WARM BARTH
CURRIE, THOMAS W.
Correspondence Warm Barth ON THE OCCASION of Arthur Schlesinger’s death, Ernest W. Lefever chose to belittle Karl Barth, the greatest Christian theologian of the last several centuries (“The...
...The Denver Post, the more liberal of our two liberal newspapers, has long proposed an open borders policy and has targeted Rep...
...I wonder what Lefever makes of Barth’s involvement in the Confessing Church movement and his opposition to Hitler, crystallized in his virtual authorship of the Barmen Declaration...
...As it turned out, Niemoeller moved further to the left than Barth and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union for his public stance...
...Given the cover story THE WEEKLY STANDARD ran on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, I would hate to think that one of its contributors would now join such men of “cold and stony hearts...
...But when it came to postwar Europe, he and another famous signer of the Barmen Declaration, Pastor Martin Niemoeller, had problems recognizing the evil of Stalinism and its threat to political and religious freedom...
...In so doing they have, of course, shown themselves to be men of stupid, cold, and stony hearts to whom we need not listen...
...Lefever concludes that Barth does not belong in the same group as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, because Barth was “simply too otherworldly to comprehend the wonder and tragedy of the human drama...
...That does not make one a “xenophobic dimwit” (to borrow from Dave Barry’s dimwitted joke...
...ERNEST W. LEFEVER RESPONDS: Of course I am aware of Barth’s courageous fi ght against Hitler, and elsewhere I have praised it...
...Correspondence Warm Barth ON THE OCCASION of Arthur Schlesinger’s death, Ernest W. Lefever chose to belittle Karl Barth, the greatest Christian theologian of the last several centuries (“The Theologian and the Historian,” March 19...
...THOMAS W. CURRIE Charlotte, N.C...
...Tancredo in particular for his fi rm stance on illegal immigration...
...The Tancredo I know is no “calculating politician” who “craves publicity...
...In another context, when attacked by some Dutch neo-Calvinists who also found his love of Mozart baffl ing, Barth wrote: “Let us not blame them for accusing me of being a ‘monist’ . . . [but] obviously to offend me the more, they so far forget themselves as to use unrepeatable terms in disparagement of W.A...
...Yet it was precisely the freedom of Mozart’s music, particularly its freedom from either a pious or tragic “seriousness,” that enabled Barth to hear the joy of God’s creation in all its worldliness...
...CREDO IN TANCREDO I WAS DISMAYED by David Harsanyi’s criticism of my congressman, Tom Tancredo (“Tancredo’s Credo,” March 12...
...Lefever criticizes Barth for listening to Mozart too much and for not reading the newspaper more so that he could “understand that freedom itself was at stake in the East-West struggle...
...Tancredo believes that Colorado should not offer in-state tuition and scholarships to those who have broken our laws and come here illegally—what gall...
...Barth thought theology was about God, whose grace, while well-acquainted with suffering and even the tragic, saves us from, among other things, the heaviness of our own very serious and even virtuous agendas...
...SUSAN WILHELM Aurora, Colo...
...Did Barth lose his position as a professor of theology at Bonn, and was he forced out of Germany, because of his “otherworldliness...
...He is in fact a very humble man who, though he does not oppose immigration, thinks it absurd to endorse illegal immigration...
...And, as I said in my piece, Barth acknowledged that his visit to America had further opened his political eyes to the blessings of democracy and the dangers of totalitarianism...
...Mozart...
...It is true that Barth thought theology was not about the Cold War, or even about America’s defense of freedom...
...In that he differed from Reinhold Niebuhr...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 28
