Abstract
In dialogue with Christiane Tietz's engrossing biography, this review essay addresses the different conflicts that characterize Barth's life. I discuss what conflicts we should be grateful for and what conflicts we should regret. My main interest is in how the story of Barth's personal and private life intersects with the story of his extraordinary theological career. My working assumption in this review is that there is an indirect line between his theology and his adultery.
This is a magnificent, engrossing, lucid, and comprehensive treatment of the most important theologian of the modern era. Tietz has given not only to Barth scholarship but also to the history of theology in the twentieth century a great gift. We are in her debt. She reminds us of Barth's abiding preoccupation with God, and specifically with Jesus Christ who is “the event of God's grace, a new beginning between God and humanity that is grounded solely in God.” (90) She also helps us understand something of the conflicts that this preoccupation encouraged. Also, what I am trying to come to terms with in this review is how the story of Barth's private life intersects with the story of his conflict-ridden theological career.
There are fourteen chapters to Tietz's text. They take up the theme of “conflict” with great gusto, conflict on four main levels. First, there is Barth's personal conflict with the commandment of God against adultery and the familial discord entailed thereby; second, his conflict with the reigning theological milieu of his day and its key figures (e.g., Harnack and Brunner); third, his conflicts with political authorities; and fourth, his more modest conflict (at times) with the catholic theological tradition. The aim of this review is to discern what conflicts we should be grateful for and what conflicts we should regret, and why.
The first conflict will anchor my review. Some years ago—perhaps 2017?—I heard Tietz give a paper at the Karl Barth Society of North America's annual meeting at the American Academy of Religion. Her paper discussed the letters published in German in 2008 between Barth and his indispensable theological collaborator, research assistant, soulmate, and lover Charlotte von Kirschbaum. I vividly remember someone asking, in the Question and Answer time, “Why are we even talking about this?” I was surprised, to say the least, by the question. It is important to talk about because a theologian, especially one of Barth's caliber and stature—is personally responsible for obedience to the commandment of God—as we all are. I think Barth was at times blind to the way we can have “other gods” in our intimate loves. There are indeed troubling questions about his life that Tietz sets before us without evasion and with great sensitivity and wisdom. In this review, I consider the relation of Barth's theology to his personal life and context. My working assumption in this review is that there is an indirect line between his theology and his adultery.
As a student, Barth “had subscribed entirely at the time to liberal theology.” (23) This was in contrast to his father's wishes. Even so, Barth criticized as a young student the penchant of historical research to downplay the miraculous, “everything that falls outside the world as it usually appears to us, the historical reality.” (25) Interestingly, Barth's studies in Bern anticipate, over and against Harnack, Barth's “later conviction that there are things in Christian faith that don’t correspond to rational laws and in that sense are “miracles.” (25) Further down the track in Berlin, Barth sensed something wrong with Harnack's approach to theological and ecclesiastical developments. Harnack, for Barth, placed too much emphasis on the shaping power of historical settings. More influential in Barth's mind is Wilhelm Herrmann's approach. Herrmann provided for Barth a more robust theological foundation, one that looked to God with a greater degree of seriousness.
Once Barth's formal education ended, he took up pastoral work in the German Reformed congregation in Geneva. Though Barth appeared “very self-assured, he essentially had very little knowledge of the great tradition before the modern age.” (53) This is a significant lacuna, and Barth worked energetically to fill it, first and foremost via Calvin. Tietz also discusses a very important event in Barth's personal life at the time: Barth's engagement to Nelly Hoffmann. Their relationship would undergo many difficult twists and turns. 1 Barth met her in his first confirmation class. She was barely eighteen when they became engaged in May 1911, and soon thereafter Barth prepared to leave Geneva for Safenwil in June 1911.
