Justified True Belief

(●) The village pastor who brought down the liberal theology he was trained in, and spent the next fifty years rebuilding theology around Jesus Christ. + Karl Barth was the most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and he began as an ordinary minister in a Swiss village of weavers who could not think what to say on Sunday morning. What he did about that problem, which was to sit down with the letter to the Romans and read it as though it might actually be true, produced a book that ended one era of theology and started another. He matters on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons that pull in opposite directions, and both are worth holding. The first is that he is a large part of the reason liberal theology stopped being the automatic future of the church. Liberal theology, in the sense the word carried in his lifetime, was the confident project of rebuilding the faith on what an educated modern person could still credit: religious experience, moral progress, and Jesus as the finest human instance of both, with the miracles and the old dogmas quietly set to one side. Barth had been taught it by its greatest masters, he had believed it entirely, and he abandoned it in public with reasons anyone could follow. The second reason is harder on us. He is the man who said, more loudly than anyone since the Reformation, that arguing your way up to God from the world is a road that does not exist. Much of what apologetics does, Barth thought could not be done. Taking him seriously means hearing that objection at full strength. One fact gives the measure of the man. The Church Dogmatics, the work he wrote across thirty-five years and never finished, runs to more than nine thousand pages in thirteen part-volumes, and he was still adding to it in his eighties. He also would not settle to the day’s work until he had listened to Mozart.

(●) 1886 AD: Born in Basel to a New Testament professor, and schooled in the liberal theology then at its height. + Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 10 May 1886, the eldest of five children of Fritz Barth, a Reformed minister and New Testament scholar, and Anna Katharina Sartorius. Reformed, in that sentence and everywhere else on his record, names the Protestant tradition that runs back to Calvin and the Swiss reformers of the sixteenth century, and in the Basel and Bern of his boyhood it was less a party than the water everybody swam in. When Karl was three the family moved to Bern, where his father taught New Testament and early church history at the university and was given the chair a few years later. The boy was not a model of piety. By his own later account he ran with a street gang, fought in the lanes of Bern, and was a good deal of trouble to his parents. Then came confirmation, the class in which a young Swiss Protestant stands up in front of the congregation and takes for himself the faith he was baptised into as an infant. Preparing for it, he decided he wanted to understand the creed he was about to affirm, and that settled his career. He began theology at Bern in 1904 and then went where every ambitious young Swiss theologian went, to Germany. At Berlin he sat under Adolf von Harnack, the greatest church historian of the age, who had argued that the simple religion of Jesus had been buried under centuries of Greek metaphysics and needed digging out. His father, alarmed, sent him next for a spell at Tübingen, where the conservative Adolf Schlatter taught, and it did not take. At Marburg he found the teacher who marked him most, Wilhelm Herrmann, for whom faith rested on the inner experience of the believer rather than on doctrines or on proofs from history. Put Harnack’s digging and Herrmann’s inwardness together and you have liberal theology at its confident peak. God was known through human religious experience rather than through anything handed down from outside; Jesus was the highest example of that experience rather than its object; and the kingdom of God was arriving, steadily and by daylight, through moral progress. It is worth saying that these were not shallow men or cynical ones. They were the best scholars in Europe, they were teaching what they believed, and their students loved them. Barth did not merely study it. He was a convinced and grateful son of it, and he stayed on in Marburg after his degree as an editorial assistant on Die christliche Welt, the movement’s leading journal.

(●) 1911 AD: Ten years as pastor of a village of mill workers, where he took the workers’ side and ran short of anything to preach. + After two years as an assistant pastor in Geneva, where he preached in the hall Calvin had used, Barth took the parish of Safenwil in the Swiss canton of Aargau. It was a village of some sixteen hundred people, most of them employed in two textile mills, and he stayed ten years. In 1913 he married Nelly Hoffmann, a violinist who had been in his confirmation class; they had five children. He threw himself into the life of the place with more energy than tact. He studied factory law and trade unionism, helped the mill workers organise, and in 1915 joined the Social Democratic Party, which did not endear him to the mill owners in his own congregation. Safenwil called him the red pastor. His closest friend through these years was Eduard Thurneysen, pastor of a neighbouring village, and the two of them wrote to each other constantly about a problem neither could solve. The problem was the sermon. Every Sunday a pastor climbs into a pulpit and people look up expecting to be told something about God. Barth found that the theology he had been given had equipped him to talk beautifully about religious experience, about morality, about the personality of Jesus, and not at all about God. "As ministers we ought to speak of God," he later wrote of exactly this predicament, and he had discovered that he could not.

