Karl Barth is a Mount Everest amongst theologians: both extremely important and extremely intimidating. The thirteen hefty volumes that make up his colossal (but unfinished!) main work, the Church Dogmatics, are enough to send most students scurrying for the secondary literature, or for some sound-bite by which to understand him. Thus you hear Barth described as ‘neo-orthodox’, ‘universalist’, or by some such tag. The tags are usually neither accurate nor helpful. Yet, scared of approaching Barth himself, such slogans are often all that students are left with. In fact, it is not just the students: even the most respected theologians have been well known to have created Barths of their own imagining. This was something that clearly frustrated the man himself:

Am I deceived when I have the impression that I exist in the phantasy of far too many … mainly, only in the form of certain, for the most part hoary, summations of certain pictures hastily dashed off by some person at some time, and for the sake of convenience, just as hastily accepted, and then copied endlessly, and which, of course, can easily be dismissed?

He had good reason to feel unjustly dealt with, for he himself was capable of highly respectful and intricate readings of those with whom he disagreed (his dealings with Friedrich Schleiermacher being the prime example).

Instead of simply covering his theology with more slogans, we will try to get to know the man and his thought from the inside out. Probably the best way to do this is to walk, first through his life, and then through the essential argument of his main work, the Church Dogmatics. Having done that we should be in a position to engage with him far more sensitively and effectively.

Early Life

Barth was born in 1886 in Basel, Switzerland. He began his theological studies at the age of 18, managing over the years that followed to study in Germany with the greatest liberal theologians of the day, such as Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann. He quickly established himself as a young rising star and champion of theological liberalism. Having finished his studies, he moved to be an assistant pastor in Geneva, where he found himself preaching from John Calvin’s old pulpit. Later he wrote: ‘I’m afraid Calvin would hardly have been very pleased at the sermons which I preached in his pulpit then’!

Two years later, in 1911, he became pastor of the church in the village of Safenwil, halfway between Zurich and Bern. It was here that everything was to change. First, the realities of pastoral work showed up the inability of his theological liberalism to help his congregation. Then, in 1914, war broke out, and Barth was shocked to find his liberal teachers supporting the war. All his confidence in them was rocked as he saw their ethical failure. From then he knew that somehow their theology must be wrong.

And so ‘I gradually turned back to the Bible’, and found a ‘strange new world’ there. As with Luther four hundred years earlier, the revolution began for him with concentrated study of Romans. In the summer of 1916, ‘I sat under an apple tree and began to apply myself to Romans with all the resources that were available to me at the time ... I began to read it as though I had never read it before.’ It forced him to repudiate all his old theological inheritance and reach out for a new, biblical way of thinking.

The notes he made on Romans were published early in 1919, and were received like a bombshell in the playground of the theologians. A new theological movement had begun. It was one that moved beyond the liberal critical methods of scripture reading that Barth had been trained in. It was one that had the audacity to use ‘the old doctrine of Verbal Inspiration’. It was with this cheek that he began that work:

Paul, as a child of his age, addressed his contemporaries. It is, however, far more important that, as Prophet and Apostle of the Kingdom of God, he veritably speaks to all men of every age. The differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require careful investigation and consideration. But the purpose of such investigation can only be to demonstrate that these differences are, in fact, purely trivial.

The problem Barth had with his old liberalism was that it had the arrogance to think that humanity was able to speak about God accurately unaided by revelation. It was supremely optimistic about our human abilities! The truth was that when liberalism claimed to speak about God, it only spoke about man (in a loud voice, as it were). Since it didn’t listen to God, it couldn’t speak about God, it could only speak about itself.

Instead Barth argued that there is in fact a ‘dialectical’ relationship between God and humanity. That is, there exists between God and us a great and impassable gulf that cannot be crossed by us. We cannot know God on our own. The gulf can only be crossed by God, and this he does in his Word. He makes himself known to us in his revelation of himself, and this is the only way in which we can know God.

