Reading some AW Tozer...great stuff in "The Pursuit of God"
The Burden of Pride
Tozer highlights three kinds of interior burdens, each one capable of attacking the heart
and mind, and eventually the body. The first is the burden of pride. The burden of pride
chains you to the labor of self-love, which is hard labor on behalf of the little god named
self. This god requires your unconditional loyalty and devotion. He forces you to remain
vigilant at all times, forever sensitive to someone speaking slightingly about you, always
scanning the room for someone who doesn’t consider you “our kind of people.” This god
has a very touchy honor that must be shielded from the opinions of others at all times. But, as Christians, were never meant to bear this burden. Jesus calls us into his rest, and meekness and humility is his method. The humble person doesn’t really care who is greater. They long ago decided that to be esteemed by the world is not worth the effort. They now define themselves as children of God, members of the body of Christ, and living stones in the Temple of God. In referring to such a person, Tozer says,
“He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, ‘Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very same things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself and cease to care what men think.’”
He reminds us to stop taking ourselves so seriously because there is One who has already taken us seriously. How seriously? The doctrine of grace humbles us without degrading us and elevates us without inflating us: in ourselves – nothing; in God – everything. God gives us an accurate audit of our spiritual poverty and then imputes to us his spiritual wealth. Our new standing is immune from the machinations and falsehoods of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We know who we are and we know whose we are.
The Burden of Pretense
The second burden is the burden of pretense. The burden of pretense superglues our face to the mask of self-importance and hides the inner ugliness of the self. At the core it is the fear of having people find out just how impoverished we really are. It “gnaws like rodents within [the] heart.” That image accurately depicts the ceaseless fear of someday coming across a person more cultured, educated, or wealthy and being unmasked as a pretender. Tozer warns, “Let no one smile this off. These burdens are real, and little by little they kill the victims of this evil and unnatural way of life.” And so, to all the victims of this heavy burden Jesus says, “Ye . . . [must] become as little children” (Matthew 18:13). The image of the child is most apropos. Tozer explains,
“For little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what they have without relating it to something else or someone else. Only as they get older and sin begins to stir within their hearts do jealousy and envy appear. Then they are unable to enjoy what they have if someone else has something larger and
better. At that early age does the galling burden come down upon their tender souls, and it never leaves them till Jesus sets them free.”
The simple way a child welcomes whatever gift is given soon gives way to the childish schemes by which we comparison-shop for what we want. But in our frenzy we forget that all the price tags are wrong. In fact, if you invert them you’re actually closer to the true worth. That which the world declares to be priceless turns out to be worthless. And that which God declares to be priceless is treated by the world as worthless. But one day, there will be a universal accounting and the true prices will be revealed. Real worth will come into its own; real treasure will be finally unearthed. Paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards, “The wisest thing a person can do is to treat things according to their true value.” This means that we assess all things according to God’s standard, not the worlds. In the meantime, we find rest for our souls as we rest in him.
The Burden of Artificiality
The third burden is the burden of artificiality. The burden of artificiality forces us to play a character in a carnival of self-deceit, hoping that the audience never awakens to the fact that underneath the costume and makeup is only an empty self. We strive to never flub a line, never miss a cue, and never, never slip out of character. The entire advertising industry is built upon artificiality – the art of convincing people that appearance is everything. But what the world has raised to an art form, each individual experiences as a burden – a burden that gets heavier as time goes on. To make matters worse, our culture encourages and celebrates artificiality without qualification. You can never go too far. Nobody cares any longer if those body parts are fake or if this designer outfit is a knock-off or if that diploma is mail order. It’s all about appearing to have more, even if you really don’t have anything. It’s about being on top, even if there really is no top. And there’s nothing new here. The artificial fruit fooled Eve. The artificial intimacy duped Samson. And the artificial reputation lured Ananias and Sapphira. The only thing that’s new is how trendy artificiality has become. At its core, artificiality is aspiration with God removed. The noble quality of aspiration: a dislike for being stuck, an impatience for mediocrity, a dissatisfaction with business-as-usual, or, as Paul proclaims in Philippians 3:14, “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” But when you remove God from this praiseworthy virtue, you are left with an empty shell – all hype, no hope.
As Tozer says, “Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus’ feet and surrender ourselves to his meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything, what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed.”
Monday, January 7, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Lessons From An Ostrich- Job 39:13-18
In Job chapters 38-42 we see God answering Job out of the whirlwind and asking Job if he can explain why God does the things He does. In this brief passage in chapter 39: 13-18, God explains a simple ostrich...and it's amazing. Read the passage and think about what God says here.
An ostrich has feathers, but they are ugly. Certainly nothing compared to a majestic stork.
An ostrich lays her eggs out in the open. No hidden nest to protect it. It is unconcerned about the safety of her egg. And when the egg hatches, she is not a caring mother, but rather is harsh with her young. It's as if she does not care, because she does not have wisdom.
But when she runs, she laughs at the horse and rider!! How awesome is that!
You see, the ostrich is ugly, dumb, and uncaring. But God did not make the ostrich to be beautiful or smart. God made the ostrich to run!! And when she runs...she laughs at the horse and rider! When the ostrich does what it is meant to do, the ostrich laughs with joy.
That's our lesson. What are we meant to do? What are you created to do? When we do what we are created by God to do, we too will laugh with joy.
An ostrich has feathers, but they are ugly. Certainly nothing compared to a majestic stork.
An ostrich lays her eggs out in the open. No hidden nest to protect it. It is unconcerned about the safety of her egg. And when the egg hatches, she is not a caring mother, but rather is harsh with her young. It's as if she does not care, because she does not have wisdom.
But when she runs, she laughs at the horse and rider!! How awesome is that!
You see, the ostrich is ugly, dumb, and uncaring. But God did not make the ostrich to be beautiful or smart. God made the ostrich to run!! And when she runs...she laughs at the horse and rider! When the ostrich does what it is meant to do, the ostrich laughs with joy.
That's our lesson. What are we meant to do? What are you created to do? When we do what we are created by God to do, we too will laugh with joy.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Five Things Christians Should Believe
It was Rupertius Meldinious who said: "In necessariis unitas, in non necessariis libertas, in omnibus caritas." which means: In the essentials unity, in the non essentials liberty, but in all things charity (or love). You see, there are certain things that as a Christian are essential and we therefore must all believe as part of being a Christian and receiving eternal salvation (IE, Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus was born of a virgin, Jesus rose from the dead, faith in Jesus is the only way into Heaven, etc.).
Then there are certain things were Scripture is not totally clear. In those non essential areas Christians can differ in practice and yet not risk eternal salvation (IE. Women in ministry, the rapture, free will vs predestination). These are areas where the scripture is not 100% clear, and therefore we can differ in practice and still be saved. These are not areas of practice that degrade the sufficiency of Jesus' atonement or would prevent a believer from entering heaven.
But as the quote above states, In omnibus caritas- in all things love!! Even when we disagree with our Christian brothers and sisters we should still love and respect one another. There is not place for brothers and sisters in Christ to not treat each other with anything less than love in any circumstance.
That said, I wanted to list a few items that I feel through study in the Word that all Christians should believe:
Then there are certain things were Scripture is not totally clear. In those non essential areas Christians can differ in practice and yet not risk eternal salvation (IE. Women in ministry, the rapture, free will vs predestination). These are areas where the scripture is not 100% clear, and therefore we can differ in practice and still be saved. These are not areas of practice that degrade the sufficiency of Jesus' atonement or would prevent a believer from entering heaven.
But as the quote above states, In omnibus caritas- in all things love!! Even when we disagree with our Christian brothers and sisters we should still love and respect one another. There is not place for brothers and sisters in Christ to not treat each other with anything less than love in any circumstance.
That said, I wanted to list a few items that I feel through study in the Word that all Christians should believe:
- The Word of God is verbally inspired: Paul, an apostle of Christ, wrote: “Every scripture is inspired of God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). The Bible asserts its own inspiration—of this there is no doubt.
