The Swiss Prophet
The Significance of Karl Barth. By John MeConnachie. (Hodder and Stoughton. 6s.) The Theology of Karl Barth : A Short Introduction. By J. Arundel. (Chapman. 28.) Christ our Brother. By Karl Adam. (Sheed and Ward. 7s. 6d.)
A CURIOUS and significant revolution, not yet completed, has been taking place in the theological thought of Europe during the present century. Its importance is now beginning to be fully appreciated by students of religion in this country ; but not yet perhaps by the rank and file.. Partly as a result of Biblical criticism, partly in harmony with the prevailing trend to,naturalism, Liberal Protestant scholarship had tended more and more to a humanitarian and this-world view of Christian- ity. The ",historic Jesus " was an ethically perfect rather than a supernaturally significant figure. Man ascended towards a knowledge of God : God did not break in upon man. The mira- culous was at a discount : religious values were subjective. Humanity and its needs, were in the foreground. The trans- cendental note, the primacy of the mysterious, the stern demand, the unchanging standards of the spiritual life were forgotten. The Reformed Churches of the Continent, in so far as they were living at all, had committed themselves to " the slippery slope that ends in Humanism." This anthropocentric emphasis and consequent impoverishment of religion brought its own revenge. In 1917 Rudolf Otto published Das Heilige ; in the following year Karl Barth's Der Romerhrief fell, as Professor Adam has said, like a bomb on the playground of the theologians." Otto's teaching is now familiar to English students of religion. As to Karl Barth, though his chief works remain untranslated, several useful studies of his doctrine have lately appeared. Professor Chapman's short but excellent essay, and Mr. MeConnachie's fuller work, will at least give those who cannot tackle the German text some notion of his quality and importance.
It is not unjust to connect the dethronement of man and awed rediscovery of Divine transcendence which is character- istic of both these writers with the experiences and disillusion- ments of the War : but at least as far as Karl Barth is con- cerned, his special outlook is the direct result of the sterile condition of Protestant theology in his youth, and his own desperate and innate need of the supernatural. Barth is a real prophet, an explosive theocentric genius, unmellowed by the culture and discipline of a historic church. It is interesting to speculate on what he might have become had he emerged in another corner of the Christian fold. His voice, as Professor Chapman says, seems " at times a blending of Second Isaiah, Thomas Carlyle and Baron von Hugel "---though probably none of the three would endorse his teaching without many qualifications. The heart of this well-named " theology cf correction " is its emphasis on the " otherness and awfulness " of God ; and this Barth puts with a force which is unequalled among modern writers on religion. The Gospel, he says, is " no tidings and instructions about the divinity and deification of man, but a message about a God who is quite Other." There is no continuity between His activity and ours. The uppishness, or, as he calls it, the Titanism of man, has blurred our sense of Holiness ; so that we no longer realize the distance between the natural creature and " the inconceivable life of God." We have to learn that " one cannot speak of God simply by speak- ing of man in a loud voice." And if the religious humanist gets scant sympathy from Barth, the advocate of " religious experi- ence " and subjective piety fares no better. " Actual experi- ence begins where our alleged experiences cease "—a sentence which would certainly have pleased St. John of the Cross. That crisis wherein the imperfect human creature " halts before God " is for Barth the birth pang of genuine religion, with its objectivity, its searching demands, and its utter sense of need.
The one-sided and wholly prophetic character of this theo- logy needs no demonstration. It is a violent attempt to recall the Christian consciousness to those searching realities it pre- fers to forget—a corrective rather than a creation. The entire contempt which Barth shows - for cultus, his extreme other- worldliness, his neglect of the incarnational and se eramental strand in Christian practice and experience, with its tender feeling, geniality, and joy, deprive his Gospel of all claim to
completeness. The wind of the Spirit blows hard from the north all the time ; there is little or no sense of that which Von Hiigel called the delightfulness of God." But we need not for that reason minimize the value of the tonic which this Baptist of the post-War world administers to our generation. Nor, on the other hand, need we be surprised that a compensat- ing movement has already begun to make itself felt. Catholic Christianity has always been sensitive to the dangers of an extreme transcendentalism, with its tendency to abstraction and depreciation of the common life. It is unlikely to tolerate a theology which ignores the corporate and incarnational aspects of religion, and puts all the emphasis on its other- worldly trend. Thus, by a strange turn of fortune's wheel, we find Professor Adam—perhaps the most influential Roman Catholic writer of modern Germany—insisting on the human side of the Christian revelation, once regarded as the peculiar stronghold of Evangelical piety. I am not sure that I under- stand all that Professor Adam is trying to say in this honk ; Tor his thought often seems muffled in the theological clichés with which he has clothed it. But at least it is clear that whit he offers us is something very near to that " completing opposite " which the astringent doctrines of the New Calvinism so urgently require. " Awake, 0 north wind ; and come, thou south ; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out."
EVELYN UNDERII ILL.
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