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Protestant thought: from Rousseau to Ritschl;: Being the translation of eleven chapters of Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert
Book by Barth, Karl
435 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
7 people are currently reading
106 people want to read
About the author
Karl Barth
465 books266 followersProtestant theologian Karl Barth, a Swiss, advocated a return to the principles of the Reformation and the teachings of the Bible; his published works include
Church Dogmatics
from 1932.
Critics hold Karl Barth among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important since Saint Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his typical predominant liberal, especially German training of 19th century.
Instead, he embarked on a new path, initially called dialectical, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth—for instance, God is both grace and judgment), but more accurately called a of the Word. Critics referred to this father of new orthodoxy, a pejorative term that he emphatically rejected. His thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election. His enormously influenced throughout Europe and America.
Critics hold Karl Barth among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important since Saint Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his typical predominant liberal, especially German training of 19th century.
Instead, he embarked on a new path, initially called dialectical, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth—for instance, God is both grace and judgment), but more accurately called a of the Word. Critics referred to this father of new orthodoxy, a pejorative term that he emphatically rejected. His thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election. His enormously influenced throughout Europe and America.
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November 13, 2022
Barth, Karl. Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and
History . Trans. anon. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1973; London: SCM Press, 1959, 1972. 669 p.
In 1979, I was first required to read Barth’s history of modern theology to read in a course on “The Liberal Spirit” taught by George Stroup at Princeton Theological Seminary. As a survey of modern Christian thought, it has much to teach regarding the eighteenth century and its strong influence on Protestant scholars, liberal and conservative, in the 1800s. In fact, some of the best historical work in these lectures by Barth first given in the 1920s deals with the Enlightenment and its Pelegian anthropology, its optimistic perspective on European “man’s” capacities and potential. One wishes that Barth had had a second semester of such lectures to give an overview of nineteenth-century theology as comprehensive as his work on the 1700s.
The author was highly selective in the figures surveyed and I was struck by those whom he left out of account, esp. Kierkegaard. We learn (almost) nothing about Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche although their writings will haunt twentieth-century thought. He limits Protestant theology to the German-speaking world of Germany and Switzerland, ignoring the Anglo-American world, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, etc.
He builds his case indirectly for a radical new direction in theology after the long nineteenth century of 1800-1914. By showing how the Enlightenment vitiated Protestant belief and practice and how the nineteenth century accommodated the Gospel to modern (European) culture, he argues that Protestant theology must proceed on a “wholly other” foundation than that laid upon reason and human experience by our predecessors. He cast a critical eye upon the Pietists, Rationalists, Revivalists, and Biblicists as well as the liberals (Hegel, Schleiermacher, and their followers) from the perspective of the Bible, the Reformers, and the classic Christian creeds and Protestant confessions of faith. But his sources of criticism include the radical skeptical voices of Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss who, according to Barth, undermined the liberal project of accommodation to modern thought from within. He finds in Kant an ally who philosophically undermined the project of natural theology by his critique of the limits of theoretical reason, and who thus made a clearing for biblical theology to recover its voice. He finds in Hegel a stronger will to the truth than Schleiermacher, and the last great attempt to ensconce classic claims of theology (revelation in history, God as Trinity, Jesus Christ as divine and human, God as Spirit in the world, the Church as the consummation of humanity’s purpose) in the heart of systematic philosophy.
Barth’s choice of theologians (and anti-theologians) to focus on is at times surprising. Rousseau and Novalis receive long chapters although they wrote no formal theology. The reader plows through over four hundred pages of “Background” before arriving at the “History” that begins with Schleiermacher. For readers in the Anglo-American world, the inclusion of figures like Wegscheider, de Wette, Marheineke, Tholuck, Menken, Schweizer, Dorner, Müller, Rothe, Hofman, Beck, Vilmar, and Kohlbrügge will feel dated. Perhaps these were theologians that Barth encountered in his education, but with a few exceptions, they are rarely read in N. American theological schools today.
The overall argument is that when the Enlightenment displaced God as the prime subject matter of theology and constricted the field of theology to the pious consciousness of the Christian individual, it dismantled the world-altering claim of the Christian message. Most of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century theology (traditional and liberal) made Christianity safe for the rising European bourgeoisie to ground their lives in both piety and science, conventional morality and conservative politics, their Christian heritage and modern disdain for the pre-Enlightenment worlds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. By aiming to be both modern and Christian, Protestant theologians read the Bible and classic creeds and confessions in highly selective ways that tended to reduce Christianity to a superior moral way of life defanged of doctrines like human depravity, supernatural miracles, and promises of eschatological transformation of the cosmos. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount replaced the Christ of the Gospel of John as a moral exemplar to be emulated, less emphasized as the Savior from sinfulness. Classic doctrines like original sin, God as Trinity, Jesus’ divinity, atonement by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, were revised to reassure well-educated Europeans that their moral wills were free, their scientific reasoning was sound, their critical sense of history could distinguish myth from fact, and their colonial empires were God’s instrument to extend the Gospel to all nations.
To read Barth’s lectures today undermines some of the standard ways his theology has been presented to theological students in survey courses of modern Christian thought. The Swiss theologian is often categorized as “neo-orthodox,” as one who aimed to recover classic Christian dogmas (God as Trinity) that offended modern critical reason as if the point of being a Christian today is to be “orthodox,” to have the right opinions about certain doctrines. In fact, Barth is just as critical of those who defended orthodoxy in the 1700 and 1800s while he casts doubt on the revisionists like Schleiermacher.
The early Barth of the WWI years and 1920s is also presented as a radical eschatological theologian who turned away from human history as the field of Christian interpretation. In fact, these lectures show how deeply he cared about the history of the modern world, church history, and the history of dogmatics. In the chapters on Lessing, Hegel, Baur, and Strauss, Barth showed his interest in the quest for the historical Jesus and how esp. Strauss raised methodological issues in historical research on Christian origins that were not yet settled in the 1920s. These chapters and others also undermine the claim that with his ground-breaking Epistle to the Romans (1919, 1921) Barth jettisoned historical- and literary-critical exegesis of the Bible for a distinctive “pneumatic” exegesis. If he had done so, he would have treated the Biblicists like Gottfried Menken (1768-1831) more as an example than a warning.
In the very first lecture, Barth makes a crucial claim: “There is no past in the Church, so there is no past in theology. ‘In him they all live’” (17). Along the way, he acknowledges there is an eighteenth-century Christian that lives on within each of us (e.g., esp. for Europeans and Americans with a strong sense of individual identity, personal freedom, and autonomy), and a nineteenth-century believer in us that wants to occupy the middle ground between devotion and critical thinking (Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, Hans Küng, and other twentieth-century theologians were just such mediating or middle-ground theologians). He gives many examples of nineteenth-century theologians who saw themselves as traditionalists whose methods and principles were as liberal as Schleiermacher. This reminds us that our own theologies today are inevitably influenced and even captive to our own age than we can be aware.
In the concluding paragraphs of many of the chapters, the reader begins to get a sense of the theological vision that set Barth apart from his teachers and many of his contemporaries. His “wholly other” foundation for theology was deeply theo-centric, focused on the living God who acts in history and who makes possible all the conditions for human awareness of God. For Barth the Gospel is not deciphered from the testimony of religious and Christian experience but revealed in the Bible as read and proclaimed in the Christian church and summed up in classic creeds and confessions of faith. The point of contact between God and humanity is not found in the depths of human reason, piety, or morality but in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ as witnessed to by the Scriptures. A renewed Protestant theology should be more critical of the human condition than the Enlightenment’s anthropology and nineteenth-century humanism (Barth notes that European enslavement of Africans flourished in the 1700s along with the emergence of global missionary work). And such theology should be more positive about the prospects for humanity since God became and is fully human in Jesus Christ. In the Bible, classic Christian creeds, and the theology of the Reformers, Barth found truth claims proclaimed more persuasively than all the apologetic theologies of the past. Classic Christian sources diagnosed the wickedness of “man’s inhumanity to man” (to racial others, women, children, nature), and offered a transformative alternative in the new reality inaugurated in God’s covenant with the descendants of Abraham and Sarah extended to the nations in Jesus Christ. Considering God’s graciousness to human sinners, Barth called upon his readers not to pass final judgment on the theologians of the past (even D. F. Strauss) but to learn from their errors and seek to renew the work of dogmatics in our times.
Robert A. Cathey (McCormick Theological Seminary)
History . Trans. anon. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1973; London: SCM Press, 1959, 1972. 669 p.
In 1979, I was first required to read Barth’s history of modern theology to read in a course on “The Liberal Spirit” taught by George Stroup at Princeton Theological Seminary. As a survey of modern Christian thought, it has much to teach regarding the eighteenth century and its strong influence on Protestant scholars, liberal and conservative, in the 1800s. In fact, some of the best historical work in these lectures by Barth first given in the 1920s deals with the Enlightenment and its Pelegian anthropology, its optimistic perspective on European “man’s” capacities and potential. One wishes that Barth had had a second semester of such lectures to give an overview of nineteenth-century theology as comprehensive as his work on the 1700s.
The author was highly selective in the figures surveyed and I was struck by those whom he left out of account, esp. Kierkegaard. We learn (almost) nothing about Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche although their writings will haunt twentieth-century thought. He limits Protestant theology to the German-speaking world of Germany and Switzerland, ignoring the Anglo-American world, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, etc.
He builds his case indirectly for a radical new direction in theology after the long nineteenth century of 1800-1914. By showing how the Enlightenment vitiated Protestant belief and practice and how the nineteenth century accommodated the Gospel to modern (European) culture, he argues that Protestant theology must proceed on a “wholly other” foundation than that laid upon reason and human experience by our predecessors. He cast a critical eye upon the Pietists, Rationalists, Revivalists, and Biblicists as well as the liberals (Hegel, Schleiermacher, and their followers) from the perspective of the Bible, the Reformers, and the classic Christian creeds and Protestant confessions of faith. But his sources of criticism include the radical skeptical voices of Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss who, according to Barth, undermined the liberal project of accommodation to modern thought from within. He finds in Kant an ally who philosophically undermined the project of natural theology by his critique of the limits of theoretical reason, and who thus made a clearing for biblical theology to recover its voice. He finds in Hegel a stronger will to the truth than Schleiermacher, and the last great attempt to ensconce classic claims of theology (revelation in history, God as Trinity, Jesus Christ as divine and human, God as Spirit in the world, the Church as the consummation of humanity’s purpose) in the heart of systematic philosophy.
Barth’s choice of theologians (and anti-theologians) to focus on is at times surprising. Rousseau and Novalis receive long chapters although they wrote no formal theology. The reader plows through over four hundred pages of “Background” before arriving at the “History” that begins with Schleiermacher. For readers in the Anglo-American world, the inclusion of figures like Wegscheider, de Wette, Marheineke, Tholuck, Menken, Schweizer, Dorner, Müller, Rothe, Hofman, Beck, Vilmar, and Kohlbrügge will feel dated. Perhaps these were theologians that Barth encountered in his education, but with a few exceptions, they are rarely read in N. American theological schools today.
The overall argument is that when the Enlightenment displaced God as the prime subject matter of theology and constricted the field of theology to the pious consciousness of the Christian individual, it dismantled the world-altering claim of the Christian message. Most of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century theology (traditional and liberal) made Christianity safe for the rising European bourgeoisie to ground their lives in both piety and science, conventional morality and conservative politics, their Christian heritage and modern disdain for the pre-Enlightenment worlds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. By aiming to be both modern and Christian, Protestant theologians read the Bible and classic creeds and confessions in highly selective ways that tended to reduce Christianity to a superior moral way of life defanged of doctrines like human depravity, supernatural miracles, and promises of eschatological transformation of the cosmos. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount replaced the Christ of the Gospel of John as a moral exemplar to be emulated, less emphasized as the Savior from sinfulness. Classic doctrines like original sin, God as Trinity, Jesus’ divinity, atonement by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, were revised to reassure well-educated Europeans that their moral wills were free, their scientific reasoning was sound, their critical sense of history could distinguish myth from fact, and their colonial empires were God’s instrument to extend the Gospel to all nations.
