Barth on Christianity

...not the god of the great Hebrew prophets...

...The fact that Hamel has suffered arrest and conviction for his fearlessness in proclaiming this gospel suggests that his god is not exactly a god of accommodation to the dominant cultural pattern...

...His conclusion is that the church must avoid both alignment and rebellion and must practice repentance for itself...

...In his interpretation, "loyalty does not mean approval of the ideology on which this government is built...

...This gives a summary of the theological and ethical ideas in the volume, and sharpens the issue for our own value judgments...

...Barth frankly admits that he does not know the "exact wording" of the oath, but advises his interlocutors to go ahead and take it anyway...

...As for Karl Barth, even if he is a bit obscure about the god whom he does worship, there is no doubt about the sort of idolatry which he abhors most: Mammonism...

...But now, at this later date, precisely because of his contempt for the culture of his time, Barth succumbs as a most notorious victim of the atheistic secularism from which he sought so earnestly to deliver his church...

...One of the pieces included in this volume is "The Proclamation of the Gospel in the Marxist World," by Johannes Hamel, a pastor in East Germany...

...The distinguished theologian, secure in his residence at Basel, consents to answer all of these queries...

...As he has said in a recent essay in The Christian Century concerning Communism: "I decidedly prefer not to live within its sphere and do not wish anyone else to be forced to do so...

...It simply means "readiness to recognize its existence and to take one's place in it," and of course he reserves the right to resist "particular implications and applications" of the system...

...Apparently his posture is that of a transcendental neutralist...

...In any case he shudders at the thought of the "flesh-pots of Egypt" as presided over by Adenauer or Eisenhower, is scornful of the "tyrannous press" of the Western democracies, and winces before our uncandid and "creeping totalitarianism" as contrasted with the more frankly "avowed totalitarianism" of the Soviets...

...So Barth concludes: "I would see no difficulty, were I in your shoes, in offering this loyalty to the East German Republic...

...Hamel looks for guidance in his situation by analyzing the experiences of Israel under Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Rome...

...For it was the great achievement of an earlier Karl Barth, as a true prophet of the Lord, to help rescue Protestantism from becoming a mere culture-religion, to recall it to a lofty transcendence from the ideologies of the age, and to make a bold thrust at the secularist aggression of the Nazis against the word and will of God...

...These latest pronouncements of the celebrated theologian round out his career in irony...

...It is most elegantly described in a phrase from one of his grateful admirers: "Once again you seem to have chosen to sit on the fence, and, like a lonely bird on the rooftop, to sing a song that the roaring lions in the East and in the West cannot hear...

...These feelings doubtless make it easy for Barth to give such comforting advice on the question of a required loyalty oath to the East German Government...

...The question of the loyalty oath is the second of eight questions put to Barth by troubled Christians living in the East Zone...

...However, a careful scrutiny of the text suggests that the metaphor of fence-sitting is a bit too simple to describe Karl Barth's theological acrobatics...

...Whatever help may be available on this difficult problem is provided by the excellent introductory essay by Robert McAfee Brown...

...Reviewed by Robert Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion WHEN WE ARE through reading this little essay, we must ask just what god or whose god is under consideration...

...Brown has five points which present a critical challenge to Barth, and four points which search for edification...

...In the first effort, the editor shows his intellectual acumen...

...and, so I understand, has some followers in the Switzerland where Barth prefers to live...

...Nevertheless, it is obvious that his judgments tip the scales in favor of the Communism which allegedly he abhors, because he declares in the same essay: "I regard anti-Communism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than Communism itself," and, again, "only the 'Hitler in us' can be anti-Communist on principle...

...Actually he has got himself firmly seated among the fleshpots which abound in Basel as in the other materialistic democracies of the West...

...This cult has its center in the United States, but also flourishes in Western Germany...

...in the second, his generosity...

...Certainly it is not the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...

...not the god of the Gospels: not the god of the better part of the Protestant tradition of which Karl Barth is the heir...