The Letter to the Romans (Barth)

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Desk in the former rectory in Safenwil, with a copy of the manuscript of the Roman letters
Church in Safenwil (2010)

“The Letter to the Romans” is a major work by the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth . It is a commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans . At the time of writing, Barth was the village pastor in Safenwil , Canton Aargau . The first version appeared at the end of 1918 (dated 1919), the second version at the end of 1921 (dated 1922).

Barth already made the first version widely known. It is considered a testimony to expressionist literature because of its high-contrast language images and its rousing writing style . The completely revised second version established dialectical theology , of which Barth became the most important representative in the following years. He thus rejected the entire liberal theology since Friedrich Schleiermacher , which based Christianity on human experience, was in conversation with religious studies and read the Bible historically and critically . (" The historically critical should be more critical to me!")

Barth was then appointed theology professor in Germany in 1921 and developed into one of the world's leading Protestant theologians of the 20th century. His commentary on the Romans had 16 editions in German up to 2005 with a total of 47,000 copies; it has also been translated into English, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The second version of the letter to the Romans had this significant impact on the story, in the form of the second copy, corrected by Barth, which was published in 1923 by Chr. Kaiser Verlag in Munich.

Emergence

In the summer of 1916 it turned out for Karl Barth in conversations with Eduard Thurneysen that her theological training was no longer helpful for preaching, teaching and pastoral care. Both said that one had to start all over again. Barth then began studying Romans in the original Greek text in July. "I began to read it as if I had never read it before: not without carefully writing down what I found ..." There was no thought of publication.

Barth worked on a writing desk that had come to him as a family heirloom at the end of 1915, and with regard to the content of his Bible study he also consulted authors who were close to the family through tradition, especially Johann Tobias Beck, who was highly valued by his father and grandfather . He also received Johann Albrecht Bengel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger . With his notes, Barth made a distinction against romanticism , idealism and pietism (in November 1916 an evangelism took place in Safenwil, which Barth viewed critically). The exegetical work proceeded hesitantly; It was interrupted in March 1917 and only resumed six months later with a new approach to Romans 5. From now on, Barth pursued the plan to have his commentary printed and applied to the church council for study leave, which he then spent in Zurich in spring 1918.

In the summer and autumn of 1917, Barth was also politically active. As a delegate he took part in the party congress of the Swiss Social Democrats and promoted the establishment of trade unions in Safenwil, where he appeared as a demonstration speaker. This created tension in his community. In the confirmation election in June he received numerous votes against. When the socialists gained a majority in the local council against liberalism, there were protests among churchgoers, including a movement to leave the church.

Three Swiss publishers refused to print in 1917; only after a deficit guarantee from Barth's friend, Rudolf Pestalozzi , did the Bäschlin-Verlag Bern accept. Barth completed the manuscript by June 3, 1918, and the corrected print version by August 18, 1918. At Christmas 1918 the book appeared in an edition of 1000 copies. But it was dated to 1919.

In 1920, Barth took up the interpretation of Romans again. For this he read a lot of theological literature, especially Calvin, with the result that he became independent from old Württemberg pietism and clearly recognized his opposition to Schleiermacher. Barth wrote the second version of the letter to the Romans, which now had a more clearly evangelical-Reformed profile, from autumn 1920 to summer 1921 within eleven months, with the finished pages always going straight to the printer. Thurneysen was heavily involved in this work at his own request. He read Barth's texts proofreading, and as the work progressed, Barth increasingly adopted Thurneysen's suggestions, sometimes verbatim.

The manuscript was ready on September 26, 1921. At the same time, Barth said goodbye to the pastor's office in Safenwil with his appointment to the newly established Chair of Reformed Theology at the University of Göttingen .

First version

The book contains two main ideas:

  1. God cannot be appropriated for one's own party position. Barth emphasized objectivity as the basic attitude of Christians in the world: “Military service ... if need be, but under no circumstances as a field preacher! Social-democratic, but not religious-social! "
  2. The kingdom of God is not, as religious socialists believed, the goal of progress towards it (in the old aeon ), but something completely different, the dawn of a new aeon.

