Karl Barth

In the early 1980s I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth. My aim was to discover how Barth would understand how the Church and the State are called by God to take responsibility for economic affairs. In many respects, Barth did not address this matter directly. Therefore, in order to get at his thinking, I had to absorb virtually the whole of his thought, including his massive Church Dogmatics. Then, in light of his theology as a whole, I deduced how he would understand certain economic and political matters in the light of Christian revelation.

I strongly recommend getting to know Barth. Among theologians, he is considered one of the great theologians of all time. He is worth reading, and it is a shame that so few read him. Since I was forced to absorb the structure and content of Barth's theology, and to set it forth as clearly and logically as possible, my dissertation gives a very good introduction to Barth. This can be helpful as Barth is not always easy to comprehend. Individual passages are usually fairly clear, but his Church Dogmatics is so long and rambling that it is easy to never see the forest for the trees. Hopefully, I have taken a difficult theologian and made him intelligible.

Barth's great theological opponent was Schleiermacher, and I am convinced that Barth and Schleiermacher frame the issues that divine the church today. These issues came to a head during WWII when the liberal theologians had no real defense against the Nazi subversion of the Church. In my view, the same liberal approach still cannot stand against the culture. That is why the Church needs to study Barth. Barth was the leading theologian of the German Church's resistance to Hitler, and to a theological liberalism that cannot help but absorb the Zeitgeist His theology was adequate to the task, as much then as now.

Barth is also important for his approach to Scripture. Hans Frei, for example, in his interesting work on hermeneutics commented that "Barth's biblical exegesis is a model of the kind of narrative reading that can be done in the wake of the changes I describe in this book." Barth interpreted Scripture narratively, seen as a single narrative revealing a triune God whose definitive revelation was Jesus Christ. As such, he was able to make sense of the entire biblical revelation. This narrative approach can be contrast with the historical/critical method, the method I learned in seminary. The critical approach to Scripture normally asks how a particular passage was understood when first written, followed by how it should be understood today. This approach has difficulty in discerning what aspects of a passage are artifacts of an ancient culture, and which aspects belong to the enduring Word of God. A narrative approach does not deny critical insight, but it places each passage in a larger context that enables its fundamental meaning to become evident. For example, in my dissertation I show how economic life can be understood in light of creation by the Father, reconciliation by the Son, and redemption by the Spirit, all revealed in the whole of the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation. As such, the dissertation is a good example of how to interpret Scripture in an theological and narrative fashion.

The fifth and final chapter of my dissertation is a bit different from the others. In that chapter I give a social and economic history of Latin America with Chile as a focal point. As this chapter makes clear, one of the fundamental causes of poverty in smaller, poorer countries is that these countries are not adequately buffered against oscillations in the international market. This was clearly the case with Chile. One result of my studies was to convince me that the globalist agenda will not lead to an enduring good. World trade is necessary, but the eradication of economic barriers and strict laissez faire economics across national boundaries will not work to the advantage of a great many of the world's people. Among other things, when poorer, smaller countries are integrated into the economies of larger countries, they lose their political independence, the capacity to direct their own economic affairs. To offset this possibility, I recommend in my dissertation that poorer countries band together to further their own interests against the larger and more powerful countries.

Further, in the final chapter, I make use of a Marxist social and economic analysis. This does not make me a Marxist. Among other things, I believe in limited private property. I used a Marxist analysis in my dissertation because I believed and still believe that their historical integration of political and economic matters is the most penetrating. Their solution, however, is inadequate because they cannot deal with sin. Among current ideologies, however, they are not alone in this.

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Karl Barth

Theology