As is well known, Barth's experiences in Safenwil were key to his subsequent theological development. Tietz provides an engrossing account of just how quickly Barth abandoned the pursuit of the “inner life”—a prominent theme in Geneva—in favor of attending to “concrete external problems.” (63) In Barth's words, “‘God's kingdom comes to us in the material and on earth.” (63) Echoing Hermann Kutter—one of the two most important figures in Swiss religious socialism at the time—Barth preached that the Christian faith “is also always a matter of the bodily, external existence of human beings.” (68) Not only does Barth rapidly revisit earlier judgments while pastoring in the years leading up to World War I, he castigated the German conflation “of fatherland, lust for war and Christian faith.” (69) The years in Safenwil set the theological tone for the rest of Barth's life. Barth is not a pastoral people-pleaser. As Tietz notes, “It was disquieting for him, too, that God's word stood in opposition to everything [emphasis mine]. In the years that followed this sense of unrest would never let go of Barth. And it would bear theological fruits.” (73)
The key word in Tietz's assessment is “everything.” What I am calling a certain natural arrogance in Barth is present even in these early years, as Barth shows no distaste for combat with the reigning ethos or indeed with his flock. Barth's theocentrism—a waiting for God and God's visible rule—propels his combat. This is the theological source of Barth's “opposition to everything.” At the same time, I think we glimpse here a disposition or stance that Barth's own form of life—that is, his eventual adultery—will soon overtly contradict. That said, we should applaud Barth's confidence in the message of God as a message that disrupts our efforts to articulate the God–world relationship as a kind of equilibrium, and to think of God on the basis of human want or need.
In Chapter 5 Tietz discusses the first Epistle to the Romans (1919), specifically how Barth (and Thurneysen) ask “how pastors could speak of God, if God's own word was distinct from everything worldly.” (84) In his Epistle to the Romans, Barth “wanted to provoke and shake things up. . . He wanted to lift God up into view.” (87) Barth certainly did this. Crucial to this shaking up is Barth's appropriation of the Reformers, especially Calvin. Importantly, Barth does not set himself over and against them but instead adopts “a central insight of the Reformers: the position of human beings toward God is dependent solely upon God.” 2 (88) We begin, too, in this period to hear in fresh ways of Jesus Christ, but always in relation to God. Barth avers that Jesus Christ “is the event of God's grace, a new beginning between God and humanity that is grounded solely in God.” (90)
In 1921, Barth moved to an honorary professorship for Reformed systematic theology in Göttingen. It is in this Lutheran setting that Barth began to acquire what Tietz describes as “his Reformed profile.” (103) Barth, as she notes, had now become “completely engaged by the Genevan Reformer.” (105) Or, in Barth's own words, “I would well and gladly sit and spend the rest of my life only with Calvin.” (106) Barth, though, did not want to spend the rest of his working life with his Göttingen colleagues (aside from Erik Peterson). Barth was relieved to leave those “sour years” in 1925, but not the “new trend in theology” that he was advocating. (114)
Tietz's discussion of the second edition of Epistle to the Romans (1921) is both sensitive and probing. Barth, as she notes, was suspicious of the success of the first edition: “Was what had been portrayed there still too comfortable?” (121) The second edition makes even clearer than the first edition Barth's ever-strengthening conviction that “the knowledge of God stands at the center of the Bible.” (122) Accordingly, the tone of Romans II is even more striking: it is an assault on the immanentizing and instrumentalizing of God, cast in the most contrastive and paradoxical terms available to Barth. Tietz writes, “the attack on human beings and their world is now even more radically executed.” (125) Or, in Barth's own words, “If we are to speak of God and the divine, it must be through something completely new.” (126)
When I read this quote, I ask myself about the identity of the “we.” Though Barth has not yet met Charlotte von Kirschbaum and begun an adulterous relationship with her, Barth's natural arrogance finds, I think, a parallel in his emerging conception of the place of the theologian in the theological task. Barth describes his theological starting point as “that which Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ of time and eternity.” (127) I wonder, however, about the function Barth ascribes to the theologian in mapping that difference. As Tom Greggs says of Barth's notion of the theological task in his piece, “Barth and Patristic Theology,” the theologian “should not simply repeat the theology of the patristic era and . . . the creeds should be measured by their relation to Scripture.” 3 For Barth, the theologian responds to the teaching of the church catholic in accordance with the testimony of Scripture. Barth has (rightly so) a high view of Scripture—“authority in the life of the church is clearly under the authority of the Word of God.” 4 I am very sympathetic to this. But Barth's vision of the theological task places him—the theologian—somewhat over and against church and tradition. This is, I think, something of a lonely vision. While I concur that one must listen to Scripture as the authority, I do not think that one can then take the additional step of “speaking to [emphasis mine] authoritative witnesses to Scripture in the church.” 5 Why? Because this places too much emphasis on the theologian speaking and not enough on the tradition as the means by which we rightly hear and receive the Word. One must, I would argue, think along the lines of the universal church rather than respond to the universal church. In other words, does Barth's sense of the theological task place too much confidence in the call that one must “respond to” rather than summarize and represent “ever more carefully the theology of the earliest centuries”? 6
At the same time that Barth's own voice acquires a greater confidence and clarity, Tietz notes “the complete separation of God and the world that is implemented in the second Epistle to the Romans.” (130) The consequence, Tietz avers, is that Barth bypasses “the fact that God is revealed in the moral law as well.” (121) While we should give thanks for Barth's profound and fervent reminder of the undomesticatability of God, we have reason to question and possibly regret aspects of the way in which Barth championed it.
