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Karl Barth’s Intellectual Background: A Biographical Sketch

Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 10, 1886, where he also died on December 9, in 1968. In 1904 the young Barth began study at the University of Berne “with my father’s kind but earnest guidance and advice.” “What I owe to those Berne masters, despite everything, is that they taught me to forget any fears I might have had. They gave me such a thorough foundation in the earlier form of the “historical-critical school that the remarks of their later successors could no longer get under my skin or even touch my heart—they only got on my nerves.”1

In the winter of 1906 (on January 20) Barth delivered a lecture on “Zofingia and the Social Question.” Referring to Leonhard Ragaz, a staunch representative of Swiss religious socialism, Barth considered the social question to be “one link in the chain of development, or better the problem of mankind, which Jesus once posed to the ancient world.” By stopping a “robust gathering round the colours, whose essential national (!) task consists in handing down ‘honorable ancient student customs’ to posterity in as intact a form as possible,” Zofingia should become an association “filled with a new spirit, with the spirit of social responsibility towards the lower strata of society and above all towards ourselves.”2

As Barth argues, “We have to agree that the rift between Capital and Labour, Mammonism and pauperism, rich and poor . . . grows continually larger.”3 Although little social analysis is found here, Barth was aware of political realities as a task of Christian responsibility on the question of social class. After preliminary examination in Berne, and following his father’s advice, Barth went to Berlin, although he wanted to go Marburg. In time, Barth was enthusiastic about going up to Marburg, which he described as “my Zion.”4

By the early 1890s the theology of Albert Ritschl exercised a dominant influence upon the theological faculties in Germany. Members of Ritschl’s school included scholars such as Wilhelm Herrmann, Adolf von Harnack, Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Johannes Gottschick, Julius Kaftan, Friedrich Loofs, Theodore Haering, and Martin Rade. Die christliche Welt, the representative journal of the day, powerfully represented the view of the Ritschlian school. Although Ritschl was in conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy during this time, Ritschl found Luther himself to be a great figure to use in combat against Lutherans. It was Ritschl who paved the way for new Luther research in the early twentieth century in pupils such as Karl Holl. Moreover, he represented new historical work and exercised a strong impact upon church historians such as Harnack in view of the history of dogma and Ernst Troeltsch in the study of Christian social ethics.

According to Ritschl, Christianity finds its basis in historical study rather than in immediate religious experience. All theological assertions should be based on the historical life of Jesus; in fact his personal relationship with God, his obedience and trust, and his ethical vocation and fellowship with humankind are personal vehicles of God’s self-revelation. Justification and sanctification are the constructive principles underlying Christian doctrine. From the standpoint in which reconciliation involves an ethical commitment to the kingdom of God, the idea of the unio mystica has no place at all. Thus, the new relationship with God in reconciliation originates in the community of faith directed toward the kingdom of God.

Finally, the idea of the kingdom of God achieves the needed reconciliation between Christianity and culture. Lebensführung (i.e., a religious, ethical lifestyle) becomes a main focus for Ritschl in dramatizing justification, sanctification, and the kingdom of God.5

Seeing the kingdom realized through Christian vocation in the world, Ritschl moves to identify even Christian morality with the cultural consciousness of his day in Germany. As a theologian of culture, Ritschl has been often accused of becoming a strong representative of “Culture Protestantism,” a form of Christendom baptized by bourgeois Prussian society. Cultural Protestantism held that the ethical demands of Jesus and cultural values are in harmony; in cultural Protestantism the true ideal of life led to no potential conflict with social or cultural structures. While uncritical of the political social system in Prussia, Ritschl saw Bismarck’s policies as genuine progress, in contradistintion to the aristocratic conservatives and the social revolutionists.

Theologically, as a student of Herrmann, Barth was critical of Ritschl.6 According to Barth, Ritschl’s ideal of the Christian life is regarded as “the very epitome of the national-liberal German bourgeois of the age of Bismarck.”7 In the mid-1890s, Troeltsch had initiated and led the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (history of religions school), focusing on a historical-critical basis that challenged dogmatic assumptions. The belief in the absoluteness of Christianity, which was based on a supernatural conception of revelation and thus at the heart of Ritschlism, became deeply questionable and was challenged by the historical-critical method of Troeltsch. In 1897 a split emerged between the older, dogmatically oriented school of Ritschlians and the younger, historical-critically oriented school of Religionsgeschichte.

In editing Die Christliche Welt Martin Rade supported younger radical members by accepting their contributions as part of the history of religions school. At the start of the twentieth century, Troeltsch emerged as the most important figure, exercising profound influence upon the theological situation in Germany. However, it was Herrmann, with his engaging style, who became the counterpart of Troeltsch, helping Barth to overcome relativism and historicism in theology.8 As a student of Herrmann at Marburg, Barth stated: “The name of Troeltsch, then at the heart of our discussions, signified the limit beyond which I thought I must refuse to follow the dominant theology of the age. In all else I was its resolute disciple”9

Karl Barth in Berlin

Characterizing the intellectual surroundings of Barth as a student in Germany was his pursuit and penetration of the poles between Ritschl and Troeltsch. Barth became a student with a high regard for Harnack in Berlin. He had little concern about Reinhold Seeberg. Instead of indulging in cultural life in Berlin, Barth saw and heard Harnack very thoroughly. “I . . . wisely avoided Seeberg, foolishly, alas, took no notice of Holl; and instead went enthusiastically to listen to Harnack (and equally keenly to hear Kaftan and Gunkel).”10 Harnack’s great lecture on the history of dogma touched Barth’s heart. According to his recollection, he heard Harnack’s argument directly in the classroom that “the dogma of the early period was a self-expression of the Greek spirit in the sphere of the gospel.”11 In Berlin, furthermore, Barth became preoccupied with the Ethics of Herrmann (1846–1922). Reflecting on this experience, Barth stated, “Herrmann was the theological teacher of my student years. The day twenty years ago in Berlin when I first read his Ethik [Ethics] I remember as if it were today. If I had the temperament of Klaus Harms, I could speak of Herrmann in the way he spoke of Schleiermacher, or I could say as Stilling did of Herder. ‘From this book I received the push into perpetual motion.’ With more restraint, but with no less gratitude, I can say that on that day I believe my own deep interest in theology began.”12

In addition to Immanuel Kant, Schleiermacher became the leading light for Barth during his student time in Berlin. Along with Herrmann’s Ethics, Barth purchased a copy of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. In the winter semester of 1906–1907 in Berlin Barth was interested in socialism. Incidentally, he participated in a series of lectures by Walter Simons on “Christianity and the Social Question.” According to Marquardt, Karl Vorländer’s book The New Kantian Movement in Socialism (Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus) is located in Barth’s book shelf with the inscription: “Karl Barth. Cand. theol. Berlin WS 1906/07.”13 Barth would have read it during his time at Berlin. In addition, in 1906 Werner Sombart was a professor in the Department of Economics at Berlin. Sombart’s influence on Barth in Safenwil is evident in Barth’s 1911 lecture “Jesus and the Social Movement.”

In a meeting at the Worker’s Association in Küngoldingen (February 1914), Barth recalled his learning of socialism through someone he called “S.” “Through S. I was acquainted with socialism and I was driven to more exact reflection and the study of the matter. Since that time, I have considered socialist demands an important part of the application of the gospel. Certainly, I also believe that they cannot be realized without the gospel.”14 Although Barth did not identify “S,” Marquardt’s assumption that it was Sombart is credible. Notably, Barth had already read Sombart during his semester in Berlin in 1906.

Sombart (1863–1941) actually started his career with a powerful academic critique of capitalism. During his lifetime he was presumably the most influential and prominent social scientist in Germany. While Heidegger provides a counterexample, Sombart’s embrace of Nazism relegated to near oblivion his fame as one of the most brilliant and influential scholars.15 When Sombart was offered an opportunity to become a successor of Max Weber at Heidelberg, he couldn’t take the position because of his socialistic orientation, which became uncomfortable for Grand Duke Friedrich II (1857–1928). In 1896 Sombart’s first edition of Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung distinguished him as a radical socialist based on his positive acceptance of Marxist historical materialism. However, Sombart did not share Marx’s base-superstructure theorem with which Marx put an excessive emphasis on productive forces influencing and even determining relations between production and the ideological sphere. In Sombart’s view, the primacy should rather be placed on superstructure.16

Because of his ardent fight for the cause of the socialist movement, Sombart received special attention from Friedrich Engels, who mentioned his name in his supplement to the third volume of Capital. According to Engels, Sombart was regarded as giving “an outline of the Marxian system which, taken all in all, is excellent. It is the first time that a German university professor succeeds on the whole in seeing in Marx’s writings what Marx really says.”17 Rather than rejecting or transcending Marx, Sombart added a sociopsychological and sociocultural dimension to the analysis of the genesis and the nature of capitalism. Sombart’s fame drew many students to his lectures both at Breslau, where he held the chair of economics at the university, and at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, where he worked from 1906 to 1917. In 1917 he was appointed a successor of Gustav Schmoller at the University of Berlin.

Karl Barth in Marburg

According to Barth’s recollection, he underwent a number of theological and philosophical influences while in Marburg, beginning with his theological foundation under Herrmann and continuing with the philosophical influence of Kant and the neo-Kantians. Barth is explicit about Herrmann’s influence:

I came to Marburg as a convinced ‘Marburger.’ And when on the day I began my ministry the mail brought me, five minutes before I was to go to the pulpit, the new, forth edition of the Ethik as a gift from the author, I accepted this coincidence as a dedication of my whole future. . . . I cannot deny that through the years I have become a somewhat surprising disciple of Herrmann. . . . But I could never inwardly agree that I had really turned away from my teacher. Nor can I so agree today.18

In addition, Barth encountered the Kantian and neo-Kantian emphasis on practical reason at Marburg through Cohen and Natorp. This philosophical direction would be deeply related to the field of socialistic analysis that would later become manifest in Barth’s pastorate at Safenwil. Like Kant, Cohen was interested in establishing the epistemological foundation of modern science. Cohen tried to develop his philosophy on the basis of mathematical physics. Kant’s basic insight, the so-called Copernican revolution in philosophy, comes from the fact that objective reality is known only insofar as it conforms to the knowing mind.

The human mind is active in the knowing process. Objects of experience may be known, but things lying behind the realm of experience, or things-in-themselves, are unknowable. Therefore, Kant’s epistemology is based on sensible intuition—which Kant often conflates with imagination—and the categories of understanding. The senses furnish raw data, which the mind then organizes and systematizes. Although the faculty of imagination intuits, imagination cannot possess an identity of its own. Empirical data are perceived by intuition and are brought by the categories of understanding to form the objects of knowledge. The faculty of understanding is involved in the processes of classifying and ordering data that is presented to it by means of the faculty of imagination. This means that what we view and how we view are dependent on our idea of reality. The world is actually the way we see it. In Kant’s famous dictum: “Thoughts without concepts are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”19

Things are known as they appear to our senses and are formed into objects by the categories of understanding. The thing in itself (Ding an sich) is not known to us. Kant distinguishes phenomena, namely things as they appear, and noumena, namely things as they are in themselves. It is the noumena that give rise to our knowing. Generally Kant uses noumenon (thing in itself) to refer to an object existing apart from any relation to a knowing subject. All we know are phenomena, as they are present in our experience. Because we cannot gain knowledge of things in themselves, Kant’s theory of knowing puts restrictions on transcendental realities (God, the immortal soul, human freedom). Such postulates are to be seen and discussed in other domains of human reason, namely reason in its practical area. The noumenon is conceived of as free. Freedom exists apart from the relationship between reason and understanding.

Therefore, practical reason is not freedom itself, but an effect of freedom. This particular relationship between practical reason and freedom is called the moral law. Our relation to the world, according to Kant, is not merely restricted to scientific knowledge; there is a realm of moral value. Kant establishes the moral nature of existence in terms of the universal human moral experience. The fundamental law of pure practical reason is known as the categorical imperative. According to Kant, the command of the categorical imperative is as follows: “act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a Universal Law of Nature.”20 The human subject must act in accordance with the idea of the moral law.

Cohen takes issue with the precritical and ontological existence of Ding an sich in Kant. Thought as such, and not the world of the noumena, gives rise to cognition. By taking “being” to be the product of thought, Cohen argues that the real being is generated not by empirical sensation but by the thought itself. The knowing subject is a transcendental, pure and simple consciousness as a mathematical point. Thought has no origin in anything outside itself, because it is self-originating. Sense experience is not a source of the content of knowledge but a basic feature of human experience. Cohen’s concept of origin (Ursprung) refers to the beginning of cognition in thought itself. As far as the origin, as the logical originator gives rise to its content, Ursprung is originative and creative of the objects of its knowledge.

For Cohen, logic, ethics, and aesthetics are valid patterns of cognition, especially in logic where all scientific knowledge is asserted to be valid. The reduction of human knowledge to the three patterns of logic, ethics, and aesthetics raises a question of the whereabouts of religion. Cohen was a pious liberal Jew. He placed religion under the heading of ethics. In agreement with Kant, Cohen maintained that ethics had to be universal. According to Kant, ethics are centered in his categorical imperative. This law has its source in the autonomy of a rational being. The moral law confronts us as an “ought” demanding our will in conformity to the law. Morality requires a belief in the existence of God, freedom, and immortality.

Like Kant, Cohen was convinced that there would be moral progress of the human race in the teleology of history. The interest that the Marburg school aroused among Marxists was less due to its radical apriorism than to its attempt at grounding socialist ethics on Kant’s theory of the practical reason. Cohen and Natorp did not regard themselves as Marxists, but as socialists with a conviction that socialism could only be founded in ethical idealism. A striving for the ethical is an endless process toward complete social justice in our world. Because the goal of ethics is to attain universal global justice, we must have hope of attaining that goal. Therefore, Cohen argues that a socialist society would be established through moral progress.

For Cohen, God appears as the idea of the unity of three different patterns: logic, ethics, and aesthetics. The existence of God is not like people’s existence. God as Ursprung exists only in a logically pure sense, not in a personal-ontological sense. God as Ursprung is a mathematical zero point. The idea of God guarantees an eternal world and human capacity of achieving ethical justice. The worldview of the ordered world and voluntary ethics are integrated in the idea of God, which is called the religion of reason. At this point Cohen’s Jewish belief in the uniqueness of God becomes manifest. God transcends the physical world but at the same time provides us with the moral imperative to act ethically. Judaism provides a basis for Cohen to take in earnest the religion of reason, in other words, ethical monotheism. Therefore, Cohen’s program for ethically established socialism becomes manifest in the following: “Socialism is right, insofar as it is grounded in the idealism of ethics. And the idealism of ethics has grounded the socialism . . . Kant as an ideal politician explicitly based himself on Plato, and he is for the republic . . . he is the true and actual originator of German socialism.”21

Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), an outstanding representative of the neo-Kantian movement, attempted to combine Marxism and ethics by means of Kant’s philosophy of ethics and epistemology in order to support the neo-Kantian socialism that Cohen represented. According to Vorländer, socialism must not marginalize an epistemological-critical foundation and ethical enlargement, the aspect lacking in Marxism.22 In 1921 Vorländer was convinced that he would fight for a synthesis between Marx and Kant. In his interim report on Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus, he said that one cannot connect socialism historically with Kant: “I emphasize explicitly that the Königsberg Philosopher has not played a role of ‘originator of socialism’ historically, and that the development of the socialism in contrast has run into ‘under completely other philosophical auspices’. What is at stake is only the possibility of methodical, systematical, logical connection.”23 In Vorländer’s view, there would be no contradiction between Kant and Marx; thus Kantian philosophy of morality could be integrated into Marxism without violating the latter’s basic assumption. For Vorländer, historical materialism is understood to define consciousness rather than to become an economic determinism that produces social and cultural consciousness. Consequently there is an interaction between the base and the superstructure in which human will plays an important role.

According to Marquardt, in Vorländer’s book The New Kantian Movement in Socialism (Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus), Barth underlined the following sentence: “‘What is at stake is not whether Kant possibly already has had the socialistic idea, but whether his ethics can be really the point of departure to a socialistic ethics.’”24 However, the neo-Kantian way to socialism has been characterized by its idealistic ethical revisionism, in contrast to scientific socialism in a Marxist sense. All in all, during his student period between Berlin and Marburg, Barth’s approach to socialism is located between Marxist elements in Sombart and the neo-Kantian ethical socialism in Cohen and Vorländer.

In April 1907 Barth again enrolled in the University of Berne. However, Fritz Barth became tired of his son’s wild goings-on and sent his son off to Adolf Schlatter in Tübingen. Dismayed at Schlatter, Barth made acquaintance with Christoph Blumhardt for the first time on December 27, 1907, and then frequently visited him in Bad Boll, “though my eyes were not yet fully open.”25 With his father’s final consent, Barth studied under Herrmann and Adolf Julicher in Marburg, and together with Rudolf Bultmann later assisted Martin Rade (1857–1940) editing Die christliche Welt in 1908. At the Aarau Student Conference before the beginning of the semester at Marburg, Barth had already been able to hear Herrmann’s lecture (“God’s Revelation to Us”) and Ragaz, whose theme was that God was meeting us today in socialism. Incidentally, it was in Marburg where Barth also renewed his acquaintance with Eduard Thurneysen, his lifelong friend from Zofingia. During his stay at Marburg, Herrmann became the great theologian for Barth. In acclaiming his greatness, Barth said, “I soaked Herrmann in through all my pores.”26

Johann Wilhelm Herrmann

What underlines Herrmann’s lifelong concern is the possibility of securing Christian faith from a metaphysical or scientific knowledge of the world. Herrmann distinguished himself from the old liberalism and also from all orthodoxies and all positivistic theology. Herrmann became the leading theologian among the faculty at Marburg (1879–1917) and was regarded as one of the most important systematic theologians of his time. His teaching gained an international reputation by including not only such students as Barth and Bultmann but also American students in pre–World War I Germany.27 As Barth recalled,

The air of freedom blew through his auditorium. It was certainly not by chance that for decades every semester a small caravan from Switzerland made the pilgrimage to Marburg and felt especially at home there. Our rebellious minds, repudiating all authority, found satisfaction there. We listened gladly when traditionalism on the right, rationalism on the left, mysticism in the rear were thrown to the refuse dump, and when finally ‘positive and liberal dogmatics’ were together hurled into the same pit.28

In his essay “Why Does our Faith Need Historical Facts?” (1844),29 Herrmann strove to answer the problem of the relation of faith to history with concentration on the inner life of Jesus, which is the essence of religion for Herrmann. It is the inner life of Jesus on which faith is grounded as historical fact. He banned every trace of metaphysics from theology. His project for the exclusion of metaphysics from theology was not meant to denounce science and morality as unnecessary life-expressions. Rather ethical claims held a special place for him in relation to religion. For Hermann, historically grounded theology meant being grounded in the inner life of Jesus as a historical fact. Historically grounded theology in Troeltsch’s sense is also grounded in the communion of the Christian with God, who comes about in history. Besides, Schleiermacher’s Speeches had a deep influence on Herrmann and helped to improve his mature understanding of religious experience.

Herrmann’s deep interest in securing the independence of religion from science and ethics moved him back from Ritschl toward the direction of Schleiermacher. In Barth’s recollection, Hermann praised Schleiermacher’s Speeches as “the most important pieces of writing to have appeared before the public since the closing of the canon of the New Testament.”30

Herrmann’s way to religion is first of all to distinguish religious knowing from all other forms of scientific knowledge. According to Herrmann, God is transcendent and supramundane. Therefore, God is not known through the way science knows the world. In fact, God lies beyond all of what science can prove and have access to. The self-revelation of God offers the basis for the rise of religion; religion lives from revelation. That being the case, the scientific method cannot prove God’s reality. Science and philosophy cannot touch the reality of God. The object of Christian faith does not lie within the realm of scientific knowledge of the world. The human situation is too easily marginalized and ignored in Cohen and Natorp. True religion is neither produced by the moral will (Kant), nor identical with it (Cohen). Besides, religion is not the objectless emotion that accompanies the moral will (Natorp). “True religion, which ‘carries in itself the energy of the moral purpose’ . . . has also its own root and its own life.”31

In the concluding sentence of Die Metaphysik, Herrmann stated: “When we seek to do theological work, we do not clutch at the goals of metaphysics.”32 However, Herrmann’s concepts of religion and revelation are not in opposition to the anti-Christian position of modern philosophy and of natural and historical science. “The real enemy’s position is on the right, within Christian theology itself.”33

Our knowledge of God becomes possible only based on the fact that God has come to us in history. Independent of nature or natural science, Christian faith stands on its own foundation because religion lives from revelation alone. The self-revelation of God on which religion is based is the miracle that occurs beyond the natural and against nature. Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence in his Glaubenslehre stands under a critical reservation because, for Herrmann, religion is not identical with feeling without reservation. Religion is an ability given by God in which humans see and experience God’s work in their lives.34

As Herrmann defines religion “in relation to empirically demonstrable objects, the decision must be made whether the subject can hold his ground in a life which he has for himself alone, an ‘inner life.’ The awakening of the individual to a consciousness, based on itself alone, of such a life of his own is religion.”35 Revelation, as the reality of God, confronts us. What stands in opposition to the reality of revelation are traditionalism, rationalism, and mysticism.

