BARTH, KARL

(1886-1968)

theologian; his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1919) led fellow theologians to compare him with Martin Luther (Pope Pius XII deemed him the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas). Born in Basel to a professor of church history, he began studies at Berlin* with Adolf von Harnack* and then pursued theology at Marburg under Wilhelm Hermann and Hermann Cohen. During 1911-1921, while pastoring an industrial parish in Switzerland, he became acutely aware of social injustice. Ever wres-tling with the polarities between God and man, he labored to distinguish his social concern from his Christianity; when he finally joined the SPD in 1931, he claimed that he was embracing the Republic, not socialism.

Appointed to Gottingen's theological faculty in 1921, Barth went to Münster in 1925 and to Bonn in 1930.Already ill at ease as a student with the relativism and historicism practiced within Protestantism, he saw no paradox in his belief in the absolute "otherness" of God (a Kierkegaardian concept) and his passion over the world's social misery; indeed, he believed that the two intersected in the person of Jesus, the supreme medium between God and humanity. Voicing concern over contemporary theology, he was wary of modern pretensions to solve society's problems. A prophetic voice in the tradition of Calvin, he called the church back to the Bible and its living foundation, Christ. His central mes-sage, which gained wide acceptance, was fundamental to his Romans commen-tary—a critique of idealism, romanticism, and religious socialism.Church Dogmatics(1932-1959), which occupied him for thirty years, partially recon-ciled him with institutional Christianity.

Barth was in the vanguard of the Protestant* struggle against Nazism. His vocal criticism of Hitler's* treatment of Jews* overlapped with his Christ-centered perspective on life; it found substance in the 1934Barman Declaration, a document largely written by Barth and central to theKirchenkampfagainst the effort to control German Christianity. Although he was deprived in 1935 of his chair at Bonn, his Christian stand gained him wide prestige. He returned to Switzerland and taught systematic theology at Basel until 1962.