- The Bible is equal in authority through from Genesis to Revelation: All books of the Bible, including the Old Testament, are the word of God. Who can say that one part of God's word is not as important as another? Certainly some are better written than others; some are easier to understand than others. But all are equally true. Revelation 22:18-19 says- 18 I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. 19 And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.
- The Word of God is infallible: Here I say WWJD!! Jesus never belittled Scripture (as some modern critics do), or set it aside (as the Jewish leaders of His day had done with their Oral Traditions), or criticized it (although He criticized those who misused it), or contradicted it (although He rejected many interpretations of it), or opposed it (although He sometimes was free or interpretive with it), nor spoke in any way as “higher” critics do of the Old Testament (Tanakh).
- Jesus knew the scriptures thoroughly and used them- John 7:15
- He believed the scriptures and claimed he was the fulfillment- Luke 4
- Multiple instances where he quoted the Old Testament as historical fact: Creation, Noah, Abraham, etc.
- The Word of God progressively reveals the person and plan of God- The Bible is a grand story. The entirety of Scripture, from the fall of man to the redemption of man is the drama of God working out the promise of Genesis 3:15. It is consummated in Jesus Christ said "It is Finished" in John 19.
- All scripture must me interpreted literally- This must take into account the types of literature in the Bible. Poetry is poetry, apocolyptic literature is rich in imagery. But the Bible is to be understood literally. There are several reasons to interpret the Bible literally, not the least of which is that the Lord Jesus Christ took it literally. Whenever the Lord Jesus quoted from the Old Testament, it was always clear that He believed in its literal interpretation. As an example, when Jesus was tempted by Satan in Luke 4, He answered by quoting the Old Testament. If God’s commands in Deuteronomy 8:3, 6:13, and 6:16 were not literal, Jesus would not have used them and they would have been powerless to stop Satan’s mouth, which they certainly did.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Leadership and the Bible
Here we are on the eve of a major election in the United States. My advice: pray, search your heart, and vote for what you believe is right. Here are some Bible verses regarding leadership. In all things keep your faith and know that the Lord is in control. Stay close to Jesus in all things!!
- “Do to others as you would like them to do to you.” Luke 6:31
- Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Philippians 2:3
- Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. Proverbs 4:23
- But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain —and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.Exodus 18:21
- With upright heart he shepherded them and guided them with his skillful hand. Psalm 78:72
- But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant. Matthew 20:26
- Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Philippians 2:4
- Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. Matthew 5:37
- Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1 Peter 5:7
- He must become greater; I must become less. John 3:30
- So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. Galatians 6:9
- For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength. Philippians 4:13
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Following Jesus Does Not Make Everything Easy
Following Jesus is the single most important thing anyone can do. It is our assurance of eternal life. Our faith and belief in Jesus Christ is the way to our eternal treasure and reward. But, following Jesus does not automatically make "this life" easy. Following Jesus has a cost, it's hard, it's tough. Consider some of the things that Jesus said (italics for emphasis):
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. - Matthew 16:24
20 Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
21 “What is it you want?” he asked.
She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”
22 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
23 Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
24 When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. 25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”- Matthew 20:20-28
18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’[b] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. 21 They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. 24 If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. 25 But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: ‘They hated me without reason.’[c]- John 15:18-24
I set this up as I look and consider the lives of the Apostles. The Apostles loved Jesus with all their being and and faithfully spread the Good News of Jesus Christ (except Judas of course). And, of the Apostles (including Matthias and Paul), they all died as martyrs with the exceptions of John. Consider some of these facts about the Apostles after Jesus death:
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4: 4-9
Yes, this life is hard and following Jesus is tough. But the eternal reward and the treasure that was will inherit above is beyond imagination. Stay close to Jesus, focus on Him, and consider it all joy.
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. - Romans 8:18
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. - Matthew 16:24
20 Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
21 “What is it you want?” he asked.
She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”
22 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
23 Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
24 When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. 25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”- Matthew 20:20-28
18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’[b] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. 21 They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. 24 If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. 25 But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: ‘They hated me without reason.’[c]- John 15:18-24
I set this up as I look and consider the lives of the Apostles. The Apostles loved Jesus with all their being and and faithfully spread the Good News of Jesus Christ (except Judas of course). And, of the Apostles (including Matthias and Paul), they all died as martyrs with the exceptions of John. Consider some of these facts about the Apostles after Jesus death:
- Peter- led the church in Jerusalem. Died by Crucifixion. Requested to be crucified upside down as he did not feel worthy to die as Jesus did.
- Andrew- went on to preach in Greece and the Ukraine. Died by crucifixion.
- James the Greater (brother of John)- Went on to preach in Spain. He was beheaded in Jerusalem.
- John- died in exile and wrote many letters and books of the New testament.
- James the Lesser- The son of Alpheaus. Martyred by the Romans.
- Thaddeus- also known as Jude. Went on to preach in Persia. Martyred.
- Simon the Zealot- Also went on the preach in Persia and was martyred.
- Philip- was martyred in Hierapolis.
- Bartholomew- some think he may have also been Nathaniel. Went on to preach in Turkey, India and Armenia. Martyred.
- Thomas- Is said to have brought Christianity to India. Martyred.
- Matthew- known as Levi. Shocked the Jewish community when he left being a tax collector to follow Jesus. Writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Martyred.
- Matthias- replaced Judas. It is said that he went on to preach to the "land of cannibals". Martyred.
- Paul- Brought the Gospel to the Gentiles. Writer of most of the New Testament. Beheaded in Rome.
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4: 4-9
Yes, this life is hard and following Jesus is tough. But the eternal reward and the treasure that was will inherit above is beyond imagination. Stay close to Jesus, focus on Him, and consider it all joy.
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. - Romans 8:18
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Some thoughts on the role of the Pastor and the Flock
I PETER 5: 1 – 4
JESUS CHRIST pledged Himself to build His church, and everything the Lord does is planned out and has a defined order to it. Therefore, the way He organized His church is no different. The text lists three primary group exhortations. This shows the church to have been well organized. Consider these traits of the pastor and the traits of the people in a church functioning as intended and planned.
“The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed: Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by constraint but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock; and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away” (I Peter 5: 1 – 4).
THE PASTOR’S CHARGE
There are three words in the Greek text used here to refer to the office of pastor:
PRESBUTEROS – “Elder”
EPISKOPOS – “overseer” or “bishop”
POIMAINO – “Shepherd”
The last of these terms is the one used by the resurrected Christ when He said to Peter “Tend (poimaino) [Shepherd] My sheep” (John 21:16).
It is interesting to note Peter refers to himself as a “fellow elder.” If he had been the head of the church, the first Pope, this would not have been the title chosen. In verse one he makes even more emphatic his togetherness by using the word “partaker.”
The first two titles noted refer to the same person as the third. Two internal, Bible evidences indicate the first two to be the same as the third:
In Philippians 1:1 Paul greeted the Bishops and deacons. If the elders were a separate body, surely he would have greeted them also.
In Acts 20:28 Paul sent for the elders (PRESBUETROS) and told them God had made them overseers (EPISKOPOS).
In I Peter 5: 1 and 2 Peter greets the elders (PRESBUETROS) and tells them to “feed,” that is, “shepherd the flock.” The verb “to shepherd” is a translation of the same Greek root from which we get our English word “pastor.” This word was doubtless in Peter’s mind from the post-resurrection seaside charge Christ gave him after three times asking him if he loved Him.
The modern pastor is to be the same as the shepherd-elder of the early church.
JESUS CHRIST pledged Himself to build His church, and everything the Lord does is planned out and has a defined order to it. Therefore, the way He organized His church is no different. The text lists three primary group exhortations. This shows the church to have been well organized. Consider these traits of the pastor and the traits of the people in a church functioning as intended and planned.
“The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed: Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by constraint but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock; and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away” (I Peter 5: 1 – 4).
THE PASTOR’S CHARGE
There are three words in the Greek text used here to refer to the office of pastor:
PRESBUTEROS – “Elder”
EPISKOPOS – “overseer” or “bishop”
POIMAINO – “Shepherd”
The last of these terms is the one used by the resurrected Christ when He said to Peter “Tend (poimaino) [Shepherd] My sheep” (John 21:16).