According to Herrmann, Troeltsch “was ‘just a bit too fastidious’ to assume for himself the decoration of ‘positive.’”36 Herrmann stood in opposition to positive confessionalist theology, the liberal-freisinnig theology, and the mediating theology. Just as he critiqued metaphysics or mixed theology, he protested orthodox confessionalism. According to Herrmann, religion arises from Erlebnis (experience), which is not to be demonstrated or disputed. The religious Erlebnis is to be found in the concept of Vertrauen (trust) or Wahrhaftigkeit (trustfulness): trust in Jesus Christ as the historical fact of the person of Jesus. Religion and ethical demand are inseparably connected with the concept of Wahrhaftigkeit. The human being as an inwardly independent being has an inner dependence and a moral autonomy. Keenly aware of Feuerbach’s critique of religion as a projection of human wish fulfillment, Herrmann granted for faith a spiritual importance to historical fact: “An honest atheist stands in all circumstances closer to the Christian faith than a representative of a religion of wish, no matter how christianly it is garbed.”37

The only place where faith is to be located lies in the inner world of human consciousness. The locus of self-certifying faith consists exactly in the Erlebnis of “a communion of the soul with the living God through the mediation of Christ.”38 However, what differentiates Herrmann from mysticism is that the latter is unhistorical, seeks God in the depth of the soul, and absorbs the soul into God. What Herrmann aims at doing is Christian Erlebnis, which is bound to a historical fact, that is, to the inner life of Jesus. What constitutes our consciousness of God’s communion with us consists in the historical fact of the person of Jesus and ethical demand for the moral law. For Herrmann, the historical Jesus is the revelation of God in which faith in God is grounded. The historical Jesus in a Herrmannian sense is not to be equated with the historical Jesus in historical-critical research because a historian deals only with outer or external history. Therefore, it would be devastating to establish the basis of faith by way of historical-critical investigation.

However, for Herrmann, inner or internal history plays a more significant role for establishing faith. The historian as historian has no access to this history of spiritual effects. The inner life of Jesus is present to us as the objective fact rather than as the facticity of Jesus that the church requires. The inner life of Jesus becomes a part of our own sphere of reality. Moreover, Jesus himself becomes a real power to us when he reveals his inner life to us. What the gospel offers as the guiding principle is the inner life of Jesus himself. Revelation is not doctrine: “The inner life of Jesus is the ‘saving fact.’”39 As Herrmann stated, “historical research cannot confront us with the Savior Jesus Christ. It cannot help us to find the historical Christ whom Christians assert to be their salvation. The inner or spiritual life of Jesus which it is necessary for us to see is never in any sense a minimum of the historically demonstrable; it is a fact ‘in experiencing which one sees his own existence as bound up with the Omnipotent.’”40 The ground of faith must be in Jesus’s inner life in a historical sense that touches human hearts by evoking human trust in God.

Karl Barth’s Earliest Writings

In the autumn of 1908 Barth took up a post as an editorial assistant to the Christliche Welt, which was published under the editorship of Professor Martin Rade. Working as an assistant editor of Die Christliche Welt in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche at Marburg, Barth contributed his article titled “Modern Theology and Work for the Kingdom of God” (“Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 1909).41 It appeared in a section of “theses and antitheses” in the Zeitschrift. (Barth’s article met opposition from two professors of practical theology, Ernst Christian Achelis at Marburg and Paul Drews at Halle.42) Herein Barth observed that his colleagues who were trained under the influence of liberal theology at Marburg and Heidelberg experienced difficulties in the beginning of parish ministry compared with those trained under a more conservative and orthodox influence at Halle and Greifswald. Barth described the reason for this difficulty by way of religious individualism and historical relativism. For Barth, conservative students drew upon authoritative doctrine as normative statements of faith, but modern theological students had no such normative statements of faith. Liberal theology stood for theory while a work for God’s kingdom stands for praxis in the form of the pastorate. In Barth’s view, liberal theology stood in contrast with the praxis of God’s kingdom. Two decisive elements (religious individualism and historical relativism), which Barth detected as the essence of the modern liberal theology, became obstacles when students trained in liberal theology encountered church praxis.43

Both the individualism of religion and the relativism of history homogenize and undermine the claim to revealed truth, whereas the concept of God’s kingdom and its praxis make a claim for the universal validity of revelation. In the framework of liberal theology, divine revelation is no longer at the center because of human claims for the truth as an individual center. Religion is grounded on personal rather than universal validity. As far as the Christian faith does not formulate the universal, responsible, and theological axiom, it strives to explore the content of the truth in terms of the personal ground of religion. Therefore the religious experience comes to the fore, and the relativity of all human knowledge precedes Christian faith, which is grounded in divine revelation.

From this basic principle of liberal theology, Barth anticipated the consequences of pluralism emerging out of the concept of Christian faith in that there takes place a subjective and religious trustfulness. All things are relative. Barth in this regard stood before the problem of value-relativism. The university-educated student of modern theology, equipped with religious individualism and historical relativism, faced a disadvantage in the ministry compared with a student of the more conservative school. The dilemma of theological value-relativism sharpened itself in regard to the problem of church praxis and its theological legitimation.

If the witness of all religious experience is accepted as the criterion of Christian discourse on God, theology must abandon an objectively true and obliging knowledge of God and claims to the truth of universality. How is it possible to come to a responsible church action in the Christian community with respect to forms and contents of various religious experiences? Would every church action and every action of religious trustfulness become legitimate in the same way on the basis of religious individualism and historical relativism? The two primary characteristics on which liberal theology is based suggest an inevitable tension between theory and praxis. In the end, liberal theology makes theologians incapable of praxis.

According to Barth, liberal theology is incapable of creating a bridge between theory and praxis. Because of its confrontation with modern science and modern culture-consciousness, liberal theology neglects the churchly character of theology.44 In order to make claims for universality in the church, liberal theology needs to be actualized in the context of church praxis and Christian faith. To overcome the limitation and dilemma of liberal theology, that is, the lack of connection between theory and praxis, Barth proposed an idea of coexistence between a more theoretical way of faith and the more practical way of faith. What he noticed in liberal theology was a problem of value-relativism and a problem of the relation between theology and praxis. This perspective remains significant for the development of Barth’s theological work.45

In his response to the aforementioned two critics of his article, Achelis and Drews, Barth regarded religious individualism to be bound to Jesus Christ as its norm and authority. On the question of how Christ is present to us, Barth found the true objectivity in Christ as the objectivity and norm in Christian religious experience. This is not at human disposal. The presence of Christ lies in “affection,” in the sense of Schleiermacher’s term. Christ is known in the depths of human consciousness: “The normative, objective, eternal lies only in the ‘affection’ of this inner experience. Everything which is set forth in thoughts and words belongs itself once again to the relativizing stream of history and is, as that which passes away, only a parable.”46

Barth was ordained in the Reformed Church in Berne in 1908. In mid-August 1909, Barth left Marburg to begin to work as an associate pastor at the German–speaking congregation of the église nationale in Geneva. In Geneva his teaching and preaching reflected his learning from Marburg and from the circle of the Chrstliche Welt. His attempt was “to foist all that historicism and individualism on the people in Geneva.”47 In his essay “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte” (“The Christian Faith and History,” published in 1912),48 which was delivered to a gathering of pastors at Neuchatel on October 5, 1910, Barth made continuous attempts to develop a theoretical framework for the justification of the praxis of God’s kingdom. What was at stake for Christian theology at that time was the problem of the relation of faith and history. It constituted “the indispensable presupposition and theoretical basis” for pastoral praxis. 49

Faith presupposes the revelation of God in history, but a historical investigation rejects God’s historical interventions by showing the impossibility of verifying revelation and miracle in history. Therefore, God disappears from history. The work of historians of religion serves as a “profane propaedeutic”50 for theological work by clearing the ground of all false objectification of theology. Herein faith is not involved when it comes to talk of scientific knowing, of causes and of effects. Faith, according to Barth, is defined as “experience of God, unmediated consciousness of the presence and reality of the trans-human, trans-worldly and therefore simply superior power of life.”51 Faith itself is the “historical movement par excellence” actualizing and making our cultural consciousness historical. “It stands heterogeneously over against the cognitive apparatus which assesses validity in logic, ethics, and aesthetics. At the point of faith two problems intersect one another which lie on completely different planes . . . the problem of the I, of the individual person, of the individual life, and the problem of law-structured consciousness, human culture, and reason.”52 Through the moment of faith, “the abstract possibility of culture-consciousness is actualized, transformed into concrete reality.”53 Herein the old Kantian-Schleiermacherian opposition between religion and science is overcome; religion does not enter into competition with logic, ethics, and aesthetics; nor yet is it separated from them. Rather it actualizes and transforms culture-consciousness into concrete reality. Scientific consciousness, because of its abstractions from reality, is not competent to establish the connection to reality. As Marquardt rightly comments, “religion with its eschatological vigor can help society to achieve vitality and social-scientific consciousness to establish ‘a connection to reality.’ ”54

As far as faith activates and actualizes the culture-consciousness of the individual into a concrete reality, Christian faith has its peculiarity through the personality of Jesus. In the personality of Jesus, the experience of God is somehow historically conditioned and determined and has been present within human society. The historical Jesus becomes the resurrected, living Christ in the community of Christ. From this perspective, the problem of the relation of faith and history has no fundamental importance. Rather it can become questionable only for those who stand outside of the experience of faith akin to Troeltsch. However, for those who live in the experience of faith, Christ outside of us is equal to Christ in us, and history is equal to faith. Therefore, “faith and the historicity of culture become synonyms.”55 Christ’s righteousness becomes my righteousness; Christ’s piety becomes my piety. He becomes I.

Revelation becomes historical in that revelation as history becomes effective through faith. Divine revelation in history can be experienced in the present through faith rather than through historical investigation. This coinherence between history and faith provides the basis for Barth to establish a theological connection to reality and to justify theological praxis in it. From this perspective, faith cannot be undermined and threatened by historical investigation. It was Schleiermacher who revealed how faith could be born in the individual. Through Schleiermacher, Luther’s meaning becomes obvious. Through Schleiermacher’s intuition, justification, and election become a fact “in the feeling brought about by God.”56 The ground of faith is the personal, inner life of Jesus. Faith is, therefore, direct, living contact with the living Lord. As far as the ground of faith is the inner life of Jesus in terms of the inner experience, as far as faith rests on Jesus’s own consciousness of God, the work of artists and composers such as Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (and including the work of numberless little ones who are bearers of Christ’s reality) could be regarded as sources of revelation alongside Paul. “Barth welcomes Luther’s ‘if you believe, you have’ and Melanchthon’s exclusive concentration on the ‘benefits of Christ’, along with the sayings of old Angelus Silesius ( ‘If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you. . . .’).”57

In Geneva Barth encountered the real poverty of the industrial working class. He paid visits to the impoverished and spent a great deal of time in relief work with the poor. As Barth says, “I knew as a student the fed-up indifference of bourgeois circles and the poverty in Geneva. I regarded at that time the social misery as a necessary fact of nature, under which faith was not simply to set forth a strong but impractical hope.—Something new was brought to me through Calvin’s idea of a city of God on earth, and it led me to the fact that Jesus has portrayed the kingdom of God as a state of complete love of God and brothers.”58 His reading of Calvin’s Institutes helped Barth to think more deeply about the relation between the kingdom of God and the world. Despite the fact that old orthodoxy was introduced and taught in caricatures at the universities when Barth had studied Calvin, he committed to relearning theology from the basics.59

Karl Barth and the Social Question in Safenwill

As Barth noted,

Although in Geneva I had still lived completely and utterly in the religious atmosphere which I brought with me from Marburg, and especially from the circle of the Christlcihe Welt and its friends, when I moved to the industrial village of Safenwil, my interest in theology as such had to step back noticeably into second place (even though it continued to be nourished by my eager reading in the Christliche Welt, the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, and even in the works of Troeltsch, etc.) Because of the situation I found in my community, I became passionately involved with socialism and especially with the trade union movement.60

Barth’s posthumous manuscript, “Socialist Speeches,” makes it possible to understand variations in his relation to socialism, particularly in his practical relation to organized socialism and the social democratic party in Switzerland and socialistic International. The “Socialist Speeches” (later so named by Barth himself) is the title of a collection of some forty-three addresses that Barth delivered during his Safenwil period.61 Barth began his pastorate in Safenwil on May 1, 1911. Four and a half months later he began to give his first socialist speech at the meeting of the Laborers’ Society in Safenwil. The Laborers’ Society was the official name of the local group of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. Barth was not a member of the socialist party yet when he began his “Socialist Speeches.” These earliest “Socialist Speeches” were formulated word for word just like sermons, and they construct comprehensive texts written out in the passion and precision of his proclamation.62 Half of Barth’s pastoral time in Safenwil was the time of World War I and the October Revolution in Russia.

Karl Barth and the Social Movement for Jesus

In 1911 Barth became the pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland, an industrial and agricultural area in the canton of Aargau. The first phase for Barth’s socialism can be located from the beginning of his pastoral work till the outbreak of the First World War. Barth himself testified in a speech (“Evangelium und Sozialismus”) of his interest in a relation between the gospel and socialism, during a meeting of the Workers’ Association in Küngoldingen on February 1, 1914.

How have I come to combine the gospel with socialism? I was educated to judge human beings not according to their money value, and to take material misery of the others as a serious problem. As a student I came to know the jaded indifference of bourgeois circles and the poverty in Geneva. At that time I still regarded social misery as a necessary fact of nature, to which faith had to provide a strong but impractical hope.—Something new was brought to me by Calvin’s idea of ‘God’s city’ on earth, and it led me to the fact that Jesus has portrayed the kingdom of God as a state of complete love of God and love among brothers. –Through S. I was acquainted with socialism and I was driven to more exact reflection and the study of the matter. Since that time, I have considered socialist demands an important part of the application of the gospel. Certainly, I also believe that they cannot be realized without the gospel.63

This pastoral context is an indication of the religious-socialist genesis of the socialist Barth. As we have already seen, Barth’s keen interest in the social question became visible in his learning of ethical socialism in Marburg. In addition, Barth’s acquaintance with S [Sombart] dates back to Barth’s student days at Berlin, although in Marburg in 1908 Barth had bought a copy of Sombart. Sombart’s writings such as Socialism and Social Movement (1896) and Der Moderne Kapitalismus (1902) were already published.64 In addition, as we have already seen, Sombart taught in Berlin during Barth’s stay there, and Sombart’s influence on Barth can be seen in his “Socialist Speeches,“ for example, in “Jesus Christus und die soziale Bewegung” (1911) and in “Die Arbeiterfrage” (1913/14).65

The installation service for Barth took place on Sunday July 9, 1911. Barth’s father, Professor Fritz Barth, gave the sermon. One of the confirmands (born in 1896) remembered: “It gave us a huge amount of respect that he came from Geneva to us in Safenwil, to our quiet little village, where most of the people were farmers or worked in the factory.”66 For the next ten years of his life, Barth would live and work here. As Barth began his pastorate in Safenwil, Gustav Hüssy-Zuber was the chairman of the church board who was responsible for the employment of the pastor, the church budget, and the link between the congregation and the community. The Hüssy family was a member of what Barth called the House of Hüssy, a factory dynasty in Safenwil. Their family members owned a weaving establishment, a paint factory, and a sawmill in the area. Barth considered this time to be formative in his theological development: “It was during my time at Safenwil that I changed my mind decisively in a way which also affected the outward form of my future career.”67

Barth also renewed his friendship with a former friend at Marburg, Eduard Thurneysen, a pastor of a neighboring church in Leutwil. Thurneysen was the person who brought Barth in contact with religious socialism in Switzerland. Through Thurneysen, Barth came into contact with Hermann Kutter, who was then fifty years old (1863–1931). Kutter completely impressed Barth by the “molten lava of his eloquence, like an uncanny volcano.” “Amazed at his astonishing intelligence and mental power,” Barth “learned to speak the great word “God” seriously, responsibly and with a sense of its importance.”68

Keenly aware of the political responsibility of a Christian in society, Barth preached on many political matters. In addition, Barth was active in Safenwil Arbeiterverein.69 The Hüssy family, which was highly respected in the church and in the civil community, owned a weaving mill and dye works as well as a sawmill where the workers were paid extremely low wages. They were not organized into a trade union. Barth even introduced Cohen, whom he knew at Marburg and read copiously in Geneva. However, the working people did not understand the academic discussions of socialism.70

In his first socialist speech at the meeting of the Laborers’ Society in Safenwil Barth dealt with the question of the origin and meaning of the state upon the request of the president of the Society. At the start Barth, however, preferred to give his lecture a different name: “Human Rights and Citizens’ Responsibility” (October 15, 1911).71 Herein Barth discussed human rights and citizens’ responsibility in regard to the origin and meaning of the state. “Human rights” is the catchphrase for “revolution” in all times. Revolution represents the demand for freedom in the name of human dignity. However, as long as revolution lies in the demand of a freedom movement for the individual, it is not fruitful for the origin of the state.72 In explanation of a relation between a capitalist revolution and human rights Barth—seeing human rights of personal freedom needing to be realized in the economic arena—discussed a clash with the human rights of the proletariat worker.73 Barth did not escape from a socialistic critique of the concept of social class. Here he understood a class struggle from above. “It is completely right, if it is spoken from a socialist side that this struggle has been opened not from the proletariat, but from the employer . . . It was the anarchy from above, to which the anarchy from below was only the answer.”74 What Barth intended in dealing with the problem of the state in view of a tension between human rights and citizens’ responsibility, is to combine two things: morality and politics. “Morality and politics may not be two different things, they are one and the same. A moral which could not be a political moral is no moral at all because the essence of the moral is just the political citizen’s responsibility.”75

Alongside Cohen, Barth argued for the progress of politics and morality not in the dream of an ideal state but in the ethical and political work. “In this progress or let’s say more precisely in this progress we set in motion the state-thought, and we operate our civil duty and just with it our human rights.”76 Cohen’s ethical socialism was incorporated into Barth’s reflections so that the state-thought must be produced anew “in a tension between human rights and civil duty.”77 In other words, in the progress from the human rights to civil duty and from the civil duty to human rights, Barth noticed a point of departure regarding the political problem and task.

With ethical socialism in Cohen’s sense, Barth noticed that the program of the Swiss Social Democratic Party would solve a relation between capital and labor in terms of a more or less violent expropriation of the means of production on the part of the state.78 However, Barth was of a different opinion. Instead of stressing the function of the state he “places his greater hope on the progress of social relations in all classes.”79 Seeing that organized labor stood against organized capital, Barth asked if this dialectical relation between capital and labor takes place for the civil duty. If so, citing August Bebel’s term “rote Kladderadatsch,”80 Barth conceived that something unexpected and unfortunate would happen. According to Barth, the Swiss Social Democratic Party raised the concept of class to a definitive form of society in a conservative way. In Barth’s view, “the highest aim of political endeavor cannot be fatherland.”81 What is more important for Barth is to balance political priorities between human rights and civil duty. This is the essence, meaning, and origin of the state.

