assertion of his unilateral right to interpret the doctrine, liturgy, and church polity of the united bodies, not merely as prince of the realm but also as a bishop of the church, posed a significant hardship when penalties for violations of civil law could also be imposed on those who broke church law. For instance, in 1831 when pastors refused to use the liturgy prescribed by the king, a royal decree called for the prosecution of the offenders with the appropriate punishment of fines and
imprisonment. The heavy hand enforcing union was largely responsible for the rise of a neo-Lutheran movement that resulted in attempts to establish free Lutheran churches, the most prominent of which took root in Silesia. But such voluntary churches were initially illegal according to the terms of Protestant union.
The outworking of ecclesiastical union provided the setting for the work of the greatest nineteenth-century German-speaking Reformed theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). The son of a Reformed chaplain for the Prussian Army, Schleiermacher came under the influence of Moravians during his teens and prevailed upon his father to permit him to study at the University of Halle, an institution founded by German pietists. He absorbed some of the school’s critical methods in the study of Scripture and acquired a love of philosophy that extended to the ancients and moderns, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant. His first pastoral assignment was as chaplain for a Berlin hospital, where he quickly fit in with the city’s elite circles. In this context, Schleiermacher authored his first major work, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), in which he defended faith not as a specialist or sectarian matter but as a perennial and quotidian human trait. For two years starting in 1802 Schleiermacher took a call to pastor the small town of Stolp (nowin Poland). His reputation as a controversialist may account for the variety of posts he held for the next few years, first at the University of Halle as professor of theology, then as pastor in Berlin. But none of Schleiermacher’s controversies prevented him from taking part in 1810 in the formation of the University of Berlin. He joined the new institution’s faculty of theology and became an officer in the Prussian Academy of Sciences. From this setting Schleiermacher was well positioned to offer advice and shape the reorganization of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Prussian church.
Although the Berlin professor supported church union, he also sought ecclesiastical independence from the state. In the mid-1820s Schleiermacher wrote an anonymous tract to oppose the liturgy that the king was imposing on the Prussian churches. Not only had these proposed practices violated Protestant understandings of worship from Schleiermacher’s perspective, but royal prerogatives should not extend to church affairs, where the king’s status was no different from other church members. Despite objections to the implementation of union, Schleiermacher supplied the theological rationale for merging German Protestants. In 1822 he wrote The Christian Faith to summarize the fundamental doctrines that a united Protestant church must affirm and to defend a doctrine of the church that would undergird the Prussian Union.
The real problem with church union as Schleiermacher construed it was not between Lutherans and Reformed but between Protestants and Roman
Catholics. For Protestants the individual believer’s relationship to Christ was essential while for Rome the individual’s relationship to Christ depended on the Christian’s status within the church. In sum, the differences between Reformed and Lutherans on the church were “quite negligible” and were in “no sense traceable to a difference in the religious affections themselves .. .” s Even so, a united church did not mean a church beholden to the state. Although Schleiermacher argued for a union of Protestants he also insisted on a church free from state control. He did believe that the church had a responsibility to minister to the state. He also conceived of the civil government taking charge of most aspects of society, including the education of citizens. Nevertheless, a union of Protestant churches in service to the kingdom did not mean the subjugation of the church to the king. Each institution had its proper sphere.
Schleiermacher’s understanding of the church and support for union were indicative of German Reformed Protestants’ willingness to acquiesce to the monarchy at least until a final church-state policy emerged. Unlike the Lutherans, among whom several pockets of confessionalism developed into secessionist movements, Reformed Protestants were content to go along with the state’s policies. The Prussian Constitution of 1850 may have functioned as a catalyst for the German Reformed to recover their heritage. Liberal efforts in the 1840s to democratize Prussia, establish a neutral state, and remove religion from public education failed but did generate reforms that granted the churches greater autonomy than they had enjoyed previously. Still, the 1850 arrangements were by no means a clear victory for the churches to regulate their own affairs. On the one hand, Lutheran, Reformed, and Union churches used a presbyteriansynodical structure that allowed ecclesiastical officers a role in the management of church life and church members a hand in selecting those who sat on administrative committees. On the other hand, the king continued to govern the churches through the Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat (EOK), an executive body appointed by the king, who continued to govern the church in his capacity as summus episcopus (highest bishop), and to represent the monarch’s sovereign rights over the churches.
Reformed churches within Prussia did not fare well after church union but persisted in other German territories, despite the appeal of the Prussian Union to other rulers. As a general geographical pattern, Lutherans were strongest in the eastern sections of the kingdom and Reformed Protestants dominated the west. Pockets of Reformed Protestant vitality within Prussia persisted in Hesse and Hanover. Outside Prussia, Lippe and Bremen supported self-conscious Reformed churches, as did Huguenot remnants in parts of Lower Saxony, Alsace, and Lorraine. Still, the appeal of union was so strong even outside Prussia that historic centers of Reformed conviction lost their ties to the
Reformation. The German-American historian, James Isaac Good, describes the situation thus: “It is a sad fact to the Reformed that the burial-place of Olevianus at Herborn in Nassau, as well as the burial-place of Ursinus at Neustadt in the Palatinate, do not know either of these men any longer, for they have left the Reformed faith.’’ 6 Good adds that Reformed sympathies in Germany had declined so precipitously during the nineteenth century that the German Reformed from the United States had to intervene to replace a decrepit plaque in the church at Herborn commemorating Olevianus’ accomplishments.