It is interesting to note Peter refers to himself as a “fellow elder.” If he had been the head of the church, the first Pope, this would not have been the title chosen. In verse one he makes even more emphatic his togetherness by using the word “partaker.”
The first two titles noted refer to the same person as the third. Two internal, Bible evidences indicate the first two to be the same as the third:
In Philippians 1:1 Paul greeted the Bishops and deacons. If the elders were a separate body, surely he would have greeted them also.
In Acts 20:28 Paul sent for the elders (PRESBUETROS) and told them God had made them overseers (EPISKOPOS).
In I Peter 5: 1 and 2 Peter greets the elders (PRESBUETROS) and tells them to “feed,” that is, “shepherd the flock.” The verb “to shepherd” is a translation of the same Greek root from which we get our English word “pastor.” This word was doubtless in Peter’s mind from the post-resurrection seaside charge Christ gave him after three times asking him if he loved Him.
The modern pastor is to be the same as the shepherd-elder of the early church.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Karl Barth 1962 Time Magazine Interview
If you know me, then you know I am a HUGE Karl Barth fan. I just came across this 1962 Time magazine article in which Karl Barth was interviewed. Like I said, I am a big fan of Barth and I really enjoyed this article. Hope you do too!!
Friday, Apr. 20, 1962
Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth
On a hill outside Jerusalem, a carpenter from Nazareth, condemned by the Roman Procurator of Judea and the high priest of the Jews, died upon a cross. Four historians of the time soberly reported that he was buried, and that on the third day the carpenter, Jesus, rose from the dead. Since that first Easter, his followers have defied all reason to proclaim that the Jew of Nazareth was the Son of God, who, by dying for man's sin, reconciled the world to its Creator and returned to life in his glory. Christianity has always been content to stand or fall by this paradox, this mystery, this unfathomable truth. "If Christ has not been raised," wrote St. Paul to the young church of Corinth, "then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins."
In the 20th century, no man has been a stronger witness to the continuing significance of Christ's death and Christ's return than the world's ranking Protestant theologian, Swiss-born Karl Barth (rhymes with heart). Barth knows that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are not coherent, but he refuses to make the mystery more palatable to human reason by suggesting—as did the great 19th century Theologian D. F. Strauss in his Life of Jesus—that the story of the crucifixion is a "myth." Instead, Barth argues that the subject of this unique event is God, not man; and only God can know the full truth of his own history. Man's only road to understanding of this divine history is through faith—faith in the reality and truth of what the Evangelists so incoherently describe.
"Do you want to believe in the living Christ?" says Barth. "We may believe in him only if we believe in his corporeal resurrection. This is the content of the New Testament. We are always free to reject it, but not to modify it, nor to pretend that the New Testament tells something else. We may accept or refuse the message, but we may not change it."
Love & Scorn. Last week, at the age of 75, the author of this challenge to modern skepticism was enjoying his first visit to the U.S.—a country whose history he loves and whose way of life he professes to scorn. Arriving in Chicago, Barth quickly found time to check theatrical versions of that life, saw performances of two plays by Edward Albee, and the current review of the iconoclastic troupe that performs in a coffeehouse-nightclub called The Second City. Among Protestant theologians, Barth's arrival has caused as much stir as would a visit by the Pope to a Jesuit convention. At the University of Chicago, Barth will receive an honorary doctorate of divinity, deliver five lectures on evangelical theology. Busloads of theologians and ministers are coming from as far as New Mexico and California in hopes of hearing him. A week later Barth will repeat the lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. Oddly enough, Barth is as interested in seeing battlefields as debating with his fellow theologians. An amateur expert on the Civil War, he has insisted that his travels include a stop at Gettysburg.
Barth has been variously damned as a heretic, a narrow-minded Biblicist, and an atheist in disguise—and praised as the most creative Protestant theologian since John Calvin. President James McCord of Princeton Theological says that "he bestrides the theological world like a colossus." Harvard's German-born Paul Tillich, the contemporary religious thinker whose stature most nearly rivals Barth's, has often disagreed with Barth —: "shouting at each other over a glass of wine" —but calls him, "the most monumental appearance in our period." Roman Catholic theologians, notably in Europe, have praised his thinking in terms they usually reserve for St. Thomas Aquinas. Once, upon hearing that Pius XII had paid tribute to his work, Barth smiled and said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope." More seriously, he insists that the best critical work on his works—over 500 titles so far —has been done by such Catholic thinkers as French Jesuit Henri Bouillard and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar of Basel.
By contrast, Reinhold Niebuhr regards Barth as a "man of infinite imagination and irresponsibility" writing "irrelevant theology to America. I don't read Barth any more," he says. And Dr. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary speaks for a host of U.S. fundamentalists in charging that "Barthianism is even more hostile to the theology of Luther and Calvin than Romanism."
The Yardstick. Barth is a theologian's theologian, whose work in "that beautiful science" by which man seeks to know God is the yardstick that measures what other men do. His treatment of Christian dogma has soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church. Preachers read him, and his thought probably affects a good share of the sermons spoken in U.S. churches any given Sunday, but laymen hardly know his name. He has far fewer disciples in the U.S. than either Niebuhr or Tillich; and even in Germany, young theologians find more impact in the Christian existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann (TIME, April 14, 1961). All this is fine with Barth himself, who dis owns the idea of a school — "except for my two sons" — meaning Markus, 46, a New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, and Christoph, 44, who teach es Old Testament in Djakarta.
In a way, this lack of a following is a tribute to the originality and individuality of Barth's accomplishments. His kind of God-thinking has been commonly called "neo-orthodoxy" and "theology of crisis" — labels that Barth rejects, since they scarcely define it at all. Essentially, Barth is a Christological theologian, whose uniquely modern thought centers around ancient realities: faith, the Bible, the church. He has a philosopher's knowledge of philosophy, but unlike such contemporaries as Tillich or Bultmann, Barth is wary of restating the dogmas of the church in nontraditional language. His thought is complex, but he nonetheless writes of doctrine in prose that is not far removed from that of the pulpit. Above all he writes of the mysterious history of Christ. Knowledge of God is knowledge of God through Christ. Faith is faith in Christ; the church is the Church of Christ; the Bible is the witness of Christ. Theologian Hans Frei of Yale calls him "a Christ-intoxicated man."
Dogmatist Greets Dog. In person, Barth looks like a Hollywood type-cast of a German professor, right down to his scholar's stoop and his thick, dark-rimmed glasses planted far down on his nose. His conservative suits are usually rumpled and flecked with tobacco from the pipe that seldom is out of his mouth. Barth is a Calvinist, but not a gloomy one; at home he speaks kindly to large dogs and small children (in guttural Swiss-German), displays a mellow, Dutch-uncle patience with puzzled students. In conversation Barth is full of wisecracks—some pleasantly pixy, some theologian-arch. Once, asked by a stranger on the trolley car if he knew the great Karl Barth, he replied: "Know him? I shave him every morning!"
It was no surprise that Barth came to spend his life in the service of God's Word; theology was as much a part of his family background as history was to the Schlesingers of Harvard. In Switzerland, there have been Pastor Barths since the early 19th century. One of them was Karl's father, Fritz Barth, an earnest, rigorous New Testament scholar who gave up the pastorate to teach Scripture at a seminary at Basel, where Karl, the eldest of five children, was born.
Karl began his theological studies at the University of Bern, but soon found the orthodox Calvinism taught there too old-fashioned for his own taste. He persuaded his father to send him to the University of Berlin, where he could study under the best known of Protestant church historians, Adolf von Harnack. For an embryonic scholar of 20, it was a heady, exhilarating experience. "I was so enthusiastic about him," Barth remembers, "that I missed going to concerts and museums. In the midst of Berlin, I saw little of the city, doing only my work."