(●) 1914 AD: Ninety-three German intellectuals signed for the Kaiser’s war, and almost every teacher he revered was on the list. + On 4 October 1914, two months into the First World War, a manifesto appeared in the German press, signed by ninety-three of the country’s most distinguished scholars, artists and scientists, defending the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Barth read the names. Harnack was there. Herrmann was there. The men who had taught him what Christianity was had put their signatures under a war he thought indefensible, and had done it as a matter of course, as though nothing in their theology stood in the way. He called it a black day, and he was precise about what it cost him. It was not that his teachers had made a political mistake; anyone can do that. It was that a theology which had located God inside the highest human ideals turned out to have no way of telling the difference between the gospel and the cultural confidence of one nation in August 1914. If God is what we reach when we climb to the top of our own religion and morality, then whatever we happen to be at the top of our form gets called God. So the two village pastors went back to the beginning. In the summer of 1916, in the study at Safenwil, Barth opened the letter to the Romans and began working through the Greek with a notebook, not looking for what Paul’s religious personality had been like, but asking what the man was actually saying. He wrote later that it felt like a man climbing a dark church tower who reaches for the banister, catches the bell rope instead, and hears the bell sound out over the whole town.

(●) 1919 AD: A commentary on Romans written at a parsonage desk landed among the theologians like a bomb on a playground, and carried him into a chair he had no degree for. + The first edition of Der Römerbrief appeared in December 1918, dated 1919, in a print run of a thousand copies that a small Bern publisher agreed to take on. It sold slowly and then very fast. Barth was so dissatisfied with it that he rewrote the whole book from the first page, and the second edition of 1922 is the one that shook the German-speaking church. It reads unlike any commentary before it. God in its pages is not the friendly summit of human aspiration but the one who confronts everything human with a question mark, and Paul’s letter is not a document from the ancient world to be dated and classified but an address to the reader now. Barth was accused of having abandoned scholarship, and in his prefaces he answered that critical scholarship, meaning the historical work of asking who wrote a text, when, in what circumstances and out of what older material, was a fine thing as far as it went and that it had stopped roughly where the interesting part began. The Catholic theologian Karl Adam, writing in the journal Hochland in 1926, said the book had fallen like a bomb on the playground of the theologians, and the phrase stuck because everyone recognised the noise. Two years after the first edition appeared, a pastor with no doctorate was offered a professorship at Göttingen in Reformed theology. He accepted, admitted afterwards that he had not owned a copy of the Reformed confessions he was hired to expound and had certainly never read them, and set about teaching himself the whole history of Christian doctrine roughly one week ahead of his students.

(●) 1921 AD: Fourteen years in German lecture halls turned a demolition man into a builder of systems. + Barth taught Reformed theology at Göttingen from 1921, moved to Münster in 1925, and to Bonn in 1930. Münster, three years before it hired him, had already given him in 1922 the honorary doctorate he never earned the ordinary way, so that a man who had written no dissertation held a doctorate all the same. Tearing a building down is one job and putting something on the cleared ground is another, and in these years the man who had thrown a bomb had to decide what to build. The answer turned out to be dogmatics: the patient, ordered account of what the church believes, subject by subject, in the way that Aquinas and Calvin had written one. His first attempt, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf of 1927, got one volume out and was then abandoned. Barth judged that he had let a philosophy of human existence set the terms of the questions, and that a theology which starts from an analysis of the human situation will end up describing the human situation. What broke the deadlock was a small book on a medieval archbishop. In Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1931) he read Anselm of Canterbury’s famous proof of God and concluded that Anselm had never been arguing an unbeliever into faith at all: he had been a believer praying his way toward understanding what he already trusted. Faith seeking understanding, in that order. Barth said it was the book he wrote with the greatest love, and in 1932 he started again from scratch with volume I/1 of the Church Dogmatics. Two other things belong to these years. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, whom he met in 1924, became his research assistant and in 1929 moved into the Barth household, where she remained for the rest of her working life; the Church Dogmatics is in a real sense a joint labour, and the arrangement caused his wife Nelly and the children lasting grief (†4). And in January 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, while Barth was holding a chair in Bonn.

