Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective

By Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack

Swiss theologian Karl Barth traveled to the United States only once during his long career. In 1962, newly retired, he came to visit family and to deliver a series of lectures subsequently published (by Eerdmans) as Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, which remains in print and widely read to this day.

Besides recounting some delightful and poignant biographical details about Barth’s two-month journey through the States, the authors of this book revisit central themes in Barth’s mature theology and explore the theological and ethical significance of his Evangelical Theology.

Even more, the distinguished scholars contributing to this volume assess contemporary North American theology and show how Barth’s Evangelical Theology remains as bracing, powerful, and relevant today as it was fifty years ago.

• Contributors:
• David W. Congdon
• Jessica DeCou
• Hans-Anton Drewes
• Kevin W. Hector
• George Hunsinger
• Cambria Janae Kaltwasser
• Gerald McKenny
• Daniel L. Migliore
• Adam Neder
• Peter J. Paris
• Katherine Sonderegger

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467442909

Book preview

Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology

A FIFTY-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

Edited by

Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN / CAMBRIDGE, U.K.

© 2015 Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack

All rights reserved

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 / P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karl Barth and the making of Evangelical Theology: a fifty-year perspective /

edited by Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack.

pages   cm

ISBN 978-1-4674-4290-9 (ePub)

1. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. 2. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968—Influence.

3. Evangelicalism. 4. Theology, Doctrinal.

5. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. Einführung in die Evangelische Theologie.

I. Anderson, Clifford B., editor.

BX4827.B3K355 2015

230'.044092—dc23

2014033438

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Introduction

Clifford B. Anderson

1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

In the Same Solitude as Fifty Years Ago

Hans-Anton Drewes

Theology as Theanthropology: Barth’s Theology of Existence in Its Existentialist Context

David W. Congdon

The First Community: Barth’s American Prison Tours

Jessica DeCou

2. DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES

Theology as an Academic Discipline: Reconciling Evangelical Theology and Theological Encyclopedia

Kevin W. Hector

Freed by God for God: Divine Action and Human Action in Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology and Other Late Works

Gerald McKenny

Barth on What It Means to Be Human: A Christian Scholar Confronts the Options

George Hunsinger

3. BARTH IN DIALOGUE WITH AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS

Veni Creator Spiritus: The Work of the Spirit in the Theologies of B. B. Warfield and Karl Barth

Daniel L. Migliore

Transforming Encounters: The Friendship of Karl Barth and John Mackay

Cambria Janae Kaltwasser

The Church’s Prophetic Vocation: Insights from Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr.

Peter J. Paris

4. THEOLOGICAL EXISTENCE IN AMERICA

The Theological Existence of the Pastor

Katherine Sonderegger

The Sun Behind the Clouds: Some Barthian Thoughts about Teaching Christian Theology

Adam Neder

Contributors

Introduction

Clifford B. Anderson

Karl Barth visited the United States of America only once during his long career as a theologian. He arrived on April 7, 1962, to visit his son Markus and family, and to deliver lectures that were subsequently published as the book Evangelical Theology. For roughly two months he toured the United States, traveling from sea to shining sea. He visited Chicago, New York, Princeton, Richmond, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., among many other places. He visited with Billy Graham, exchanged greetings with Martin Luther King Jr., and talked politics with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He returned to Switzerland on May 26th, ending the two months with a superfluity of impressions. He wrote to his son-in-law: Max, America, which we have sampled a little in the midwest, east, and west, is a fantastic affair, a world in which much is astonishingly alike and much astonishingly unlike. When people ask for impressions of America one’s mouth simply closes; there is no knowing where to begin, since generalizations are certainly wide of the mark.¹

This volume of essays exhibits a similar form of astonishment at the depths and riches of Karl Barth’s theology. The eleven contributors to this volume address different facets of Barth’s theology and ethics, but his visit to America serves as the common thread running through these reflections. The contributors all took part in a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, held June 17-20, 2012, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Barth’s Evangelical Theology. The conference also celebrated the 200th anniversary of the 1812 founding of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Here we may perhaps say a few things about the relationship between Karl Barth and the United States. Barth had few connections to America at the beginning of his career and, as a political leftist, disliked its capitalist and imperialist politics. In a very early writing about the evangelist John Mott, Barth confessed: I was distrustful in the first instance as any normal Central European, to whom the association of ideas—America-humbug—simply exists deeply in the blood.² However, like many Europeans, Barth’s distrust was also mixed with curiosity. He suggested jocularly to his friend Eduard Thurneysen on December 1, 1918: "Should we not set forth on an American journey [like that of Albert Oeri, editor-in-chief of the Basler Nachrichten] in order to ascertain, amid the tumult of 200,000-300,000 toasts (is that humanly possible?) what the place is actually like over there?"³

