but are social and universal. No wonder that Barth repeatedly relates the Revelation of John, chapter 21, to the proclaimed revelation of the new world: “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men! The Holy Spirit makes a new heaven and a new earth and, therefore, new men, new families, new relationships, new politics.”255 God makes a new politics. So God’s action is political. The unity between knowledge and interest can arrive in this discovery of the Bible when this political interest is brought explicitly to social consciousness and defined in accordance with it. Barth seeks in Bible just such an actual political orientation of human action as in the revolutionary situation of 1918. This is also a hermeneutical aspect for Barth that directs him to knowledge and understanding by putting together the newspaper and the Bible. This social-historical contemporaneity retains a fundamental significance for Barth’s hermeneutics regarding exegesis and his understanding of the Word of God. This contemporaneity will become manifest in his commentary on Romans. Barth argues for a conversion to the Bible from the inside out, from its own subject matter to what lies beyond.
A new world, namely, the world of God, is in the Bible. It is a spirit in the Bible. God drives us to the primary matter, whether we want it or not. The Holy Scripture interprets itself despite our human limitations. We must dare to follow this urge, spirit, and current in the Bible. Herein Barth conceptualizes a hermeneutical spirit, “scripturae ipsius interpres,” in terms of the world-effective reality. The resurrection creates its world-effectiveness through the constitution of a subject of the new, in other words, a “solid subject,” in Ernst Bloch’s sense. That is the meaning as the new physicality.256 The new world in the Bible is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is of social and political significance. The resurrection is not to be exchanged for the immanent law of history or as the law of dialectical materialism. However, in the effective realm of the resurrection, God has no spectators, because the resurrection is the constitution of the revolutionary subject. Given this fact, totaliter aliter in Barth’s view mediates the reality of God and the reality of world, and grounds God’s presence in society.
Totaliter aliter is not a metaphysical or distancing concept but a qualified concept with a particularly social content. Henceforth the new world in the Bible, the new world of God, implies the revolutionary overthrowing of the existing bourgeois society. Totaliter aliter is originally the new society in the thought of Barth in contradiction to the declining society, and the original in this contradiction is God. As to the concept of totaliter aliter Barth reports: “It was Thurneysen who whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, while we were alone together: ‘What we need for preaching, instruction and pastoral care is a “wholly other” theological foundation.’”257 Human praxis must be shaped in correspondence to the breakthrough of God, which means the new world. Human political action has a task and a duty to participate in God’s new creation of the world. From this standpoint, Barth articulates his theopolitical slogan: “waiting for the kingdom of God.”258 This waiting should not be misunderstood as a passive and unpolitical theology, a so-called waiting-room theology; for being just such a theology Ragaz ridiculed it.259
By contrast, it is a deeply engaged commitment and a revolutionary stance in expectation of the coming kingdom of God. Barth’s theology of expectation is well articulated in his lecture of 1922, “Not und Verheissung der christlichen Verkündigung.” Schellong views Barth’s theology of waiting for God in light of veni creator Spiritus. What is decisive for Schellong’s approach to Barth is the sighing call for the coming of the Holy Spirit. “Sighing: veni creator spiritus! is now once according to Rom 8 full of hope more than triumph, although one would already have it.”260
In 1916 Barth began working on his commentary on Romans, which was eventually released in 1919. During this period of working on Romans, Barth became more critical of the religious socialists as well as liberal theology, although he continued his active involvement in the SPS. At the end of 1917 he ceased his involvement in the religious-socialist movement. Barth and Thurneysen resigned from the committee from the conference in Olten, which had resolved on the reorganization of religious socialism on December 10.261 When it came to a relation between socialism and Christendom, Thurneysen mentions Blumhardt and Kutter as two men who had heard the command of the time and fulfilled it, although not denying the inspiration of Ragaz.262 For Thurneysen the whole problem of ethics and its related eschatological question not only would be a question of the art of theological dialectics, but must be rolled up in a completely new way, forced by the real dialectics of life as such.263
Likewise, Barth’s socialism can be expressed theologically and eschatologically in light of the kingdom of God or the absolute Revolution of God. His socialist praxis, therefore, maintains a theological character and contour. In this regard we notice that Barth would stand closer to Ragaz politically, but with a theological affinity to Kutter. But Barth hesitated with religious socialists in general. The term “Revolution of God” was generally used in the circle of religious socialism. Barth appropriated this term from religious socialism in order to develop, clarify, and radicalize his theological position and political radicalism in his Romans I and II in particular. Herein we discern Barth’s position “on the most extreme left side” within the SPS. When it comes to Barth’s socialist activity within the SPS in Safenwil, he distanced himself from Zimmerwald leftists. But given his friendship with Fritz Lieb (1892–1970), we can assume that Barth’s position was in line with left-wing radical socialists within the SPS at this time. Later he would move toward the Second and a half International under the leadership of Robert Grimm, which was formed in protest against the Third International.264
Later in his lecture on Schleiermacher, Barth recalled his relationship with Kutter and Ragaz:
what we needed for preaching, instruction, and pastoral care was a “wholly other” theological foundation. It seemed impossible to proceed any further on the basis of Schleiermacher . . . But where else could we turn? Kutter was also impossible, because he, like Ragaz later on, would have nothing to do with theology, but only wanted to know and to preach the “living God.” He was also impossible for me, because, with all due respect for him and his starting point, his “living God” had become extremely suspicious to me after his wartime book Reden an die deutsche Nation [Speeches to the German Nation].265
1. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 34.
2. Ibid., 37.
3. Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1905–1909, 74.
4. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life, 44.
5. For Ritschl “the Christian idea of the kingdom of God denotes the association of mankind—an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible—through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations” (Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 98).
6. Besides, there was another reason for Barth’s ill feeling against Ritschl.