Less abruptly than in the second version, under the influence of the theologians he favored at the time, Barth tried to concretize the kingdom of God in the world. Similar to Oetinger, Barth could assume in the first version of Romans that Christians would also be physically transformed by a spirit of life, and that their ties would become freedoms. This created perspectives for ethics, possibilities for new action. He later rejected all such “attempts to advance through speculation in natural philosophy to a vividly real spiritual corporeality” as misleading.

Barth's formulation “God's Revolution” gave rise to discussions. Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt's thesis that Barth showed knowledge of Lenin's writing State and Religion when commenting on Rom. 13 , but fails because Lenin's writing had not yet appeared. Barth, although he took up socialist parlance, had no knowledge of the Marxist classics. His judgment of the state is negative and comes close to anarchism.

Second version

John the Baptist points away from himself to the crucified Christ ( Isenheim Altar , detail). Barth described this picture, a copy of which from now on always hung over his desk, as inspiration for the revision of the commentary on the Romans

The second version takes up the central ideas of the first, but formulates it more sharply:

  • God is completely different. With his paradoxical statements, which he learned from Kierkegaard, Barth pursues a polemical-liberating intention: “But God is in heaven and you on earth! And precisely the ignorance of what God knows is the knowledge of God, the consolation, the light, the power, the knowledge of eternity with which we are in time. ”Barth does not have these radical negations in later writings represent more.
  • God is obscure to reason, but can be seen in the revelation of Jesus Christ. The new aeon has to do with the present reality, it works into the pragmatics of the old aeon and enables an objectivity of everyday action.
  • The concept of parables, fundamentally developed in church dogmatics , already appears here. To interpret the statements in Barth's commentary on the Romans, Christofer Frey draws on Plato's allegory of the cave . The parable does not depict directly, but is like the shadow on the wall. Karl Barth is here in conversation with his brother, the philosopher Heinrich Barth .
  • The foundation and goal of human history is Jesus Christ , however not how he lived as Jesus of Nazareth in his historical environment, but how he carries his cross: this is God's no to all human attempts to thwart God. The cross is in the center. Therefore, for Barth, there is no progress in history, however conceived, but an ambiguous experience of everyday reality.

The radical positions that Barth took in the second version of Romans made it difficult to interpret Rom 12ff. to come to ethical statements that go beyond a no. Frey stated that “the 'organic' connection between theological foundations and ethics” becomes obsolete. Where Paul wrote “I admonish you”, Barth understood: “Let yourselves be interrupted”. For Barth ethics is - selectively - criticism of everyday routines, God is the "great disturbance" of human activity.

Barth's handset

In the afterword to the first edition, Barth named as " particularly valuable to me ": Johannes Calvin , Johann Tobias Beck , Johann Albrecht Bengel, Frédéric Godet , Hermann Kutter , Hans Lietzmann , Karl Heinrich Rieger , Adolf Schlatter , Albert Schweitzer , Theodor Zahn and Friedrich Zündel , also an unprinted college booklet from his father Fritz Barth . Barth stated that he preferred to use the following literature:

  • Johann Calvin: Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos , Calvini Opera Volume 49;
  • Johann Tobias Beck: Explanation of the letter Pauli to the Romans , ed. by J. Lindenmeyer, 2 volumes, Gütersloh 1884;
  • Johann Albrecht Bengel: Gnomon Novi Testamenti , ed. by J. Steudel, 2 volumes, 3rd edition Tübingen 1850;
  • Frédéric Godet: Commentary on the letter to the Romans , edited in German by ER Wunderlich, two volumes, Hanover 1881/1882;
  • Hermann Kutter: The immediate. A question of humanity. Berlin 1902;
  • Hans Lietzmann: The letters of the Apostle Paul ... Volume I: To the Romans. 2nd Edition. Tübingen 1919;
  • Karl Heinrich Rieger: Reflections on the New Testament, on the growth in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ , Tübingen 1828;
  • Adolf Schlatter: The Roman Letter designed for Bible readers , (Calw 1887) 4th edition Stuttgart 1902;
  • Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research . 2nd edition, Tübingen 1913;
  • Theodor Zahn: Paul's letter to the Romans. 2nd edition, Leipzig 1910;
  • Friedrich Zündel: From the time of the apostles . Zurich 1886.

