Theology and Church. Karl Barth

       INTRODUCTION (1962)

       by T. F. Torrance

      KARL BARTH is the greatest theological genius that has appeared on the scene for centuries. He cannot be appreciated except in the context of the greatest theologians such as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, nor can his thinking be adequately measured except in the context of the whole history of theology and philosophy. Not only does he recapitulate in himself in the most extraordinary way the development of all modern theology since the Reformation, but he towers above it in such a way that he has created a situation in the Church, comparable only to the Reformation, in which massive clarification through debate with the theology of the Roman Church can go on. Karl Barth has, in fact, so changed the whole landscape of theology, Evangelical and Roman alike, that the other great theologians of modern times appear in comparison rather like jobbing gardeners.

       Who is he?

      Karl Barth is a native of Switzerland, born and brought up in the home of a Swiss pastor who when Karl was but two years old became a Professor of Church History in the University of Bern. It was in Bern that Karl Barth grew up and went up to University to study philosophy and theology, and from there he went on to the Universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. After spending some twelve years in the pastorate, mostly in the Alpine village of Safenwil in Aargau, he was called to be Professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen. Then after more than a decade of teaching and debating in the Universities of Münster and Bonn, in which he was the living centre of a volcanic disturbance in the whole field of theological thinking, and the great mind behind the German Church’s struggle for survival against National-Socialism, he was ejected from Germany, and found refuge in Basel, the city of his birth, where he was appointed to the chair of Dogmatics, which for centuries had been occupied by some of the greatest thinkers of the Reformed Church.

       What is he like?

      Perhaps more than any other theologian of modern times Barth resembles Luther in his sheer Menschlichkeit. That is to say, he has an overflowing love for all things human, whether they are the simplicities of natural life or the great achievements of the human spirit, in the midst of which he manifests a frankness, and childlikeness, and sincerity toward other human beings, which can be both gentle and rough, but always with compassion. His whole attitude to life, and even to theology, is expressed in his passionate love for the care-free, light-hearted music of Mozart, in which the profoundest questions are put to the eternal and the creaturely alike without the dogmatic presumption to any final answer or last word, and it is to the accompaniment of Mozart’s music that his engagement in the hard work of dogmatics becomes sheer enjoyment of the majesty and beauty of God.

      In the depth of this humanity Karl Barth has a fundamentally scientific cast of mind—the mind of eternal inquiry, relentlessly probing into everything he finds, not in order to master it or to show off his own powers over it, but to listen to it, to learn from it, to let it declare itself to him, to teach him how to articulate understanding of it sincerely and faithfully in accordance with its own inner nature and necessity and beauty. That is the humility of the scientist who will not impose theory arbitrarily upon what he investigates, but is always ready to reconstruct what he already thinks he has learned in order to make it possible to learn really new things. It is the eye of the artist who has the faculty of seeing what is actually there and can pick out its deepest and most characteristic forms with which to depict it and communicate it so that his own creative art is allowed to be the instrument of the reality of his subject. All Barth’s theology is characterized by relentless, irresistible questioning that uncovers the artificiality that constantly prevents us from attaining objectivity, and therefore has the most disturbing, critical effect in shaking the foundations, but only in order that the fundamental realities