Barth’s speech “Jesus and the Social Question” was the topic chosen by the workers’ union. In 1912 the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SPS) and the workers’ union came to terms with each other for mutual support regarding the agitation of socialism, propaganda, and educational work. Already in 1910 the workers’ union emphasized educational work in a series of public lectures for workers. Barth’s speech at the local Laborers’ Society on the theme “Jesus and the Social Movement” (on December 7, 1911) was extensively reprinted in the Aargau Free Press between Christmas and New Year’s. In this speech Barth called into question the injustices carried out by the local factory owners, one of whom was a member of his congregation. Barth’s lecture “Jesus Christ and the Social Movement” became an indication of Barth’s position about the relation between the gospel of Jesus Christ and socialism. Barth argued that Jesus himself was more socialistic than the socialists. “Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present. . . . The real contents of the person of Jesus can in fact be summed up by the words: ‘movement for social justice.’”82

We see in this speech a classic example of the religious-socialist identification of the Laborers’ movement with Jesus, and Jesus with the well-being of this movement. The Socialistic Party newspaper printed the complete text of the speech, reporting, “The lecture of Pastor Barth last Sunday here on the theme ‘Jesus and Social Question,’ given at the request of the local Laborers’ Society, was well attended. Women were present too. The theoretical discussion and the comparison with today can be found on page two of this edition.”83

In Safenwil Barth was introduced for the first time to the real problem of social life. Before his very eyes, class warfare occurred in his parish. This forced him to study factory legislation, insurance, trade-union affairs, and so on. In Safenwil Barth no longer asked about the praxis-relevance of theology in general as we see in his Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit. Instead he concretized the question of the practical-political relevance of Christianity. “One might well say that for eighteen hundred years the Christian church, when confronted by social misery, has always referred to the Spirit, to the inner life, to heaven. The church has preached, instructed, and consoled, but she has not helped, in the face of social misery she has always commended help as a good work of Christian love, but she has not dared to say that help is the good work.”84

From this assertion we see that, on the one hand, Pastor Barth was deeply disturbed by social misery that brought human life to degradation and moral collapse. On the other hand, he sought a responsible reaction of Christian community toward the material and moral plight of workers. Barth’s contact with socialism materialized primarily through his practical confrontation with the real situation of Safenwil workers. It does not ignore his theoretical or social philosophical reflection. Therefore, we need to pay attention to the socialistic influence upon his theological development in the sense of a correlation. For instance, Barth’s turning away from the individualism of liberal theology and constructing universalism in his thought shows the primacy of the social/political dimension over the individual/particular dimension in Barth’s thought and theology

What is characteristic of Barth’s practical concern is articulated in the following: “When I talk about the movement for social justice, I am not talking about what some or all Social Democrats are doing; I am talking about what they want. . . . What concerns us, therefore, are not the words and deeds of Bebel or Jaures, of Greulich or Pflüger or Naine, nor even the words and deeds of socialists in Aargau and Safenwil.”85 What Barth intends to demonstrate is “the inner connection” between social democracy or socialism and the eternal Word of God that became flesh in Jesus, namely “the inherent connection between Jesus and socialism.”86 According to Barth, Jesus is not the representative of the Christian church, worldview, or ideas. For the bridge between Jesus and socialism, Barth introduced Jesus’s way of life in which “as an atheist, a materialist and a Darwinist, one can be a genuine follower and disciple of Jesus.”87

In Barth’s view, what connects socialism with Jesus is a movement from below. If socialism is “a movement from below to above,” “the movement of the economically dependent,” “the movement of the proletariat” who is “always dependent in his existence upon means and the goodwill of the factory owner,” Jesus himself came from the low social class of the Jewish people at that time. Jesus was also a worker, getting along with the poor and the lowly. His message was good news to the poor, to those who were dependent and uneducated. This was the eruption of a volcano from below to above. A liberation theology in Barthian fashion has its foundation in the belief that “the kingdom of God has come to the poor.”88

Barth did not forget to differentiate between the kingdom of God for social democracy and the kingdom of God for Jesus. In agreement with Sombart (who says “the quintessence of all socialist doctrines of salvation” contained in a poem of Heinrich Heine—“to build the kingdom of heaven even here upon the earth”—), Barth introduced the message of Jesus for the poor. Socialistic passion and praxis for building up the kingdom of heaven on earth need not be diametrically opposed to Jesus’s good news of the kingdom of God for the poor. A church’s transformation of Jesus’ social and material concern into cultivating the inner life and preparing candidates for the kingdom of heaven is “the great, momentous apostasy” from Christ.89

The fundamental contention is that God’s kingdom comes to us in matter and on earth because the Word became flesh. In light of God’s movement from above to below, wholly and completely, the gospel is a movement from below to above. In Jesus there is no dualism between spirit and matter, between heaven and earth. In keeping with Matt 25:32–46, Barth stressed that the spirit having value before God is the social spirit. Jesus opposed material misery and created new people in order to create a new world. “Regarding the goal, social democracy is one with Jesus.”90 Herein Barth cited a famous statement of Oettinger: “The end of the way of God is the affirmation of the body.”91

Barth’s critique of capitalism is along the lines of socialistic critique: “The class contradiction” is “the daily crime of capitalism.” Private property as a means of production belongs to the factory owner. However, in the account of the rich man and the poor Lazarus, Jesus wanted to say that a rich person does not enter into the kingdom of God (Luke 16:19–31). A Marxist theoretician, Joseph Dietzgen, who was a despiser of Christianity, was right in saying that the original sin of the human race is self-seeking. The similarity between Barth’s argumentation and that of a more Marxist approach is shaped in his passion for the socialistic spirit of solidarity. In view of The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Barth argued that socialism proceeds from solidarity and it emphasizes solidarity “as the source of his power and progress” to the social consciousness of the worker. Furthermore, he argued, “Solidarity is the law and the gospel of socialism.” As a socialist, one ceases to be an individualist and thus ceases to think, feel, and act as a private person, so he or she should become a class-conscious worker. “To be a socialist means to be a ‘comrade’ in consumer’s unions, in labor unions, and in political parties” “as a member of the forward-striding, fighting totality.”92

Dietzgen has argued that “conscious and planned organization of social work is what the longed-for savior of the modern period is called.”93 Therefore, should the socialist call to solidarity and Jesus’s gospel stand in contrast to one another? By no means, because there was only “a social God, a God of solidarity” for Jesus. “There was also only a social religion, a religion of solidarity.”94 On the basis of the “awareness of the collective, solidarity, communal, social God” Jesus’s call to discipleship, namely, the rule of corresponding action follows. As Barth said passionately and convincingly, “Let him take it in who can, that one must lose one’s life in order to find it, that one must cease being something for oneself, that one must be a communal person, a comrade, in order to be a person at all.”95 Jesus is the partisan of the poor. “Real socialism is real Christianity in our time.”96 Certainly the correct socialism for Barth is not that which the socialists now do, but rather what Jesus does—and what the socialists want to do. At a minimum, the demands of the socialists cannot be realized without the gospel. The kingdom of God was close to the poor, and Jesus identified himself with them.

Be that as it may, Barth would be hesitant in terms of the manner in which socialists act to attain it. Concerning the socialistic manner necessary for attaining the goal, Barth distanced himself from secular socialists because his socialism is theological in light of the gospel of Jesus and the kingdom of God. The socialist’s concern is in line with what Jesus wanted to do. “Leave the superficiality and the hatred, the spirit of mammon and the self-seeking, which also exists among your ranks, behind. . . . Let the faithfulness and energy, the sense of community and the courage for sacrifice found in Jesus be effective among you, in your whole life; then you will be true socialists.”97 As a pastor, Barth had to stand in the forefront of the class struggle. These writings reflect a belief that theology and social questions are not in conflict, but complement each other in light of the gospel. Theology and national economy, sermons and politics, are not separated from each other but belong together. Barth’s sense of the identification of God’s kingdom with true socialism—“real socialism is real Christianity in our time”—does not mean at this time that we can strictly identify our socialism with God’s kingdom through our utilization of God to serve human interests or to exploit God for human purposes. Rather we follow the movement of the kingdom of God, serving, believing, and obeying its promise for the poor, alienated and wrecked.98 “Jesus is more socialist than the socialist.” Seen from the divine side, the gospel is “wholly and completely a movement from above to below. It is not that we go to heaven, but that heaven comes to us.”99 For this reason, Barth did not agree with the manner in which socialists acted to attain their goal.

After this socialist speech, Barth was ridiculed and attacked sharply as an ignorant idealist by the manufacturer, Walter Hüssy, a nephew of the Safenwil church board president. His “Open Letter” (February 1, 1912) was printed on February 3 in the Zofinger Tagblatt. It declared Barth’s lecture to be “a long rabble-rousing speech, garnished with an incredible number of religious quotations,” and he heard from it the demand “Private property must fall—not private property in general, but private property as a means of production.”100 According to Walter Hüssy, what Barth wants is his ideal of a future state!101

Barth responded in “Answer to the open letter of Herr W. Hüssy of Aarburg on February 6, 1912,” by arguing that Hüssy’s response was a fundamental misunderstanding of his speech. Barth would carry on the fight with Hüssy stating, “despite the prevailing coldness, I enter the fray in my shirt sleeves rather than my frock coat and reply with equal clarity.”102 Against the charge that his lecture was “a ‘rabble-rousing speech’ with the purpose of ‘sowing discord between employer and employee,’” Barth clarified that his speech was directed objectively about capitalism as such, and it did not refer to specific capitalists.103 Barth’s response sounds harsh because he regarded Hüssy’s protest as “pathetically naïve.”104

Regarding the problem of private property, Barth’s idea was in line with the official program of the Swiss Social Democratic Party even although he was not yet a member. Barth explained that what led him, as a pastor, to the side of socialism lay “in the idea of a socialist state of the future.”105 His concise definition of capitalism reads: “The net profits of the common work of the entrepreneur and the worker now become the private property of the former, because he is the private owner of the means of production. This is the essence of the capitalist economic system.”106 Socialism fights against this economic system on grounds of inequality and dependence. The private profit that Hüssy stands for is opposed to the justice of socialism and the Bible.

Barth also wrote a letter to the father of Mr. Hüssy, Mr. Hüssy-Juri in Safenwil. In it Barth announced that his sharp response was not directed personally to either the father or the son. Barth was seeking to attack the economic system of capitalism objectively, not its particular, individualistic expressions. In the interest of the congregation, Barth hoped that his speech would not cause any disturbance to friendly relations between the pastorate of Safenwil and the house of Hüssy. Barth’s official answer was one of the clearest texts using Marxist argumentation emerging from a biblical paradigm. In protest of Barth’s attitude, the president of the Safenwil church board, Gustav Hüssy-Zuber, who was a cousin of Walter Hüssy, resigned.107

A number of attacks poured upon Barth in the Zofinger Tagblatt. The first “letter to the editor” (on February 12) was under the polemical headline “Concerning the Red Danger in Safenwil.” The writer sought “to catch Barth in the fly of his pants,” insulted him as “a Red Doctrinaire,” as “a Red Messiah,” as “the Messiah from Safenwil,” as “a combative little pope,” as “Mr. Trade Pastor,” and as “an Ivory Tower Wise Man.” The second anonymous letter (on February 14) with a more moderate tone was sent to the editors of the Zofinger Tagblatt.108 There was also criticism from Marburg about Barth’s lecture as “the superficiality of Barth’s theology!”109 However, Barth did not abandon his conviction that socialistic demands were to be understood as an indispensable part of the gospel and are completely dependent on the gospel for their realization.

Karl Barth and Socialist Activities

Barth’s Sunday sermon was attacked by the newspaper (in its edition of July 15, 1912), under the title “Pastoral Agitation: A sermon held this past Sunday in a congregation in our district.” The article states, “A certain pastor seeks to bring to life once again the times of the religious upheavals, even though in a modern, social-political dress.” “Finally, we would like to ask whether the church is the proper place for the pastor to express his political views. The great majority of our church-goers, free-thinkers alongside the social democrats . . . seek on this day, with more reason than their Shepherd demonstrates, an hour of edification and meditation. That is true worship, Dear Pastor, and not what you dare to offer us!”110

This attack of the Zofinger Tagblatt was echoed by the Aargauer Volksblatt which was close to the Catholic–conservative People’s Party. Under the title “A Terrible Crime” (in the edition of July 16, 1912) it reads: “In the district of Zofingen a reformed Pastor gave a sermon last Sunday, in which he, referring to the Sunday Gospel of the Reformed Lectionary (Matthew 5, about the self-righteousness of the Pharisee), castigated the pharisaic in political life, and illustrated it by pointing to the hollowness, half-heartedness and inconsequentiality of certain people, whose greatest lie is their claim that they are ‘free-thinkers.’”111

In the spring of 1913 there occurred a conflict with the owner of the textile firm Hochuli and Co. in Safenwil. In the minutes from a meeting on February 6, 1913, we read: “The firm of Hochuli and Co. complains in a letter of Jan. 28 about the scheduling of the confirmation classes in the last three months of the instruction year . . . The secretary is asked to give the Firm Hochuli and Co. written information, with reference to 44 of the Aargau Church Order, which prescribes for the Summer 2-3 hours and for the Winter 3-4 hours per week.” However, Hochuli responded that he would no longer accept any more confirmation youth in his factory. Barth proposed, for the sake of peace, that during the final three month, the three hours per week be one and a half hours twice. The church board adopted the provision extending from May to New Year’s twice a week an hour-and-a-half session. And the factory was notified of this regulation. We shall deal with this affair in more detail later because this conflict accompanied the whole period of Barth’s pastorate.

In a sermon on the cleansing of the temple (January 19, 1913), Barth justified Jesus’ anger based on a higher notion of justice than the customary order. What Jesus carried out in the remple was a revolution against the existing order. “There in the Temple, Jesus ignored the customary order with the fullness of the power of the Messiah. . . . Yes, Jesus carried out a revolution—when the divine appears in human form, there must always be a revolution against human order. Let us be drawn into this struggle. . . . Oh, if only we would awaken and want to become fighters!”112

In a sermon of February 23, 1913 Barth stresses Christian solidarity with the suffering of the world: “The misery of the world is your misery, its darkness is your darkness . . . We must acquire for ourselves that holy sense of solidarity which bears the suffering of the world in its heart, not in order to sigh and shake our heads over it, but rather to take it in hand so that it will be otherwise.”113 Barth also saw a clear connection between the social question and the question of militarism. Barth had served as the president of Blue Cross (a social service group ) ever since January 1912. Under his leadership, the “Blues” sometimes worked together with the “Reds” (i.e., socialists) in Safenwil.

In his “Dissenting View on Military Aircraft” (March 14, 1913),114 Barth distanced himself from the naïve pacifism of the socialists at that time. Against the patriotic sentiment that any expenditure for military aircraft means especially clear evidence of true love of fatherland, Barth (based on Matt 6:10 and Luke 11:2) regarded war as a criminal offense against humanity.115 War is War. “Military-expenditures are as such ‘horror before God.’”116 Barth also paid attention to the German Social Democratic Party. “I was well aware of August Bebel and old Liebknecht, and saw the prophetic cloud hovering over the German Social Democrats before it disappeared.”117

In his Easter sermon (March 23, 1913) Barth encouraged his congregation to become concerned about the battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil: “The message of Easter leads us to the boundary between two worlds. And on this boundary, a battle is raging. Two gigantic kingdoms are engaged in a war with one another . . . The world strives against God. But we cannot and we may not be mere spectators of this battle of which Easter speaks. We have to become partisan on one side or the other.”118

Soon after his wedding (on March 27, 1913), Barth prepared a lecture, “Belief in the Personal God” (delivered to the Aargau Pastors’ Association at Lenzburg on May 19).119 In Aargau Barth tried to reconcile his Marburg insights with his new socialist discoveries of the kingdom of God. In addition, in the sermon on May 4, 1913, he recognized the task for the pastor in the prophetic consciousness of Amos: “A prophet is, in all things, precisely the opposite of that which most people expect from a pastor these days and of that which most pastors have really been . . . The prophet is the employee of God. For him, it is a matter of indifference what people think of him and what they do to him . . . He knows that if he does his duty, they will be shocked by him and indignant . . . The prophet is the representative of the unaccustomed.”120 The kingdom of God does not stand in contrast to catastrophes and violent storms in revolution; rather they are in the service of it.

The importance of the lecture “Belief in the Personal God” lies in the fact that it demonstrates Barth’s early affinity toward the coexistence of dialectical thinking and analogical thinking. For Barth, personality and absoluteness are predicates of God in which religious experience becomes possible. The concept of personality lies between transcendentalism and psychology. In fact, just as transcendentalism refers to the infinite aspect of personality, psychology points to a concrete and finite aspect of personality. When viewed transcendentally, personality does not match with an absolute subject. Likewise if the concept of absoluteness were applied to a personal subject, the concept of personality would dissolve. Therefore absolute personality is nonsense. The only solution is to see two concepts in contradiction. God is an infinite Spirit. The problem of analogy comes out in Barth’s consideration of human personality and divine personality.121

For Barth, the analogical way of thinking is not based on the process of human ontological abstraction. This being the case, Feuerbach’s thesis—that the concept of God is the result of human projection—critiques religious experience. As Barth said, “We cannot find in the human personality an analogy to the real content of religious faith in God . . . A concept of God that results from projecting human self-awareness into the realm of the transcendent cannot latch on to the reality of God, or describe it exhaustively. Religion’s notion of God cannot be a projection from our side; it can only be the reflection of a fact that has been carried into us. This fact is the life in God which is granted to us through our association with history. This is the real religious experience; in it we possess God, and because of it we can speak of God.”122

The possibility of speaking of God comes out of the life in God, a reflection of a fact that has been created in us. Beginning on the divine side, analogical reflection is given to us through human association with history. Herein the anthropological approach to God is denied. Instead, Barth identifies the analogy of faith or the analogy of history for the first time. What is at stake here is that the motives of religious socialism and comprehensive universalism surface for the first time. The Ursprung of the analogy makes religious experience with God possible and justifies human speech about God. By way of dialectics and analogy we have God and can speak of God on the basis of them.

This Ursprung is formulated, in fact, not merely in a negative way but also in a positive way. The meaning of all negations is, from the start, the gaining of a theological position, namely, of a new beginning and starting point of thought. The intention of positive theology is also the intention of dialectical theology. Barth cites a formulation of Cohen to illustrate his point: “‘Non-grounding becomes the ground for grounding of the thought and the willed.’” That is, the critical a priori of Kant becomes a positive-theological apriori of God-thought. As Barth said, “to negate the grounding of the actual as such, that is to say, at the same time to affirm it. Negation of space and time is simultaneously master over them . . . It is the truth and validity of apriori which rests in itself, which proves itself here as the positive side of God-thought.”123

Already in 1914 Barth articulated a positive a priori not only in relation to the grounding of the thought and the willed, but also in relation to the grounding of the actual. In this dialectical framework, the concept of Ursprung is used so that the development of analogy becomes possible. The analogy of Ursprung stood before the conceptualization of the dialectics in Romans II, materially as well as temporarily. Analogy and dialectics can be co-originally set in the thought of Ursprung.

Barth’s thought of Ursprung by way of dialectics and analogy in 1914 can be seen later as a basis for the development of his socialistic theology in the Tambach lecture of 1919. In November 1913 Barth’s Sozipredigten (socialist sermons) caused five of six members of the church board to resign. “Newly elected were the Misters Hans Hilfiker, Wagner, Ernst Widmer, Artur Hüssy, Arnold Scheurmann, a moving company proprietor, and Ritschard, Mr. J. Schärer, School Property Administrator, was elected president.”124

In the sermons of 1913, we notice Barth’s strong preference for socialism in light of the kingdom of God. In a sermon dated 16 November, Barth addressed the socialists’ decision to retreat from the Landes church in Prussia: “The leader of this movement has made a declaration: We are for the religion, but against the state religion. We are for all churches, but against the state churches.”125 The church retreat movement was carried out among Prussian social democrats on October 28, 1913. In all, 1,328 social democrats removed themselves from the Prussian Landes church. For Barth, the church as the state church was without a doubt a disadvantage compared with the watchman office of the old prophets. In his sermon of August 31, he even praised August Bebel, the chairman of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who had died in Passugs, Switzerland, on August 13, 1913. According to Barth, if we regard a man like Bebel from a Christian standpoint, we must say that he gripped important points about what Jesus wanted much better, and followed Jesus more passionately, than most so-called Christians. Although Bebel made errors, Barth did not hesitate to declare that through him “a voice of God, an announcement of the coming Kingdom of God” could be heard.126

Barth continued articulating his conviction about Bebel on September 14, knowing that many in the congregation were saddened at his death. In Barth’s view, Bebel was a man who had declared God’s Word to his time. The life of Bebel was beautiful, great, and even godly because it was dedicated completely to truth and human rights. “I am delighted about it, because he [Bebel] is for me a sign that God is living in humankind, and that a strong resistance is against the power of egoism. I think just definitely that the loving God needs also such people and speaks to us through them.”127

Several people were offended by Barth’s sermon of September 14. There was even some talk of having him removed from his position. Nevertheless, on the edge of social catastrophe Barth still had hope about a gathering of the Socialist International in Basel’s Münster Cathedral in November 1912 and of a peace conference between the German and French parliaments in Bern in the summer of 1913.128 On November 24 and 25, 1912, the International Socialist Congress took place, and there was a demonstration against the impending war that would become World War I. In Basel’s Münster Cathedral, the International Socialist congress declared war against war in an internationally unanimous decision. In the summer of 1913, forty-one members of German Reichstag had a meeting with 164 French delegates as well as with twenty-one French senators in a conference in Bern in order to advise a communication between Germany and France.

