Background
Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, to Johann Friedrich "Fritz" Barth, a theology professor and pastor who would greatly influence his son's life, and Anna Katharina (Sartorius) Barth.
( Prayer is one of the central activities of Christian li...)
Prayer is one of the central activities of Christian life. This anniversary edition of Karl Barth's lectures on the Lord's Prayer, along with supplementary essays by three Barth scholars, introduces us to what he had to say about this important Christian practice. For Barth, the ultimate aim of all theology is worship, and here he mines the theological and spiritual wisdom of Luther, Calvin, and the Heidelberg Catechism, urging us to participate in the work of God through prayer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0664224210/?tag=2022091-20
( Karl Barth's monumental work, Church Dogmatics, is reco...)
Karl Barth's monumental work, Church Dogmatics, is recognized as a landmark in Protestant theology--perhaps the most important work of this century. However, the size range of its fourteen volumes has meant that its content and significance may not be so widely known or appreciated as it deserves. In this concise introduction, Helmut Gollwitzer provides a selection of some of the most important passages from Church Dogmatics to help the busy student explore the heart of the great work; or perhaps to direct a student to parts of the Dogmatics of greatest interest.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0664255507/?tag=2022091-20
( Karl Barth is generally regared as the greatest Protest...)
Karl Barth is generally regared as the greatest Protestant thinker of modern times. The three essays in this book, "The Humanity of God," "Evangelical Theology in the 19th Century," and "The Gift of Freedom," show how Barth's later work moved beyond his revolt against the theology dominant in the first decades of the twentieth century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804206120/?tag=2022091-20
( In this concise presentation of evangelical theology --...)
In this concise presentation of evangelical theology -- the theology that first received expression in the New Testament writings and was later rediscovered by the Reformation--Barth discusses the place of theology, theological existence, the threat to theology, and theological work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802818196/?tag=2022091-20
( Named one of Church Times 's Best Christian Books This...)
Named one of Church Times 's Best Christian Books This volume provides a much-needed English translation of the sixth edition of what is considered the fundamental text for fully understanding Barthianism. Barth--who remains a powerful influence on European and American theology--argues that the modern Christian preacher and theologian face the same basic problems that confronted Paul. Assessing the whole Protestant argument in relation to modern attitudes and problems, he focuses on topics such as Biblical exegesis; the interrelationship between theology, the Church, and religious experience; the relevance of the truth of the Bible to culture; and what preachers should preach.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195002946/?tag=2022091-20
Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, to Johann Friedrich "Fritz" Barth, a theology professor and pastor who would greatly influence his son's life, and Anna Katharina (Sartorius) Barth.
From 1904 to 1909, Barth studied theology in Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. He studied under Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann and was attracted to the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Faced with the task of preaching each week, Barth turned with fresh eyes to the Bible and discovered there what he was to call a "strange new world. " In 1919 his explosive Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans catapulted the unknown pastor into international theological prominence. Strongly influenced by the recently discovered 19th-century religious thinker Kierkegaard, Romans stressed the "infinite qualitative difference" between God and man. According to the Bible's own testimony, said Barth, revelation is entirely the gracious self-disclosure of the utterly transcendent and otherwise hidden God in the person of Jesus Christ. This revelation is the crisis or judgment of all human activities, including religion. In this work Barth strongly opposed liberal theology's blurring of the divine-human distinction and the subordination of Christian faith and ethics to the passing standard of each historical period.
Romans brought Barth an invitation to become professor of reformed theology at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he remained from 1921 to 1925. This post was followed by professorships at the universities of Münster (1925-1930) and Bonn (1930-1935). During this period Barth's understanding of the nature and method of Christian theological reflection developed into the mature position of his monumental Church Dogmatics. The first volume of the work appeared in 1932, and at Barth's death in 1968 it had grown to 13 volumes and was the most comprehensive exposition of theology since St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologica. Leading up to this main work were writings such as the sermons and lectures included in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1924) and Theology and Church (1928); and Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum (1931), a study of the great 11th-century theologian whose method of "faith seeking understanding" had a decisive influence on the direction of Barth's developed theology.