Having said this, Tietz reminds us that there is much to be grateful for in the wake of the second Epistle to the Romans and its clash with liberal theology. The early 1920s and the dialectical theology movement represented by Barth and his allies (e.g., Gogarten and Thurneysen) championed the primacy of God: “God is the subject because God reveals himself to human beings; only when understood in this way can God be the object of theology.” (143)
Chapter 8 is a key chapter. It is titled “The Need for Thinking Further: Münster, 1925-1930.” By 1925, the ”Bergli,” a vacation residence in Oberrieden that Barth frequented and that belonged to his wealthy friend and patron Rudolf Pestalozzi, featured prominently in Barth's life. In the summer of 1925, just before his move to Münster, while on summer holidays with friends and family, Barth “became acquainted with Charlotte von Kirschbaum.” 7 Tietz notes that “they fell in love with each other. She began to work for him and although Barth remained married, she became his life companion.” (154) Busch notes, moreover, that “Barth treasured and loved her.” Busch continues: “She was an exceptionally strong woman—sensitive, intelligent, courageous, and not bothered by her unconventional living arrangements. Even so, the situation in the family home was certainly not easy for her or for any of the others.” 8 To be sure, the last sentence of this description is somewhat evasive. To say that she was not “bothered” downplays the very real pain that the “Notgemeinschaft” brought upon all three, especially Nelly. (188) By Notgemeinschaft, Barth mean that the relationship with Kirschbaum was absolutely necessary to him. As his lover and collaborator, he needed her. Indeed, he needed her theological gifts and commitment to a shared theological vision, and her indispensable co-working with him. He also needed her because of his own well-hidden neediness, loneliness, and woundedness.
While in Münster Barth lectured widely and tirelessly on various biblical books, figures, and themes, from the Letter to the Philippians (summer 1927) to lectures on ethics (summer 1928 and winter 1928/1929) and Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologiae (winter 1928/1929). Barth also had significant encounters with Roman Catholics while in Münster, most especially with the Catholic theologian Erich Przywara, S.J., the mentor of Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguably Barth's closest theological friend during his years in Basel. Having met Przywara in February 1929, Barth reported to Thurneysen that “he was impressed by Przywara's intellectual brilliance.” (166)
Tietz also reminds us of Barth's intellectual humility, despite what I am calling a certain natural arrogance, meaning that Barth was unafraid to admit some of his own theological errors. Significant is an error in judgment Barth made in November 1929 in relation to remarks made by Captain (ret.) Hermann Göring at a university memorial ceremony on the anniversary of the battle of Langemarck on November 10, 1914. Göring stressed: “In heaven only God, on earth only Germany.” Barth recognized in retrospect that he “fundamentally erred back then in not seeing the danger of the already rising National Socialism.” (169) Barth thought, mistakenly, that Göring's sentiments would fizzle out and come to nothing, ridiculous as they were.
