Word: barthe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, 67, has given modern Protestants a lot to think about. In the '20s, almost singlehanded, Barth took Luther and Calvin down from the dusty bookshelves where liberal Protestants had put them, and roughly recalled theologians everywhere to some fundamentals.† In the '30s, Barth was one of the first European churchmen to attack the Nazis. But since the late '40s, Barth has played a different kind of role. In the political and spiritual battle of Communism and the democracies, he has become Europe's most respected Christian preacher of neutralism...
This week, in a book called Against the Stream (Philosophical Library; $3.75), a collection of Barth's recent writings, largely on church and state problems, appeared in the U.S. The book clarifies Earth's political position and partly explains its connection with his rigid theology, with which U.S. theologians, be they as "neo-orthodox" as Barth himself, increasingly disagree. By what he says, Neutralist Barth marks himself as actually an indiscriminate "participationist." The essence of his church-state philosophy: the church must participate in the affairs of any state, Communist or not. "The State," says Barth...
Thin Ice. Barth's pessimism is enough to cast the optimistic reader into deepest depression. "Everything we see before us today." he writes, "is more or less polluted, diluted and devalued . . . Men were never good, are not good, and never will be good . . . The morality of modern civilized man has turned out to be a terribly thin covering of ice over a sea of primitive barbarity . . . There is no doubt but that in recent years the whole conception of a Christian civilization in the West has been pitilessly exposed as an illusion-not least in the eyes...
With these sorry foundations under them, can Christians hope to build any systems of just governance? Barth doubts it. He first makes the point that, since every political system has some elements of good and evil in it, there is really not much to choose between them all. Continues Earth: "Something of God's wisdom and patience (though it may be only a reasonable traffic regulation!) will be revealed by even the worst political system. It has often been observed, and rightly, that the 'government' of whose divine institution the Apostle Paul spoke* was the 'State...
...Century of the Church pulled down a hornet's nest. It brought an especially strong buzzing from Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, who disagreed on theological grounds with Dibelius' view that the church must fill the void left by the passing of the Kaiser's "Christian state." Snapped Barth: "I have nothing against your argument, but don't call it theology." Dibelius looked on Theologian Earth's criticism as a front-line infantry commander might regard a staff officer's observations on tactics. Said he: "I think dogmatics are a mischief. A systematic theologian...