The major event of twentieth-century theology was a postwar explosion, the Barthian overthrow of the liberal establishment. No theological movement in Christian history caused a more dramatic transformation of its inherited landscape than the one led by Karl Barth in the 1920s and 1930s. For two centuries the pressure of modern science and historical criticism made the liberal strategy in theology seem imperative. That presumption was overturned with astonishing swiftness in the early 1920s, as Barthian “crisis theology” replaced liberalism with a neo-Reformationist perspective that, in Barth’s case, combined dialectical brilliance, spiritual power, a prophetic edge, and a great and strange narrowness.1
Karl Barth, the son of a conservative Reformed pastor and seminary professor, took for granted the necessity of the liberal tradition when he enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1906 and hung on Adolf von Harnack’s every word, deeply admiring Harnack’s lectures on Christian doctrine. Later, at his father’s behest, Barth studied under Adolf Schlatter at Tübingen and sneered at his theological conservatism. After that he studied at Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann, where he embraced Herrmann’s christocentric blend of Kant and Schleiermacher. Years later Barth recalled, “I absorbed Herrmann through every pore.”2
Herrmann’s warm-hearted devotion to Christ assured Barth that liberal theology retained the essential gospel faith. Rationalistic forms of liberalism had no appeal to Barth, and Ernst Troeltsch’s de-Christianized historicism left him cold, but Herrmann had the evangelical spirit. Barth later reflected: “One of the best remedies against liberal theology and other kinds of bad theology is to take them in bucketsful. On the other hand, all attempts to withhold them by strategem or force only causes people to fall for them even more strongly, with a kind of persecution complex.” The moral of the story: Fritz Barth saved his son from a lifelong fascination with liberal theology by allowing him to study bad theology at prestigious schools. But when Barth turned away from his acquired liberalism, his father’s conservative orthodoxy was not an option.3
For two years Barth preached liberal sermons at a German-speaking Reformed church in Geneva, where Calvin had preached and where his tiny audience found him strange. Afterward, moving to Safenwil, Switzerland, he preached to a tiny congregation of farmers and shopkeepers that also shook their heads in perplexity. In both places only women attended church; Barth urged them to “think seriously about yourselves,” to strive for the highest ideals, and to “try to become valuable.” After services he puzzled that no one found his interpretations as inspiring or edifying as he had when he heard them from Herrmann.4
Ministry proved unsettling at best, but Barth’s early ministry coincided with the emergence of the Religious Socialist movement in Switzerland, led by Zurich pastor Hermann Kutter and University of Zurich theology professor Leonard Ragaz. The religious socialists, especially Kutter, were religiously serious in a way that was new to Barth. They spoke and behaved as though it made all the difference in the world whether one believed in God. Barth later recalled, “From Kutter I simply learnt to speak the great word ‘God’ seriously, responsibly, and with a sense of its importance.”5 Kutter was not ashamed of the gospel and not impressed with the achievements of capitalist civilization.
Barth’s exposure to religious socialism shook loose some of his acquired bourgeois culture-religion. He told his congregation that without a commitment to a kingdom-bringing social justice, their religion was a pack of lies. Having been touched, as he later recounted, “for the first time by the real problems of real life,” he immersed himself in trade union issues and socialist theory, blending liberal theology with socialist politics. Barth still assumed, with Schleiermacher and Herrmann, that religious experience must be the generative ground of theology. At the same time he resisted the disturbing suspicion that he had been corrupted by the cultural chauvinism and nationalism of his German teachers.6
That suspicion helped to motivate Barth’s incessant railing against German and English militarism, which he kept up nearly every week from the pulpit for a year before Europe descended into war. He urged his tiny congregation that the teaching of Jesus was irreconcilable with the murderous violence of war and that modern Christians had to be anti-war. For a while Barth imagined that at least some of his teachers must have agreed. But on August 1, 1914, the kaiser called the German nation to war, in an address written by Harnack. Two months later, 93 prominent German intellectuals issued a ringing manifesto of support for the kaiser’s war policy. Barth read the manifesto with revulsion, finding the names of nearly all of his German theological teachers, including Harnack and Herrmann. He later compared the experience to the twilight of the gods.7
The spectacle of seeing his mentors promote the kaiser’s militarism was deeply alienating to Barth. Their appeal to a religiously normative “war experience” and their failure even to raise the question of national idolatry made him doubt the integrity of their theology. If liberal theology was so easily pushed aside by political expediency or so easily turned into an instrument of patriotic hubris, what good was it? In Barth’s telling, the question answered itself: “A whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching, which I had hitherto held to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.” Liberal theology was obviously bankrupt, and he had to find an alternative to it.8
Actually it was not that simple. The story of how Barth rebelled against his liberal teachers and changed the direction of modern theology is the founding narrative of twentieth-century theology, notwithstanding that a good deal of it is wrong or exaggerated. Contrary to the story that Barth told, his career did not consist of a series of dramatic conversions; it took him six years to break from liberal theology, his development of an analogical method was an elongated affair too, and he never stopped being a dialectical theologian. His path to Barthian theology was more winding and complex than the usual rendering of it, partly because Barth told the story from the perspective of his later theology. I dissected this extremely tangled story in The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology. Here it is enough to pause briefly over his involvement in Religious Socialism.