Liberal Wind. Von Harnack was Barth's cicerone to theological liberalism, the intellectual wind prevailing in German religious thought after the turn of the century. By then, Protestantism had come a long, hard way from Luther and Calvin. During the 17th and 18th centuries, at the hands of their followers, the creative insights of the great reformers had been hardened into rigid dogmatisms—such as a literal acceptance of Biblical miracles—that were left shattered by the rational attacks of the Enlightenment and the discoveries of natural sciences. By 1850, Protestant thinkers had begun to construct a new and liberal religious synthesis that attempted to reconcile Christianity with man's empirical knowledge.
Instead of starting with a defense of dogma, liberal theology stressed the need for man to respond emotionally to the Jesus of history. Liberalism believed that religion was an expression of man's noblest impulses and that man himself had the freedom to shape his life and his world in accordance with the divine will. Faith in God was made to seem perfectly compatible with an industrial civilization's faith in science, progress and democracy; church and state would work hand in hand for man's final victory over nature, and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Liberalism also accepted scientific study of the Bible, even when it tended to challenge orthodox views of the divinity of Christ. Von Harnack's own major contribution to this "higher criticism" was a historical examination of church dogmas; his aim was to cut through the formulas of faith created by churchmen, reach back to the simple message of love that Jesus had actually taught. The New Testament in liberal hands became not so much a record of God's unique intervention in human history as an "inspiration" to Christians on how to live a good life.
Parish Parson. Barth spent a year grappling with Von Harnack's historicism. absorbed more liberal theology at the universities of Tubingen and Marburg before being ordained in 1908 by his father at the Reformed cathedral of Bern. He served his ecclesiastical apprenticeship as an assistant pastor in a French-speaking parish near Geneva. Then, in 1911, he was called to the Reformed Church of Safenwil, a small mill town in northern Switzerland, where he married a sprightly young violinist named Nelly Hoffman.
Faced with the problem of how to give meaningful sermons. Barth as a minister discovered that the liberal theology of the universities held out no real message to people. He also found that expression of Christian belief, in the minds of his rich parishioners, was perfectly compatible with economic exploitation. Shocked by the low wages paid to Safenwil's textile workers, Barth became an active socialist, earned the nickname of "the Red pastor" for his role in organizing unions, and for such deadpan japes as passing out free frankfurters to rich and poor alike one Christmas morning at church.
An even more severe test of Barth's theological assumptions was World War I, which ended man's cocky dream of inevitable progress toward a reign of universal peace. Barth, who disapproved of Switzerland's vacillating neutralist politics, was shocked when the church in Germany approved the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II; not one of his theological teachers protested. Barth's contempt for this display of their social thinking led him to a reappraisal of their theology. In company with another disillusioned liberal pastor, Eduard Thurneysen, Barth went back over all his past theological and philosophical reading, finally returning to the Bible—a book, he discovered, which contained "divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God." He found some of the text of those divine thoughts in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, began work on a commentary that would bring that letter alive to modern man.
Bomb on the Playground. Published in 1918 and rewritten completely for the second edition in 1921. Barth's Epistle to the Romans, as Karl Adam, a Roman Catholic put it, "felt like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians." Barth attacked the liberal assumption that the Bible expressed man's religious experience of God; instead, he said, it contains God's Word to man. This God—the real God of revelation—is a being "wholly other" than man, a God who shouts a divine No to all of man's efforts to reach him through inner emotion or reason.
There is, as the great Dane Sören Kierkegaard wrote, "an infinite qualitative difference" between time and eternity, between man and God. The only bridge to God is the one that God provides—the bridge of faith that can come to man only after he has recognized the futility of his own efforts to meet his Creator.
Barth granted the service that liberal theology performed in emphasizing the genuine humanity of Jesus, but charged that in the process it had all but forgotten Christ's divinity. So, too, in speaking of the dignity and natural goodness of man, it had all but eliminated from Christianity the sense of sin. He also challenged the liberal suggestion that there was a natural alliance between God and the men who were building Western civilization—not because Earth opposed culture, but because man had no right to "domesticate" God in the name of progress.
Awakening the Town. In his Epistle, Barth wrote a declaration of independence on behalf of the God who stands in judgment over all human culture; the message made an immediate hit. Barth later compared his experience to that of a man who climbs the church tower at night and grabs a rope for support, only to discover that he has struck the church bell and awakened the whole town. "I did not know," he says "that it was so great a bell." On the strength of the book's success, Barth accepted a chair in Reformed theology at the University of Gottingen in 1921. There, besides teaching, he helped to edit a new magazine that continued his onslaught on liberalism; among the contributors were such rising young theologians as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann.
As a teacher, Barth found that theology needed reconstruction as well as criticism, and during professorships at the universities of Münister and Bonn he began to study the writings of the church fathers and the Reformation confessions. Totally absorbed in the Word of God, Barth had little time for the word of man. Politics, he wrote then, was "essentially a game," and "fundamentally uninteresting."
Politics suddenly became interesting for Earth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new "German Christian" churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma. "This was a nationalist heresy,"he says, "confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation." He launched a new magazine to attack the "heresy" and in 1934 wrote nearly all of the Barmen Declaration—an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed by 200 leaders of Germany's Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Unionist churches.
"Seducing Minds." As a professor at the University of Bonn, Barth was technically a civil servant. But he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Führer or open his classes with the Nazi salute. It would be bad taste, he told them, "to begin a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with Heil Hitler." At the end of 1934, Barth was brought before a Nazi court, found guilty of "seducing the minds" of German students. For his defense. Earth pulled a copy of Plato's Apology from his pocket, read Socrates' argument to the court of Athens that he should be given a pension for his services to the city's youth rather than be condemned to death. Something like that, Barth suggested, ought to be done for him. "It seemed like a good idea before going into court," he says sadly, "but it made no impression on the judges."
In 1935 the German Minister of Education decreed that there was no place in the new Germany for Barth. He accepted a professorship of theology at the Uni versity of Basel. Later he tried once more to speak in Germany and was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. After the out break of World War II, Barth issued a flurry of powerful, evangelical epistles opposing Naziism. "The enterprise of Adolf Hitler," he wrote, "with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ."
In World War II Barth volunteered at the age of 54 for the Swiss army, spent much of the duration guarding a bridge on the German frontier. Barth cheerfully ad mits that, despite his lifelong hobby of military strategy, he showed no aptitude for leadership. Placed in command of a squad patrolling a mountain pass one cold winter night, he distributed his troops, soon found that they had all deserted to a hut for the warmth of a fire and hot coffee. "That," he says, "was the crash of my ambition to be a corporal."
Summa of the Century. After the war, Barth lectured on theology among the bombed-out ruins of his old university in Bonn for a semester, then returned to Basel to carry on with the intellectual job that has preoccupied him since 1932: the writing of Church Dogmatics. Now 9,000 pages and twelve fat volumes long, Dogmatics is Earth's major effort to ex plain what it is that God has revealed. Dogmatics, in Barth's definition, is the critical examination of the Christian mes sage in light of what the Scriptures say. Barth's own examination of this message is garrulous, eye-wearying, and studded with trackless deserts of scholarly foot notes. "Barth is just about the most gabby person that ever hit Christendom," grumbles Robert Hannen of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. But Dogmatics is also wreathed with a knowledge of 1,900 years of Christian writing, and stands as the century's only equivalent to the summa of the medieval scholastics.
The dogmatic Barth, in many respects, is "wholly other" than the angry evangelist who wrote the Epistle to the Romans after World War I. In that early work, Barth says, "I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings." In place of the divine No uttered by God, Barth in Dogmatics writes about the divine Yes spoken to those who accept God's revelation in faith.
What Theology Is. The foundation of Dogmatics is the faith held by the Christian churches: faith in the God who revealed himself through the Scriptures in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith, Barth says, is not an idea about God; it is man's humble, total acceptance of God brought on by God— "the consequences in man of the action of God himself." He flatly rejects all "natural theology," meaning man's systematic efforts to know God through the use of reason alone by speculating on natural mysteries—the "God is in the stars" theory. Barth insists that natural theology can only understand God as a First Cause or a Great Designer or some similar abstract idea that in reality is a product of man's own thinking processes. But God is not an idea dreamed of by man. He is the Supreme Being, who is only known through a specific revelation of himself. Therefore Barth does not try to "prove" the existence of God in his Dogmatics; he starts with the reality of the God of revelation.
