Karl Barth

• 1. Introduction

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  Karl Barth appeared on the cover of Time magazine on the 20th of April 1962 - a Swiss theologian whose arguments about God had somehow broken out of seminaries and lecture halls and into the mainstream of American religious culture. He was not a celebrity preacher or a televangelist. He was an academic who had spent decades writing a work so vast it ran to over six million words and 9,000 pages. What drove a Reformed pastor from a small Swiss industrial village to reshape the Protestant world? How did a man who once sided with textile workers in labor disputes end up writing one of the longest works of systematic theology ever produced? And what do we make of the complicated private life he left behind - one that his own children eventually exposed through a cache of intimate letters?

• 2. The Red Pastor of Safenwil

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  Karl Barth was born on the 10th of May 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Fritz Barth, a theology professor and pastor who hoped his son would follow a traditionalist Christian path. That wish collided early with Karl's appetite for the liberal Protestant education then flourishing in German universities. He studied first at the University of Bern, then moved to Berlin to work under Adolf von Harnack, one of the towering figures of liberal theology, before briefly attending Tübingen and finally settling in Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann.

  From 1911 to 1921, Barth served as a Reformed pastor in Safenwil, a village in the canton of Aargau. In 1913 he married Nelly Hoffmann, a violinist. They had a daughter and four sons. Two of the sons, Markus and his brother, became Biblical scholars and theologians themselves.

  In Safenwil, Barth found himself doing more than preaching. He threw his support behind the local textile workers, advocating for their rights and unionization. He also entered a public disagreement with a local factory owner. These actions earned him a nickname that followed him for years: the Red Pastor from Safenwil.

  The nickname captured something real. Barth's encounter in 1915 with Christoph Blumhardt, leader of the Bad Boll Christian Community and a Social Democratic politician, deepened his sympathies. Barth later said that Blumhardt always began with God's presence, power, and purpose - a formulation that pointed toward the theocentric starting-point Barth would make his own. His neighbor and fellow pastor Eduard Thurneysen became a close intellectual companion during these years, and the two worked together to find a theological foundation more solid than the liberal tradition they had inherited.

• 3. Breaking with the Liberals

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  In August 1914, Barth opened a document that changed the direction of his life. Ninety-three German intellectuals - including his revered teacher Adolf von Harnack - had signed a manifesto supporting the Kaiser's war aims. Barth was dismayed. He concluded he could no longer follow their reading of the Bible or of history.

  The break had been building. Liberal theology, which had dominated nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant thought, pursued two parallel projects: applying historical-critical methods to Christian sources, and engaging modern science and philosophy on their own terms. Barth had been shaped by this tradition. Now he found it hollow. Together with Thurneysen, he began searching for what they called a "wholly other" theological foundation than the one Friedrich Schleiermacher had proposed.

  In a 1916 lecture delivered in Arau, Barth described his emerging position with unusual imagery. God's righteousness, he said, comes like a trumpet blast from another world that interrupts obligations to nation and interrupts the cultivation of religious feelings. "A 'No' to these assumptions knocks one to the floor, but a 'Yes' to God's righteousness and glory sets one on one's feet again." The method he was developing - Dialectical theology - worked by negation and affirmation simultaneously, refusing to let liberal assumptions settle undisturbed.

  Barth began writing his commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans in the summer of 1916, while still at Safenwil. The first edition appeared in December 1918, with a publication date of 1919. The response was enough to earn him an invitation to teach at the University of Göttingen.

• 4. The Epistle to the Romans

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  Around October 1920, Barth decided the first version of his Romans commentary was not good enough. He spent the next eleven months rewriting it almost entirely, finishing the second edition around September 1921. The book that emerged in 1922 was a different kind of theological statement.

  In this thoroughly re-written second edition, Barth argued that the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus challenges and overthrows any attempt to ally God with human cultures, achievements, or possessions. This was a direct confrontation with a theology that had come to identify German civilization with divine purpose. The book was republished and reprinted in several languages.

  The commentary's influence spread to a remarkable range of readers. Among those Barth shaped were Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, Helmut Gollwitzer, James H. Cone, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Thomas F. Torrance, and Hans Küng. Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Ellul also registered his mark, as did novelists including Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and the Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy. His sway reached into Christian ethics as well, touching the work of Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and Oliver O'Donovan.

  On the strength of the Romans commentary, Barth moved through professorships at Göttingen from 1921 to 1925, then Münster from 1925 to 1930, and then Bonn from 1930 to 1935. It was during his time at Göttingen that he first met Charlotte von Kirschbaum, the woman who would share his household for 37 years and become indispensable to his major work.

• 5. The Barmen Declaration and Nazi Resistance

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  By 1934, Nazi ideology was pressing hard on the Protestant churches of Germany. Barth drafted the Barmen Declaration - in German, the Barmer Erklärung - as the theological backbone of resistance. He was responsible for virtually the entire text, with only a single phrase written by someone else.

  The declaration argued that the church's allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ gave it both the grounds and the resources to resist any competing lord - including the German Führer. Barth mailed this document to Adolf Hitler personally. The Barmen Declaration became one of the founding texts of the Confessing Church, and Barth was elected to its leadership council, the Bruderrat.