The religious socialists were divided between an idealistic faction that wanted to Christianize the social democratic movement and a more quietist faction that wanted Christian Socialists to stay out of party politics. The first group, led by Leonard Ragaz, urged that Christians had a social mission to transform society into the kingdom of God. The second group, led by Herrmann Kutter, warned that Christian Socialists would lose their Christian character if they entered the political struggle for power. The Ragaz activists were very tough on German militarism, they condemned the war unequivocally, and they had a coherent strategy of social and political transformation. The Kutter group sympathized with Germany and kept quiet about the war, yet it was also more radical in its Socialist identity. Most of the Ragaz idealists lined up with Eduard Bernstein’s social democratic revisionism, while Kutter sided with the radical Marxism of Karl Kautsky.9
Barth was torn between them. Politically he tended to side with the social democratic idealists. What was the point of calling for socialism if you refused to work with actual unions and socialist parties? Plus, the Ragaz activists were right about the war. Unlike most of the European socialist movement, which surprised and appalled Barth by marching off to war, the Ragaz social democrats held fast to the socialist opposition to war. Barth was inclined to write off Kutter as a pro-German quietist, but his closest friend, Pastor Eduard Thurneysen, cautioned him against that dismissal. Thurneysen suggested that Kutter’s emphasis on “waiting for God” contained a deeper spiritual wisdom than Ragaz’s eagerness to see signs of the kingdom in the antiwar opposition and the socialist movement. Kutter understood that every hearing of the Word of God was problematic. While Ragaz stressed ethical idealism and the politics of social democracy, Kutter and Christoph Blumhardt stressed that people are enslaved without God. By the fall of 1915 Barth agreed that the religious part of religious socialism needed its own language, sphere, and basis. It needed to wait upon a God that does not submit to human plans. Instead of an activist agenda for building the kingdom, Christian Socialism needed formative spiritual communities that waited upon the movement of God’s Spirit in the world.10
That was the crucial turn in Barth’s twisting and turning path to a neo-Reformation theology. The first name by which the Barthian revolt came to be known was “crisis theology.” Barth wrote that before the kingdom of God can become real to modern Christians “there must come a crisis that denies all human thought.” Crisis theology was a reaction against the slaughter and destruction of World War I and the complicity of Barth’s teachers in sacralizing the German war effort. More broadly, it was a response to the ferocious judgment of the war on European cultural pretension. Liberal theologians gave the impression of being comfortable with God and proud of their sophistication. Crisis theology was about shattered illusions, the experience of emptiness before a hidden God, and what Barth called the unexpected surge of spiritual meaning that he found in “the strange new world within the Bible.”11
During the war Barth compiled a wild, lyrical, expressionist commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The book began as a compilation of sermon notes, grew into a commentary aimed only at edifying Thurneysen and a few other friends, and was eventually published in 1918 with no thought of acclaim or a wide audience. Barth later recalled, “I had no inkling of the repercussions which would follow.” His first edition of the book stressed that Paul taught that true history is made only through the inbreaking power of the Spirit. This spiritual truth could not be grasped by historical criticism or by cutting Paul’s theology to fit the worldview of modern academic culture, Barth contended. It could be known only by presenting Paul in all of his strangeness. Paul was an apostle of the kingdom of God who spoke to people of every age. The differences between his age and the modern age were unimportant. Modern biblical criticism had a rightful place as a preparatory discipline, Barth allowed, but beyond that, it did very little to help readers apprehend the Bible’s meaning. Liberal theology was weak because it historicized and psychologized the gospel. Barth preferred “to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit.”12
That was an echo of Plato’s theory of forms and Kant’s appeal to the thing-in-itself. For Barth, as for Plato and Paul, salvation was about the restoration of a broken ideal and the hunger for a new age. Like Plato and Kant, Barth thematized the notion of a “real reality” that lies beyond the world of appearance. The first edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans was a message of hope with a joyful, exuberant tone. It proclaimed that in the new aeon of Christ’s triumph over sin, God’s grace worked upon faith and unbelief and sin to bring about God’s purpose. Through Christ’s redeeming death and resurrection, God inaugurated the salvation of the entire world.
But that was still a version of liberal theology, emphasizing experiences of value and treating the gospel message as a progress report. As late as 1920, Barth assured himself that Schleiermacher would have agreed with him. His famous second edition of 1921 had a darker tone and an outright rejection of liberal theology, which reflected the influence of Christoph Blumhardt, Franz Overbeck, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Søren Kierkegaard upon him. Now Barth described the gospel message as “the fire alarm of a coming new world” and religion as an obstacle to knowing God. From Blumhardt, Barth interpreted Christianity as a kingdom faith that proclaims the transformation of the present from beyond. From Overbeck, he presented Christian history as an unavoidably degenerative process. From Dostoyevsky he took the theme that the church substituted its own authority and myth for the freedom of Christ. From Kierkegaard he refashioned his book around the dialectic of time and eternity, adopting the notion of the “moment” as a trans-historical divine act through which God breaks into history from beyond. In both editions the book was extremely expressionist in its rhetorical style and argument, featuring images of disruption and explosion that broke apart the world of appearances. Barth’s alternately soaring, lyrical, volcanic prose and his torrential flow of metaphor made the reigning liberal theology seem sterile by comparison.13
If history stands under the crisis of divine judgment and death, as Barth stressed in the second edition, a different fundamental dialectic was needed. The dialectic of the first edition was too optimistic, like liberalism. The later Barth turned to Luther and Calvin to get his bearings, but in 1921 Barth did not know either of them very well. His second-edition Romans put Kierkegaard’s dialectic at the heart of his argument, stressing the infinite qualitative difference between God and humankind. In the Hegelian and Marxist traditions, dialectic is a critical process, the dynamic of history that makes history move. Explicating Paul’s theology via Kierkegaard, Barth affirmed the movement but also its dissolution. Barth stressed that Paul did not think of God as an aspect of the historical or evolutionary process. To Paul, God was a personal supracosmic reality, absolute in power, who cannot be free for us unless he is free from us. By drawing so extensively on Kierkegaard, who was little known at the time, Barth helped to make him famous.
Crisis theology was an explosion of culture-sundering dialectics that played up the Kierkegaardian cleavages between God and world, existence and essence, and faith and reason. Against liberal theology, Barth asserted the priority of the Word of God for theology; but against Protestant orthodoxy, he rejected any identification of the divine Word with the biblical text. Barth took his doctrine of revelation straight from Herrmann, who got it from Hegel: Revelation is divine self-revealing, not the disclosure of propositional truths about God or anything else. Barth did not acknowledge, however, that the linchpin of his theology was a liberal idea; he never managed to say it. He did say that any human apprehension of revelation is limited by the incomprehensible otherness of God and the impossibility of extricating oneself from the revelatory act. Theology made progress only as a dialectical process of question and answer, answer and question, in faithful anticipation of the Spirit’s movement, through which an always-fallible discernment of the ineffable divine mystery takes place.
The key to the Barthian revolt in theology, which morphed into a variety of existential, dialectical, neo-orthodox, and neo-scholastic theologies, was Barth’s Pauline rendering of faith. Faith is the miraculous possibility of constantly new beginning. There is no way to faith, for faith is its own presupposition. Faith is a form of daring, a leap into the unknown, not a possession or the end of an argument. The early Barth put it in self-dramatizing, Kierkegaardian fashion, boasting about leaping into the dark. The later Barth dropped his wild expressionist tropes and his reliance on Kierkegaard, settling for traditional doctrines that he interpreted as analogies of faith; otherwise he could not have written 12 volumes of Church Dogmatics. But in both cases Barth hammered on the same Pauline theme, that faith is a spiritual gift of the Holy Spirit, and he did it dialectically, stressing that God remains hidden even when disclosed in revelation. Faith is not a matter of grasping a revelation that cannot be held but a matter of being open to being held in God’s ever-gracious hands. When Barth put it negatively, he charged that liberal theology turned faith into a human achievement, it consigned Paul’s religious claims to the worldview of mythical consciousness, and it evaded the true subject matter of scripture, the Spirit of Christ.