While Barth confessed his error in judgment in dismissing as absurd the notion that such ideology could produce a long-term threat, he did not ever disband what Tietz calls in Chapter 9, “A Troubled “Ménage à Trois:” Tietz describes how “when the letters between Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth from the years 1925–1935 appeared in 2008, it became possible to trace the conflicts in the marriage in detail, and a portrayal emerged of the deep love between these two human beings.” (177) Tietz also writes that “the letters published in 2008 illustrate how all three suffered from the situation but also how each, at least in their respective view, tried to behave responsibly toward the other two.” (178) Unfortunately, however, what we do not know is “how Nelly Barth herself felt about the situation, since very few of her letters have been published.” (183)
I find it interesting and somewhat unsettling that Frank Jehle in his otherwise helpful chapter on “The Young Barth (1886–1921)” in the Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth adjudges “that Barth's marriage did not always run smoothly. Nevertheless, it should be recorded that all her life Nelly Barth identified with her husband. A good example is that even at a very advanced age she transcribed and published Barth's sermons of 1913 (GA:8).” 9 To be sure, this offhand remark seems to me to be somewhat evasive and diminishing of the need for private conformity to the commandment of God. I think Tietz offers a far more nuanced assessment. She notes how Barth on January 1, 1929, suggested that Kirschbaum move into his home “and for the outside one should speak of her as his “secretary.” (186) In addition—and I find this hard to swallow—Barth spent a research semester “from April to September 1929 . . . with Kirschbaum on the “Bergli.” 10 (186) In August 1929, while Barth's own family was on summer vacation without Barth because he was with Kirschbaum, Nelly “tried to make it clear to him [Barth] how difficult the situation was for her, and mentioned the possibility of divorce.” (187) Even so, on October 15, 1929, Kirschbaum “did then move into the family home in Münster.” (188)
Accordingly, I think Jehle is being less than forthright when writing “that Barth's marriage did not always run smoothly.” 11 More nuanced and honest is Busch's assessment in his biography Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, first published in English translation in 1976. Though Busch did not have access to the letters to which Tietz has had access, Busch still was keenly aware of Barth's “responsibility and blame for the situation which had come about. But he thought that it could not be changed. It had to be accepted and tolerated by all three. The result was that they bore a burden which caused them unspeakably deep suffering. Tensions arose which shook them to the core.” 12 This is in keeping with what Tietz observes on the basis of the letters published in 2008.
Having said that, this “troubled “ménage à trois” arrangement was not to change, even as Barth was nonetheless making significant changes to his own thought in the early 1930s, having moved in the meantime to Bonn in the summer semester of 1930. Tietz writes, “Barth now emphasized that revelation itself was not dialectical and no paradox. It was much more the case that only the thinking and speaking of the theologian must proceed dialectically, since the theologian is simply human.” (203) Why this revision? It has to do with Barth's engagement with Anselm and his insistence that theology builds on a divine foundation. Accordingly, “Human speech about God can be an “analogy” that corresponds to God: Because God in Jesus Christ has spoken about himself, one human being can speak to another of God appropriately. . . . Now he [Barth] pondered more intensively how God spoke of himself in Jesus Christ.” (204) Barth's theocentrism becomes increasingly christologically charged, its center being Jesus Christ, understood as the center of all theological knowledge. Put again, Barth no longer overlooks “the significance of Jesus Christ.” (205) One surprising result of this concentration is that Barth does not consider the world to “stand generally in contradiction to the reality of God. Through God's working, things that correspond to and are analogies of God's relation to the world come into being.” (205) Barth's theology thus acquires a more analogical and ecumenical form, all the while remaining Reformed.
While mapping the impact of Anselm on Barth's thought, Tietz unfolds how Barth's “private experience influenced his theology.” (221) Just so, in 1947 Barth describes “how he viewed himself in his relationship to the two women [Nelly, his wife, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum, his lover] and what this meant for his theology . . . . [in terms of] “an element of lived life.” (223) This element is why we must talk about Barth's adulterous living situation. The phrase “an element of lived life” is crucial. While Barth is famous for filtering all dimensions of theological discourse through God's self-revelation in the Word, Barth himself nonetheless acknowledges, as Tietz judiciously notes, “lived life” as a source of theological reflection. But in what way? That is what I am wresting with in this review essay. Let me explain. I think Barth's lack of unqualified loyalty to the Christian tradition contributed (in part) to his willingness to isolate himself from the call to personal obedience to the commandment. Throughout the Church Dogmatics, Barth expresses judgments such as “it is unfortunately true that from the very first the church has often missed the first and decisive point.” (CD III.1, 7) In this case, the decisive point is the relevance of revelation and faith to thinking about the “Creator.” Barth's judgment that he saw things that the church “has often missed” betrays (on his part) a hasty willingness to entertain the notion that the church has really bypassed something fundamental; that the church has indeed erred. Does Barth's willingness to judge—in my view somewhat too presumptuously—encourage his sense that the commandment does not quite apply to him personally? That is an open question.