After 1850, Reformed Protestants in Prussia and other German territories began in small ways to recover their traditions. After 1873, identifying with a church different from the established one became easier in Prussia thanks to a change in the constitution that made the established church voluntary. Some of these efforts stemmed from a reaction against church union policies. Others, like so many confessional revivals in nineteenth-century Europe, stemmed from anniversaries in Reformation history. As early as 1850, a diet of Reformed pastors, twenty-eight in all, met in Stuttgart to bemoan the state of convictions among Reformed Germans. The initial solution was to found a journal, Reformierte Kirchenzeitung, and to sponsor a series of books dedicated to the founders of the Reformed churches (modeled after a similar Lutheran series). The blossoming of Reformed self-awareness during the 1850s and 1860s also spawned several conferences for education and edification. These events took place at Elberfeld, Emden, and Detmold and culminated in an 1863 conference to celebrate the tercentenary of the Heidelberg Catechism. Another wave of conferences and publications refreshed pockets of Reformed Protestant vitality during the late 1870s and early 1880s. Reformierte Kirchenzeitung , which had ceased publication, received a new lease on life and accompanying it were two publication societies, one at Barmen and the other at Hanover. Another anniversary in 1884, this time the 400th anniversary of Zwingli’s birth, led to another conference. It also generated the formation of the Reformed Alliance (Reformierter Bund), an informal association of congregations (as many as one hundred at the time) dedicated to the recovery of the churches’ Reformed heritage. This organization proved to be the most enduring of the Reformed initiatives after 1850. The Alliance continued the work of education and publication and also promoted theological training for pastors by establishing seminaries in Berlin and Halle (though the education was informal rather than traditional).
By the time of the First World War, the ecclesiastical pattern in Germany was highly complex. Lutheran, Reformed, Union, and Roman Catholic churches enjoyed establishment privileges, while even if Germans themselves were free to align or refuse membership with any religious body. Protestant churches continued to be regulated by the state, and with this oversight came the
compensation of church taxes raised by the civil authorities to subsidize the churches. The German population also reflected the church s privileged status. The 1910 German census indicated that Protestants in the Union, Lutheran, and Reformed congregations numbered close to 40 million (compared to approximately 24 million Roman Catholics, over 600,000 Jews, and 283,000 “other” Christians). A 1925 census revealed that the German membership of Free Reformed churches was 9,559, only 3,000 more than the Moravians. 7 Degrees of participation in the churches varied. Although membership lists were large, the ratio of pastors to parishioners was even larger; in some German cities the number of church members for each pastor ranged between 10,000 and 14,000. In some of those same cities, the percentage of people attending worship ranged between 5 percent and 16 percent of membership. At the same time, the number of Germans submitting infants for baptism, seeking marriages within the church, and receiving Christian burials remained high: almost universal participation in baptism, three out of four burials within the church, and almost half of all marriages being conducted by ministers or priests. No matter if other western church leaders regarded German universities as a hotbed of infidelity, the churches remained a conservative piece of the German social fabric. The stature of Germany’s churches made ecclesiastical leaders reluctant to adapt to the new political order that came with Weimar.
Reformed Awakening and German Doldrums
The Weimar Republic closed a four-century chapter in German church history that had commenced with the Peace of Augsburg (1555). With the abdication of Germany’s princes and monarch in 1918, its churches lost the officials that had functioned as summi episcopi in each territory. The question that all church officers were asking after 1918 was who would now oversee the churches. This worry was all the more pressing because some of the Social Democrats, who initially controlled the new republic at the national level, called for the separation of church and state and the elimination of religious instruction in public schools. As a result, the pressing ecclesiastical issues for the new government were the place of religion in public education, whether the state would continue to support military, hospital, and prison chaplains, and the legal status of the churches as corporations with powers of taxation and state subsidies.
The first Weimar assembly, dominated by a coalition of Social Democrats, Democrats, and Center Party ministers, received a petition from the German Evangelical Church Committee that pressed these matters and added Sundays and religious holidays to the list of Christian endeavors that the state should protect. The new German constitution, which went into effect on August 11,
1919, quieted many Christians’ fears, even if most pastors lamented the replacement of the old hierarchical order with a republican and democratic system of government. The churches received almost everything they wanted, minus the Kaiser: the right of self-government, financial support, and a continuation of religious instruction in primary schools. The constitution also granted religious liberty to citizens, thus maintaining the voluntary model of church membership. But by granting the same liberties to the institutional churches - namely, the power to govern their own affairs - while continuing to subsidize them, the new constitution was not as revolutionary or as threatening as many had feared.
