Karl Barth

Life

Barth was born in 1886 in Basel, Switzerland. His father, Fritz Barth, was a Reformed pastor and theologian; his mother was Anna Sartorius. He studied theology in Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg, where he learned from leading liberal theology scholars of the day such as Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann. From 1911 to 1921 he served as pastor in Safenwil, a small industrial town in Switzerland. Although he held no doctorate, he went on to become a professor at the universities of Göttingen (1921), Münster (1925), and Bonn (1930). Because of his opposition to Nazism, the Nazi authorities removed him from his professorship in 1934. He then moved to the University of Basel in his hometown, where he taught until his retirement in 1962. He died in Basel in 1968.

Ministry and Work

• The Epistle to the Romans: Barth wrote this commentary while serving as pastor in Safenwil during the First World War and first published it in 1919. The work is regarded as a break with nineteenth-century liberal theology, which held that the kingdom of God could be built through human effort. It emphasized that God is the "wholly other," qualitatively different from humanity. A substantially revised second edition appeared a few years later. The movement that began with this book is known as "dialectical theology" or "neo-orthodoxy" (a movement that criticized liberalism and reinterpreted Reformation theology).
• The Barmen Declaration: This confession of faith was issued in 1934 by the Confessing Church in Germany, which resisted the Nazis. Barth was its principal author, though it also reflected the input of Lutheran theologians. It confessed that the church has no other lord than Jesus Christ and rejected the state's attempt to control the church.
• Church Dogmatics: Dogmatics is the discipline that systematically sets forth the teaching of the church. Barth worked on this multivolume work for the rest of his life but never completed it. Starting from the proposition "God speaks," he developed a theology centered on the Word of God and on Jesus Christ.

Influence on the Korean Church

Barth is one of the most extensively studied foreign theologians in Korean theological scholarship. At the same time, he is regarded as one of the most controversial theologians in the Korean church. In a 2009 article in Theological Thought, a journal of Hanshin University, Kim Young-kwan observed that Barth's theology was received in Europe as thoroughly conservative but in North America as liberal because of his understanding of revelation and inspiration. In Korea, he argued, Barth has been understood as a theologian who has repeatedly sparked doctrinal disputes among denominations and theologians. The article also examines how Barth's Christocentric theology relates to Korean theological movements such as Minjung theology. Professor Park Man of Busan Presbyterian University has argued that Barth's view—that one cannot speak of God apart from the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture—offers lessons for those parts of the Korean church that have leaned toward a blessing-seeking faith (a faith centered on praying for blessings).

Assessment

Supporters regard Barth as the leading Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. They credit him with moving beyond the optimism of liberal theology and with defending the church's confession of faith against the Nazis. Conservative Reformed theologians in Korea, by contrast, take issue with his views of revelation and Scripture. From the standpoint of biblical inerrancy, they see this issue as bearing on the very starting point of theology. His understanding of salvation is also disputed. Critics argue that Barth ultimately leans toward universalism, the belief that all people will be saved. Professor Yoo Tae-hwa of the Baekseok University Graduate School of Theology has expressed concern that Barth extends the reconciliation accomplished in Christ so broadly that it could lead to universalism. Others respond that the question depends on how one interprets Barth's doctrine of reconciliation.