To read Barth’s lectures today undermines some of the standard ways his theology has been presented to theological students in survey courses of modern Christian thought. The Swiss theologian is often categorized as “neo-orthodox,” as one who aimed to recover classic Christian dogmas (God as Trinity) that offended modern critical reason as if the point of being a Christian today is to be “orthodox,” to have the right opinions about certain doctrines. In fact, Barth is just as critical of those who defended orthodoxy in the 1700 and 1800s while he casts doubt on the revisionists like Schleiermacher.
The early Barth of the WWI years and 1920s is also presented as a radical eschatological theologian who turned away from human history as the field of Christian interpretation. In fact, these lectures show how deeply he cared about the history of the modern world, church history, and the history of dogmatics. In the chapters on Lessing, Hegel, Baur, and Strauss, Barth showed his interest in the quest for the historical Jesus and how esp. Strauss raised methodological issues in historical research on Christian origins that were not yet settled in the 1920s. These chapters and others also undermine the claim that with his ground-breaking Epistle to the Romans (1919, 1921) Barth jettisoned historical- and literary-critical exegesis of the Bible for a distinctive “pneumatic” exegesis. If he had done so, he would have treated the Biblicists like Gottfried Menken (1768-1831) more as an example than a warning.
In the very first lecture, Barth makes a crucial claim: “There is no past in the Church, so there is no past in theology. ‘In him they all live’” (17). Along the way, he acknowledges there is an eighteenth-century Christian that lives on within each of us (e.g., esp. for Europeans and Americans with a strong sense of individual identity, personal freedom, and autonomy), and a nineteenth-century believer in us that wants to occupy the middle ground between devotion and critical thinking (Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, Hans Küng, and other twentieth-century theologians were just such mediating or middle-ground theologians). He gives many examples of nineteenth-century theologians who saw themselves as traditionalists whose methods and principles were as liberal as Schleiermacher. This reminds us that our own theologies today are inevitably influenced and even captive to our own age than we can be aware.
In the concluding paragraphs of many of the chapters, the reader begins to get a sense of the theological vision that set Barth apart from his teachers and many of his contemporaries. His “wholly other” foundation for theology was deeply theo-centric, focused on the living God who acts in history and who makes possible all the conditions for human awareness of God. For Barth the Gospel is not deciphered from the testimony of religious and Christian experience but revealed in the Bible as read and proclaimed in the Christian church and summed up in classic creeds and confessions of faith. The point of contact between God and humanity is not found in the depths of human reason, piety, or morality but in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ as witnessed to by the Scriptures. A renewed Protestant theology should be more critical of the human condition than the Enlightenment’s anthropology and nineteenth-century humanism (Barth notes that European enslavement of Africans flourished in the 1700s along with the emergence of global missionary work). And such theology should be more positive about the prospects for humanity since God became and is fully human in Jesus Christ. In the Bible, classic Christian creeds, and the theology of the Reformers, Barth found truth claims proclaimed more persuasively than all the apologetic theologies of the past. Classic Christian sources diagnosed the wickedness of “man’s inhumanity to man” (to racial others, women, children, nature), and offered a transformative alternative in the new reality inaugurated in God’s covenant with the descendants of Abraham and Sarah extended to the nations in Jesus Christ. Considering God’s graciousness to human sinners, Barth called upon his readers not to pass final judgment on the theologians of the past (even D. F. Strauss) but to learn from their errors and seek to renew the work of dogmatics in our times.
Robert A. Cathey (McCormick Theological Seminary)
July 16, 2024
BARTH'S HISTORICAL "TORSO" SURVEY OF 18TH-19TH CENTURY THEOLOGIANS
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian who wrote many crucially-important theological works (e.g., 'Church Dogmatics'). He wrote in the Foreword to the original 1946 edition, "This is not a new book. Indeed, it is a relatively old work. During my time in Basle I was unable to continue and improve the lectures on the history of modern Protestant theology ... The reader... will find all sorts of gaps that I would not leave open today... I have allowed publication because I have constantly had occasion to wish and suggest that the attitude and approach of the younger generations of Protestant theologians to the period of the Church that is just past might be rather different from that which they now often seem to regard...as the norm."
