Word: barthe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Protestantism's biggest names found themselves in a hot-collar controversy last week. One was Basel's bearlike Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian of his time; as a professor at Bonn University, he defied Hitler early in the Nazi regime, but since World War II Barth has angered many by his live-and-let-live attitude toward Communism, his sharply anti-U.S. attitude. His antagonist last week was U.S. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, himself a sometime left-of-center critic of U.S. policy. The issue for which Niebuhr takes Barth to task in the pages...
...Fresh Look. Niebuhr holds that the theology underlying Barth's political judgment is defective on two counts. First, it is too eschatological, too concerned with the second coming of Christ at the world's end to be able to see the relevancies and relativities of politics here and now. Second, says Niebuhr, it is devoid of principle. Barth once answered his colleague Emil Brunner, who had asked him why he did not oppose Communist totalitarianism as he had the Nazi variety, by saying: "The church must concern itself with political systems not in terms of principles...
...relation to Hungary, Barth has been what Niebuhr calls "a kind of unofficial Pope of the Hungarian Reformed Church." Called upon in 1948 by that church for advice in its relations with the Communist regime, Barth encouraged collaboration with the Reds, and urged the church not to let opposition to the Communists guide its affairs. Niebuhr concedes that Barth is no Marxist and grants that in East Germany Barth's "eschatological emphasis has inspired a kind of religious resistance which has permitted the East German Christians to bear witness to their faith." But why has Barth not confessed that...
Professor Marcus Barth, son of famed Swiss Theologian Karl Barth and currently associate professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago's Federated Theological Faculty, gave U.S. Protestants something to think about last week...
...Barth, a minister of the Evangelist Reformed Church, also finds signs of creeping sacramentalism in the U.S. Speaking to ministers at Chicago Theological Seminary, he said: "I am alarmed to see exactly that kind of sacramentalist thinking increasingly adopted here which has done so much harm to the Protestant churches of Europe . . . The present emphasis on the sacraments in U.S. churches tends to glorify the churchgoer more than Christ." Barth cites four examples of sacramentalist tendencies: infant baptism, the tendency to entrust church decisions to officials and committees rather than congregations, Protestant leanings toward the Roman Catholic concept...