Word: barth
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Like the mysteries that he plumbed, Barth himself was rich in paradox. He was a theologian who almost belligerently proposed the "wholly otherness" of God, yet he lived long enough to write a book mellowly asserting the "humanity" of a loving Creator. Though a critic of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II renewal, Barth had to concede that some of his most astute interpreters were Catholic theologians. He mixed profound spiritual insights with a wit that could be caustic or self-critical; a friend called him the only Swiss with a sense of humor. He was aggressively anti-Nazi...
Idolatrous Counterfeiters. The son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, Barth studied theology at the University of Berlin under Church Historian Adolf von Harnack. Perhaps the greatest of Protestant liberals, Harnack stressed the importance of Jesus as a supreme ethical teacher more than as God's son, and Christianity as the culmination of mankind's spiritual aspirations. World War I destroyed Barth's faith in secular optimism; he was also appalled that his teachers supported the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm. While serving as a pastor of a Reformed church in the Swiss village of Safenwill, Barth returned...
Against the liberals who assumed the partnership of God and man, Barth proclaimed a radically transcendent Creator whose message had been hurled like a stone at humanity. In contrast to an ethical, teaching Jesus, Barth preached a divine Christ who was, in his person, God's message to man. Rejecting the higher criticism that reduced the Bible to human wish fulfillment, Barth proclaimed the objective authority of Scripture. The Bible, he wrote, was not man's word about God, but God's word about man. Barth's thinking, which came to be known as "crisis theology...
...just such an idolatry that Barth saw in Nazism, which sought to impose Hitler's ideology on the Protestant churches of Germany. As a leader of the so-called "Confessing Church," Barth, then a professor at the University of Bonn, was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, which opposed the Nazi infiltration of Christianity as a heathen profanation of God's message. Expelled from Germany in 1935, Barth continued his war of words against Hitlerism from the University of Basel. Later he volunteered for the Swiss home defense force and served as a border guard during World...
...cold war. In 1945, he defended the return of political freedom to the German people, who, he said, had been Hitler's first victims. He consistently refused to condemn the aggressions of Russia with anything like the same vigor with which he had challenged Hitler. Unlike Nazism, Barth argued, Communism was a totally materialistic philosophy whose frank atheism represented no threat to the internal authenticity of the church. He thus refused to protest the Communist invasion of Hungary-although when a friend visited him in the hos pital last summer and asked about his health, Barth growled...