Over the next few years, as he re-schooled himself and grappled with theologians such as Calvin, Schleiermacher and Anselm, his theology matured. How much it actually changed, though, has become quite a matter of debate. In the 1950s the Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that around 1930 Barth’s theology went through a change of gear. That is where previously Barth had argued for that dialectical relationship between God and man, from then he began to see that relationship as analogical (that is, that there is in fact a correspondence, ordained by God, between God and humanity). Barth never disagreed with the theory (though he was aware of it), and thus the argument held sway for the decades to come. However, that theory of a gear change now looks too crude. This is partly because of a major re-examination of that early stage of Barth’s thinking by Bruce McCormack, and partly because of the recent publication of much previously unpublished material by Barth from the 1920s. His ‘dialectic’ theology was not just a passing, immature phase. What happened around 1930 was not a complete change of direction, but a clarification. What Barth had somewhat more abstractly called ‘the Word’ was, from then on, clearly the specific person of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ who is the only way by which we can know God.

A few years later there was to be another event that would be of immense significance for Barth and all the world: Hitler came to power in Germany. Much of German Protestantism swiftly bowed the knee. Barth, however, did not, seeing that capitulation was just the latest political expression of a theology derived from outside of God’s Word. For this he was soon to be deported back to Switzerland. It is, however, what he did while still in Germany that is most telling. Not only did Barth spearhead the creation of a Confessing Church that would resist accepting Nazi theology, he also applied himself to theology with even greater fervour. What he saw was that, instead of it being a time to abandon deep theology for a quick response, now was the time to do theology all the more intensely in order to recover and safeguard the gospel.

In 1935 Barth was dismissed from his teaching post and deported from Germany. He returned to Basel where he would remain until his death in 1968. His time there was to be dominated by his production of the Church Dogmatics.

Church Dogmatics

Throughout his life, Barth read and wrote at a superhuman rate. He wrote about the Early Church Fathers, mediaeval, Reformation and modern theologians and theologies. He wrote commentaries, letters and articles for specific occasions; he even wrote a book on Mozart. But our best chance at getting an accurate flavour of the overall thought of so prolific a writer is by looking at his pièce de resistance, the Church Dogmatics. There will be so much we will not have time to enjoy: every few pages he makes an intriguing detour, pausing to examine any subject from laughter to Leibniz. Quite simply our aim will be to look at the essence of each volume of the work, and so to get a feel for the overall thrust of the Dogmatics as a whole.

Volume I: The Word of God

There are four ‘volumes’ to the Church Dogmatics. A fifth volume, ‘The Doctrine of Redemption’, on our eschatological redemption, was planned but never written (and Barth left no indication of what it would have looked like). In fact, even the fourth volume was cut short by Barth’s death. Each ‘volume’ is divided up into part-volumes (each one an entire book), so that you have volume 1, part 1 (I/1), volume 3, part 2 (III/2) and so on.

I/1

In Barth’s day, two practices had become conventional in writing complete works of theology like the Dogmatics. The first convention was to begin by asking if it is possible for God to be known. Straightaway Barth disobeyed that rule, beginning his work by acknowledging that God actually has already made himself known in his Word. Christian theology is studying the Word that God has spoken. The second tradition of the day was to do with the Trinity. In 1830 Friedrich Schleiermacher had put the doctrine of the Trinity in the final conclusion of his The Christian Faith, and through the nineteenth century the doctrine of the Trinity became about the most dust-covered of all theological subjects. Once again Barth rebelled and instead put the Trinity at the very beginning of his theology showing that theology can only be Christian when it has the Trinity as its foundation. (Thus began a renaissance of interest in the Trinity that can still be felt in theology today.)

What was even more revolutionary was that Barth combined the two subjects of revelation and Trinity. The Dogmatics therefore begins with the God who makes himself known; that is, the self-revealing Trinity. The Father, Son and Spirit act as Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness, God being the Subject, Act and Goal of revelation. In doing this, Barth protected revelation from being mere talk about how we know things. Revelation for Barth could not be about neutral information, for revelation is the gift of the presence of the Triune God himself. God makes himself known, and that knowledge is something relational, not merely cerebral.

