Barth and neo-orthodoxy

1914: a confidence collapses

Nineteenth-century liberal theology trusted that as culture and morality advanced, the world would grow ever more like the kingdom of God (see The Enlightenment and modern theology). The war of August 1914 ended that hope. Nations that called themselves Christian turned their guns on one another, and each one's pulpits blessed its own side.

For Karl Barth (1886–1968), a young Reformed pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil, the war became a crisis of theology. German intellectuals published a declaration backing Kaiser Wilhelm II's war policy, and among the signatures Barth found almost all the teachers he had revered, Adolf von Harnack among them. He later dated this to early August 1914, though the famous Manifesto of the Ninety-Three appeared that October. Either way, if his teachers' ethics could fail like this, he could no longer trust their exegesis or their dogmatics.

With his friend Eduard Thurneysen, a neighbouring pastor, Barth went back to Scripture for something to preach: not our feelings about God, but God's own word to us. In the Bible he found an unexpected world: not our search for God but God coming to find us. The fruit was The Epistle to the Romans, published in 1919 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans.

The God who speaks

In 1922 Barth rewrote the book almost entirely, and the second edition shook European theology. God, he insisted, is ‘wholly other’, known only when he himself speaks. The gospel is not religious experience or moral progress but God's judgment on every human effort, with his grace hidden in that judgment; even religion, our highest attempt to lay hold of God, stands under it. Hence the movement's names: the theology of crisis, or dialectical theology.

The text Barth wrestled with was the one that had seized Luther four centuries before (see Luther: the theology of the cross and justification):

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek. For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

Romans 1:16-17

John Wesley saw in these two verses the sum of the whole epistle Wesley. Barth heard in them God's power, not our achievement.

As a professor, Barth worked this cry out into a theology of the Word of God. In the Church Dogmatics, begun in 1932 and unfinished at his death, he taught that God's Word, his revelation, comes to us in three forms Barth, Church Dogmatics. First is the revealed Word, Jesus Christ himself: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (John 1:14). Second is the written Word, Scripture, which bears witness to him; third, the church's preaching, which proclaims him from Scripture. God "spoke to our fathers through the prophets. But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2), and Barth's whole theology begins from that Son (see special revelation and God makes himself known).

‘Neo-orthodoxy’ is mainly the English-speaking world's name for this movement: orthodox in returning to the Reformers and the creeds, new in accepting modern biblical criticism. Emil Brunner and Rudolf Bultmann were early companions; their paths soon parted. In America Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), whose ‘Christian realism’ took seriously the pride of nations and groups, is usually counted its leading voice.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), professor of New Testament at Marburg, proposed demythologising in 1941 Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology. The New Testament, he observed, speaks within an ancient world-picture of heaven, earth and underworld, with supernatural powers breaking in; to demand that modern people accept it would put a needless obstacle in their way. So he would not delete the myths but interpret what they say about human existence: a call to stop securing our lives by what we control and to decide, in faith, for the word of what God has done in Christ. He meant this as a preacher's work, clearing away every offence but the true one, the cross. Yet for him the resurrection was less an event in history than the disciples' coming to faith at Easter, faith in the cross as God's saving act, and here many, Barth among them, parted from him (see Did Jesus really rise from the dead?).

Barmen and the Confessing Church

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, the ‘German Christians’ gained ground in the Protestant churches. They sought to fuse the faith with National Socialist nationalism, saw God's hand in Hitler's rise, and wanted pastors of Jewish descent removed. After they swept the church elections that July, the church risked becoming an arm of the state. Barth, then teaching at Bonn, became the theological voice of those who resisted.

At the end of May 1934, representatives of Lutheran, Reformed and United churches met at Barmen, in Wuppertal, as the first Confessing Synod. Barth wrote most of the draft of the six-article Theological Declaration they adopted The Theological Declaration of Barmen. Its first article confesses Jesus Christ, to whom Scripture bears witness, as God's only Word to his church, the one it must listen to, rely on and follow to the end, and rejects as false any teaching that the church may take some other source beside him as God's revelation. Its warrant is John's Gospel: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). Whoever climbs into the sheepfold some other way is a thief and a robber (John 10:1), but Jesus says, "I am the gate. If anyone enters through Me, he will be saved" (John 10:9).