During this time, Barth came in contact with Leonhard Ragaz (1868–1945) who, as one of the most prominent and influential figures among Swiss religious socialists, brought forward his view of the kingdom of God from 1902 onwards during his time as the pastor of Basel cathedral. Starting in 1908, he held a theological chair in Zurich but resigned from it in 1921. As Barth pointed out, “although ‘Religious Socialism’ was also prompted by the younger Christoph Blumhardt’s message of hope, by virtue of its critical and polemical presentation it was already a characteristically Swiss movement.”129 Barth also participated in this movement, read Neue Wege, and conversed with prominent representatives of the movement. However, he was hesitant about identifying himself fully with religious socialism. Interested as he was, he kept his distance from it. In Barth’s letter to his mother on November 20, 1913, he was preoccupied with a study of social questions. He had to teach a course to a group of workers and youth who came to him every other week Sunday afternoon for one and a half hours. Moreover, his wife, Nelly, who was not ashamed to support his work, stated her feelings about the mood of the day: “I am fundamentally fed up with bourgeois society.”130 In connection with his work in the Safenwil Workers’ Association during the winter of 1913–1914, Barth produced an extensive dossier on the “Workers Question.”131

In this “Workers Question,” we see Barth’s connection with SPS and the workers’ union in Safenwil and his effort to provide a more solid theoretical basis for his socialist praxis. Barth lamented, “How stupid that I missed an opportunity to take Wagner’s national economy in Berlin.”132 At any rate, in his “Workers Question,” Barth made use of writings such as Die Arbeiterfrage: Eine Einführung by Heinrich Herkner (1863–1932), who was professor of the national economy at the Königlichen Technischen Hochschule, Berlin.133

Here Barth showed his interest in the history of two important industry plants, namely, the firm C. F. Bally in Schönenward and that of the Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur, both of which are still today considered great Swiss enterprises. Through collecting data, Barth became concerned about the life circumstances and conditions of his parishioners and comrades. Barth’s “Workers Question” was used already in winter 1913–1914 in Safenwil or in Aargau before his entrance to the party in 1915. We shall deal with Barth’s dossier later in more detail. In 1914 Barth spoke on “The Gospel and Socialism” and “The New Factory Act.” In a sermon in June 1914 about the Berne Exhibition (published in Neue Wege), Barth declared that “the evil of capitalism was the consequence of a world without God.” The Christian hope of a new world is to be brought into being by the living God. At the same time, Barth was critical of Friedrich Naumann. (Naumann was an important representative of social democracy in the German Protestant context. Early on, Barth was impressed by Naumann’s social activity. However, as Naumann became associated with the war policy of the German empire, Barth grew dismayed.) In Barth’s view, Naumann had made a political compromise and so no longer looked for something better beyond war and capitalism. For Barth, however, the sentence “God is” amounted to a revolution. Socialism was, therefore, a very important and necessary application of the gospel.

Karl Barth and Die Hilfe

Before the outbreak of the First World War, Barth reviewed the previous year’s publications of Die Hilfe, whose editor was Naumann. Naumann was influential and reputable within the German Protestant church. He also began, as a liberal, to be involved in the Inner Mission movement in Hamburg. In his earlier thought he held a view similar to the religious socialist movement. Naumann founded Die Hilfe in 1890. However, around 1895–1896 he turned from religious socialism and became a defender of the national state and patriotism. In his statement in Die Hilfe he wrote, “Of what use to us is the best social policy when the Cossacks are coming? Whoever wishes to concern himself with domestic issues must first secure people, Fatherland, and borders; he must be concerned with national power. Here is the weakest point in the Social Democracy. We need a socialism which is capable of ruling . . . Such a socialism must be German-national.”134 Thus Naumann became a strong defender of the German military buildup between 1905 and 1914.

With an invitation from Rade, Barth wrote a review of Die Hilfe which was published in Die Christliche Welt. Barth recognized the great service Die Hilfe had provided over the years with respect to practical social progress, unemployment insurance, trade unions, land, and housing reform. However, Barth noticed that Naumann was no longer capable of bringing to the fore the relevance of Christianity for political life.

According to Barth, politics that raises the necessary concessions and compromises to the dignity of generally valid ultimate ideas is different from politics that make concessions and compromises for the sake of immediate goals. What Barth argued for was a politic of hope, full of revolutionary longing for a better way that would come in the midst of the world of relativity. “It is one thing to become accustomed to the world of relativities, finally becoming completely satisfied and . . . at home in them, as those who have no hope. It is another thing altogether, in the midst of this world of relativities, to be incessantly disquieted and full of longing, fundamentally revolutionary vis-à-vis that which exists, longing after the better which will come, after the absolute goal of a human community of life beyond all temporal necessities.”135

In Die Hilfe, Naumann failed to seek this truth of longing against all that exists. In contrast to Die Hilfe, the SPS took seriously the political momentousness of the absolute God. Christian hope that takes God seriously in the social political arena means a revolutionary unrest, always moving forward, longing for something better in the future rather than being satisfied with what is offered by the world of relativities. What Barth discerned in socialism was this revolutionary unrest and disquiet revealed in longing for the future. However, Barth was aware of August Bebel’s mistake of supporting the military appropriations bill which had been passed by the Reichstag in the summer of 1913. This is what Naumann called Bebel’s “last will and testament.” Such compromises in the Social Democracy did not signify a fundamental change of socialist direction as Naumann had expected. As Barth states, “If the Social Democracy should be transformed into a radical reform party on the soil of capitalism and nationalism as Die Hilfe so much expects—we do not believe it—then that would be for us at most a new disappointment, as the politics of Die Hilfe is finally a disappointment for us, not, however, a proof that a politics which simply capitulates before certain alleged realities is the only possible, the correct politics. We should expect more from God.”136

What we discern in Barth’s review is a theology of radical socialism. There is a direction that has higher political faith, which is, by no means, satisfied with political and economic relativities. Although concessions and compromises are made, they are done in inner contrast to all temporality. Barth found this direction in International Social Democracy. Taking in earnest the ultimate, namely, God, politically, the Social Democracy sought to rewrite politics. This radical revolutionary socialism was based on the standpoint of the absolute, which is the genuine otherworldliness (Jenseits) of all social relativities; it is, in other words, the standpoint of God. This radical socialism that represents the standpoint of God takes a position that is not ready to establish peace with the reality of the present era, with capitalism, nationalism, and militarism.137

According to Barth, Die Hilfe had no understanding of the inner essence of Social Democracy, that is, of the revolutionary unrest, the radicalism, and the enthusiasm. Although Die Hilfe understood the industrial-democratic element, which was the whole reform apparatus in the social-democratic program, it shook its head at their unrealistic ideals. “‘Utopia,’ ‘fantasy,’ ‘outmoded Marxist dogma,’ or even ‘agitation talk’—that is the repertoire of their fight against the left.” The position of Die Hilfe against the left resorted to “placing this utopia and talk into a box, and placing ‘Gegenwartarbeit’ [‘present work’] arm in arm with decisive liberalism.”138

In April 1915, in wartime Germany, Barth went to Marburg with Thurneysen for the wedding of his brother Peter who married Rade’s daughter, Helene. At the wedding Barth had an opportunity to meet Rade’s father-in-law, Naumann. Barth engaged in a passionate discussion with him over the war. Naumann’s position on the war became obvious in his description of religion: “All religion is right for us . . . whether it is called the Salvation Army or Islam, provided that it helps us to hold out through the war.”139 Barth’s disappointment with him led Barth closer to Blumhardt. Barth’s subsequent comparison of Naumann and Blumhardt is evident in their obituary that Barth wrote in the year that the two died. I shall deal with Barth’s obituary on Naumann and Blumhardt in a later chapter on the Tambach lecture of 1919.

The radical-revolutionary hope of the working class was not merely political but theological for Barth. He arrived at this position because his concept of radical socialism came from the absolute God. “It is a religious difference, which separates the hope of the proletariat from the hope of the circle of Die Hilfe. Naumann does not understand this religious difference, and he levels it off to a mere political difference.”140 However, what is central to Barth’s position is well articulated in his understanding of hope: “in the midst of this world of relativities, to be incessantly disquieted and full of longing. To be fundamentally revolutionary against that which exists. To long after the better which will come, after the absolute goal of a human communal life beyond all temporal necessities.”141

Barth believed that the one who seeks faith in Jenseits of war and capitalism, as Die Hilfe does, seeks in vain. The hope and longing for the new and the better has its origin and telos outside Jenseits of all temporal necessities because this hope comes from God. Therefore accommodation to an existing reality or the status quo is perpetually challenged and discredited since we should expect more from God. In Die Hilfe Barth spoke of God in political relevance and developed his discourse of God in the context of social justice, revolution, socialism, and radicalism. Barth critically supported revolutionary leftist socialism before World War I and interpreted socialistic theory and praxis in light of his understanding of God, who is Jenseits of all temporal necessities. Thus Barth integrated socialistic theory and praxis into his theology. In other words, Barth attempted to see the “left” of socialism grounded in the “above” of God because he deepened and actualized God as the radically Novum in the context of a radically new society. As Danneman states, “In the bringing-in of the transcendence-thought (God and socialism as the Jenseits of the world of capitalism) lies the theology of Barth’s radical socialism.”142

Religious Socialism in Switzerland

Barth’s theology cannot be properly understood without reference to his socialistic activity and Swiss religious socialism. His “Socialist Speeches” and activity until the outbreak of World War I—as has been described above—are themselves reflective of liberal theology, especially when dealing with a relation between theology and political praxis. However, after the war he made a new departure by breaking with his liberal background. To further appreciate Barth’s theology and social praxis after the war, it is first necessary to look at the movement of religious socialism in Switzerland. For understanding the development of religious socialism in Switzerland, it is worthwhile to take note of a historical event beginning with Christoph F. Blumhardt (1842–1919). Although Blumhardt is not depicted as a religious socialist in an authentic sense, the movement of religious socialism in Switzerland has one point of departure in him. Representatives of Swiss religious socialism such as Kutter and Ragaz were strongly influenced by Christoph Blumhardt. Blumhardt, properly understood, is both an example and father of religious socialism in Switzerland. Ragaz, in his book Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt, Vater und Sohn, und weiter! is full of honor and respect for Blumhardt.

Blumhardt is spiritually and theologically related to his father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–1880). In his parish at Moettlingen the elder Blumhardt was involved for two years in a process of healing a woman who suffered a high degree of hysteria as seen from a medical perspective. As she was healed, a voice sounded out: “Jesus is victor.” Thus, Jesus’s victory became the grounding principle for his healing work in light of the kingdom of God. For him, the kingdom of God had a strong cosmic and apocalyptic dimension rather than being confined to an individualistic and pietistic realm of salvation. The presently real quality of the kingdom of God was bound up with the incarnation of Jesus Christ. However, the reality of the kingdom of God was not restricted to the historical Jesus, but after the ascension the kingdom of God broke into the world in which the healing of a possessed woman was regarded as a sign of God’s in-breaking reality. What is important is that hope for the kingdom of God and the voice that said “Jesus is victor” was understood as an immanent concretization of God’s kingdom.

According to the elder Blumhardt, the kingdom of God is not shortened or reduced to a spiritual, otherworldly salvation of the soul but is sharpened in concrete-physical and social-material realms. This tendency to integrate the material arena and concrete content into the movement of God’s kingdom finds a strong expansion in the younger Blumhardt. In 1852 Johann Blumhardt moved from Moettlingen to the retreat house in Bad Boll.

After the death of his father, Blumbhardt placed a new accent on his father’s watchword, “Jesus is victor.” Beyond a healing ministry in Bad Boll, Blumbhardt made a radical turn to the world. As Blumbhardt stressed, “The kingdom of God comes to the street where the poorest, the most offended and the most miserable are. There the kingdom of God comes.”143 For Blumhardt, God is directed toward the world in spite of its sinfulness. With a social turn Blumhardt found the effect of the kingdom of God in the socialist movement in which he sees the life of humans occupying a place of utmost importance. Without falling into replacing the kingdom of God with socialism, Blumbhardt discerned a sign of God’s in-breaking reality in the socialist movement for the sake of humanity. “The purpose of God is this-worldly” makes Blumhardt’s direction so explicit that God is the starting point and the ground for the redemption of the world, not the other way around. God is related to the this-worldly dimension (that is, to the material realm) so radically that according to Blumhardt, revolution can become a word of God.144

In 1899 Blumhardt arrived at a practical consequence from his understanding of God’s kingdom. In protest against Wilhelm II, he joined the SPD. His entrance into the Social Democratic Party in Germany was not meant to be a sign of his interest in the politics of the party but an expression of his fundamental solidarity with the poor and a practical performance of his idea of the kingdom of God. After Blumhardt’s speech in Göppingen (in June 1899), Eugster-Zuest founded the textile union (Webeverband) in Apenzell, Switzerland. In December 1900, Blumhardt was elected to the Social Democratic Congress in Württemberg. Then in 1889 Kutter came into contact with Blumhardt and paid visits to Bad Boll.

Hermann Kutter

In December 1902 when Hermann Kutter (1863–1931) published his work Das Unmittelbare: Eine Menschheitsfrage, he was a pastor at Neumunster in Zurich (between 1899 and 1926). Under the influence of Blumhardt, his work appeared as a philosophical interpretation of Blumhardt’s thought. He characterizes the new life as the living God revealed in Jesus Christ. A turning away from the pure speculative theology to immediacy is identical with a return to the living God or, in the sense of Blumhardt, to the kingdom of God. In this light Kutter noticed in Social Democracy a will to social change, an in-breaking reality of immediacy into an incomplete and deficient society.

In his book Das Unmittelbare, there is a positive evaluation of the socialistic movement inspired by Blumhardt. The protest of Social Democracy against the old authority, its struggle for a better social order, and its utopia of a new community are, for Kutter, signs of the living God. In a sense, the work of Ragaz was connected to the emergence of Kutter’s theology. In April 1903 Ragaz preached a sermon that came to be known as the “Bricklayers’ Strike Sermon.” In December of the same year, Kutter’s prophetic voice was manifest in his book Sie Müssen! Ein offenes Wort an die christliche Gesellschaft (They Must! An Open Word to Christian Society) (1905).

In September 1906 Ragaz gave his important speech “Das Evangelium und der soziale Kampf der Gegenwart” (“The Gospel and the Current Social Struggle”) to a gathering of Swiss pastors. In it Ragaz scrutinized the social class struggle and challenged Christians to get involved in the movement of social justice. In October 1906 the first conference of Swiss religious socialism in Degesheim occurred. Finally, in November of the same year the first issue of Neue Wege was released.145 Given this fact, the religious socialism of Switzerland was developed first of all through the influence of Kutter and Ragaz (1868–1945) in 1906. Their journal Neue Wege appeared, bearing the strong influence of Ragaz, its founder and editor. The Freie Schweitzer Arbeiter, edited by Gustav Benz and Otto Lautenburg, was the other voice of religious socialism. Although a socially and politically liberal pastor in Basel, Benz rejected Social Democracy, unlike Ragaz, who had already joined the SPS in 1913.

At any rate, the religious socialist movement in Switzerland was greatly indebted to Kutter’s books, Sie Müssen! (1905) and Wir Pfarrer (1907), in which the message of Blumhardt played an important role. Although Das Unmittelbare remained—because of philosophical language—without great effect to the readers, Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! aroused great public attention. He argues that God takes sides with Social Democracy, not with the church. In his analysis of society, Kutter defended the political interest of Social Democracy against charges and attacks from the side of church. What is to be fought against is not Social Democracy but the Christian society that had abetted social injustice and misery. “The Social Democrats are revolutionary, because God is there. They must be forward, because God’s kingdom must be forward. They are people of revolution, because God is the great over-thrower.”146 The atheism, materialism, and internationalism of Social Democracy are no less than a protest of Christian society and conventions that have fallen into mammonism. The kingdom of God breaks in with the social democrats into the society. “Class struggle is a necessity provoked through mammon . . . The contradiction of classes is such that fighting has become not only necessary, but also the essence of humanity.”147 Social Democracy becomes God’s instrument that denies the existing social order. They must. They cannot do otherwise. “The most violent revolutionary is the living God.” He is the overthrower without reservation at all.148

Be that as it may, Kutter remained a pastor and a prophetic voice throughout his active life. “We must meet ourselves in our life and struggle, in our morality and religion toward God. The Bible starts out of him . . . For the Bible God is the single reality that is taken in earnest.”149 Furthermore, at the center of Kutter’s work is the insistence that the Social Democrat carried out the will of God. The atheism that was so frequently blamed by Christian conservatives (such as, for instance, Stoecker and Naumann) bears in it the stamp of the living God.

For Kutter God used Social Democracy as an instrument to awaken the church. It is to be seen as the hammer of God. The socialists must serve God’s purpose. What Kutter saw behind the hope of the Social Democrat is an unconscious Christianity. Therefore, the society has no right to complain about revolution. “The salvation becomes, at first, full in the material thing. Sin means a faulty placement of the spirit against the material. On the contrary, the spirit must direct itself again to the material.” “God’s promise fulfills itself in the Social Democrats: They must!”150 However, Kutter believed that pastors are confronted with a different kind of work in which they are to shape the conditions for the new society by being faithful to the living God. They are to proclaim a prophetic call to Christians in accordance with a life in immediacy with this living God. Kutter was more restrained about involvement with politics. He did not join the Social Democracy Party. Kutter’s prophetic call had more to do with theology and the church than with politics. Among his books, Sie Müssen! maintained a lasting influence as the founding document of the religious-social movement in Switzerland.

Unlike Blumhardt’s entrance to Social Democracy as a sign of solidarity with the poor, Kutter’s contribution to the social question meant a new form of preaching. Such an approach gave rise to the following question: to what degree does a Christian take part in the socialist movement in a practical-political way? This question remained an issue of conflict between Kutter and Ragaz. Finally the environment of the general strike in Zurich in 1912 fostered a break between Kutter and Ragaz.

Leonhard Ragaz

Unlike Kutter, Ragaz was a political activist. Ragaz was born on July 28, 1868, in Tamin, a small mountain village in Canton Graubünden in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He grew up in the democratic atmosphere of a Swiss village and remained a strong believer in democracy all his life. Impressed by the cooperative forms of economic life among Swiss mountain farmers, he was concerned with a decentralized form of socialism. His father was active in a number of offices in the community, and his father’s interest in politics passed over to Ragaz. Because his family was constantly surrounded by financial difficulties, Ragaz was well aware of social problems from his personal experience. After graduation from high school in nearby Chur, he decided to study theology, enabled by a scholarship. He enrolled at the University of Basel and spent some time at the universities in Jena and in Berlin. He then returned to Basel.

The theological background that he learned and developed in his years of study was liberalism, especially Hegelianism. (A. E. Biedermann, who made a great impact on Ragaz, was a Swiss Hegelian theologian.) In 1890 Ragaz was ordained as a Reformed pastor and began his ministry in three villages in Canton Graubünden. During his parish work, his main concern was with the intensive study of the Bible and the theology of the priesthood of all believers, encouraging the laity to be more involved in parish life. Between 1893 and 1895 Ragaz served as a language and religion teacher in Chur in part for health reasons, and also in part due to his dissatisfaction with ministry. During this time he was in contact with the writings of Christian socialism, including Carlyle, Kingsley, and Robertson, and German authors such as Naumann.

In 1895 Ragaz returned to the pastorate as a senior pastor in Chur and remained there until 1902. Influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard and Ritschl, he was preoccupied with ethics. In Chur he met Clara Nadig and married her. She remained a supportive companion throughout his difficult life. His experience with social issues was later deepened when, in the pastorate in Chur, Ragaz came into contact with poverty and social problems such as bad housing, poor working conditions, broken families, prostitution, criminality, and alcoholism. Later he wrote about this experience, saying it was “the comprehensive solidarity of guilt.”.151 Involved in an educational program for workers and giving talks to worker’s groups, Ragaz was given Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as an expression of gratitude from the laborers’ association. In 1902 he received a call from the Münster Cathedral in Basel. During his pastorate in Basel, the kingdom of God became, for him, the central teaching of Christianity. Seeing the kingdom of God as a gift of God, Ragaz called for human participation in the coming of God’s kingdom. Wherever people work for justice, peace, and humanity, one will find the signs of God’s kingdom. The labor movement was one of the most important signs of God’s kingdom for Ragaz.

