Word: barth
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...