(●) 1934 AD: He drafted the Barmen Declaration, refused the oath to Hitler, and lost his chair for it. + The pressure on the German church was not chiefly persecution. It was flattery. A movement calling itself the German Christians proposed to read the events of 1933 as a fresh revelation of God alongside Scripture: the nation, the race, the leader, understood as a second book through which God was now speaking. Barth’s answer came in the summer of 1933 in a pamphlet, Theologische Existenz heute!, written in a single night and selling tens of thousands of copies; he sent one to Hitler. In May 1934 he sat down with two Lutheran colleagues, Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit, at a Frankfurt hotel to draft a confession for the churches that refused the new teaching. The Lutherans took an afternoon nap. Barth, by his own cheerful account, worked on with strong coffee and one or two Brazilian cigars, and the Lutheran church slept while the Reformed church stayed awake. What he produced was adopted, with revisions, by the Confessing Synod at Barmen on 29 to 31 May 1934, and it is one of the shortest and most consequential documents in modern church history. Its first thesis says that Jesus Christ, as Scripture attests him, is the one Word of God the church must hear, and its rejection clause closes the door on any second source of revelation (T2). In the autumn of 1934 every German civil servant, professors included, was required to swear an unconditional oath of loyalty to Hitler, and in November the demand reached Barth. He did not refuse the oath outright. He stipulated an addition, that he could be loyal to the Führer "only within my responsibilities as an Evangelical Christian," and he would not open his lectures with the Hitler salute. He was suspended in November, tried, and in June 1935 put out of his chair at Bonn. Basel offered him one the same summer. He was forty-nine, and he went home.

(●) 1935 AD: Basel kept him for twenty-seven years, and the Church Dogmatics ran past nine thousand pages. + Barth held the chair of systematic theology at Basel until he retired in 1962, and the years there settled into a rhythm: Mozart on the gramophone in the early morning, then lectures, then the Dogmatics. Volume after volume came out, on the Word of God, on God, on creation, on reconciliation, and the doctrine of reconciliation alone ran to four large part-volumes. He never got to the doctrine of redemption. The last thing he published from it, in 1967, was a fragment on baptism. The war did not leave him alone in Switzerland. He wrote to a Czech theologian, Josef Hromádka, in September 1938, saying that a Czech soldier resisting Hitler would be fighting for the church of Jesus Christ as well as for his country, and the letter was published and caused an international row. He served in the Swiss army auxiliary as an armed border guard from 1940, aged fifty-four, which is a picture worth holding still for a moment: the professor of systematic theology, well past the age when anyone would have asked him, standing armed watch at the frontier of a small country with Germany on the other side of it. The next blow had nothing to do with the war. In 1941 his twenty-year-old son Matthias was killed in a climbing accident in the Bernese Alps, and Barth preached the funeral sermon himself four days later. The man who had spent nearly twenty years telling ministers that they were obliged to speak of God and unable to do it had to stand up and do it for his own son (T3). Afterwards he went back to the ruins. In 1946 he lectured in the bombed-out University of Bonn to students who cleared rubble before class, walking them through the Apostles’ Creed line by line; those lectures became Dogmatics in Outline, the shortest way into his thought. Two years later he spoke at the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, the first attempt to seat the world’s divided churches at one table. Nearer home, and for years, he preached in the Basel prison, to men who had every reason to doubt that the gospel had been meant for them, and he published the sermons rather than leaving them in a drawer. Then, in 1962, at seventy-five, he toured the United States for seven weeks, lectured at Chicago and Princeton, and appeared on the cover of Time.