We could also refer to Barth's doctrine of election, which he considered the heart of his theological work. Has the church catholic erred so deeply in its thinking on election (which is not homogeneous) as Barth avers it has? The question becomes, then, whether Barth's willingness to make such sweeping judgments identifies a crucial weakness in his theology. Can one really say that the church catholic has “often missed the first and decisive point?” I do not think so. But then again, I am grateful for Barth's theological leadership during the Church struggle and in the postwar years, grateful that Barth sought to ground the church's testimony in the reality of God revealed in Jesus Christ as attested in the Bible.
The early 1930s (January 1933 to be precise) also brought the ascendency of Hitler. Barth's polemic against natural theology intensified during this time, culminating in the remarkable Barmen Declaration of Faith in May 1934 and its championing of the “‘correct form of obedience” in theology. Barth was the main author of this declaration. Its target is the “German Christians” and their support of the Nazis as well as Lutheran and Reformed Christians who thought that obedience to the governing authorities is the proper form of conduct for the church. Barmen's famous first thesis challenges us to cling to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, . . . the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” Barmen champions a vision of the living Lord Jesus Christ speaking through Scripture as the church's sole authority. It is Jesus’ voice and not that of the governing authorities to which the church must listen.
The spring of 1933 also inaugurated a year of crisis in Barth's household. “In reality both of them—as Kirschbaum explicitly wrote—had long since divorced from Nelly.” (214) Just so, Barth writes to Nelly that he “could not remain faithful to you as promised.” (215) Hence Barth's sense was that a divorce was the proper course of action. Nelly agreed to one in May 1933 but then Barth and Kirschbaum “now did not see themselves in the position to agree to it. They had the impression that Nelly did not genuinely want this divorce.” (217) Nelly's depression, Tietz notes, was so great that by the summer of 1934 “she could no longer manage the household.” (218) These years—years in which Barth's theological isolation intensified due to his responsibility for the Confessing church—show a shocking disregard for God's commandment on the personal level. Indeed, Barth would not in the end agree to a divorce because he did not wish to compromise the authority with which his voice was received (by some) in the German church struggle even as his call to embrace the first commandment sat uneasily with his personal conflict in relation to the seventh commandment.
In a 1947 letter, Barth comments that “I do not doubt for a moment that the seventh commandment in its Christian interpretation implies monogamy and the insolubility of the marital bond.” (222) That said, as early as February 1935, Barth together with Kirschbaum describe the “Notgemeinschaft” of the three as “a form of responsibility, an “order in disorder.” (223) Barth's theological loneliness is a large part of the Not, the need of which he speaks. Barth's private neediness resulting from the hurts that his conflict with people evoked led him to seek out one who understood those hurts and provided not just theological support but also intimate companionship. Just so, this review essay is about working out which conflicts in Barth's life we should be grateful for and which ones to regret, and to espy how gratitude and regret may be tied to each other. Having read this section—“The Theological Dimension of Barth's Relationship to Charlotte von Kirschbaum” in Chapter 10—many times, I find myself concluding that Barth the realist—or pragmatist?—begins to emerge. The solution of remaining married while loving another indicates Barth's relative comfort with the least disruptive way forward. Interestingly, Barth thinks that there is something of a blessing in this, namely—and again from the vantage point of 1947—“I have been forbidden from becoming a legalist.” (223) True, but Barth is also thereby forbidden from pointing to his own form of life as one to be imitated, as does Paul in 1 Cor 11:1.