Ragaz later experienced the great bricklayers’ strike in 1903. Troops were called to intervene. In his sermon known as the “Bricklayers’ Strike Sermon,” Ragaz claimed that Christ was on the side of the oppressed. The social movement, which for him was associated with the “humanization of humans,” became a sign of the kingdom of God; therefore, Christians are asked to take part in the struggle for the oppressed: “So the social movement is in its deepest ground a realization of the idea which stands in the middle point of the gospel: Human beings as the children of God and the brotherhood of humans . . . Who understands it, sees, in spite of all wave and storm, the blowing and ruling of the creative Spirit of God.”152

Shortly after the “Bricklayers’ Strike Sermon,” Ragaz became acquainted with Pastor Hermann Kutter in Zurich. Together Ragaz and Kutter founded a religious-social movement to join in the struggle for the humanization of humanity, “in the drama of the humanizing of mankind, whose value we do not quite realize yet.”153 Interestingly enough, Herrmann’s concern for the working class echoed in the development of religious socialism. Herrmann’s concern for socialism—regardless of his individualist bent—was mediated by Oskar Holtzmann. The thesis of “the social movement as the unconscious bringer of divine will” came out ten years earlier than Kutter’s book Sie Müssen!, and six years earlier than Blumhardt’s entrance to the social democratic party.

Herrmann’s thesis reads: “The Christian church has to thank modern socialism that her horizon is expanded, her formation of thought is deepened, in short, her inner life is enriched.”154 It was delivered by Herrmann as an address to the Evangelical Social Congress in 1891. Ragaz accepted Holtzman’s reappropriation of Herrmann’s socialism as the legitimate child of the Reformation for his development of religious socialism.155 Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! also made a significant contribution to the task of theology, especially in Switzerland. In 1906 Ragaz delivered his address “The Gospel and the Current Social Struggle” (“Das Evangelium und der soziale Kampf der Gegenwart”) at a pastors’ conference in Basel. This is one of the fundamental documents through which Ragaz was able to deepen and actualize religious socialism in terms of his theology of God’s kingdom and to bring to the fore its social and political implications. As the second thesis reads, “The Kingdom of God is the central concept of the good news. Jesus teaches the worth of each child of God as well as the brotherhood of men under God. Jesus sees Mammon as the greatest enemy of man.”156

According to Ragaz, socialism in its basic goals provides “the direction that will lead us out of capitalism to the next higher level in historical development.”157 Ragaz’s intent in this regard was not to identify the teachings of Christ with socialism. Rather his “task is simply to determine which telos an economic order must have if it is to harmonize with the life-style required by the gospel.”158 When seen in light of the gospel, capitalism, the telos of which “centers on the increase of capital,” is condemned “as a means to greater profit.”159 However, in the midst of capitalist society, “the social movement reveals itself as the true way to God for our race.”160 The social movements such as the political organization, the labor union, and the cooperative “made workers members of a reputable community and brought them under the discipline of the community.”161 The better economic order, that corresponds to the gospel, is the socialistic one because the spirit of socialism is in complete economic solidarity. What Ragaz argued for is “a religious rebirth,” “a Spirit-guided community” and “a radical renewal of the spirit.”162

For Ragaz, social change and religious reform should complement each other rather than contradict each other: “Social change can topple capitalism and with it Mammonism . . . ; it can bring about a fairer distribution of the earth’s goods, but still not satisfy the souls of men; it can link people together socially but it will not unite them in the deepest sense.”163 As far as a deeper unity between the social struggle and spiritual movement is concerned, the telos of religious socialism is “an act in the drama of the humanizing of mankind.”164 In 1907 Ragaz accepted an invitation to address the World Congress of Free Christianity in Boston. While in North America, he was impressed by Walter Rauschenbusch and his Social Gospel. (Rauschenbusch’s book Christianity and the Social Crisis was later translated by Ragaz’s wife, Clara Nadin, into German.) In 1908 he accepted a call to professorship in systematic and practical theology at the University of Zurich. Here Emil Brunner, who later became a founder of dialectical theology, took a different direction than Ragaz. Emil Brunner remembered Ragaz when he stated, “that was a great time, when Ragaz came to Zurich. Then theology was interesting, not as a science, but a proclamation in our time, as encounter with historical reality, with the labor question, with the war issue.”165

In 1909 Ragaz first came into contact with Blumhardt of Bad Boll in Germany. Like Kutter and Barth, Ragaz was greatly influenced by him. Ragaz found in Blumhardt’s message of eschatological waiting for the kingdom of God an activist and social dimension. Seeing the sign of the coming kingdom in the socialism and labor movements, Blumhardt was deeply engaged in the social struggle from 1899 to 1906. Kutter saw the kingdom only as a movement out from God, whereas Ragaz stressed a task of human participation in the kingdom by distinguishing an absolute hope from a relative hope in the kingdom of God. For Ragaz, relative hope can be seen as a sign pointing to the kingdom and a summons for human participation in the movement for social justice. Absolute hope, by contrast, is based on God’s action alone; absolute hope measures and judges relative hope.

Although greatly inspired by Kutter’s Sie Müssen!, Ragaz was uncomfortable with the social-ethical quietism present in Kutter. Kutter’s conviction was that the church must be first renewed before entering into the social struggle. Rather than restricting himself to the sphere of church, Ragaz was active in the labor movement by joining the Social Democrats. The difference between them led to a conflict within the religious-socialist movement in Switzerland. In contrast to Kutter’s von Gott her (out from God), Ragaz dialectically emphasized the direction zu Gott hin ( toward God) as the free effectiveness of human praxis, which is grounded on the direction von Gott her in a particular way. In Ragaz’s letter to Kutter (on May 9, 1907) we read: “The right of this ‘zu Gott hin’ I’d like to represent generally. It is one of the differences between you and me. The ‘von Gott her’ is certainly right principally and systematically. I also represent it, as far as I can truly represent it.”166

As Barth characterized the difference between them, “Leonhard Ragaz developed what Kutter meant to be a view of the current situation and an interpretation of the signs of the time.” For Ragaz, “the church must regard socialism as a preliminary manifestation of the kingdom of God . . . He made it a true system of ‘Religious Socialism.’”167 The systematic approach of Ragaz was, however, what Barth was hesitant to accept. In seeing the action of God in history, there is a tendency in Ragaz’s theology of history to ideologize the kingdom of God totally as socialism.168

In 1912 there occurred a general strike in Zurich in which Ragaz was active. Again in this matter Kutter broke with Ragaz and retreated from the religious-social movement. During his participation, Ragaz was shocked by the attack of the military upon workers. His later antimilitarist stance, associated with this experience, became a dominant factor for Ragaz’s development of the peace movement. In the same year the Peace Congress of the Socialist International was held at the Münster Cathedral in Basel. Ragaz spoke of God’s work in building up God’s kingdom with unchurched people. However, World War I became a great obstruction and setback for the religious-social movement. Proving the international element of socialism to be an illusion, workers in each country rallied to fight for their fatherlands. International Workers were not united in solidarity but instead came to fight and kill each other in the war. Unlike Kutter, who hoped for a German victory, Ragaz hoped for a German defeat. After 1913 Ragaz was active in the Swiss Social Democratic Party (SPS). During the war, various options were debated for the future of the Party. Lenin exercised a considerable influence among Swiss leftist socialists. Trotsky came to Switzerland, and Ragaz had a stimulating encounter with him, albeit in his anti-Bolshevist stance. Recalling their encounter Trotsky noted that “the Zurich professor Ragaz, a committed Christian, more a theologian with his education and profession” stood on the most extreme left wing of Swiss socialism. Ragaz represented the most radical fighting method against the war and was for the proletarian revolution.169

As Lenin began his socialist activity in Zurich, Bolshevism came into conflict with the religious-social movement. In his article “The Battle against Bolshevism” (“Sozialismus und Gewalt” [1919]), Ragaz saw Bolshevism as a betrayal of socialism. He argued that the socialists must fight against the perversion of socialism.170 Ragaz’s campaign against the entrance of Swiss Socialists into the Communist International was a well-known fact. In Zurich the leftist group of Münzenberg and his Jungburschen followed for years the religious-socialist direction that Ragaz had represented. Ragaz’s influence on the socialist youth organization had not ebbed, so that the socialist youth were impressed by Ragaz’s seriousness and his ethical demand. However, Münzenberg found himself more under the influence of Lenin than under the religious-socialist spirit. Münzenberg was critical of Ragaz’s demand to abandon violence, and charged that “he [Ragaz] preached salvation out of political oppression and exploitation through love.”171

In 1915 much had been discussed about the military and violence. Together with a women’s conference in Bern initiated by Clara Zetkin, the International Socialist Youth Conference during Easter of 1915 was regarded as a prelude to the meeting of the International workers’ movement in the Zimmerwald. Müntzenberg hoped that the Youth organization would make a contribution to the first International Youth organization after the betrayal and collapse of the Second International during the war. “The Youth organizations became in many countries leaders of the whole proletariat, and avant-garde in the fight against the imperialistic and social democratic betrayal.”172 At the International Youth conference in Bern, Münzenberg came into contact for the first time with Bolshevists. Lenin, who remained at his home in Bern, directed Bolshevists by phone behind the scenes. In this conference the Bolshevist thesis was raised: people must exploit the war for the revolutionization of the masses and must not speak about peace too early.173 Ragaz and Lenin never talked to each other, but an indirect dialogue occurred between them over the issue of the question of the revolutionary use of violence. The leader of the Youth organization stood on the side of Lenin by turning away from the religious-socialist approach. Münzenberg wrote, “Lenin saves us from religion.”174

Through Neue Wege, Lenin was aware of the antiwar position in the religious-socialist circle. Lenin reported that a pious philistine declared that it was not bad to turn a weapon against the war agitator, whereas famous Social Democrats such as Kautsky justified the chauvinism scientifically: “Whose voice is it? Our citation is extracted from a journal of a petit-bourgeois Christian democrat, whose journal is published in society of the upright cleric in Zurich.”175 Lenin actually began his attack on Ragaz and his religious socialism before Ragaz came to know about Lenin. Ragaz also reported, “I had no relation with Lenin and was not concerned about him. But Lenin was concerned about me and our movement. Lenin calls us in one Zurich journal ‘tearful social clerics’ who would keep the workers’ association from the use of violence. Obviously we stood in the way for him. The necessity of the violence was for him a dogma.”176 Warning against the danger of Bolshevism as practiced in the Soviet Union, Ragaz himself was confronted with the spirit of Bolshevism. In an article (in Neue Wege in November 1918), Ragaz defined Bolshevism as “Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in Russia.”177 Lenin acclaimed that the proletariat must break with the bourgeois dictatorship through the dictatorship of the proletariat.178 The meaning of the Bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat lay in taking away the means of production, the state apparatus, and finally the cultural apparatus, especially the press. This was the way of eliminating ruling violence through revolutionary violence. Only then could the whole economic, social, and cultural apparatus serve socialism in a genuine sense.179

According to Ragaz, Bolshevism from above and Bolshevism from below were no less than a minority rule over majority by holding “a belief in violence rather than justice, in dictatorship rather than democracy, in absolutism rather than freedom, in matter rather than spirit.” For Ragaz, therefore, “Bolshevism is imperialism and militarism in another form.”180 There was only one way to revolution: through a military coup and a military dictatorship evolving from it. But Ragaz did not find the idea of military dictatorship bearable or feasible: “The emergence of socialist militarism after the destruction of capitalistic militarism is one of the saddest surprises that we have witnessed in our time.”181 In order to battle Bolshevism, Ragaz calls for a new orientation in socialism. The kingdom of God must overthrow the kingdom of violence and build up the kingdom of freedom. Therefore, socialism has a task of uniting “a powerful sense of community and a passionate consciousness of freedom.”182 Although Ragaz argued that a certain measure of violence becomes inevitable, he denounced every use of violence as a defeat of socialism. Ragaz’s ideal was a social revolution without violence, a victory without violence through a spirit of truth toward “an immediate socialism and an immediate democracy.”183

We cannot underestimate an anarchist element in Ragaz’s religious socialism. Anarchism, especially in its communal form, had a strong impact on Ragaz’s theory and praxis until his late phase. In 1914/15 when there took place a collapse of the Second International after World War I, Ragaz strove to seek a new orientation and content for socialism. He came into contact with an anarchist circle initiated by a medical doctor, F. Brupbacher, in Zurich. As Ragaz recalled, this period belonged to his “anarchist intermezzo.”184 However, in April 1915, under the influence of Gustav Landauer, Ragaz broke with the Brupbacher circle. In Landauer’s concept of idealistic socialism Ragaz saw a point of contact with his theology of God’s kingdom-socialism. Socialism as a voluntary attitude and movement is to be realized in a new community. For Ragaz there was a close connection between Landauer’s anarchism and his socialism of the kingdom of God. According to Ragaz, Landauer was an anarchist in the sense that he—with or without Credo—knew something about a living God and God’s kingdom.

The influence of Landhauer upon Ragaz and Ragaz’s emotional participation in Landhauer’s life and destiny become explicit at this point. On the questions of rejection of the state, the condemnation of the war, and the fundamental demand for violence-free activity, we notice a parallel between Landhauer and Ragaz. Gustav Landauer, an activist of the Bayern revolution, founded the “Socialist Alliance” with Martin Buber in 1908 in the attempt to build up a communal socialism, a community without hierarchy or violence. Early in 1919 he was called by the comrades of the Munich counciliar republic and took part for six days in the Bayern council government. After the collapse of the first council republic in April of 1919, Landauer was put under arrest and slain on the way to prison.

What Landauer defended was a new socialism without enforcement or authority: “The socialist alliance declares as the aim of endeavor anarchy in the original sense: Order through alliances of voluntariness.”185 In the alliances there is neither rule nor oppressed, but only the community of equality. Neither class struggle nor proletarian politics can be the aim. With this idea in mind, Landauer turned away from an orthodox and a revisionist Marxism; he also turned from a program of the reformist party in the Second International. To be sure, the central content of Landauer’s vision was directed against the dominion of human over other humans and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Ragaz’s emphasis on the community as a sociological form, we see Landauer’s idea of Bünde der Freilligkeit informing Ragaz. Ragaz found in Landauer’s thought a methodologically open anarchism. According to Ragaz, Landauer’s anarchism was not doctrine (in fact did not mention dogma) but was a method that he operated in freedom and superiority. From this viewpoint he looked and worked onwards, always remaining in freedom and never becoming slave to his method. Ragaz looked upon Landauer as one of “the greatest socialists of all ages.”186

Next to Landauer we need to mention Buber and Peter Kropotkin. In connection with Landauer, Buber developed a similar anarchist idea of the community. Buber’s concept of community cannot be detached from his concept of religiosity. He was a very important dialogue partner to Ragaz because Buber integrated his anarchist project of socialism into the Jewish tradition of faith in God. Starting from the God of the Bible and God’s promised kingdom, Buber and Ragaz shared their own view of transformation of the social relation in this light. In April 1928 Buber and Ragaz organized a convention in Heppenheim under the heading, “Socialism through Faith” (“Sozialimus aus dem Glauben”).187 At stake for them was a shared commonality between the Hebrew prophets and early Christianity. In April 1923 Buber had reviewed Ragaz’s book Weltreich, Religion und Gottesherrschaft (1923) in the literary section of the Frankfurter Zeitung.188

The hope of the kingdom of God and communal renewal of the world united a Jew, Buber, with a Christian, Ragaz, beyond religious barriers. Like Ragaz, Buber understood himself as a religious socialist. As Buber states in “Three Theses of a Religious Socialism” (1928), “Religious socialism can only mean that religion and socialism are essentially directed to each other—that each of them needs the covenant with the other for the fulfillment of its own essence . . . Unity with God and community among the creatures belong together. Religion without socialism is disembodied spirit, and therefore, not genuine spirit; socialism without religion is body emptied of spirit and, hence, also not genuine body.”189 Ragaz conceived of Buber as standing much closer to him than many Christian representatives. The anarchist methodology of a cooperative and communal society was accepted and reflected by Ragaz in his social and ecclesiological explication. Ragaz was convinced that an anarchist concept of the cooperative community was the only adequate sociological form of Christianity. Next to the labor union, he believed it must become a necessary and fundamental component of the new political and social construction of society.190

In addition, a Russian, Peter Kropotkin, helped Ragaz to overcome the Darwinian concept of evolution. In his book, Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier und Menschenwelt (1908), Kropotkin, without finally rejecting Darwin’s concept of the fight for survival, did not regard this idea as one single motive in the development and progress of nature and humanity. Kropotkin made an attempt to discuss and build an anarchist philosophy on natural scientific grounds. Against the Darwinian idea of struggle for survival, he proposed that the regulation is the mutual aid that gains significance in the process of evolution. According to Kropotkin, there is in nature and history a structure of reciprocal aid and an attitude of solidarity.

Marx and Kropotkin would share a similar social vision of communism, but Marx was skeptical of the immediate establishment of Communism. According to Marx, the attainment of the final stage of Communism goes on ahead of the phase of a raw Communism. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition from state power monopoly to the revolutionary party appeared to Marx to be unavoidable. However, in a circle of anarchism, the appropriation of the state through the party is not meant to be the negation of the state but only another interpretation of state despotism. According to Kropotkin, a communist society could be realized without the state.191 The vision of the dominion-free society, the organization of life in community, and an anti-institutional stance made an impact on Ragaz. Ragaz held such an anarchist vision as “the basis of socialism” in a better and more adequate form than Marxist socialism. Furthermore, Ragaz distinguished between a dogma and a methodological principle of anarchism. He rejected anarchism in the form of a total philosophical-theoretical explanation of the world and human race. What attracted Ragaz was a principle of the federative construction of society in terms of small and personal unified social groups from below to above. Opposed to a form of the state, this idea is oriented toward the cooperative and communal essence of society.192

Given this fact, anarchism as a principle stands in the line of God’s kingdom because the theocracy of God’s kingdom means none other than an anarchist order. The anarchism of God’s kingdom does not mean disorder or chaos but quite the reverse. Here every human being stands in a direct relation to God and in freely ordered and equally based community to each other. The kingdom of God does not run counter to anarchism, but anarchism comes out of the kingdom of God. Where anarchism stands under the rule of God, there is no master-slave relation in the interpersonal realm. The primary rule of God does not tolerate a secondary dominating form of human over human. Where there is the Sprit of the living God, there occurs a voluntary and domination-free personal community.

In this anarchist principle of a cooperative and federal community Ragaz saw a concrete realization-form within the historical process. Where God rules and is given glory, the traditional structure of dominion and rule can be broken and eliminated. Then a new communal and cooperative order of solidarity must be developed. As Ragaz stresses, “the anarchism of the immediacy under God is the highest form of historical life and of human community.”193

After 1916 the religious-social movement began to decline, in part due to Ragaz’s conflict with Kutter and in part due to his rejection of the dialectical theology of Barth. In his first edition of Romans (1919), Barth, speaking on behalf of Social Democracy, expressed his critique that Ragaz’s religious socialism had limitations. In 1919 at a religious-socialist conference in Tambach, Barth was invited in place of Ragaz, who was unable to speak because of health reasons. Herein Barth dealt a final blow to any kind of hyphenated Christianity in light of totaliter aliter revolution. In the wake of Barth’s commentary on Romans (1919, 1922) and the Tambach lecture (1919), many pastors in Germany and Switzerland left their previous alliance with religious socialism in order to become followers of the dialectical theology of Barth. This remained a bitter experience for Ragaz, who attacked dialectical theology as reactionary, quietistic, antihumanistic and antisocial.

