No one has appreciated more than Barth the colossal task of the Christian Church during the last three hundred years in giving intelligent and intelligible expression to the Christian faith in the midst of the greatest advances in the history of civilization. An effort on the part of the Church that could measure up to the astonishing developments in the sciences and arts was required, an achievement of the human spirit within the realm of religion comparable to the achievement of the human spirit in its triumph over nature. That was the task undertaken by Schleiermacher early in the nineteenth century, undertaken with a genius that matched the brilliant culture in the midst of which he lived, and indeed widely regarded as the finest expression of that culture. Schleiermacher’s work affected the whole of the rest of the century, for generations of theologians, whether they followed Neo-Kantian or Neo-Hegelian tendencies, or broke out into more psychological interpretations of the Christian faith, built upon what he did, and even Roman theology absorbed not a little from him. In this development Christianity was set forth as the most sensitive quality of modern civilization, and the religious consciousness it mediated was looked upon as the holy flame in the innermost shrine of culture. Intellectually, the Christian faith was looked upon as a necessary and essential element in the development of the human mind, and its doctrines as rational determinations of social and ethical structure. Hence there grew up that profound assimilation of Christianity to culture and culture to Christianity that poured over from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
According to Barth, there was a fundamentally right intention in this development, for the Christian Gospel must be articulated within the understanding of men, and must be communicated to the age in such a way that it is addressed to it in the midst of its spiritual and mental growth, and its literary and artistic creations. But what a task the Church had to face in addressing itself to the age of Kant and Hegel, of Goethe and Schiller, and many others, not to speak of the world of music and art! The theology of the nineteenth century manifested a responsibility for modernity which, Barth declares, we can hardly respect enough—but in making it its supreme task to speak to the age, it so accommodated its teaching to the masterful developments of the age, above all in romantic-idealist philosophy and in the natural sciences, that it came near to betraying itself altogether. Indeed, in the steady resolve not to interpret Christianity in such a way that it would conflict with the methods and principles of historical and scientific research or philosophical reflection, it lost a grip upon its own essence as theology and became basically anthropocentric, and so was unable to serve the advance of culture as it desired, for it had no positive word to say to culture which that culture did not already know and had not already said to itself in ways more congenial to it. That is the sickness unto death that lies behind so many of the troubles of Europe—the fatal collapse in ethics manifested in the first world war and later, the atheistic insistence that theology is nothing but anthropology, and that God is but the projection of man’s own ego or the objectification of his own dreams or desires, the materialism of the Marxist recoil from idealistic religion, the strange terrible lapse back into baalistic nature-mysticism and nature-religion with its arbitrarily deified principalities and powers and dominations. It is the naturalization of the Church and the divinization of nature that follows upon the confusion of God with nature or the confusion of God with reason. Behind it all Barth sees the corrupting influence of ‘natural theology’.
In order to throw the problem into clear relief we may note three (among other) elements in this assimilation of Christianity to culture and its romantic-idealist background which Barth sought to expose.
(a) In seeking to conquer the consciousness of the age on its own ground theology undertook a radical reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of inwardness. This took two forms. On the one hand, a sharp dichotomy was posited between what Schleiermacher called the sensuous and the spiritual, while Christianity was interpreted in terms of a developing ascendency of spirit over nature. Hence what needed to be carried out in the nineteenth century was a basic re-editing of those sensuous elements in the Christian tradition which appeared to belong to a more primitive stage of development, and a reinterpretation of them in terms of spirit and pure consciousness. On the other hand, spirit came to be regarded rather as the insideness of things, and therefore as the other side of material objectivity and as correlated to nature. In either way there came about a direct identity between the Holy Spirit of God and the spirit of man or such a mutual reciprocity between the two that it amounted to identification in practical and theoretical elaboration. Hence the development of Neo-Protestant thinking from the Enlightenment and Pietism into the combination of rationalism and subjectivity, so characteristic of idealism, was looked upon as the emergence of the real essence of the Reformation, that is, through a discarding of the objective elements in the teaching of the Reformers and a denigration of them as survivals of Catholicism. But what this really meant was that Christianity was interpreted only as the inner side of the developing culture of the nineteenth century, and was treated as of only aesthetic and symbolic significance. It was thus inevitable that Christianity should come to be regarded as a harmless musical overtone in the mighty symphony of science or as an anachronistic survival of the past that could only hinder scientific progress in the present and future.
(b) But if Christianity was to play any part in this developing culture it had to take its due part within the field of scientific study. It was in the realm of history that the overlap of theology and science was to be found, so that a scientific theology was pursued as the critical reflection and interpretation of historical religious self-consciousness, that is, as Troeltsch expressed it, the self-interpretation of the spirit so far as it is a matter of its own productions of itself in history. God himself is not objectifiable, for he does not give himself as such to our experience, but what is given to us is an awareness of him in the experience of the individual and of the community in the form of determinations of historical consciousness. It will be the task of theology to reflect upon that, to dig out and sift out the ideas embedded in that history and reinterpret them as living co-determinants of the human spirit in the present. Thus scientific theology will be concerned with historicism, with the investigation of the objective events of history and with an interpretation of historical ideas.
That may be carried out through an attempt to examine the whole history of the Christian Church and of its doctrine and to penetrate into some fundamental essence of Christianity as the kernel of it all, as Harnack sought to do, or it may take the way of interpreting the Christian Religion in the context of and in the light of universal religion with a view to eliciting the basic religious a-priori which enables us to understand and interpret this inner side of the development of the human spirit. It may take a speculative form in which the crude realistic narrative form of the Christian faith as it has been handed down from early times is to be stripped away like a garment grown too tight in order that the timeless essence or the ideas embodied in it may be allowed to emerge into the open. Or it may take a more existentialist form in which the outward events and their realist interpretation in terms of the acts of God in space and time are looked upon as mythological expressions of a deeply significant way of life, and therefore they are not to be stripped away but either reinterpreted in modern scientific myths as more adequate vehicles of meaning or employed as occasions and challenges to attain the same kind of authentic existence that the creative spirituality of the early Church revealed when it threw up these significant mythological forms traditionally called doctrines.
What is all this in the end but to subject Christianity entirely to history on the one hand and so to subordinate it to its relativities and transiencies, and on the other hand to co-ordinate it, not rationally, but by some ‘existential leap of faith’ with another realm of ‘meaning’ which is neither susceptible of conceptual articulation in its own right, nor amenable to rational criticism and investigation? And what else can this lead to but to the identification of Christianity with the basic Weltanschauung or attitude to existence that already lurks in the prior understanding of ‘historical man’? And what has this to do with the Gospel, that is, with genuine news communicated to man, for is it not, after all, something that natural man can hear from himself through existentialist analysis, something that is inseparable from a secularized culture?
(c) But there is another line of development that must be noted, not one concerned so much with history