Barth’s teachers were appalled by these arguments and their electrifying impact on theology. How could Barth think he could move directly from Paul’s epistle to the crisis of modern civilization? How could he expound Paul’s skewed interpretation of Hebrew scripture, his deprecation of the historical Jesus, his theory of blood redemption, and his doctrine of pre-destination as though Paul were above criticism? How could he ignore the chasm between Paul’s mythological worldview and modern consciousness? Harnack was appalled by Barth’s first-edition Romans, which struck him as the work of an unhinged sectarian. The next year he heard Barth speak at a student conference in Aarau, which was even worse. Barth told his youthful audience that the key to biblical piety was its antipathy to religion and the religious idea of sacredness. Biblical piety held fast to a peculiar kind of worldliness that refused to regard anything as sacred, he explained. Only God is sacred, and in the scriptural witness God is holy, incomparable, and unattainable. God cannot be grasped or put to use; God is only to be served, “He is not a thing among other things, but the Wholly Other, the infinite aggregate of all merely relative others.” Harnack confessed to a friend, “The effect of Barth’s lecture was just staggering. Not one word, not one sentence could I have said or thought. I saw the sincerity of Barth’s speech, but its theology frightened me.” Barth’s theology was apocalyptic and self-negating, Harnack judged; if Barth was the future, modern theology was finished as a critical, rational enterprise worthy of academic respect.14
To Barth directly, Harnack allowed that perhaps the church needed to be shaken up “a bit,” but he advised Barth to keep his religious worldview to himself and not make an “export article” of it. The following year Barth issued his second-edition Romans, which confirmed, for Harnack, that Barth had opted for sectarian apocalypticism; the book reminded him of Thomas Münzer and the Münzerite disaster. Eminent biblical scholar Adolf Jülicher, closer to the mark, compared Barth to Marcion. Barth waved off the guardians of liberalism, noting that their books on Paul were tame and boring. Paul was never boring, and he always stood on the edge of heresy. If Barth was some kind of heretic, that made him something like Paul. Barth countered that at least he tried to understand what the Bible said before he dismissed it.15
But Rudolf Bultmann, who exploded into prominence at the same time as Barth, was a different kind of critic. Bultmann’s theological perspective was similar to Barth’s; his History of the Synoptic Tradition, published in 1921, immediately made him a major figure in biblical scholarship, and he went on to become the leading New Testament scholar of the twentieth century. Three times, over a 30-year period, Barth and Bultmann debated how theology should be done. The first debate was about biblical interpretation; the second was about theology and philosophy; the third was about theology and myth. But it was always the same argument about the place of worldviews in theology.16
Bultmann was mostly critical of Barth’s first-edition Romans, protesting that it “completely reinterprets history as myth.” But he took a mixed view of the second edition, praising Barth’s recovery of Paul’s existential understanding of faith while objecting that Barth still interpreted history as myth. Bultmann complained that Barth distorted the heterogeneous character of scripture by treating it exclusively as a witness to the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit of Christ was surely to be found in Paul’s letter, Bultmann allowed, but so were Hellenistic sacramental beliefs, strains of Jewish theology, the history of the Pauline Christ myth, and Gnostic redeemer myths. Barth’s either/or was unrealistic. One did not have to choose between historical criticism and attending to the Word in the words. No writer speaks only from the subject matter. Even Paul listened to other spirits besides the Spirit of Christ. To Bultmann, good biblical scholarship approached the text as a witness to Christ and a heterogeneous construction.17
Barth replied that this seemingly reasonable approach had its own distortions. The Spirit of Christ does not compete within scripture alongside other spirits, he argued. To take that approach is to fall back into liberalism, where the critic identifies favorite passages with the Spirit of Christ and writes off the rest as myth or conjecture. To Barth, the point was to perceive “that the whole is placed under the crisis of the Spirit of Christ.” Of course the text as a whole contains the voices of other spirits, he acknowledged; heterogeneity was obvious. But how was the whole to be understood in relation to its true subject matter, the Spirit of Christ? That was the question, and the answer was not to arrogate oneself above Paul or the gospel writers as their schoolmaster, “We must be content if, despite other spirits, we are not wholly bereft of the Spirit; content if, standing by Paul’s side, we are able to teach and learn; content with a readiness to discern in a spiritual fashion what is spiritually intended; and satisfied also to recognize that the voice with which we proclaim what we have received is primarily nothing but the voice of those other spirits.”18
The closing phrase was crucial for Barth and characteristic of him; he acknowledged that his apprehension of the Word was fallible, relative, and riddled with cultural blinders. He did not possess God’s truth; all he could do was listen for it in the strange medium of the scriptural text. In his view, the liberal establishment subordinated this concern to its concern for respectability, reducing God to a manageable cipher of the whole. Barth countered that the divine Word can be expounded “only in weighty negations [and] preached only in paradoxes.” The Word of God, which is never a thing, is the transformation of everything in the world; thus it must be “apprehended as the negation of the starting-point of every system which we are capable of conceiving.”19
This exchange brought Barth and Bultmann together as friends and collaborators. In the early 1920s the differences between them seemed less important than their commitment to a non-liberal, existential theology of the Word. Bultmann’s colossal History of the Synoptic Tradition reinforced Barth’s anti-historical bias by showing that the synoptic narratives provide little historical information about Jesus, and in the 1920s all of the major crisis theologians became leading figures in theology: Barth, Bultmann, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and Paul Tillich. All were deeply influenced by existentialism, but in the mid-1920s Barth moved away from existentialism, opting for a stricter view of theology as the explication of revelation alone, while Bultmann’s commitment to existential philosophy deepened, partly as a consequence of his collegial relationship with Martin Heidegger at Marburg.
