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Karl Barth

The Epistle to the Romans

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The Epistle to the Romans

Barth's choice of Romans is crucial to understanding what he was trying to accomplish. He was not simply writing a commentary on one biblical book; he was using Paul's Epistle to the Romans as a kind of theological detonator—a text through which he could challenge the assumptions of modern Protestant theology.

Why Romans?

Barth encountered Romans at a decisive moment. His first Epistle to the Romans appeared in 1919, with a substantially revised second edition in 1922. He was a young Swiss Reformed pastor who had become increasingly dissatisfied with the liberal theology in which he had been trained.

That theology had tended to locate Christianity in things such as:

• human religious experience,
• moral consciousness,
• culture and civilization,
• historical progress,
• and humanity's capacity to know God.

Then came World War I.

The catastrophe profoundly shook Barth's confidence in that theological world. Many of the German theologians whom he had regarded as his teachers and intellectual heroes—including Adolf von Harnack—supported Germany's war effort. Barth came to see this as evidence that liberal theology had become too closely allied with human culture, human achievement, and human self-confidence.

He went back to Paul.

And Romans gave him something he desperately needed: a theology in which God, rather than humanity, is the starting point.

What Barth saw in Romans

Barth found Romans overwhelmingly concerned with the radical difference between God and humanity.

Paul's themes—sin, grace, faith, judgment, righteousness, Christ, resurrection, and reconciliation—could be read by Barth as an assault on the assumption that humanity could somehow climb upward toward God through its own religious or moral capacities.

His emphasis became roughly:

God is not the highest achievement of human thought. God encounters us from beyond our control.

This is why Barth's Romans can feel so startling. He reads Paul not primarily as an ancient religious writer whose ideas we can calmly reconstruct historically, but as someone whose proclamation confronts the reader here and now.

The particularly important contrast

For Barth, Romans overturns the direction of ordinary religious thinking:

Humanity → searches for God

becomes

God → confronts humanity.

That is perhaps the single most important key I would keep in mind as we work through the book.

And it connects directly with what you have been noticing in other thinkers. Barth is reacting against the confidence that reason, morality, culture, or religious experience can provide a secure ladder to God. His answer is not atheism or skepticism; it is almost the opposite:

God is so radically God that we cannot domesticate Him into a product of human consciousness.

Why Romans rather than another Pauline letter?

Romans was particularly suited to this project because it is Paul's most sustained theological treatment of the relationship between:

God → humanity → sin → law → faith → Christ → grace → salvation → transformed life.

It also contains the extraordinarily powerful opening declaration:

“The just shall live by faith.”

For Barth, that became far more than a statement about one doctrine. It pointed toward an entirely different understanding of the relationship between God and human beings.

Romans also allowed Barth to confront several enormous questions simultaneously:

• What is sin?
• Can humanity know God?
• What can reason accomplish?
• What is the law?
• What does faith mean?
• What does Christ accomplish?
• What is grace?
• Why does God judge?
• How does God reconcile humanity to Himself?
• What does genuine Christian existence look like?

The crucial thing to watch in our review

I would therefore make Barth's particular reading of Romans one of the central threads of the review—not merely what Paul says, but:

What does Barth see in Romans that earlier interpreters missed, and how does his reading transform the meaning of Paul's argument?

That distinction will be especially valuable because you already know Romans. We don't need to produce another general summary of Romans. We need to discover Barth's Romans.

And I think that is where the review could become especially interesting: Barth reads Romans as a confrontation between the human attempt to reach God and God's utterly sovereign initiative toward humanity. His commentary is therefore simultaneously an interpretation of Paul and a declaration of war against the theological assumptions of his own age.

The Epistle to the Romans

I’ll treat this as a Barth-centered reading of Romans, not another summary of Paul’s letter. In particular, I’ll keep asking: What does Barth see in Romans that is distinctively Barthian, and why did this reading become such a watershed in twentieth-century theology?