Ragaz sensed that Barth, in his Romans I, initiated his attack on religious socialism. After the publication of Romans I, Ragaz wrote in his diary: “Barth, Römerbrief: That is possibly the strongest attack up to now against me, because it cuts the center. Inspired by Kutter, misusing Blumhardt, full of poison, spitefulness, and arrogance. But so many significant and profound things.”194 Ragaz regarded Barth as turning away from the religious-socialist movement at three levels: 1) the religious-socialist message was theologized, so that it led to a new orthodoxy; 2) it was reduced to a churchly sphere (ecclesiologized) with the consequence of a new clericalism; and 3) it was reduced to Paulinism, that is, in Barth’s Römerbrief, Paul’s epistle to the Romans retained primacy over Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.195

In 1921 Ragaz published an anthology of writings of the two Blumhardts with his own commentary, Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt, Vater und Sohn—und weiter! In the same year Ragaz made an important decision to commit to the labor movement. By abandoning his teaching position on the theological faculty in Zurich, he moved into a predominantly working-class section of Zurich, Aussersihil, where he built up an educational center for the poor. He spent the rest of his life working at this center and editing the journal Neue Wege. In his struggle for peace and against the power of militarism, Ragaz became a pacifist and a supporter of the League of Nations.196

Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen in the Midst of the World War I and Socialism

The Situation of Social Democracy in Switzerland

The period of the Second International (1889–1914) cannot be simply identified with the Marxist movement. Many sources of European socialism had influenced the ideology and movement of the socialist parties that belonged to the International. For instance, there was a tradition of Lassalleanism in Germany, Proudhonism and Blanquism in France, and anarchism in Italy. Although Marxism stood out as the dominant ideology of the workers’ movement and proletariat, this was not the ideological center of the Second International. This International can be understood as an assemblage of socialist parties from different backgrounds representing the masses and various workers’ movements.197

The philosophical texts of Karl Marx such as the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right remained unpublished until the 1930s. One group, which viewed Marxism as a theory of social development and progress out of capitalistic society and its inevitable and necessary collapse, tried to combine and complement the philosophical ethics of Kant with a historical materialism. This is the classic way of neo-Kantian Marxism dominant in figures such as Cohen, Natorp, and Voländer.

In the socialism of the Second International we notice that there was a struggle against anarchism and revisionism, and a conflict between Social Democrats and left-wing groups after the Russian Revolution of 1905. When Barth joined the Swiss Socialist Party in 1915, this party was still radical in its progressive orientation because it did not split into communist and revisionist wings until the Zimmerwald conference. No doubt the German Social Democracy was dominant in the Second International. Lassalle’s party (founded in 1863) gained considerable support among the workers. A new party, the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei was organized in 1869 at Eisenach under the leadership of August Bebel (1840–1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900).

In 1875 the Lassalle and Eisennach parties were united at Gotha to form the Socialist Worker’s party. However, the Gotha Program, which was a compromise between Marxism and Lassalle’s revisionist orientation, was severely criticized by Marx himself. In 1878 Bismarck enacted an emergency law prohibiting socialist meetings and publication, under the pretext of forbidding an environment that could cause an attack on the emperor’s life. The local party organization was dissolved, and many party leaders were forced to emigrate. The crucial issue in the first phase of the International was controversy with the anarchists. In the early 1880s an anarchist association (the Alliance Internationale Ouvriere) came into being; Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Elisee Reclus were included in this group. According to Marx, socialism would restore human individual life in all its fullness, remove political organisms, and thus replace institutionalized oppressive forms of social organization and community with a direct association of individuals.

However, this vision was based on reorganizing civil society in terms of technique and the organization of labor that was already created in the capitalist world rather than on a liquidation of the existing institutional forms. Marx held that the overthrowing of the state and political authority did not mean the destruction of social and industrial organization. The socialization of property would prevent society from degenerating into an apparatus of violence based on injustice and inequality. However, according to anarchists, the aptitude of human beings for friendly cooperation would prevent all injustice, once the institutions of dictatorship and tyranny were liquidated. In opposition to Darwinism, Kropotkin argued for human aid and cooperation, in that the natural inclinations of individuals would ensure the harmony of society. Therefore, the anarchists made attacks on Marxist socialism as a new form of tyranny to replace bourgeois society.198

The last years of the Second International were overwhelmed by the war issue. The question was closely related to nationalism and self-determination. The International had condemned militarism at Brussels in 1891 and at London in 1896. If a war broke out, a large part of the proletariat was to be mobilized and thus fall into the general slaughter. If necessary, they allowed for the possibility of rebellion. However, if the fatherland was attacked, they argued it is the duty of socialists to take part in the defense. The call to strike and rebel was within the reformist policy. The left wing (including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht) put forward a more radical position: In the case of the outbreak of war, no attempt must be made to stop it; rather the war must be used to overthrow the capitalist system. At the Basel Congress in 1912—while the First Balkan War was breaking out—an antiwar resolution was passed. The delegates dispersed with the slogan “war on war” and in the conviction that the socialist movement was strong enough to prevent the danger of the imperialist war.

The collapse of the International occurred in the face of the 1914 war. German social democrats surrendered to the fatherland’s call to arms. The great majority of socialists in every country of Europe adopted a patriotic attitude in favor of the war policy. The opponents of war were expelled and in April 1917, the Independent German Socialist party (USPD) was formed. Among their membership was Karl Kautski, Hugo Haase (chairman of the SPD since Bebel’s death in 1913), and even revisionists like Eduard Bernstein. In addition, the left wing, which had formed itself into the Spartacus League at the beginning of 1916, joined the USPD.

Although the Swiss Social Democratic Party (SPS) belonged to the First and Second Internationals, the socialist movement in Switzerland underwent a dramatic radicalization at the outbreak of World War I. It was Lenin who exercised the decisive impact on the workers’ movement in Switzerland. On September 5, 1914, Lenin arrived with Nadeshda Krupskaja and her mother in Bern and led a discussion with Robert Grimm on the socialist situation in Switzerland. Lenin was on a campaign to win the young workers for the socialist cause as he did later in Zurich. In February 1916 Lenin and Nadeshda Krupskaja moved from Bern to Zurich and remained there until they returned to Russia in April 1917. Zurich was a great place for Lenin to concentrate on scientific socialist writings in the library there; and in addition, people of a leftist orientation gathered there from all other countries. In Zurich Lenin worked on his book Der Imperialismus als höchstes Stadium des Kapitalismus.199

When the war split the SPS into various fractions, three different groups emerged: the social chauvinists, the left wing of socialists, and the centrists. The social chauvinist group was represented by Gruetliverein, and its direction was under the leadership of people such as Herman Greulich, Paul Pflüger, Gustav Müller, and Johann Sigg. This right wing supported the unconditional defense of the fatherland and Burgfrieden, whereas the left wing struggled against the war and their opponents in Switzerland. Centrists took an opportunistic attitude between the two opposing trends. The left-wing group was represented under the leadership of Münzenberg, Fritz Platten, and people of Revoluzzer. Robert Grimm was one of the most important leaders among leading centrists, who were a majority within the socialist workers’ movement in Switzerland.

Although the SPS officially sent its delegates to the Zimmerwald Conference (September 5 to 8, 1915), some of its representatives, such as Grimm, Platten, and Naine, also freely participated in the conference. The manifesto of Zimmerwald leftists and their resolution Weltkrieg und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie were underwritten by Platten from the Swiss side. Zimmerwald leftists argued that the imperialist war was conditioned by the economic system of capitalism, and the war must be regarded as a necessary result of this economic system. Therefore, Marxism should be further applied and developed toward the stage of late capitalism. Furthermore, the imperialist war must be transformed into a revolutionary civil war through an internationally led class struggle against the bourgeois of all countries. Lenin and Zimmerwald leftists blamed the collapse of the International on treachery and opportunism on the part of the social-democratic leaders. Through this position, Bolshevists and Zimmerwald leftists distanced themselves sharply from all pacifist attempts. In fact, the 1915 Zimmerwald conference paved the way for the foundation of the Third International.

However, a couple months before the Zimerwald conference, a meeting of the Zimmerwald group was held in Bern and Olten. In a meeting of the small Bureau of Zimmerwald union (in winter of 1916) there occurred a sharp contrast between the Grimm-led centrist group and the Bolshevist group. In 1915/16 Zimmerwald leftists in Switzerland penetrated the workers’ movement. In addition, Münzenburg, a director of the Swiss Socialist Youth organization, mentioned that Zimmerwald leftists in the SPS had taken action in close connection with Lenin and his Bolshevik group, with whom they had kept close contact since the fall of 1915.200

According to Münzenberg, the Swiss Socialist Youth followed Lenin’s way to revolution. “After we . . . had known Lenin personally, we gained the firm conviction that he was the right leader, who could point us to the right way to a good revolutionary activity.”201 That the revolution needed an avant-garde fighter was Lenin’s political motto. On the question of revolutionary use of violence, Lenin attacked religious socialists by calling them emotionally tearful social clerics who stood in the way of the working class’s use of violence. Ragaz in turn criticized Leninism as an ideology that led to the necessity of violence. In 1917 the Socialist Youth International published Lenin’s pamphlet Militärprogramm der proletarischen Revolution and Lenin’s Abschiedsbrief an die Schweizer Arbeiter. In opposition to Christian socialists and the centrists of Robert Grimm, who were afraid of using weapons, Lenin said, “the capitalistic society was and is always a shock without end.”202 In spring 1917, the Youth organization deviated from religious socialism by following the socialist theory of Lenin. Zimmerwald leftists gained the first success in the party assembly of November 20 and 21, 1915, in Aarau in the SPS. The resolution of the party assembly was that “the war can be brought to an end only through the revolutionary action of the working class.”203 This above-mentioned milieu was the situation of the Swiss Socialist Party when Barth joined there.

Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen: World War I and Socialism

In his curriculum vitae, which Barth formulated in the evangelical faculty at the University of Münster (1927) we read: “First the outbreak of the world war brought a turn.” This refers to Barth’s turn to theological work in a determined perspective and expectation, that is, from the standpoint of the kingdom of God toward which the two Blumhardts’ message of Christian hope was principally oriented.204 Barth’s break with his theological teachers and neo-Protestantism began with the outbreak of World War I. In August 1914, counter to Barth’s expectations from Social Democracy in his Die Hilfe 1913, socialist representatives in the Reichstag voted to support the war policy and grant war credit finances to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. German troops invaded Belgium. Then, to Barth’s amazement, ninety-three German intellectuals published a petition in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policies and government. As Barth remembered,

One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II and his counselors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, 19th century theology no longer held any future.205

Barth experienced the twilight of the gods as he witnessed Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken, and the like positioning themselves with respect to the new situation. All his German teachers, with the exception of Rade, were compromised in the face of ideological war. “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation, and discovered how religion and scholarship could be changed completely, into intellectual 42cm cannons.” “The ethical failure of the liberal theologians in Germany has to do with a failure of their exegetical and dogmatic presupposition.” For Barth, “a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching,” which he regarded “to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.”206

Thurneysen was pastor in the Aargau in the congregation of Leutwill from 1913 until 1920. He reported that Barth was preoccupied with the Holy Scripture, erecting the tablets of the Bible before him and reading the books of expositors from Calvin though the Biblicists to the modern critical interpretation of the Bible. On the basis of the Bible, Barth’s theological thinking was deeply related to the life of humankind, namely, the wholeness of human existence from the beginning. In Thurneysen’s characterization, “Karl Barth as a proclaimer of the biblical Word had also a very vigorous and concrete word to speak to the actual political problems in the sphere of his community and his country and in the context of the world events of those days.”207 Through his open character and by introducing Barth to his large circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, Thurneysen was a stimulus to Barth. Barth came into contact with religious socialist conferences through Thurneysen. Barth’s acquaintances with Kutter and Ragaz were also initiated by his lifelong friend, Thurneysen. From 1914 to 1916 Barth corresponded with Ragaz on a regular basis.208 Thurneysen’s writing on Dostoevsky, his work on “Socialism and Christendom,”209 and his project on new homiletics affected and contributed to the development of Barth’s dialectical theology.

In his letter to Thurneysen (September 4, 1914) Barth expressed his opinion against the war. “Dei providentia—hominum confusion . . . The manner in which you make the ‘wrath of God’ positively fruitful is clear. The formula ‘God does not will the war’ is perhaps misleading. God does not will egotism. But he does will that egotism should reveal itself in war and become itself the judgment . . . I would relate the wrath of God yet more strongly to the ‘godless existence’ itself and would think of social injustice and war as symptoms or consequences of the latter.”210 In a sermon from August 1914, Barth denounced the war as “unrighteous, sinful, unnecessary, and stemming only from the evil of human nature. The war is not a natural phenomenon like the sun and the rain. It is not inevitable or insurmountable. One may and should expect much more from God. In the war God’s punishment has come upon us.”211 Still, Barth was not moved by Christian pacifism.

After finding Herrmann’s signature on the war manifesto, Barth expressed his disappointment to him.

Especially with you, Herr Professor (and through you with the great masters—Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher), we learned to acknowledge “experience” as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion. In your school it became clear to us what it means to “experience” God in Jesus. Now however, in answer to our doubts, an “experience” which is completely new to us is held out to us by German Christians, an allegedly religious war “experience”; i.e., the fact that German Christians “experience” their war as a holy war is supposed to bring us to silence, if not demand reverence from us. Where do you stand in relation to this argument and to the war theology which lies behind it?212

Barth’s critique of war theologians, especially Harnack, traces back to Schleiermacher. “He [Schleiermacher] was unmasked. In a decisive way all the theology expressed in the manifesto and everything that followed it (even in the Christliche Welt) proved to be founded and governed by him.”213 In addition to his criticism of liberal theology, Barth expressed his bitter disappointment with socialism. Although he expected from Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! that socialism would serve as “a kind of hammer of God,” socialism also swung into line. “In the cathedral in Basel the socialists of all lands had solemnly assured each other and the world that they would be able to offer effective resistance to the outbreak of any new war.” Despite the socialist decision of resistance to the outbreak of war, what really happened was “the apostasy of the party,” and especially the “failure of German Social Democracy in the face of the ideology of war.” The status of neutrality in Switzerland required the Swiss in World War I to develop a high degree of military defense preparation. During wartime one or another of the church board members in Safenwil was absent due to military service. It was recalled that at the mobilization of the Swiss Army, Barth was at the Safenwil Railway Station every morning in order to give his good wishes to those who were called to military duty.214

However, despite his criticism of Social Democracy, Barth joined the SPS on January 26, 1915 as a token of his solidarity with it. Barth articulates his intent: “I have now become a member of the Social Democratic Party. Just because I set such emphasis Sunday by Sunday upon the last things, it was no longer possible for me personally to remain suspended in the clouds above the present evil world but rather it had to be demonstrated here and now that faith in the Greatest does not exclude but rather includes within it work and suffering in the realm of the imperfect.”215 Pejorative terms such as “the Red pastor of Safenwil” or “Bolshevik” poured down upon Barth. But “the Aargau Workers’ Party was hardly a dangerous enclave of the Red International.”216

As we have already seen in his “Workers Question,” Barth would perform his socialistic base work a year prior to his entrance to the party. From several places in the text one can discern that Barth has also formed this writing for an oral lecture. It is uncertain whether he used it already in the winter of 1913/14 in Safenwil or in Aargau. Our knowledge of this occasion is from his letter exchange with Thurneysen on January 1, 1916, in which he states that he has “made full use of” this dossier “with local workers” “every Tuesday” at the end of 1915. “I make it without enthusiasm, simply because it is necessary.” This writing on “Workers Question is an indication of the degree to which Barth understands the worker’s question in a socialistic perspective.217

Two texts without information on the time of formation consist of data and notices regarding the history of two important industry plants: the firm C. F. Bally in Schönenward, and Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur. Barth was interested in the family history of the firm owners, the technological development of their businesses, the social conditions of their companies, and also the religious self-understanding of these industry owners. It is not clear so far whether what is represented here are excerpts from the present history of the company or independent data collections of Barth. Barth’s intended use of the information can certainly be surmised. Through the collection of information Barth is concerned about the life circumstances and living conditions of his parish members and comrades. Because the two enterprises offer examples of the social conscience of certain capitalists, it is also conceivable that these texts could have been materials for the great dossier.

This work is especially interesting because it documents a way of working, namely via empirical analysis. Barth worked with hardly accessible statistical material: wage and price scales, “household [income] calculations of workers,” statistics of working hours, paragraphs of labor law in various countries, Youth labor statistics, statistics about profit and receipts, insurance statements, records of bank dividends, a report of occupational hazards (from a tobacco worker), statistics about accidents, about women in the labor force (different from Swiss cantons), about money devaluation, about the cost of business middlemen, about age structure in industry, about the housing situation, about overpopulation in living space, and about vacation time. Here we see some discussions important for Barth’s holistic perspective, such as his critique of the so-called scientific management, the Taylor system, through which nourishment, motion, and timing of the worker as a human time machine should be regulated solely from the standpoint of economic efficiency.

According to Barth, the current labor conditions included an enormous squandering of resources. Every increase in productivity was also for this reason to be welcomed because promotion of production means also progress for humanity under the given circumstances. The sole question for Barth was whether the economic effectiveness of the system operated at the cost of the humanity of the worker, whether the system displaced the “personality,” whether the ideal worker who experienced as few irritants as possible was in fact immeasurably more prone to nervousness and so to workplace accidents, and whether all this was not the quintessence and practical zeal of a through-and-through materialistic worldview. To this, Barth’s answer was unequivocal: as long as the economic principle of effectiveness stands in service to “the system,” i.e., capitalist production, then rationalization does not serve the general progress but only the monetary gain of the shareholder. At the same time, workers experience moral and political oppression, losing the consciousness of solidarity because of personal isolation and the loss of reflection and feeling. This means a smashing of the worker’s stance, of the worker’s will to resistance, and of the worker’s will to the self-organization of the proletariat.

There is another example: Barth’s no to the so-called yellow worker organization, which was promoted as a strike-breaking organization by entrepreneurs, which would create agitation among the workers against the class struggle and would work for peaceful negotiation for the sake of employers. In confrontation with such organizations, Barth argued with the concepts of Marxist political economy and notices:

But the socialists have not created yet the class contrast. It is the product of present economic order: “Free” work contract on the basis of private property to the means of production. Through this order a part of society is made principally dependent and practically exploited. The class struggle, i.e. the fight for the power of the worker class aims at the overcoming of such contradiction, i.e. the peace. There is no other peace than that of the new order of relation for one who is in earnest with the healing of the worker’s stance.218

Here Barth specifies the concept of worker: “‘Worker’ in a general sense is every well-behaved human. Herein is it meant: the worker who stands in service and wage of industrial enterprise”—also the wage worker. Its special feature Barth defines with the description of its labor relation.

