Neo-Orthodoxy and Karl Barth

Neo-Orthodoxy and Karl Barth

Neo-orthodoxy (also called dialectical theology or crisis theology) was a theological movement that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War as a radical rejection of liberal theology. Its central figure was the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), widely regarded as the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Barth and his colleagues — including Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and Rudolf Bultmann (in his early career) — argued that liberal theology had domesticated God, reducing the divine to a dimension of human experience. Neo-orthodoxy sought to recover the radical ‘otherness’ of God and the centrality of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

The Crisis of Liberal Theology

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 shattered the optimistic assumptions of liberal theology. Liberal theologians had taught that humanity was progressing toward the Kingdom of God through moral effort, education, and cultural development. The unprecedented slaughter of the war — in which Christian nations butchered each other on an industrial scale — seemed to expose this optimism as naïve and dangerous.