In a twist of providence, the chair of Reformed theology at Göttingen University, to which Barth was appointed in 1921, was established with American (and Dutch) funding.⁴ As his fame grew and publications about him began to appear in English, Barth began to attract English-speaking students. John A. Mackay, ecumenical theologian and future president of Princeton Theological Seminary, was among the first to study under Barth. Many more would follow over the years. Barth began to exercise considerable influence in America as his former students and German exiles from Nazism drew on his theology to combat theological liberalism. Invitations to lecture in America invariably followed. In fact, Barth wound up turning down requests to visit America repeatedly throughout his career. While he traveled extensively within continental Europe, the notion of journeying to the United States seemed to make him uneasy. He viewed such invitations as a distraction from his calling, especially as he labored to complete his unfinished Church Dogmatics. As he explained in 1953 to the ecumenist Willem Visser ’t Hooft, "I can’t allow myself to forsake the work on the Dogmatics for so long in favor of such an American journey with all its presuppositions and complications as would be necessary."⁵ This attitude persisted until his retirement from teaching in 1962.

Barth’s growing theological influence in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with a period of soul-searching at Princeton Theological Seminary. The reorganization of the seminary in 1929 led to a schism in the Presbyterian Church and to contestation of the theology of Old Princeton. Karl Barth’s revitalization of Reformed theology in Germany attracted the attention of the loyal Princetonians. Already during the presidency of J. Ross Stevenson, the alumni committee recommended that the board of trustees extend an invitation to Professor Karl Barth to act as a special lecturer in the Seminary for an extended period of time.⁶ The appointment of John A. Mackay as president of the seminary in 1936 resulted in the appointment of several professors favorable to Karl Barth, as Cambria Janae Kaltwasser notes in her chapter below. The seminary took a turn toward dialectical theology in the 1930s, a spiritual legacy that, despite ups and downs, persists to this day.

The emergence of the cold war after World War II alienated Barth from the mainstream of American theology. While frequently grouped with neo-orthodox theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, Barth always protested against this designation. He intensely disagreed with Niebuhr’s political realism and protested against any effort to engage the churches in political campaigns against communism. Barth’s protests sometimes made the papers. After the appearance of his Letter to a Pastor in the German Democratic Republic in 1958,⁷ The New York Times published an article entitled Swiss Theologian Assails the West.⁸ Barth’s theology also came under attack from evangelicals and fundamentalists. The firebrand Presbyterian Carl McIntire (1906-2002) sent a telegram to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, assuring him that Karl Barth’s attitude in his letter to pastors in East Germany, reported in our press here today, does not represent the position of orthodox Christianity.⁹ In our previous book, we have amply noted how Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) relentlessly criticized Barth’s theology as unorthodox, though he did show up to take in Barth’s lectures in Princeton in 1962.¹⁰

Barth’s decision finally to travel to America in 1962 coincided with political controversies arising from his retirement from the University of Basel. Barth had hoped that the left-leaning theologian Helmut Gollwitzer (1908-1993) would be appointed as his successor. However, the trustees deemed Gollwitzer’s appointment unacceptable on political grounds and awarded the chair to Heinrich Ott (1929-2013). Barth was bitterly disappointed. In a subsequent letter to Gollwitzer, Barth stated that he felt that he had received a dishonorable discharge after twenty-five years of teaching.¹¹ His remark about having the opportunity of shaking the dust of Basel from my feet and boarding an airplane should be taken as an allusion to Matthew 10:14 and perhaps also to the famous schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054.¹² The trip to America meant, among other things, regaining strength for the challenging theological and political conflicts of the 1960s. I shall be coming back with the impetus of the rebel yell (do you know what that is?) into the theological doings and affairs over here.¹³

The fiftieth anniversary of Karl Barth’s American journey offered a suitable opportunity to explore the long-term impact of the theology of Karl Barth on American theology. The contributions in this volume are organized under several rubrics: historical perspectives, doctrinal and ethical perspectives, dialogue with American theologians, and theological existence in America. The goal of the book is not to present a historical chronology of Barth’s American journey or to provide an exegesis of Evangelical Theology.¹⁴ Rather, the purpose of this book is to witness from different angles the historical event of Barth’s 1962 trip and to reflect on its continuing influence on the direction of American theology during the intervening fifty years.

