When, in my mid-twenties, I first had my religious reawakening, and started developing an interest in Christian theology and the church, I remember being presented with an “either-or” choice. Now, this choice may not have been stated explicitly in this way, but I know it was shown to me at least implicitly by those who I was first learning from. This was the choice: if I wanted to get into academic theology, as someone who was (and is) more progressive, then I should lean towards studying Paul Tillich and the theology that came after him in the 20th century, and should avoid Karl Barth and those that came after him. This was presented as a choice between progressive theology and conservative theology; between a non-ideological or pluralistic school of thought and hard-core TULIP Calvinism; between an emphasis on love and acceptance on one hand, and exclusion and fundamentalism on the other.

And so, for a long time, I stuck to this understanding. I read a lot of Tillich, and a lot of theologians who could be said to descend from him, if not literally then at least spiritually. And I avoided anything associated with Barth and Reformed theology. I became especially enamored with Jugen Moltmann and his liberal theology; I am in fact still quite indebted to him, and find his work quite useful and beautiful.

But, as I’ve documented before in my writing, in seminary I was introduced to the work of Stanley Hauerwas, and through him, John Howard Yoder, and their brand of non-apologetic, highly critical post-liberal Anabaptist theology. From there, I have dipped my toes into George Lindbeck’s post-liberalism, Wittgenstenian language games, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics. I still consider Hauerwas the number one influence on my theological life, and Yoder is in the top five as well. But, through them, I started to become acquainted with that name I was warned against, and who influenced almost all of these thinkers and schools: Karl Barth. It was hard not to: Yoder studied directly under Barth at the University of Basel in the forties and fifties. Although Yoder was not a pure proponent of Barth’s thought, and had quite a bit of criticism of Barth in his own work, he was also clearly in Barth’s school of thought, and especially in the work of Hauerwas on Yoder, it becomes clear how much Barth influenced Yoder.

And so, over the last couple of years, my interest in Barth has grown and grown. However, a little of that old aversion is hardwired into me, despite the fact that I now largely reject a lot of the theology of Tillich, and so I have never quite dove into reading Barth for myself (other than a quick read of his Church Dogmatics in Outline as part of an online reading group Hauerwas and Will Willimon lead during the summer of 2020.) But, that has changed this year, and one of the leading motivators of it was receiving Chris Boesel’s new work, Reading Karl Barth: Theology That Cuts Both Ways to review. Boesel, an associate professor of Christian Theology at Drew Theological School, is a progressive thinker, aims to make Barth accessible for those he identifies as “socio-politically progressive” but who still want “a life of faith that is theologically traditional.” Consider my box checked. This book was really written for me.

For that reason, I want to do more than just write a simple book review. I will do that, here in this essay, but I want to expand this a bit. And the reason I want to do this is because I, like Boesel, have found that Barth has a lot to offer progressive Christians, those of us who consider ourselves left politically but want to reclaim the idea that Christianity is only for conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. Barth offers a powerful traditional Christian theology; one that preserves the orthodox beliefs important to the life and tradition of the church throughout history and doesn’t jettison them in order to conform to the idea that progressives can’t believe those kinds of things. Boesel shows that Barth can be an important voice for those who believe the words found in the Bible and the Creeds – and who think those words call us to care for the poor, preserve the environment, fight injustice, and preserve pluralism and liberalism.

So, over the course of a few essays, I want to offer a review of Boesel’s book (which I will do in this first essay), and then, I want to use his work to break down, in a few digestible pieces, how Karl Barth can speak to progressive Christians today. I’m doing this because I have found, contrary to what I was originally warned about, I have found Barth’s theology to be, in large part, an amazing resource for thinking about the role of the church in the world, without that church being stripped of its moral authority or folded anonymously into leftist or progressive social justice movements. In line with Boesel, I want to “reclaim Barth” from the most conservative theological voices, because I don’t think his theology, when followed through all its richness, upholds a faith that justifies insularity, exclusion, and exclusivity, nor does it lend itself to a theology that advocates for socially conservative policies (there is a reason Barth was nicknamed “The Red Pastor from Safenwil” after all.)

Establishing an ideological distinction between the Church and the world of American politics has been a consistent point of priority for me as well as a driving motivation for what makes me want to embark on this project. As I’ve written before, 2016 played a big role in shaking a lot of assumptions I carried about the viability of politics as a way of really advancing a vision of justice or a better world, and I have especially become convinced that the progressive church in America should not aim to become a “Christian Left” a la the Christian Right – identified with and subservient to the needs of a secular political movement and providing ideological and metaphysical cover to the needs of those seeking power. Instead, progressive churches should aim to just be the Church – feeding the hungry, loving our neighbor, welcoming the stranger and comforting the oppressed – regardless of whether or not that serves the interests of the American political left perfectly or not. We as the Church have a commission, and an allegiance, and those should not be subsumed under the banner of the Democratic Party or the DSA or any other secular political organization. This doesn’t mean we don’t care about injustice, or public policy, or elections; it means we don’t confuse effectiveness in getting the right person elected with what it means to be a Christian.

