“Barth wrote from a commanding position. He not only had lived through the rise and fall of European liberal theology but had directly influenced its changing fortunes. The defining events of Barth’s career occurred as a result of the First World War. After witnessing Christian support for German militarism and struggling as a pastor in a working-class congregation, Barth became convinced that the foundations of establishment liberalism, which had for a century supported the intellectual scaffolding of German culture, were irremediably corrupt.”

Karl Barth was the greatest theologian since the Reformation, and his work is today a dead letter. This is an extraordinary irony. Barth aspired to free Christian theology from restrictive modern habits of mind but in the end preserved the most damaging assumptions of the ideas he sought to overcome. This does not mean he no longer deserves serious attention. Barth now demands exceptionally close attention, precisely because his failures can teach us how profound the challenges of modernity are for theology—and show us the limits of a distinctly modern solution to them.

My own interest in Barth was inspired by a conventional religious crisis and followed a recognizable script. As an undergraduate I was anguished to discover a conflict between the creed I was reciting in church and the arguments I was reading in Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Although my grasp of their arguments was imperfect, it seemed to me obvious that the Enlightenment philosophers posed a lethal threat to Christian belief. I found nothing alarming in their shallow accounts of the life of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, or the possibility of miracles. These I dismissed. But the modern consensus, involving thinkers of otherwise diverse views, that human reason could not attain genuine knowledge of God had become a source of debilitating dread.

Descartes instructs us to doubt everything except clear and distinct ideas, which turn out in the end to be few in number. Hume counsels that we restrict our knowledge to sense impressions of a material world whose causal regularities were largely imagined. Kant wants to transform speculative aspirations into an analysis of the knowing subject. Learning these things, I judged that modern philosophy imperils biblical religion not by elevating the power of reason—histories claiming so are gravely misleading—but by impairing our ability to reason properly about God. For if human knowledge is indeed limited to physical sense experience or to the categories of understanding imposed by the mind, one cannot speak credibly about the God of Christian doctrine.

As I soon discovered, however, initially with great relief, theological liberalism promised otherwise. We may be unable to reason directly about God, and in that sense the creed of my youth could not be affirmed in a traditional way, but it could nevertheless still be affirmed in an existentially meaningful way. A good deal of liberalism’s appeal, in fact, stemmed from the conviction that the Christian message could be genuinely personal.

A movement that had drawn some of Europe’s most gifted scholars over the previous two centuries, theological liberalism set its talents to securing articles of peace between an advancing modern worldview and a religious tradition in confused retreat. It adopted different strategies, but on the main question that disturbed my student slumbers—how my deepest convictions could be legitimately affirmed as true—the giants of liberalism agreed. They argued that if Christians would accept the limits on human reason imposed by the Enlightenment, believers not only would reap spiritual benefits but would encounter a purer form of Christian faith. Under the agreement negotiated by liberalism, Christian theology would cease defending truth claims about the order of nature and address instead the private faith of individuals or the moral good of secular society.

Two of Barth’s teachers provide examples. In the winter of 1906, Barth enrolled at the University of Berlin to study under Adolf von Harnack, arguably the preeminent academic in Wilhelmine Germany. Author of a major liberal historiography, History of Dogma (1894–98), Harnack was convinced that the teachings of Jesus had been distorted by Greek philosophy and could be recovered only through historical inquiry. Harnack invested scholars with tremendous authority, regarding the historical-critical method as part of the Reformation’s mission to return Christianity to its primitive essentials. He assured believers that modern thinking was an unambiguous blessing, as it could liberate them from a metaphysical mindset that was foreign to the original spirit of their faith. And that spirit was animated by a simple creed about the universal Fatherhood of God and his presence in every human soul.

Barth learned a similar lesson from Wilhelm Herrmann. A professor at Marburg, where Barth entered after leaving Berlin, Herrmann embodied the vibrant religious legacy of Kant, who had cautioned against the pursuit of unresolvable metaphysical questions. The “land of truth,” Kant warned, is a tiny island “surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores.” Kant thought identifying reason’s “unalterable limits” portended not the end of religion but its ethical revival; the fact that the “starry skies above” were speculatively inaccessible meant human beings could now focus on obeying the “moral law within.”

Herrmann seized on Kant’s idea that religion was principally about morality and made truth claims fundamentally different from those of science. Theologians had wrongly thought that Christianity provided a privileged perspective on the physical world, a mistake the advance of the natural sciences could only expose to ridicule. But the uniqueness of Christianity was a matter of personal experience, not demonstrable knowledge. Herrmann argued that the Christian life involved communing with God’s spirit through the moral influences exercised by Jesus’s life on human history.

By uncoupling Christian theology from an outdated worldview, Harnack and Herrmann hoped that theology could better express the teachings transmitted by the biblical writers, a message allegedly free from a cosmology to which no intelligent person could assent. As Gary Dorrien writes in his excellent book The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (2000), Barth’s teachers thought Christian anxiety about modernity was misguided: “Harnack had assured [Barth] that liberal theology recovered the simple and beautiful religion of Jesus; Herrmann convinced him that liberal theology retained the essential gospel faith through its insistence that the living Christ could be known personally.”

Theological liberalism offered itself as a respectable way to preserve the culture, language, and ethics of Christianity without abandoning modern philosophy. There was much to admire in this tradition, and as a student I was impressed by its intellectual courage and institutional prestige. This was a route I might have taken had a perceptive teacher not handed me the first volume of the Church Dogmatics (1932).

In Barth I met a thinker who told me that liberalism was on a fool’s errand, offering a fraudulent solution to a misunderstood problem. Liberalism could not inoculate my faith against the challenges of modernity, because it misjudged the import of modernity for Christianity.

Barth wrote from a commanding position. He not only had lived through the rise and fall of European liberal theology but had directly influenced its changing fortunes. The defining events of Barth’s career occurred as a result of the First World War. After witnessing Christian support for German militarism and struggling as a pastor in a working-class congregation, Barth became convinced that the foundations of establishment liberalism, which had for a century supported the intellectual scaffolding of German culture, were irremediably corrupt. His ideas came together in an incendiary commentary, Epistle to the Romans, whose second edition, published in 1922, was famously said to be “like a bomb on the theologians’ playground.”

Barth’s genius was to have noticed that modern theology had effectively ceased speaking about God. It was not that God had disappeared from Western thought—he was, as it happens, being conscripted into an expanding number of new roles—but theologians were increasingly using God in order to explain or justify positions held on secular grounds. Sometimes the idea of God was discerned in the order of the natural world, at other times he was said to be the ground of moral obligation or the mystery of human subjectivity—in any case, God was used to sustain a secular scheme of knowledge. To satisfy his need for truth, Barth wrote, “man steps out in a bold bid for truth, creating the Deity according to his own image—and in a confident act of self-assurance, undertaking to justify and sanctify himself.”

Liberalism came in several varieties, but it consistently made two moves. First, often drawing on something like St. Augustine’s observation that the heart intuitively seeks God, it argued that religion or religious experience plays an integral role in our lives. Sometimes we hide this from ourselves, but an examination of our deepest commitments reveals an ineliminable religious dimension to human nature. Second, it argued that Christianity is the loftiest or most fitting historical expression of our innate religious impulses. The Christian proclamation could be deemed “true” because it corresponds to the religious needs of modern man.

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