To Barth, theology cannot be free speculation ; it is correct only when it is obedient to what God says. Hence there can be no theology apart from prayer, and no theology apart from God's revelation. The revelation of God is a continuous act: God still speaks to man through the words preached by his church to those who accept Christ. Since this revelation continues within the body of those who witness to God, there can be no theology apart from the church and what it believes. Barth, of course, is appalled at the divisions of Christendom; yet he thinks that most of those differences are the result not of heresies but of "particular errors"in doctrine. Barth's dogmatic theology, which freely ranges across denominational lines despite its basic Calvinist orientation, seeks to correct those errors by analyzing doctrinal interpretations in the light of what the Bible says.
The Divine Address. Barth accepts and welcomes scholarly criticism of the Bible, even when it shows the Scriptures to be full of errors and inconsistencies. He does not consider the Bible infallible, and he deplores orthodox Protestants who make it into "a paper Pope." Nevertheless, the Bible testifies to God's Word, which is revealed to man through human speech. The words that the Biblical writers use may not always be the appropriate ones, but they must be accepted as words elected by God. There can be, in Barth's view, no question of "disproving" the authority of the Scriptures, for the church today must take the "risk" of accepting the witness of the early Christians who established the canon of the Scriptures, and the Reformation fathers who revised it. God still speaks within the Bible; in the light of faith, the church and her theologians must listen and undertake the ever-unfinished task of finding out what He is saying.
The decisive center of the Bible is its witness of Jesus Christ—the Son who became man, and by the humiliation of his death reconciled the sinful created world to the father. For Barth the Word of God came to man in the person of Christ, and Dogmatics is a Christocentric exploration of that word. Since Christ is man's only contact with God, Barth hammers every article of Christian faith into a firm relationship to Christ himself. He defines creation, for example, as the establishment of a place where grace would operate, and argues that God's creation of the universe cannot be considered apart from Christ's redemption of it.
A Joyful Message. This emphasis upon the awesome mystery of the Redemption makes Dogmatics, for all its forbidding size, a joyful and optimistic work. By Christ's reconciling act. Barth says, the Kingdom of God has already been established, although it is held out to man as a promise rather than a visible reality. Man, in Luther's phrase, is simultinstus accpeccator (simultaneously righteous and sinful). He is still besieged by evil and capable of sin himself, but he also knows that Christ has already conquered the forces of darkness, and that in St. Paul's words "death hath no more dominion over him." Says Yale's Theologian Frei: "What emerges from Barth's theology is a breathtaking, daring vision of a universe in which tragedy, demonic evil and chaos have been met and defeated in the figure of Jesus Christ."
Barth feels free to reject the writings of the church fathers where he feels they may have mistaken the meaning of God's Word; even his admitted master, John Calvin, is not exempt. Once, when someone questioned the unorthodox way in which he was commenting on Calvin, Barth retorted: "Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright."
One orthodox dogma that Barth has tried to set aright—much to the dismay of other theologians in the Reformed Church —is the best-known and gloomiest of Calvinist tenets: predestination. In his Institutes, Calvin argued that God has already determined both those who will be saved at the Last Judgment and those who will suffer the eternal pangs of Hell. Barth says that this belief does not pay sufficient heed to the fact that Christ's death was intended for all men: Man's ultimate fate is shrouded in mystery, but Barth believes that Christ, the loving Judge, could indeed reconcile all the world to the Father. "I do not preach universal salvation," Barth insists. "What I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment."
Plenty of Critics. Earth's Dogmatics, says Langdon Gilkey of Vanderbilt University's divinity school, "is the most impressive and most complete statement of the Christian faith in this century." Other theologians complain that if anyone tried to read all that Barth says about the Word of God he would have no time to read the Word of God itself. Barth's interpretation of that Word has plenty of critics. Both Niebuhr and Tillich think that he is too critical of the cultural disciplines, such as philosophy and anthropology, which attempt to give man an insight into life's meaning. Princeton's best-known systematic theologian, Presbyterian George Stuart Hendry, says Barth's Christocentric approach forces many church doctrines into an artificial mold. Wilhelm Pauck of Union Theological Seminary thinks Barth pays insufficient attention to the history of how Christian dogma developed.
Quiet on Communism. A different category of criticism of Barth attacks his enigmatic political views. During World War II, Barth urged the church to stand up and be counted in the "holy war" against Hitler; in the cold war against Communism, he has urged ministers behind the Iron Curtain to live peacefully with Red regimes. In 1956 Barth was perhaps the only important Western theologian who refused to condemn publicly the Communist repression in Hungary.
Barth thinks that Marx sincerely tried to correct injustice in industrial society, but he has no desire to live under a totalitarian government. He argues that Naziism attempted to defeat the church by perverting its doctrines with cultural heresies, whereas Communism is an atheistic political system based upon philosophical ideas that must be countered with other ideas. And God, Barth insists, is not an idea, "not a banner for human ideas and intentions. For many people Christianity is a kind of moral, religious and political idea, against what they call an atheistic idea." To Barth, the capitalist West is as materialistic as the Communist East—and represents a serious temptation to the church, since it tries to cloak its political ambitions in religious and moral terms.
He has asked the West to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally; such a gesture would help the West regain the "confidence" of the Soviet Union, and start it on the road toward a peaceful democratic regime. The vast majority of U.S. theologians regard such views as politically naive at best and irresponsible at worst. Says an old friend and theological colleague, Emil Brunner of Zurich: "If President Kennedy were to adopt Barth's pacifist doctrines, the United States would soon be swallowed by the Soviet Union. A Communist regime would make short shrift of men like Barth."
In other days. Barth would undoubtedly have hit back at such criticism with a barrage of satire, scorn and scriptural learning. "I was hard then," he says. "Now that I am older, I am softer." This older, mellower Barth seems eager only to get on with the fourth section of Volume IV of Dogmatics. At his stucco house on Basel's Bruderholzallee, day begins around 8, when Barth's wife, or his longtime secretary. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, tiptoes to the phonograph and puts on a record. The music that serves as his alarm clock is always by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work Barth describes as a "constant of my existence." "When the angels praise God in Heaven," Barth once wrote, "I am sure they play Bach. However, en famille they play Mozart, and then God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them."
He usually retires early, lying awake to read military history or detective stories, from which he first learned English at the age of 40. Says he: "My friends claim that I have a criminal vocabulary." Barth has little taste for modern novels, poetry or art. "What I object to," he says, "is the disappearance of the object. In art, as in theology, it is the object that counts, not the subject."
For many years, Barth's only preaching has consisted of occasional sermons to the prisoners in the Basel jail. He takes great pride in this spiritual work, writing out the prayers for the service and choosing hymns for the prisoners. "When I come before these men," he says, "I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner."
"God Is for You." Does Barthian theology have anything to tell a world in which persistent doubt seems to be man's real condition? Because of its roots in an unchallengeable faith and its reliance upon the truth of a book that many men now regard as a volume of interesting poetry rather than a divine revelation, his theology has been described—by Reinhold Niebuhr—as "designed for the church of the catacombs." Barth himself believes his work contains "a missionary call." It provides no easy, immediate, specific answers to man's daily worries—but summons him to learn that all questions are ultimately theological, and that the ultimate theological answer has been given. Translated into elementary pulpit talk, Karl Barth's rich and complex theology might appear to resemble the exhortations issued by many contemporary preachers; actually his thought is far more subtly attuned to the psychology of modern man. "To the man in the street," sums up Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, "Barth's message is 'God is for you.' You're not trapped in overwhelming guilt and anxiety. In these terribly perplexing modern times, there is hope in the Gospel, for God has involved himself in the human situation through Jesus Christ."