For anyone who shares these kinds of priorities, Karl Barth becomes a powerful ally. As Boesel lays out in his brief biographical sketch, Barth too confronted a church that had become an apologist for state power and national ambitions. In his case, this was pre-WWI Germany, and then later, pre-WWII Nazi Germany as well. He first came to prominence when he pushed backed hard against liberal theology¹ – the 19th century movement pioneered by such thinkers as Schleimacher and Von Harnack, and taken up in the 20th century by the aforementioned Paul Tillich, that embraced enlightenment values and methods emphasizing reason and experience over tradition, and which introduced historical criticism and other modes of skepticism to Scripture, tradition, and the long-held orthodoxies of Protestantism. Barth was trained in liberal theology under Von Harnack and Hermann, and while he strove to take the good of liberal theology with him, his experiences around World War I drove him to largely reject the movement.

The impetus of this rejection for Barth was, as Boesel describes, “the endorsement of the Kaiser’s war declaration by virtually the entire theology establishment in Germany,” which Barth understood as a theological failure by the church. Continuing on, Boesel describes this theological failure:

“There was no distance between the Christian faith and theology of the liberal church and the spirit of the people, the nation, the Volk, as expressed in cultural institutions and traditions and the various national and cultural corridors of power. Perhaps without intending to, liberal theology appeared to be uniquely suited for creating what in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible are called “court prophets” – “yes men”… to the principalities and powers, to the prevailing winds, be they the whims of the crown or the spirit of the age and its cultural achievements.”

In his commentary on the book of Romans, Karl Barth established himself as the leading voice standing against this dominant liberal tradition at the heart of Protestant Christianity, and in the process, became a well-known figure. His turn was a major inflection point in 20th century Christian thought, and defined the arguments theologians would have for at least the next half century. Contributing to this growing fame was his role as an outspoken German national and intellectual against the war, in a milieu where very few were taking such a position.

Barth did not rest on this notoriety, however. Following on the defeat of Germany in the war, and the subsequent rise of Hitler’s National Socialism in the following decades, Barth once again staked out a theologically-principled position against his homeland and fellow Germans. As the German church came increasingly under the sway of Nazism, Barth spearheaded the writing of the Barmen Declaration, a remarkable and timeless statement of Christian belief in the face of nationalism and war. For the second time in the first half of the 21st century, Barth had established himself as an important prophetic voice in the face of political currents that most people found difficult to resist or step out of. 

It is this continued act of standing against the sublimation of the Church under the desires of national power that makes Barth such a powerful voice for Christians today who too want to stand against the desire by some to appropriate the Christian witness in justification of decidedly non-Christian ends. But, his power as a theologian shouldn’t end there; there are plenty of good theological voices, but today and throughout history, who can be said to play a similar role. The strength of Barth’s theology runs deeper than as a consequentialist appropriation for a positive end, but instead is found in Barth’s ability to make such a principled argument against nationalism in a way that does not sideline or make excuses for the orthodox declarations of the faith. How he does so is what I want to spend this series exploring. 

Before we get to that, however, let me spare a few more words for Chris Boesel’s book. Boesel manages to take a notoriously difficult theologian to read and understand, and makes his thought digestible for the general reader. As noted earlier, Boesel wants to not just explain the theology of Karl Barth, but also to show how it can be read as relevant for those in progressive churches today, and he largely succeeds in this task. He does this by following the priorities and emphases in Barth’s own work, rather than re-classifying what we should think important in Barth. Boesel begins with a discussion of Barth’s purposes and theological method, before digging into the content of Barth’s theology, making the same move that Barth spent his whole life extolling: from God first, through Jesus, to us, and finally through our action in response to God. In doing so, Boesel does a masterful job of explaining Barth’s theology, and in the end, shows how it can speak to the priorities of progressive Christians in today’s world. This work is one that any seminary professor today can turn to for a course on Barth; it serves both a general and academic audience in its clarity and its fidelity to its subject.

And so, because of this clarity and fidelity, I want to spend the next five essays going through the high points of Barth’s theology as Boesel describes them, in order to present him to my progressive readers as someone they should know and be familiar with, if we want our faith to do more than justify our politics or serve as a form of Moral Therapeutic Deism. Barth is hailed as the greatest theologian of the 20th century for a reason, and it would be a shame if we forgot him today, or even worse, ceded the power of his work to those who would twist it to justify the very kind of theological nationalism he abhorred and worked against throughout his life.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

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¹  I want to be clear here: the “liberal theology” I am describing and that prevailed in Western Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries should not be somehow confused with liberal politics in America in the late 20th and 21st century. Lest any of my more conservative readers want to make such a connection, be assured, liberal theology does not refer to American political liberalism, but instead to the liberal tradition arising from the enlightenment, of which we all partake today, which centers individuality and human rights alongside empiricism and self-determination. We are all, in many ways, liberals in this sense, and the American dichotomy of liberal-conservative does not apply here and would be unknown to Barth.