Concept

Karl Barth

Overview

Karl Barth (; Swiss Standard German: [bart]; (1886-05-10)10 May 1886 – (1968-12-10)10 December 1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship (except for a single phrase) of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics (published between 1932 and 1967). Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.

Like many Protestant theologians of his generation, Barth was educated in a liberal theology influenced by Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Schleiermacher and others. His pastoral career began in the rural Swiss town of Safenwil, where he was known as the "Red Pastor from Safenwil". There he became increasingly disillusioned with the liberal Christianity in which he had been trained. This led him to write the first edition of his The Epistle to the Romans (a.k.a. Romans I), published in 1919, in which he resolved to read the New Testament differently.

Barth began to gain substantial worldwide acclaim with the publication in 1921 of the second edition of his commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, in which he openly broke from liberal theology.

He influenced many significant theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who supported the Confessing Church, and Jürgen Moltmann, Helmut Gollwitzer, James H. Cone, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Thomas F. Torrance, Hans Küng, and also Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, and novelists such as Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Miklós Szentkuthy.

Among many other areas, Barth has also had a profound influence on modern Christian ethics, influencing the work of ethicists such as Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Jacques Ellul and Oliver O'Donovan.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

Whereupon the good monk drinks the health of the dame Elizabeth, wiping his eyes the while. With mundane reflections of this sort Luther never started on his journey, but rather as a pious monk who had penetrated to their depths the religious conceptions and convictions of Augustine, another source altogether. Subject to precisely similar defects are the pedagogical references to that period which occur in the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
The author is tied to Karl Barth in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
As Fichte in modern times has especially and with justice insisted, the theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object and there stops, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute object however, God does…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
The author is tied to Karl Barth in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Nor at first did it go far in furthering tolerance or respect for divergency of moral and religious convictions. But practically it did tend to disintegration of established institutions. By multiplying sects and churches it encouraged at least a negative toleration of the right of individuals to judge ultimate matters for themselves. In time, there developed a formulated belief in the sacredness of individual…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Close in meaning to Karl Barth; the term itself is not named.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Karl Barth

Overview

Possible passages

Philosophers who discussed Karl Barth

Related ideas

Place in the tradition