Five-minute digest
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Summary
The Word of God and the Word of Man gathers the addresses with which a young Swiss village pastor broke with the theology of his teachers. Karl Barth was minister of the Reformed parish of Safenwil in Aargau from 1911 to 1921, preaching every Sunday to farmers and factory workers. In August 1914 he saw nearly all his German professors, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann among them, endorse the Kaiser's war policy. If their theology could bless that, he concluded, something was wrong at its root, and he and his friend Eduard Thurneysen began to read the Bible again as if for the first time. The commentary on Romans (1919; rewritten 1922) was one result; these lectures, delivered between 1916 and 1923 and collected in German in 1924 as Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, are the other. The addresses circle a single conviction. Religion, morality, culture, and even the church are human activities; the Word of God is God's own act, and it comes as judgement on all of them before it comes as grace. In 'The Righteousness of God' Barth argues that the war exposed how human beings build a tower of Babel out of their own righteousness and call it God's. In 'The Strange New World within the Bible' he tells a congregation that Scripture is not a record of how pious people found God but of how God sought out people: not history, morality or religion, but a new world, the world of God. 'The Christian's Place in Society', given in 1919 to religious socialists at Tambach, unsettles hearers who hoped he would bless their programme; the kingdom of God, he insists, is neither a movement within society nor a revolt against it, though it judges and stirs both. The later lectures, written after Barth became a professor at Göttingen in 1921, turn to the minister's task. Speaking of God is the preacher's obligation and is beyond human power; theology must hold both facts together and give God the glory. The congregation, Barth says, comes on Sunday morning asking one question, whether it is true, and the sermon exists to answer from Scripture, not from the pastor's religious experience. The language is deliberately dialectical: yes and no, crisis and promise, the dead end that is also the beginning. The book matters historically as the first English door into 'dialectical theology' or the 'theology of crisis', translated by Douglas Horton in 1928. It also introduces positions Barth later revised, especially in the Church Dogmatics, where the stark negations give way to a fuller account of God's gracious humanity in Christ. Students should read these pieces as speeches, full of rhetorical overstatement, and test them against Scripture as Barth asks.
Top Lessons
When the war tested theology
Barth's turn began with a public event: respected Christian scholars endorsing a nation's war. He concluded that a theology which begins from human religious experience can be enlisted for any cause. The lesson for students is that ideas show their worth when tested by events, and that the church needs a Word not of its own making.
Not our thoughts about God, but God's thoughts about us
In 'The Strange New World within the Bible' Barth tells his congregation that Scripture is not chiefly a record of human religion or a handbook of morals but the account of God's search for humanity. The approach recovers Reformation emphases on the priority of God, though it also invites questions about how Barth relates the Bible's human words to the Word of God.
Neither baptizing nor abandoning the world
At Tambach in 1919 Barth disappointed religious socialists by refusing to equate the kingdom with their programme, while still taking social injustice seriously. His threefold pattern of affirming creation, criticizing the present, and hoping for God's redemption offers a way to think about Christian political engagement without idolatry or withdrawal.
The preacher's impossible duty
Barth describes ministers as obliged to speak of God and unable to do so by their own powers, and he insists that this tension is the starting point of honest theology. The congregation wants to know whether what is preached is true; only God can make human words carry his Word, which humbles the preacher and dignifies the task.