(●) 1968 AD: He died in his sleep at eighty-two, with the great work unfinished and a telephone call the evening before. + On the evening of 9 December 1968 Barth was on the telephone to Eduard Thurneysen, the friend he had been arguing about the Bible with since Safenwil, fifty years before. Thurneysen was gloomy about the state of the world. Barth told him not to be so down in the mouth, and said that things are ruled, not in Moscow or Washington or Peking, but from above, from heaven. Nelly found him the next morning; he had died in the night, at home in Basel, on 10 December 1968. He had been working that evening on a lecture he never delivered, an address for an ecumenical week of prayer in Zurich, meant for Reformed and Roman Catholic Christians together. The last sentence he wrote breaks off in the middle of a thought about the church of the present having to sit down and listen to the church of the past. The Church Dogmatics stopped where he stopped, four volumes into a plan of five.

What He Taught

(T1) God is not the highest thing we already know, and there is no ladder from our side up to him. + Think of how a child first learns the word "big." A house is big, a mountain is bigger, the sky is bigger still, and God, the child is told, is the biggest of all. That is a natural way to talk and it hides a serious mistake, because it puts God at the top of a scale that also has houses on it. Barth’s first and most persistent claim is that God is not on our scale anywhere, not even at the top. He borrowed a phrase from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard to say it: the infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity. Qualitative, not quantitative. The difference between God and us is not that he has more of what we have; it is a difference in kind, like the difference between a portrait and a person, so that no amount of enlarging the portrait produces the person. In the Romans commentary Barth calls God the one who meets every human religion, morality and achievement as their crisis, meaning the point at which they are judged rather than crowned. Two things follow, and the second is more surprising than the first. If God is that far off, then no human religion is a road to him, including the Christian religion; Barth was as hard on churchgoing piety as on anything else. And if God is that far off, then the only way anyone knows anything about him is that he has come the distance himself and spoken. Revelation stops being a supplement to what we could work out and becomes the whole basis of the subject.

(Q) "If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance." + Source: Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, preface to the second edition, dated September 1921, page 10 in the translation by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford, 1933). Barth is answering the charge that he had imposed a philosophy on Paul. He goes on to say that the relation of this God to this man, and of this man to this God, is for him both the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy (T1).

(T2) Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, and neither nature nor history nor nation gives the church a second. + In 1934 this was not an abstraction. The German Christian movement was not asking the church to deny Christ. It was asking the church to add: to say that God had spoken in Scripture and also in the German nation, in the bond of blood and soil, in the hour of national renewal. Barth’s Barmen thesis is a flat refusal of the word "also." Behind it stands his account of how God’s Word reaches anyone at all, which he set out in three forms. God’s Word is first of all a person, Jesus Christ, God speaking himself. It is second the Bible, the written witness of prophets and apostles to that person. It is third the preaching of the church, which becomes God’s Word when God is pleased to speak through it. All three are the one Word, and the order matters: Scripture and sermon are not independent sources but testimony pointing at the same living centre. This is also the ground of his most famous quarrel with a friend. In 1934 the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner argued in Nature and Grace that fallen human beings retain a point of contact, an Anknüpfungspunkt, some capacity in us that grace can latch onto, and that the created order gives a real if faint knowledge of God. Barth replied the same year with a pamphlet whose title was one word: Nein! What he was refusing has a name worth learning, because most of what people mean by apologetics falls under it. Natural theology is the attempt to reach something true about God from the world alone, from the order of nature, the moral sense, the fact that anything exists at all, without waiting on Christ or on Scripture to say it first; the design argument and the cosmological argument are natural theology doing its ordinary work. Barth’s charge was that a natural theology of that kind is exactly the crack through which the German Christians had climbed in: once you grant a second channel of revelation, someone will fill it with whatever their nation is excited about. Most Christian thinkers, then and since, have judged this an overcorrection, and they point to Paul’s statement that God’s eternal power and divine nature "have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20), with Psalm 19:1 standing beside it. Barth’s reply was that Paul says this about people who are without excuse, not about people who are on their way to God.

