It will be a century this coming summer that the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth began his revolutionary commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. A quiet and studious man of simple tastes, Barth was an unlikely revolutionary. He listened to Mozart, smoked his pipe and read the paper: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” he said. But mostly he sat and wrote. His Church Dogmatics is more than six million words. And no, I haven’t read it all. But his considerably shorter Epistle to the Romans, written earlier, was the decisive turning point in 20th-century theology. It was a book that dropped a bomb on the comfortable assumptions of German liberal thought. And it’s a bomb that needs dropping again ”“ but this time much closer to home.
Barth’s target was the sort of theology offered by his tutor, Adolf von Harnack. For the universally admired Harnack, Christianity was a religion of inner morality ”“ of good people, in their local congregations, who sought nothing more than personal transformation.
I read this and thought once more that although Giles is a brilliant wordsmith, he is as usual off target. Of course we can and should fear governmental overreach. But I would submit that what threatens Christianity today is not co-option by the state but co-option by the Zeitgeist, the trendy ruling culture, so aptly called a culture of death by John Paul II. This culture loves us to play along (e.g climate change) but gets vicious if we depart from the script (eg gay marriage). All of us have felt that pressure and caved in to it at some time or another. It is the same pressure that produces the scorn for Christianity (eg the Rev series; compare and contrast the hapless vicar with the confident, pragmatic local imam). But Giles is writing in the Guardian which is famously left of centre and beyond, so it would be very unlikely for him to criticise his own.
It also seemed odd that [i]Fraser[/i] would be expounding the precepts of the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy, as I would have assumed that he would have a problem with Barth’s preoccupation with God’s transcendence.
Jeremy, that is absolutely spot on.
I remember seeing G. F. in a video of an event at St Paul’s. It quite shocked me because (if memory is correct) he said: ‘Eternal life is not good Christianity but good Platonism.’