We need another Karl Barth before it's too late

In 1914, two months into hostilities, ninety-three German intellectuals signed a letter absolving their government of blame for war, their troops of committing atrocities in Belgium, and announcing their support of the German government’s war policy. 

A radical young Swiss pastor (known to locals as The Red Pastor) was horrified to learn that among the signatories was his revered former theology professor, Alfred Von Harnack. That young pastor was Karl Barth, and his disillusionment would lead to a theological revolution whose influence is still felt, but nowhere near enough for the times we are living through. 

The son of a Theology Professor, Barth had rejected his father’s theology to seek out the cream of German liberal protestant theology before entering ministry. Now, one of his heroes had shamed himself, and with it, Barth concluded, his theology. Far from unveiling and recovering the truth, his liberal professor had proved himself blind to it, and had become a cheerleader for an aggressive and militaristic government bent on war. The problem, as Barth saw it, was that Von Harnack, like all liberal theologians, had abandoned the authentic voice of God in scripture under a landslide of human thoughts. 

And so Barth, and pastor friend, Edward Thurneysen, set about rereading the Bible to see if it could speak to them outside the interpretive framework of their liberal training. This project came to fruition in Barth’s remarkable commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. First published amid the wreckage of Europe in 1918,  when Barth was thirty-two, it was substantially rewritten over six editions, culminating in the 1926 text that is best known. It was long after described as a theological earthquake, and yet it is hardly known or read today. 

‘Romans’ showcased an entirely new way of reading scripture - at turns poetic, orthodox, and revolutionary. It laid an axe at the root of liberal theology, which was Friedrich Schleiermacher's eighteenth century turn to the subjective. And it did this without succumbing to fundamentalism. 

Schleiermacher, in seeking to defend Christianity against the enlightenment inroads made by ‘its cultured despisers’, had relocated theology’s focus in the inner intuitions and feelings of humanity. He and his heirs developed what are still recognisable as liberal presuppositions, among them that Christianity is not the result of special revelation, but just one example of the human phenomenon of religion, as evidenced by humanity’s universal religious feelings. For Schleiermacher, Christianity was the ‘highest stage’ of this phenomenon: inevitably his successors have not claimed this. In opposition to this Barth set out a theology that took particular revelation seriously, and with it scripture, but without subscribing to the doctrine of Biblical Inspiration. 

The Bible, for Barth and other neo-orthodox thinkers, was a record of revelation, with its close proximity to revelatory events - including the Incarnation which is the rock on which much of 

Barth’s theology rests. Barth’s exact ideas about revelation are hard to grasp initially, and he was often accused of denying the doctrine of inspiration while treating scripture as though it were divinely revealed. And yet when fundamentalists and evangelicals attacked him as a liberal, it was with some justification. Barth was just a different sort of liberal to that which the world had known before, one who absorbed the fruits of liberal scholarship but without making idolatrous claims for human reason and perfectibility. 

Barth once reflected that his starting point was Kierkegaard’s ‘infinite qualitative distinction between God and man.’ This combined, in Barth, with a deep appreciation for the Reformed tradition’s antithesis between natural theology and grace. According to this tradition God can be only be properly known by God’s gracious decision to reveal himself; he cannot be 'reached' through human reasoning. Human reason is corrupted by the sinful condition of the human mind, and by the limitations of being a mere creature. Barth’s constant theme was the establishing of right relations between God and humanity - the creature must learn from its creator in humility, not define and limit God within its own creaturely thoughts.

According to Barth, the liberal protestant theology of his time had constructed a false God, a God that was simply the product of human imagining and scheming, not the God who revealed himself in Jesus. Having been formed by the world, it was powerless to correct the world. He underlined this harsh opinion by endorsing Ludwig Feuerbach’s claim that God had been created by humanity rather than the other way round. 

The truth about God, he insisted, must be sought in God’s revelatory events, never allowing human ‘wisdom’ to dictate, control or define what God has said to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus was, for Barth, the ultimate revelation of God, our point of contact with a ‘strange new world’. Barth described Jesus as the place where God and humanity meet, the small point on which a horizontal and vertical line (representing the thought of God and Humanity) intersect. This raised the incarnation, in a sense, above scripture, arguably above other miracles. God was, for Barth, ‘a wall of fire’, whom we meet in the Jesus  of scripture, like a crater left in the earth by an exploding shell.