The two editions matter: the first appeared in 1919, while the radically rewritten second edition appeared in 1922 and is the version that became especially influential.

Karl Barth (1886–1968), The Epistle to the Romans (1919; substantially rewritten 1922)

1. Author Bio

Karl Barth (1886–1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian whose work became one of the most consequential theological developments of the twentieth century. He was trained within the liberal Protestant tradition, particularly under figures such as Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), but his experience of World War I and his growing dissatisfaction with liberal theology led him toward a radically different conception of revelation, God, and Scripture.

Two influences are especially important here:

• John Calvin (1509–1564) and the Reformed tradition supplied Barth with a strong emphasis on God's sovereignty and grace.
• Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) profoundly influenced Barth's insistence upon the qualitative distinction between God and humanity—the gulf between time and eternity, human existence and God.

Barth began writing the commentary in 1916, while serving as a pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland. The first edition appeared in 1919; dissatisfied with it, Barth essentially rewrote the work, producing the dramatically different second edition of 1922.

2. Overview / Central Question

(a) Form and length

Prose theological commentary / biblical interpretation.

It is not a conventional verse-by-verse commentary. Barth uses Paul's text as the launching point for an enormous theological meditation on God, humanity, sin, grace, revelation, Christ, faith, history, and salvation.

The work exists in two substantially different forms: 1919 and 1922. The 1922 second edition is the decisive text for understanding Barth's mature interpretation of Romans and his emergence as a major theological voice.

(b) Entire book in ≤10 words

God breaks through human religion, revealing Himself in Christ.

(c) “What's this story really about?”

What happens when God confronts humanity on God's terms?

Barth reads Romans as the announcement that God cannot be reduced to human religious experience, morality, philosophy, culture, or historical progress. Humanity does not climb upward to God through its own achievements; rather, God reveals Himself and acts decisively in Christ.

Sin is therefore deeper than individual wrongdoing: it is humanity's attempt to establish itself independently of God. The Gospel is the shocking reversal in which God's judgment and God's grace converge, opening a reality that humanity could never manufacture for itself.

The central question

Can humanity encounter God, or must God Himself break through the barrier separating humanity from God?

That is, I think, the question to keep in the margin throughout this review.

2A. Plot Summary of the Entire Work

This is an unusual "plot," because Barth is following the argument of Romans while simultaneously using it to tell a much larger story: humanity's attempt to live as though it were self-sufficient, God's judgment upon that attempt, and God's decisive revelation in Jesus Christ.

Romans begins with humanity's predicament. Human beings possess religion, morality, reason, culture, law, and apparently every conceivable means of approaching the divine. Yet none of these provides a bridge to God. Indeed, they can become precisely the means by which humanity hides from God. Barth therefore sees Paul's discussion of sin and judgment not as a catalog of particularly bad human behavior but as an exposure of the fundamental human condition.

Then comes the decisive interruption: Christ. For Barth, the Gospel is not primarily information about a past religious event. In the Gospel, something happens now: God reveals God's righteousness, judgment, and salvation. The resurrection is especially important because it represents the irruption of a new reality into the old world. Barth famously describes this relationship almost geometrically: eternity and time intersect, but they cannot simply be collapsed into one another.

Romans 3–8 then becomes the great movement through justification, faith, grace, freedom, sin, law, and new life. Barth's distinctive emphasis is that salvation cannot be understood as humanity's successful religious accomplishment. It is God's action. Faith itself cannot become a human possession with which one earns God; it is a response to God's prior initiative.

Romans 9–16 then moves outward into God's dealings with Israel, the mystery of election, Christian existence, community, ethics, and the transformation of life. But Barth never allows ethics to become a substitute for revelation. The Christian life is the life that follows from having been confronted by God—not a human program for reaching God.

The trajectory is therefore:

human self-sufficiency → judgment → impossibility → divine revelation → Christ → faith → grace → new existence.