The worker is without possessions, i.e., for subsistence he is dependent upon the employer, who through the labor contract with the worker acquires and pays for labor power. The employer is . . . qualified for this contract as the possessor of the means of production (factories, machines, raw material) and therefore of production profit. Labor contract: An obligation between two opponents with equal rights, seemingly very clear and fair, in reality, a sequence of disadvantage follows on the part of worker. (a) The worker is dependent upon the labor contract for his survival, while the employer can live on property, pension, or labor. (Marginal note: “on the one hand a question of life, on the other hand a business interest!”).” (b) The worker engages his person in labor contract; the employer engages (and risks) only his belongings. (c) The worker cannot restrict his ‘production’ (labor supply), without going into the ruin, while every other production can be restricted. If the wage decreases, he must work longer and more intensely. (. . . ‘Demand and supply determine the wages here and elsewhere . . . We buy the labor on the cheapest market. If a man is not satisfied with his wage or relations, under which he works, he can leave. Against this nothing can be said).219

As Barth comments, the ruling classes

regard it as a matter of course that the worker finds himself/herself in his/her place determined by “free” labor contract. In a misunderstood interpretation of the Christian concept of subordination one mistakes superiority of the employer (which is based on capital possession) for divine order, rebellion against it for “indignation,” “overthrowing,” etc. The attitude toward strike, therefore, is typical of state and society (‘laziness,’ disturbance of economic life, exception law). For the worker the most necessary should be good enough, while one draws no border line to enrichment of employers. The welfare of industry becomes one-sidedly identified with the gain of employer (factory law). The risk of the employer is estimated morally very highly, while the well-being and the risk (crisis, accidents) of the worker stands in the second line at any rate.220

In March 1915 a conflict occurred within the church board when a request was made for financial support for a military newspaper, “A Good Defense and Weapon,” which was published by an evangelical church organization. When the president of the board moved to approve a sum of 10 francs from the budget, Barth took a position against such a patriotic-military Christianity. According to Barth, there could be no question of patriotic-military Christianity in the church. “Hüssy held, on the contrary, that one needed to put himself in the position of the soldier, and from that vantage point would gladly have such material created for him.”221

Barth delivered his first lecture (“War, Socialism, and Christianity”) as a new party member on February 14, 1915 in Zofingen. In calling for the reformation of Christianity and socialism, Barth argued that “A real Christian must become a socialist (if he is to be in earnest about the reformation of Christianity!). A real socialist must be a Christian if he is in earnest about the reformation of socialism.”222 Barth was asked frequently how he could deal with the external and internal relation of religion and socialism, or church and socialism. To what extent could he serve as a pastor and at the same time as a practicing socialist? In a lecture addressing “Religion and Socialism” in December 1915, Barth clarified the reason for his socialistic cause in a rather confessional tone:

I have become a socialist in a very simple way, and I live socialism in a very simple way. Because I would like to believe in God and God’s kingdom, I place myself at the point where I see something of God’s kingdom break through. . . . I think I can see the mistakes of socialism and its proponents very clearly. But much more clearly I see in the grounding thought, in the essential endeavor of socialism, a revelation of God which I must recognize before all and about which I must be delighted. The new society, which is based on the foundation of community and justice, instead of capriciousness and the law of the jungle, the new order of work in the sense of common activity of all for all instead of in the sense of exploitation through egotism of the individual, the new connection of humans as humans over the barrier of class and nations . . . finally the way to this goal: the simple brotherhood and solidarity [that appear] first among the poor and underprivileged of all countries—I must recognize all these new [features], which socialism brings it into political and economic life, as something new from God’s side. . . . Socialism—despite its imperfections, which people should discuss calmly and openly—is for me one of the most gratifying signs for the fact that God’s kingdom does not stand still, that God is at work, and hence I may not and cannot stand against it indifferently. . . . From the sentiment of duty, that tells me: this is where you belong, if you take God in earnest. Through my membership in the Social Democratic Party I believe to confess a very important point in complete plainness to myself and to my parish that God must come to honor. . . . People may cling to religion and still associate themselves with another party or remain without a party. . . . But I cannot find the kingdom of God there, where people again and again make money more important than the human beings, where possession is again and again the scale of all value, where people set the nation over humanity in anxiety and small-mindedness, where people again and again believe more in the present than in the future.223

To overcome compromise or accommodation of Christianity and socialism there was a need for a renewal of the so-called Christian morality and so-called socialist politics. In a lecture, “What Does It Mean to Become a Socialist?” on August 16, 1915, Barth expressed his intention to renew socialism regarding the failure of socialists in the Second International and their wrong collaboration with the War policy. According to Barth,

We would like to become dangerous to the structures, otherwise we may pack up. Hence: “socialist personalities.” As Kautski thinks, is the idea of a socialist personality one that changes the conditions, bourgeois ideology? Against this view Barth writes: “Historical materialism in the sense of Marx does not have the form of merely economic course, but more so the emerging independent of the living human over against matter. Within the circumstances and transcending them, the human wants to rise up. The relation is that of the interrelation. The ideals may be an illusory bubble of economic development; but the human is the most real and stands above economy. That has been overlooked and there was a lack of depth in socialist praxis (not by the founders of socialism, cf. Engels).” “Not: first better humans, then better situation. Not: first better situation, then better humans. Both of them together and interwoven—we need human beings, grasped by the transcendental power of the socialist truth. Only the redeemed can redeem. The new human being must be created.”224

Barth’s “Socialist Speeches” are evidence of the fact that Barth “eagerly read the writings of Marxist theoreticians from Marx through Kautski to Lenin.”225 Meanwhile, a meeting with Blumhardt became a remarkable event for Barth at this time. Thurneysen introduced Barth to Blumhardt himself at Bad Boll. Of course before Berlin and Marburg, in his Tübingen period, Barth had already visited Bad Boll a couple times. Barth’s meeting with Blumhardt this time was different in its significance from his previous one. He stayed in Bad Boll from the tenth to the fifteenth of April 1916. In Blumhardt’s message, Barth noticed that “the hurrying and the waiting, the worldly and the divine, the present and the future met and were united, kept supplementing one another, seeking and finding one another.” “What is more fundamental is Blumhardt’s way of connecting knowledge of God with the Christian hope for the future. God is the radical renewal of the world, and at the same time becomes completely and utterly new.” “The new element, the New Testament element, which appeared again in Boll can be summed up in the one word: hope.”226

Through appropriating Blumhardt’s message, Barth tried to overcome a controversy between Kutter and Ragaz. Kutter put more emphasis on the prophetic knowledge of the living God. Ragaz was more concerned with active discipleship along the lines of the Franciscan ideal of poverty. In the face of the outbreak of the First World War, Kutter was moved with a summons to tranquil reappraisal. But Ragaz responded to the war with an appeal for pacifist action. Kutter never became a Social Democrat, while Ragaz became one in 1913. Barth feels himself more in line with Kutter’s radical tranquility without ruling out Ragaz’s energetic tackling of social problems.

Barth’s position moved toward the eschatological question of Christian hope in the Blumhardtian sense. Thereby Barth took God seriously in quite a different way than either Kutter or Ragaz. “The world is the world. But God is God”—this “but” remains because the world is to be transformed by this “but”: Something new is expected from God. As Thurneysen reports, the slogan “The world is the world. But God is God” was accepted and interpreted in Barth’s own way; Blumhardt’s message of the kingdom of God became an important leitmotif for Barth.227 This concern about God, which is associated with Barth’s understanding of radical socialism, functioned as a critical pole to self-destructive bourgeois society and empirical Social Democracy, which failed with the outbreak of the war. Drawing upon a concept of the kingdom of God, Barth’s socialism is characterized by the socially transcendent and critical utopia, in contrast to the existing social order. Barth’s emphasis on God as the absolute Novum, his skepticism of human self-righteousness, and his practical concern about religious socialism would be the point of departure for Barth in his dialectical theology in distinguishing between God and humans.

On January 1, 1916, Barth reported to Thurneysen on his work in Safenwil: “Imagine! I have the workers here enlisted again in a course on the ordinary practical questions (time of work, women’s work and the like), every Tuesday, making full sense of the dossier on these things that I at one time assembled.”228 Although, regarding “the formation of trade unions as one of his chief political concerns,” Barth had less interest in Marxist principles and ideology as a worldview than in practical social questions associated with the life of workers. “The aspect of a socialism which interested me most in Safenwil was the problem of the trade union movement. I studied it for years and also helped to form three flourishing trade unions in Safenwil (where there had been none before). They remained when I left. That was my modest involvement in the workers’ question and my very limited interest in socialism. For the most part it was only practical.”229

On January 17, 1916, “a letter from factory-owner Hochuli” arrived. The occasion for it was Barth’s sermon of January 16 and his address at the confirmation of youth two days earlier, in which the pastor had taken issue with a celebration hosted by Mr. Hochuli. Mr. Hochuli considered the expressions used in the sermon and in the address to be “slanderous and discrediting.” He demanded their retraction within three days. If the pastor refused to take back his remarks, he threatened to file suit. Barth reported to Thurneysen in a letter on January 10: “Our factory Owner Hochli hosted a drinking party for his 500 employees on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding, and all of them, including my confirmation youth were totally drunk, and conducted themselves shamefully. So are our people kept as fools, with whips and sugar bread, and are at his beck and call.”230 Unlike Thurneysen, Barth saw the political nature of the drinking party and its connection to the relationship between the ruling class and the people. Barth rejected the accusations of slander and defamation because he defended himself by saying that he did not characterize the textile work as hell and Mr. Hochuli as the Devil.231 The Hochuli affair tells us the realities of late capitalism. Barth’s politically motivated pastorate had its foundation in his experience of the brutality of social relationships within capitalism. Already in the sermons of 1913, Barth condemned child labor and pleaded with parents to endure economic plight rather than deliver their children too early into the world of the factory. However, those sermons were without success. In this situation he came to a radical, revolutionary conviction that reforming and moderating actions can be explained from the objective misery of this place.

On December 8, 1915, Barth wrote to Thurneysen: “Social Democratic Party and cartel of Worker’s Union Baden. Thursday December 6, 1915, evening 8 o’clock, in Schulhaussaal. Lecture on ‘Are religion and socialism in agreement?’ Presenter: Mr. Barth, pastor, Safenwil. Committee of education expects numerous visits.”232 In a religious socialist conference in Pratteln near Basel, Barth was impressed by Hans Bader’s lecture in which a distinction between Ragaz and Kutter was made. In his letter to Thurneysen (September 8, 1915) Barth outlined this distinction:

For Ragaz: it is of importance to consider “experience of social needs and problems.” The “Ethical demand” is necessary.

For Kutter: What is central is “experience of God.”

For Ragaz: there is an emphasis on “belief in development.”

For Kutter: the kingdom of God is understood as promise.

For Ragaz: there is an “optimistic evaluation of Social Democracy” and “opposition to the church.”

For Kutter: “the Social Democrats can never understand us.” “Religious responsibility” must be taken “in the church in continuity with the pietistic tradition.”

Ragaz calls for “Religious-Socialist Party with conferences and new ways,” and emphasizes sympathy with workers and other laymen. He is in expectation of martyrdom and in protest against war.

Kutter, however, calls for “circles of friends for spiritual deepening and for work.” With concentration primarily on the pastors his concern lies in “the building of dams for a much more distant future.”

Conclusion: the religious socialist thing is finished. Our task is to begin with taking God seriously.233

After this, Barth adds his own opinion of Ragaz’s effort, that is, to put principles into practice. In his approach to Ragaz and Kutter, Barth places himself closer to Kutter theologically, but without losing the practical concern of Ragaz. As Barth asks, “is it not better to strive toward the point where Kutter’s ‘No’ and Ragaz’ ‘Yes,’ Kutter’s radical tranquility and Ragaz’ energetic tackling about the problem ring together?”234

On May 23, 1916, Barth was elected president of the religious socialist conference at Brugg. However, at this time Barth became alienated from the religious socialists. Barth was not regarded as a committed supporter of either Kutter or Ragaz. In coming to terms with Kutter, however, Barth was concerned more about holding for a period of tranquil growth than having time for organized activities. In addition, there occurred an emotional conflict between Ragaz and Barth. Barth wrote a review of Blumhradt’s Hausandachten (House Prayer) in an issue of Neue Wege with the title “Wait for the Kingdom of God.” In his review Barth expressed his critique of religious socialists with the following words: “Our dialectic has reached a dead end, and if we want to be healthy and strong we must begin all over again, not with our own actions, but quietly ‘waiting’ for God’s action.” Ragaz refused to publish it, regarding it as quietistic. This episode severed any contact between Barth and Ragaz. Barth mused, “Ragaz and I roared past one another like two express trains: he went out of the church, I went in.”235 Although Barth was alienated from religious socialism, he still served as a delegate to the SPS Party Congress in Bern (June 8, 1917).

God as the New World in the Bible

In “The Righteousness of God” (“Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes” [1916]), which was given in the Town Church of Aarau in January 1916, Barth elaborated on the social question in light of God’s righteousness. Herein we see Barth’s contrast between God’s righteousness and human righteousness. The former is based on Christ’s way, while the latter depends on the Tower of Babel. What is the deepest and surest fact of life for Barth is that God is righteous.236 Human effort to do righteousness would lead to human construction of the Tower of Babel. Eritis sicut Deus (“You will be like God” [Gen 3:5]) would sound in our attempt at taking divine righteousness under our own management.237 “Apart from God’s righteousness, all clever newspaper articles and well-attended conventions are completely insignificant,” because “the primary matter is a very decided Yes or No to a whole new world of life.”238 In critically dealing with the righteousness of the state and religious righteousness, Barth determines that the righteousness of the state will fail in touching “the inner character of world-will at any point.”239 The state is dominated by this will and the war stands as a striking illustration. Likewise, Christianity as a religion does its job in its uninterrupted way, “in the midst of capitalism, prostitution, the housing problem, alcoholism, tax evasion, and militarism”240 Barth’s critique of Christianity as a religion sounds so hostile because it is regarded as a comforting illusion and a self-deception. It is a product of a human attitude of “as if,” full of pride and despair that come from a Tower of Babel.241

However, in wartime, God’s righteousness becomes a problem and an issue for discussion. Where the human Tower of Babel falls to pieces we look for righteousness without God and a god without God and against God. However, such a god is not God, and is not righteous. “The god to whom we have built the tower of Babel is not God.”242 This god is a dead idol. According to Barth, the righteousness of God can be found only in a wholly other way. God’s will is not a continuation of our own, but God approaches us “as a Wholly Other . . . not a reformation but a re-creation and re-growth.”243 In the presence of God’s righteousness what is needed from us is humility and childlike joyfulness, which are called faith in the biblical context. “Where faith is in the midst of the old world of war and money and death, there is born a new spirit out of which grows a new world, the world of the righteousness of God.”244 The righteousness of God becomes our possession and our great hope in that the way of Christ as “the inner way of simple faith” shows us the love of God.245

In his article “The Strange New World within the Bible” (“Die neue Welt in der Bibel”), which was delivered in the church at Lentwil in the autumn of 1916, Barth finds the Bible to be the canon of theological discourse on God, humans, and the world. In other words, the development of Barth’s theology results from the discovery of the new world in the Bible. The Bible is a witness to the new world in which Barth finds the being of God extra nos and speaks of the transcendence of God in a theologically positive way. Whoever wants to interpret the Bible must speak of the new world in it. Barth materializes concepts such as the absolute and the new from the standpoint of God in a biblical-theological manner. In the biblical discourse on the new world, Barth defines the Jenseits of the existing society as knowledge of God. The Bible qualifies a contrast between the human/relative and the absolute/divine as a verifiable position. The standpoint of God, which is to be shown in the Bible, is not the image of the individual-relative standpoint of humans, but the example toward which an explicit and univocal action of human being must orient itself.

Barth’s discovery of the Bible enables him not only to make progress in his theological thought but also to deepen his political thought. In these two articles we see how the Bible for Barth begins to break itself out of the encapsulation of modern, bourgeois thought-forms and opens anew knowledge of God beyond churchly self-understanding, and enters into dispute with social idols.246 As Thurneysen states, from the message of the biblical witness Barth saw God’s intervention as the new world in the Bible in the midst of war and revolution.247

Given that Barth understood his lecture activity in connection with his parish work, we notice that Barth arranged the manuscript of a funeral sermon on Safenwil worker Arnold Hunzinker under his “Socialist Speeches.” In other words, for Barth, party and parish work belong together. His funeral sermon was published in the New Free Aargauer (on Monday, September 3, 1917), which was the official publication organ of the Aargau Social Democratic Party and of the cartel of workers’ unions. This sermon interpreted the socialist understanding of death and resurrection in the workers’ particular struggle against capitalism, in light of Barth’s theological subject matter. Here Barth accepted and applied the interpretation without contradiction.

One lives on in one’s matter—in the worker’s matter—and in the end the mourning congregation is requested to “Take care that you understand and grasp the living that was in our dead comrade, and let go of the transitory, human affairs, that lies now over there. Take care of it, you of his sons and daughters, you of his colleagues and comrades, all of you that have known him—and not known him! Then it does not go backwards from this grave into human sadness and desolation, but forwards to new greater victories of life.248

Barth portrayed Arnold Hunziker as an exemplary worker, i.e., as unselfish socialist, not directed by egoistical interest, who has understood “that one cannot live just only for oneself and also only for one’s family, that there is a higher duty, which nowadays unswervingly commands the workers to hold together and to vouch for each other.” 249 Barth saw divine effectiveness in the life of the worker Arnold Hunziker and all the workers. On the eve of Swiss general strike (from November 12 to 14, 1918), Barth wrote to Thurneysen: “It seems to me that we come just too late with our bit of insight into the world of the New Testament. . . . if only we had been converted to the Bible earlier so that we would now have solid ground under our feet! One broods alternately over the newspaper and the New Testament and actually sees fearfully little of the organic connection between the two worlds concerning which one should now be able to give a clear and powerful witness.”250

In response (November 14, 1918) Thurneysen affirmed an organic connection between the movement of God and the revolutionary event of the general strike in Switzerland. The root cause of the revolutionary event, which was implanted by God in the hearts of the workers, consisted in a longing for a new world. Because of his bold assertion, Thurneysen was denounced as a Bolshevik pastor.251 Along the line of Barth, Thurneysen interprets the Bible in terms of the social-historical connection that implies a hermeneutical character. For Thurneysen and Barth a historical-materialistic reflection of understanding process underlies their approach to the organic connection between the world of the Bible and the world of the newspaper.252

The significance of Blumhardt and Kutter for Thurneysen lay in their reappropriating the voice of socialism for the repentance and renewal of the church. In other words, against popular misunderstanding they did not fall into a politicization of the church through socialism, or conversely into an idealization of socialism through Christianity. From this standpoint we see that Barth and Thurneysen were attesting to an organic connection between the Bible and political events. The new world in the Bible has material relevance to what happens politically in our world. Barth tried to find in the Bible actual political orientation toward human action in the revolutionary situation of 1918. The connection between the Bible and the newspaper occupies fundamental hermeneutical significance for his exegesis as well as for his understanding of the Word of God. Reading of all sorts of world literatures and, above all, the newspaper, was urgently recommended for understanding Barth’s Romans commentary.

In the face of the daily newspaper, Romans needed to be understood in a new light. This competence came out of the conversion to the Bible, from inside out, namely, from its own subject matter. Barth’s theology of the Bible explicitly retains this social, political interest instead of withdrawing it from biblical interpretation. For Barth, biblical interpretation has to do with reflection on the relation between God and the Bible and social circumstances. The blueprint of theology should be no other than the preparation for a political sermon and social praxis. As Barth further states,

One day I awakened as president of an eleven-member emergency commission with 6000 francs of cash as capital that was raised by our manufacturers. All at once at the eleventh hour mammon begins to totter on his throne and it is a life or death matter for soup to be prepared in the schoolhouse for everyone. . . . The question is whether such measures can prevent the entry of Bolshevism into Safenwil? . . . The post arrives—again without a newspaper. What is happening in Basel? The cowardly anxiety of the Basler Nachrichten is an amusing point in the general world picture. I wonder what Kutter’s sermon sounded like yesterday, whether or not, and how, perhaps, he found a way to make a public spectacle of the principalities and powers of this age. What are we going to say this time in the coming period of Advent?253

The Bible does not pass by the problem of the political situation. What was at issue is how to articulate adequately the organic connection between the Bible and politics. It was, therefore, of special significance for Barth to identify the organic relevance of the Bible and the political-update event in a theoretical-practical manner. In other words, the Bible is a Word to a theological subject matter as well as a Word to social situation. The primary theme of the Bible and theology is the history of God that renews the world. God who speaks of God’s will in this history is by no means a continuation of human will. In contrast, the will of God radically demands a new creation of humans, leading all human morality, culture, and religion to silence. God’s deed brings a new world to the fore. The Bible witnesses from the beginning to the end to God’s new life of advent, of breaking through. Jesus Christ stands before us as the victor who has overcome the old world. Christ “has become the mediator for the whole world, the redeeming Word, who was in the beginning of all things and is earnestly expected by all things.” “He is the redeemer of the growing creation about us.” What the Bible announces is “that God must be all in all; and the events of the Bible are the beginning, the glorious beginning of a new world.”254

Having faith in the God of the Bible means believing in God’s breakthrough which is begun in Jesus Christ. This faith leads to believing that a relation between God and the human world must be acknowledged as God’s victory. God’s condescension in Jesus Christ, the fight and victory of the kingdom of God are, for Barth, political content. The acts of God are not restricted to the private existence of individuals, but are social and universal. No wonder that Barth repeatedly relates the Revelation of John, chapter 21, to the proclaimed revelation of the new world: “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men! The Holy Spirit makes a new heaven and a new earth and, therefore, new men, new families, new relationships, new politics.”255 God makes a new politics. So God’s action is political. The unity between knowledge and interest can arrive in this discovery of the Bible when this political interest is brought explicitly to social consciousness and defined in accordance with it. Barth seeks in Bible just such an actual political orientation of human action as in the revolutionary situation of 1918. This is also a hermeneutical aspect for Barth that directs him to knowledge and understanding by putting together the newspaper and the Bible. This social-historical contemporaneity retains a fundamental significance for Barth’s hermeneutics regarding exegesis and his understanding of the Word of God. This contemporaneity will become manifest in his commentary on Romans. Barth argues for a conversion to the Bible from the inside out, from its own subject matter to what lies beyond.