Indeed, Barth's uncompromising stand against Brunner in 1934 perhaps manifests a certain natural arrogance and shows once again that his conflicts with his milieu were fundamentally with people. Barth publicly excoriates a brother in Christ for advocating what Barth calls a “mediation theology.” (227) Brunner's call to Barth to take seriously “that every person possesses a remnant of the image of God such that the Gospel encounters in everyone a rational, responsible being who “somehow” already knows about God” engendered a response that was, I think, inadequately disciplined by humble obedience to the commandments. 13
Upon reflection, I do think that there is a degree of hypocrisy in Barth's call in Barmen to recognize all areas of life as belonging to Christ except that of his own domestic sphere. Even then, however, Barth is (later) willing to admit to some of his theological mistakes in Barmen. Barth recognized much later on that Barmen was incomplete, lacking a “missing seventh thesis” concerning the treatment of the Jews. (236) To be sure, Barth's extraordinary insistence on the power and truth of God's revelation in Christ was profoundly and desperately needed in light of National Socialism's “policy of violent nihilism.” 14 Christian faith must never “be bound first and foremost to the circumstances and conditions of the people and nation.” 15
Tietz notes Barth's uncompromising stand against the loyalty oath to Hitler, which was demanded from all civil servants in August 1934. As a professor at a state university, Barth was required to take the oath. In light of this requirement, which he refused, Barth adjudged “that in Adolf Hitler we have a czar and pope in one person . . . we are dealing with an incarnate God.” (241) By early 1935, the possibility that Barth might take up an appointment in Basel was circulating. Sadly, this “provoked unrest among his Swiss relatives. . . . they had the feeling that they had to suffer for the way he was conducting his life, while he did as he pleased.” (245) By April 1935, Barth was banned not only from teaching but also from preaching. On June 25, Barth accepted the appointment at Basel, having by then established for the Confessing Church that “the word of God once again [be] the sole guiding principle for church doctrine and law among us.” (247)
In July 1935, Barth returned to Basel, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Barth, however, retained his links to the Confessing Church, providing guidance to Confessing Church leadership as to whether they could and should resist state authority in the church, especially in relation to renewed demands (in April 1938) from the president of the Old Prussian Union Church's Church Council for pastors “to take the oath to Adolf Hitler, using the same wording as German civil servants.” (275) Indeed, it was Barth's firm view that “one could not take such an oath without violating the first commandment and serving an alien God.” (276) Barth also, as the Nazi terror increased, turned increasingly to political and social engagement focused on refugees, even as family intrigues persisted and the grief caused by the death of Barth's son Matthias in June 1941 in a mountain climbing accident made its presence felt.
In Chapter 11, Tietz treats Barth's vocation as a theologian in Switzerland as the war unfolded, including Barth's championing of Switzerland's independence and neutrality “against every quest for domination by individual European powers,” even as Barth continued to warn “Christians in Germany that Christian responsibility could not be limited to the private sphere of individuals or to church life.” (295, 297) By the conclusion of the war, Barth was encouraging Germans to “take responsibility for the path that all the Germans had followed to these crimes, even when they themselves had not committed them.” (301)
In the years following the war, Barth repeatedly weighed in on state and church issues. For example, together with Kirschbaum Barth visited and lectured (in Summer 1946 and 1947) at his old university in Bonn, delivering among other things a lecture titled, “The Christian Community and The Civil Community,” which he repeated in several different German cities. Tietz describes it as “his most important text on the relationship between church and state,” emphasizing therein “the significance of democracy.” (321) Barth “developed a model of politics with two concentric circles—the civil community as the larger, the Christian community as the smaller—with the gospel of Jesus Christ as the shared center.” (322) Barth, among other things, made known in no uncertain terms his resistance to Germany's desire to rearm itself, as well as the need to renounce nuclear testing. “The question of nuclear weapons was so important to Barth that he became involved in the board of an initiative that wanted to lay down a ban on nuclear weapons in Switzerland in the constitution.” (334) In 1959, Barth was invited to the European Congress against Nuclear Armament in London.
Tietz's mapping of the postwar years is seriously illuminating. I tend to think of Barth's theological-political leadership as reaching its zenith in general in the German church struggle and in particular with the Barmen Declaration. Tietz shows how Barth's principled postwar resistance to anti-communist rhetoric—and to a concomitant exaltation of the merits of military-industrial capitalism—in the church and in society won him few friends and many enemies. Barth's conflicts with the Swiss government and with anti-communist sentiments were always, more or less, conflicts with people. Barth reminded the state and the church that a given political system—communism—cannot be assumed to be “demonic” just because so many think that it is.