Majesty & Love. But Barth's greatest service has been to those who are most likely to listen to him: the committed believers. His Dogmatics is the most exhaustive compendium of what a Christian must believe, and why he believes it, that Protestantism has had in more than a century. Barth's insistence on the supreme majesty of God and His supreme love in Christ has forced Christian thought to reconsider its basic focus. His demand that theology is necessarily church theology has caused Protestantism to take a new look at the confessions it stands by, and has thereby contributed mightily to today's worldwide ecumenical dialogue. Barth has always insisted that dogma is important, that theology is not philosophy, that Christianity is not the spiritual side of politics. The mysteries of God's Word are hard ones—but they cannot be made more palatable to nonbelievers or to the lukewarm faithful by hiding them in the language formed by man's own wishful thinking. God speaks; man must listen. And Barth summons Goethe to warn the church:
Long, long ago the Truth was found, A company of men it bound. Grasp firmly then—that ancient Truth!
Friday, Apr. 20, 1962
Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth
On a hill outside Jerusalem, a carpenter from Nazareth, condemned by the Roman Procurator of Judea and the high priest of the Jews, died upon a cross. Four historians of the time soberly reported that he was buried, and that on the third day the carpenter, Jesus, rose from the dead. Since that first Easter, his followers have defied all reason to proclaim that the Jew of Nazareth was the Son of God, who, by dying for man's sin, reconciled the world to its Creator and returned to life in his glory. Christianity has always been content to stand or fall by this paradox, this mystery, this unfathomable truth. "If Christ has not been raised," wrote St. Paul to the young church of Corinth, "then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins."
In the 20th century, no man has been a stronger witness to the continuing significance of Christ's death and Christ's return than the world's ranking Protestant theologian, Swiss-born Karl Barth (rhymes with heart). Barth knows that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are not coherent, but he refuses to make the mystery more palatable to human reason by suggesting—as did the great 19th century Theologian D. F. Strauss in his Life of Jesus—that the story of the crucifixion is a "myth." Instead, Barth argues that the subject of this unique event is God, not man; and only God can know the full truth of his own history. Man's only road to understanding of this divine history is through faith—faith in the reality and truth of what the Evangelists so incoherently describe.
"Do you want to believe in the living Christ?" says Barth. "We may believe in him only if we believe in his corporeal resurrection. This is the content of the New Testament. We are always free to reject it, but not to modify it, nor to pretend that the New Testament tells something else. We may accept or refuse the message, but we may not change it."
Love & Scorn. Last week, at the age of 75, the author of this challenge to modern skepticism was enjoying his first visit to the U.S.—a country whose history he loves and whose way of life he professes to scorn. Arriving in Chicago, Barth quickly found time to check theatrical versions of that life, saw performances of two plays by Edward Albee, and the current review of the iconoclastic troupe that performs in a coffeehouse-nightclub called The Second City. Among Protestant theologians, Barth's arrival has caused as much stir as would a visit by the Pope to a Jesuit convention. At the University of Chicago, Barth will receive an honorary doctorate of divinity, deliver five lectures on evangelical theology. Busloads of theologians and ministers are coming from as far as New Mexico and California in hopes of hearing him. A week later Barth will repeat the lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. Oddly enough, Barth is as interested in seeing battlefields as debating with his fellow theologians. An amateur expert on the Civil War, he has insisted that his travels include a stop at Gettysburg.
Barth has been variously damned as a heretic, a narrow-minded Biblicist, and an atheist in disguise—and praised as the most creative Protestant theologian since John Calvin. President James McCord of Princeton Theological says that "he bestrides the theological world like a colossus." Harvard's German-born Paul Tillich, the contemporary religious thinker whose stature most nearly rivals Barth's, has often disagreed with Barth —: "shouting at each other over a glass of wine" —but calls him, "the most monumental appearance in our period." Roman Catholic theologians, notably in Europe, have praised his thinking in terms they usually reserve for St. Thomas Aquinas. Once, upon hearing that Pius XII had paid tribute to his work, Barth smiled and said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope." More seriously, he insists that the best critical work on his works—over 500 titles so far —has been done by such Catholic thinkers as French Jesuit Henri Bouillard and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar of Basel.
By contrast, Reinhold Niebuhr regards Barth as a "man of infinite imagination and irresponsibility" writing "irrelevant theology to America. I don't read Barth any more," he says. And Dr. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary speaks for a host of U.S. fundamentalists in charging that "Barthianism is even more hostile to the theology of Luther and Calvin than Romanism."
The Yardstick. Barth is a theologian's theologian, whose work in "that beautiful science" by which man seeks to know God is the yardstick that measures what other men do. His treatment of Christian dogma has soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church. Preachers read him, and his thought probably affects a good share of the sermons spoken in U.S. churches any given Sunday, but laymen hardly know his name. He has far fewer disciples in the U.S. than either Niebuhr or Tillich; and even in Germany, young theologians find more impact in the Christian existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann (TIME, April 14, 1961). All this is fine with Barth himself, who dis owns the idea of a school — "except for my two sons" — meaning Markus, 46, a New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, and Christoph, 44, who teach es Old Testament in Djakarta.
In a way, this lack of a following is a tribute to the originality and individuality of Barth's accomplishments. His kind of God-thinking has been commonly called "neo-orthodoxy" and "theology of crisis" — labels that Barth rejects, since they scarcely define it at all. Essentially, Barth is a Christological theologian, whose uniquely modern thought centers around ancient realities: faith, the Bible, the church. He has a philosopher's knowledge of philosophy, but unlike such contemporaries as Tillich or Bultmann, Barth is wary of restating the dogmas of the church in nontraditional language. His thought is complex, but he nonetheless writes of doctrine in prose that is not far removed from that of the pulpit. Above all he writes of the mysterious history of Christ. Knowledge of God is knowledge of God through Christ. Faith is faith in Christ; the church is the Church of Christ; the Bible is the witness of Christ. Theologian Hans Frei of Yale calls him "a Christ-intoxicated man."
Dogmatist Greets Dog. In person, Barth looks like a Hollywood type-cast of a German professor, right down to his scholar's stoop and his thick, dark-rimmed glasses planted far down on his nose. His conservative suits are usually rumpled and flecked with tobacco from the pipe that seldom is out of his mouth. Barth is a Calvinist, but not a gloomy one; at home he speaks kindly to large dogs and small children (in guttural Swiss-German), displays a mellow, Dutch-uncle patience with puzzled students. In conversation Barth is full of wisecracks—some pleasantly pixy, some theologian-arch. Once, asked by a stranger on the trolley car if he knew the great Karl Barth, he replied: "Know him? I shave him every morning!"
It was no surprise that Barth came to spend his life in the service of God's Word; theology was as much a part of his family background as history was to the Schlesingers of Harvard. In Switzerland, there have been Pastor Barths since the early 19th century. One of them was Karl's father, Fritz Barth, an earnest, rigorous New Testament scholar who gave up the pastorate to teach Scripture at a seminary at Basel, where Karl, the eldest of five children, was born.
Karl began his theological studies at the University of Bern, but soon found the orthodox Calvinism taught there too old-fashioned for his own taste. He persuaded his father to send him to the University of Berlin, where he could study under the best known of Protestant church historians, Adolf von Harnack. For an embryonic scholar of 20, it was a heady, exhilarating experience. "I was so enthusiastic about him," Barth remembers, "that I missed going to concerts and museums. In the midst of Berlin, I saw little of the city, doing only my work."
Liberal Wind. Von Harnack was Barth's cicerone to theological liberalism, the intellectual wind prevailing in German religious thought after the turn of the century. By then, Protestantism had come a long, hard way from Luther and Calvin. During the 17th and 18th centuries, at the hands of their followers, the creative insights of the great reformers had been hardened into rigid dogmatisms—such as a literal acceptance of Biblical miracles—that were left shattered by the rational attacks of the Enlightenment and the discoveries of natural sciences. By 1850, Protestant thinkers had begun to construct a new and liberal religious synthesis that attempted to reconcile Christianity with man's empirical knowledge.