A new world, namely, the world of God, is in the Bible. It is a spirit in the Bible. God drives us to the primary matter, whether we want it or not. The Holy Scripture interprets itself despite our human limitations. We must dare to follow this urge, spirit, and current in the Bible. Herein Barth conceptualizes a hermeneutical spirit, “scripturae ipsius interpres,” in terms of the world-effective reality. The resurrection creates its world-effectiveness through the constitution of a subject of the new, in other words, a “solid subject,” in Ernst Bloch’s sense. That is the meaning as the new physicality.256 The new world in the Bible is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is of social and political significance. The resurrection is not to be exchanged for the immanent law of history or as the law of dialectical materialism. However, in the effective realm of the resurrection, God has no spectators, because the resurrection is the constitution of the revolutionary subject. Given this fact, totaliter aliter in Barth’s view mediates the reality of God and the reality of world, and grounds God’s presence in society.

Totaliter aliter is not a metaphysical or distancing concept but a qualified concept with a particularly social content. Henceforth the new world in the Bible, the new world of God, implies the revolutionary overthrowing of the existing bourgeois society. Totaliter aliter is originally the new society in the thought of Barth in contradiction to the declining society, and the original in this contradiction is God. As to the concept of totaliter aliter Barth reports: “It was Thurneysen who whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, while we were alone together: ‘What we need for preaching, instruction and pastoral care is a “wholly other” theological foundation.’”257 Human praxis must be shaped in correspondence to the breakthrough of God, which means the new world. Human political action has a task and a duty to participate in God’s new creation of the world. From this standpoint, Barth articulates his theopolitical slogan: “waiting for the kingdom of God.”258 This waiting should not be misunderstood as a passive and unpolitical theology, a so-called waiting-room theology; for being just such a theology Ragaz ridiculed it.259

By contrast, it is a deeply engaged commitment and a revolutionary stance in expectation of the coming kingdom of God. Barth’s theology of expectation is well articulated in his lecture of 1922, “Not und Verheissung der christlichen Verkündigung.” Schellong views Barth’s theology of waiting for God in light of veni creator Spiritus. What is decisive for Schellong’s approach to Barth is the sighing call for the coming of the Holy Spirit. “Sighing: veni creator spiritus! is now once according to Rom 8 full of hope more than triumph, although one would already have it.”260

In 1916 Barth began working on his commentary on Romans, which was eventually released in 1919. During this period of working on Romans, Barth became more critical of the religious socialists as well as liberal theology, although he continued his active involvement in the SPS. At the end of 1917 he ceased his involvement in the religious-socialist movement. Barth and Thurneysen resigned from the committee from the conference in Olten, which had resolved on the reorganization of religious socialism on December 10.261 When it came to a relation between socialism and Christendom, Thurneysen mentions Blumhardt and Kutter as two men who had heard the command of the time and fulfilled it, although not denying the inspiration of Ragaz.262 For Thurneysen the whole problem of ethics and its related eschatological question not only would be a question of the art of theological dialectics, but must be rolled up in a completely new way, forced by the real dialectics of life as such.263

Likewise, Barth’s socialism can be expressed theologically and eschatologically in light of the kingdom of God or the absolute Revolution of God. His socialist praxis, therefore, maintains a theological character and contour. In this regard we notice that Barth would stand closer to Ragaz politically, but with a theological affinity to Kutter. But Barth hesitated with religious socialists in general. The term “Revolution of God” was generally used in the circle of religious socialism. Barth appropriated this term from religious socialism in order to develop, clarify, and radicalize his theological position and political radicalism in his Romans I and II in particular. Herein we discern Barth’s position “on the most extreme left side” within the SPS. When it comes to Barth’s socialist activity within the SPS in Safenwil, he distanced himself from Zimmerwald leftists. But given his friendship with Fritz Lieb (1892–1970), we can assume that Barth’s position was in line with left-wing radical socialists within the SPS at this time. Later he would move toward the Second and a half International under the leadership of Robert Grimm, which was formed in protest against the Third International.264

Later in his lecture on Schleiermacher, Barth recalled his relationship with Kutter and Ragaz:

what we needed for preaching, instruction, and pastoral care was a “wholly other” theological foundation. It seemed impossible to proceed any further on the basis of Schleiermacher . . . But where else could we turn? Kutter was also impossible, because he, like Ragaz later on, would have nothing to do with theology, but only wanted to know and to preach the “living God.” He was also impossible for me, because, with all due respect for him and his starting point, his “living God” had become extremely suspicious to me after his wartime book Reden an die deutsche Nation [Speeches to the German Nation].265

1. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 34.

2. Ibid., 37.

3. Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1905–1909, 74.

4. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 44.

5. For Ritschl “the Christian idea of the kingdom of God denotes the association of mankind—an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible—through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations” (Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 98).

6. Besides, there was another reason for Barth’s ill feeling against Ritschl. During the period of Barth’s honorary professorship at Göttingen, Walter Rathenau, the Reichsminister for Foreign Affairs, and of Jewish origin, was assassinated. Regarding this event the faculty at Göttingen took no action. As the prototype of the national, liberal German bourgeoisie, Ritschl was, for Barth, “a sturdy, dry, insensitive lump who notices nothing.” Cf. Barth to Thurneysen, 28 June 1922, in B-Th II, 88–89.

7. Barth, From Rousseau to Ritschl, 392.

8. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 38–41.

9. B-B, 153.

10. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 38.

11. Ibid., 39.

12. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 238.

13. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistisches Reden,’” 478.

14. In the edition of “Evangelium und Sozialismus, 1914, “S” is versed as S[afenwil], which is less convincing. Cf. Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 2:731. Cf. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistisches Reden,’” 470–88.

15. Grundmann, “Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology?” 257–87.

16. In this regard, Parsons said that Sombart has “assimilated the main content of Marx into the framework of historico-idealistic thought.” See Parsons, Structure of Social Action, 495.

17. Engels, “Supplement to ‘Capital Vol. 3,’” 893–94.

18. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 238–39.

19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 93.

20. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 38.

21. Cohen, “Kant, 1896,” 70.

22. Marxismsus und Ethik, eds. Sandkühler and Rafael de la Vega, 17.

23. Ibid.

24. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistisches Reden,’” 479.

25. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 44.

26. Ibid., 45.

27. Welch, Protestant Thought, 2:45.

28. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 267.

29. Herrmann, “Warum bedarf unser Glaube geschichtlicher Tatsachen?” 214–38.

30. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 44.

31. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 245.

32. Quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought, 2:45.

33. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 248.

34. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 20.

35. Quoted in Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 243.

36. Ibid., 248.

37. Herrmann, Ethik, 107.

38. Herrmann, Communion of the Christian with God, 9.

39. Barth, “Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann,” 249.

40. Ibid., 250.

41. Barth, “Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 317–21.

42. Achelis, “Noch einmal: Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 406–10; Drews, “Zum dritten Mal: Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 475–79.

43. Barth, “Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 317–18.

44. Barth, “Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 319–21.

45. Dannemann, Theologie und Politik, 28–29.

46. Barth, “Antwort an D. Achelis und P. Drews,” 484; cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 72.

47. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 57.

48. Barth, “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 2:149–212. This essay was later revised in light of Ernst Troeltsch’s famous lecture, “The Significance of the Historicity of Jesus for Our Faith” and published in the Schweizerische Theologische Zeitschrift (1912).

49. Husinger, Karl Barth and Radical Politics, 193.

50. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 74.

51. Barth, “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 2:161; cf. Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony, 27.

52. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 75.

53. Ibid.

54. Marquardt, “Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” 71.

55. Barth, “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 2:163.

56. Ibid., 186.

57. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 57.

58. Barth, “Evangelium und Sozialismus,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 2:730.

59. Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, 264.

60. Ibid., 263.

61. Cf. Vorwort to Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1:viii. Andreas Pangritz reports that F.-W. Marquardt deciphered and edited Barth’s “Socialist Speeches” from 1911 to 1919. Cf. Pangritz, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, 29.

62. Barth’s minutes from July 1911 until February 20, 1919, remain from when Barth served as secretary on the church board. Marquardt reconstructs Barth’s political activity as a pastor at this time in the analysis of these church minutes. See Marquradt, “Aktuar,” 93–139.

63. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistisches Reden,’” 473.

64. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 80. McCormack says that “Barth’s personal copy of Sombart was not printed until 1908.” “It is most likely that Barth only read Sombart after his arrival in Safenwil.” With this statement, McCormack critiques Marquardt’s conviction that “Barth had already read Sombart during his semester in Berlin in 1906.” It appears that McCormack is unaware of Sombart’s powerful influence as a professor of economics in Berlin when Barth was a student there.

65. Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1909–1914, 380–409, 573–689.

66. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 93.

67. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 61,

68. Ibid., 76.

69. “When I moved to the industrial village of Safenwil, my interest in theology as such had to step back noticeably into second place. . . . I became passionately involved with socialism and especially with the trade-union movement. . . . I had to read Sombart and Herkner, I had to read the Swiss trade-union newspaper and the Textilarbeiter” (Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, 263).

70. Busch, Karl Barth, 56.

71. Barth, “Menschenrecht und Bürgerpflicht” (1911) in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1909–1914, 361–79.

72. Ibid., 365.

73. Ibid., 366.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid., 371.

76. Ibid., 374.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid., 375.

79. Ibid., 376–77.

80. Ibid., 376.

81. Ibid., 379.

82. Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice,” 19–37.

83. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 119.

84. Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice,” 26.

85. Ibid., 21.

86. Ibid., 22.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid., 25.

89. Ibid., 26.

90. Ibid., 28.

91. Ibid., 29.

92. Ibid., 33.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid., 34.

95. Ibid., 35–36. Cf. Schellong, “Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit,” 57–58.

96. Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice,” 36.

97. Ibid., 37.

98. Gollwitzer, “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” 79–80.

99. Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice,” 27.

100. Ibid., 37–38.

101. Ibid., 39.

102. Ibid., 40.

103. Ibid., 41.

104. Ibid., 42.

105. Ibid., 43.

106. Ibid., 44.

107. We read in the minutes of February 13, 1912, that “Mr. Gustav Hüssy-Zuber tendered his resignation as President and member of this authority. Preliminary notice is taken of this fact” (Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 121).

108. “The open letters of the two Safenwil gentlemen have brought me great joy. In this way no one needs to lick any more envelopes to close them, and everyone can read the letters. I think the best thing would be for the Pastor to become an Industrialist. With his intelligence and good books, from which he thinks to derive his life experience, he would quickly have a learning experience behind him. Then he could share profit and loss with his workers and see whether they stay with such an arrangement or break away. To Mr. W. Hüssy, the nobleman who knows less of life’s needs, we would recommend that he change and become pastor in Safenwil. The spiritual profession would not harm him. After a few years industrialist and Pastor would have come closer together in their view. Yours sincerely.” Ibid., 120-1.

109. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 70.

110. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 109.

111. Ibid.

112. Barth’s sermon of January 19, 1913 in Barth, Predigten 1913, 38; cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 97–98.

113. Barth’s sermon of February 23, 1913 in Barth, Predigten 1913, 72.

114. Barth, “Gegenrede betreffend militär-Flugzeuge,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbieten, 2:485–93.

115. Ibid., 489.

116. Ibid., 493.

117. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 71.

118. Barth’s sermon on March 23, 1913 in Barth, Predigten 1913, 143.

119. Barth, “Glaube an den persönlichen Gott,” 21–32, 65–95.

120. Barth’s sermon on May 4, 1913 in Barth, Predigten 1913, 209.

121. In light of this relation, Balthasar thinks “the first hints of the analogy of faith break through Barth’s suggested approach” in this article “Glaube an den persönlichen Gott.” See Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 178.

122. Barth, “Glaube an den persönlichen Gott,” 89; cf. Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 178–79.

123. Ibid., 72. Cf. Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, 208.

124. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 121.

125. Barth, Predigten 1913, 591.

126. Cf. Barth’s sermon on August 31, 1913, in Barth, Predigten 1913, 435.

127. Ibid., 470.

128. Barth’s sermon on September 21, 1913 in Barth, Predigten 1913, 478.

129. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 77.

130. Ibid., 576.

131. Cf. Barth, “Arbeiterfrage, (1913/14),” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 2:573–682.

132. Ibid., 577.

133. Furthermore he utilized the book Die Gewerbliche Arbeiterfrage by Werner Sombart (1863–1941), from the collection of Göschen, and the works of Paul Pflüger (1865–1947), who was the pastor in Zurich-Aussersihl from 1911 to 1918 and the national council member of the SPS. Barth, “Arbeiterfrage, (1913/14),” 573.

134. See Kupisch, Zwischen Idealismus und Massendemokratie; cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 108.

135. Barth, “Die Hilfe 1913,” Die Christliche Welt 28 (15 August 1914) 776. Cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 109.

136. Barth, “Die Hilfe 1913” in Die Christliche Welt 28 (15 August 1914) 776; cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 110.

137. Ibid., 778.

138. Ibid.

139. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 84.

140. Barth, “Die Hilfe, 1913” in Die Christliche Welt 28 (15 August 1914) 778.

141. Ibid., 776.

142. Dannemann, Theologie und Politik, 37.

143. Lejeune, Christoph Blumhardt, 47–48.

144. Ragaz, Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt, 115.

145. Buess and Mattmüller, Prophetischer Sozialismus, 48.

146. Kutter, Sie Müssen. 90.

147. Ibid., 85.

148. Ibid., 74.

149. Ibid., 58

150. Ibid., 59, 61.

151. Bock, Signs of the Kingdom, xii.

152. Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2:85.

153. Ragaz, “Gospel and the Current Social Struggle,” in Bock, Signs of the Kingdom, 14.

154. Cf. Jäger, Ethik und Eschatologie bei Leonhard Ragaz, 248.

155. Ibid., 246.

156. Bock, Signs of the Kingdom, 3–4.

157. Ibid., 6.

158. Ibid.

159. Ibid.

160. Ibid., 11.

161. Ibid., 12.

162. Ibid.

163. Ibid., 15.

164. Ibid., 14.

165. Ibid., xiv.

166. Jäger, Ethik und Eschatologie bei Leonhard Ragaz, 228.

167. Ibid., 78.

168. Ibid., 226.

169. Trotsky, Mein Leben. 217.

170. Ragaz, “Battle against Bolshevism,” in Bock, Signs of the Kingdom, 43.

171. Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2:154.

172. Ibid., 155.

173. Ibid., 156

174. Ibid., 157.

175. Lenins Werke, 21:82, as cited by Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2:158.

176. Ragaz, Mein Weg, 2:83.

177. Bock, Signs of the Kingdom, 43.

178. Ibid., 51

179. Ibid., 52.

180. Ibid.

181. Ibid., 53.

182. Ibid., 55.

183. Ibid., 61, 63.

184. Ragaz, Mein Weg, 2:64.

185. Harms, Christentum und Anarchismus, 104.

186. Böhm, Gottes Reich und Gesellschaftsveränderung, 195

187. Sozialismus aus dem Glauben.

188. Buber, “Three Theses of a Religious Socialism,” 259–60.

189. Ibid., 258. Cf. Gudopp, Martin Bubers dialogischer Anarchismus, 95ff.

190. Gudopp, Martin Bubers dialogischer Anarchismus, 65–66.

191. Harms, Christentum und Anarchismus, 28–29.

192. Ragaz, Mein Weg, 2:70.

193. Ragaz, Geschichte Israels, 104.

194. Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2:251.

195. Ragaz, Mein Weg, 2:188.

196. In this regard Ragaz became an admirer and an ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson and his idea of the League of Nations. However, in Barth’s later stage, Ragaz was friendly to Barth’s theology. Barth was satisfied with Ragaz’s agreement with him. Ragaz also regarded “Barth’s gratitude to be an act of discipleship which casts a glow of reconciliation on the remainder of my earthly days.” Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 322.

197. Kolakowski, Golden Age, 4.

198. Ibid., 20.

199. Krupskaja, Biographie, 116–21.

200. Egger, Entstehung der Kommunistischen Partei, 71.

201. Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2:163.

202. Ibid., 163.

203. Ibid., 72.

204. Schellong, “Barth Lessen,” 14.

205. Barth, Humanity of God, 14.

206. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 81.

207. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 14.

208. Rostig, Bergpredigt und Politik, 132.

209. Cf. Thurneysen, “Sozialismus und Christentum,” 221–46.

210. Ibid., 27.

211. Schellong “Barth Lessen,” 16.

212. Karl Barth to Wilhelm Herrmann, 4 Nov. 1914, in Schwoebel, Karl Barth-Martin Rade, 115. Cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 113.

213. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 82.

214. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 103.

215. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 28.

216. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 83.

217. Here I deal with Marquardt’s report on Barth’s “Socialist Speeches.” Cf. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistische Reden,’” 475–78.

218. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistische Reden,’” 477.

219. Ibid., 477.

220. Ibid.

221. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 105.

222. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 83.

223. Marqurdt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistische Reden,’” 472–73.

224. Ibid., 482. In Engels’s letter to Joseph Bloch (on 21/22. September 1890): “According to a materialistic interpretation of history, what a moment determines in the last instance in the history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More have neither Marx nor I ever insisted . . . The economic situation is the basis, but the various moments of superstructure . . . exercise also the development in the process of historical struggles and decide predominantly in many cases its form. It is an interaction of all those moments, in which lastly through the infinite amount of accidents . . . the economic movement asserts itself as the necessary thing” (MEW 37:463ff.).

225. Gollwitzer, “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” 102. In examining carefully Barth’s “Socialist Speeches,” this runs counter to McCormack’s hunch—“If Barth did study Marxist literature, it was sometimes after 1917, and even then, there is no primary source evidence which would confirm such a hypothesis” (McCormack, Critically Realistic, 88, fn. 27).

226. Gollwitzer, “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” 85.

227. Thurneysen, Karl Barth “Theologie und Sozialismus” in den Briefen seiner Frühzeit, 9.

228. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 36.

229. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 103–4.

230. Thurneysen’s response is different. “When I observe the signs of enjoyment at my local tavern on Saturday evening, I see the same picture. That Hochuli makes the offer in this case is in so far no basic difference, as the people will have their feast, and take it where they can get it. All of this can only strengthen you in your appeal to the little flock.” B-Th I, 123.

231. Marquardt, “Aktuar,” 134.

232. Thurneysen, Karl Barth ‘Theologie und Sozialismus,’ 29.

233. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 31.

234. Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, 83. In the interpretation of Marquardt, Kutter’s living God was philosophically rather than biblically grounded, while Ragaz’s kingdom of God arose from political principles rather than from Scripture (ibid., 49).

235. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 92.

236. Barth, “Righteousness of God,” 9.

237. Ibid., 16.

238. Ibid., 17.

239. Ibid., 19.

240. Ibid., 19–20.

241. Ibid., 20.

242. Ibid., 22.

243. Ibid., 24.

244. Ibid., 25–26.

245. Ibid., 26.

246. Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” 51–96.

247. Thurneysen, Karl Barth ‘Theologie und Sozialismus,’ 18.

248. Marquardt, “Erster Bericht über Karl Barths ‘Sozialistiche Reden,’” 474.

249. Ibid. “It became clear to him that the worker must be a conscious, not a sleeping person, a fighter and not a coward. . . . Hence he had to become a Social Democrat. I say: he must. . . . In him there came to light and breakthrough precisely this, which also moves the great masses unconsciously and spinelessly in their innermost hearts: the realization of the deprivation of the people in their dependence upon capital, and the insight of the sole help, which must consist in solidarity, in the willing and unselfish and brave community of the dependent, and finally the hope and will: Things must change, if only the human beings would come to themselves.”

250. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 45.

251. Thurneysen’s letter to Barth (January 13, 1919) in B-Th I, 309.

252. Later, in his writing on “Socialism and Christendom” (1923), Thurneysen called for the renewal and repentance of Christianity in the face of the challenge of the proletarian brother. Socialism, argues Thurneysen, is not only the cry for a new world and the longing and hope thereof. It is, when seen in its historical development, necessarily a comprehensive countermovement against the ruling powers and tendency that appeared in the culture and economy at that time. Socialism became the single critique and enemy of mammonism and militarism in the second half of nineteenth century by taking seriously these two forces. Thurneysen, “Sozialismus und Christentum,” 242.

253. Smart, Revolutionary Theology, 45–46.

254. Barth, “Strange New World within the Bible,” 49.

255. Ibid., 49–50.

256. Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, 108.

257. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 97.

258. “Auf das Reich Gottes warten,” 175–90.

259. Mattmüller, Leonhard Ragaz, 2: 222; see n. 23.

260. Schellong, “Barth Lessen,” 12.

261. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 104.

262. Thurneysen, “Sozialismus und Christentum,” 241, 243.

263. Ibid., 244.

264. Gollwitzer, “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” 112.

265. Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, 264.