Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Truth:
Dr.
Karl Barth
One of the most brilliant and complex intellectuals of the twentieth century,
Barth wrote volume after massive volume on the meaning of life and faith.
In
the early 1930s the rise of Nazi power and its defense by the so-called "German
Christians" as a sign of God's providence proved to be the supreme test of Barth's
radical "Nein" to natural theology.
Barth
rejected in anger the nationalist heresy of confusing God and the spirit of the German
nation. He became one of the chief spokesmen of the small group of Christians that started
the church struggle against Hitler. In 1934 he wrote most of the now famous Barmen
Declaration, a defiant confession of faith rejecting the Nazi infiltration of
Christianity. At the end of the year, Barth was brought before a Nazi court and found
guilty of seducing the minds of German students! He had refused to open his classes with
the Nazi salute, and to sign the required oath of allegiance to Hitler. In 1935 Barth was
expelled from Germany, and returned to Switzerland, where he became professor at Basel.
He
has been accused of. dogmatism, yet he was the pioneer of the German churches' resistance
movement against the Nazis. He has been accused of narrow Protestantism, yet he came to
play an important role in the first assembly of the World Council of Churches at
Amsterdam, 1948. He has been accused by many of rejecting the Bible as the Word of God,
yet in many passages Barth states that the Bible is the Word of God.
Those
who parrot the saying that “Barth holds that the Bible only contains the Word of
God” have probably never read him! He has been accused of pessimism, with
overemphasis on man's inability in the matter of salvation, yet who has produced a better
theology of hope than he has? But, as someone has said, "to get beyond him you have
to climb over him."
To believe that Barth was the greatest
theologian since the Reformation does not mean a slavish acceptance
of whatever he wrote. Barth never wanted "followers" but students
who were willing to think for themselves on the basis of God's Word.
"Thank God, I am not a Barthian,"
Barth once exclaimed!
Barth,
the great 20th century theologian, spent his entire life writing volumes and volumes of
theology that are the classics of this era. A student-skeptic
once asked him if he could sum up everything he'd learned in a lifetime of study. Barth,
quite seriously yet, presumably, with a twinkle in his eye, quoting the children's rhyme,
gave him this answer: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." The skeptic then,
pressing him further, asked how he could be certain of that, to
which Barth replied, "Because my mother told me
and she would not lie."
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