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In a letter to Eduard Thurneysen (July 19, 1916), Karl Barth in-formed him of his preoccupation with an exegetical investigation of Romans. With great excitement he found in J. T. Beck a guide who led him in this exegetical work. In addition to Beck, Barth was influenced by Pietist writers such as Johannes Bengel, C. H. Rieger, and August Tholuck. On 9 September 1917, Barth came to the passage in Rom 5:12–21.1

The first draft of the book Romans was completed on June 3, 1918. There immediately followed a period of intensive revision.2 This manuscript was first printed in December 1918 but only later released, in 1919, by the Bern publisher G. A. Boeschlen. During Barth’s work on Romans, the revolution in Russia (February 1917) put an end to czarist rule. Then the shock of the October Revolution in Russia swept Switzerland in November of 1917. There had been a lot of local strikes, demonstrations, and riots among the working class and socialists until they reached a climax in the general strike in Switzerland in November 1918. On 8 June 1917, Barth still served as a delegate to the SPS congress in Bern.

Barth wrote his first edition of Romans as he became caught up in the joy of discovery. The task of his exegesis during this time was to hear anew Paul’s message in terms of seeing through the historical into the spirit of the Scriptures. As a child of his time, Paul spoke to his contemporaries. But what was more important for Barth’s exegesis was to hear from Paul as the prophet and apostle of the kingdom of God who spoke to all people in all ages.3 Barth’s hermeneutical and practical concern in Romans I was to see the eternal spirit of the Bible penetrate the historical-critical method. For Barth the historical-critical method has its place in preparation for understanding the biblical text. However, what was more important for Barth was that an understanding of history be continuous, more accurate, and a more penetrating dialogue between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow.

Barth’s stance toward the historical-critical method was directly related to his disillusionment with the outbreak of the war and the bankruptcy of all liberal theologians in the German universities, who did not view the war critically. In the autumn of 1916, Barth was led to the discovery of the Bible, that is, “the new world within the Bible.”4 When theology and worldview, coupled with their hermeneutical filters and interpretation of the Bible, were shaken to the core, the Bible struck him in a completely new manner; for Barth, the discovery of the Bible was “completely dominated by an interest in the concrete situation in which with all of our contemporaries we found ourselves enmeshed.”5 Social issues, therefore, become indispensable for exegesis. The subject matter that concerns us is an organic connection between the Bible and the world of the newspaper. Keenly aware of the human being’s historical existence and its social and economic structure, Barth moves himself toward integrating historical problems and social criticism into his exegesis of Romans. Rather than dwelling on the difference between the times in terms of historical criticism, Barth, along with St. Paul, makes an attempt to articulate a struggle for the new world that the Bible promises.

Exegesis moves in retrospect as well as in prospect toward the future of God, which means, for Barth, a conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow. For example, one must consider Barth’s exegetical study of Rom 8:9–15 and Romans 13 from the angle of his political involvement with social questions: religious socialism in Switzerland and Leninism in Russia, for example. The creation waits in eager anticipation for the revelation of the children of God. God as the coming new reality makes us stand in solidarity with God’s fight and thus with God’s coming victory. Life in Christ and its nature lie just in the perspective of the future. This perspective of God’s future, which is realized in reborn communion with Christ, drives us to be responsible for what God creates and prepares in the world (R I:238).

Blumhardt’s message, which articulates the suffering of the oppressed for freedom in God’s future, influenced Barth’s understanding of the relation between the faithfulness of God and eschatology. The suffering of the oppressed can be “a part of nature history of the Spirit” (R I:240). The renewal of the world begins with the new humanity of the children of God. The real content of apocalyptic eschatology can be seen in its taking sides with the oppressed in the present. In Barth’s words, “God is one-sidedly a God of the lower but not a God of the upper, indeed, without reservation, a God of the small (i.e. the totally marginal)” (R I:367). Furthermore, Barth’s social criticism can be well articulated from his concise remark in Romans II in that the “historical critics, it seems to me, must be more critical” (R I:xviii).

