Barth, << bahrt, >> Karl (1886-1968), was one of the best-known Protestant theologians of the 1900’s. Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 10, 1886. He was ordained a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church in 1909. From 1911 to 1921, Barth was a pastor in Safenwil, near Zurich. At that time, he was committed to the liberal theology of his day, based on the optimistic belief in the essential connectedness between God and humanity.
World War I (1914-1918) shattered Barth’s liberal convictions. He rejected the idea that human beings could know the nature of God. He accused liberal theologians of forgetting the absolute distance between God and humans. In the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans (1922), Barth preached a theology of God’s word in Jesus Christ as proclaimed by Saint Paul. He attacked the liberal Protestant belief that people could achieve religious understanding through their own reasoning. Barth conceived of God as “wholly other,” independent of any human actions or thought.
After World War I, Barth taught at the universities of Gottingen (1921-1925), Munster (1925-1930), Bonn (1930-1935), and Basel (1935-1962). He devoted the years from 1932 to 1962 to publishing Church Dogmatics, a monumental work in which he brilliantly reworked traditional church doctrines of God, creation, and Jesus Christ. In Barth’s later theology, he argued his firm conviction that God loves human beings and freely chooses to express that love in their lives. Barth died on Dec. 10, 1968.