In 1927 Barth published the first volume of a projected dogmatics, Christliche Dogmatik, which took a hard line against theological dependence on philosophy. Philosophy got in the way of allowing the Word to express itself, he argued, and in really bad cases it became a substitute for the Word, negating what theology is supposed to be about. Barth made a strenuous case for this position while retaining some existential elements. Later he decided that the existential retentions ruined the whole thing, so he had to start over, rewriting the book under a new series title, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik.20
To Bultmann, Barth’s dogmatic turn and his stricture against philosophy were both disastrous; he emphasized the latter. It was simply wrong and self-defeating to maintain “a sovereign scorn for modern work in philosophy,” he told Barth. Eliminating philosophy was not an option for theology, because every theology is guided by implicit or explicit philosophical assumptions about the knower and the known. The choice was between using philosophy intelligently or badly; in Barth’s case, it was done badly, because he left himself in the clutches of an outdated ontology. Instead of allowing an assumed philosophy to control his thinking, Bultmann urged, it was better to use philosophy intelligently as an aid to theology. That was how he used Heideggerian phenomenology. Barth’s scorn for philosophy deprived him of the tools that he needed to break free from the discredited ontology of Protestant scholasticism.21
Barth’s reply was irenic and somewhat evasive. For over a year he tried to avoid this debate with Bultmann, telling him that they needed to leave each other alone to pursue their separate courses. He was not ready to defend his position or to answer Bultmann’s criticisms. After Bultmann objected anyway, Barth conceded that he had a valid point. Bultmann’s description of the pertinent choice made enough sense to Barth that he declined to defend in principle his lack of a philosophical orientation. It was undoubtedly true that his theology contained philosophical assumptions and concepts, Barth allowed. If he had to defend himself, his point was not really that theology should be purged of philosophy but that it should not be dependent on a single philosophical perspective. He used philosophical concepts in an eclectic fashion whenever they helped him explicate his meaning. Theology needed to be free to do its own work, which was not possible if it was chained to a philosophical system. At the same time, he recognized that his haphazard use of philosophy exposed him to the charge of “a terrible dilettantism.” In 1928, Barth was willing to live with the charge, stopping short of the judgment that his friends were accommodating the gospel to alien philosophies.22
But by 1930 this judgment seemed no longer deniable to him. Bultmann, Brunner, Gogarten, Tillich, and many others in Barth’s circle of dialectical theologians variously accommodated Christianity to modern philosophy and culture. Barth admonished Bultmann that all of them represented “a large scale return to the fleshpots of Egypt.” Even dialectical theologians were committing the liberal mistake of understanding faith as a human possibility and thus surrendering theology to philosophy. The new dialectical theologies were no better than the old liberalism, Barth scorned; in fact, the old religious socialism of the pre-war period was better than Bultmann’s Heideggerian phenomenology, Brunner’s theology of natural revelation, Gogarten’s “states of life” theophilosophy, and Tillich’s ontology of ultimate concern. A bit later he put it sharply to Bultmann, scolding him that by conflating the gospel message with a modern worldview, “You have done something that one ought not to do.” If Bultmann asked why this was so terrible, Barth could only reply “not with an argument, but with a recitation of the creed.”23
The faith itself was at stake in the battle of theologies, a conviction that deepened in Barth after Hitler ascended to power in Germany. The spectacle of pro-Nazi “German Christianity” confirmed Barth’s worst fears about the evils of paganized theology. Barth was not surprised when Gogarten did a brief dance with fascism, and Heidegger and theologian Emanuel Hirsch became outright Nazi apologists. He was surprised when Bultmann joined the Confessing Church. Barth assumed that Bultmann’s infatuation with Heideggerian philosophy would lead him straight into German Christianity. In November 1933 he confessed to Bultmann that he had somehow misjudged him. Bultmann, stunned to learn that Barth had expected him to join the German Christians, replied that obviously Barth had never really understood him.24
Barth conceded the obvious, while noting that in most cases his suspicions were sadly confirmed. For several years, while Barth wrote the mammoth early volumes of Church Dogmatics, he and Bultmann resumed their previous debates, though with a strained wariness, especially on Barth’s part. Bultmann complained that Barth was too devoted to church dogma to let the text speak for itself; he imposed the lid of dogmatics so tightly over his exegesis that the voice of the Word could not be heard through it: “After a few sentences one knows all that will be said and simply asks occasionally how it will be produced out of the words of the text that follow.” Barth countered that Bultmann’s sermons were tedious, and his theology merely circled around the anxieties of believers, which was not the same thing as proclaiming Christ. He also expressed his discomfort over the fact that Bultmann quietly took the Hitler loyalty oath in 1934.25
If not for the rise of fascism and German Christianity in the 1930s, Barth’s philosophical eclecticism would have been clearer to subsequent interpreters of his theology. As it was, he was routinely understood and described for decades as a despiser of philosophy, usually with proof-texts from his polemics against Bultmann, Brunner, German Christianity, and Roman Catholicism in the 1930s. Brunner defended a very limited concept of natural theology, based on the idea of an autonomous knowledge of God or “point of contact” that resides in every person by virtue of having been created in the image of God. Human beings, he argued, despite the ravages of sin, possess a passive capacity to be reached by revelation; otherwise they could not hear the Word when it was spoken. Barth replied furiously that Brunner betrayed the Reformation principles of sole fide and sola gratia, taking “the downward path.” In the same spirit he charged that the Catholic analogy of being was an invention of the antichrist and the most serious reason not to be a Catholic. Debates on these issues preoccupied much of the theological field in the 1930s and 1940s, making Barth the giant theological figure of his time but one lacking disciples who approached theology in his fashion, as he often complained.26
Barth’s renderings of Calvin on natural theology and of Aquinas and Augustine on the analogy of being were subjected to withering criticism, and after the world crises of the 1930s had passed he retreated somewhat from his extreme positions, though usually without explicitly acknowledging it. But his deepest disagreement with Bultmann was still to come. For 20 years Barth puzzled over Bultmann’s insistence on wedding his theology to a philosophical system. Why did Bultmann refuse to let the Word demonstrate its truth? If he really believed that Barth’s dogmatism got in the way of explicating the Word in the scriptural witness, why did not he offer a better example? Instead of keeping philosophy in its place, Bultmann filled his theology with Heideggerian ruminations on being, preunderstanding, anxiety, and authenticity. Why did he have so little confidence in the power of the biblical Word?
Barth puzzled over this question until 1941, when Bultmann’s sensational essay on the problem of New Testament mythology provided the answer, at least to Barth. The article owed some of its electrifying impact to its bluntness. In starkly straightforward language Bultmann asserted that the world picture of the New Testament was thoroughly mythical and completely out of play for modern people. Everywhere the New Testament assumed a three-decker universe, earth as the theater of supernatural agency, and interventions by God, angels, Satan, and demons in natural occurrences. The only way to make sense of biblical religion in a modern context was to thoroughly demythologize the Bible without giving up the saving message of the gospel kerygma.27
As a theologian Bultmann sought to demythologize the world picture of early Christianity while reclaiming, through existential interpretation, the gospel message of salvation from the bondage of sin and death. The deepest purpose of myth is not to convey information about history or the world, he argued. To repudiate myth on the basis of its factual claims is to miss the point. The subject of myth is always the human situation in the world. Through myth we recognize that we are dependent on the powers that rule over the world. Myth itself is demythologizing inasmuch as it speaks about a transcendent power that relativizes and subverts the authority of familiar powers. Thus, the objective representations of myth are never the point and should hold little interest for modern Christians.
Bultmann allowed that the Bible features a peculiar mix of history and myth, which posed special problems for demythologizers. The passion narratives fold together the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus without any acknowledgement that the former is historical and the latter is mythical; moreover, the New Testament repeatedly renders historical events as having cosmic significance. But what mattered in all such cases was to recover the existential truth of the gospel. Modern people cannot accept a mythological interpretation of the cross, Bultmann insisted; the meaning of the cross depends entirely on our experience of being crucified with Jesus. The cross is an eschatological event that, linked with the resurrection, proclaims that Christ has broken the power of death universally. There is no basis for believing in this saving effect of Christ’s death and resurrection except that it is proclaimed as such; faith is nothing but simple hearing and accepting of the Word proclaimed. To Bultmann, demythologizing was analogous to the Pauline/Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. Just as the doctrine of justification destroyed the illusion of control and security in the sphere of salvation, demythologization destroyed every false security based on objective knowledge. True security is found only by abandoning every form of security, recognizing that every person before God has empty hands.