Ursprung as the Eschatology of God

Barth’s thesis that the world remains the world but that God is God tells that the world must be transformed by this “but God is God,” notwithstanding. Barth is convinced that there must be a fundamental difference between God and the world. The world is not capable of knowing naturally who God is. However, a relation of God and the world is structured in a dialectical and organic way rather than remaining dualistic. According to Barth, the power of God erupts from above, cutting through the world longitudinally or perpendicularly. Barth’s eschatology of senkrecht von Gott aus is first of all to be seen in light of God’s reconciliation with the world in Jesus Christ. In the universal/cosmic reconciliation of God with the world, a turning back of humankind to its origin (Ursprung) occurs. God proves God’s faithfulness to the world—beyond human sacrilege and injustice—and God’s loving power to the world (R I:67). The revelation of God in Christ is not emptied but is the fulfillment of history, culminating in the law and even to the present.

Therefore history stands in the effecting domain of God in the present. The revelation of the faithfulness of God becomes visible because it is the effecting power in all (R I:69). The world of God is not a purely transcendental world without relation to this world. But in Christ the world turns to its origin and the world of God breaks through this world, achieving a provisional victory (along the lines of Blumhardt’s message of “Jesus is victor”) in historical events. Therefore the breakthrough of God in history occurs in now-time.

Barth’s understanding of reconciliation, which is universally/cosmically set in motion in Jesus Christ, is deeply related to the redemption of the world that religious individualism and liberal theology lack the ability to understand. Although Barth turned away from J. T. Beck,6 Blumhardt’s influence remains compelling in regard to the cosmic perspective in Romans. Of Rom 8:19–22 Barth says, in a Blumhardtian fashion: “The actual sonship of God which we do not have yet, but expect is the ‘redemption of our body,’ the victory of God in the materiality of the whole creation of which our own existence is only particle and example. ‘This is our aim and our hope’” (R I:247–48). The solution of the world enigma and eschatology are not separated from each other because the whole creation waits for humanity, that is, the revelation of the children of God. Our hope for the future of God is not mere waiting for an event in the outer world, but “we are called and capable of one day becoming the mediator and helper for the destroyed world, one day to speak the redemptive words as a strange and hostile objectivity and power of destiny” (R I:245). The Spirit as the Spirit of radical transformation pours upon us, so that “we might strongly call for more Spirit to enter the world, for a continuation of the Spirit’s outpouring on all flesh” (R I:246).

The kingdom of God has been implanted in history and nature, and like a germ cell will continue to grow until the consummation of the kingdom on earth becomes complete and the entire cosmos is restored. This refers to Barth’s understanding of the organic growth or organism of God’s kingdom. Through our reception into the body of Christ, our fellowship with God becomes part of an organism, in that individual parts are completed in this organism and stand in living connection to each other. The kingdom of God as organism embraces the whole cosmos. Nevertheless, God’s involvement with the world does not mean mere identification between God and world. Rather, it points to a dialectical and organic relation initiated by God’s movement from above. Barth’s phrase of “organic growth” does not mean a mechanical construction based on any possibilities existing in this world; rather it refers to the new life’s possibility created in Christ. As God becomes living to humans, humans are in turn living in God. In Christian faith, humans enter into the kingdom of the absolute spirit. “Through the disposition which is given to faith by the faithfulness of God, humans are a part from individuality, life stance, and performance, implanted transcendental-organically into the living growth of divine righteousness” (R I:80). This refers to the practical shape of analogia fidei which later was in full bloom in Barth’s theology.7

Speaking of Sache (on Rom 1:16–17), Barth states:

The Ursprung, which was always claimed, known, yearned for, and under pain sought after, opened its mouth again. The divine word, “it shall be” is again fulfilled. . . . Nothing historical, rather the precondition of all history. . . . The opening of a new aeon, the beginning of a new world in which God once again has power. This power of God stands behind us. This is our gospel that we announce. This is our Sache. (R I:7–8)

What Barth seeks in Romans I is to understand the power of God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ which has a universal/cosmic dimension and content. What is behind Barth’s concept of Ursprung as God’s eschatological reality is his theological concept of God’s universal reconciliation with the world, in line with Blumhardt’s. Through the term origin Barth portrays humans in an immediate relation to God. In fact, we could see the whole actuality, namely, the invisible nature of God mirrored in the visible. There is no outside without inside, no phenomena without essence, no works without the eternal power and Godhead. Human beings are capable of seeing things as they are and as having their own origin in the eternal power and Godhead. Because the cosmos is produced out of creative reason (logos), and because this creative reason dwells in us, we can say the God-idea is known to humanity, God has made Godself known to us (R I:15). However, the seed of the immediate knowledge of God in us was crushed because of the fall. Although the fall made a secret out of the divine, there is no longer a secret to those who have been born in Christ: “God speaks in Christ and we hear in Christ. The power of God is no more secret to us. It reveals itself more and more as the life of our life” (R I:420).

