A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth's WWI Sermons

By Karl Barth

World War I changed Karl Barth's theology forever. In this book William Klempa presents for the first time in English thirteen sermons that offer Barth's unique view and commentary on the Great War. Barth saw the war as “a unique time of God,†believing it to represent God's judgment on militarism. The sermons reveal a deep strain of theological wrestling with the war's meaning, as Barth comes to see the conflict as the logical outcome of all human attempts to create God in our own image. As it demonstrates a decisive shift in Barth's early theology, this volume is essential for anyone who wishes to understand the twentieth century's greatest theologian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611647952

Karl Barth

Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a pastor, an outspoken critic of the rise of the Nazi Party, and Professor of Theology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Book preview

A Unique Time of God

A Unique Time of God

A Unique Time of God

Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons

Karl Barth

Translated and Edited by William Klempa

© 2016 William Klempa

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Translated by William Klempa from the German Predigten 1914 (Karl Barth, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1), published by Theologischer Verlag Zürich, Zurich 1999.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, and 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission. Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission.

Book design by Sharon Adams

Cover design by Marc Whitaker / MTWdesign.net

Cover photo: © Imperial War Museums (Q 5100)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barth, Karl, 1886–1968, author. | Klempa, William, editor.

Title: A unique time of God : Karl Barth’s WWI sermons / Karl Barth ; translated and edited by William Klempa.

Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032994 (print) | LCCN 2016047885 (ebook) | ISBN 9780664262662 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611647952 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914-1918—Sermons. | Sermons, German—Translations into English. | Bible—Sermons.

Classification: LCC BX4827.B3 A5 2017 (print) | LCC BX4827.B3 (ebook) | DDC 252/.042—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032994

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Most Westminster John Knox Press books are available at special quantity discounts when purchased in bulk by corporations, organizations, and special-interest groups. For more information, please e-mail [e-mail].

To the memory of my father, Miko, who fled Europe

and in particular Austrian-Hungarian conscription before the war, and

to my mother, Mary, who fled Europe shortly after the Great War

And also to my father-in-law, Major James Stewart,

who went with the Canadian forces to the Great War in Europe,

and to my mother-in-law, Margaret Findley, Scottish war bride,

who came to Canada with her husband to lead a new life

With honor, gratitude, and affection

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Time Line

Introduction

Sermons

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index of Persons

Index of Places

Index of Subjects

Excerpt from The Early Preaching of Karl Barth, by Karl Barth and William H. Willimon

Preface

The Great War of 1914–1918 was the most horrendous, catastrophic, and unprecedented happening in all of history. As a unique clash of men and armaments, it defined the twentieth century. The war’s consequences were immense, and in our day we still experience its dreadful effects.

World War I, as it was later called, in its vast literature of some 25,000 books and articles—and counting—has received numerous striking appellations and descriptions. It has been called Armageddon,¹ the Great Cataclysm,² and Europe’s Last Summer.³ It has been described as the seminal catastrophe⁴ and the defining event of the century. The most striking and perhaps the most perplexing designation given to it was by a young Swiss pastor who was to become the century’s leading Protestant theologian, Karl Barth. He gave the war a strikingly positive interpretation by calling it a Gotteszeit, a time of God,⁵ not only a time of God, but eine Gotteszeit, wie nur je eine, a unique time of God. He knew the war’s wickedness and destructiveness, but he held out hope for redemption and restoration. As we might expect, Barth’s take on the war was profoundly moral and religious. Barth saw the war through eyes of faith, focused on the one sovereign God who holds the whole world in his hands. Not all readers will agree with his views, but his contribution cannot be readily dismissed. Barth’s status as the century’s preeminent Protestant theologian and major political thinker, plus the strong persuasiveness of his moral analysis and religious interpretation, ought to merit him our attention.

It was Barth’s conviction that, in this unique time of God, God had drawn nearer to humanity. Barth does not state explicitly how and why God’s mysterious presence was evident. Hints, however, are given. The how is indicated by the religious phenomena that were associated with the outbreak of the Great War in Germany and in Russia. Barth mentions that something comparable to a new Pentecost had occurred. He is clearer about the why: God has come nearer than ever in recent memory to address Europe in judgment and in mercy. If there is one theme pounding through the thirteen sermons like the relentless beating of a drum, it is the gospel ethic: God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow (Gal. 6:7 NRSV). Europe had heard this warning many times but had not heeded it. In consequence, it would have to face the full force of its failure and negligence in massive slaughter, destruction, and misery. It was Barth’s conviction that we live in a moral universe upheld by God’s righteousness and justice, and to displease God by departing from God’s ways is, as it was for Israel of old, to incur judgment. With Barth, however, judgment is never the ultimate, but only the penultimate, word. God’s grace always abounds over God’s judgment. Though God’s word is a judging one, it is even more a saving one.