Instead of starting with a defense of dogma, liberal theology stressed the need for man to respond emotionally to the Jesus of history. Liberalism believed that religion was an expression of man's noblest impulses and that man himself had the freedom to shape his life and his world in accordance with the divine will. Faith in God was made to seem perfectly compatible with an industrial civilization's faith in science, progress and democracy; church and state would work hand in hand for man's final victory over nature, and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Liberalism also accepted scientific study of the Bible, even when it tended to challenge orthodox views of the divinity of Christ. Von Harnack's own major contribution to this "higher criticism" was a historical examination of church dogmas; his aim was to cut through the formulas of faith created by churchmen, reach back to the simple message of love that Jesus had actually taught. The New Testament in liberal hands became not so much a record of God's unique intervention in human history as an "inspiration" to Christians on how to live a good life.
Parish Parson. Barth spent a year grappling with Von Harnack's historicism. absorbed more liberal theology at the universities of Tubingen and Marburg before being ordained in 1908 by his father at the Reformed cathedral of Bern. He served his ecclesiastical apprenticeship as an assistant pastor in a French-speaking parish near Geneva. Then, in 1911, he was called to the Reformed Church of Safenwil, a small mill town in northern Switzerland, where he married a sprightly young violinist named Nelly Hoffman.
Faced with the problem of how to give meaningful sermons. Barth as a minister discovered that the liberal theology of the universities held out no real message to people. He also found that expression of Christian belief, in the minds of his rich parishioners, was perfectly compatible with economic exploitation. Shocked by the low wages paid to Safenwil's textile workers, Barth became an active socialist, earned the nickname of "the Red pastor" for his role in organizing unions, and for such deadpan japes as passing out free frankfurters to rich and poor alike one Christmas morning at church.
An even more severe test of Barth's theological assumptions was World War I, which ended man's cocky dream of inevitable progress toward a reign of universal peace. Barth, who disapproved of Switzerland's vacillating neutralist politics, was shocked when the church in Germany approved the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II; not one of his theological teachers protested. Barth's contempt for this display of their social thinking led him to a reappraisal of their theology. In company with another disillusioned liberal pastor, Eduard Thurneysen, Barth went back over all his past theological and philosophical reading, finally returning to the Bible—a book, he discovered, which contained "divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God." He found some of the text of those divine thoughts in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, began work on a commentary that would bring that letter alive to modern man.
Bomb on the Playground. Published in 1918 and rewritten completely for the second edition in 1921. Barth's Epistle to the Romans, as Karl Adam, a Roman Catholic put it, "felt like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians." Barth attacked the liberal assumption that the Bible expressed man's religious experience of God; instead, he said, it contains God's Word to man. This God—the real God of revelation—is a being "wholly other" than man, a God who shouts a divine No to all of man's efforts to reach him through inner emotion or reason.
There is, as the great Dane Sören Kierkegaard wrote, "an infinite qualitative difference" between time and eternity, between man and God. The only bridge to God is the one that God provides—the bridge of faith that can come to man only after he has recognized the futility of his own efforts to meet his Creator.
Barth granted the service that liberal theology performed in emphasizing the genuine humanity of Jesus, but charged that in the process it had all but forgotten Christ's divinity. So, too, in speaking of the dignity and natural goodness of man, it had all but eliminated from Christianity the sense of sin. He also challenged the liberal suggestion that there was a natural alliance between God and the men who were building Western civilization—not because Earth opposed culture, but because man had no right to "domesticate" God in the name of progress.
Awakening the Town. In his Epistle, Barth wrote a declaration of independence on behalf of the God who stands in judgment over all human culture; the message made an immediate hit. Barth later compared his experience to that of a man who climbs the church tower at night and grabs a rope for support, only to discover that he has struck the church bell and awakened the whole town. "I did not know," he says "that it was so great a bell." On the strength of the book's success, Barth accepted a chair in Reformed theology at the University of Gottingen in 1921. There, besides teaching, he helped to edit a new magazine that continued his onslaught on liberalism; among the contributors were such rising young theologians as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann.
As a teacher, Barth found that theology needed reconstruction as well as criticism, and during professorships at the universities of Münister and Bonn he began to study the writings of the church fathers and the Reformation confessions. Totally absorbed in the Word of God, Barth had little time for the word of man. Politics, he wrote then, was "essentially a game," and "fundamentally uninteresting."
Politics suddenly became interesting for Earth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new "German Christian" churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma. "This was a nationalist heresy,"he says, "confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation." He launched a new magazine to attack the "heresy" and in 1934 wrote nearly all of the Barmen Declaration—an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed by 200 leaders of Germany's Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Unionist churches.
"Seducing Minds." As a professor at the University of Bonn, Barth was technically a civil servant. But he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Führer or open his classes with the Nazi salute. It would be bad taste, he told them, "to begin a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with Heil Hitler." At the end of 1934, Barth was brought before a Nazi court, found guilty of "seducing the minds" of German students. For his defense. Earth pulled a copy of Plato's Apology from his pocket, read Socrates' argument to the court of Athens that he should be given a pension for his services to the city's youth rather than be condemned to death. Something like that, Barth suggested, ought to be done for him. "It seemed like a good idea before going into court," he says sadly, "but it made no impression on the judges."
In 1935 the German Minister of Education decreed that there was no place in the new Germany for Barth. He accepted a professorship of theology at the Uni versity of Basel. Later he tried once more to speak in Germany and was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. After the out break of World War II, Barth issued a flurry of powerful, evangelical epistles opposing Naziism. "The enterprise of Adolf Hitler," he wrote, "with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ."
In World War II Barth volunteered at the age of 54 for the Swiss army, spent much of the duration guarding a bridge on the German frontier. Barth cheerfully ad mits that, despite his lifelong hobby of military strategy, he showed no aptitude for leadership. Placed in command of a squad patrolling a mountain pass one cold winter night, he distributed his troops, soon found that they had all deserted to a hut for the warmth of a fire and hot coffee. "That," he says, "was the crash of my ambition to be a corporal."
Summa of the Century. After the war, Barth lectured on theology among the bombed-out ruins of his old university in Bonn for a semester, then returned to Basel to carry on with the intellectual job that has preoccupied him since 1932: the writing of Church Dogmatics. Now 9,000 pages and twelve fat volumes long, Dogmatics is Earth's major effort to ex plain what it is that God has revealed. Dogmatics, in Barth's definition, is the critical examination of the Christian mes sage in light of what the Scriptures say. Barth's own examination of this message is garrulous, eye-wearying, and studded with trackless deserts of scholarly foot notes. "Barth is just about the most gabby person that ever hit Christendom," grumbles Robert Hannen of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. But Dogmatics is also wreathed with a knowledge of 1,900 years of Christian writing, and stands as the century's only equivalent to the summa of the medieval scholastics.
The dogmatic Barth, in many respects, is "wholly other" than the angry evangelist who wrote the Epistle to the Romans after World War I. In that early work, Barth says, "I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings." In place of the divine No uttered by God, Barth in Dogmatics writes about the divine Yes spoken to those who accept God's revelation in faith.
What Theology Is. The foundation of Dogmatics is the faith held by the Christian churches: faith in the God who revealed himself through the Scriptures in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith, Barth says, is not an idea about God; it is man's humble, total acceptance of God brought on by God— "the consequences in man of the action of God himself." He flatly rejects all "natural theology," meaning man's systematic efforts to know God through the use of reason alone by speculating on natural mysteries—the "God is in the stars" theory. Barth insists that natural theology can only understand God as a First Cause or a Great Designer or some similar abstract idea that in reality is a product of man's own thinking processes. But God is not an idea dreamed of by man. He is the Supreme Being, who is only known through a specific revelation of himself. Therefore Barth does not try to "prove" the existence of God in his Dogmatics; he starts with the reality of the God of revelation.
To Barth, theology cannot be free speculation ; it is correct only when it is obedient to what God says. Hence there can be no theology apart from prayer, and no theology apart from God's revelation. The revelation of God is a continuous act: God still speaks to man through the words preached by his church to those who accept Christ. Since this revelation continues within the body of those who witness to God, there can be no theology apart from the church and what it believes. Barth, of course, is appalled at the divisions of Christendom; yet he thinks that most of those differences are the result not of heresies but of "particular errors"in doctrine. Barth's dogmatic theology, which freely ranges across denominational lines despite its basic Calvinist orientation, seeks to correct those errors by analyzing doctrinal interpretations in the light of what the Bible says.
