God Lets Loose Karl Bart

"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.


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