In sermons preached beginning July 26, 1914—the date of Austria-Hungary’s forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia—and continuing to the first Sunday of Advent, he took a dialectical approach to the war, contrasting its force of judgment with its expression of God’s grace. As Barth said, God will not soon come so near to us again as he does now with this generous call to mend our ways and to change our minds.⁶ Moreover, Barth said that God had spoken to Europe so clearly in the first two months of the war that it would be difficult not to understand this message.⁷

Barth’s theology has received the appellation crisis theology because of his frequent use of this term in his Römerbrief commentary. This term described an aspect of Barth’s theology but is not as comprehensive as the term dialectical theology. Bruce McCormack has used the designation realistic dialectic theology. However, Barth’s theology was not realistic from the outset but became so only later. The frequently used term neo-orthodoxy is the least accurate and most unsatisfactory one of the three.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past,⁸ as the American novelist William Faulkner rightly said; and these sermons from the past still make for compelling reading today. They are not at all like the mental impressions typically evoked by the word sermon. They are vital, brilliant, and gripping analyses of the causes and events of the First World War and a running commentary on its conduct and events.

Years later, Barth criticized his war sermons as an excessive and needless pursuit of relevance. His desire for relevance was not without cause; presumably, he wanted to interest and appeal to the wartime newcomers to his church services, though his sermons eventually prompted the rebuke, The preacher needs to get back to the Bible.⁹ Perhaps at the time, and certainly in retrospect, Barth was conscious that he had departed from the high road he had first chosen to follow. As he wrote later in his Homiletics, relevance should not be a preacher’s primary aim, and his warning that the preacher must aim [higher] than relevance was made partly in reference to these early sermons,¹⁰ though the contemporary reader can be grateful that he saw so clearly the importance of the Great War and that he preached on it so passionately, so lengthily, and so ably.

Not everyone in his congregation was so grateful. He received another rebuke at the beginning of Advent, when a parishioner told Barth that she was tired of hearing about the war. He stopped, as it were, in his wartime tracks. The war continued to rage on, but no longer in his sermons. Barth’s preaching took its own course; the war and his preaching converged again from time to time, but never with the same intensity as in its first four months. When closure came to the war on November 11, 1918, Barth breathed a sigh of relief and wrote, Now has the devil evidently departed.¹¹ Perhaps, but if so, not for long. Was Barth underestimating the strength and tenacity of evil? In fact, the devil and his minions continued their awful work during the years of the Weimar Republic. A firm foothold was gained by these forces of evil during the Third Reich, and nights of terror, bloodbaths, exterminations of the weak and infirm, and final solutions perpetrated their horrors in ways difficult to imagine at the time. There is no equal in world history to what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil in the twentieth century.¹²

Barth, the cheerful theologian, however, did not despair. He trusted in the triumph of God’s purposes and was convinced that God’s kingdom would be established. Throughout his World War I sermons, as well as his later works, he never lost sight of the fact that the true and ultimate relevance is to be found in exposing the life and conduct of individuals and nations to God’s light, which is revealed in Jesus Christ, who is the Light of life.

Barth’s war sermons have a threefold significance. First, they establish Barth as a significant critic of World War I. He joins the distinguished company of its major critics, such as Romain Rolland,¹³ the French Nobel laureate in literature who became a pacifist, was forced to flee France, and went to work for the Red Cross in Geneva during the war; Stefan Zweig,¹⁴ the Austrian literary figure who joined the army as a young man but later became a pacifist and wrote a pacifist drama entitled Jeremiah that played in Zurich; Leonard Ragaz, the Swiss pastor and religious socialist, editor of the journal Neue Wege (New Way), who in his preaching and literary work strongly opposed the war; Bertrand Russell,¹⁵ the brilliant Cambridge philosopher, who was imprisoned for six months by the British government for his strong pacifist views; Keir Hardie, a founder of Scotland’s Labour Party, who protested the war alongside the suffragettes; and the French socialist Jean Jaurès, who was assassinated near the war’s beginning.

Second, the sermons reveal Barth’s mature historical understanding and his keen political acumen. Early in August, he saw the significance and worldwide dimensions of the Great War and spoke of it as one of the most monumental events since the beginning of humankind. He believed it would be not a short but a long war, that millions of soldiers would be slaughtered, that the destruction and devastation would be horrific, and that Europe would lose its central place in the world, giving way to the emergence of the United States as the great world power.

