On Reading Karl Barth in the USA: Laudation given at the conferment of the Karl Barth Prize 2010 to Prof. George Hunsinger

For many years the mountain “stay[ed] … put while Americans came to the mountain.” This Spring, however, “the mountain at last paid a visit to America.” ² With these words Newsweek would report in 1962 on Karl Barth’s arrival in the USA. Although Barth had repeatedly been invited to the United States, it was not until he was 75 years old that he finally made his way across the Atlantic.

Barth looked with pleasure on the seven weeks he spent in the USA: ³

I can only sum up [my impressions] with the word “fantastic.” …. Yes, fantastic: the unending panorama of rivers, plains, hills and mountains between the two oceans, which I flew over by airplane or sped through by car—the deserts of Arizona, the Grand Canyon (which for good reasons I refrained from going down into), the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge—Chicago and New York with their buildings towering to heaven and their streets filled with the constant coruscating movement of countless cars, with their swarms of individuals from all countries, classes, races and walks of life—the organization and standardization of the whole of life (even of church life and of academic theology), the pertinent and sometimes almost impertinent curiosity and descriptive power of the American reporter. ⁴

Barth visited several important academic institutions, presented lectures there, and held public discussions with some of the most important theological figures of the day. Thousands came to experience the great Swiss theologian in person and to pose questions to him.

It was not only the theological guild that was eager to encounter Barth in the flesh. The broad American public was also interested in him. Time magazine featured Barth on its cover accompanied by a long story about his trip and his theological views. ⁵ On the cover Barth is depicted in a somewhat bizarre way. An empty tomb can be seen in the background with the gravestone rolled to one side and a crown of thorns lying on the ground. And there in the foreground, almost larger than life, is none other than Karl Barth, looking directly at the reader. Barth’s stress on Christology is one of the main points of the story inside, as the cover was meant to imply. One’s first impression, however, might be otherwise. It almost seems as though the Risen One were Barth himself. Barth felt uneasy about the portrayal and sought to deflect it with good humor. “In a pinch,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, the empty tomb “might represent the entrance to a wine cellar.” ⁶ As if in corroboration, a photo inside shows Barth in a Chicago nightclub, where the caption reads, “A Calvinist—but not a gloomy one.” ⁷ All in all, Barth was warmly received in the States. At the University of Chicago Divinity School he was welcomed with the words, “We are what we are, theologically because of him.” ⁸ At Princeton Theological Seminary he was given a T-shirt making him an honorary member of the school’s baseball team. ⁹

At the same time, many prominent American theologians cast a critical eye on him. It was reported of Reinhold Niebuhr that he regarded Barth’s theology as “designed for the church of the catacombs” and as “irrelevant … for America.” ¹⁰ Paul Tillich criticized Barth’s theological starting point for proceeding without taking humanity’s existential questions into account, as if it were possible to begin directly with “the eternal truth.” ¹¹

By and large, many elements of American religiosity were on a collision course with Barth’s theology. That the religious human being was in a position to discern God’s ways and to pursue them without difficulty, that American society was destined to be made analogous to God’s kingdom, ¹² and that religion was therefore a necessary means to social betterment—all these notions were at odds with Barth’s questions about human religiosity and experience. Barth obviously was aware of this. After his return to Switzerland, Barth wrote to the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, that he was wondering, if, through his presence in the States, he had been able to irritate the American casualness with which people speak about “religion.” ¹³ Christianity, Barth insisted, was not about religion but about the Word of God. ¹⁴

Today, the American theological landscape seems split into two groups: those who (still) read Barth and those who respect his historical contributions, especially his opposition to Nazism, but who otherwise see him as a reactionary thinker who in current times is not helpful anymore.

Every two years, the Union of Evangelical Churches in the German Evangelical Church awards the Karl Barth Prize. Its purpose is to keep alive the memory of Karl Barth, that provocative Reformed theologian who shaped twentieth-century theology. The idea is not to indulge in nostalgia for the old days that were perhaps truer to Barth, but rather to indicate the ongoing relevance of Barth’s theology, which even today makes the reading of his texts rich and rewarding. With the bestowal of the 2010 Karl Barth Prize on Professor George Hunsinger, the Union of Evangelical Churches in the German Evangelical Church honors an American theologian who reads Karl Barth, and who has said of himself, “I continue to read Barth because I keep learning from him.” ¹⁵ George Hunsinger, Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, has devoted the better part of his academic career to the study of Karl Barth. Having written his doctoral dissertation on the great Swiss theologian, he has produced a steady stream of publications on his theology ever since. From 1997 to 2001 he was the founding director of Princeton’s Center for Barth Studies, and since 2003 he has served as the President of the Karl Barth Society of North America. In his academic teaching he has made the study of Barth one of his main themes in order to enable American theology students to gain access to Barth’s work.

