Karl Barth’s gift to the church

Surely no great Christian theologian exceeds Karl Barth in devotion to the church and its pastors. Kimlyn Bender shares a remark from late in Barth’s life: “My whole theology, you see, is fundamentally a theology for pastors.” Barth was a pastor for ten years, and the whole point of theological analysis, he wrote in his Church Dogmatics, is “self-examination,” by the church, “in respect of its proclamation.” Pastors are preachers, for whom such a perspective seems tailor-made.

But Barth’s scholarship—his gift precisely to preachers—is both long and difficult. The first and shortest of the four volumes of Church Dogmatics comes, by itself, to 1,500 densely covered pages. Before that two-part volume appeared in the 1930s, Barth had, with an eye on German Christianity’s complicity in its country’s World War I aggression, written an equally demanding 500-page commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. How can anyone with a hurried life even begin to take advantage of such a gift?

Bender, with a view to “the contemporary church and its life,” has produced a reading guide to assist those who are not Barth specialists. In the introductory chapter he notes, as others have, that Barth is like the composer who an­nounces a piece’s theme or themes at the start, follows up with more detailed theme development, then returns to the beginning for recapitulation. This insight provides helpful orientation for anyone negotiating such a formidable body of work.