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.

For Barth, the decisive moment came in August 1914, when ninety-three German intellectuals — including several of his own liberal theology professors — signed a manifesto supporting Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policy. Barth later recalled: ‘One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II and his counsellors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated.’ If liberal theology could not prevent — and indeed actively supported — the catastrophe of war, something was profoundly wrong with it.

Karl Barth’s Theology

Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief, first edition 1919, revised edition 1922) ‘fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians’ (as Karl Adam put it). In it, Barth declared:

• The infinite qualitative distinction — there is an absolute, unbridgeable gap between God and humanity, between eternity and time, between the divine and the human. God is ‘wholly other’ (ganz andere) — utterly transcendent, not a dimension of human experience or culture
• The ‘No’ of God — the Word of God addresses humanity as a crisis (Greek krisis, meaning ‘judgement’). God’s revelation judges all human religion, culture, morality, and theology. Every human attempt to reach God — through reason, experience, mysticism, or morality — is idolatry. God can only be known through God’s own initiative
• Revelation as God’s act — God is not discovered at the end of a philosophical argument or at the peak of religious experience. God reveals himself — in his own freedom, on his own terms, in Jesus Christ. Theology begins not with human questions but with God’s answer

Barth’s magnum opus was the Church Dogmatics (Kirchliche Dogmatik), published in thirteen volumes between 1932 and 1967 (and left unfinished at his death). It is one of the longest and most comprehensive works of theology ever written. Key themes include: