To what extent could he serve as a pastor and at the same time as a practicing socialist? In a lecture addressing “Religion and Socialism” in December 1915, Barth clarified the reason for his socialistic cause in a rather confessional tone:
I have become a socialist in a very simple way, and I live socialism in a very simple way. Because I would like to believe in God and God’s kingdom, I place myself at the point where I see something of God’s kingdom break through. . . . I think I can see the mistakes of socialism and its proponents very clearly. But much more clearly I see in the grounding thought, in the essential endeavor of socialism, a revelation of God which I must recognize before all and about which I must be delighted. The new society, which is based on the foundation of community and justice, instead of capriciousness and the law of the jungle, the new order of work in the sense of common activity of all for all instead of in the sense of exploitation through egotism of the individual, the new connection of humans as humans over the barrier of class and nations . . . finally the way to this goal: the simple brotherhood and solidarity [that appear] first among the poor and underprivileged of all countries—I must recognize all these new [features], which socialism brings it into political and economic life, as something new from God’s side. . . . Socialism—despite its imperfections, which people should discuss calmly and openly—is for me one of the most gratifying signs for the fact that God’s kingdom does not stand still, that God is at work, and hence I may not and cannot stand against it indifferently. . . . From the sentiment of duty, that tells me: this is where you belong, if you take God in earnest. Through my membership in the Social Democratic Party I believe to confess a very important point in complete plainness to myself and to my parish that God must come to honor. . . . People may cling to religion and still associate themselves with another party or remain without a party. . . . But I cannot find the kingdom of God there, where people again and again make money more important than the human beings, where possession is again and again the scale of all value, where people set the nation over humanity in anxiety and small-mindedness, where people again and again believe more in the present than in the future.223
To overcome compromise or accommodation of Christianity and socialism there was a need for a renewal of the so-called Christian morality and so-called socialist politics. In a lecture, “What Does It Mean to Become a Socialist?” on August 16, 1915, Barth expressed his intention to renew socialism regarding the failure of socialists in the Second International and their wrong collaboration with the War policy. According to Barth,
We would like to become dangerous to the structures, otherwise we may pack up. Hence: “socialist personalities.” As Kautski thinks, is the idea of a socialist personality one that changes the conditions, bourgeois ideology? Against this view Barth writes: “Historical materialism in the sense of Marx does not have the form of merely economic course, but more so the emerging independent of the living human over against matter. Within the circumstances and transcending them, the human wants to rise up. The relation is that of the interrelation. The ideals may be an illusory bubble of economic development; but the human is the most real and stands above economy. That has been overlooked and there was a lack of depth in socialist praxis (not by the founders of socialism, cf. Engels).” “Not: first better humans, then better situation. Not: first better situation, then better humans. Both of them together and interwoven—we need human beings, grasped by the transcendental power of the socialist truth. Only the redeemed can redeem. The new human being must be created.”224
Barth’s “Socialist Speeches” are evidence of the fact that Barth “eagerly read the writings of Marxist theoreticians from Marx through Kautski to Lenin.”225 Meanwhile, a meeting with Blumhardt became a remarkable event for Barth at this time. Thurneysen introduced Barth to Blumhardt himself at Bad Boll. Of course before Berlin and Marburg, in his Tübingen period, Barth had already visited Bad Boll a couple times. Barth’s meeting with Blumhardt this time was different in its significance from his previous one. He stayed in Bad Boll from the tenth to the fifteenth of April 1916. In Blumhardt’s message, Barth noticed that “the hurrying and the waiting, the worldly and the divine, the present and the future met and were united, kept supplementing one another, seeking and finding one another.” “What is more fundamental is Blumhardt’s way of connecting knowledge of God with the Christian hope for the future. God is the radical renewal of the world, and at the same time becomes completely and utterly new.” “The new element, the New Testament element, which appeared again in Boll can be summed up in the one word: hope.”226
Through appropriating Blumhardt’s message, Barth tried to overcome a controversy between Kutter and Ragaz. Kutter put more emphasis on the prophetic knowledge of the living God. Ragaz was more concerned with active discipleship along the lines of the Franciscan ideal of poverty. In the face of the outbreak of the First World War, Kutter was moved with a summons to tranquil reappraisal. But Ragaz responded to the war with an appeal for pacifist action. Kutter never became a Social Democrat, while Ragaz became one in 1913. Barth feels himself more in line with Kutter’s radical tranquility without ruling out Ragaz’s energetic tackling of social problems.
Barth’s position moved toward the eschatological question of Christian hope in the Blumhardtian sense. Thereby Barth took God seriously in quite a different way than either Kutter or Ragaz. “The world is the world. But God is God”—this “but” remains because the world is to be transformed by this “but”: Something new is expected from God. As Thurneysen reports, the slogan “The world is the world. But God is God” was accepted and interpreted in Barth’s own way; Blumhardt’s message of the kingdom of God became an important leitmotif for Barth.227 This concern about God, which is associated with Barth’s understanding of radical socialism, functioned as a critical pole to self-destructive bourgeois society and empirical Social Democracy, which failed with the outbreak of the war. Drawing upon a concept of the kingdom of God, Barth’s socialism is characterized by the socially transcendent and critical utopia, in contrast to the existing social order. Barth’s emphasis on God as the absolute Novum, his skepticism of human self-righteousness, and his practical concern about religious socialism would be the point of departure for Barth in his dialectical theology in distinguishing between God and humans.
On January 1, 1916, Barth reported to Thurneysen on his work in Safenwil: “Imagine! I have the workers here enlisted again in a course on the ordinary practical questions (time of work, women’s work and the like), every Tuesday, making full sense of the dossier on these things that I at one time assembled.”228 Although, regarding “the formation of trade unions as one of his chief political concerns,” Barth had less interest in Marxist principles and ideology as a worldview than in practical social questions associated with the life of workers. “The aspect of a socialism which interested me most in Safenwil was the problem of the trade union movement. I studied it for years and also helped to form three flourishing trade unions in Safenwil (where there had been none before). They remained when I left. That was my modest involvement in the workers’ question and my very limited interest in socialism. For the most part it was only practical.”229
On January 17, 1916, “a letter from factory-owner Hochuli” arrived. The occasion for it was Barth’s sermon of January 16 and his address at the confirmation of youth two days earlier, in which the pastor had taken issue with a celebration hosted by Mr. Hochuli. Mr. Hochuli considered the expressions used in the sermon and in the address to be “slanderous and discrediting.” He demanded their retraction within three days. If the pastor refused to take back his remarks, he threatened to file suit. Barth reported to Thurneysen in a letter on January 10: “Our factory Owner Hochli hosted a drinking party for his 500 employees on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding, and all of them, including my confirmation youth were totally drunk, and conducted themselves