The way God makes himself known is through his Word, and this Word, Barth argued, has three forms: there is Christ, the revealed Word of God; that revelation is attested to in the written Word of God, the Scriptures; and finally, those Scriptures are preached, and so the world hears the one Word of God. There is not space for many detours, and yet so much confusion can arise here, so it is worth pausing to look at this point more closely. Barth’s talk of scripture ‘bearing witness’ to the Word of God tends to make evangelicals uneasy. Is Scripture not itself the Word of God? Barth never denies this. In fact, he scrupulously affirms it. His point is that the Bible is not an alternative way of knowing God next to Christ. It is the Spirit-breathed Word of God that preaches Christ, the Word of God sent from God the Father.

There is one other aspect of his doctrine of revelation that we need to flag up. Barth argued that, in the same way that Jesus, being human, had the potential within him for sin, so too the scriptures, having human authors (as well as their Divine author), have the potential to contain error. Evangelicals are surely right to be nervous about both statements, and our nerves are hardly helped by Barth’s rhetoric at this point. He was so passionately motivated by Jesus’ point in John 5:39–40, that it is possible to study the scriptures without looking to Christ, that he hit out hard against what he perceived as the danger of raising the Bible to the throne where Christ alone belongs. All in all, whilst evangelicals have cause to be uncomfortable with some of Barth’s formulations of biblical inspiration, it would be foolish then simply to stop our ears against him. The irony would be that we would leave ourselves deaf to one of Barth’s greatest messages: that we submit all our thinking to scripture. With that reflection over we can resume our account of Barth on revelation.

Barth believed that he was carrying the project of the sixteenth-century Reformers into the doctrine of revelation. They had held that salvation is a work of God’s grace alone. Barth wanted to apply that banner of ‘grace alone’ to how we know God (the Reformers, of course, had done that, but Barth felt it needed to be restated sharply). In other words, he wanted to reject all Pelagianism in our knowledge of God (that is, actually contributing to it ourselves). He also wanted to reject any semi-Pelagianism there (that is, that while we do not contribute to our knowledge of God explicitly, we can know God through an ability graciously given to us). Just as we cannot contribute to our righteousness before God, so we cannot contribute to our knowledge of God. Both are his gift to us. We, therefore, cannot bring any presuppositions to our knowledge of God, in the same way as we cannot bring any good works to our relationship with God.

This was his famous rejection of all ‘natural theology’. Yet Barth is commonly misunderstood here. He was neither rejecting a theology of creation, nor was he denying General Revelation: ‘God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog’. The point was that we can only know God in his Word, and only once we have done that can we appreciate the true meaning of his revelation of himself elsewhere. If we start somewhere other than with God’s Word, we will go wrong, for we will have gone about things the wrong way round. Barth says we know God only because he gives himself to be known. Natural theology proceeds in the opposite direction by first constructing its own theory of the possibility of knowing God, and then using that as a yardstick by which to measure what may or may not be true.

I/2

The second part-volume on the Word of God really serves to flesh out that main theme of the Triune God and his revelation of himself. Looking in turn at Jesus the revealed Word of God, the Word of God written in Scripture, and the preached Word, he extends the argument that revelation is the work of the Father, Son and Spirit together, and not a human attempt to reach up and grab God. Half of the book is given over to an examination of the relationship between Word and Spirit. As expected, Jesus Christ is held out as the revelation of God; he describes the Spirit as the one who enables us to receive that revelation.

The book ends with an important sermon on how to do theology. Theology, he argues, is what the Church does to check that what it preaches is actually what God has revealed. There are three marks, he says, of a theology that lives up to that task: it must be biblical; it must be confessional; and it must be (as the title Church Dogmatics suggests) done for the Church and not merely for the academy or for intellectual amusement. Theology is worship in the field of thought. In our situation today, where theology is so divorced from our Church life, it is a sermon we would do well to hear.

