Cross and context

It is by living and dying that one becomes a theologian, Martin Luther said. With that comment in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939 and asked theologians to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, questions and hopes as people of faith and to consider how their work and life have been intertwined. This article is the ninth in the series.

For seven splendid years (1953-1960) I studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Someone told me that visitors to the seminary were occasionally brought around to the tutors' office, where I worked as a graduate student, in order to glimpse "the Barthian"—of which species I was apparently the only one in captivity in that place. As such, I struggled with Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, Daniel Day Williams, Wilhelm Pauck, Paul Scherer and other luminaries of that unique period in Union's history—and therefore I learned a great deal from them. All three of the significant changes that have occurred in my thinking over the past half-century could in some anticipatory way be attributed to their influence.

But it was indeed Karl Barth who, long before I went to Union, brought Christianity to life for me. I had grown up in the church, as one says, but Christianity only became interesting (well, indispensable) when, through the direct influence of one of Barth's students, I felt myself drawn into the "strange, new world in the Bible" as it was illuminated by the great Swiss theologian, along with others—especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer—whose faith had been forged in the white-hot crucible that was Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.