When Barth assumed his teaching responsibilities at Gottingen in February of 1921, the changes introduced by the Weimar Constitution had practically no direct bearing on his duties. His appointment to the newly founded chair of Reformed theology was a joint endeavor that involved lobbying by the Reformed Church of Northwest Germany and approval by the Prussian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Technically, this made Barth a civil servant. But the political implications of this professorship absorbed few of his thoughts. His immediate challenge was to prepare lectures on Reformed theology, and Barth admitted that he had little acquaintance with Reformed Protestantism’s doctrinal features. This deficiency was no great impediment since Bart himself admitted that the Reformed churches in the surrounding territory (Hanover) “were a dwindling and even despised minority.” 8 He confessed that the first edition of his Romans commentary was responsible for the invitation from Karl Muller, a professor at Erlangen, and Adam Heilmann, a pastor at Gottingen, to occupy a chair funded in large measure by Presbyterians in the United States. Of his commentary (the first edition), Barth wrote, “one will hardly find [it] distinguished by a particular Calvinistic content.” In fact, he admitted that being addressed as a Reformed theologian so often was “a novel experience.” Barth did not even have a doctorate, a deficiency soon remedied by the Protestant faculty at Munster, who awarded him an honorary degree for his “many and varied contributions to the revision of religious and theological questioning.” What attracted Barth to his German advocates was that, in his own words, “I was passionately concerned with holy scripture.” 9
The Bible may have been the draw, but Reformed doctrine was Barth’s assignment in the classroom. This meant becoming familiar with material from the sixteenth century that he had previously ignored. At one point, he admitted he did not own a copy of the Reformed confessions and had “certainly not read them - not to mention all the other terrible gaps in my knowledge.” His first lectures in 1922 were an exposition of the Heidelberg Catechism; this course attracted only fifteen students compared to almost sixty for his lectures on Ephesians. Barth’s initial approach was to sympathize with the historical context
for the catechism and then assess its relevance to contemporary Christians. According to Barth, this twofold task involved “having to approve and disapprove of almost everything.” In his second semester he lectured on Calvin, which turned out to be an intellectual feast: “a waterfall, a primitive forest, a demonic power, something straight down from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological.” 10 Later in 1923 he undertook lectures on Ulrich Zwingli and was deeply disappointed. He had started “full of good will and trust” but found in Zwingli all the problems of modern theology “with a few eggshells from the early church thrown in.” Attention to Zwingli led Barth to the debates with Luther over the Lords Supper. The Gottingen professor believed that Luther had the better of Zwingli but was too persistent. Barth viewed Calvin as the theologian to the rescue: he had lifted the “two carriages” out of the ruts of “an undialectical relationship” and moved them forward. Such exposure to the Reformers and their debates convinced Barth that his eyes were now “properly open to the Reformers and their message of the justification and sanctification of the sinner, of faith, of repentance and works, of the nature and limits of the church, and so on.” Barth had “swung into line with the Reformation,” not uncritically but with “special attention.” 11
The fruit of this reorientation was Barth’s creation of the dialectical school of theology. One outlet for this program was a new journal that Barth co-founded in 1923 (with Eduard Thurneysen and Friedrich Gogarten), Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times). The predominant theme at the outset was the Bible rather than the Reformed confessions, though Barth’s lectures on the Reformation era had cultivated an interest in recovering the formal principle of the sixteenth century, namely, sola scriptura. What the editors wanted was “a theology of the Word of God” and the Reformers were a “model” for this project. 12 Another point of departure for dialectical theology was Barth’s Church Dogmatics, a writing project that he began in 1924 and continued for the rest of his life (in ways that paralleled John Calvin’s lifelong project of the Institutes). Here again was an emphasis on the word of God but it included a stress upon Christian preaching such that an explication of dogma involved the exposition of Scripture. By the time that Barth started the Dogmatics, his colleagues at Zwischen den Zeiten knew that he was not merely following a school of theology. Disputes during the first year of publication with Emil Brunner, Ruldolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich over natural theology, the significance of Christ, and the usefulness of existentialism indicated that Barth’s understanding of the word of God was increasingly becoming his own theological trademark.
Barth had begun to sour on older (liberal) Protestant theology at the beginning of World War I when his former theological professors signed a manifesto of German intellectuals in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his war policy.
Liberalism, Barth believed, had lost sight of the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God. It treated religious truth more as the culmination of human reason and initiative than as a reality independent of human endeavor and wisdom. This understanding of God was crucial to dialectical theology, which involved juxtaposing conflicting ideas for the sake of positive affirmation. The polarities in Barth’s emerging outlook involved the finitude, sinfulness, dependence, and ignorance of human beings on the one side, and the power, holiness, transcendence, and omniscience of God on the other. This dialectic even extended to the work of pastors and theologians whose responsibility was to speak about divinity even though human beings were incapable of knowing God. The only resolution came through Jesus Christ, revealed in the word, who, as God the man, resolved the dichotomies.
Throughout this process Barth categorically rejected natural theology. He taught that human beings were incapable of knowing or reflecting meaningfully about God and Christ apart from faith or divine revelation. The idea of constructing a chain of thought that led from creation to the creator was anathema. It was also, in Barth’s view, responsible for the church’s all too ready identification with civil authorities and the civilizations they cultivated. Barthianism was emerging not only as a modern reappropriation of Reformation teaching but also as a Christian expression with potential for political protest.
Barth himself gave little sustained attention to German politics, busy as he was in his academic output. When he began teaching at Gottingen his advocates asked him to avoid politics, and Barth was content to comply with this request. He also continued to view Switzerland as his home and was inclined to think of himself as a foreigner in Germany. Still, Barth could not help noticing the political turmoil that afflicted the Weimar Republic. The Germans’ political incompetence seemed “boundless.” Meanwhile, university professors were “real masters at finding ingenious moral and Christian grounds for brutality.” German scholars’ opposition to the republic was particularly vexing. When colleagues at Gottingen donned the colors of the old empire in their regalia, Barth felt the old urge “to take up my position on the left wing.” 13 Barth could not understand the “attitude of sabotage” toward Weimar that pervaded the German academy. The professors “did not even give [the republic] a fair chance,” Barth complained. “They poured scorn on the notion that the year 1919 might have been a liberation for Germany.” He saw similar tendencies among the Protestant churches, which cultivated loyalties to the old imperial order and “developed a remarkably pompous self-importance which did not seem to be matched by the content and profundity of its preaching.” 14 Meanwhile, in 1925 when Barth presented a lecture to the Reformed Churches of Duisburg-Meiderich on the desirability of formulating a contemporary Reformed confession of faith, one of his
justifications for such a creed was its practical significance: it could allow the church to speak to the wider society. Barth conceded that Reformed Protestants and Lutherans differed over the nature of creeds, including whether a confession should address civil authorities. This difference would eventually cost Barth the support of conservative Lutherans.
