Karl Barth

Overview

Karl Barth (May 10, 1886 - December 10, 1968) was a Swiss Reformed pastor and theologian whose multi-volume Church Dogmatics made him the central figure of the twentieth-century “dialectical theology” movement often labeled neo-orthodoxy.¹ Trained within German Protestant liberalism, he broke from it during his own pastorate and turned to a theology centered on God’s self-revealing act in Jesus Christ rather than on human religious experience.² He went on to help lead Confessing Church resistance to the German Christian movement’s accommodation of National Socialism, and his doctrines of revelation, Scripture, and election remain debated among Reformed and evangelical theologians.³

Life and Ministry

Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, and grew up in Bern, where his father taught at the university.⁴ He began his own theological studies in Bern in 1904, where he encountered Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which he later called “the first book that really moved me as a student.”⁴ He went on to study at Berlin, then a center of Protestant liberalism, and later at Tübingen and Marburg, where Wilhelm Herrmann’s lectures left a deep impression on him.⁴

After Marburg, Barth spent a decade, from 1911 to 1921, as a pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil.⁵ The pastorate, not the academy, broke his confidence in the liberal theology in which he had been trained: “Barth’s liberal assurances were initially undermined by his exposure to the Swiss social democratic movement… The outbreak of the Great War further disillusioned him… most of his former teachers signed a declaration of support for the Kaiser.”² Barth described the crisis in his own words:

An entire world of theological exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which up to that point I had accepted as basically credible, was thereby shaken to the foundations, and with it everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.⁶

He returned to close exegesis of Scripture, publishing a commentary on Romans in 1919 (revised in 1922) that broke with the liberal exegetical consensus and brought him sudden prominence.⁵ On the strength of it he was offered an honorary professorship of Reformed theology at Göttingen in 1921, and went on to teach at Münster from 1925 and Bonn from 1930.⁵ When the German Christian movement moved to bring the churches into line with National Socialism, Barth helped draft the Barmen Declaration of 1934 and became a leading voice of the Confessing Church’s resistance; he was dismissed from his Bonn professorship in 1935 for refusing to swear an unconditional oath of loyalty to Hitler, and returned to Basel, where he taught until his retirement in 1962.⁵ He died in Basel on December 10, 1968.⁵

Theological Contribution

Revelation as God’s act, not human religious experience

Barth’s theology rejects general revelation and any independent natural theology as a path to the knowledge of God. Berkhof read this as a deliberate reversal of a drift he traced from Schleiermacher onward, toward locating revelation in human religious insight: Barth “denounced in the strongest terms” that drift, and “wants to lead the Church back from the subjective to the objective, from religion to revelation.”⁷ On Berkhof’s reading, Barth held that revelation “never exists on any horizontal line, but always comes down perpendicularly from above,” occurring only in Jesus Christ and never in nature, so that “it is a mistake to regard the Bible as God’s revelation in any other than a secondary sense. It is a witness to, and a token of, God’s revelation.”⁷

Evangelical canon scholar Michael Kruger characterizes the same point from a different angle: “Barth’s doctrine of Scripture emphasizes revelation as an ‘event’ that happens to individuals when the Spirit illumines them and they experience the word of God.”⁸ Kruger’s own account of the resulting debate among Barth’s readers names Cornelius Van Til and Carl F. H. Henry as early critics who read this “Scripture as witness” formula as a departure from the church’s historic doctrine of Scripture, and more recent evangelical readers including Kevin Vanhoozer and Bruce McCormack who have argued Barth has been misunderstood on the point; Kruger himself doubts Barth has been universally misread, since even a sympathetic reader like T. F. Torrance did not read him that way.³

A Christocentric doctrine of election

The Church Dogmatics also reworks the doctrine of election around the person of Christ rather than an abstract divine decree. Barth held that God’s own being cannot rightly be considered apart from God’s self-revealing action: “God is who He is in the act of His revelation,” he wrote, meaning specifically the incarnation of the Son.⁹ He extended the same rule to the doctrine of the Trinity itself, holding that “statements about the divine modes of being [Father, Son, Spirit] antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation.”⁹ Applied to election, this Christocentrism led Barth to make reprobation a function of an individual’s own rejection of Christ rather than an unconditional decree: Berkhof summarized that “Barth teaches a reprobation which is dependent on man’s rejection of God’s revelation in Christ,” in contrast to the Reformed confessional doctrine of an unconditional decree of preterition and condemnation.¹⁰

Historical Significance

Barth’s break with nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, first visible in his 1919 commentary on Romans, made him, with Emil Brunner and Rudolf Bultmann, one of the founders of the “dialectical theology” that reshaped twentieth-century Protestantism; Cornelius Van Til’s earliest full-length critique of the movement treated Barth and Brunner together as a single, if internally divided, target.¹ In 1934 Barth also debated Brunner over the legitimacy of natural theology and helped draft the Barmen Declaration against the German Christian movement’s accommodation of National Socialism.⁵

Barth’s doctrine of Scripture has drawn the most sustained criticism from Reformed and evangelical theologians. Kruger’s survey of the debate places Van Til and Henry among the earlier critics who read Barth’s revelation-as-event language as eroding Scripture’s own claim to be, simply and objectively, the word of God, against more recent readers such as Vanhoozer and McCormack who argue the earlier critics misread him.³ His qualification of the classical Reformed extra Calvinisticum, the teaching that the eternal Son is never wholly contained within his incarnate humanity, is itself debated among his interpreters, turning on how far his Christocentric doctrine of God can be reconciled with it.¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book,” note 132. ↩ ↩²
John Webster, Barth, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2004), 4. ↩ ↩²
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book,” note 134. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Webster, Barth, 3. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Webster, Barth, 5-9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Karl Barth, quoted in Webster, Barth, 4. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 24-25. ↩ ↩²
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 133-34. ↩ ↩²
Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 101-2. ↩
Duby, God in Himself, 131-86 (chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context”). ↩