3. Special Instruction for This Book

Because you already know Romans as a biblical text, the primary task is not to re-summarize Paul. The important task is to crystallize Barth's Romans: what he emphasizes, what he radically reinterprets, and why his interpretation became so influential.

4. How This Book Engages the Great Conversation

Barth enters the Great Conversation at a moment when European civilization had placed extraordinary confidence in human reason, culture, morality, science, and progress.

Then came World War I.

Barth saw something profoundly disturbing: the very culture and theology that claimed to represent humanity's moral and intellectual progress could participate in catastrophe. The liberal theological tradition in which he had been trained suddenly appeared to him insufficiently critical of human self-confidence.

Romans supplied Barth with a radically different starting point.

The question becomes:

What if the problem is not that humanity has insufficient knowledge of God, but that humanity continually mistakes its own constructions for God?

That question touches nearly every great philosophical issue:

What is real?
God is more than anything human beings can construct.

How do we know what is real?
Not by mastering God intellectually, but through God's revelation.

How should we live?
As creatures who have received grace rather than as beings who have achieved righteousness.

What is the meaning of the human condition?
Humanity is neither autonomous nor abandoned; it exists under judgment and grace.

What pressure forced Barth to address these questions?

The collapse of confidence in a theology that seemed too willing to identify God with the best achievements of humanity.

Barth's response was essentially:

Start again—with God.

That is the revolutionary impulse behind Romans.

5. Condensed Analysis

What problem is this thinker trying to solve, and what kind of reality must exist for their solution to make sense?

Problem

How can finite, sinful humanity genuinely encounter the transcendent God?

Barth believes that traditional theology repeatedly risks turning God into an object within the human world—a being whom we can investigate, describe, possess, domesticate, or use to support our culture.

The deeper problem is therefore the direction of theology itself.

Do we begin with:

human experience → religion → ideas about God

or with:

God → revelation → human response?

Barth chooses the second.

The assumption underlying his entire project is enormous:

God is genuinely transcendent and cannot be reduced to anything within the human order.

Core Claim

God's revelation, not humanity's religious capacity, is the foundation of theology.

The Gospel announces God's action in Christ.

Faith does not manufacture contact with God. It is the human response to God's prior revelation.

This is why Barth repeatedly emphasizes the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and humanity. The phrase comes from Kierkegaard, but Barth makes it a governing principle of his theology.

God is not simply the highest item on the ladder of existence.

God is on the other side of the ladder altogether.

And yet—this is the astonishing Christian claim—God crosses the gulf.

That is what Barth finds in Christ.

Opponent

Barth's principal opponent is not one individual. It is a whole theological orientation:

liberal Protestant theology when it makes Christianity primarily an expression of human religious consciousness, morality, or culture.

He also resists:

• theological humanism,
• attempts to prove God through human reason,
• religious confidence in human virtue,
• nationalism baptized with Christianity,
• and any attempt to make God serve human cultural purposes.

The strongest objection is obvious:

If God is so radically beyond human knowledge, how can Barth say anything meaningful about God at all?

This becomes one of the deepest questions in Barth's theology.

His answer is revelation.

We cannot climb to God.

But God can speak.

Breakthrough

Barth's breakthrough is his radical reversal of theological direction.

Traditional religious instinct says:

How can I find God?

Barth says:

God has found us.

That sounds simple, but its implications are enormous.

It means theology cannot begin with human psychology and work upward. It must begin with God's revelation and ask what human existence looks like in its light.

This is why Barth's Romans became such a watershed. Modern theology had often tried to make Christianity intellectually respectable by relating it to contemporary culture.

Barth instead asks what happens when Christianity judges the culture.

That reversal was explosive. Contemporary scholarship continues to regard the two editions of Romans as among the most significant works in twentieth-century Christian theology.

Cost

Barth's position carries a substantial cost.

If God is radically transcendent, then human reason loses its sovereignty in theology.