Historical Perspectives

Barth recommended to American theologians that they explore a theology of freedom. He pointed to the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor as a source of inspiration with a little or, perhaps, a good bit of demythologization.¹⁵ The remark was, of course, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Bultmann. But Barth’s comments also had a serious side. Among the visits to various tourist attractions—the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon, Gettysburg—he took time to visit three Great American prisons—an unnamed institution in Chicago, San Quentin outside San Francisco, and Rikers Island in New York City.¹⁶ In the chapter entitled The First Community: Barth’s American Prison Tours in this volume, Jessica DeCou reconstructs Barth’s visits to these prisons. But DeCou, recent graduate of The University of Chicago Divinity School, goes beyond historical reconstruction to assess the theological significance of Barth’s visits.

Barth’s interest in prisons predated his trip to America. In 1954 he had begun to preach in the Schällemätteli Prison in Basel.¹⁷ Late in his career, he published two collections of sermons, Deliverance to the Captives (1959; English trans. 1961) and Call for God (1965; English trans. 1967). But his visits to prisons in the United States emerged less from professional curiosity than from an attempt to understand American liberty from its underside. DeCou illustrates Barth’s different perspectives, ranging from horror at the conditions in Chicago to admiration for the programs at Rikers Island. But her contribution inevitably raises the question of what Barth’s response might be were he to visit those prisons today. Can we defend a theology of freedom when we incarcerate an unprecedented number of citizens? DeCou gives theologians—and everyone in the Christian community—the challenge of bringing our faulty prison system under the scrutinizing light of the gospel.

In his contribution, David W. Congdon reminds us how different the theological scene was in 1962. Theological liberalism was strong and self-confident. Paul Tillich was arguably the most popular theologian in America, and Rudolf Bultmann exercised an enormous influence over professional theologians. Existentialism was at its zenith. Barth was a critic of theological liberalism and existentialism. He considered both of them forms of anthropocentric theology—that is, theology that starts with experience, not God. But he also accommodated himself to the motifs of existentialism, devoting a series of lectures to the subject of theological existence, with titles such as Wonder and Concern. Congdon, an associate editor at InterVarsity Press Academic, provides an overview of Barth’s criticisms of Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist theology. Provocatively, he contends that Barth failed to appreciate the existentialist implications of his own doctrine of election. Barth’s theanthropology pushed him closer to Bultmann than he either suspected or was willing to acknowledge. Today theological liberalism is in sharp decline, and existentialism seems like a philosophy from an era as bygone as the world depicted in Mad Men. Congdon contends that reading Barth’s theology in our time demands a reevaluation of its relationship to Bultmann’s hermeneutical program, if only to combat our contemporary tendency toward abstract orthodoxy rather than a theology for a living faith.

Karl Barth frequently remarked that theologians must continually begin again at the beginning in every point.¹⁸ Barth followed this example, restarting his cycle of dogmatics three times during his career and writing several introductions to his work, including Evangelical Theology. However, as Hans-Anton Drewes shows in his chapter here entitled In the Same Solitude as Fifty Years Ago, there is a strong degree of continuity between Barth’s earliest writings and his mature theology. Drewes, the former director of the Karl Barth Archives in Basel, Switzerland, and general editor of the Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe, draws on archival evidence to illustrate Barth’s own sense of amazement when, reading over his early writings late in life, he found references to concepts and ideas he developed much later in his career. His late work was less abstract, more focused on the concrete person of Jesus Christ. But the perspectives that put him at odds with so many theologians in the 1920s did not fade with time; they continued to throw him into intellectual solitude at the end of his career. Here we need only think of his criticisms of sacramental theology in his final, fragmentary volume of the Church Dogmatics. Drewes challenges readers of Barth not to agree with him, but to join him in his solitude: to read such continuities faithfully before seeking to isolate or distill an essential Barth in the discontinuities among his texts.