The Divine Address. Barth accepts and welcomes scholarly criticism of the Bible, even when it shows the Scriptures to be full of errors and inconsistencies. He does not consider the Bible infallible, and he deplores orthodox Protestants who make it into "a paper Pope." Nevertheless, the Bible testifies to God's Word, which is revealed to man through human speech. The words that the Biblical writers use may not always be the appropriate ones, but they must be accepted as words elected by God. There can be, in Barth's view, no question of "disproving" the authority of the Scriptures, for the church today must take the "risk" of accepting the witness of the early Christians who established the canon of the Scriptures, and the Reformation fathers who revised it. God still speaks within the Bible; in the light of faith, the church and her theologians must listen and undertake the ever-unfinished task of finding out what He is saying.
The decisive center of the Bible is its witness of Jesus Christ—the Son who became man, and by the humiliation of his death reconciled the sinful created world to the father. For Barth the Word of God came to man in the person of Christ, and Dogmatics is a Christocentric exploration of that word. Since Christ is man's only contact with God, Barth hammers every article of Christian faith into a firm relationship to Christ himself. He defines creation, for example, as the establishment of a place where grace would operate, and argues that God's creation of the universe cannot be considered apart from Christ's redemption of it.
A Joyful Message. This emphasis upon the awesome mystery of the Redemption makes Dogmatics, for all its forbidding size, a joyful and optimistic work. By Christ's reconciling act. Barth says, the Kingdom of God has already been established, although it is held out to man as a promise rather than a visible reality. Man, in Luther's phrase, is simultinstus accpeccator (simultaneously righteous and sinful). He is still besieged by evil and capable of sin himself, but he also knows that Christ has already conquered the forces of darkness, and that in St. Paul's words "death hath no more dominion over him." Says Yale's Theologian Frei: "What emerges from Barth's theology is a breathtaking, daring vision of a universe in which tragedy, demonic evil and chaos have been met and defeated in the figure of Jesus Christ."
Barth feels free to reject the writings of the church fathers where he feels they may have mistaken the meaning of God's Word; even his admitted master, John Calvin, is not exempt. Once, when someone questioned the unorthodox way in which he was commenting on Calvin, Barth retorted: "Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright."
One orthodox dogma that Barth has tried to set aright—much to the dismay of other theologians in the Reformed Church —is the best-known and gloomiest of Calvinist tenets: predestination. In his Institutes, Calvin argued that God has already determined both those who will be saved at the Last Judgment and those who will suffer the eternal pangs of Hell. Barth says that this belief does not pay sufficient heed to the fact that Christ's death was intended for all men: Man's ultimate fate is shrouded in mystery, but Barth believes that Christ, the loving Judge, could indeed reconcile all the world to the Father. "I do not preach universal salvation," Barth insists. "What I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment."
Plenty of Critics. Earth's Dogmatics, says Langdon Gilkey of Vanderbilt University's divinity school, "is the most impressive and most complete statement of the Christian faith in this century." Other theologians complain that if anyone tried to read all that Barth says about the Word of God he would have no time to read the Word of God itself. Barth's interpretation of that Word has plenty of critics. Both Niebuhr and Tillich think that he is too critical of the cultural disciplines, such as philosophy and anthropology, which attempt to give man an insight into life's meaning. Princeton's best-known systematic theologian, Presbyterian George Stuart Hendry, says Barth's Christocentric approach forces many church doctrines into an artificial mold. Wilhelm Pauck of Union Theological Seminary thinks Barth pays insufficient attention to the history of how Christian dogma developed.
Quiet on Communism. A different category of criticism of Barth attacks his enigmatic political views. During World War II, Barth urged the church to stand up and be counted in the "holy war" against Hitler; in the cold war against Communism, he has urged ministers behind the Iron Curtain to live peacefully with Red regimes. In 1956 Barth was perhaps the only important Western theologian who refused to condemn publicly the Communist repression in Hungary.
Barth thinks that Marx sincerely tried to correct injustice in industrial society, but he has no desire to live under a totalitarian government. He argues that Naziism attempted to defeat the church by perverting its doctrines with cultural heresies, whereas Communism is an atheistic political system based upon philosophical ideas that must be countered with other ideas. And God, Barth insists, is not an idea, "not a banner for human ideas and intentions. For many people Christianity is a kind of moral, religious and political idea, against what they call an atheistic idea." To Barth, the capitalist West is as materialistic as the Communist East—and represents a serious temptation to the church, since it tries to cloak its political ambitions in religious and moral terms.
He has asked the West to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally; such a gesture would help the West regain the "confidence" of the Soviet Union, and start it on the road toward a peaceful democratic regime. The vast majority of U.S. theologians regard such views as politically naive at best and irresponsible at worst. Says an old friend and theological colleague, Emil Brunner of Zurich: "If President Kennedy were to adopt Barth's pacifist doctrines, the United States would soon be swallowed by the Soviet Union. A Communist regime would make short shrift of men like Barth."
In other days. Barth would undoubtedly have hit back at such criticism with a barrage of satire, scorn and scriptural learning. "I was hard then," he says. "Now that I am older, I am softer." This older, mellower Barth seems eager only to get on with the fourth section of Volume IV of Dogmatics. At his stucco house on Basel's Bruderholzallee, day begins around 8, when Barth's wife, or his longtime secretary. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, tiptoes to the phonograph and puts on a record. The music that serves as his alarm clock is always by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work Barth describes as a "constant of my existence." "When the angels praise God in Heaven," Barth once wrote, "I am sure they play Bach. However, en famille they play Mozart, and then God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them."
He usually retires early, lying awake to read military history or detective stories, from which he first learned English at the age of 40. Says he: "My friends claim that I have a criminal vocabulary." Barth has little taste for modern novels, poetry or art. "What I object to," he says, "is the disappearance of the object. In art, as in theology, it is the object that counts, not the subject."
For many years, Barth's only preaching has consisted of occasional sermons to the prisoners in the Basel jail. He takes great pride in this spiritual work, writing out the prayers for the service and choosing hymns for the prisoners. "When I come before these men," he says, "I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner."
"God Is for You." Does Barthian theology have anything to tell a world in which persistent doubt seems to be man's real condition? Because of its roots in an unchallengeable faith and its reliance upon the truth of a book that many men now regard as a volume of interesting poetry rather than a divine revelation, his theology has been described—by Reinhold Niebuhr—as "designed for the church of the catacombs." Barth himself believes his work contains "a missionary call." It provides no easy, immediate, specific answers to man's daily worries—but summons him to learn that all questions are ultimately theological, and that the ultimate theological answer has been given. Translated into elementary pulpit talk, Karl Barth's rich and complex theology might appear to resemble the exhortations issued by many contemporary preachers; actually his thought is far more subtly attuned to the psychology of modern man. "To the man in the street," sums up Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, "Barth's message is 'God is for you.' You're not trapped in overwhelming guilt and anxiety. In these terribly perplexing modern times, there is hope in the Gospel, for God has involved himself in the human situation through Jesus Christ."
Majesty & Love. But Barth's greatest service has been to those who are most likely to listen to him: the committed believers. His Dogmatics is the most exhaustive compendium of what a Christian must believe, and why he believes it, that Protestantism has had in more than a century. Barth's insistence on the supreme majesty of God and His supreme love in Christ has forced Christian thought to reconsider its basic focus. His demand that theology is necessarily church theology has caused Protestantism to take a new look at the confessions it stands by, and has thereby contributed mightily to today's worldwide ecumenical dialogue. Barth has always insisted that dogma is important, that theology is not philosophy, that Christianity is not the spiritual side of politics. The mysteries of God's Word are hard ones—but they cannot be made more palatable to nonbelievers or to the lukewarm faithful by hiding them in the language formed by man's own wishful thinking. God speaks; man must listen. And Barth summons Goethe to warn the church:
Long, long ago the Truth was found, A company of men it bound. Grasp firmly then—that ancient Truth!
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