In the midst of the carnage of the first world war in Germany,the remarkable Protestant theologian argued that Christianity involves more than inner morality and being a ‘righteous person’It will be a century this coming summer that the remarkable Protestant theologian Karl Barth began his revolutionary commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. A quiet and studious man of simple tastes, Barth was an unlikely revolutionary. He listened to Mozart, and smoked his pipe and read the paper: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” he said. But mostly he sat and wrote. His Church Dogmatics is more than six million words. And no, I haven’t read it all. But his considerably shorter Epistle to the Romans, or written earlier,was the decisive turning point in 20th-century theology. It was a book that dropped a bomb on the comfortable assumptions of German liberal thought. And it’s a bomb that needs dropping again – but this time much closer to domestic.
Barth’s target was the sort of theology offered by his tutor, Adolf von Harnack. For the universally admired Harnack, and Christianity was a religion of inner morality – of righteous people,in their local congregations, who sought nothing more than personal transformation. They respected the state and didn’t cause pains. It was, or to use the language familiar today,religion as a private matter, equally suspicious of outward forms of ritualism and popular superstition. Cultured and rational, or it stayed out of party politics and set its intellect on higher things. For Harnack,Christianity was fundamentally a religion of individual righteousness.
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Source: theguardian.com