Karl Barth (1886-1968) is a theologian who is admired
by many in the evangelical church, including some who are very, very
conservative theologians. Why are so many evangelicals bedazzled by Barth? There
were three reasons: he spoke out against classic liberalism, rejecting its anti-supernaturalism;
second, he vowed that he was promoting Calvinistic theology; and, third, he
wrote a ton of ‘erudite’ stuff, and that made it hard to pin him down, and it
also made him look very, very intelligent and someone to be feared as a
theologian.
As a young professor, I was
in a conversation with two senior evangelical theologians from Trinity,
Deerfield. I mentioned to them that I’d been studying Karl Barth and couldn’t
understand for the life of me why evangelicals were so enchanted by Barth. Their
reply: well, he does say some good stuff, and his writings are so voluminous
that its hard to pin him down. I looked at them with utter disbelief.
Here’s just a tiny,
miniscule, sample of Barth’s mind: his belief that only Christ reveals God.
Now, to evangelicals this sound cool. (Didn’t I tell you he sounds traditional?)
But what he means is a million miles removed from traditional belief. He means
that NOTHING, BUT NOTHING, reveals to us anything about God but the person called
Jesus Christ. Thus, the Bible, creation, dreams, prophets and prophecies, and
so on, did not reveal God to us. Rather, God comes to us in a person…the Son. Thus,
God’s revelation is EXCLUSIVELY personal;
that is, it comes ONLY in the person of Jesus Christ. This means to ‘see’ God
and his revelation, one must have a personal encounter with Jesus. The Bible is
not God’s word and his revelation to us about himself and his Son. Nor is it
God’s revelation to us about salvation. God’s revelation is exclusively in the
person of the Son; and he reveals himself existentially, that is, in a
person-to-person kind of way. The Holy Spirit does not reveal the Father. Only
the Son does.
I could spend forever critiquing
just this one aspect of Barth’s Christology. The above summary is enough in
itself to condemn Barth forever. And, sadly, there are countless examples of
this type of theology. Yet, I’m going to take a different tack and look at his
lifestyle, that is, his love-life.
Barth was in a very weird
sexual relationship. Barth was married with five children. He hired a secretary,
Charlotte von Kirschbaum, fell in love with her, and wanted to marry her. His wife
did not consent to a divorce, so he moved his girlfriend into the family home.
(Yes, the children still lived there.) His wife hated the arrangement, but put
up with it. This went on for thirty-five years in the same home. On the same
gravestone are the names of Barth, his wife, and his lover![1]
What do you make of this?
Mark Galli, an author who wrote a biography on Barth, writes in Christianity
Today that Barth was just another great theologian with feet of clay. (This is
after Galli cites such ‘great’ theologians as Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis
of Assisi.) Indeed, Galli has the gall to question whether Barth actually committed
adultery (presumably because there was no ‘evidence’); yet Galli is sure that
there was emotional adultery.[2]
I don’t know who makes me gag more, the fake-evangelical Galli or the ‘could be’-adulterer
Barth!
The irony in all of this
is that Liberal theology is quite clear on what Barth really was. When doing my
Ph.D., my supervisor was prof. Paul Badham, a leading modernist/Liberal scholar
from Great Britain. He was a good man and fair. But he did not have the
slightest notion what traditional evangelicalism taught. That being said, he
was spot-on in his assessment of Neo-orthodoxy, especially in his criticisms of
Barth. In his book The Contemporary
Challenge of Modernist Theology, he takes to task the theology and
hypocrisy of Karl Barth (in chapter 3, “Modernism in Relation to Neo-Orthodoxy”).[3]
He draws out the same criticisms that I have noted. He outlines Barth’s
Christological mumbo-jumbo. And adds, very explicitly, that Barth takes traditional
theological language, eviscerates it of its theology, and pours into a new theology!
Nor does Badham shy away from pointing at Barth’s exceedingly shameful adulterous
affair!
It is shameful how
evangelicals are so willing to stick their heads in the sand and deny the
obvious because they want so much to be acceptable to mainstream academia and
because of a really twisted view of God’s love. And it is equally shameful that
it takes a rank Liberal to tell the truth about Barth! If you’re an evangelical
brother and you cannot determine that Barth was a fraud, heretic, and
licentious fool, you need to fall on your face in repentance and ask God to
forgive you!
[1]
Mark Galli, Karl Barth: An Introductory
Biography for Evangelicals (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
2017), 67-69, 91, 93, 129, 136.
[2] Mark Galli, “What
to Make of Karl Barth’s Steadfast Adultery, Christianity Today (October 20th,
2017), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/october-web-only/what-to-make-of-karl-barths-steadfast-adultery.html,
accessed 3/31/2018.
[3] Paul Badham, The Contemporary Challenge of Modernist Theology
(Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 1998).
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