While he employed the categories of justice and injustice to understand the war, he was not content with this sanitized view of it but interpreted it as a European power struggle, the result of narrow nationalism, racial pride, and a false Christian religiosity that identified God with the ancient pagan god Wotan. Barth lamented that the war had occurred between supposedly Christian nations ruled by Christian monarchs. To him, it represented the failure of the European churches and of socialism to prevent it. He predicted that historians would continue to argue about the origins and causes of the war for years to come; indeed, a century later this debate continues.

Third, the sermons are thoroughly theological in character and are indispensable for an understanding of the beginnings and development of Barth’s dialectical theology. The beginnings are usually identified with his essays published in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928). Yet it is clear that in Barth’s early preaching, and in these war sermons in particular, are the true beginnings of Barth’s later theology. The doctrines that are discussed more fully in the Church Dogmatics—God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, creation, providence, sin, judgment, the supremacy of God’s grace over sin, the new world of the Bible, and eschatology—are to be found in nuce in these war sermons. Although they remain under the influence and are couched in the terms of liberal theology, it is also discernible that Barth was gradually departing from his liberal roots.

Near the end of his life, Barth pinpointed his break with liberal theology as the moment when he saw to his horror the names of his two revered teachers, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, in the appeal of the ninety-three German intellectuals (published in October 1914) in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policies. Undoubtedly, the shaking of the foundations of the house of liberal theology, in which Barth lived as a student and as a young pastor, took place at that time; but its eventual collapse probably did not occur until the spring of 1915, when he had important meetings and conversations with Friedrich Naumann and Christoph Blumhardt. These talks prompted him to turn his back on the former and to follow the teaching of the latter.

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, the late professor of systematic theology at the Free University of Berlin, has stated that the 1974 publication of the 1914 Sermons (Predigten 1914) was the most important posthumous Barth publication.¹⁶ The importance of these sermons, and particularly the war sermons, cannot be overstated. Through these addresses, a revolutionary theology was born out of the necessity and struggle of proclaiming the Christian message during the first few months of the Great War. In them the war is given a moral and religious interpretation, an element often missing in other historical studies. These interpretations must be taken into account as we remember and reflect upon this armageddon, this apocalyptic event of a century ago. It is a matter of gratitude that these sermons, unlike so many, were preserved and later published. It is also a matter of pride that thirteen of these sermons are translated and published here in English for the first time.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for my dear late wife Lois Stewart’s encouragement and support of this project. She followed its progress with great interest and read and commented on a number of the translated sermons. When she was afflicted with cancer in 2011, I postponed the project, originally intended to be completed by the autumn of 2013. Shortly before she died in May 2013, she urged me to resume my work on it. I did so at first with a measure of reluctance, but I continued out of the conviction that these sermons should be made available to English readers.

I am grateful to Ms. Anneka Voeltz and Mr. Henry Unruh for their initial help in translating some of the sermons. Above all, I am grateful to Professor Iain Nicol, a noted translator, for his assistance with the translation of some of these sermons. He has corrected and tidied up my translated prose to make it publicly presentable. Any errors or infelicities of language that still remain are my own doing.

I want to thank Dr. Hans-Anton Drewes, the Karl Barth archivist in Basel, for his hospitality and help. I had an enjoyable week of research work in the Barth archives. At the same time, I want to thank the two pastors of the Safenwil congregation for showing me the church and the parsonage where Karl Barth and his family lived. This visit to Safenwil gave the place a local habitation and a name. I also want to thank Dr. Clifford Anderson, now of Vanderbilt, who managed the Barth Collection while at Princeton Seminary, for his valuable help. Librarians have also been exceedingly helpful; I am grateful to the librarians of Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and McGill University for their help. In particular, I want to thank Dr. -Daniel Shute, librarian at the Presbyterian College in Montreal, for his help and assistance. I am also grateful to my daughter, Catherine Klempa, and my son, Michael, for their help with the manuscript, and to Ms. Kirsten Shute for her assistance.

Finally, I can appreciate the feeling of satisfaction Barth felt after his father permitted him to study in Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann in 1908, since I myself had the fine opportunity to study under Karl Barth in Basel during the short summer semester of 1960. I am grateful to my Doktorvater Thomas F. Torrance for arranging a grant from the University of Edinburgh to make this study possible. Barth’s lectures on the doctrine of baptism, his seminar on the first eight chapters of Calvin’s Institutes, and his English seminar are still vivid in my mind some fifty years later. I am appreciative to the German government for providing a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Stipendium that enabled me to study at the University of Göttingen and to acquire a facility in the German language, for which I shall always be grateful.