By mid-century these arguments about the mythical worldview of scripture and modern meaning of Christianity dominated the field of theology. Conservatives generally regarded Bultmann’s position as an outright attack on Christianity and responded accordingly; others questioned whether the human mind can ever dispense with myth; many protested that Bultmann completely subjectivized theology; some argued that Bultmann overestimated the problem of myth as a stumbling block to modern belief; others objected that Bultmann arbitrarily stopped short of demythologizing the kerygma. To most critics, Bultmann simply restated his concept of the kerygmatic center of Christianity, the original gospel message, which contained no objective “facts” accessible to knowledge or prior to faith. This irreducible core of the Christian faith was unabashedly circular, in his rendering; it was “that which gives meaning to an occurrence to whose historicity it testifies.”28
But Bultmann was not always that clear. He failed to sustain a clear definition of myth; he failed to distinguish adequately between analogy and myth, which raised problems for his God-language; and he could even be quoted both ways on whether Easter faith had any factual basis. Sometimes he included the historical Jesus and the Easter appearances in the content of the kerygma. These inconsistencies helped to stoke an enormous literature about him, as interpreters assailed or defended different Bultmanns. Barth complained that Bultmann was not sufficiently intelligible to be understood. But to Barth, Bultmann clearly had two major problems that led to many lesser ones. One was that he reversed the pattern of the New Testament message; the other was that he vested far too much importance in demythologizing and worldviews.
The first problem was fundamental and fatal. Bultmann started with an experiencing subject that heard the gospel message, accepted it in faith, experienced a transition from one state of being to another, and experienced one’s self as an object of God’s redemptive act. But that was the gospel in reverse, Barth protested; every part of the gospel message was distorted by turning it into an existential trope. Instead of presenting Christ as the kerygma, Bultmann presented the Christ event as something that is known in and through the kerygma. Instead of featuring a doctrine of Christ, Bultmann featured a doctrine of existential transformation that drove Christ to the margin. Even in the resurrection, Christ could not break out of his kerygmatic prison, because he was not allowed a life of his own; nothing could be said until the disciples inaugurated the church.29
More importantly, from Barth’s perspective, Bultmann’s project recycled the old liberalism in dialectical dress, trying to adapt Christianity to the best available worldview. Barth countered that theology should not be in the business of endorsing worldviews or any independent theory of existence. Rather than commit itself to any particular worldview, he argued, Christian theology should use or appropriate as many worldviews and forms of language as are necessary to explicate the truth of God’s Word. Just as theology should not privilege literal meaning over the language of narrative, paradox, irony, and dialectic, neither should theology commit itself to the enervating task of adopting and then discarding one worldview after another. A healthy pluralism in philosophy and rhetorical forms is needed if theology is to be free to locate the event of correspondence between human word and divine truth.30
Barth acknowledged that there were myths and even outright fairy tales in the Bible. Though he preferred to speak of biblical “saga” rather than “myth” in order to distinguish biblical myth from the monist mythologies of other religions and philosophies, he urged that by either name, the mythical aspects of scripture should not be regarded as dispensable for theology.31 Bultmann and other demythologizers unfairly demeaned the biblical worldview in their attempts to adapt Christianity to a modern worldview, Barth contended: “We ought not to overlook the fact that this particular worldview contained a number of features which the primitive community used cautiously but quite rightly in its witness to Jesus Christ.” Moreover, he insisted, some of these mythical features remain indispensable to Christian speech: “We have every reason to make use of ‘mythical’ language in certain connections. And there is no need for us to have a guilty conscience about it, for if we went to extremes in demythologizing, it would be quite impossible to bear witness to Jesus Christ at all.” As usual, Barth agreed with radical critics for conservative reasons; in this case, Bultmann’s best critics were radicals like Fritz Buri. If Bultmann was going to make such a fuss about getting rid of a mythological worldview, he needed to stop talking about a personal God, the saving meaning of the cross and resurrection, and the irreducible core of the kerygma.32
Barth is starting to sound like the hero of this story, but how accurate is this portrayal? His narrowness was relentless. He was rigidly devoted to Sola Scriptura. His anti-feminism was strident and repugnant. He was famous for his obnoxious performances at conferences, sometimes treating colleagues very rudely. He ignored natural science and the natural world, paid little attention to social science, and claimed not to fathom why a Christian theologian should be interested in other religions. He was more political than is often claimed, but he addressed political issues very selectively and sometimes eccentrically, as in his piecemeal and belated opposition to fascism, his non-opposition to Communism, and his quietly supportive but above-it-all relationship to democratic socialism. His later theology stifled the rhetorical dialectics that gave his early work its spiritual power. For all of Barth’s warnings about the narrowness and hubris of theological systems, his dogmatics took on the appearance of a massive new scholasticism. He claimed not to want followers but blasted even close followers when they dissented from his positions. Though he claimed to accept the necessity of critical biblical scholarship, he made practically no use of it. Repeatedly his dogmatism prevailed over his insistence on the freedom of the Word.
Yet Barth’s notorious narrowness opened out to something very much like postmodern diversity and fluidity. Despite the many ways in which he reveled in dogmatism, his vision was pluralistic and discursively open-ended. He insisted that Christian theology is healthy and free only when it remains open to a multiplicity of philosophies, worldviews, and forms of language. By fixing on the truth of grace, he relativized the problems of method and discursive form. Barth’s thought was too sprawling and complex to be reducible to any single theme, but one thing, above all, helped to make him the greatest theologian since Schleiermacher: his persistent refusal to reduce God to an element of a system.
In a great deal of modern theology, the trend has been the other way, rendering God as an aspect of the temporal order. Whiteheadian theology takes that option explicitly, conceiving God as an actual entity that competes for space with creativity and is subordinate to it. On the incomprehensible mystery of the divine, I stand with Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart, Hildegaard, Luther, Karl Rahner, and even Karl Barth. Augustine taught that whatever we understand is not God. Anselm defined God as that which nothing greater can be understood. Eckhart’s apophatic mysticism refused to apply the names of Father, Son, and Spirit to the “God above God.” Hildegard envisioned God’s glory as blinding Living Light. Luther taught that God’s glory is hidden in the death of Jesus. Rahner stressed the inexhaustible mystery of the holy.