Through revelation, which means a breakthrough of God’s will from heaven to earth, from God’s consciousness to human consciousness, the original nature of God, that is, the pristine divine nature, has appeared in humanity. God no longer leads us to war against the world but declares it as God’s world, being in solidarity with it (R I:61). Humanity’s experience as the children of God is not based on our religious experience but on the Spirit as the object in which our spirit takes part. God is at work in and through humanity as a result of God’s universal power (R I:237). When humankind is restored, God’s own Spirit steps in to take the place of the flesh (R I:60).

According to Barth, our knowledge of God on the basis of the power of God is realized in Christ. “Our Sache is our knowledge which is a realized knowledge of God in Christ; in which God does not become objective, but comes close to us, immediately and creatively; in that we not only see, but are seen, not only understand, but are understood; not only comprehend, but are grasped” (R I:7). We share in the immediacy of the knowledge that God knows Godself because “the concept of God is given us as immediately as our own being” (R I:14). However, this immediacy is not grounded on a human search for God but in God’s initiative grasping of human being. In other words, as Hermann Kutter had described it: von Gott aus, out from God.

Kutter takes a middle stance between Blumhardt and Barth. The social question in Kutter’s thought was anchored in the fundamental theological horizon of preaching. This is performed neither in terms of eschatological and christological-pneumatic proclamation of the kingdom of God (like Blumhardt’s) nor in terms of the Ritschlian concept of God’s kingdom-idea (like the young Naumann). For Kutter the Bible speaks of the living God. The Bible starts from God onward. This understanding of God is redefined idealistically as immediate life in his early writing, Das Unmittelbare (1902). This immediate life, appearing in Jesus Christ, stands against dead and rigid religion. In his writing Sie Müssen! the immediate life turns into a concept of the living God. For Kutter, “social democracy belongs to the gospel.”8

The living God is the redefinition of idealistic “immediacy” so that “God” is not present in the mediation of the Christian doctrine of God, such as ceremony, dogmas, religious consciousness, or religion in general, but present in life, especially in the immediacy of human deeds. Given this fact, social democracy is to be seen from God onward: “The social democrats are revolutionary, because God is revolutionary. They must move forward, because God’s kingdom must move forward. They are people who overthrow, because God is the great overthrower.”9 However, such an identity does not mean a strict identification, but an analogy: “Jesus had an eternal, unchangeable must: the must of God’s love. In just such a must the social democrats stand . . . What the gospel has in common with social democrats is . . . a great irresistible must, with which they announce a new condition of divine progress against the present age.”10

An organic relation between identity and analogy in Kutter’s thought-complex plays an important role in Barth’s understanding of God’s kingdom in relation to the world in Romans I. However, Barth’s way of expressing the immediacy of humanity in relation to God as Ursprung is accused of resulting in a pantheistic conception of the God/world relation. In Barth God is “the innermost but disarrayed nature of all things and all men in their height and depth” (R I:34). For humans in Christ the grace of God is natural, not alien. Being in Christ means one is transplanted into the tree of life. Being in Christ means the objective truth of divine love to the world. Being in Christ means the new or rather the most primordial nature of life. It is the natural foundation of all existence, our nature in God (R I:220). Given this statement, Hans Urs von Balthasar sees a platonic and oriental Christian concept of identity shaping Barth’s theology, and from that point the pantheistic concept of nature becomes necessarily dialectical.11

However, Barth’s standpoint is not inextricably tied to a philosophical unity of idealism but to christological universalism in light of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. The movement of God is not to be understood as a mechanical process or an immanent cultural history, but as the critical, actual, limiting, and justifying principle over the world.12