Word: barthe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dusen-and to American Protestantism generally-Christianity is still the "good news" ... To Barth-and much of European Protestantism-Christianity appears to be a means for coming to terms with a world which man makes worse but cannot make better . . . The result is that U.S. churches are largely "activist"; Europe's largely "escapist" ... In view of the awe in which, among some American churchmen, Europe's theologians are held, Dr. Van Dusen and those of his mind have a large but a prophetic job cut out for them...
Professors' Textbooks. Never averse to minority positions, Barth feels that church denunciations of Communism would be superfluous. Says he: "When the Church witnesses, it moves in fear and trembling, not with the stream but against it ... Must the Church then move with the stream and side with America and the Vatican, merely because somewhere in the textbooks of its professors-ever since 1934-it has rightly been said that 'totalitarianism' is a dreadful thing? . . . The Church ought to stand quietly aloof from the present conflict and not let off all its guns before it is necessary...
...Mixture. "The Church," Barth repeats, "cannot ally itself with any political system, old or new, for better or for worse, just as it cannot oppose any system unconditionally." What about new political systems, e.g., Communism? Barth has his own question for that: "Can a new political system arise without the Christian Church asking itself how, with what fresh insight and strength, it can make a new and better appeal to men in the new situation...
Theologian Barth has consistently urged that Christians in Communist countries come to terms with the new regimes. The churches should accept restrictions on them as "penance," protesting only when some really flagrant state violation of their rights as Christians occurs. As for ideology: "The Church can never defend and proclaim-or even attack-abstract norms, ideals, historical laws and sociopolitical ideologies as such ... It cannot make itself responsible either for any ism or for rejecting...
Equipped with this kind of reasoning in the '50s, why did Karl Barth come out so boldly against the Nazis in the '30s and after? His answer: "Naziism . . . was a mixture of madness and crime in which there was no trace of reason." Barth seems to think that Communism is different, and, like other European neutralists, he is fond of the old balancing act equating Russian Communist "materialism" with U.S. capitalist "materialism." The evils of Communist living, furthermore, are all too apparent to Barth from where he sits in Western Europe. Only "a few Western European Communists...