The appointment in Gottingen lasted until 1925, when Barth moved to Munster - a “nest of priests and rebaptizers” - where his isolation from colleagues and other neo-orthodox interlocutors prompted another move in 1930, this time to Bonn. His time at Bonn coincided with one of the most productive and accomplished periods for the university’s Protestant theological faculty and Barth enjoyed his colleagues there more than at Gottingen or Munster. Although he may have found a congenial academic home, Barth’s teaching at Bonn also coincided with the end of the Weimar Republic and the institution of the National Socialist regime under Adolf Hitler. These political developments had enormous consequences for the German churches and drew Barth directly into the fray.
Within the Weimar political order, the German Protestant churches Lutheran, Reformed, and Union - had established an alliance in 1922 for the sake of protecting and representing the common interests of German Protestantism and cultivating a religious and moral outlook for the nation. The governing body of this German Evangelical Church Confederation was the Kirchentag, an assembly of 210 delegates, 150 of whom the various Land churches elected in proportion to their church members. In addition to the Kirchentag, a second layer of governance functioned within a Church Confederation Council (Kirchenbundesrat), a smaller body that allowed one delegate from each of the Land churches and additional representatives depending on membership (one delegate per 500,000). In 1932 these representative bodies became the object of Nazi designs to control the German churches. In particular, the National Socialists determined to exert control over the Old Prussian Union Church, a communion that had expressed opposition to the Nazis on various occasions, such as in a 1931 edict that prohibited the wearing of party uniforms in public gatherings for worship. This group of National Socialists took the name German Christians, and in the 1932 elections within the Union churches gained roughly one-third of the seats. The aim of the German Christians was to promote Protestant conviction within the National Socialist Party and infuse the German churches with the spirit of the German folk. Racial purity was also part of the agenda. Meanwhile German Christians forbade marriages between Christians and Jews, and rejected evangelism to the Jews because it would introduce foreign blood.
When Adolf Hitler assumed power as chancellor he received warm support from most Germans, including church officials. His willingness to defend
German traditions and affirm Christianity “as the basis of our collective morality” was a welcome change from the religious indifference and ambivalence that had prevailed in the Weimar Republic. 15 The new constitution of 1933 recognized that the “inviolable” foundation of the German Evangelical Church (Deutsch Evangelische Kirche) was “the gospel of Jesus Christ, as testified ... in the Holy Scriptures” and summarized in the “creeds of the Reformation.” 16 The new law also fostered greater administrative consolidation at the national level but allowed for diversity among Protestant churches in different territories along confessional lines. At the same time, the new constitutional provisions, along with the new governing authorities, created a climate in which the pro-Nazi German Christians gained the upper hand in church affairs. In the summer of 1933 the German Christians won almost two-thirds of the seats in the national synod. The emergence of a strong Nazi element in the German Protestant churches also resulted in the reorganization of the territorial churches. In September of 1933, for instance, the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union lost its superintendent and senate in favor of a bishop appointed by a Nazi-dominated synod. This territorial church also witnessed the ratification of a new law that restricted the office of clergy to Germans of Aryan descent only.
Opposition to these changes took shape in two forms. The first was the Pastors’ Emergency League, instituted in the fall of 1933 under the leadership of Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor of strong nationalist and monarchist convictions. Members of the organization pledged to expound Scripture and the Reformation confessions faithfully and to resist anything that would prevent such faithfulness. Those who joined the League also took an official stand against the laws that restricted ecclesiastical office to Aryans as “an infringement” of the organization’s confessional convictions. At the peak of its appeal, the League had just over seven thousand members. But a meeting with Hitler and Nazi church officials in January 1934 placated the fears of some, and the League lost almost one-third of its membership.
With the decline of the League, the second institution to gather opposition to the German Christians was the Confessing Church movement. This was a grassroots initiative of church leaders, gathering in independent (i.e. free) synods, who pledged fidelity to the word of God as the sole source of truth. These free synods initially developed in Reformed circles, with pastor Karl Immer organizing the first meeting in January of 1934 at Barmen-Gemarke. The Confessing Church would eventually include members of the League. Between January and May, free synods met at various locations; the assembly of roughly 25,000 at Dortmund in March was one of the largest. The culmination of the free synods was the First Confessing Synod of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union, which met on May 29, 1934 at Barmen. This assembly laid the
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basis for the Confessing Church as a rival organization to the national Protestant church in Germany (EDK).
The Barmen Declaration, proposed and ratified by the Confessing Church at the May meeting, was chiefly the work of Karl Barth even though he was not involved in German church politics. At the time when Hitler came to power, Barth continued to work on his lectures on nineteenth-century theology and understood that his “first priority” as a professor was to persuade students “to keep working as normally as possible in the midst of the general uproar.” 1 ' When he did consider politics, Barth thought about membership in the Social Democratic Party if only to protest Nazi policies that threatened the dismissal of professors from civil service appointments for belonging to another political party. Still, he did bristle over the National Socialist control of the Evangelical Church. In a sermon peached at the end of 1933 Barth provocatively highlighted Jesus’ racial identity. He also prompted a discussion of theological first principles in Theological Existence Today. Here Barth reaffirmed the biblical injunctions against worshiping false gods and the sufficiency of the gospel in Jesus Christ. The work appeared on July 8, 1934 and circulated widely: 37,000 copies were printed and Barth made sure that Hitler received one. Within three weeks of publication the German government had banned the treatise.
Barth was a natural ally for the Confessing Church movement but remained ambivalent about German Protestantism. He had known the leaders of the Pastors’ Emergency League and Confessing synods for some time and appreciated their stance. At the same time, Barth believed that the Confessing synods were voicing objections on grounds that were too narrow: whether or not to remain within the national church. For him, the real question was National Socialism, not simply the status of the German churches in the new government. If the chancellor of Germany were actually saying what Nazi teaching claimed, then the churches needed to recognize, according to Barth, that Hitler was “a god incarnate and offending most seriously against the first commandment.” 18 Despite tensions between Barth and the Confessing Church leaders, he participated in the first synod in January of 1934, where delegates discussed his paper on the status and conception of the Reformation confessions within contemporary Germany. Barth may have given the delegates more than they wanted to hear when he reiterated that the problem with German churches was not simply the dominance of the Nazis but centuries of capitulation to German rulers.