We cannot simply construct a philosophical system and insert God at the top.

There is also a danger of making the gulf between God and humanity so immense that human experience, reason, nature, history, and religious insight seem almost incapable of bearing genuine theological significance.

This is one of the places where your trans-rational lens will be particularly interesting.

Barth is strongly opposed to reducing God to rational constructs. But the question remains:

Does transcending discursive reason open us to deeper reality—or can it become a barrier against the legitimate knowledge that human experience provides?

That is a question worth retaining as we move through the work rather than resolving prematurely.

One Central Passage

One passage that captures Barth's whole orientation comes in his discussion of Romans 1:17:

“A revelation takes place in the Gospel.”

Barth immediately makes this more radical than ordinary religious language. Revelation means that something previously hidden becomes disclosed—but the revelation does not simply become a piece of information that we can possess. The Gospel makes the hearer a contemporary of the revelation.

That is quintessential Barth.

The Gospel is not merely:

“Something happened long ago.”

It is:

“Something is happening now.”

The reader is brought into confrontation with the reality of God.

This is one reason Barth's commentary can feel less like a conventional commentary and more like an existential encounter with the biblical text.

8. Dramatic & Historical Context

1916 — The beginning

Barth begins working on Romans while serving as pastor in Safenwil.

1919 — First edition

The first edition appears, startling the theological world.

1922 — Second edition

Barth radically rewrites the commentary. This is not merely a revised edition; it represents a significant transformation in his theological presentation.

The famous description of the work as having landed “like a bombshell” captures its contemporary effect, though the phrase itself belongs to the subsequent reception history.

The intellectual climate

Barth was reacting against a nineteenth-century theological world heavily influenced by:

• historical criticism,
• liberal Protestantism,
• confidence in culture,
• moral progress,
• religious psychology,
• and the identification of Christianity with European civilization.

World War I made that confidence much harder for Barth to sustain.

The result was what became associated with dialectical theology: theology organized around the dramatic difference between God and humanity, revelation and human religion, grace and achievement, eternity and time.

9. Sections Overview Only

The commentary follows the structure of Romans rather than imposing an independent systematic arrangement.

The important warning is that Barth's organization follows Romans, but his controlling question is theological rather than merely exegetical.

11. Vital Glossary

Dialectical theology — Theology emphasizing the decisive contrast between God and humanity, revelation and human knowledge, grace and human achievement.

Infinite qualitative distinction — The fundamental difference between God and humanity; God is not merely a greater version of something within creation.

Revelation — God's self-disclosure; knowledge of God is possible because God makes Himself known.

Righteousness of God — For Barth, not merely a divine attribute but God's decisive action and judgment revealed in Christ.

Justification — God's gracious declaration that the sinner is righteous; not a human achievement.

Faith — Human response to God's revelation and grace, rather than an independent human accomplishment.

Paradox — A situation in which theological truth cannot be reduced to ordinary human categories without distortion.

Religion — One of Barth's most provocative concepts: humanity's attempt to reach or comprehend God can itself become an obstacle to genuine revelation.

The Gospel — God's saving revelation in Christ.

Election — God's sovereign determination of grace; a major theme that will become even more developed in Barth's later theology.

12. Deeper Significance / Strategic Themes

1. Barth relocates the center of theology

The center is not:

humanity thinking about God.

It is:

God revealing Himself to humanity.

That is the single most important conceptual shift.

2. Sin becomes epistemological as well as moral

This is particularly interesting.

Sin is not merely doing bad things.

It also involves misperceiving reality—attempting to understand ourselves and the world without reference to God.

3. Christ becomes the intersection of eternity and history

For Barth, Christ is not simply the most impressive religious personality in history.

Christ represents the point at which God's reality intersects the human world.

This is why Barth's interpretation of the Resurrection is so important. Later scholarship identifies the Easter event as one of the central themes running through the commentary.