Doctrinal and Ethical Perspectives

Karl Barth always distrusted the writing of introductions or prolegomena to theology. He considered prolegomena to theology to be a source of temptation, that is, a place where theologians made normative concessions that trammel free theological inquiry. Barth regarded Schleiermacher as the quintessential example of a theologian who had capitulated theological inquiry to non-theological norms in his prolegomena. As he remarked in 1932 in Church Dogmatics I/1, The lack of prolegomena, or at least of extensive prolegomena, might well indicate, not a naïve attitude, but one which is scientifically mature and well-considered.¹⁹ He made a similar statement thirty years later at the beginning of Evangelical Theology, adding that he would refrain from any discussion . . . of the manner in which a similar task has been conceived and carried out by Schleiermacher. . . .²⁰ That Barth never attempted a dogmatics without prolegomena suggests the difficulty of undertaking such a task. Does it also signal a silent concession to Schleiermacher?

Kevin Hector, assistant professor of theology and of the philosophy of religions at the Divinity School of The University of Chicago, in a chapter entitled "Theology as an Academic Discipline: Reconciling Evangelical Theology and Theological Encyclopedia," contends that Schleiermacher and Barth are not the antipodes many took them to be in 1962. A close reading of Schleiermacher’s methodology illustrates its essential compatibility with Barth’s understanding of the theological task. Hector suggests that contemporary students of Karl Barth can in fact learn from Schleiermacher how to be better Barthians. In 1962, Chicago and Princeton may have seemed like different worlds—the first skeptical about the possibilities of Barth’s Evangelical Theology, the second enthusiastic. Hector demonstrates that they are not so far apart as they may have seemed and that a contemporary Barthian theology will need to bring together elements of both traditions.

A central concern of Evangelical Theology is to describe the contours and threats to Christian existence. Barth’s analysis of the  ‘existentials’ of evangelical theology presupposes, builds on, and extends his explorations of theological anthropology in the Church Dogmatics.²¹ George Hunsinger, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, explores a crucial section of Church Dogmatics III/2, The Phenomena of the Human (§44.2), where Barth lays out his criteria for evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of competing philosophical and theological anthropologies. A satisfactory theological anthropology presupposes the revelation of genuine humanity in the person of Jesus Christ and rises from there to consider its conditions of possibility. However, Barth holds that we can learn from philosophical and theological anthropologies even if they fail to start in the right place. Hunsinger examines Barth’s criteria for assessing the relative merit of the phenomena of true humanity in naturalism, idealism, existentialism, and neo-orthodoxy. He puts a contemporary North American spin on the discussion by showing how Barth’s evaluation of the (mainly German) scientists, philosophers, and theologians of his era can help us to adjudicate the anthropologies of more recent (French and American) scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

Gerald McKenny, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, considers a common charge against Barth’s moral theology, namely, that his radical emphasis on divine action correlates with a relative neglect of the significance of human action. In his chapter entitled " ‘Freed by God for God’: Divine Action and Human Action in Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology and Other Late Works, McKenny admits that Barth does not provide a practical theory of spiritual development along the lines of virtue ethics. He contends that this refusal is not a weakness, but is the source of the distinctive strength of Barth’s theological ethics: It may be that Barth’s greatest contribution to the account of human agency in Christian ethics takes the form of an alternative to the dominant theories of virtue and spiritual growth." Substantiating this claim requires demonstrating that Barth does not, in fact, diminish human action to enlarge divine action. To pass muster, any theory of the relationship between divine and human action must: (1) credit the human agent for the action; (2) account for the continuity (as well as discontinuity) of human action; and (3) engage with the whole agent, not just the will (or intellect, emotions, etc.). There are certainly passages from Barth’s early theology (in the 1920s) that suggest one-sidedness in these regards. However, McKenny argues that Barth got the balance basically right in his late theology. Looking at Evangelical Theology against the background of the Church Dogmatics, McKenny credits Barth’s views on the covenant as providing the descriptive framework for the relationship between human and divine agency. The covenant between God and human beings in Jesus Christ makes possible and creates the reality of human freedom for God. Barth’s refusal to specify how the levers and switches of the human person enact this freedom means, of course, that his account will never be explanatory, only descriptive. While Barth may never satisfy those who identify moral theology more or less with virtue ethics, McKenny shows that Barth’s views present a credible—and, to many, compelling—alternative to virtue theory.

