The theologian who refused Hitler's oath ended up on the cover of Time
In 1935 only two professors at Bonn refused to swear loyalty to Hitler, and Karl Barth was one of them. The Swiss pastor had already drafted almost all of the Barmen Declaration against Nazi influence on the church. By 1962 his unfinished Church Dogmatics had made him famous enough to feature on Time's cover.
Barth was born in Basel on 10 May 1886, son of Fritz Barth, a theology professor and pastor who hoped his son would follow a conservative line. Karl instead sought out liberal Protestant training at Bern and then Berlin, where teachers such as Adolf von Harnack approached Christianity through historical criticism and dialogue with science and philosophy.
From 1911 to 1921 he served the village church at Safenwil in Aargau, where his politics earned him the nickname of the Red Pastor. The break with his teachers came in August 1914, when he found Harnack's name among the signatories of a manifesto by ninety-three German intellectuals backing the war effort. Barth decided he could no longer trust their reading of the Bible or of history. A 1915 visit to Christoph Blumhardt, a Christian community leader and Social Democrat, pushed him toward a theology that starts from God's presence and purpose rather than human experience.
He began a commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans in the summer of 1916; the first edition appeared at the end of 1918, and a heavily reworked second edition in 1921 announced an open rupture with liberal theology and won him international attention. Professorships followed at Göttingen, Münster and Bonn. Göttingen also brought Charlotte von Kirschbaum into his life as assistant, secretary and eventually lover, though he had married the violinist Nelly Hoffmann in 1913.
In 1934, as German Protestants wrestled with the Nazi state, Barth wrote all but one phrase of the Barmen Declaration, the founding text of the Confessing Church. Forced out of Bonn in 1935, he returned to Switzerland and kept working on the Church Dogmatics, issued between 1932 and 1967. After the war he pressed for German repentance and co-wrote the Darmstadt Declaration of 1947. His readers ranged from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the novelist Flannery O'Connor. He died on 10 December 1968.
Source: Karl Barth