Barth deals with Rousseau, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Novalis, Hegel, Schliermacher, Wegscheider, de Wette, Mahreineke, Baur, Tholuck, Menken, Feuerbach, Strauss, Schweizer, Dorner, Muller, Rothe, Hormann, Beck, Vilmar, Kohlbrugge, Blumhardt, and Ritschl. (In fact, the German title of the book was 'From Rousseau to Ritschl.')
He notes, "By the phrase 'problem of theology,' I mean the subject-matter of theology... It is a matter of God and his revelation... It is a matter of this man being in the Church as the place of organ of the covenant... It is a matter of a book, the Bible, in which everything is documented and told to us." (Pg. 80)
He asserts that "The factor which is decisive in making a theology does not belong to the motifs whose presence can be asserted or denied in anyone's work... The Christian quality of a theology ... is not on the same plane with the motifs of a theology that can truly be vouched for. I say all this in opposition to Brunner." (Pg. 428) He argues that "A bold apologetics proves to a particular generation the intellectual necessity of the theological principles taken from the Bible or from church dogma or from both; a more cautious apologetics proves at least their intellectual possibility." (Pg. 440)
He makes the following five points: "if we conceive of the Christian faith as a ... matter of history, (do we not) destroy it as faith?"; are not the New Testament records "useless as 'sources' of a pragmatically comprehensible picture of a man and of a life?"; "It is not a fact that a 'historical Jesus'... has nothing at all to do with the faith of the Apostles?"; does not a historian aiming at a "Life of Jesus" either "give a moralizing interpretation, or, like Strauss, he has to conceive of Jesus as a noble spiritual fanatic." (Pg. 565-566)
At least half of these German theologians are of little importance to most Americans. But whether you read this book as an introduction to them, or as an interesting window into Barth's thought, it is well worth the reading.
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian who wrote many crucially-important theological works (e.g., 'Church Dogmatics'). He wrote in the Foreword to the original 1946 edition, "This is not a new book. Indeed, it is a relatively old work. During my time in Basle I was unable to continue and improve the lectures on the history of modern Protestant theology ... The reader... will find all sorts of gaps that I would not leave open today... I have allowed publication because I have constantly had occasion to wish and suggest that the attitude and approach of the younger generations of Protestant theologians to the period of the Church that is just past might be rather different from that which they now often seem to regard...as the norm."
Barth deals with Rousseau, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Novalis, Hegel, Schliermacher, Wegscheider, de Wette, Mahreineke, Baur, Tholuck, Menken, Feuerbach, Strauss, Schweizer, Dorner, Muller, Rothe, Hormann, Beck, Vilmar, Kohlbrugge, Blumhardt, and Ritschl. (In fact, the German title of the book was 'From Rousseau to Ritschl.')
He notes, "By the phrase 'problem of theology,' I mean the subject-matter of theology... It is a matter of God and his revelation... It is a matter of this man being in the Church as the place of organ of the covenant... It is a matter of a book, the Bible, in which everything is documented and told to us." (Pg. 80)
He asserts that "The factor which is decisive in making a theology does not belong to the motifs whose presence can be asserted or denied in anyone's work... The Christian quality of a theology ... is not on the same plane with the motifs of a theology that can truly be vouched for. I say all this in opposition to Brunner." (Pg. 428) He argues that "A bold apologetics proves to a particular generation the intellectual necessity of the theological principles taken from the Bible or from church dogma or from both; a more cautious apologetics proves at least their intellectual possibility." (Pg. 440)
He makes the following five points: "if we conceive of the Christian faith as a ... matter of history, (do we not) destroy it as faith?"; are not the New Testament records "useless as 'sources' of a pragmatically comprehensible picture of a man and of a life?"; "It is not a fact that a 'historical Jesus'... has nothing at all to do with the faith of the Apostles?"; does not a historian aiming at a "Life of Jesus" either "give a moralizing interpretation, or, like Strauss, he has to conceive of Jesus as a noble spiritual fanatic." (Pg. 565-566)
At least half of these German theologians are of little importance to most Americans. But whether you read this book as an introduction to them, or as an interesting window into Barth's thought, it is well worth the reading.
February 7, 2017
Fascinating and very useful while studying full time. I'm not sure what I'd make of it now, 16 years on.
April 15, 2012
Very worth it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews