href="#ulink_6641e85e-6e06-5a28-a6e9-c630a9419f4d">203 This above-mentioned milieu was the situation of the Swiss Socialist Party when Barth joined there.
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen: World War I and Socialism
In his curriculum vitae, which Barth formulated in the evangelical faculty at the University of Münster (1927) we read: “First the outbreak of the world war brought a turn.” This refers to Barth’s turn to theological work in a determined perspective and expectation, that is, from the standpoint of the kingdom of God toward which the two Blumhardts’ message of Christian hope was principally oriented.204 Barth’s break with his theological teachers and neo-Protestantism began with the outbreak of World War I. In August 1914, counter to Barth’s expectations from Social Democracy in his Die Hilfe 1913, socialist representatives in the Reichstag voted to support the war policy and grant war credit finances to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. German troops invaded Belgium. Then, to Barth’s amazement, ninety-three German intellectuals published a petition in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policies and government. As Barth remembered,
One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II and his counselors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, 19th century theology no longer held any future.205
Barth experienced the twilight of the gods as he witnessed Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken, and the like positioning themselves with respect to the new situation. All his German teachers, with the exception of Rade, were compromised in the face of ideological war. “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation, and discovered how religion and scholarship could be changed completely, into intellectual 42cm cannons.” “The ethical failure of the liberal theologians in Germany has to do with a failure of their exegetical and dogmatic presupposition.” For Barth, “a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching,” which he regarded “to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.”206
Thurneysen was pastor in the Aargau in the congregation of Leutwill from 1913 until 1920. He reported that Barth was preoccupied with the Holy Scripture, erecting the tablets of the Bible before him and reading the books of expositors from Calvin though the Biblicists to the modern critical interpretation of the Bible. On the basis of the Bible, Barth’s theological thinking was deeply related to the life of humankind, namely, the wholeness of human existence from the beginning. In Thurneysen’s characterization, “Karl Barth as a proclaimer of the biblical Word had also a very vigorous and concrete word to speak to the actual political problems in the sphere of his community and his country and in the context of the world events of those days.”207 Through his open character and by introducing Barth to his large circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, Thurneysen was a stimulus to Barth. Barth came into contact with religious socialist conferences through Thurneysen. Barth’s acquaintances with Kutter and Ragaz were also initiated by his lifelong friend, Thurneysen. From 1914 to 1916 Barth corresponded with Ragaz on a regular basis.208 Thurneysen’s writing on Dostoevsky, his work on “Socialism and Christendom,”209 and his project on new homiletics affected and contributed to the development of Barth’s dialectical theology.
In his letter to Thurneysen (September 4, 1914) Barth expressed his opinion against the war. “Dei providentia—hominum confusion . . . The manner in which you make the ‘wrath of God’ positively fruitful is clear. The formula ‘God does not will the war’ is perhaps misleading. God does not will egotism. But he does will that egotism should reveal itself in war and become itself the judgment . . . I would relate the wrath of God yet more strongly to the ‘godless existence’ itself and would think of social injustice and war as symptoms or consequences of the latter.”210 In a sermon from August 1914, Barth denounced the war as “unrighteous, sinful, unnecessary, and stemming only from the evil of human nature. The war is not a natural phenomenon like the sun and the rain. It is not inevitable or insurmountable. One may and should expect much more from God. In the war God’s punishment has come upon us.”211 Still, Barth was not moved by Christian pacifism.
After finding Herrmann’s signature on the war manifesto, Barth expressed his disappointment to him.
Especially with you, Herr Professor (and through you with the great masters—Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher), we learned to acknowledge “experience” as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion. In your school it became clear to us what it means to “experience” God in Jesus. Now however, in answer to our doubts, an “experience” which is completely new to us is held out to us by German Christians, an allegedly religious war “experience”; i.e., the fact that German Christians “experience” their war as a holy war is supposed to bring us to silence, if not demand reverence from us. Where do you stand in relation to this argument and to the war theology which lies behind it?212
Barth’s critique of war theologians, especially Harnack, traces back to Schleiermacher. “He [Schleiermacher] was unmasked. In a decisive way all the theology expressed in the manifesto and everything that followed it (even in the Christliche Welt) proved to be founded and governed by him.”213 In addition to his criticism of liberal theology, Barth expressed his bitter disappointment with socialism. Although he expected from Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! that socialism would serve as “a kind of hammer of God,” socialism also swung into line. “In the cathedral in Basel the socialists of all lands had solemnly assured each other and the world that they would be able to offer effective resistance to the outbreak of any new war.” Despite the socialist decision of resistance to the outbreak of war, what really happened was “the apostasy of the party,” and especially the “failure of German Social Democracy in the face of the ideology of war.” The status of neutrality in Switzerland required the Swiss in World War I to develop a high degree of military defense preparation. During wartime one or another of the church board members in Safenwil was absent due to military service. It was recalled that at the mobilization of the Swiss Army, Barth was at the Safenwil Railway Station every morning in order to give his good wishes to those who were called to military duty.214
However, despite his criticism of Social Democracy, Barth joined the SPS on January 26, 1915 as a token of his solidarity with it. Barth articulates his intent: “I have now become a member of the Social Democratic Party. Just because I set such emphasis Sunday by Sunday upon the last things, it was no longer possible for me personally to remain suspended in the clouds above the present evil world but rather it had to be demonstrated here and now that faith in the Greatest does not exclude but rather includes within it work and suffering in the realm of the imperfect.”215 Pejorative terms such as “the Red pastor of Safenwil” or “Bolshevik” poured down upon Barth. But “the Aargau Workers’ Party was hardly a dangerous enclave of the Red International.”216
As