Barth belongs to this line of theologians, however much he may have spurned its mystics. By refusing to defend God with arguments that reduced God to the logic of a system, Barth pointed to the ineffable mystery and glory of the divine. He spoke of God as negating and transcending Christian theism, though his early writings were stronger on this theme than the later ones. By insisting on the transcendent holiness of the divine, Barth tried to liberate theology from its subservience to philosophy, bourgeois culture, and church tradition. His opposition to the colonization of theology prefigured the post-modern critique of totalizing discourse without its nihilist presumption that there is no ground of truth. Poststructuralist theory criticizes the colonizing effect of philosophical systems, which pre-empt the possibility of recognizing true difference. Barth’s polemic against theological modernism anticipated the postmodern critique of philosophical foundationalism in this respect. By refusing to render Christianity as an illustration of mythic truth, existential analysis, process metaphysics, or a similar criterion, he broke apart the modern preoccupation with ascertaining the methodological limits of truth.
Barth’s project anticipated the critical thesis of Gadamerian hermeneutics, that modern philosophy truncates the limits of truth in its subservience to method.33 With powerful force Barth protested against the totalizing implications of all claims to methodological neutrality, epistemological foundationalism, and philosophical preunderstanding. The interpreter has no chance of hearing a new word if she brings her preunderstanding to the text as a final norm. The Word does not seek to be mastered by us in order to be understood by us, Barth urged. It seeks rather to lay hold of us in our openness to its voice. We glean something of God’s Word through the mystery of the subject matter, which invites us through human words and the movement of the Spirit to “investigate the humanity of the word by which it is told.”34
Barth stood for methodological pluralism, not an impossible blank slate. He accepted that theology had to use philosophy and hermeneutical theory; his point was that theology should not sanction or presuppose any fixed canon of truth or importance. His theory of the threefold Word implied simultaneously the indissoluble unity of the Word with the texts, tradition, and present life of the church but also the necessity of always distinguishing between the Word and the text, the text and the community, and the present creeds and future possibilities. Because human beings are immersed in transience and relativity, he urged, it is perilous to identify the gospel message with the questionable possibilities emerging out of the historical process. The gospel conveys the radically new possibilities of God, which are fallibly understood in the present, which stand on the borderline of human achievements, and which become evident in the negation of these achievements.
The strongest and weakest aspects of Barth’s approach came together in this insistence on the eschatological character of the gospel and the exclusive witness of a self-authenticating revelation. Both were prominently displayed in 1948 in his dramatic address to the opening assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, over which he and Reinhold Niebuhr clashed for years afterward.
The theme of the conference was “The Disorder of the World and God’s Design,” but Barth protested that this premise put it backwardly. The World Council of Churches needed to begin not by speaking of the world’s disorder, nor of any social or religious solutions that it favored for the world’s problems, he admonished. Christian speech about the world must begin with God’s kingdom, “which has already come, is already victorious, and is already set up in all its majesty.” The churches needed to begin “with our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already robbed sin and death, the devil and hell of their power.”35
Much of the council’s pre-conference literature was secular and politicized by comparison. Barth remarked that it gave him “the same strange impression as garments of deep mourning,” and that the World Council of Churches needed to come out of its bereavement. Christians were called to be God’s witnesses, not God’s lawyers, managers, or engineers. The conference literature was long on Christian plans to rebuild and reform the postwar world; Barth countered that “God’s design” was not “something like a Christian Marshall Plan.” It was not the church’s business to straighten out the world, he exhorted. The church was called to confess that the world belongs to God. Put differently, the church was not the world’s caretaker, but rather, the body of God’s children that was called to trust in God and proclaim God’s victory over sin and live according to God’s way.36
Barth hoped and half-expected that Niebuhr would cheer him on. Though Barth understood that he and Niebuhr were very different theologically, he thought that Niebuhr would rally to his attack on the council’s moralistic reformism.37 Barth had not grasped that at bottom, Niebuhr was a liberal advocate of social Christianity. Niebuhr still believed that the church was called to promote world order, freedom, and social justice. He took for granted the social gospel assumption that the church had to concern itself with bringing about the right ordering of the world.38
Niebuhr was appalled by Barth’s claim that Christians had no business accommodating the gospel faith to modern secular thought. He protested that Barth’s otherworldly evangelicalism negated the church’s capacity to defend Christian belief from modern criticism. He added that it also made Barth’s ethical thought woefully deficient. Niebuhr allowed that in the 1930s Barth admirably opposed the Nazification of German churches, giving a “powerful witness to Christ.” Barth was good at responding to a crisis. But his thundering, otherworldly approach to theology was not very good at discerning the moral meaning of Christianity in normal times. Niebuhr judged: “It can fight the devil if he shows both horns and both cloven feet. But it refuses to make discriminating judgments about good and evil if the devil shows only one horn or the half of a cloven foot.” To Barth it was axiomatic that the church had no business fulfilling or accommodating the modern cultural enterprise, but to Niebuhr it was axiomatic that “the Christian must explore every promise and every limit of the cultural enterprise.”39
This debate had a Cold War subtext. By 1948 Barth had made it clear that he did not endorse the West’s Cold War against Communism in the name of Christianity.40 In pointed opposition to Brunner, who contended that Christian churches were obliged in principle to oppose Communist totalitarianism with the same fervor that they aroused against Nazi totalitarianism, Barth insisted that the two cases were dissimilar from a Christian standpoint. The structural similarities between Communist and fascist totalitarianism were not pertinent subjects of Christian ethics, he argued, for there was no such thing as a Christian political system. The church did not rightly endorse or condemn political systems as such. It did not properly concern itself with ideologies; therefore it did not speak “on principle” about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of political systems. In Barth’s view, the church had no business anathematizing the Communist system as such because it had no business making “principled” judgments that identified Christ with or excluded Christ from any political ideology.41
Many critics, including Brunner, made the obvious objection that Barth did not talk that way in the 1930s; otherwise the Nazis would have had no cause to throw him out of the country. Brunner stressed that Barth condemned the Hitler regime in the name of Christ and called for its overthrow; Barth replied that he had not done so on the basis of a political principle. As much as he despised National Socialism, ideology was not the point. What made Nazism different was its power to overwhelm and corrupt Christian souls; it was an evil religion that subverted the soul of the German church. Niebuhr subsequently claimed that Soviet Communism, too, was an evil religion, but Barth denied that Communism was religiously corrupting.42 The German church nearly lost its soul to Nazism, he reasoned, but where was the spiritual threat that Communism posed to North American or West European churches? In the countries where church leaders called for “Christian” crusades against Communism, where was the spiritual threat to the church that the truth of an anticommunist crusade needed to extinguish? “Are they not already sure enough of the justice of their cause against Russia without this truth and our Christian support?” Barth asked. The implication, which he left hanging, was that since the U.S. had overwhelming economic and military power, the existence of a militantly “Christian anticommunism” in the U.S. was not a spiritually healthy phenomenon.43
