Religion: Brother, Where Art Thou?

To nobody’s surprise, U.S. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s attack on Swiss Theologian Karl Barth for his speech before the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam (TIME, Nov. 8) got a prompt reply. Barth, Niebuhr had said, was preaching a dangerous doctrine, which, by concentrating on the Kingdom of God, made no provision for the tragic, practical decisions Christian men and Christian nations must make on the earthly plane. Earth’s answer, published in the British fortnightly Christian News-Letter under the heading: “A Preliminary Reply to Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr,” struck a sharp issue.

Strike in the Dark. Niebuhr, says Barth, reminds him of a player in “a curious game called ‘Brother, where art thou?’ . . . who with eyes blindfolded [strikes] out wildly into the dark in a direction in which the other . . . is in all probability not to be found . . . Niebuhr’s contribution is in my view a shattering example of a blow in the dark, such as I have described. The only fundamental answer I can give him is that I do not find myself where . . . I appear to him to be, and where he had delivered such lusty blows . . . When I read his exposition, I cannot help recalling the concave mirror in which I recently saw my reflection in the Musee Crevin in Paris and did not know whether to laugh or cry . . .

“And now may I add . . . surprising as it may seem, that I experienced at Amsterdam the opposition between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘continental’ theology at a quite different point from that which Niebuhr has raised . . . To put it quite simply, it was the different attitude to the Bible, from which we each take our start . . . I was struck by finding in our Anglo-Saxon friends a remarkable [tendency] . . . to theologise on their own account, that is to say, without asking on what biblical grounds one put forward this or that professedly ‘Christian’ view. They would quote the Bible according to choice . . . according as it appeared to them to strengthen their own view, and without feeling any need to ask whether the words quoted really have in their context the meaning attributed to them.”

Only Whisper It. This “irresponsible attitude” toward the Bible, suggests Earth, explains the absence of “a whole dimension” in “Anglo-Saxon” thinking. At

Amsterdam, he found his opponents well aware of two dimensions—”the contrasts of good and evil, freedom and necessity, love and self-centredness, spirit and matter, person and mechanism, progress and stagnation—and in this sense, God and the world or God and man. Who would deny that these are important categories? I am not unaware that . . . within this framework . . . [is] more profound thinking . . . than there was a decade ago.

“But I am chilled by this framework . . . I am encouraged, however, by the fact that it is precisely the Bible that knows not only these two dimensions but also a third that is decisive—the word of God, the Holy Spirit, God’s free choice, God’s grace and judgment, the Creation, the Reconciliation, the Kingdom, the Sanctification, the Congregation, and all these not as principles to be interpreted in the same sense as the first two dimensions but as the indication of events, of concrete, once-for-all, unique divine actions, of the majestic mysteries of God that cannot be resolved into any pragmatism.

“[‘Anglo-Saxon’ theology] is, so far as I can see and understand, in principle to a remarkable degree without mystery, and for this reason I have not been able up to now—I hardly venture to say this, and can only whisper it—to find it really interesting. My own explanation of this lack of mystery is that it has not yet seen the third dimension in the Bible . . .

“What after all have I done in this paper? Brother, where art thou? . . .”