Religion: Credo

Switzerland’s Karl Earth, founder of the potent “neo-orthodox” movement in modern Protestantism, has so far completed six massive volumes of his Kirch-liche Dogmatik, which may turn out to be the most imposing theological work of modern times. But Calvinist Barth is more than a theologian’s theologian; he can also write brilliantly for laymen. Readers who are not frightened away by the dry crackle of its title will find Christian challenge and mental stimulus in a new Barth book published last week, Dogmatics in Outline (Philosophical Library; $3.75).

Law & Love. The book is a series of lectures delivered under dramatic conditions. In 1934, as professor of systematic theology at Germany’s University of Bonn, Barth was one of the first academicians to defy Hitler by refusing to take the oath of loyalty. As a result, he was barred from Germany, where most of his teaching and preaching had been carried on. In the summer of 1946, when Bonn’s war-ruined university was reestablishing itself in a half-blasted castle, Theologian Barth was invited to return. Lecturing at 7 o’clock in the morning, “after we had sung a psalm or a hymn to cheer us up,” competing with the racket of rubble-clearing machinery outside his classroom, Barth spoke, without notes, on the Apostles’ Creed. The 24 lectures that resulted deal, phrase by phrase, and in some instances word by word, with this oldest confession of the Church.*

Beginning with the words, “I believe. . .,” Barth devotes three lectures to the subject of Faith. “Christian faith,” he says, “is the illumination of reason in which men become free to live in the truth of Jesus Christ and thereby to become sure also of the meaning of their own existence and of the ground and goal of all that happens.”

God, according to Barth, “is He who according to Holy Scripture exists, lives, acts, makes Himself known to us in the work of His free love …” But it is dangerous to think of God as nothing but unlimited power. “Perhaps you recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called Him ‘the Almighty.’ . . . Holy Scripture never speaks of God’s power, its manifestations and its victories, in separation from the concept of law.” This law is to be found in God as Father—”the God who is in Himself love.”

Behind God’s Back. The idea of God as Creator, says Barth, is not, as generally thought, an easily accepted article of the Creed on which “Christians, Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers … to some extent stand together.” God as Creator is a mystery as difficult of comprehension as the belief that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin. “The existence of the creature alongside God is the great puzzle and miracle … It is the genuine question about existence, which is essentially and fundamentally distinguished from the question which rests upon error, ‘Is there a God?’ That there is a world is the most unheard-of thing, the miracle of the grace of God.”

Creation, writes Barth, is grace. All created things are kept from a state of nothingness only by God. But the “whole realm we term evil—death, sin, the Devil and hell—is not God’s creation, but rather what was excluded by God’s creation, that to which God has said ‘No.’ And if there is a reality of evil, it can only be the reality of this excluded and repudiated thing, the reality behind God’s back, which He passed over when He made the world and made it good.” Thus, evil is nothingness; and the man who wants to sin—”that is, to ‘sunder’ himself from God and from himself”—is doomed by, his disobedience to fall into this uncreated nothing.

Fresh Spirit. The Church, says Barth, will die and petrify if it does not proclaim the Good News. Christians have been told to “Go out and preach the Gospel!” The injunction is not ” ‘Go and celebrate services!’ ‘Go and edify yourselves with the sermon!’ ‘Go and celebrate the Sacraments!’ ‘Go and present yourselves in a liturgy, which perhaps repeats the heavenly liturgy!’ ‘Go and devise a theology which may gloriously unfold like the Summa of St. Thomas!’ Of course, there is nothing to forbid all this; there may exist very good cause to do it all; but nothing, nothing at all for its own sake. In it all, the one thing must prevail: ‘Proclaim the Gospel to every creature!’ . . .

“Where the Church is living, it must ask itself whether it is serving this commission or whether it is a purpose in itself? If the second is the case, then as a rule it begins to smack of the ‘sacred,’ to affect piety, to play the priest and to mumble. Anyone with a keen nose will smell it and find it dreadful! Christianity is not ‘sacred’; rather, there breathes in it the fresh air of the Spirit. Otherwise it is not Christianity. For it is an out & out ‘worldly’ thing, open to all humanity: ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.’ “

*Formulated in its original Greek version some time before the year 250.