Barth in Dialogue with American Theologians

When Karl Barth repeated his series of lectures on Evangelical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1962, he did so as the Annie Kinkead Warfield lecturer during the 150th anniversary of the seminary’s founding. Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921) endowed the lectures for his invalid wife, Annie, who had died in 1915 after a long illness. Barth did not pay homage to Warfield in his lectures. Perhaps he was wary of the legacy of the Calvinist Lion of Princeton. More likely, he was simply unfamiliar with his work. While he was an expert on nineteenth-century theology in Europe, Barth seems not to have paid much attention to the doctrinal expositors of Calvinism in early twentieth-century America. Might it fairly be said that Barth was more intrigued by the theology of Stonewall Jackson (1824-1863) than he was by the Princeton theologians Hodge and Warfield?

Daniel Migliore, the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, suggests that the missed encounter between Barth and Warfield is regrettable. He argues that we can learn a great deal from the similar ways in which they interpreted Reformed theology in the modern world, but also from how they diverged. In his chapter, "Veni Creator Spiritus: The Work of the Spirit in the Theologies of B. B. Warfield and Karl Barth, Migliore contends that their differing understandings of the role of the Holy Spirit in theology constitutes a significant distinction between their approaches. For Barth, acknowledging the freedom of the Holy Spirit requires abandoning the apologetic bulwarks Warfield developed to link theology with the other sciences and to uphold the authority of Scripture. Positively, Barth’s rethinking of classical doctrine from the ground up allowed him to credit the Spirit’s participation in the person and work of Christ and in the triune life of God more adequately (or more daringly?) than did Warfield. While both theologians met the challenge of modernity by rethinking theology from the ground up, Migliore suggests that Barth’s presuppositionless" theology, so problematic from Warfield’s perspective, reflected a deeper grounding in the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

The death of Warfield initiated a new period in the history of Princeton Theological Seminary. The controversy between modernists and fundamentalists in the 1920s inevitably affected the seminary, leading to a reorganization of Princeton Seminary’s governing structures and the departure of several members of the faculty to found Westminster Theological Seminary outside of Philadelphia. The trustees of Princeton Seminary called on the missionary-theologian John A. Mackay (1889-1983) to revitalize the institution in 1936. As Cambria Janae Kaltwasser points out in the chapter entitled  ‘Transforming Encounters’: The Friendship of Karl Barth and John Mackay, Mackay was a Scottish theologian who had the unusual distinction of studying under both Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) and Karl Barth. Kaltwasser chronicles the relationship between Barth and Mackay. While studying with Barth in Bonn, Mackay became Barth’s English teacher, and the two formed a lifelong friendship. This friendship subsequently influenced the reorganization of the seminary, with Mackay drafting several leading German theologians to fill vacant posts in Princeton. That is not to say that Mackay could be classified as a Barthian. After all, he arranged for Emil Brunner to teach at the seminary, hoping that he might become a permanent member of the faculty. While Mackay placed stronger emphasis on the role of personal religious experience in theological reflection than did Barth, Kaltwasser illustrates a striking resemblance to Barth’s language and thought forms, particularly when it comes to the dominant theme of the Christian life as an encounter with God. And it was fitting that Mackay, even though he had retired as president of the seminary in 1959, introduced Karl Barth as the Warfield lecturer in 1962.

A series of photographs famously documents Barth’s fleeting encounter with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968). Barth admired King and the civil rights movement in the United States: he regretted that his relationship to the courageous Negro Pastor Martin Luther King was confined to being photographed together in front of a church door.²² For his part, King had studied Karl Barth while a doctoral candidate at Boston University. Who knows what words passed between Barth and King during those brief moments together? While their encounter was fleeting, Peter J. Paris, in his chapter The Church’s Prophetic Vocation: Insights from Karl Barth and Martin Luther King, Jr., says that there are numerous parallels between their lives and works. Paris, the Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor of Christian Social Ethics Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, and a foremost authority on the theology of Martin Luther King Jr., notes that both Barth and King remained faithful to their callings as theologians in the face of social crises. For Barth, the crisis was precipitated by the rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933, whereas the crisis was sparked for King by a black woman’s courageous defiance of longstanding discrimination and injustice in Montgomery in 1955. While Barth and King may have differed in perspective—Paris points to a difference in their understanding of the relationship of church and state, for instance—he underscores that both understood theology as intrinsically linked to mission. The wholehearted commitment to prophetic witness against injustice and to the kingdom of God linked the careers of Barth and King, spiritually bridging the geographic and cultural contexts that otherwise divided them.

