The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth

First published:Der Römerbrief, 1919 (English translation, 1933)

Edition(s) used:The Epistle to the Romans. 6th ed. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford University Press, 1968

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Exegesis; theology

Core issue(s): The Deity; the divine; faith; God; grace

Overview

In the early twentieth century, Karl Barth radically changed the direction of Protestant theology. He was disenchanted with liberal modernism, represented by such theologians as Friedrich Schleiermacher, which promoted rationality and religious individualism. Modernistic theology assimilated with culture, science, and a belief in progress rather than promoting God and his revelation in Jesus Christ. In an address from 1916, “The Righteousness of God,” Barth argues that to conflate a country or civilization’s progress with the will of God was a fallacy and an evasion of the real will of God. To Barth and his associates, proof that this anthropocentric Christianity was morally bankrupt lay in the ease with which many churches in Germany accepted German nationalism in both world wars. Liberal theology made it possible to see both Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler as God-appointed leaders bringing unity to the German people. In 1933, Barth led a rebellion against the uncritical acceptance of Hitlerism, creating the Barmen Synod of the Confessing Church. As a result, he was expelled from his teaching position in Germany and returned to his native Switzerland.

Although educated in the modern liberal tradition, Barth reacted against it and developed what many who have studied him call a theology of neo-orthodoxy: a return to orthodox opinions of the Reformation. Theologian Hans Kung terms Barth’s position as postmodern in that it is a reaction against excessive reliance on human reason and involves a belief in the unreasonable, essentially incomprehensible nature of God, a God who is completely “other” than humanity. Barth rejected the idea that humans can discover in themselves and their own activities God’s relationship to them. Rather, that relationship is solely and freely determined by God in his own way and time, and the result of such a relationship is more likely to disorient humans and call them away from their accustomed activities than it is to reassure them and legitimize those activities.

The Epistle to the Romans was the first major work in which Barth developed his alternative to the reigning theology. It is fitting that he chose the New Testament book of Romans as a counter to the certitudes of his time. The confident positivism that he found in the early twentieth century was in stark contrast to Paul’s teaching that grace, not works, would determine humankind’s salvation. In other words, God’s actions, not humankind’s, indicated the presence of divinity. Humankind’s task was essentially a passive one: to have faith so the Lord’s purpose could be illuminated. Barth argues that there is a fundamental, qualitative difference between God and humankind. He calls God pure negation: everything humankind is not. Throughout the book, he uses imagery of inaccessibility and spatial separateness to reinforce his idea of the vast disparity between the divine and humanity.

He also diverged from the popular historical scholarship of his day, which he thought was anthropocentric and rationalistic in its approach and consequently failed to value sufficiently the uniqueness of Scripture. Instead of just another text, he argued, the Bible is a medium for divine self-manifestation. It introduces a strange new world, as he called it in his 1916 lecture “The Strange New World Within the Bible.” This is the world of God, where human history ceases to be and a new history begins.

Biblical discourse testifies to divine speech, and Paul is an instrument of that speech. Contemporary attempts to place Paul in a historical context or to find in his personality some predisposition to, or special qualification for, his role were, at best, subservient to the purpose of the text, the role of which was to bear witness to divinity. Barth felt that Romans could not be regarded as a historical monument; it was Gospel and therefore had to be approached through faith. Likewise, Paul should not be regarded as the subject of his epistle; if anything, he acts “in contradiction to himself”: “. . . his mission is not within him but above him—unapproachably distant and unutterably strange.”

His faith in Jesus Christ, not his lineage, was the only qualification of which Paul could boast. Barth asserts that it is likewise for readers of Paul: Only faith illuminates the text; without faith, it cannot be seen.

According to James D. Smart, the first edition of The Epistle to the Romans demonstrated the enthusiasm of discovery, as if Barth were an explorer discovering in Paul new territory. Beginning in the second, 1922 edition, however, Barth bolstered his case with the weighty philosophical underpinnings of Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Overbeck, who both stressed the unknowable qualities of God. Overbeck argued that the early Christians were radically at odds with the world at large and thus began living a God-inaugurated primal history within history. Kierkegaard also emphasized the revolutionary character of early Christianity and contrasted it with the modern bourgeois culture that attempted to appropriate and domesticate it. To express the disconnectedness of the temporal and eternal worlds, Kierkegaard used dialectics: a series of unresolvable paradoxes by which the incongruity between God and humankind could best be expressed. Barth adopted Kierkegaard’s dialectic method to express the brokenness and indirection of humankind’s knowledge of God. Both philosophers reinforced Barth’s notion that the worlds of humankind and of God contradicted each other absolutely, and humankind consequently faced a “krisis” of what to believe and how to resolve the contrasts between belief and unbelief, connection and disconnection, temporality and eternity.

Christian Themes

Throughout The Epistle to the Romans, Barth emphasizes the distinctive differences between the Deity and humankind. He states that those differences cannot even be calculated by human beings and are best expressed in a dialectic that approximates radical divergence. To Barth, the divine cannot be understood by anyone living in this fallen world. God is separate from humans and beyond any cultural or religious attempt to discover him. Barth saw in the tragedy of the German church during Hitler’s time that a theology that sought to ally Christianity with cultural movements was doomed to fail. It was not simply that Hitler was an extreme example. No man-made endeavor in a fallen world could be assumed to be God-inspired.

The tremendous disparity between God and his creation requires faith to overcome. The Gospel reveals the truth to a fallen people and offers an everlasting alternative. Faith alone allows those fallen persons to participate in this new life. In Barth’s view, readers of the Word are to be passive. The text demands no natural abilities such as intellect but only faith, and even that is created within the reader by an inscrutable God. The role of the reader is to listen, not to probe, compare, or analyze. To Barth, although the Word is infallible, the Bible is not. He acknowledges that God has selected the Bible as a means to communicate with humans, but he argues that a human-created source is not infallible like the God-authority of Christ himself.

Grace, according to Barth, enables humanity to see another world but not to live in it. It is an indication that God is pleased with the recipient, but it cannot be appropriated, relied on, or made to serve human convenience. A transforming gift, grace is more likely to destabilize a person’s life than to conform to it. Like God, it is “other.” Barth objects to pietism: that is, a preoccupation with soul-searching characterized by an attitude of fear and trembling. Such a posture lacks grace. The proper attitude of a Christian is joy. In the old world when humans were under the law rather than under grace, they were constantly asking what to do and how to act. The law reminded them of the distance between themselves and God. Grace, however, is a promise of the future, and it requires only faith in response.

Sources for Further Study

Kung, Hans. Great Christian Thinkers. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1994. This influential German theologian terms Barth a postmodernist. Assesses the importance of Barth’s break with liberal Protestants whose excessive reliance on modernist rationality led them to an uncritical acceptance of Hitlerism in the early 1930’s.

Smart, James D. The Divided Mind of Modern Theology: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, 1908-1933. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967. A careful analysis of the differences between the first and second editions of the Romans commentary with particular attention to the new influences of Franz Overbeck and Søren Kierkegaard.

Tillich, Paul. Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestant Theology. Edited by Carl E. Braaten. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. This collection of lectures by an influential theologian highlights Barth’s most important conceptions: the otherness of God, the need to disassociate Christianity from social movements, and the universal crisis existing between the eternal and temporal worlds.

Webster, John. Karl Barth. 2d ed. London: Continuum, 2004. Comprehensive, concise, and readable account of Barth with an excellent explanation of Romans.