Word: barthes
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Swiss Theologian Karl Barth has had a vast influence on Visser 't Hooft. "Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends," he says. "He called the church again to be itself." He remembers that the "unofficial slogan" of the men who met at Edinburgh and Oxford in 1937 to launch the ecumenical movement was "Let the Church be the Church." And this, he says, "did not mean that the church should run away from the world. It did mean that the church was not merely an echo of trends...
World War II had the unexpected effect of casting Visser 't Hooft in a new role-underground leader. Even before the war began, rescuing Jews and others from Hitler's Germany was one of his prime concerns. Karl Barth once told him of an imprisoned pastor Barth was especially worried about, and Wim remembered a beer-drinking session he had had in 1933 with a blackshirted Nazi who turned out to be Heinrich Himmler. So Churchman Visser 't Hooft wrote Nazi Himmler. recalling the incident, and succeeded in having the pastor released...
Christ or Caesar. As Theologian Barth strode in, wearing his usual rumpled summer suit without a tie, his shock of grey hair was its customary bird's nest. Barely acknowledging the thunderous ovation that greeted him, he began his lecture on ethics where he had left off the day before, on the phrase of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come." Christians, he said, should act not according to rigid principles, but only according to what their faith tells them is God's will in Jesus Christ. "Christians should be free," he said, "to give an attenuated...
Behind the delay was a name-calling hassle between Switzerland's two traditional city rivals, Zurich and Basel, over the politics of Gollwitzer, a onetime pupil of Barth who was imprisoned for five years in a Russian P.O.W. camp. Gollwitzer, screamed Zurich papers, was a "proCommunist" who opposed West German rearmament, atomic weapons and Adenauer's policies in general. Basel's National-Zeitung jumped to Gollwitzer's defense: "This man is a radical Christian in the original sense of the word, who believes that Christ did not die on the Cross to serve as a mascot...
Almost unknown in the world of scholarship, Gollwitzer was emerging as a man after Neutralist Barth's own heart, whether or not Basel's nervous municipal authorities, who have the final say, decide to swallow their unease. "Gollwitzer," said one Barthian, "is not out to support those who would like to sweeten their political coffee with the sugar of Western Christian culture...