The second Confessing synod, which ratified Barth’s Barmen Declaration, combined awkwardly the historic conservatism of the German churches and Barth’s radical theological affirmations. The fifth article on the state was cautious but did break with older Reformation teaching, which held that the civil magistrate had some responsibility for maintaining the true religion:
Scripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things. 19
With this affirmation came rejections of state power that harbored totalitarian impulses or church power that embodied characteristics of the state. To Barth’s later regret, the Declaration did not make the Jewish question “a decisive feature.” 20 Barmen’s radicalism was evident in its first two articles, which recognized Christ as the only revelation and the Bible as the sole source of the church’s proclamation. If the delegates rejected all other “events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation,” as Barmen indicated, and limited their task simply to proclaiming the word of God, some might wonder about the status of all confessions, even that of Barmen, which used the powers of human reasoning to understand Scripture. Soon after the Synod, Barth issued his famous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner’s proposal to recover natural theology. In the context of a dispute over the state’s authority as a manifestation of the created order, Barths heated rejection made sense. But his insistence on the Word of God understood only by the work of the Holy Spirit raised questions about the human aspects of Christian ministry and witness that Barmen failed to answer.
Barth’s unique doctrinal convictions were not alone responsible for the lack of unanimity among Confessing Church leaders. His socialist convictions always proved a stumbling block among German church leaders, who were historically conservative and preferred the church’s status under the monarchy. At the same time, confessional Lutherans remained wary of the Confessing Church because Barmen seemed to undermine the status of Lutheran confessions. Some Lutherans in particular took issue with Barth’s idiosyncratic understanding of Scripture and the church. Beyond Lutheran opposition Barth also differed with Confessing Church leaders on the aims of the movement. While Barth was prepared to abandon the trappings of ecclesiastical establishment altogether for the sake of the church’s proclamation, most of the Confessing Church members wanted recognition from the Nazi regime. As a result, when German officials began to investigate Barth’s disloyalty to the Nazi government - he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Liihrer and to give the Nazi salute before his classroom prayers — he was basically on his own. The Confessing Church would
not identify its aims with Barth’s, and at one point some of its leaders refused to invite him to their synod. For his part, Barth believed the Confessing Church had “no heart for the millions who suffer unjustly.” 21 After a period of being banned from the classroom and public speaking, on June 14, 1935, Barth accepted an offer to teach at the University of Basel.
After his relocation, Barth and the Confessing Church went broadly separate ways, though Barth did continue to monitor the German church and enlisted support for German Protestants among the Swiss. The Confessing Church failed to gain recognition from the German authorities, and after 1936 it and the German Christians were merely two factions within a national church overseen by the Ministry of Church Affairs, which used intimidation and mediation to control clergy. Differences also afflicted the Confessing Church. Lutherans balked at Barmen as a true expression of Lutheran theology. Furthermore, in territories where they had retained control over local church committees Lutherans rejected calls by Confessing Church leaders to contest the regime’s ecclesiastical administration. The one issue on which the Confessing Church achieved unanimity was in opposing the government’s effort to secularize the nation’s schools.
Meanwhile, Barth went back to teaching Reformed subjects and composing the Church Dogmatics. In 1937 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen and chose the Scottish Confession (1560) as the basis of his presentation on the knowledge of God. He also started a new series of classroom lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism. Onlookers may have wondered how Barth could continue to study old documents in a context where those confessions made so little difference. And yet, his lectures fit Barth’s emphasis on divine transcendence and God’s word. They also isolated Barth from Protestants who looked to the state churches as the embodiment of ministering Scripture. This was a theological move clearly in step with the original Reformed protest against Rome’s easily abused identification of God’s designs with the pope’s determinations. But whether Barth would grant God a point of contact with fallen humanity was a question that haunted his breathtaking recovery of church dogma.
Neo-Orthodox Boundaries
After World War II, Barth’s reputation and influence expanded thanks to his ongoing intellectual productivity and the increased opportunities for personal exchange and ecclesiastical fraternity that accompanied peace. After the war, he accepted an offer to teach summer semesters at Bonn, where he attracted other opportunities for speaking, preaching, and giving interviews with the media.
Barth also established contacts with former colleagues in the Confessing Church movement. Wherever he taught, whether in Basel for the regular year or in Bonn over the summer, Barth received visits from numerous church leaders from Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He was not simply the most productive and widely published European Protestant theologian, but was also perceived as a man of political conviction who had stood up to the worst regime in European history.
Barth was readily accessible to German-speaking Protestants, but his reception in the Anglo-American world was delayed. The most important conduit for Barthianism to Presbyterian churches was Scotland, and specifically faculty and students from the New College at Edinburgh, a theological school originally established by the Free Church of Scotland but now part of the University’s faculty, thanks to the recent merger in 1929 of the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland. 22 Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870-1936), who lectured in systematic theology at New College since 1904, originally taught a version of theology that followed the trail established by Albrecht Ritschl. Like Barth, Mackintosh had studied at Marburg with Wilhelm Hermann. But by the 1920s when Barth’s writings were circulating, Mackintosh shifted into a dialectical mode, particularly in his posthumously published book Types of Modern Theology, Schleiermacher to Barth (1933).