4. Barth attacks religious possession

There is something almost mystical in this.

The moment we say:

“I have God figured out.”

Barth wants us to become suspicious.

God remains God.

The revelation is real, but the mystery is not thereby eliminated.

14. “First Day of History” Moment

I would mark one major conceptual invention—not invention of a doctrine, but a new theological configuration:

Christian theology begins again with the absolute initiative of God rather than with human religious consciousness.

The individual ingredients were not new. Scripture, Augustine, Calvin, Kierkegaard, and others had emphasized many of them.

What was historically novel was Barth's forceful reassembly of them in response to modernity.

This helped launch a major twentieth-century theological movement and decisively redirected Protestant theology away from some of the assumptions of nineteenth-century liberalism.

16. Reference Bank — Selected Quotations

I would keep this relatively small for this particular book.

“A revelation takes place in the Gospel.” — Barth, commenting on Romans 1:17.

“The Resurrection is the revelation.” — Barth.

“God chooses to come to man, not man to God.” — Barth.

The last formulation is especially useful as a memory hook, because it compresses much of Barth's project into one reversal.

17. Core Concept / Mental Anchor

“God comes down; humanity does not climb up.”

Or, even more compactly:

God → revelation → Christ → faith

That is Barth's Romans in miniature.

18. Famous Words

The most important Barthian phrase associated with this work is:

“the infinite qualitative distinction”

It names the unbridgeable difference between God and humanity.

Another memorable image from Barth's Romans is his description of the relation between the new divine reality and the old human world as resembling a tangent touching a circle—a striking image for God's intersection with history without reducing eternity to history.

And perhaps the most useful famous formulation for your purposes is:

“God chooses to come to man, not man to God.”

That sentence may be the best single mental key to Barth's entire commentary.

Bottom line

I think this is one of the books in your project where Section 10 deserves to be activated. Not because we need to dissect Barth verse by verse—we absolutely do not—but because Romans is important enough, and Barth's interpretation distinctive enough, that two or three direct encounters with the text could substantially sharpen the conceptual framework.

The three places I would tentatively flag are Romans 1:17 (revelation/Gospel), Romans 3 (righteousness/justification), and Romans 8 (the new reality in Christ and the Spirit). Those three would give us a very good test of whether the formulation above—“God comes down; humanity does not climb up”—really captures Barth, or whether we need to refine it after closer contact with his actual argument.

For this book I would activate Section 10, and I would use the full allowance of three targeted passages. Barth's Romans is important enough that a purely panoramic review risks making his theology sound simpler than it actually is. These three passages give us the architecture:

1. Romans 1:17 — Revelation and the Gospel
2. Romans 3:21–31 — Righteousness and justification
3. Romans 8 — Resurrection, Spirit, and the new reality

I would also make one correction to the earlier review: the phrase “God comes down; humanity does not climb up” is a good interpretive shorthand, but it should not be treated as a direct Barth quotation. More importantly, the passages below let us test whether that shorthand really captures him.

10. Targeted Engagement — Passage 1

Romans 1:17 — “The Revelation of God”

Central question

What does it mean for God's righteousness to be “revealed” rather than discovered by humanity?

Paul's famous statement is:

“For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.”

Barth's emphasis falls heavily on revealed.

Paraphrased Summary

For Barth, the Gospel does not merely tell us about a righteousness that already lies available for human inspection. Something occurs in the Gospel: God discloses Himself. This means that theology cannot begin by examining human religious consciousness and reasoning upward toward God. The Gospel represents an intrusion of another reality into the human situation. God's righteousness is therefore not primarily a quality that human beings can acquire through moral improvement. It is God's own reality breaking into human existence. Faith is the human response to that revelation, not the human invention of it.

Main Claim / Purpose

Barth is establishing the epistemological foundation of his entire theology:

We know God because God reveals God.

This is much stronger than saying that revelation is simply one source of religious information.

