Thank God for Karl Barth, but …

… we need to read him with our eyes open.

During his lifetime, Karl Barth was a very controversial figure. In 1986, 100 years after his birth, he is still a controversial figure. One contemporary lauded him as the greatest theologian since the apostle Paul—greater than Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin. Another deplored his contribution to theology as a rehash of liberal neo-Christianity, and highly deceptive to boot since he tried to pawn his theology off as a new evangelicalism.

My own acquaintance with the thought of Karl Barth traces back to 1935. I had just found Jesus Christ, but I didn’t have much faith, and I was hanging on for dear life. Everyone whose intelligence I respected seemed to think that faith in Jesus Christ as divine Lord and Savior was a piece of foolishness. I was reading voraciously to bolster my shaky Christian faith, but pickings proved mighty slim.

Then I ran across a book by a man called Karl Barth entitled The Word of God and the Word of Man. Rumor had it that almost single-handedly he had set liberalism back on its haunches and moved the Western church back toward orthodoxy. With ecstatic delight I read: “It is not the right human thoughts about God which form the contents of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God, but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has made with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children, and which he has sealed once and for all in Christ Jesus. It is this which is within the Bible.”

Here was a new Luther and Calvin—risen from the dead to call my generation to repentance and faith.

Then I went to seminary! There I heard the arguments later recorded in Cornelius VanTil’s The New Modernism. The teachers under whom I studied accepted his understanding of Barth and of Barth’s followers in Europe and America, and so did I. The title of the book tells the whole story: Barth’s theology was the same old liberal baloney, repackaged and dressed up in evangelical verbiage to sound like traditional Protestant orthodoxy. That became almost the official evangelical “case” against the new modernism.

I am greatly indebted to VanTil and other evangelical interpreters of this movement. They were honest students who may have misinterpreted Barth, but they were convinced that his teaching was harmful to the church; and therefore, the church must be warned against it. Moreover, they pointed out valid weaknesses in his thought where he had been overly influenced by the liberalism that had dominated theological scholarship for almost a century and had caused him to warp both biblical revelation and Reformation theology. For example, Barth’s total rejection of natural revelation is a perversion not only of the teaching of Luther and Calvin but of the Bible as well.

But the evangelical seminaries of that day did not simply hand down a party line to be swallowed without examination. They insisted that we must read the writings of these new modernists and decide for ourselves whether they were orthodox.

I did. And in spite of what I owe my evangelical teachers (and I gladly acknowledge that I owe my very faith to them), they were wrong in their understanding of Karl Barth. Most of them had never used the untranslated tomes of the Swiss theologian (though VanTil had); and consequently, they tended to interpret him in light of his more liberal European and American colleagues like Bultmann and Niebuhr. In addition, they invariably faulted him for the logical conclusions of his teachings—conclusions that could validly be drawn from his premises and that represented clear-cut contradictions of biblical faith. The problem was, Barth himself did not draw these logical conclusions, but in fact, explicitly repudiated them in favor of more biblical and orthodox positions. For example, Barth would repeat from Søren Kierkegaard the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man. That may have served a useful apologetic purpose in the battle against liberals who tried to reduce God to man’s size, but evangelicals were put off by it. If God is really totally different from everything we know, then all our words about God really mean nothing. And in any case, the Bible says man was created in God’s image, and that image has not been obliterated by the Fall.

A second example of what proved very disturbing to evangelicals was Barth’s insistence that Jesus Christ is unknown and unrecognizable as far as human history is concerned. A photographic plate would have showed no image of the resurrected Christ. Barth seemed to deny a real Incarnation in real human history.

But of course, this represents only one side of his thought. Barth was trying to make a distinction between a Jesus known about from the study of history (historically attested) and an actual Jesus who really did walk up and down the land of Palestine as God Incarnate, but whose incarnate life we learn about only by faith. Evangelicals believe that we become convinced that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior only when the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts. But they also believe that after his death, Jesus “gave many convincing proofs that he was alive” (Acts 1:3; cf. 1 Cor. 15).