Volume II: God

II/1

Barth tied revelation and Trinity together in volume I. We, therefore, should not be surprised to see discussion of the knowledge of God carried over into volume (II), on the doctrine of God. And so it is: he begins by stating that we should not ask questions such as ‘Is it possible for God to exist?’ and ‘Is knowledge of God possible?’ First, because God has actually revealed himself to us; second, because of the complete inability of the human mind, by itself, to know God. Instead we must ask: ‘what is the God who does exist, and we have seen revealed, like?’

So Barth proceeds to look at what God has done, and what that reveals about who he is. And what does Barth find revealed there about God’s nature? That God is ‘the one who loves in freedom’. God’s love and God’s freedom are fundamental and inseparable for Barth. God’s freedom is not an unwieldy and unrestrained freedom. It is his utter freedom to be who he is. He exercises his freedom in love: he determines to be in fellowship. God’s sovereign freedom is thus expressed in his love

With that fundamental in place Barth can examine what are traditionally called the divine attributes (though Barth prefers to call them divine ‘perfections’): God’s grace and holiness, his mercy and righteousness, his patience and wisdom, his unity and omnipresence, his constancy and omnipotence, and finally his eternity and glory.

II/2

What comes next can be quite a shock, for in a crucial chapter Barth turns to look at election. The first surprise is that election is usually dealt with as part of salvation. Barth sees it differently.

In all his theology Barth sought to let the person of Christ (as the Revelation of God) shape everything. For him that meant the traditional picture of election that he knew from his Calvinist heritage had to be reshaped dramatically. He felt that in that view Christ was effectively pushed out of his central role. There the important part of salvation was God’s election of an individual; Christ came simply to effect that salvation. In so doing he believed that that account had ceased to be biblical: in dealing with an election passage like Ephesians 1, for instance, it failed to deal with the repeated phrase ‘in Christ’

Instead, Barth argued that Jesus Christ alone is the one person elected by God, ‘the living Stone rejected by men but chosen by God.’ His people are elected ‘in him’. Just as they find they are righteous and holy ‘in Christ’, so they find they are of the elect only once they are ‘in Christ’ and share his election. It was for this reason that Barth held that election was part of the doctrine of God, for in it, God elects himself. Our salvation involves being caught up into that relationship.

Because election is to that relationship, Barth concludes his doctrine of God with an examination of the ethical shape of that relationship.

Volume III: Creation

III/1

What follows is perhaps the largest exposition of the doctrine of creation by any single theologian (demonstrating that this rejecter of natural theology should not be thought of as a rejecter of creation). One reason was that he felt there was much to recover. Theologians, he believed, had allowed themselves to be pushed out of any serious study of creation by the natural scientists. As a result, the doctrine of creation had become a mere study of origins, losing what is specifically Christian about creation.

It should come as no surprise by now that Barth turned all that on its head. In complete contrast, Barth believed that the created order can be understood only in the light of God’s purposes as revealed in Jesus Christ. That, he wrote, is because creation is all about the covenant relationship between God and humanity. Creation exists for the sake of that relationship. That relationship is not therefore just a response to the fall; it is the reason God created. Creation, therefore, simply cannot be understood without Christ, the one who brings about that relationship.

III/2

Having argued that the relationship between God and humanity is the reason for creation, Barth’s next step is to look at mankind itself. Here we get to see how far Barth would carry his rejection of natural theology. Having claimed that we are unable to know God without revelation, now Barth proceeds to claim that we are unable even to know what it is to be human without God revealing it to us! Only when we look at Jesus Christ can we know God’s purposes for us, and so know who we are. ‘Who and what man is, is no less specifically and emphatically declared by the Word of God than who and what God is.’