Another illuminating aspect of Tietz's treatment of the postwar years is Barth's involvement in ecumenical work. Regarding ecumenism, Barth described “the separation between the Roman Catholic church and the other churches” as “‘a sad, embarrassing, galling matter for all of us.” (337) Roman Catholic theologians like Hans Küng recognized something of a friend and ally in Barth. Küng concluded, as Tietz notes, “that in the doctrine of justification, seen as a whole, there is fundamental agreement between Barth's teaching and that of the Catholic Church.” (339)
In addition to Barth's political and ecumenical work, there was, of course, his life's theological work, the Church Dogmatics. Barth wrote the Church Dogmatics as lecture material, which he would then use in class. He would “read from the most recently worked-on manuscript pages of the next section of Church Dogmatics.” (342) Throughout the 1950s Barth made remarkable progress on the Church Dogmatics. Even then, he “admitted to his children how tired and exhausted he felt in the meantime with his massive Dogmatics project.” (348) By 1961, Barth asked to retire but nonetheless continued to plug away on the Church Dogmatics, beginning “anew each day, indeed each hour, at the beginning.” (351)
Chapter 13, “The White Whale”: Church Dogmatics,” is noteworthy because it provides a lucid overview of “The White Whale.” The great contribution of the Church Dogmatics was to unfold “how Protestant theology must be shaped methodologically and conceptually; above all it had to start with Jesus Christ.” 16 (364) Barth's Christological concentration is perhaps no more evident than in Tietz's discussion of his volume on election: “Jesus Christ is there the only one rejected. Simultaneously he is the first elected to fellowship with God. . . . And in his election all human beings are included.” (370) Striking, too, is Tietz's account of the penultimate volume of Church Dogmatics: “Barth argues that the light of Christ, the expression of his prophetic office, can also be encountered outside the church.” (377) Barth thereby “clarifies how we should think of God's way of speaking outside the church and how theology and church can learn from this.” (377)
Tietz narrates Barth's closing years with sympathy, describing in detail his 1962 trip to America, and also Kirschbaum's battle with dementia; in 1966 Kirschbaum moved “into the Sonnenhalde psychiatric clinic in Riehen near Basel.” (391) Right up until the end of his life, Barth remained active, receiving a medal from the Pope in 1966 and striking up a late friendship with the Catholic writer Carl Zuchmayer. By the spring of 1967, Barth finally gave up the Church Dogmatics, having labored on it for nearly fifty years. Barth died in his sleep on December 10, 1968. Tietz quotes Jüngel's summation of Barth's work: “Barth attacked the world with the Gospel.” But this attack was not brutal or unmerciful, on the contrary: “His thought and his life was the collective attempt to show that God is a joyful word.” (402)
Until the Epilogue, the only thing that seemed to be missing from Tietz's book was any kind of assessment of the conflict that permeated Barth's life. Tietz indicates that there was a certain natural arrogance to Barth—“even his first theological opinions already show his self-confidence.” (409) However, Tietz also observes that Barth's fearless engagement “with the political and church powers of his day” left him “deeply wounded when others took substantive positions against him.” (409) After noting that “Barth never [personally] found a resolution for the burden of his “three-way relationship,” Tietz remarks that he “was well-aware of his own guilt.” (409) Tietz adjudges, accordingly, that “he who otherwise dismissed “experience” as a theological category remained here under the spell of his own experience,” which is precisely why I think we must talk about Barth's “three-way relationship.” (409) All of us are tempted to make an idol of our experience, even great theologians who achieve worldwide fame.
We must talk about Barth's conflict with the commandment of God, but reception of him should not be dominated by it. Barth will continue to be read—as he ought to be—because his “theology is not primarily concerned with the human cultural performance of religion, but with God.” (411) We, I think, should be grateful for Barth's rejection of liberal theology, cultural Protestantism, and furthermore, the “Weimar republic, [the] Third Reich,” and also many of the “ideals and myths” of the postwar period. (410) Barth's insistence throughout his long and fruitful life that God and humanity be kept “fundamentally distinct” is something we ought to celebrate. (411)
Stated differently, not only does Tietz have a remarkable command of Barth's corpus, I think she displays great insight into how Barth's theological efforts to think afresh everything in relationship to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ sits uneasily with the discord at the familial level as Barth ”reconsidered” the pertinence of God's commandment in his own domestic setting. Indeed, Barth's opposition to the theological Zeitgeist, for which we must give repeated thanks, does not erase or excuse the conflict that marked his domestic sphere. Are there immediate parallels between Barth's approach to the private sphere, involving as it does a standing above the commandment, and Barth's theology, which “could not “simply go along” with an accepted church doctrine and theological tradition” (362)? I do not think so. Barth could not simply accept—and for this we are grateful—the reigning theological milieu of his day: “Christian responsibility could not be limited to the private sphere of individuals or to church life.” (297) For this we give thanks! Perhaps it is this dimension of Barth's life and witness that is drawn out most beautifully by Tietz. That said, a traditional Catholic (such as myself) would not want to make Barth's standing against the dominant theological stream of his day undermine an unqualified loyalty to the tradition.
