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As Herrmann defines religion “in relation to empirically demonstrable objects, the decision must be made whether the subject can hold his ground in a life which he has for himself alone, an ‘inner life.’ The awakening of the individual to a consciousness, based on itself alone, of such a life of his own is religion.”35 Revelation, as the reality of God, confronts us. What stands in opposition to the reality of revelation are traditionalism, rationalism, and mysticism.
According to Herrmann, Troeltsch “was ‘just a bit too fastidious’ to assume for himself the decoration of ‘positive.’”36 Herrmann stood in opposition to positive confessionalist theology, the liberal-freisinnig theology, and the mediating theology. Just as he critiqued metaphysics or mixed theology, he protested orthodox confessionalism. According to Herrmann, religion arises from Erlebnis (experience), which is not to be demonstrated or disputed. The religious Erlebnis is to be found in the concept of Vertrauen (trust) or Wahrhaftigkeit (trustfulness): trust in Jesus Christ as the historical fact of the person of Jesus. Religion and ethical demand are inseparably connected with the concept of Wahrhaftigkeit. The human being as an inwardly independent being has an inner dependence and a moral autonomy. Keenly aware of Feuerbach’s critique of religion as a projection of human wish fulfillment, Herrmann granted for faith a spiritual importance to historical fact: “An honest atheist stands in all circumstances closer to the Christian faith than a representative of a religion of wish, no matter how christianly it is garbed.”37
The only place where faith is to be located lies in the inner world of human consciousness. The locus of self-certifying faith consists exactly in the Erlebnis of “a communion of the soul with the living God through the mediation of Christ.”38 However, what differentiates Herrmann from mysticism is that the latter is unhistorical, seeks God in the depth of the soul, and absorbs the soul into God. What Herrmann aims at doing is Christian Erlebnis, which is bound to a historical fact, that is, to the inner life of Jesus. What constitutes our consciousness of God’s communion with us consists in the historical fact of the person of Jesus and ethical demand for the moral law. For Herrmann, the historical Jesus is the revelation of God in which faith in God is grounded. The historical Jesus in a Herrmannian sense is not to be equated with the historical Jesus in historical-critical research because a historian deals only with outer or external history. Therefore, it would be devastating to establish the basis of faith by way of historical-critical investigation.
However, for Herrmann, inner or internal history plays a more significant role for establishing faith. The historian as historian has no access to this history of spiritual effects. The inner life of Jesus is present to us as the objective fact rather than as the facticity of Jesus that the church requires. The inner life of Jesus becomes a part of our own sphere of reality. Moreover, Jesus himself becomes a real power to us when he reveals his inner life to us. What the gospel offers as the guiding principle is the inner life of Jesus himself. Revelation is not doctrine: “The inner life of Jesus is the ‘saving fact.’”39 As Herrmann stated, “historical research cannot confront us with the Savior Jesus Christ. It cannot help us to find the historical Christ whom Christians assert to be their salvation. The inner or spiritual life of Jesus which it is necessary for us to see is never in any sense a minimum of the historically demonstrable; it is a fact ‘in experiencing which one sees his own existence as bound up with the Omnipotent.’”40 The ground of faith must be in Jesus’s inner life in a historical sense that touches human hearts by evoking human trust in God.
Karl Barth’s Earliest Writings
In the autumn of 1908 Barth took up a post as an editorial assistant to the Christliche Welt, which was published under the editorship of Professor Martin Rade. Working as an assistant editor of Die Christliche Welt in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche at Marburg, Barth contributed his article titled “Modern Theology and Work for the Kingdom of God” (“Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” 1909).41 It appeared in a section of “theses and antitheses” in the Zeitschrift. (Barth’s article met opposition from two professors of practical theology, Ernst Christian Achelis at Marburg and Paul Drews at Halle.42) Herein Barth observed that his colleagues who were trained under the influence of liberal theology at Marburg and Heidelberg experienced difficulties in the beginning of parish ministry compared with those trained under a more conservative and orthodox influence at Halle and Greifswald. Barth described the reason for this difficulty by way of religious individualism and historical relativism. For Barth, conservative students drew upon authoritative doctrine as normative statements of faith, but modern theological students had no such normative statements of faith. Liberal theology stood for theory while a work for God’s kingdom stands for praxis in the form of the pastorate. In Barth’s view, liberal theology stood in contrast with the praxis of God’s kingdom. Two decisive elements (religious individualism and historical relativism), which Barth detected as the essence of the modern liberal theology, became obstacles when students trained in liberal theology encountered church praxis.43
Both the individualism of religion and the relativism of history homogenize and undermine the claim to revealed truth, whereas the concept of God’s kingdom and its praxis make a claim for the universal validity of revelation. In the framework of liberal theology, divine revelation is no longer at the center because of human claims for the truth as an individual center. Religion is grounded on personal rather than universal validity. As far as the Christian faith does not formulate the universal, responsible, and theological axiom, it strives to explore the content of the truth in terms of the personal ground of religion. Therefore the religious experience comes to the fore, and the relativity of all human knowledge precedes Christian faith, which is grounded in divine revelation.
From this basic principle of liberal theology, Barth anticipated the consequences of pluralism emerging out of the concept of Christian faith in that there takes place a subjective and religious trustfulness. All things are relative. Barth in this regard stood before the problem of value-relativism. The university-educated student of modern theology, equipped with religious individualism and historical relativism, faced a disadvantage in the ministry compared with a student of the more conservative school. The dilemma of theological value-relativism sharpened itself in regard to the problem of church praxis and its theological legitimation.
If the witness of all religious experience is accepted as the criterion of Christian discourse on God, theology must abandon an objectively true and obliging knowledge of God and claims to the truth of universality. How is it possible to come to a responsible church action in the Christian community with respect to forms and contents of various religious experiences? Would every church action and every action of religious trustfulness become legitimate in the same way on the basis of religious individualism and historical relativism? The two primary characteristics on which liberal theology is based suggest an inevitable tension between theory and praxis. In the end, liberal theology makes theologians incapable of praxis.
According to Barth, liberal theology is incapable of creating a bridge between theory and praxis. Because of its confrontation with modern science and modern culture-consciousness, liberal theology neglects the churchly character of theology.44 In order to make claims for universality in the church, liberal theology needs to be actualized in the context of church praxis and Christian faith. To overcome the limitation and dilemma of liberal theology, that is, the lack of connection between theory and praxis, Barth proposed an idea of coexistence between a more