Barmen invented nothing. Long before, Matthew Henry wrote on these words, "We are to believe the revelation of God to man in Christ" Matthew Henry. Barmen said it again when nation and race were being offered as a second revelation. Its fifth article grants that God has given the state the task of keeping justice and peace, but denies that the state may claim to order the whole of human life. Those who stood on this confession formed the Confessing Church.

That year Barth also broke with his Swiss colleague Emil Brunner (1889–1966). In Nature and Grace Brunner argued that sinners keep a capacity to hear God's word and answer for themselves, a ‘point of contact’ for the gospel and the ground of a Christian natural theology. Barth replied with a pamphlet titled No! While God's revelation was being sought in a people's history, he insisted that when God speaks he creates the very ears that hear him (see general revelation). Late in 1934 Barth refused to swear unconditional loyalty to Hitler; suspended, then dismissed in 1935, he went home to Basel.

The story has its shadows. The Confessing Church fought chiefly for its own freedom and said little in public for the persecuted Jews. In 1967 Barth admitted in a letter that it had long weighed on him: he had not, at least in public, made the Jewish question a deciding issue in the church struggle.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), a young Lutheran theologian, stood with the Confessing Church from the start. From 1935 he led its preachers' seminary at Finkenwalde until the Gestapo closed it in 1937. That year he published Discipleship, which sets cheap grace against costly grace Bonhoeffer, Discipleship. Cheap grace pardons without asking for repentance and wants Christ's benefits without following him or bearing any cross, so that in the end it excuses the sin instead of setting the sinner right with God. Costly grace is the call to follow Jesus. It costs much, for it claims a whole life and God paid for it with his own Son; yet it is a gift, for through it alone we come to real life. As Jesus said, "If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me" (Mark 8:34).

In 1939 Niebuhr invited him to America, but within weeks he sailed home: he could have no part in rebuilding the church in Germany after the war, he wrote, unless he bore this hard time with his people. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi he joined the resistance to Hitler, and he was arrested in April 1943; how far he was involved in the plots on Hitler's life is still debated. After the failed attempt of July 1944, papers came to light linking him with the conspirators, and on 9 April 1945 he was hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. As he was led away, it is reported, he sent word that this was the end, but for him the beginning of life.

What evangelicals received and questioned

Evangelicals did not agree about Barth. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary criticised Barth and Brunner sharply in The New Modernism (1946) Van Til, The New Modernism. They used orthodox words, he argued, but beneath them lay modern philosophy since Kant, so that theirs was a new modernism with the same roots as the old liberalism. Many have valued his warning that familiar words may carry new meanings; others judge that he read Barth through a philosophical grid and missed what Barth meant.

G. C. Berkouwer of the Free University of Amsterdam took another path in The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (1954) Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace. He read Barth with warm sympathy, yet asked hard questions. Barth taught that Jesus Christ is both the God who chooses and the man chosen, who bore the rejection all deserved. Does the decision of faith or unbelief then keep its seriousness? Does this doctrine of election not lean toward the salvation of all? Barth would neither teach universal salvation as a doctrine nor rule it out; we may only hope, he said. Answering Berkouwer, he said he meant not the triumph of a principle called grace but the victory of the living Jesus Christ.

Evangelicals gained much from Barth: the conviction that God himself speaks, the insistence that all theology begin from Jesus Christ, and Barmen's confession that the state is not lord of the church. But most could not accept his account of Scripture as a human witness to revelation that becomes God's Word when God speaks through it. Since "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16), evangelicals confess Scripture itself as the written Word of God (see inspiration).

Barth remains among the most studied theologians of the twentieth century; some evangelicals read him as an ally, while others share Van Til's caution. His questions are still ours: however loud the voices of the age, are we listening to Jesus Christ, the Word God has spoken, and will we follow him, whatever it costs?

Practice