For Barth, revelation is God's active presence.

That distinction is fundamental. Contemporary scholarship likewise identifies revelation as a central organizing doctrine in Barth's theology and notes that he connects revelation closely with Christology, Scripture, proclamation, and the knowledge of God.

One tension or question

Here is the question I think we should carry forward:

If God must reveal Himself before we can know Him, what role remains for ordinary human reason and experience?

This is not a trivial objection. It is one of the places where Barth's theology will need to be examined carefully through your trans-rational framework.

Conceptual Note

The crucial word is event.

Barth's Gospel is not merely:

information about God

but:

God's self-disclosure.

That is a major reason his Romans feels so different from an ordinary commentary.

10. Targeted Engagement — Passage 2

Romans 3:21–31 — “The Righteousness of God”

Central question

Is righteousness something humanity achieves, or something God gives?

Paul reaches the great turning point:

“But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested.”

Paraphrased Summary

Barth sees Romans 3 as the place where human religious and moral striving reaches its limit. The law cannot provide the bridge to God because humanity's fundamental problem is deeper than insufficient moral performance. Then comes the astonishing “But now.” God's righteousness appears independently of human achievement. Justification is therefore grace rather than accomplishment. Faith does not constitute a kind of spiritual merit by which we earn God's favor; it is the response through which we receive what God has done. The result is the destruction of boasting: no human being can claim to have manufactured his or her own righteousness.

Main Claim / Purpose

The important Barthian move is to shift the center of gravity from:

What can humanity do for God?

to:

What has God done for humanity?

This is why justification is so important to Barth. It is not merely one Christian doctrine among others; it dramatizes the fundamental structure of the relationship between God and humanity.

God's righteousness is God's initiative.

One tension or question

There is an important question here:

Does Barth's emphasis on divine initiative leave enough room for genuine human participation?

Barth certainly does not want to make human beings robots. But he is so determined to prevent grace from becoming a human achievement that we need to watch carefully how he understands faith, freedom, response, and transformation.

Conceptual Note

I would put a large mental bracket around Paul's words:

“But now.”

That is Barth's drama.

Humanity reaches the end of its resources.

But now—God acts.

10. Targeted Engagement — Passage 3

Romans 8 — “The New Reality”

Central question

What happens to human existence when God's new reality enters it?

Romans 8 is where Barth's theology becomes particularly expansive. Paul moves from condemnation and justification toward Spirit, freedom, hope, suffering, resurrection, and the future.

Paraphrased Summary

Barth does not understand Christian salvation merely as a legal change in humanity's status. Romans 8 opens onto a radically new existence. The Spirit represents God's presence operating within human life, while resurrection establishes the decisive horizon toward which creation is moving. Yet the Christian does not escape ordinary existence: suffering, weakness, mortality, and uncertainty remain. The difference is that they no longer have the final word. Christian hope is therefore not optimism about historical progress. It is confidence grounded in God's action and God's future. Human existence becomes oriented toward something that it cannot produce but can receive and participate in.

Main Claim / Purpose

This passage prevents us from reducing Barth to:

“God is infinitely beyond us, therefore humanity can do nothing.”

That would be too simple.

Barth's transcendence is ultimately creative and redemptive.

The God who is beyond humanity is also the God who enters humanity's situation and transforms its meaning.

This is where the earlier shorthand needs refinement:

God does not merely come down; God's coming down creates a new possibility for humanity.

One tension or question

The important question becomes:

How does God's transcendent action become an actual transformation of human existence?

This is precisely where Barth's doctrine of the Spirit becomes important.

Conceptual Note

Romans 8 supplies the positive counterpart to the first two passages.

Romans 1:

God reveals.

Romans 3:

God justifies.

Romans 8:

God transforms and brings creation toward its fulfillment.

That gives us a much more complete picture of Barth.

What These Three Passages Reveal About “Barth's Romans”

This is the part I think is particularly valuable for your project.