Barth was neither an angel of light standing heroically in defense of orthodox faith once delivered to the saints, nor was he a sneaky wolf in sheep’s clothing seeking to destroy the true church. Karl Barth is best understood as a man in revolt against nineteenth-century rationalism and the liberal reconstruction of Christianity that dominated the German church at the turn of the last century.

Bit by bit he turned from his optimistic liberalism back to the miracles of Christmas and Easter and to his childhood faith in Jesus Christ as God Incarnate. He gave his life and his first-class mind to the sorting out of the strands of religious thought that surrounded him—nineteenth-century rationalism, liberal neo-Christianity, traditional Reformed piety, and Reformation theology. His monumental opus Church Dogmatics betrays the presence of each of these strands woven into a remarkable whole.

Evangelical Christians find much to disturb them in the theology of Karl Barth. His well-known repudiation of natural revelation and the uneasy relationship between the incarnate Christ and ordinary history are just the beginning. Clearly related to these positions is his total rejection of any reasonable defense of Christian faith. He was a true fideist—that is, he believed that God simply creates faith. No grounds may be adduced either to instigate faith or to confirm it. While evangelicals agree that God creates saving faith, the Bible and the whole history of the evangelical church, including the Reformers Luther and Calvin, repudiated his radical fideism.

Even more serious was Barth’s acceptance of a kind of modal trinity that sets forth the Godhead as a single person (“not three ‘I’s’,” he declares in his Church Dogmatics, but “one I thrice repeated”). Barth never really came to terms with the interpersonal relationship displayed in the Gospels between Jesus the Son and his heavenly Father. And even Rudolf Bultmann chided him for failing to delineate the person of the Holy Spirit.

Most serious of all is Barth’s unorthodox doctrine of salvation. He rejected the penal substitutionary atonement in favor of Christ’s overcoming of sin and evil. We who are sinners identify with this overcoming, therefore sharing in his victory. Coupled with this “Irvingite” theory of the Atonement is Barth’s “hope-so universalism.” He wrote that all humans are predestined to be saved in Christ. Indeed, belief in Christ is not so much the condition for our justification as for our becoming aware of what is true for all. So Barth felt that we may confidently hope for the salvation of all, even including Judas and those who, throughout their entire lives, remained active opponents of the gospel.

Finally, Barth argues against the infallibility of the Bible not only in matters of history and science, but of theology and ethics as well. The Bible is not so much a guide to truth as a guide to what we should say in our witness to the gospel. It is the witness God honors by freely choosing to meet us personally as we listen to the message of Holy Scripture.

Evangelicals may well ask: If Karl Barth departs from an orthodox and biblical faith on all these crucial points, can his theology be of any value to us?

There is a broad stream of solid biblical and Reformation theology in Karl Barth from which evangelicals can greatly profit. His mastery of post-Reformation and especially nineteenth-century theology is superb. His treatises abound with long and excellent excursuses providing careful exegesis of biblical passages relevant to each issue. In spite of his rejection of biblical infallibility, he always takes the biblical text with dreadful seriousness as the authoritative witness to the Word of God. For half a year I sat through his lectures in systematic theology in two seminars. Always his appeal was: “What does the text say?” Evangelicals have much to learn from his constant and faithful appeal to the written text.

In spite of the amazing assiduity with which Karl Barth pursued his theological task, his theology represents a complex of alien and unreconciled strands of thought lying together in uneasy union. This very inconsistent mixture of orthodox and unorthodox elements in Barth made it possible for evangelicals—looking at the orthodox elements—to find so much profit in his thought. Had he been more consistent, he would, like Reinhold Niebuhr, have been only another liberal with a broken heart. Or a twentieth-century successor to Luther and Calvin.

As it was, God used him to break the backbone of liberal neo-Christianity that dominated the theological world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

As my old Hebrew professor Allan A. MacRae taught me: Only the Bible is infallible, but we can learn a lot from fallible and sinful humans.

So thank God for Karl Barth. But read him with your eyes open.

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