Guess who is marked out as a false prophet by such criteria. Karl Barth. For that man maintained a lifelong, impenitent, and fairly public affair with his research assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, in which he both refused to repent when confronted by his mother and forced his wife (who knew about the affair) to accept his mistress moving into the family home. Christiane Tietze has the story in the Scottish Journal of Theology, available here. I’m not sure that Eph. 5:3 (“sexual immorality . . . must not even be named among you”) and 5:12 (“it is shameful even to speak of the things that they [the sons of disobedience, v. 6] do in secret”) commend reading the whole thing, but suffice it to say that such brazen hypocrisy marks the man out as someone to avoid, not one to learn from.

In his Church Dogmatics, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that “the fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet.”1 The theological ‘retrieval’ crowd has latched upon this quote and repeats it with some regularity in their endeavor to promote a renewed interest in ancient and medieval theology. Craig Carter began an article at Credo with the quote, while Ryan McGraw quoted it approvingly elsewhere at Credo, in an article which featured the quote as a ready-made tweet on the side bar: readers had only to click to retweet it on their own X accounts.

The choice is a strange one, to put it mildly. Scripture warns us to beware false prophets and tells us their character that we might recognize and avoid them. Such people are characterized by “sensuality” (1 Pet. 2:2), the Greek for which (ἀσελγείαις) means “wantonness,” “lewdness,” “licentiousness,” and “conduct shocking to public decency,” per Strong’s (see here). They “indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority” (v. 10), and “have eyes full of adultery” (v. 14).

Guess who is marked out as a false prophet by such criteria. Karl Barth. For that man maintained a lifelong, impenitent, and fairly public affair with his research assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, in which he both refused to repent when confronted by his mother and forced his wife (who knew about the affair) to accept his mistress moving into the family home.

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