One of Mackintosh’s students who played a critical role in the reception of Barth was Thomas F. Torrance. The son of Church of Scotland missionaries to China, Torrance had studied philosophy at Edinburgh as an undergraduate, and then arrived at New College in pursuit of ministerial credentials. Torrance finished his academic training at Basel from 1937 to 1938, where he studied with Barth. Although he did not know German at first, and while struggling with Barth’s pronunciation of Latin, the young Scot excelled to the point of becoming one of the Swiss theologian’s prized pupils. (Three decades later, when Barth retired, his recommendation was for Torrance to be his successor at Basel.) After a year in Switzerland, one of his professors from New College arranged for an appointment for Torrance at Auburn Theological Seminary in upstate New York, an institution of the Presbyterian Church USA, and the place of origin for the liberal Presbyterian manifesto “The Auburn Affirmation” (1923). Between his missionary background and studies with Barth, Torrance sounded more conservative than the colleagues that the progressive faculty at Auburn were used to. Torrance passed the year teaching systematic theology without any serious incidents, but his experience was an indication of how much more theological (read: dogmatic in the older sense) and churchly were members of European Protestant theological faculties than their peers in the United States.
Torrance turned down offers to teach at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University in 1939, deciding to return to Europe instead and serve as a chaplain in the British military. Throughout the 1940s he served in parish ministry, but in 1950 accepted an appointment at New College where he transmitted Barth’s theology in two significant ways. The first was through classroom instruction; the second was to persuade the Scottish publisher T&T Clark to publish an English translation of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Torrance served on the two-person editorial team with Geoffrey Bromiley, an English historical theologian teaching at the newly founded Fuller Theological Seminary in California, who performed the bulk of translation.
Torrance was not the sole mediator of Barth to the English-speaking world. Barth’s influence in Scotland extended to theologians at Glasgow and Aberdeen where the likes of Ian Henderson, Ronald G. Smith, and John K. S. Reid appropriated Barthian themes into their own teaching and writing, considered by some to embody the best of Scottish neo-orthodox theology. These contributions, however, made no obvious dent on Scottish Presbyterian churches, in part because the communions’ Calvinist creeds had prevented liberal theology from dominating ecclesiastical life as it had in Germany. At the same time, the Church of Scotland never came under the same pressure to issue Barmen-like affirmations because the Scottish authorities did not pose a threat to Presbyterianism on the order of National Socialism. This left Barthianism to develop in the classroom, study, and pulpit, depending on the theological interests of a divinity professor or pastor. It did not generate a program of ecclesiastical reform or renewal.
In situations where Reformed confessions as expressions of church teaching held little force - such as England and the United States - Barth’s writings had much less influence. Some of this difference owed to the lack of familiarity with - and in some cases hostility to - German theology. But equally important to the reception of Barth in the United States was the presence of a homegrown version of neo-orthodoxy produced by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). The son of a German-American minister in Wright City, Missouri, Niebuhr studied at his denomination’s (Evangelical Synod of North America) college (Elmhurst) and seminary (Eden) before enrolling at Yale for degrees at the Divinity School and in arts and sciences. After graduating from Yale, Niebuhr received a call to serve as parish minister in Detroit, to an Evangelical Synod congregation. This ecclesiastical body was a direct successor of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union. When some of its members immigrated to the United States and settled in Illinois and Missouri, they sought pastors from the Old World who upon their arrival in America in 1840 formed German Evangelical Church Association of the West, the Evangelical Synod’s original name. This meant that
Niebuhr’s lone pastoral experience was in the American offshoot of the Prussian Union church. In 1928 he accepted a teaching post in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, the most influential liberal Presbyterian school in the United States. By 1934 the Evangelical Synod had merged with the German Reformed denomination, the Reformed Church US, to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
Barth’s first encounter with Niebuhr occurred in 1947 when the American visited Barth at Basel. The Swiss professor later wondered whether “we would sniff at each other, or lie stretched out peacefully in the sun side by side.” 23 By that point, Niebuhr was every bit the spokesman for neo-orthodoxy that Barth was. In fact, in the United States the Yale professor was the preferred option for mainstream Protestant pastors and professors, since Barth’s project of producing a church dogmatics was distant from the intellectual habits that prevailed among Americans. Much of this appeal owed to Niebuhr’s own efforts as a pastor, when he had tried to apply liberal Protestant ideals to the gritty realities of an urban, working-class neighborhood. He had realized that liberal idealism about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was powerless to address deepseated social problems. In 1932 Niebuhr took matters into his own hands and ran for Congress on the Socialist ticket, arguing that only socialism had the rigor to save western civilization. He won 4 percent of the vote. That same year saw the publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society, which introduced a strain of ethical realism to mainstream Protestants in the United States. Instead of invoking the ethics of love and self-sacrifice, Niebuhr taught liberal Protestants about the realities of power politics and the ever present reality of self-interest. For liberals to hope that people would embrace selflessness was “stupid” 24 ; Niebuhr preferred radical politics to the hypocritical status quo. By 1934 he had repudiated pacifism and rejected the tenets of liberal Protestant progressivism: that education promotes justice, that western civilization was improving, that character was more important than social structures, that appeals to love and justice would overcome selfishness and greed, and that wars are simply the product of ignorance. Although he eventually abandoned socialism, Niebuhr maintained a sober perspective on American and world affairs. This outlook even appealed to secular liberals because of its frank affirmation of the West in the face of Soviet communist tyranny.
