Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung

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      Karl Barth and Socialist Activities

Barth’s Sunday sermon was attacked by the newspaper (in its edition of July 15, 1912), under the title “Pastoral Agitation: A sermon held this past Sunday in a congregation in our district.” The article states, “A certain pastor seeks to bring to life once again the times of the religious upheavals, even though in a modern, social-political dress.” “Finally, we would like to ask whether the church is the proper place for the pastor to express his political views. The great majority of our church-goers, free-thinkers alongside the social democrats . . . seek on this day, with more reason than their Shepherd demonstrates, an hour of edification and meditation. That is true worship, Dear Pastor, and not what you dare to offer us!”110

This attack of the Zofinger Tagblatt was echoed by the Aargauer Volksblatt which was close to the Catholic–conservative People’s Party. Under the title “A Terrible Crime” (in the edition of July 16, 1912) it reads: “In the district of Zofingen a reformed Pastor gave a sermon last Sunday, in which he, referring to the Sunday Gospel of the Reformed Lectionary (Matthew 5, about the self-righteousness of the Pharisee), castigated the pharisaic in political life, and illustrated it by pointing to the hollowness, half-heartedness and inconsequentiality of certain people, whose greatest lie is their claim that they are ‘free-thinkers.’”111

      In the spring of 1913 there occurred a conflict with the owner of the textile firm Hochuli and Co. in Safenwil. In the minutes from a meeting on February 6, 1913, we read: “The firm of Hochuli and Co. complains in a letter of Jan. 28 about the scheduling of the confirmation classes in the last three months of the instruction year . . . The secretary is asked to give the Firm Hochuli and Co. written information, with reference to 44 of the Aargau Church Order, which prescribes for the Summer 2-3 hours and for the Winter 3-4 hours per week.” However, Hochuli responded that he would no longer accept any more confirmation youth in his factory. Barth proposed, for the sake of peace, that during the final three month, the three hours per week be one and a half hours twice. The church board adopted the provision extending from May to New Year’s twice a week an hour-and-a-half session. And the factory was notified of this regulation. We shall deal with this affair in more detail later because this conflict accompanied the whole period of Barth’s pastorate.

In a sermon on the cleansing of the temple (January 19, 1913), Barth justified Jesus’ anger based on a higher notion of justice than the customary order. What Jesus carried out in the remple was a revolution against the existing order. “There in the Temple, Jesus ignored the customary order with the fullness of the power of the Messiah. . . . Yes, Jesus carried out a revolution—when the divine appears in human form, there must always be a revolution against human order. Let us be drawn into this struggle. . . . Oh, if only we would awaken and want to become fighters!”112

In a sermon of February 23, 1913 Barth stresses Christian solidarity with the suffering of the world: “The misery of the world is your misery, its darkness is your darkness . . . We must acquire for ourselves that holy sense of solidarity which bears the suffering of the world in its heart, not in order to sigh and shake our heads over it, but rather to take it in hand so that it will be otherwise.”113 Barth also saw a clear connection between the social question and the question of militarism. Barth had served as the president of Blue Cross (a social service group ) ever since January 1912. Under his leadership, the “Blues” sometimes worked together with the “Reds” (i.e., socialists) in Safenwil.

In his “Dissenting View on Military Aircraft” (March 14, 1913),114 Barth distanced himself from the naïve pacifism of the socialists at that time. Against the patriotic sentiment that any expenditure for military aircraft means especially clear evidence of true love of fatherland, Barth (based on Matt 6:10 and Luke 11:2) regarded war as a criminal offense against humanity.115 War is War. “Military-expenditures are as such ‘horror before God.’”116 Barth also paid attention to the German Social Democratic Party. “I was well aware of August Bebel and old Liebknecht, and saw the prophetic cloud hovering over the German Social Democrats before it disappeared.”117

In his Easter sermon (March 23, 1913) Barth encouraged his congregation to become concerned about the battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil: “The message of Easter leads us to the boundary between two worlds. And on this boundary, a battle is raging. Two gigantic kingdoms are engaged in a war with one another . . . The world strives against God. But we cannot and we may not be mere spectators of this battle of which Easter speaks. We have to become partisan on one side or the other.”118

Soon after his wedding (on March 27, 1913), Barth prepared a lecture, “Belief in the Personal God” (delivered to the Aargau Pastors’ Association at Lenzburg on May 19).119 In Aargau Barth tried to reconcile his Marburg insights with his new socialist discoveries of the kingdom of God. In addition, in the sermon on May 4, 1913, he recognized the task for the pastor in the prophetic consciousness of Amos: “A prophet is, in all things, precisely the opposite of that which most people expect from a pastor these days and of that which most pastors have really been . . . The prophet is the employee of God. For him, it is a matter of indifference what people think of him and what they do to him . . . He knows that if he does his duty, they will be shocked by him and indignant . . . The prophet is the representative of the unaccustomed.”120 The kingdom of God does not stand in contrast to catastrophes and violent storms in revolution; rather they are in the service of it.

The importance of the lecture “Belief in the Personal God” lies in the fact that it demonstrates Barth’s early affinity toward the coexistence of dialectical thinking and analogical thinking. For Barth, personality and absoluteness are predicates of God in which religious experience becomes possible. The concept of personality lies between transcendentalism and psychology. In fact, just as transcendentalism refers to the infinite aspect of personality, psychology points to a concrete and finite aspect of personality. When viewed transcendentally, personality does not match with an absolute subject. Likewise if the concept of absoluteness were applied to a personal subject, the concept of personality would dissolve. Therefore absolute personality is nonsense. The only solution is to see two concepts in contradiction. God is an infinite Spirit. The problem of analogy comes out in Barth’s consideration of human personality and divine personality.121

For Barth, the analogical way of thinking is not based on the process of human ontological abstraction. This being the case, Feuerbach’s thesis—that the concept of God is the result of human projection—critiques religious experience. As Barth said, “We cannot find in the human personality an analogy to the real content of religious faith in God . . . A concept of God that results from projecting human self-awareness into the realm of the transcendent cannot latch on to the reality of God, or describe it exhaustively. Religion’s notion of God cannot be a projection from our side; it can only be the reflection of a fact that has been carried into us. This fact is the life in God which is granted to us through our association with history. This is the real religious experience; in it we possess God, and because of it we can speak of God.”122

      The possibility of speaking of God comes out of the life СКАЧАТЬ