In these early years the theological movement which Barth had begun, variously called "theology of the Word, " "theology of crisis, " "dialectical theology, " "Neo-Reformation theology, " and "neo-orthodoxy, " attracted in varying degrees men who, with him, became the leading Protestant theologians of this century. Among them were Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, and Friedrich Gogarten.
At Bonn, Barth assumed leadership of those Protestants in Germany who opposed the rising National Socialist or Nazi party. After Hitler came to power, Barth served as the chief drafter of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church's Barmen Declaration (1934), a confession of faith vigorously repudiating Nazi ideology on the basis of the gospel. The following year Barth was expelled from Germany. He returned to his native Basel and was a professor of theology at the university there until his retirement in 1962.
Barth's numerous writings after 1931, besides the successive volumes of Church Dogmatics, include Credo (1935), which comments on the Apostles' Creed; The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1938), which is a good example of Barth's important recovery of the vital theological insights of the Protestant Reformation; Dogmatics in Outline (1947), which summarizes his theology; Against the Stream (1954), which includes some controversial essays on the cold war, describing communism in theological terms as far different from Nazism; and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (1963), which contains the lectures he gave in the United States during his only visit, in 1962.
A lecture Barth delivered in 1956 entitled "The Humanity of God" (published in The Humanity of God [1960]) best describes the development which took place in his theology. He had begun, he said, with the "otherness" of God as the biblical theme which most needed attention; but the direction of his theological was toward a deepening concentration on Jesus Christ as the full revelation of God and therefore the sole object of theological thinking. In this light Barth had come to see more and more fully that the central theme of Scripture is the "togetherness" of the sovereign God and creaturely man in Christ—God's "humanity" in the Incarnation.
Barth's theological "revolution" was a dynamic, nonfundamentalistic recovery of the biblical message as the proclamation of the unique self-disclosure of God to man in Jesus Christ. He believed that Christian theology ought always to derive its entire thinking on God, man, sin, ethics, and society from what can actually be seen in Jesus as witnessed by the Old and New Testaments rather than from sources independent of this revelation. His voluminous writings explore the inexhaustibly fruitful implications of his total Christ-centeredness.
He died on December 9, 1968.
The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary was established in 1997. It is dedicated to supporting scholarship related to his work and contains nearly all of his works in English and German.
( In this concise presentation of evangelical theology --...)
( Named one of Church Times 's Best Christian Books This...)
( Karl Barth's monumental work, Church Dogmatics, is reco...)
( Karl Barth is generally regared as the greatest Protest...)
( Prayer is one of the central activities of Christian li...)
Quotations:
"I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally. "
"To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world. "
"Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way. "
"When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers. "
"We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard. "
He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.
Quotes from others about the person
Thomas Oden said of him: "Barth looked like a casting agency's idea of a German professor, with his shock of wavy gray hair, high forehead and cheekbones, craggy eyebrows. His owlish eyes peered occasionally over his horn-rimmed glasses, which often sat at the tip of his nose. He was known for his geniality, modesty, patience and sympathy, and above all a pixyish sense of humor. "
"Barth's dedication to the sole authority and power of the Word of God was illustrated for us … while we were in Basel. Barth was engaged in a dispute over the stained glass windows in the Basel Münster. The windows had been removed during World War II for fear they would be destroyed by bombs, and Barth was resisting the attempt to restore them to the church. His contention was that the church did not need portrayals of the gospel story given by stained glass windows. The gospel came to the church only through the Word proclaimed. … the incident was typical of Barth's sole dedication to the Word. "
Elizabeth Achtemeier
"Barth accepts and welcomes scholarly criticism of the Bible, even when it shows the Scriptures to be full of errors and inconsistencies. He does not consider the Bible infallible, and he deplores orthodox Protestants who make it into "a paper Pope. " Nevertheless, the Bible testifies to God's Word, which is revealed to man through human speech. The words that the Biblical writers use may not always be the appropriate ones, but they must be accepted as words elected by God. "
"Witness to an Ancient Truth, TIME magazine (20 April 1962).
Barth's chief avocation was a passionate love of Mozart's music.
In 1913, Karl Barth married Nelly Hoffmann, a talented violinist. They had a daughter and four sons, one of whom was the New Testament scholar Markus Barth.
He was a Swiss scholar of theology.