Theological Existence in America

Karl Barth visited the United States during the heyday of mainline Protestantism. His lectures were thronged with admirers, and the press followed his itinerary. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 20, 1962. He was a world-famous Protestant theologian when that phrase was not a contradiction in terms. Yet Barth rejected any hint of triumphalism in his theology. He dedicated a third of Evangelical Theology to The Threat to Theology, specifically the threat of solitude, doubt, and temptation (Anfechtung). His description of these threats was not abstract. He had suffered a painful political defeat regarding his successor at Basel. His sphere of theological influence also gradually declined in the 1960s as a new generation of theologians preferred the worldly Bonhoeffer and philosophical Bultmann to the dogmatic Barth.

In The Theological Existence of the Pastor, Katherine Sonderegger dwells on Barth’s reflections on Anfechtung, or the fear of failure. Sonderegger, professor of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, acknowledges candidly the challenges her seminarians face as they graduate and enter the pastorate. The brash enthusiasms of scarcely a century ago—‘The Christian Century!’—seem far away and faint. How did we imagine such a thing? How may we account theologically for the decline of the mainline church? There is a temptation to despair over the future of the churches of the Magisterial Reformation. The looming failure of these churches may be blamed on doctrine, demographics, or the devil. While not denying these external factors, Sonderegger follows Barth in identifying God as the source of judgment and grace. The silence of God—the No! of God to our universal desire for outward trappings of success—serves the Yes! of God. God is the One who loves in freedom. God’s freedom to withhold his voice from pastors and their congregations throws us into doubt, solitude, and temptation, but also liberates us from attachments and casts us on his mercy alone. Sonderegger’s explorations of the pastor’s theological existence suggest that Barth’s work may speak more directly to the situation of pastors today than it did during the heyday of mainline Protestantism.

Of course, the threats to theological existence do not afflict pastors alone. As Adam Neder argues in  ‘The Sun Behind the Clouds’: Some Barthian Thoughts about Teaching Christian Theology, professors of theology may, if anything, be exposed to greater danger. A large number of contemporary seminarians aspire to teach theology in academic contexts rather than congregational settings. And who would blame them? While the mainline church is struggling to survive, many schools of theology continue to flourish. The trappings of success may perhaps be more easily cultivated in the academy than in the church, especially as academic theologians climb the academic ladder from assistant to associate to full professor. Neder, professor of theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, contemplates the dangers of teaching theology as an academic discipline. How may a professor teach theology to students without invoking and relying on the Holy Spirit? How can students learn theology without experiencing the joys of and threats to theological existence? How may professors adopt the stance in their professional lives of Grünewald’s John the Baptist, pointing away from their teaching about Jesus to Jesus the Christ himself? Neder takes up these questions, showing that success, like failure, brings along its peculiar form of Anfechtung.

* * *

The diversity of perspectives in this volume demonstrates the impossibility of summing up the impact of Karl Barth’s 1962 visit. The growing collection of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary illustrates that, rather than fading from the scene after his death in 1968, Barth’s theology continues to fascinate and challenge American theologians. Measured by the scholarly output, Barth may be more popular among students of theology today than he has ever been. Nevertheless, his work still stands as a countercultural challenge in an age characterized by browsing and scanning rather than sustained reading. Barth observed to a Japanese interlocutor about the Church Dogmatics in 1968: People want short explanations, anything fast, fast. But it just does not go so fast. One must make an effort. Especially in America.²³

The editors would like to thank Amy Ehlin for her assistance with the organization of the 2012 conference and David C. Chao for his assistance with the preparation of this volume. Clifford B. Anderson would like to dedicate this volume to his wife Rosanna with gratitude for her steadfast love and patience.

---

1. Karl Barth to Max Zellweger, May 19, 1962, in Barth, Letters 1961-1968 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 45.

2. Karl Barth, John Mott und die Christliche Studentenbewegung, in Vorträge und Kleinere Arbeiten, 1909-1914 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1993), p. 270.

3. Karl Barth, Karl Barth—Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, Band I: 1913-1921 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), p. 305.

4. See George Harinck, The Early Reception of Karl Barth in the Netherlands (1919-1926), trans. Clifford B. Anderson, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 17:2 (2001): 174-75.

5. Karl Barth to Willem Visser ’t Hooft, October 18, 1953, in Barth—Visser ’t Hooft Briefwechsel 1916-1966 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), p. 278.

6. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary (October 10, 1933); courtesy of Special Collections of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library. The board decided at its February 6, 1934,