Word: barthes
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...weakness of 19th century theology, as Barth sees it, was that it tried above all to confront and adapt itself to the times. Through theology's wide-open doors and windows "came so much stimulation for thought and discussion that there was hardly time or love or zeal left for the task to be accomplished within the house itself. With all its energies captivated by the world, 19th century theology achieved little in terms of a new and positive understanding of Christian truth...
This conforming to the world, says Barth, lowered theology's prestige. "Man in the 19th century might have taken the theologians more seriously if they themselves had not taken him so seriously...
Clearing Away. Barth feels that Christian theology must explore God's dealings with man, whereas 19th century theologians reversed the matter and concentrated on man's relationship to God. And Christianity as an "inner experience" is a poor ground on which to take a stand. "How naively did the Church subscribe to political conservatism in the first half of the century, and in the second half to the preservation of the liberal bourgeoisie, the growing nationalism and militarism...
Rebelling against this kind of rudderless, over-humanistic Protestantism, Karl Barth first achieved fame after World War I with his radical insistence on the transcendence of God. His terms for it-e.g., the "wholly other" and the "infinite qualitative distinction"-became slogans for a new school of theologians. "How we cleared things away!" he reminisces. "And we did almost nothing but clear away! Everything which even remotely smacked of mysticism and morality, of pietism and romanticism, or even of idealism, was suspected and sharply interdicted or bracketed with reservations which sounded actually prohibitive! What should really have been only...
...Togetherness. Today Barth emphasizes a different aspect of divinity; instead of being "wholly other," God's deity, he feels, has meaning and power only in the context of "His dialogue with man, and thus in His togetherness with man . . . Who God is and what He is in His deity He proves and reveals not in a vacuum as a divine being-for-Himself, but precisely and authentically in the fact that He exists, speaks, and acts as the partner of man, though of course as the absolutely superior partner...