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THE SERMONS OF KARL BARTH

By JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

Why do people go to church, if they do go? What do they really want to hear, though they may not have formulated their need clearly in their own minds? What is the unasked question for which they are seeking an answer? Why do they go again and again, in spite of many disappointments, yearning deeply, listening intently, as if the word they want to hear may any moment come to birth and bring the blessing they seek?

They do not go to church to hear about science, philosophy, economics, or art, useful as such studies may be. Nor do they go to hear the preacher tell of his faith, his feelings, his experiences, much less his opinions on life and its problems. No, they go sorely needing and sadly seeking something else, something more primary and profound—longing to hear a voice out of the heavens, telling them the things eye hath not seen nor ear heard. They go seeking, as of old, the healing touch which makes them know that they are not alone in their struggle for the good; wanting to hear the forgiving, redeeming, all-inclusive, all-solving Word of God which embraces the whole of life—“the one Word alongside of which there is and can be no other.”

Such is the vision of preaching in the soul of Karl Barth, out of which his theology was born, not as an academic adventure, but as a response to divine urging in contact with aching human need; an effort “to tell that God becomes man, but to tell it as the Word of God, as God Himself tells it,”—nothing less, nothing else. If we are to understand his theology, he tells us, we must hear all through it the question which the preacher puts to his own soul and tries to answer, “What is preaching?” It was while in the pastorate, looking into his own heart and into the expectant faces of his people, that he discovered that preaching, as he had been trying to practice it—the preaching of spiritual values, based on his own inner experience or that of others, seeking to satisfy religious needs—is not enough, and was indeed no longer possible for him. Hence his quest for a Word more authentic, more authoritative, more intimately personal, more inviting, in which the contradictions of human life are reconciled; an answer to the cry of the soul not for truths, but for Truth, not for solutions but for the Solver, not “for something human, but for God as Saviour even from humanity.”

What, then, is preaching? “It is thirty minutes to raise the dead in,” said Ruskin; and only the living word of the Living God can work such a wonder. So defined, it is an august and impossible undertaking, “an act of daring,” as Barth admits, and only the man who would rather not preach, he adds, and cannot escape from it, ought ever to attempt it. Who, alas, is sufficient for these things? The answer is that our sufficiency is from God, who has spoken to us in His Word, and who has commissioned us to preach. Else, thinking up against these facts, no man could muster either knowledge or courage enough for the task, even if the right to attempt it could be claimed. But the preacher is under orders; he preaches because he must. It is the paradox of his office that he must “dare the impossible,” as Barth puts it, aware of an imperfect human instrument; but he can do no other, since his office is qualified as obedience, coming under the sign of the highest responsibility and promise.

For the preacher, to say it once more, is not a lecturer, nor a teacher, nor an exhorter; he is an ambassador of authority, a herald bearing tidings. His word is not his own. He has his message, as he has his office, not by virtue of a poetic temperament, a dynamic personality, or a mastery of fine phrases, but as a witness of the Word of God. A Christian preacher, says Barth, “does not speak in the way of a clever conversationalist who wants only to be listened to, or as a teacher who claims only attention, or an agitator who seeks only agreement, or as a person of importance who desires only acquiescence.” If he were any or all of these, men might well require his credentials, or regard him as an officious meddler and adventurer whom they have good right to warn off. No, the preacher is a bringer of the Divine Word, so far as human lips can upbear it, not denouncing men like the prophet, but calling for faith, repentance, obedience, and proclaiming the Gospel of Reconciliation in which warning is blended with “the wooing note” of love.

Here, then, in a swift sketch, is what Karl Barth means by preaching, and no one in our generation has done more to exalt the preaching office, alike in theory and in practice. It is remote from the artificial conception of preaching which regarded sermon-making as a literary act, and the sermon itself as an object to be achieved, if not an end in itself; a legacy from the Sophists, as Hatch taught us in a famous lecture. It is far more momentous and thrilling than the old evangelical three R’s, Ruin, Redemption and Regeneration preached with Animation, Affection and Application. It is too big for our current academic and homiletic definitions, in that it makes the sermon really an extension of God’s revelation of Himself, and of the record of His Word in the Bible; and therefore a sacrament in very truth.

By the same token, as will be discovered in the sermons here to be read, the vision of what preaching is determines the method and art of the preacher, so direct in its approach, so disarming in its earnestness, so deceptive in its simplicity. The sermons are unique both in matter and in manner, and no one can read them without feeling that we have in them a living Word of God in the midst of our confusions, when the soul of man is astray in its own life, and the nations grope in the dark without goal or guide. May the vision grow and abide.

St. James’s Church,

Philadelphia.