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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

THIS book is more simple and popular than some of Karl Barth’s other works. It can be understood by, and it certainly has a message for, every member of the Church. Unfortunately the most difficult part of the book comes at the beginning. It is because I do not want the general reader to lay down the book after the first few pages, that I transgress the translator’s rule neither to be seen nor heard, and write this note. I suggest to the general reader that, in his first reading of the book, he start with the Fifth Chapter. Perhaps Karl Barth would be shocked if he knew that I was making such a suggestion, and yet I am not so sure. For him faith begins with Jesus Christ. The reader who starts with the Fifth Chapter, therefore, not only misses some difficult hurdles, but he begins where faith begins.

Though I have used the words “simple” and “popular” I do not mean that CREDO will be found as easy to read as the newspaper leader that we skim at the breakfast table. But it is worth a little pains, for it is a statement, by the Church’s greatest living thinker, of the faith of the Church. In twenty years Karl Barth has, in God’s providence, changed the whole direction of the Church’s thought. Every part of the Church of Christ throughout the whole world is to-day wrestling with the questions raised by him. But many who are discussing these questions and quoting Barth’s name have the weirdest ideas as to what Barth stands for. This book will show that he is neither the iconoclast nor the spinner of daring speculative theories that some people imagine him to be, but that he is before all else a “Doctor of the Holy Scriptures”. He has brought the Church back to the Word of God. If people must have a label for his theology, let them call it, not the “Dialectic Theology,” not the “Theology of Crisis,” but the Theology of the Word.

This note is for “the man in the pew,” whom I want to encourage to read this book. Ministers and other specialists in theology will need no encouragement, but, beginning at the beginning, will, I am sure, find challenge and inspiration in every word of it.