III/3

Tying together the themes of the previous two part-volumes, Barth now examines the ways in which God relates to man in creation. In other words, the doctrine of providence. Perhaps the defining characteristic of Barth’s study of providence is his desire for an account of God’s providence that is explicitly Christian. He is not interested in how, in theory, a supreme being might relate to his creation. He wants to see specifically how this God acts. Out of this flowed one of the more important studies of the problem of evil. Barth defined evil as ‘Nothingness’; not that evil is nothing, but that it is what God has willed not to exist. Like a hole in a bucket, it spoils the bucket, but it cannot be described as a ‘thing’ – the hole is precisely where there is no-thing. Like darkness, it is simply a lack of the good light, a state that will vanish at the final appearing of Jesus.

III/4

Barth finishes his account of creation with a look at how man responds to God in creation (that is, ethics). Placing ethics here is key, for he wants to demonstrate that the ‘task of theological ethics is to understand the Word of God as the command of God’. God’s Word commands us, and it is this command that Barth seeks to examine here. What Barth has done is place his ethics within the main body of his theology to emphasise that theology always leads towards ethics, and that ethics cannot be done properly outside of theology. The two are inseparable.

Volume IV: Reconciliation

The fourth volume of the Dogmatics consists of three part-volumes and some unfinished fragments of a fourth part-volume. The structure here is a little different. Instead of being a sequential argument, this volume is more like a tapestry, with themes interwoven with each other. Doctrines that traditionally are kept separate (such as the doctrines of Christ and salvation) are intertwined here. This is because Barth was eager to show that it is wrong to divorce who Christ is from what he came to do. What he does shows who he is; he is who he is in what he does. It is not a sequential argument; but that said, Barth is recounting a story here. The basis for the story is the parable of the prodigal son, and it is worth being on the lookout for motifs from that throughout the volume.
In order to spot the reappearance of themes better, each theme will appear below as a bullet-point. To get the best understanding of Barth, you’ll need to compare the themes as they appear in each part-volume (key ideas appear in italics to help the comparison).

IV/1

The master-theme here is ‘Jesus Christ, the Lord as Servant’, and in it Barth describes Jesus as God humbling himself. As is typical with Barth, yet again our expectations are reversed: he connects Jesus’ divinity with his humiliation as he will connect Jesus’ humanity with his exaltation

·    This divine humbling happens through ‘The Obedience of the Son of God’. Jesus the Lord humbles himself to become ‘The Judge Judged in our Place’.
·    Using ‘prodigal son’ language, all this is ‘The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country’.
·    Christ is therefore seen as our priest, achieving reconciliation between God and humanity.
·    Through this, Christ exposes sin as the pride that rebels against his divine humility.
·    The effect of Christ’s work here is: justification.
·    Finally, he looks at the Holy Spirit’s role here in i) gathering a community ii) generating faith in the individual believer.

IV/2

Now we see ‘Jesus Christ, the Servant as Lord’, Jesus being described as the man who is exalted in his resurrection.
·    This happens through ‘The Exaltation of the Son of Man’.
·    Using ‘prodigal son’ language, all this is ‘The Homecoming of the Son of Man’.
·    Christ is therefore seen as king, having been exalted and enthroned by God.
·    Through this, Christ exposes sin as the sloth which miserably refuses to join Jesus as he goes to his Father.
·    The effect of Christ’s work here is: sanctification.
·    Finally, he looks at the Holy Spirit’s role here in i) upbuilding a community ii) generating love in the individual believer.

IV/3

Finally we see ‘Jesus Christ the True Witness’, Jesus being described as the one who unites God and humanity in himself.
·    Christ is therefore seen as prophet, proclaiming salvation in himself.
·    Through this, Christ exposes sin as falsehood, as the turning away from this truth proclaimed in Christ.
·    The effect of Christ’s work here is: our vocation.
·    Finally, he looks at the Holy Spirit’s role here in i) sending a community ii) generating hope in the individual believer.

Going on with Barth

A difficulty with tackling Barth is where to start.

