I first encountered Barth’s Evangelical Theology: An Introduction when I was a senior at Hope College in 1975. I hated the book and the tone of the author. Barth seemed so blithely positive, so sure of himself, and frankly I misunderstood the sense in which the title used the word evangelical (more in the German sense of “protestant”). I was far more attracted to Soren Kierkegaard, whose dense, self-referential books The Concept of Dread and The Sickness Unto Death I read for Prof. Sang Hyun Lee’s class. SK has since fascinated me, but after reading Bruce Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark I began to understand that (howevermuch I may admire him) I’m not such a hyper-Lutheran. Kierkegaard was one of Barth’s intellectual resources, however, and has remained touchstone of my reading.
My next encounter with Karl Barth was at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1978, in an entire class dedicated to Barth, taught by Prof. Daniel Migliore. Again, I sis nor understood a lot of what I read (1000+ pages), although I did a reasonable job on a paper on Barth’s concept of works, based on the German text. I simply didn’t have the personal background or depth to understand what Barth was really challenging –and some more vocal students (and a few faculty!) who championed Barth seemed pretty full of themselves. (This criticism applies not a whit to Prof. Migliore, whose patience I undoubtedly severely tried and who deserves my thanks decades later for his pains.)
Eventually I became an academic librarian, and then completed a Ph.D. in church history from Princeton Seminary in 2000. As a church historian, focused specially on the history of worship and the Medieval period, I became keenly aware of the very long passage of time (longue durée) of the Christian church, and how profoundly discourse can shift over a long period. At that time, several prominent Barth scholars there and elsewhere (again except Dr. Migliore) seemed overly convinced that Barth’s black tomes somehow stopped church history, that his was the final word this side of the eschaton, and that his numerous historical insights en passant to executing his theological argument effectively halted further discussion. I became aware how much Barth himself was historically conditioned –and how could it be otherwise to a scholar sometimes described as reading the New Testament in one hand and the newspaper in the other?
The decisive moment in Barth’s life story is his disillusionment with German liberal theology during the First World War. Several of Barth’s theological teachers supported German war aims (Barth was neutral Swiss), in particular Adolf von Harnack. Barth’s sense of having little to say about the war and to war veterans on the basis of liberal theology –as well as the influence of religious socialists such as Herman Kutter and other influences– lead him to re-evaluate everything he had been taught by Protestant liberals such Wilhelm Herrmann. As with so many other European intellectuals (for example, T.S. Eliot), the brutality of the war was a profound shock, and it contributed to Barth’s turn to so-called Dialectical Theology. The theological bankruptcy exposed by the Great War was Barth’s formative moment, the occasion of the Barthian Revolt.