Barth’s works, of course, have appeared in English translation. Nevertheless, for American theology students—and if the truth be told, also for the German ones— getting a handle on Barth’s thought is not easy. ¹⁶ The reason is first of all because of the literary form of his texts. Hunsinger knows that reading Barth can be “discouraging,” not least because of his “long, complicated, and seemingly interminable sentences.” ¹⁷ Hunsinger attributes this difficulty, in part, to the peculiarity of the German language. The German sentence, especially when written by Karl Barth, is “like a dog that jumps into the Atlantic Ocean, swims all the way across to the other side, and climbs out at the end with a verb in his mouth!” ¹⁸ The reader may also feel overwhelmed by the sheer weight of detail in Barth’s argumentation as well as by the many instances of apparent repetition. A certain sense and taste for composition is necessary in order to discern that Barth’s apparent repetitions are really more like musical recapitulations that carry previously stated material over into new contexts in which the meaning sounds different. ¹⁹ Hunsinger has the gift of that sense and taste. His 1991 book How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology sets forth the underlying thought-forms of Barth’s magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics, in a way that makes it possible to appreciate Barth’s theological depth. It was written in 1988 at Yale University under the supervision of his teacher Hans Frei, who was one of the participants involved in the 1962 panel discussion with Barth in Chicago, and who, under H. Richard Niebuhr, had himself written one of the first major dissertations on the concept of revelation in the early Barth. ²⁰

In 2009 Hunsinger’s book was finally published in German, in a fine translation by Marianne Mühlenberg, under the title Karl Barth lesen: Eine Einführung in sein theologisches Denken. Hunsinger of course has engaged with Barth in the original German in order to make explicit the literary and logical structure of Barth’s theology. His book is driven by a passion for the beauty of Barth’s achievement. He compares the Church Dogmatics to the cathedral at Chartres. “Once one’s eyes get used to the light, one discovers that one is inside an awesome and many-splendored structure.” ²¹ Hunsinger’s theological masterpiece proceeds to lay bare Barth’s central “motifs.” In this enterprise he is like an expert tour guide who makes it possible for the viewers to appreciate the cathedral’s soaring structural engineering along with the sheltering form of its vaults. The formal motifs that structure the Church Dogmatics are called particularism, objectivism, actualism, personalism, realism, and rationalism. What might at first seem like a formalistic narrowing of Barth’s breadth proves to be a mode of interpretation that offers truly splendid insights into the refined architectonic of Barth’s thought as well as into the theological concern that inspired the construction of such a magnificent edifice, namely the relationship between God and humankind that ever and again becomes an event through God himself. ²² Ultimately Jesus Christ emerges as the center of the motifs. ²³ Unimpressed by the objection that American Protestants might have “difficulties in grasping what Barth meant by the ‘Word of God’,” ²⁴ Hunsinger proceeds on the premise that here no shortcuts can be taken. Christian theology must begin with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ as the Word of God, ²⁵ or else it is not Christian theology.

Because God’s unconditional turning to humankind is what comes first, and not the needs or distress of humanity, not human insufficiency or guilt, Christian theology begins with joy. For that reason in the USA Barth was critical of Billy Graham’s evangelistic methods. Barth had already met Graham personally in Switzerland, where he learned to look on his techniques with disfavor. “Mr. Graham begins by making people afraid,” Barth said in an interview. “I don’t think the Christian doctrine should be held like a pistol at man’s breast. Christian faith begins with joy and not with fear.” ²⁶ One senses something similar in George Hunsinger’s approach to theology; it breathes with joy over God’s unconditional Yes to humankind.