(Q) "Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death." + Source: The Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934), thesis 1, drafted by Barth and adopted by the Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church, 31 May 1934 (translation of the Presbyterian Church USA Book of Confessions). The thesis is headed by two texts from John. The first is "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). The second is John 10:1 and 9, and the half the declaration leans on runs "I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved" (John 10:9). The rejection follows immediately: "We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation" (T2).

(T3) A preacher is obliged to speak of God and unable to, and admitting both is the beginning of theology. + Every pastor knows the Saturday night version of this. The sermon is due in twelve hours, the text is open, and the thing that needs saying is God, who cannot be summarised, illustrated or handled. Barth turned that ordinary distress into a working principle. The minister stands under an obligation he cannot discharge, and the temptation is to escape it in one of two directions: to give up on speaking of God and talk about religion, ethics or current events instead, or to pretend that the difficulty is not there and speak of God as fluently as of anything else. His prescription was to stay in the tight spot on purpose. Theology, on his account, is the church’s ongoing correction of its own speech: you check what the church is saying against what the church is given to say, you find it wanting, and you say it again better, knowing that the next generation will have to do the same to you. That is why the Church Dogmatics is so long and so full of small print. It is not a system built once and defended; it is a man going around the same centre again and again, correcting himself in public. Georges Casalis reports him saying that the angels laugh at old Karl, who keeps trying to get the truth about God into a book and keeps producing a volume fatter than the last. There is a warning here for apologetics too, and it is worth hearing even by people who think he pushed it too far. An argument that ends by producing a God the arguer can manage has produced something, but it may not have produced God.

(Q) "As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory." + Source: Karl Barth, "The Word of God and the Task of the Ministry," a lecture given at Elgersburg on 3 October 1922, in The Word of God and the Word of Man, translated by Douglas Horton (1928), page 186. Barth was addressing a conference of ministers and theologians, and the lecture is his account of why the sermon is an impossible assignment that God nevertheless gives out every week. The three sentences are his own numbered summary of the preacher’s position (T3).

(T4) Election is not a secret list of names but a person: Jesus Christ, chosen by God and rejected in our place. + Predestination is the doctrine that God, before the world was made, determined who would be saved. In the form Calvin gave it, and much more sharply in the form his later followers gave it, this means a decree fixed in eternity dividing humanity into two groups, and it leaves a believer with a question that cannot be answered by looking at Christ: am I on the list? Barth thought the whole way of putting it was wrong, and he rewrote the doctrine over some five hundred pages of the Church Dogmatics. His move is to ask who is elected, and to answer with a name rather than a number. Jesus Christ is the electing God, since it is in him that God turns toward the world at all, and Jesus Christ is the elected man, the one human being chosen from eternity. And what he is chosen for is the cross. Whatever rejection God’s judgment involves falls on him. So election is no longer a hidden decree standing behind Christ that you might be excluded from; it is the content of the gospel, and the answer to "am I chosen?" is "look at him." Paul’s phrase that God "chose us in him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4) is doing the work: in him is where the choosing happens. Christians divide over this, and the division is real. Those who love it say Barth finally made predestination good news, which the New Testament plainly treats it as. Those who resist it, including many in his own Reformed tradition, say he has proved too much: if the whole human race is elect in Christ and the whole rejection has already landed on him, it is hard to see what is left for anyone to be lost by, and the New Testament’s warnings then have nothing to warn about. Barth refused to teach that everyone is finally saved, on the ground that God’s grace cannot be turned into a rule that binds him. He also refused to say that anyone is not. That refusal is the honest description of where he left it (†4).

(Q) "The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory." + Source: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, §33 ("The Election of Jesus Christ"), opening thesis, page 94 in the English edition edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1957). Each section of the Church Dogmatics opens with a thesis paragraph in bold, a compressed statement of the argument that follows. This one is the hinge of Barth’s whole doctrine of God (T4).

