Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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Название: Karl Barth

Автор: Paul S. Chung

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Религия: прочее

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isbn: 9781498270311

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ his active life. “We must meet ourselves in our life and struggle, in our morality and religion toward God. The Bible starts out of him . . . For the Bible God is the single reality that is taken in earnest.”149 Furthermore, at the center of Kutter’s work is the insistence that the Social Democrat carried out the will of God. The atheism that was so frequently blamed by Christian conservatives (such as, for instance, Stoecker and Naumann) bears in it the stamp of the living God.

      Unlike Blumhardt’s entrance to Social Democracy as a sign of solidarity with the poor, Kutter’s contribution to the social question meant a new form of preaching. Such an approach gave rise to the following question: to what degree does a Christian take part in the socialist movement in a practical-political way? This question remained an issue of conflict between Kutter and Ragaz. Finally the environment of the general strike in Zurich in 1912 fostered a break between Kutter and Ragaz.

      Leonhard Ragaz

      Unlike Kutter, Ragaz was a political activist. Ragaz was born on July 28, 1868, in Tamin, a small mountain village in Canton Graubünden in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He grew up in the democratic atmosphere of a Swiss village and remained a strong believer in democracy all his life. Impressed by the cooperative forms of economic life among Swiss mountain farmers, he was concerned with a decentralized form of socialism. His father was active in a number of offices in the community, and his father’s interest in politics passed over to Ragaz. Because his family was constantly surrounded by financial difficulties, Ragaz was well aware of social problems from his personal experience. After graduation from high school in nearby Chur, he decided to study theology, enabled by a scholarship. He enrolled at the University of Basel and spent some time at the universities in Jena and in Berlin. He then returned to Basel.

      The theological background that he learned and developed in his years of study was liberalism, especially Hegelianism. (A. E. Biedermann, who made a great impact on Ragaz, was a Swiss Hegelian theologian.) In 1890 Ragaz was ordained as a Reformed pastor and began his ministry in three villages in Canton Graubünden. During his parish work, his main concern was with the intensive study of the Bible and the theology of the priesthood of all believers, encouraging the laity to be more involved in parish life. Between 1893 and 1895 Ragaz served as a language and religion teacher in Chur in part for health reasons, and also in part due to his dissatisfaction with ministry. During this time he was in contact with the writings of Christian socialism, including Carlyle, Kingsley, and Robertson, and German authors such as Naumann.