God Lets Loose Karl Barth

"Beware," warns Emerson, "when the great God lets loose a thinker in this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city and no man knows what is safe or where it will end.’’ Nothing less than conflagration appears to have broken out in the religious thought of Europe. Many incendiaries may be pointed to, but there is one whose torch seems to have burned more brightly and to have been applied more effectively than that of any of the others.

Five years ago one began to hear, at the tables of the student clubs and restaurants of Germany, the name of Karl Barth. A young theologian recently called from Switzerland had made an amazingly impressive debut at the University of Göttingen. His chair-- that of Reformed or Calvinistic theology-- was subsidized in part by American Presbyterians, and was not in itself sufficiently exalted to catch the eye of Lutheran Germany. This circumstance made only the more significant the number of students who soon crowded his lecture hall, and the number of students, professors and townspeople who filled and overflowed any church where he had been advertised to preach.

He was remembered by many as having been himself a student in Tübingen and Berlin little more than twelve years before. Even then he had been marked as a man of unusual, if not wholly conventional, vitality. Born in Basel, in 1886, he had returned at the end of his university career to be the minister of the church in the little town of Protestant Aargau, north of Lucerne; and there, during the war period, he had preached on Sunday mornings before the good peasant folk, to the antiphonal booming of guns in near-by Alsace. The sombre thought of guns and of the stricken and perplexed Europe, governed then by guns, gave him long hours in his study. He studied, dreamed and wrote, until, almost simultaneously with the armistice, was announced the publication of his commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans. It was this which elicited his call to Germany.....

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