100th birthday to Karl Barth - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1986 - 80 Pfennig

The reformed theologian Karl Barth was born on 10 May 1886 in Basel. Although originally Swiss, he always felt particularly attached to Germany, where his work received the strongest response. In a rousing book he wrote as a young Swiss pastor, he sharply criticized Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the same time, he called upon the Church and theology for a fundamental and comprehensive new way of thinking in the direction of God's Word. When he became professor of theology in Germany in 1921, he began to work out the other theology he required in a comprehensive work. Displaced by the Hitler state, he worked from 1935 until his death in 1968 in Basel. The implications of his often surprising findings on church and theology in many countries of the world and beyond Protestantism are incalculably diverse. If he found some contradictions, he is recognized as the great Christian theologian of our century. A little later, after the birth of Karl Barth on May 10, 1886 in his hometown of Basel, his father Fritz followed a call to theology professor in Bern. Here the son spent his teenage years. As a student of theology, he received deep impressions in Berlin and Marburg, which made him a convinced liberal. In 1909 he was in Geneva assistant pastor, who preached on the old pulpit Calvin. After becoming a pastor in Safenwil in 1911, his solidarity with the disadvantaged workers of his community made him a socialist. For all later change, the social dimension of thinking and the risk of non-conformist political statements remained typical for him. In a bold reinterpretation of the Pauline "Epistle to the Romans," the Safenwil minister accused modern Protestantism of forgetting that "to speak of God means something else than to speak of man in a somewhat elevated tone"; and he called on Christianity to take on a new seriousness of the assumption that "God is God." This critical theology, also called "dialectical theology," was often denied. But it was also celebrated as a "Copernican revolution in Protestant theology," and a circle of young theologians soon gathered around them (Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, Paul Tillich). Since 1921, Barth worked as a professor of theology in Göttingen, Münster and Bonn, where his thinking has now received strong international attention. After much preparatory work, he began in Bonn with his major work, the "Church Dogmatic," which remained unfinished, although in the end it contained twelve voluminous volumes on almost 10,000 pages. Open to a wealth of voices of tradition and present, and in profound engagement with them, he sought to place theology and the Church in a new way on their own ground and at the same time to equip them for their show service in the world. For him the key to all knowledge lay in the fact that God Himself has completely opened up to us in the person of Jesus Christ. After the onset of Hitler's Reich he urged the German churches and then the Christians of the other countries to an attitude of resistance against the ruling ideology. The basis for this attitude found expression in the Barmer Theological Declaration (1934), which he formulated. Sold out of Germany because of his attitude, he worked in Basel from 1935 onwards. After the Second World War, in the Cold War he encouraged Christians to walk a path of freedom between the fronts, and joined Albert Schweitzer in protesting nuclear armaments. A Reformed theologian, he saw himself as advocating the unification of separated Christians in the "ecumenism." It was no coincidence that he gave the opening keynote address at the first World Church Conference in Amsterdam in 1948. On numerous trips abroad to eastern and western countries, 1962 also by the USA, his lectures received a large echo. The occupation with the renewal of Catholicism by the second Vatican Council, in which he was given impetus, led him still in 1966 for talks in the Vatican. His fierce nature was paired with a cheerfulness that delighted in Mozart's music. He died on December 10, 1968, honored as the "Church Father of the 20th Century." His theology is of a concentration on the cause of God and of an openness to the cause of men that future generations will be measured by the standards they set. (Text: Professor Dr. Eberhard Busch, University of Göttingen)