When Barth and Niebuhr met again in 1948 at the World Council of Churches inaugural assembly, held in Amsterdam, the former’s opening address became the occasion for these neo-orthodox leaders to air their differences. The Council’s theme was “The Disorder of the World and God’s Design,” and Barth argued that “God’s Design” should always go before the “World’s Disorder.” The church’s task was to witness that Christ had “robbed sin and death, the devil and
hell of their power.” He elaborated that the church was not responsible for solving the world’s problems; its task was to announce the kingdom of God. As such, “God’s Design” for the world was not a kind of “Christian Marshall Plan” but a requirement to trust in and follow the Lord Jesus Christ. To Niebuhr s ears this was typical Barthian fundamentalism, a “sanctified futilitarianism. ’ 2S He challenged Barth for relegating the church to institutional irrelevance and denying Christians any voice in discriminating between better and worse forms of social organization.
The brawl between neo-orthodox heavyweights persisted throughout the 1950s, precisely because the international tensions evident during the initial phase of the Cold War raised the larger question of the church’s role in resistance to Communism. For Niebuhr, Barth’s insistence that God stood above all political arrangements, even capitalism and socialism, left vast parts of eastern Europe condemned to totalitarian rule, with no recourse to divinely derived opposition. For Barth, Niebuhr’s defense of liberal societies in the West naively ignored capitalism’s and democracy’s own forms of tyranny. One positive outcome was Niebuhr’s recognition of his dependence on liberal theology. In 1960 he wrote: “when I find neo-orthodoxy turning into a sterile orthodoxy or new Scholasticism, I find that I am a liberal at heart, and that many of my broadsides against liberalism were indiscriminate.” 26 Barth had a similar effect on other American proponents of neo-orthodoxy whose ecclesiastical and doctrinal contexts were distinct from Europe.
Confessing Neo-Orthodoxy
Barth’s disagreements with Niebuhr did not prevent the Swiss theologian from appearing on the cover of Time magazine on April 20, 1962, an indication of how much Americans had incorporated Barth within their reflections about Christianity. The news story coincided with Easter (hence the title, “Witness to an Ancient Truth”), Barth’s first visit to the United States where the University of Chicago was granting him an honorary doctorate, and his seventy-fifth birthday. Barth’s appeal in the United States was largely enigmatic, according to Time’s reporter. On the one hand, no contemporary theologian had ventured as comprehensive a statement of the Christian religion as he had. On the other hand, he had earned political stripes for standing up to Hitler and the Nazis, even speaking of the Fiihrer in terms that echoed American sentiments: “the enterprise of an evil spirit.” But Barth was hardly a household name. The story credited the Swiss theologian with composing theology that “soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church.” This meant that preachers
read Barth and used him for weekly sermons, but “laymen hardly know his name.” Time's reporter also judged that Barth had “far fewer disciples in the U.S. than either Niebuhr or Tillich; and even in Germany, young theologians find more impact in the Christian existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann.” 2
One Protestant leader of note in the United States, whom Time quoted on Barth - “he bestrides the theological world like a colossus” - was John Mackay, the president of Princeton Theological Seminary. A native of the Scottish Highlands and a son of the Free Presbyterian Church, Mackay’s interest in Barth owed more to his European than American connections. After studying at the University of Aberdeen, Mackay pursued theological training at Princeton Seminary, thanks partly to ties between his pastor and Princeton’s foremost theologian, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. At Princeton, Mackay entered the world of mainstream American Protestant ecumenism and became active in the YMCAand Student Volunteer Movement. Between 1916 and 1930, he served as a schoolmaster in Peru under the auspices of the Free Presbyterian Church and then as an evangelist for the YMCA in Uruguay. While on furlough in 1930, Mackay knew that Barth would be teaching at Bonn and relocated his family so that he could hear the Swiss theologian’s lectures. Although not without misgivings, the evangelist expressed “deep sympathy” with the dialectical school of theology, precisely because Barth was “rehabilitating in contemporary thought the concept of God held by the great Hebrew prophets as well as that of Jesus Christ.” 28 After returning to Latin America, American Presbyterian officials offered Mackay the post of president of Princeton Seminary in 1936. His chief task at Princeton was to heal the controversy that had divided the seminary between conservatives like J. Gresham Machen and evangelicals like Charles Erdman (see Chapter Twelve, above). The selection of Mackay was stroke of genius. As a Scot he came without any of the negative associations that haunted either liberals or conservatives in the American church, and as a Scot with a conservative ecclesiastical background and openness to neo-orthodoxy, Mackay was well equipped to position Princeton to the conservative side of mainstream American Protestantism without becoming extreme (read: sectarian).
Under Mackay, Princeton Seminary emerged as the home for continental neo-orthodox reflection in the United States and an alternative to Niebuhrian realism at Union Seminary in New York City. His selections would not always have pleased Barth but his new faculty did draw from European theological currents, such as the appointment of Emil Brunner for the academic year 1938-39. (Brunner declined a permanent position.) Objections from remaining conservatives in the PCUSA led Mackay to assert that “Princeton is virtually a bulwark of dialectical theology.” 29 To back this up, Mackay added a host of biblical and theological scholars from Europe whose ties to the United States
were mainly through ecumenical networks. In addition to Brunner, Mackay recruited: Otto Piper, a German theologian who had succeeded Barth at Munster; Josef Hromadka, a Czech theologian who had escaped his homeland after Nazi occupation through ecumenical leaders in Geneva; and two French scholars, Georges Barrois, a philosophical theologian, and Emile Cailliet, an archaeologist. Rounding out Princeton’s international faculty were George Hendry, a Presbyterian from Scotland who did advanced work at Tubingen and Berlin, and Edward J.Jurji, a Lebanese scholar of world religions.