Long before Barth's private life took the turn that it did, and through the decades in which there were three under one roof, Barth openly and profoundly called the church to take seriously God's insistence that “you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), whether it be in the context of the German church struggle or in the postwar years. Barth's theology never ceased to be politically charged because of its center, “the Old and New Testament witness to the person and work of Jesus Christ.” (362) Barth's dogged adherence to the center “convinced [him] that a radical enmity against this [communist] system would not help the people there and overshadowed the problems in the West.” (329) Even so, gratitude for Barth's standing apart from the German theological milieu sits uneasily and inconsistently with the distance Barth placed at times between himself and the tradition and the commandment on a personal level.
The elements of Barth's biography that are most problematic—the three under one roof as well as an unhealthy willingness to set oneself above the catholic tradition—sit awkwardly with what is most attractive, namely, his deep commitment to hearing the Word as scripturally attested. Barth's conflict with the reigning milieu is to be applauded, but not his personal conflict with the commandment. Also, a certain natural arrogance encouraged his willingness to at times stand above the tradition; but even then, Barth's willingness to engage neglected dimensions of the tradition, especially in its medieval, Reformation, and Protestant scholastic dimensions, should be applauded, especially given the liberal Protestant establishment's indifference to much of the tradition. Barth does go against the stream, and the way in which he went against the stream in terms of his theological-political witness is profoundly instructive. We are in his debt. Though Barth's context understood itself not to “stand generally in contradiction to the reality of God,” Barth showed the extent to which it actually did, explaining how the divine gospel upsets any and all attempts to idolize or demonize a political system (e.g., communism in the postwar years) and thereby encourages all people to take responsibility for keeping human life human. (205)
Tietz has not only written a superb overview of Barth's theology, she has presented with great clarity the political and theological contours of the decades in which Barth preached, wrote, and taught. Also, she shows how Barth's encounter with the one Word of God did not impact his private life to the degree that one would have hoped. Just as Barth placed himself above the whole tradition and willingly corrected it where he thought necessary, he also placed himself above the commandment of God. I think that Barth's authority as the leading theologian of the twentieth century will be promoted by Tietz's treatment, but also a more nuanced sense of Barth's humanity. We now have in our hands a more complex and interesting understanding of the person who called church and theology to an exclusive obedience conceived along dialectical lines to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We also have received a portrait that shows the intimate linkage between theology and biography.
In sum, for Barth, human beings do not provide us with much grounds for hope. As Barth's own personal story demonstrates, disobedience is often more enchanting than obedience. That said, Barth at his best points us to God, lifting “God up into view.” (87) Barth knows that correspondence may exist between God's own reality and will, and that of the creature. Barth also knows that correspondence between God's reality and will, and individual and social life may never be established independently of God. Indeed, it is God who “in an act of the overflowing of His inward glory” determines what is and is not of God (CD III.1, 15). Barth knew that certain forms of life were more appropriate than others to God's reality. Barth described those forms with great clarity via our creaturely dependence in such a way that the distinction between God and the world remains intact. What also, unfortunately, remained intact was a personal ethos that bracketed off the commands from the domestic realm. Barth, thankfully, never offered any justification for withstanding the disquieting commandment of God in terms of his personal circumstances. By proceeding dialectically, Barth never tired of pointing out the extent to which the world stands in contradiction to God. One does, however, wish that Barth would have taken personal responsibility to the commands as intrinsic to presentation of God's gospel. Stated differently, Barth's unparalleled attempt among modern theologians to analyze and conceptually express the self-revelation of God and to rethink all doctrines as determined by this event would have been strengthened by a personal life more open and transparent to Jesus Christ as the first one elected to fellowship with God, having borne our disobedience and the power of death in order that they might no longer hold sway.