I want to express my gratitude to three people who read this manuscript and made suggestions for changes: Professor David Demson of Wycliffe College, Toronto; Mary-Margaret Klempa at Cornell University; and Professor John Vissers of Knox College, Toronto. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professors George Hunsinger and Bruce McCormack of Princeton Seminary, David Demson once again, and other members of the North American Barth Society for all that I have learned from them. Danke sehr.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Dr. Robert Ratcliff and Westminster John Knox Press for accepting my book for publication and especially to Dr. Ratcliff for his extra efforts to ensure its publication in 2016.

Time Line

Introduction

THE GREAT WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

It is said with some justification that the twentieth century began not according to the calendar in 1900, celebrated by the six-month-long Paris Exposition that attracted fifty million visitors,¹ but in August 1914, marked by the Great War. This disastrous European war quickly escalated and engulfed most of the world, inaugurating a century of calamities. It so convulsed the great European empires of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary that the scepters fell from the hands of Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Emperor Franz Joseph, bringing to an end these ancient European monarchies.

Another empire, the Ottoman, which became the fateful ally of Germany, fell when the latter fell, and great was its fall, leaving only the Turkish region of its empire intact. Kaiser Wilhelm II had cleverly courted the Ottomans. He made a visit to the Middle East as early as 1892 and pledged his undying friendship to the Ottomans. He knew that if a war occurred, it would be a two-front one that involved Russia and France, since they were members of the Entente powers along with the United Kingdom. It was therefore crucial that the Bosporus and the Dardanelles be kept in Ottoman hands and Russian ships be prevented from sailing between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

The Great War created the conditions that produced the totalitarian movements of both the right and the left, leading to the Second World War and the Holocaust, a host of smaller wars, including the Korean War, and the wars within Israel, and that culminated in the cold war that continued nearly to the end of the century. The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a resurgent radical Islamic movement, in the fourfold form of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram, that declared jihad against Western democracies and in particular what it called its Christian crusaders. This clash of religious civilizations is likely to continue for at least another decade.

The Great War brought sweeping social, economic, political, and religious changes whose effects we continue to experience daily. The First World War was a catastrophic event, and we continue to live with its consequences.

IMPACT ON STATESMEN AND SOLDIERS

A British historian active in the antinuclear movement of the 1960s, A. J. P. Taylor, has commented in the preface to his book on the First World War that the (then called) Great War cut deeply into the modern consciousness.² This was true of those who were both directly and indirectly involved with the war.

It includes European leaders and diplomats who scrambled and largely stumbled to prevent the war, such as British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, who shortly before Britain’s entry into the war said, The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. This was obviously an exaggeration, but it testifies to the horror of the war that Grey feared. It includes Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, who had the unenviable task of defending Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality and did so under great personal stress, especially since his wife had died earlier in 1914. It includes Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who botched the Schlieffen Plan and bore the responsibility for its failure, being sacked by the German military staff in October 1914. It includes General John French, head of the British Expeditionary Force, who was fired by Lord Kitchener and replaced by General Douglas Haig. It includes the officers and soldiers who manned the trenches on both sides; nine million were killed, twenty million were wounded, and another twenty million returned home bearing the trauma of the war. It includes the war’s critics: Keir Hardie, Bertrand Russell, the British suffragettes, the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, the French socialist Jean Jaurès who was assassinated on the eve of the First World War, Stefan Zweig in Austria, Leonard Ragaz in Switzerland, and Albert Einstein in Germany. It includes the leaders of the churches, who for the most part defended their countries’ policies, and, especially, it includes the theologians. I will single out three theologians who were deeply affected by the outbreak and course of the Great War—Adolf von Harnack, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth—before discussing Barth and his war sermons in particular.

IMPACT ON HARNACK, TILLICH, AND BARTH

The Great War cut deeply into the consciousness of these three theologians. They were all sons of pastors, and each achieved the achievements of his father. However, they also differed in many other respects: the first two were German Lutherans and the third a Swiss German Reformed pastor. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) was a dominant voice in German liberal theology. He was born in Estonia and educated at the universities of Tartu in Estonia and Leipzig in Germany. His father opposed his becoming a Lutheran minister, because he had ceased to believe in the resurrection of Jesus; so instead he taught at the universities of Giessen and Marburg before taking up his position at the University of Berlin. Shortly after his arrival in Berlin, he created a controversy over the Apostles’ Creed, which