On various occasions afterward Barth spelled out the implication, sometimes infuriating Christian anticommunists like Niebuhr and Brunner. In 1958 he declared, “I regard anticommunism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than communism itself.”44 The following year, after an East German pastor asked Barth if he should pray for the abolition of the Communist government in East Germany, Barth cautioned the pastor to beware that such a prayer “might be awfully answered, so that some morning you would wake up among those ‘Egyptian fleshpots,’ as one obligated to the ‘American way of life.’” He advised the pastor that it would be better for him to pray for the East German government than against it. From a Christian standpoint, Barth cautioned, the existence of a Communist government in East Germany had to be regarded in some sense as the rod of divine punishment. Barth regarded Communism as a dreadful but natural product of Western history. The Western nations were getting what they deserved for centuries of imperialism and war, and they had barely begun to pay the price.45
That was never the heart of the matter for Barth, however. To him the crucial question was always: Who sits in the seat of judgment? The only judge to be taken seriously, he urged, is the gracious and merciful God who wills that all people—“Christians and the whole of mankind”—should be saved. Because God is above all things, God was certainly above the “legalistic totalitarianism” of Communist governments. As a system of political rule, Communism was limited precisely by its godlessness and inhumanity. Barth predicted that “one day its officeholders will halt at those limits, or else they will be destroyed.” In either case, Communism was not sustainable and not worth the spiritual price of committing the church to anticommunism. The church was not called to support or impose any political system: “She can only follow Jesus; that is, she cannot but keep her sights constantly fixed on the merciful God and on man who is to receive God’s mercy and be set free.”46
Niebuhr took Barth’s “Egyptian fleshpot” crack about the American way of life as a sneering cheap shot. He took Barth’s Christian neutralism as a provocation. He shot back that the East Germans were no more sinful than their West German kin. If the East Germans were suffering for their sins, why did West Germany have immunity? For the most part, Niebuhr allowed, Barth adhered to “the strategy of approximating divine impartiality.” He recalled that in the days of the Nazis, Barth dared to make “hazardous detailed judgments” on a regular basis, but now it was only on a rare occasion that Barth’s “robust humanity” so betrayed him. Now Barth desperately aspired to be impartial, like God. “The price of this desperation is of course moral irrelevance,” Niebuhr declared. Barth’s pursuit of prophetic purity was necessarily a pursuit of moral irrelevance. Niebuhr did not grant, however, that Barth had actually attained pure impartiality in his moral judgments. He judged that Barth’s writings were still loaded with “merely human political” sentiments, such as, most notably, his animus against the United States. He also believed that Barth overestimated his prophetic stature. These points built up to a vintage Niebuhr verdict: “Barth is a man of talent to the point of genius. But even a genius cannot escape the dilemma that the price of absolute purity is irrelevance and that the price of relevance is the possible betrayal of capricious human loves and hates even in the heart of a man of God.”47
That put it cuttingly well. Barth’s refusal to get caught in a tangle of socio-political problems and responsibilities sometimes gave him the independence to make political judgments that were better than Niebuhr’s. Thus, unlike Niebuhr, he did not mythologize anticommunism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Contrary to what is usually said about him in this area, and which Barth sometimes said about himself, he had a socio-political perspective that was fueled, shaped, and limited by his theology. But it was a slippery and sometimes strange approach to politics; it was shot through with terribly human anxieties and conceits; and Barth’s contempt for the social-ethical concerns of the churches was not his most attractive attribute.
His writings were spiritually powerful chiefly because he insisted with high-octane persistence that Christianity must live by the life-renewing Spirit of Christ, not by weak substitutes such as philosophy, apologetics, ideology, churchianity, or smells and bells. The key to Barth’s theology was the dialectical Paulinism of his Romans commentary, though he misled generations of interpreters by claiming to have left dialecticism behind after he became a dogmatic theologian. His theology remained an affirmation of the dialectical movement of God in self-revelation, that God becomes objective without ceasing to be hidden.48
True knowledge of God begins with the recognition of God’s hiddenness, not with an act of imagination or creativity. God is incomprehensible, for God does not exist in the sphere of human power. No myth or doctrine or scriptural word, by itself, can bring us to God or show God to us. It becomes God’s Word by grace through the movement of God’s Spirit. The myth of the dying God becomes divine speech through God’s action in Christ. Only there is the hidden God apprehensible, Barth taught, taking christocentrism for granted, and even there, the hidden source of revelation is apprehended only indirectly. In Christ the hidden God is apprehended by faith, not by sight; in sign, not in being. The Word made flesh is the sign of all signs, but it is made known only after the flesh, through the Spirit. For in Christ we see the human face of God in and through the movement of the Spirit.49
That is dialectical theology, which Barth expounded in the Church Dogmatics. In my view, he remained more dialectical than what came to be called Barthian neo-orthodoxy; on the other hand, the problem with Barth was that he was never dialectical enough. He offered the God of Pauline supernaturalism as an answer to modern religious needs, which spoke powerfully to many in his generation, and he was very good at blasting certain kinds of idolatry. But he failed to bring together the “yes” and “no” of his dialectic. In his early career Barth was relentlessly one-sided, denying that his religion of faith was still a religion. No point of identity between God and humankind was allowed; even Brunner’s tiny, passive capacity for receiving revelation was forbidden. In his later theology Barth developed analogical models for the relationship between God and humankind, and he spoke of the humanity of God.50
But that did not lure him any further into the real world of culture, nature, philosophy, other religions, or anything else that was not Western Protestant Christianity. He took for granted Kant’s dichotomy between science and theology and gave no further thought to science. Barth’s dialectic was paradoxical, not relational. It had no inner movement from one state to another by an inner dynamic. It engaged the world only episodically, when his Christian identity was provoked. Mostly it kept modern criticism at bay, defining theology as church-based explication of a self-authenticating revelation. Theology today has to be more real and relational than that, breathing freely in a world where everything is relative because all are related.
1. This chapter adapts material from Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); and Dorrien, The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).
2. Karl Barth, “Autobiographical Sketch for the Faculty Album of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Münster,” 1927, reprinted in Karl Barth-Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Company, 1971), 151–157, “absorbed Herrmann,” 153.
3. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London: SCM Press, 1976), 43–44.
4. See Karl Barth, Predigten 1913, ed. Nelly Barth and Gerhard Sauter (Zurich: TVZ, 1976), 67–68, 166–168, 213–220.; Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Suchet Gott, so werdet ihr legen! (Bern: G. A. Baschlin, 1917); Barth, “Autobiographical Sketch for the Faculty Album of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Münster,” 154–155; Jochen Fahler, Der Ausbruch des 1. Weltkrieges in Karl Barths Predigten, 1913–1915 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979); and Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 92–107.
5. See Herman Kutter, Social Democracy: Does it Mean Darkness or Light? (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1910); Kutter, They Must; or, God and the Social Democracy (Chicago: Co-operative Printing Company, 1906); Leonhard Ragaz, Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt Vater und Sonhund Weiter! (Erlenbach-Zurich: Rotapfel Verlag, 1922); Ragaz, Le Message revolutionaire (Zurich: Neuchatel, 1941); Ragaz, Israel, Judaism and Christianity (London: Victor Gollanez, 1947); Busch, Karl Barth, 76.; Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925, trans. James D. Smart (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964), 27–32.
6. Barth, “Autobiographical Sketch for the Faculty Album of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Münster,” quote 154; see Karl Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice” (1911), Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, “Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” and George Hunsinger, “Conclusion: Toward a Radical Barth,” in Karl Barth and Radical Politics, trans. and ed. George Hunsinger (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 19–46, 47–76, 181–233.
7. Busch, Karl Barth, 81.
8. Barth’s October 1, 1914 letter to Martin Rade quoted in McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 114.; Busch, Karl Barth, 81–82.
9. See Kutter, Social Democracy: Does it Mean Darkness or Light?; Kutter, They Must; or, God and the Social Democracy.; Ragaz, Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt Vater und Sonhund Weiter!
10. Barth, Predigten 1913, 252; Thurneysen quote in Busch, Karl Barth, 97; Barth, “Autobiographical Sketch for the Faculty Album of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Münster,” 154–155.
11. Karl Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978), “there must,” 80; Barth, “The Strange New World Within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 28–50.
12. Barth, “Autobiographical Sketch for the Faculty Album of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Münster,” “I had,” 155; Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Bern: G. A. Baschlin, 1919), “to see,” 1.
13. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (1933; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), “fire alarm,” 38.
14. Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” 51–96, quote 74; Agnes zon Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1951), Harnack quote, 415.
15. Karl Barth to Eduard Thurneysen, April 20, 1920, in Revolutionary Theology in the Making, Harnack quote 49–50; Barth to Thurneysen, July 14, 1920, ibid., 52–53; Adolf Jülicher, “A Modern Interpreter of Paul,” Die Christliche Welt 34 (1920), reprinted in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, ed. James M. Robinson ( Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1968), 72–81.
16. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
17. Rudolf Bultmann, “Ethical and Mystical Religion in Primitive Christianity,” 1920 essay reprinted in Robinson, The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, 221–235, quote 230.; Bultmann, “Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in its Second Edition,” 1922 review article reprinted in Robinson, The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, 117–120.
18. Karl Barth, “Preface to the Third Edition,” Epistle to the Romans, 19.
19. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 278.
20. Karl Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, I: Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes. Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1927).
21. Rudolf Bultmann to Karl Barth, June 8, 1928, in Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966, trans. Bernd Jaspert, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ( Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982), 38–39.
22. Karl Barth to Rudolf Bultmann, June 12, 1928, in Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 40–42.
23. Karl Barth to Rudolf Bultmann, February 5, 1930, Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 49–50, “fleshpots,” 49; Barth to Bultmann, June 20, 1931, Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, “you have done,” 65.
24. Rudolf Bultmann to Karl Barth, July 7, 1934, Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 75.
25. Rudolf Bultmann to Karl Barth, December 10, 1935, Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 82–83; Karl Barth to Rudolf Bultmann, December 22, 1935, Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 84.
26. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising “‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), “downward,” 89; Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, I:1, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936), analogy of being, x.
27. Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, trans. and ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 1–43. This is a cleaner translation than the one by Reginald H. Fuller featured in the noted work edited by Hans Werner Bartsch, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate 2 vols. (London: SPCK, 1954, 1962), I: 1–44.
28. Rudolf Bultmann, “Bultmann Replies to His Critics,” in Bartsch, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, I, 191–211; Hans Werner Bartsch, “The Present State of the Debate,” Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, II, 1–82, quote 74.
29. Karl Barth, “Rudolf Bultmann—An Attempt to Understand Him,” Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, II, 83–132.
30. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, III: 2, trans. Harold Knight et. al., (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 446–447.
31. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, III:1, trans. J. W. Edwards et. al., (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), 79–89.
32. Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, III: 2, 446–447.
33. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second edition trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1960; reprint, New York: Crossroad, 1989).
34. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, I: 2, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 470–471.
35. Karl Barth, “Amsterdamer Fragen und Antworten,” Theologische Existenz heute 15 (1949), 3–4. An edited version of this speech featuring a somewhat problematic translation by the World Council of Churches staff was published under the title, “No Christian Marshall Plan,” in The Christian Century 65 (December 8, 1948), 1330–1333.
36. Barth, “Amsterdamer Fragen,” 4–7.
37. See Karl Barth, “Continental vs. Anglo-Saxon Theology: A Preliminary Reply to Reinhold Niebuhr,” The Christian Century 66 (February 16, 1949), 201.
38. For extensive discussions of these themes, see Gary Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 84–161, 308–310, 343–350.
39. Reinhold Niebuhr, “We Are Men and Not God,” The Christian Century 65 (October 27, 1948), 1138–1140.
40. See Karl Barth, “The Christian Community in the Midst of Political Change,” (1948), reprinted in Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946–52, trans. Stanley Godman and E. M. Delacour (London: SCM Press, 1954), 51–105.
41. See Karl Barth, “Karl Barth’s Reply,” reprinted in Barth, Against the Stream, 114–115. See Emil Brunner, “An Open Letter to Karl Barth,” reprinted in Barth, Against the Stream, 106–113; Reinhold Niebuhr, “An Answer to Karl Barth,” The Christian Century 66 (February 23, 1949), 234.
42. See Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 37–42. And Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 128–129.
43. Barth, “Karl Barth’s Reply,” 116–118.
44. Karl Barth, “How My Mind Has Changed,” (1958), reprinted in Barth, How I Changed My Mind (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966), 66. See Barth, “The Church Between East and West,” (1949), reprinted in Barth, Against the Stream, 127–146.
45. Karl Barth, “Karl Barth’s Own Words: Excerpts from the Swiss theologian’s letter to an East German pastor,” The Christian Century, 76 (March 25, 1959), trans. Rose Marie Oswald Barth, 353–355. On Barth’s theme regarding communism as a product of modern Western history, see also “How My Mind Has Changed,” (1958), 63–65.
46. Barth, “Karl Barth’s Own Words,” 354–355.
47. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Barth’s East German Letter,” The Christian Century 76 (February 11, 1959), 167–168. Ten years later, sick at heart over his country’s war in Vietnam, Niebuhr had second thoughts about his debate with Barth. He remarked that while he still did not share Barth’s “sneer at the ‘fleshpots of Germany and America,’ I must admit that our wealth makes our religious anti-Communism particularly odious. Perhaps there is not so much to choose between Communist and anti-Communist fanaticism, particularly when the latter, combined with our wealth, has caused us to stumble into the most pointless, costly, and bloody war in our history.” Reinhold Niebuhr, “Toward New Intra-Christian Endeavors,” The Christian Century 86 ( December 31, 1969), 1662–1663.
48. See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 1–28, 270–274, 453–467.
49. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, II: 2, trans. G. W. Bromiley et. al., (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 179–204.
50. See Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1960).