At the same time, for Professor Hunsinger as for Barth himself, neither theology nor the Christian can be permitted to retreat into the private sphere. Hunsinger constantly reads Barth as a challenge to social and political engagement. “As something whose content involves a King and a kingdom that is at once hidden and yet also to be revealed,” wrote Barth, “the Gospel is inherently political.” ²⁷ For Hunsinger as for Barth, it is crucial for political engagement to be the fruit of faith in Christ. It’s not the political which comes first, but faith in Jesus Christ. Yet since Jesus Christ, as we read in the Barmen Declaration, is “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death,” ²⁸ there is no sphere of human life which Christians can regard as independent of their faith in Christ and as not to be oriented through Christ. ²⁹ As Barth stated during his visit to Princeton, “You cannot believe in the Kingdom which [came] and will come without also being a politician. Every Christian is a politician, and the Church proclaiming the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is itself a political reality.” ³⁰ This assessment leads Hunsinger, for example, to the conviction that national interests must not be allowed to overshadow the commands of Christ. Loyalty to Christ is contradicted if Christ’s commands of justice and peace are relativized for the sake of “national security.” ³¹ Accordingly, statements like that of Richard J. Neuhaus—“we believe that America has a peculiar place in God’s promises and purposes” ³² —are repellent to George Hunsinger. He rejects such ideas decisively: “The very notion of American exceptionalism—that unlike other nations, wealth and power in our case somehow do not corrupt—is integral to the national myth. Whatever we do must be virtuous, simply because we do it.” ³³

As for Barth, so also finally for Hunsinger, the situation of prisoners is a matter of urgent concern. Because he preached regularly in the main Basel prison, Barth had requested that he be allowed to see an American prison during his visit to the USA. The “small cages” in which the prisoners had to live he considered as “the sight of Dante’s Inferno on Earth.” He stressed that the failure to build humane prisons “is in contradiction to the wonderful message on your Statue of Liberty.” ³⁴ Hunsinger shares Barth’s concern that prisoners should be treated in a way which respects they are human beings, and he has therefore become an activist against torture. In the 1980s and 1990s Hunsinger was active on the board of “American Christians for the Abolition of Torture.” And in 2006, Hunsinger founded the National Religious Campaign against Torture (NRCAT), an organization that unites Christians, Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other religions, around the goal of abolishing torture. ³⁵ Today NRCAT is recognized as a respected Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Washington. The organization’s slogan, “Torture Is a Moral Issue,” is meant to indicate that torture is a nonpartisan question, and that morality cannot be narrowed to merely private affairs. It stands over against the trend in recent decades for American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists to restrict political engagement of Christians to issues like abortion and homosexuality. What stands out about the organization Hunsinger founded is its effort to work against the “Religious Gap.” In the United States it has been customary for some time now for political values to be derived directly from religious convictions. With their strong personal piety and their traditional ideas of faith, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have been worried about themes like abortion, homosexuality, child education, marriage, and family; liberal Christians, on the other hand, who scarcely go to church and relate only with difficulty to the traditional contents of faith, struggle for peace, and human rights. One might speak pointedly of “fundamentalists without justice and liberals without doctrine.” ³⁶ The two camps look on one another with suspicion and rarely enter into conversation. With his campaign against torture, Hunsinger has succeeded in building a bridge between these camps. Hunsinger struggles for a Christianity in which personal faith in God and political engagement for a more humane world are not in opposition. “Happily,” he writes, “between evangelical truth and social justice we need not choose.” ³⁷

Accordingly, Hunsinger is dedicated to his church. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), and has led an adult Bible study every Sunday in his local congregation for more than 15 years. He was the primary author of the new Presbyterian catechism. ³⁸

During the 1962 panel discussion in Chicago, Barth emphasized what he thought necessary for American theology. If he were an American theologian, Barth would develop for America a theology of freedom. It would be a freedom from every inferiority complex over against good old Europe as well as a freedom from every superiority complex over against Asia and Africa. It would strive to be a freedom “for … humanity.” He continued,

Being an American theologian, I would then look at the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor …. That lady needs a little or, perhaps, a good bit of demythologization. Nevertheless, maybe she may also be seen and interpreted and understood as a symbol of true theology, not of liberty, but of freedom. Well, it would be necessarily, a theology of freedom. Of that freedom to which the Son frees us [cf. John 8:36], and which as His gift, is the one real human freedom. My last question for this evening is this: Will such a specific American theology one day arise? ³⁹

With the theology of George Hunsinger in view, we may gladly say, just so has it come to pass.