Arguably, the most important Princeton faculty member for securing a Barthian presence in North America, Edward A. Dowey, Jr, was one who started as a student soon after Mackay’s inauguration as president. A native of Philadelphia, Dowey studied nearby at a Presbyterian school, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, before enrolling at Princeton in 1940. Dowey was not keen on all members of the European faculty, but he did admire and seek out Mackay, who assisted the seminarian in finding theological resolution through Barth’s writings. After service as a chaplain during World War II, Dowey pursued graduate study, first in the United States at Columbia University in philosophy and then in Zurich under Emil Brunner. Despite deep disagreements between professor and student, which echoed the 1930s exchanges between Brunner and Barth, Dowey completed a dissertation on John Calvin’s doctrine of the knowledge of God. Upon his return to the United States, Dowey taught briefly at Columbia, then at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, and in 1958 finally returned to Princeton under Mackay, where he taught for three decades.
Soon after joining Princeton’s faculty, Dowey received an appointment from the Presbyterian Church USA to chair a committee responsible for drafting a brief summary of the Reformed faith. The occasion for this doctrinal statement was the 1958 ecclesiastical merger between the PCUSA and the United Presbyterian Church of North America - resulting in a twenty-five year period when the northern Presbyterian church was known as the United Presbyterian Church USA. Under Dowey’s leadership, the committee received the General Assembly’s approval to survey Reformed Protestantism’s entire confessional heritage. The culmination was a proposed Book of Confessions and a new Confession of Faith. Between 1965 and 1967 American Presbyterians debated the merits of both documents. The purpose of the former was to enlarge the church’s witness beyond the Westminster Confession and Catechisms and to include a range of Christian creeds. These spanned Christian history from the ancient church (the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds) to the Reformation era (Scots Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, and Second Helvetic Confession). The proposed book of confessions also included two twentieth-century
statements - the Barmen Declaration and the Confession of 1967 - both of which revealed the unmistakable fingerprints of Barthianism.
At the same time, the Barthian influence proved to be the most contested aspect of the new confessional statements. In summarizing the Christian faith “In Jesus Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. Jesus Christ is God with man” - the Confession of 1967 drew upon the Christocentric teaching that Barth had been developing for the better part of three decades. But when the Confession reserved for Christ the status of “Word of God” (with a capital “w”), Barth’s teaching became harder to negotiate. Some conservatives wanted the Confession to affirm that the Bible was also the Word of God. In fact, controversy over the Confession launched two dissenting organizations, Presbyterians Umted for Biblical Confession and the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a harbinger of the special-interest groups that would torment the Presbyterian Church USA throughout the late twentieth century. The compromise that finally gained approval reserved a special status for Christ while acknowledging the uniqueness of the Old and New Testaments:
The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel. The church has received the books of the Old and New Testaments as prophetic and apostolic testimony in which it hears the word of God and by which its faith and obedience are nourished and regulated.
Ironically, at the very moment that Barth’s labors gained ecclesiastical approval and confessional standing, neo-orthodoxy’s influence was subsiding thanks to the very inspiration that Barth had provided through the Barmen Declaration. The inclusion of Barmen in the American Presbyterian Book of Confessions drew little opposition because many in the church regarded the heroic struggle of German Protestants against the Third Reich as a model for Protestant churches in the United States to speak religious truth to government power. Although Barth had insisted that the church must limit its message to the reconciliation available to the world through Jesus Christ - a point that Niebuhr found indifferent to the “social crisis” - Barmen functioned as a pretext for the church-based social activism that would dominate the Presbyterian Church’s assemblies. The Confession of 1967 tapped protests in the United States against racial segregation, the subordination of women, the Vietnam War, and corporate capitalism in a section on “Reconciliation in Society.” This included affirmations of the church’s opposition to discrimination, war, poverty, and sexual anarchy.
The Presbyterian Church proved what Barth had known since his exchange with Niebuhr after World War II - namely that the United States’ capacity for proclaiming church dogma could not withstand the American predilection for activism.
The American Presbyterian reception of Barth was ironic not simply because a church was incorporating a non-political theological program partly for the sake of social relevance but also because the Swiss theologian’s work in Reformed dogmatics turned out to be alien to most contemporary Reformed churches, American Presbyterians included. Compared to Thomas Chalmers, Abraham Kuyper, or J. Gresham Machen, Barth had done more to learn from and appropriate the theology of the historic Reformed churches. However much his philosophical oddities or dialectical method colored doctrines taught byjohn Calvin or the Heidelberg Catechism, Barth featured those earlier statements of Reformed conviction in ways that surpassed even the best efforts of conservative church leaders in Scotland, the Netherlands, or the United States.
Yet Barth’s recovery of Reformed orthodoxy occurred in contexts where the churches were ill equipped to reflect on and benefit from the past. Whether in Germany, where Reformed churches had languished for several centuries under the weight of German politics, or in Switzerland, where civil polity and social order also put limits on the churches, Barth’s recovery of Reformation theology was not institutional but depended on individual pastors and theologians, who would imitate Barth’s stance and apply his teaching. The United States and its mainline Presbyterian Church was the sole instance of a Reformed church that attempted to appropriate Barth’s insights. Even this appeal to Barth, however, turned out to be partial and inconsistent.
Perhaps the failure of Barth’s theology to find ecclesiastical outlets owed to his odd blend of themes from continental philosophy and early modern theology. Just as important, if not more so, was the shallowness of the institutional setting in which Barth labored. Without an ecclesiastical program adding the recovery of Reformed confessions to the heroism of social and political protest, the appeal of Reformation theology would depend on the idiosyncrasies of individual theologians’ seminars and writing projects. At the same time, Barth’s theology dominated twentieth-century Protestant thought and would rival Calvin’s teaching for supremacy within academic theology. For pastors, church leaders, and professors who wanted a serious engagement with Reformed doctrine without the stigma of separatism that haunted followers of Chalmers, Kuyper, and Machen, Barth was and would remain the answer.