There is no end of websites on Barth, packed with hundreds of articles. Yet none of them seem particularly helpful for the real beginner. Even those seeking to introduce Barth usually offer you a completely mixed bag of articles with very little indication of what level they’re at, or where they’re coming from. All the books can also leave you feeling bewildered. One that routinely manages to crush novices is George Hunsinger’s, How to Read Karl Barth (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). It is an excellent study, but don’t be deceived by the title: it’s definitely not the book to try and start out with.

Instead, as the next step from here, try John Webster’s Karl Barth, in the ‘Outstanding Christian Thinkers’ series (London & New York: Continuum, 2000). After that, Eberhard Busch’s The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids, MI. & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004) is well worth consulting.

Or, perhaps even better, go straight to the source. There are two especially good options for starting to read Barth himself: Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI. & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004), on how to be evangelical in theology, and his Dogmatics in Outline (London: SCM, 1949).

Is it possible, though, for mere mortals to read the Church Dogmatics itself? Actually, yes! Perhaps one reason people don’t read him is because Barth is hard to quote. He doesn’t reduce easily to a catch-phrase, and so when commentators do quote him he usually sounds impossibly complicated. So, without having read Barth himself, people are put off, but this is just to misunderstand his style. Barth’s writing tends to be quite story-like, which means that if you take one bit out on its own (for a quotation), it often won’t make sense in the way it does in its context. Reading Barth himself is nothing like reading Barth second-hand.

It’s when you actually start to read him that knowing his writing style really begins to pay off. The first reason is because it makes sense of why the Dogmatics is so long! Barth once said that ‘the task of theology is the same as the task of preaching’ (a statement well worth pondering). This is what we see in the Dogmatics. Barth is preaching, and so his theology fills up books in the same way that Spurgeon’s sermons fill so many volumes. When a preacher preaches, he speaks to the heart as well as the mind; he seeks to persuade; and so he uses repetition to enforce points. This is just what Barth does. The result is that not only do you find many deeply moving passages in the Dogmatics, you can actually relax somewhat in reading. If he is using repetition, then it doesn’t matter too much if you feel you’ve not entirely understood a point, for he will come back to clarify things for you. (Of course, close attention to the text is also good, but failure to appreciate the big argument lies behind far more problems in reading Barth.)

John Webster puts it a different way:

Commentators often note the musical structure of Barth’s major writings: the announcement of a theme, and its further extension in a long series of developments and recapitulations, through which the reader is invited to consider the theme from a number of different angles and in a number of different relations. No one stage of the argument is definitive: rather, it is the whole which conveys the substance of what he has to say. As a result, Barth’s views on any given topic cannot be comprehended in a single statement (even if the statement is one of his own), but only in the interplay of a range of articulations of a theme.

This has two important consequences. The first is that the reader cannot take an individual strand of Barth’s thought in isolation, and then take it to its apparent logical conclusion without seeing how it fits into the whole. This is a common mistake made in reading Barth, and one that accounts for many of the simplistic tags that are applied to him. (The charge that he was a universalist is perhaps the classic instance – the case is a highly complex, technical debate, and, given his assiduous denial of the charge, not one to be settled over-hastily). The second consequence is that, because of the way in which Barth does keep approaching his same themes from different angles, it is quite possible to start reading the Dogmatics from any point that appeals. CD III/1 is particularly good for a first assault

Of course Barth does demand that you give him time. If you want theological fast-food, try elsewhere. But for those who want to grow as theologians, Barth will certainly help; for agree with him or disagree, he is both stretching and stimulating because he is so deliberately (often infuriatingly) provocative. Michael Wyschogrod said that ‘Reading Barth is like entering into shock therapy’. It certainly is: more surprising than comfortable, he constantly challenges his reader. We may not wish to follow Barth to all his conclusions (not even he wanted to do that), but he does still encourage us in some healthy ways: to submit our thinking to scripture, and to do our theology, not as a game, but for the Church.

To let John Webster conclude:

not the least of his encouragements is his counsel to see the marginalization of theology in the contemporary church and in academia as an opportunity rather than a threat – as offering the occasion for theology to concentrate once again on its great, joyful subject matter, God and the gospel of Jesus Christ.`