(T5) God’s deity, rightly understood, includes his humanity. + In 1956, at seventy, Barth gave a lecture to Swiss ministers in which he did something theologians rarely do in public. He said that the young man who wrote the Romans commentary had been right about what he was attacking and lopsided in how he did it. In the fight against a theology that had made God into an aspect of humanity, the early Barth had shouted the distance between God and man so loudly that the God he described could sound like sheer distance and nothing else. The correction is not a retreat to liberalism, and he is careful about that. It is a claim about who God has turned out to be. If we take seriously that this God became a Jewish carpenter, was born, ate, wept, and was executed, then being for humanity is not something God does in spite of his divinity. It is what his divinity looks like when it acts. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) is not an exception to God’s nature but its clearest expression, and Paul can say of Christ that "in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9). Barth’s late work is warmer than his early work for this reason, and it is where his humour lives. The man who had once described God as the crisis of everything human spent his last decades preaching to prisoners in Basel and writing about Mozart, whose music, he said, knows the whole shadow side of the world and is not frightened by it because it knows something else as well.

(Q) "It is precisely God’s deity which, rightly understood, includes his humanity." + Source: Karl Barth, "The Humanity of God," a lecture given at Aarau on 25 September 1956, in The Humanity of God, translated by John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (1960). The sentence is Barth’s own summary of the turn his theology took after the war, and the lecture around it is the closest thing he wrote to a self-assessment (T5).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Confessing Church had a confession to sign because he wrote one. + Barmen did not save Germany, and Barth never claimed it had. What it did was give the Christians who refused the new teaching something concrete to stand on: not a mood of disapproval but six theses with Scripture attached, which a congregation could read aloud and a pastor could be arrested for. One hundred and thirty-nine delegates from eighteen provincial churches adopted it, and the Confessing Church, meaning the pastors and congregations across Germany who would not let the state reorganise the gospel for it, made it the ground it stood on. Some who stood there, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, went considerably further than Barth did and paid for it with their lives. Its afterlife has been long. The Barmen Declaration is now a confessional document in Reformed and united churches in Germany, and the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. placed it in its Book of Confessions in 1967. Christians resisting apartheid in South Africa reached for it directly: the Belhar Confession of 1986 is built on the same logic, that a church which lets the state tell it who its neighbours are has already changed religions. The lesson Barmen teaches is portable, and it is not comfortable for anyone. A church that has quietly acquired a second authority beside Christ, whether the second authority is a race, a party, a nation or a market, will not usually notice, because nobody involved intends to stop being Christian.

(†) He put dogmatics back at the centre, and the century argued with him because there was nothing else that size to argue with. + By 1900 serious theology in the universities had largely become the history of religion: what people had believed, how the beliefs developed, what social conditions produced them. Barth put the old question back on the table, which is not what people believed but whether it is so, and he made the church’s own doctrine a respectable object of study again for a generation that had thought it settled. The reach was wide and it crossed the confessional lines. In Scotland, T. F. Torrance, who edited the English Church Dogmatics with Geoffrey Bromiley, built on him a body of work on theology and natural science. Roman Catholics engaged him more warmly than anyone expected: Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a book-length study in 1951 arguing that Barth was the most serious Protestant conversation partner Catholic theology had had since the Reformation, and the two men were friends in Basel. A remark calling Barth the greatest theologian since Aquinas circulated for years under the name of Pope Pius XII; it is a story with no source anyone has been able to produce, and it should be treated as one. What is documented is that Barth was invited as an observer to the Second Vatican Council, was too ill to attend, and went to Rome afterwards in 1966 to ask the questions he had prepared, publishing them as Ad Limina Apostolorum. The list of those who worked in his wake is long and various, and none of them was merely repeating him: Jürgen Moltmann, Eberhard Jüngel, Thomas Torrance, Colin Gunton, John Webster and George Hunsinger all built on ground he had cleared. So, in their way, did his sharpest opponents, which is the surer measure of the size of the thing. When Rudolf Bultmann proposed to demythologise the New Testament, that is, to strip out the ancient picture of a world of angels and demons under a heaven overhead and keep what that picture had been trying to say about human existence, Barth wrote a small book to ask him whether he was still talking about a God who acts.

