And Just Like That I Have a 1,500 Word Post

I wrote this for a class so don't expect it to be very interesting.

What is Karl Barth's view of tradition, and how does that fit into post-modern society?

Over the span of the history of theology there has grown a sense of tradition: the things that were thought by previous theological thinkers still have value. Tradition has become an important part of theology because it is a way to judge people’s experiences and their interpretations of Scripture. In an ironic way theology still keeps with tradition by looking at what previous theologians thought about tradition. There is now a tradition of looking at tradition. In this way Karl Barth was a theologian that looked at tradition, and wrote a considerable amount on the subject. Although tradition was not the main focus of Karl Barth’s work it was something that could not be over looked. For Karl Barth, tradition was not just something that happened it was the responsibility of the previous generation. Karl Barth has much to contribute to the grand scheme of theology and how tradition fits in to theology, even in today’s society.

Karl Barth came in direct contact with the traditions of the church as he grew up, and the time and culture in which Barth grew up significantly impacted his views on this tradition. Karl Barth was born in 1886 of Swiss-German decent. His father, Johann Friedrich Barth, or Fritz as he went by, was a pastor and then became a teacher of theology. A treasured photo of his father “above Barth’s desk [hinted] that the father’s theological pilgrimage was in a real way a model for the son” (Green 13). Barth studied in Berne, Berlin, Tubingen and Marburg. Early on as a pastor he was very concerned with how theology related to the everyday problems in his congregation. He began work on theology in Germany, but he shortly moved back to Switzerland when he would not swear allegiance to Hitler. World War II led Barth to write The Barmen Declaration which spoke out against Hitler and the German Christians who supported the anti-Semitic ideas of the Third Reich. These German Christians emphasized the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews and some even called for the elimination of the Old Testament from the Bible. The Barmen Declaration is a modern confession of faith rooted in scripturally based doctrines believed by the early church and “it appeals to all concerned to return to unity in faith, hope and love” (Gunton 135). Over his life Barth wrote many major works including Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Community, State and Church, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, The Epistle to the Romans, The Word of God and the Word of Man, and his largest but unfinished work, Church Dogmatics.

The overarching theme of much of Karl Barth’s work was this idea that God, Who is ultimately free, unchanging, and unlimited, “has elected to be for, with, in and among us” (McDowell 3) and has decided to act on behalf of humanity and redeem them. God does not have responsibility to do this and He is in no way bound to do it. God Himself has chosen of His own will to make Himself a part of human history through the person Jesus Christ and through revelation. This is the central theme of Barth’s theology and it dictates how he thinks about other aspects of theology, including tradition. Tradition is viewed through the lens of God’s self revelation to people throughout history. When it comes to tradition, Barth is not explicitly concerned with the topic; it is all in relation to how God makes Himself known through revelation.

This main theological idea, that God has made Himself known and that He is still making Himself known through revelation, greatly shaped Barth’s ideas on tradition. The most important thing in Barth’s mind was God’s revelation to His people, not tradition, not Scripture, not Dogmatics. This is not to say that Barth disregarded all of these things and was swept away by whatever theology came along the way, but he did judge each piece of theology through this idea that God has revealed Himself. Still, tradition plays a key role in determining the legitimacy of revelatory thoughts, for “theology does not labor somewhere high above the foundation of tradition, as though Church history began today.” (Barth 42). Instead tradition proved to be a helpful way of testing and approving of new theological ideas claiming to be a revelation from God. “Theology has to reconsider the confession of the community, testing and rethinking it in light of its enduring foundation, object, and content.” (Barth 42). Tradition is crucial for actually being able to assess and approve of whether something is of God or not. Does the revelation keep with scripture? Have people in the past had revelations like this? What do previous theologians have to say about this topic or that topic? These types of questions can all be answered through tradition. Barth’s idea about tradition was that it played an important role in subjecting what people might claim as revelations to an outside source that receives its authority through continuation of previous theologies and most importantly the Word of God.

All this being said; for Barth tradition started with the Apostles of the New Testament. The Apostles were first hand witnesses to the life and event of Jesus Christ. They came in personal contact with Jesus, saw the miracles He performed and witnessed His death and resurrection. These Apostles then wrote down their accounts for various purposes, but all as witnesses to the Gospel. For this reason, Barth would say, the Apostles’ testimony is to be regarded as valid and cannot be added to or taken away from. Theology and tradition are always subject to the original witnesses of the Gospel; they are never equal with it, and most certainly never above it. “All subsequent theology, as well as the whole community that comes after the event, will never find itself in the same immediate confrontation” (Barth 32). All succeeding generations of theologians are all subject to the witness of the Apostles to the Gospel. This continuous looking back at previous generations led Barth to make the statement, “in order to serve the community of today, theology itself must be rooted in the community of yesterday.” (Barth 42). This community of theology is to be secondary witness to the Gospel, and if it is not doing this, then it has failed. Because the community believes the testimony of the previous generations and ultimately the witness of the Apostles to the Word, the community must speak and testify to the Word as well. For Barth the intent of theology, also, was to serve the needs of the church/community that it finds itself in, and the needs of the community could only be met when theology looked at the communities of the past and evaluated the way they dealt with similar problems. This process is part of tradition.

Karl Barth’s view of tradition is an important one to think about in a society like today’s. The common worldview today is a post-modern one that sees truth as a relative thing to what one’s experiences tell them it is. One person may see Jesus as God’s Son and another may see Him as nothing more than a teacher; both views are valid in the post-modern perspective. Where post-modern thought has a problem with Christianity is when Jesus claims that His is the One and Only way to God. Similarly, because of the post-modern thinking, Karl Barth’s ideas in general could be seen as unpopular. In a society that rejects most authorities that are outside or contradict their individual and personal experiences, it is easy for a theology that says one’s own experiences are not always valid unless they coincide with the traditions of the Church to be ridiculed or hated. Barth’s view expresses “the need for conversation with other perspectives and disciplines from one's own” (McDowell 2). This view emphasizes the idea that people cannot know everything without other perspectives to draw them back to reality.

Although Barth’s ideas have taken some heat among post-modern thought, I still believe that they really have truth in them. I believe this because if the post-modern reality is true, then no one reality is true, which can be a very slipper slope to go down. Post-modern thought also places individuals in the highest respect, that whatever it is they have figured out, they have right. This view throws tradition out the window and makes living in the moment the only real way to live life to the fullest. I do not believe this mentality because the people that came before did have some things figured out right and society cannot just discard them because they do not agree in pursuit of personal ideologies. Barth had a great analogy that does a good job of summing up tradition. Barth had this idea that the people we are learning from are really just students of previous students, all the way back down to the original witnesses to the Gospel, and we are really just joining with them to find out more about how to live life in a pleasing way to God. “To study theology means not so much to examine exhaustively the work of earlier students of theology as to become their fellow students” (Barth 173). So we join the long line of witnesses to the Gospel that have the hope of finding something a little bit deeper than the previous generation, and the hope that we might be able to pass that on to the next.










Bibliography

Barth, Karl." Encyclopædia Britannica.
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 3 Mar. 2008 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9013520>.

Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology: an Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.

Green, Clifford, ed. Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom. Minneapolis: Fortress P, 1991.

Gunton, Colin E., Stephen R. Holmes, and Murray A. Rae. The Practice of Theology. St. Albans Place: SCM P, 2001. 133-134.

McDowell, John C. "The mystery of God: Karl Barth and the post-modern foundations of theology." Evangelical Quarterly 76.3 (July 2004): 275-278. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 10 Mar. 2008 .

Reinisch, Leonhard, ed. Theologians of Our Time. Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame P, 1964. 1-16.