Our initial formulation was:

God comes down; humanity does not climb up.

After examining the three key passages, I would upgrade it:

God reveals → God justifies → God transforms.

Or, in more existential language:

Humanity cannot reach God; God reveals Himself, reconciles humanity, and opens a new existence.

That is considerably more precise.

And it also reveals something I think is easy to miss if one simply reads summaries of Barth: his theology is not fundamentally negative.

He is not merely saying:

• reason cannot reach God,
• religion cannot reach God,
• morality cannot reach God,
• culture cannot reach God.

Those are the negative preparations.

His real claim is positive:

God has acted.

And therefore the whole human situation must be reconsidered.

One further passage I would flag—but not fully activate

Romans 9–11, especially Barth's treatment of election, deserves a bookmark rather than a fourth Section 10 engagement.

That is because election eventually becomes one of the most distinctive and controversial features of Barth's mature theology. If we later decide to study Church Dogmatics, this Romans material will become extremely important background.

So I would stop Section 10 here at three passages, as your format intends.

The conceptual harvest from this deeper look is unusually good:

Romans 1 — Revelation
Romans 3 — Justification
Romans 8 — New existence

Reveal → reconcile → transform.

That is, I think, a much stronger mental anchor for Barth's Romans than the initial “God comes down” formulation alone.

Ed: Reacting to his later fame as a writer, Barth once commented, “Thank God I am not a Barthian”. He had built his work upon acting individualistically in terms of interpretation, and now others were deifying the one who exalted following one’s own course.

Chat: I think your observation gets at something deeply ironic in Barth's legacy.

Barth's remark, “Thank God I am not a Barthian,” is almost a perfect expression of his resistance to turning theology into a school of discipleship. The irony is that a thinker who so strongly emphasized God's freedom and sovereignty could himself become an authority whom people treated as though he had supplied a finished theological system.

His more fundamental principle was: do not allow any human authority—including Barth himself—to become a substitute for the reality to which theology points. He wanted the theologian continually to be confronted by God, Scripture, and Christ rather than safely installed inside a Barthian system.

That makes the irony particularly rich:

Barth opposed the human tendency to turn revelation into possession—and his followers risked turning Barth's interpretation of revelation into a possession.

There is almost a second-order version of Barth's critique here.

Barth: Don't confuse theology with God.
Barthians: Here is Barth's theology.
Barth: Thank God I am not a Barthian.

And this fits beautifully with the passage we just examined. If Barth's deepest point is that God cannot be domesticated by human thought, then Barth himself cannot legitimately be domesticated into an intellectual brand.

I'd preserve your insight in the review, perhaps under Deeper Significance, because it tells us something important about the difference between a thinker and a school. A genuinely independent thinker can become the founder of an orthodoxy precisely by being imitated—sometimes in a way that contradicts the spirit of his own work.

Ed: I’ve written extensively on the subject of the humanity of Jesus, which is to say, he was not a “god”. This acknowledged, I find myself substantially drawn, in principle, to the theology of Barth. We do not climb up to God, but he speaks through us. Moreover, God reveals himself to humanity, a virtual “intrusion of another reality into the human situation.”

I gravitate toward the model offered, not by the canonical Gospels but that of Thomas, wherein the Jesus of that gospel instructs that each of us is a light of the world, each of us harbors the hidden “light” of God. As such, we all share in the mission of the Christ, each enlightened person – that is, each one who comes to realize what he or she is and the light that is secreted within.

All this, I would say, substantially buttresses Barth’s contention that God reveals himself in us, and does so “now”.

I was moved by Barth’s realization that his old professors, for all of their fine words on theology, were so shallow as to support an oppressive military machine. This was the tipping point for Barth as it became painfully evident that the old ways of thinking about God and the Bible did not translate into changed lives in a practical way.

And so, it seems, I might also call myself a Barthian.

Chat: I think there is a real and fruitful convergence here.