(†) English-speaking evangelicals took the Christ-centred core and fought him hard over the Bible and history. + Conservative Protestants met Barth with a mixture of relief and alarm. The relief was that here was a first-rate mind saying in the universities that Jesus Christ is the centre of everything and that liberal theology had been talking about the wrong subject. The alarm was over what he did with Scripture and with history. Cornelius Van Til, at Westminster Theological Seminary, published The New Modernism in 1946, arguing that Barth had kept the old liberal denial of a revelation given in ordinary space and time and had dressed it in orthodox clothing. Others, notably Geoffrey Bromiley, who translated him, thought Van Til had read him unfairly and that the disagreement was real but narrower than that. The sharpest moment was a lunch. In 1962, at a luncheon for two hundred religious leaders at George Washington University during Barth’s American tour, Carl F. H. Henry stood, identified himself as editor of Christianity Today, gestured at the press table where the wire services and the Washington papers were sitting, and asked whether, had those reporters been on hand that morning, the resurrection of Jesus would have been a story any of them could have covered. Barth, irritated, asked him whether he had said Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday, and the room laughed. Henry answered, "Yesterday, today and forever." Barth apologised publicly for the jibe before the session ended, but he never gave the answer Henry wanted, and the exchange has been retold ever since because it puts the disagreement in one question (†4).

(†) Where his own record invites criticism: the empty tomb kept out of the historian’s reach, an unclosed door on universal salvation, and a household his wife suffered in. + Three items on his own ledger, drawn from what he wrote and did rather than from what others made of him. - The resurrection and history. Barth insisted that Jesus rose bodily and that the tomb was empty, and he was not being coy about it. But he placed the event in what he called Geschichte rather than Historie. German has two words where English has only the word history, and Barth leaned on the difference: Historie is the past as a researcher reconstructs it from the surviving evidence, while Geschichte is what actually happened and what it now means for the people it happened to. The resurrection, on his account, is real history and God’s own act, and still not the sort of thing a historian could establish by the ordinary methods, since those methods assume that the past runs on causes we already recognise. The trouble is that Paul does not seem to hold the question at that distance. "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14) reads like a man staking the case on something that either happened in the world or did not, and who then lists witnesses by name and notes that most of them are still alive to ask (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). Barth would say the witnesses testify to what no camera could have caught. Carl Henry’s question at that Washington lunch (†3) is the sharp form of the objection, and it has not gone away. - Universal salvation. Having made Christ both the electing God and the rejected man, Barth had a doctrine that pointed hard toward everyone being saved in the end, and he would neither affirm it nor rule it out, saying that grace cannot be converted into a principle we can require of God. Critics across traditions, Catholic and Protestant alike, have replied that this is not reserve but incoherence, and that the New Testament’s warnings are addressed to people who might actually be lost. God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), and Scripture also speaks of a judgment that is real. Barth held both ends and declined to tie them. - Charlotte von Kirschbaum. From October 1929 until illness ended her work, Barth’s research assistant lived in his house alongside his wife Nelly and their five children. The correspondence between the two, published in the collected edition in 2008, shows that the relationship went well beyond collaboration, that Barth knew what it was costing Nelly, and that he would not end it. The three of them called the arrangement a Notgemeinschaft, a fellowship of necessity, and in explaining it to Nelly he wrote that each of them had a special place and a special security in it and also a special burden and pressure; Christiane Tietz, working through the family papers, records how heavily that fell on his wife and on the children. It is a plain failure in the life of a man who taught the church that the command of God claims the whole of a life, and it belongs on his own ledger for that reason rather than passed over. None of this cancels the debt. Barth is why a generation of pastors stopped apologising for the gospel and started preaching it, and the man who spent his eighth decade preaching to prisoners and writing about grace knew better than his critics how much he needed the thing he taught.