  The following year he paid a direct price. In 1935, Barth refused to sign the Oath of Loyalty to Hitler without modification. He was removed from his professorship at the University of Bonn. Alongside his colleague Kurt von Fritz, he was one of only two professors who declined to take the oath. The German authorities deported him.

  Back in Switzerland and holding a chair at the University of Basel, Barth did not go quiet. The newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung published his 1936 criticism of the philosopher Martin Heidegger for supporting the Nazis. In 1938, he wrote to a Czech colleague named Josef Hromádka, declaring that soldiers fighting against Nazi Germany were serving a Christian cause. When a routine question for Swiss civil servants asked whether he supported national defence, he answered: yes, especially on the northern border.

• 6. Church Dogmatics

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  Barth's theological project reached its fullest expression in the Church Dogmatics, published between 1932 and 1967. Five volumes were planned, organized around five doctrines: the Word of God, God himself, Creation, Reconciliation, and Redemption. The completed portions run to over six million words and 9,000 pages, placing it among the longest works of systematic theology ever written. Barth never finished the final part-volume of the fourth section, and the planned fifth volume was never begun.

  At the center of the Dogmatics sits Barth's revision of the Reformed doctrine of election, laid out in Church Dogmatics II/2. Classical Calvinist teaching held that God had decreed from eternity that certain individuals would be saved and others damned, and that the reasons behind these choices could not be known. Barth rejected this framing. In his reading, Jesus Christ is both the one elected by God and the one who bears reprobation; he embodies simultaneously God's choice for humanity and God's judgment on human sin. The critic Emil Brunner charged that this revision amounted to a soft universalism.

  Barth himself denied he was a universalist. "I do not believe in universalism," he wrote, "but I do believe in Jesus Christ, reconciler of all." He maintained, however, that Christians were permitted - even obligated - to hope for the salvation of all, as a matter of grace. He wrote that one must not claim for oneself what can only be given as a free gift.

  On the atonement, Barth began in dialogue with the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury and moved progressively further from him across successive volumes of the Dogmatics, ending with a position in which God's mercy always takes the initiative and is identified with God's righteousness in a distinctive way. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who lived in the family home and worked alongside Barth, played a large role in the writing of this epic.

• 7. Charlotte von Kirschbaum

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  George Hunsinger, summarizing the relationship in direct terms, wrote that Charlotte von Kirschbaum was Barth's unique student, critic, researcher, adviser, collaborator, companion, assistant, spokesperson, and confidante, and that Barth could not have been what he was, or done what he did, without her.

  In 2017, intimate letters written by Barth, von Kirschbaum, and Nelly Barth were released by Barth's children. The letters between von Kirschbaum and Barth from 1925 to 1935 revealed what their editors described as the deep, intense, and overwhelming love between the two. The letters also showed how Barth understood his own situation. He wrote: "The way I am, I never could and still cannot deny either the reality of my marriage or the reality of my love. It is true that I am married, that I am a father and a grandfather. It is also true that I love. And it is true that these two facts don't match."

  His answer was not separation on either side. Von Kirschbaum lived in the family home for 37 years. When she died in 1975, Nelly Barth buried her in the family tomb. Nelly herself died the following year.

  The publication of these letters in English created a significant crisis among English-speaking followers of Barth. Many had simply not known about the arrangement, and the letters raised pointed questions about the distance between Barth's theological statements on marriage and his own practice. Von Kirschbaum's early financial dependence on Barth added a further dimension to these debates. Princeton Theological Seminary, where Barth had lectured in 1962, houses the Center for Barth Studies, established in 1997, which holds the largest collection of Barth materials in the world.

• 8. Later Years and Legacy

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  After the Second World War, Barth took public positions that kept him controversial. Together with Hans Iwand, he authored a 1947 statement - more explicit than the 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt - arguing that the Protestant church's willingness to side with anti-socialist and conservative forces had made it vulnerable to Nazi ideology. Anti-Communists in the West rejected this framing. East German dissidents thought it did not go far enough in condemning Communism.

  In 1950, Barth was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Through the 1950s he sympathized with the peace movement and opposed West German rearmament. The University of Basel exempted him from the regulation that would have ended his professorship when he turned 70 in 1956.

  In 1960, he published an article in The Christian Century on the East-West question. He was clear he did not wish to live under Communism or wish it on anyone. Yet he wrote that he regarded anti-communism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than communism itself - a statement that earned him fierce criticism from multiple directions.

  His 1962 visit to the United States included lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, Union Theological Seminary, and San Francisco Theological Seminary. He was invited to the Second Vatican Council but could not attend due to his health. He did visit the Vatican and meet the pope in 1967, after which he wrote the small volume Ad Limina Apostolorum.

  Barth died on the 10th of December 1968, at his home in Basel. The evening before his death, he told his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen not to be downhearted. Things are ruled, he said, not just in Moscow or in Washington or in Peking, but entirely from above, from heaven above.