In later years, Barth’s Epistle to the Romans came to be seen, not least by Barth himself, as a corrective rather than a complete theology. It should be read today for its extraordinary power, but always with an understanding of the theological shellshock that produced it. Romans was a wrecking ball, after which Barth attempted to build a new systematic theology in his unfinished thirteen volume Church Dogmatics. This later theology is still audacious and profound, but it is more positive, and in its own way comprehensive - built like an intellectual cathedral in which every separate doctrine is a foundation that props up and connects with every other structure. 

Like many theologians Barth would say that his theology was provisional, yet he wrote as though it were the finished word - a distillation of God’s very thoughts. He has been seen at times as a sensation, an oddity, a relic, a conservative and a radical. For a time his work dominated the study of theology, then it disappeared and seemed to be forgotten. Ironically, given how heavily he leaned on the Reformed tradition, there was a backlash within protestant theology, yet a warm appreciation of him among many Roman Catholic theologians. More recently Barth has had influence among the post-liberal theologians from Yale in the 1990's, as well as with post-conservative evangelicals. Like the best thinkers he is impossible to put neatly into any categories and he inspires, confuses and annoys across all denominational barriers. 

Barth was teaching in a German university when Hitler came to power and demanded allegiance from the churches, most of whom duly obliged.  He was among the courageous few (including Bonhoeffer) who organised the Barmen Declaration, which denounced the idolatry of Nazism, before he returned to the safety of his native Switzerland. In 1945 he returned to the German academy to lecture among the rubble. These lectures became another famous theological book, Dogmatics in Outline. This is not especially easy reading, but I would recommend it as a starting point in attempting to read Barth. 

Later, in a lecture on the theology of John Calvin, Barth praised Calvin’s insistence that Christianity address itself to the whole of life, including the civil and political sphere. He contrasted this with Luther’s ‘Two Kingdoms’ theology, in which the Church concentrates on spiritual matters and leaves government and politics to the civil authorities. There was, Barth contended, a clear line between this Lutheran doctrine and Germany’s failure to prevent the rise of Nazism. Once again, he had found a theological root to national and ecclesiastical calamity. 

The problem that Barth identified has never gone away. The heirs to Schleiermacher have not been thwarted. Liberal theologians are still looking for God within the prescribed limits of currently fashionable secular theory. This has always happened, but now the reach and institutional power of the latest intellectual fashion, which has captured the West over the last ten years, is becoming scary. There is a new way of thinking and speaking that has, with terrifying speed, gained the status of the ‘known known’, and makes heretics of anyone who tries to probe its incoherence and absurdities. That's why we need a another Karl Barth before it's too late.

Liberal theologians have always capitulated to secular thinking, trying to fit God, Jesus and the Bible into the latest intellectual categories. Under this arrangement Christianity ceases to exist as a narrative in its own right, becoming a mere delivery mechanism for secular ideas. In the past, liberal Christianity often seemed to be no more than Christianese, Christian language superimposed on non-Christian thoughts - a sort of baptised humanism. 

It has always happened. Christian words have been sprinkled across every philosophical novelty from neoplatonism and neo-aristotelianism to Marxism, existentialism and process philosophy. Well, the zeitgeist has moved on since then, but what persists is liberal Christianity’s habit of conceding the whole pattern of thinking to the latest human ‘wisdom’, even when it is shockingly illiberal. And so baptised humanism has given way to a Christianese application of Critical Theory. And as CT takes hold of, first the western academy, then the government, media and schools this cannot end well.  If Critical Theory leads us down dark paths, as seems likely, what resistance can Christianity offer if it must do all its thinking and speaking within the categories laid out by this new secular orthodoxy? 

God should never be inside the tent. That’s why we need a new Karl Barth, someone to once again teach non-fundamentalist Christians to take Christianity seriously, and so give them an actual basis from which to take on the forces of darkness. We’re probably not on the verge of a catastrophe to rival those Barth addressed after the two world wars, but that doesn’t mean that such catastrophes cannot arrive in time on the path we are on. In 1918 Barth saw Christian failure to oppose the German war machine as having begun with an eighteenth century intellectual turn to the subject. After world war two he linked national and church failure over the rise of Nazism with a fifteenth century theologian. The point is this: when ideas become settled and unchallengeable in a nation their weaknesses have a long, long time in which to bear evil fruit. We need another Karl Barth soon, and maybe he or she is already out there. But sadly history is likely to repeat itself: we will only discover the new Barth once things have gone horribly, cataclysmically wrong.