However, this does not indicate all of the literature used, as Gerhard Ebeling worked out using the example of Martin Luther : Luther is missing in the references to the first version (in the second version of Romans, Barth omitted the references “for various reasons”). In fact, Luther is used at least as much as Calvin in both versions. However, the quotations do not come from Luther's commentary on the Romans , but mainly two collections of texts from Luther's works that the Württemberg pastor Chr. G. Eberle published in the mid-19th century. “From Eberle's easily accessible treasure trove of quotations, he ... without exception, cited high-quality theological texts, almost without exception.” But Eberle's edifying collection was not quotable.

According to Christiane Tietz, Plato , Immanuel Kant , Søren Kierkegaard , Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski , Carl Spitteler and Franz Overbeck influenced both versions of the letter to the Romans. In order to understand Plato and Kant, Karl Barth said the exchange with his brother Heinrich was helpful, while Kierkegaard and Dostojewski were made accessible to him by Eduard Thurneysen .

Barth as an exegete

Barth had turned intensively to the Greek text of Romans because he wanted to understand Paul of Tarsus . The serious questions are the same over time: "Our questions are, if we understand ourselves correctly, Paul's questions, and Paul's answers, if their light shines on us, must be our answers." Critics, however, saw ironegesis in this . Hugo Gressmann judged that in Barth's comment one does not get to know "Paul as he really was, but as Paul as he should have been according to Barth, that turns a letter from Paul to the Romans into a letter from Barth to his community."

As a New Testament scholar, Adolf Jülicher came to the same conclusion as Gressmann, but he was impressed by Barth's translation of πίστις pístis with “Faithfulness of God” in the first version of the commentary to the Romans. Barth explained that he owed this discovery in the Greek text to a reference made by his cousin Rudolf Liechtenhan .

The second version, published in 1922, received largely positive reviews from Rudolf Bultmann . Bultmann admitted to Barth that he was working philologically and historically correctly with the text and that one could only understand what one had an inner relationship with. However, Barth skipped the necessary demythologization of the ancient text. Barth asserts that he stands by Paul, but that it is necessary to translate Paul into the language of the present. Bultmann's suggestion that other spirits had their say in Paul than the pneuma Christou , countered Barth: “The pneuma Christou is not a point of view that one can take to teach Paul or whomever from here. It is enough for us ... to place ourselves next to Paul in a learning and teaching manner despite the "other" spirits ... "

Barth's reception of neo-Kantianism

After analysis by Friedrich Lohmann , Barth positively received three elements of Neo-Kantianism in his two commentaries on the Romans :

  1. epistemological anti-subjectivism and anti-psychologism;
  2. the polemic against the “given”;
  3. the talk of God as "origin".

The first element can be found in both versions, the second and third only in the second version of the commentary on Romans, and for these two elements it is certain, according to Lohmann, that Barth consciously drew on Neo-Kantianism.

reception

Karl Bart, Der Römerbrief.jpg

The Catholic dogmatist Karl Adam wrote in the Hochland magazine in 1925/26 : “As soon as it was first published, Barth's letter to the Romans hit the theologians' playground like a bomb, its effects roughly comparable to the anti-modernist encyclical of Pope Pius X. Pascendi . "

The first version of Romans found mainly Swiss readers and reviewers, including Emil Brunner as one of the first . Adolf von Harnack distanced himself in conversation, but this was perceived by Barth, when he heard about it, as a vote of a representative of the departing generation of theologians. The book irritated some reviewers. So the author was assumed to be close to Rudolf Steiner or Oswald Spengler .

To Barth's astonishment, he, a pastor without a doctorate or habilitation, was appointed professor of Reformed Theology at the University of Göttingen in 1921 on the basis of the letter to the Romans (first version). The decisive factor was the recommendation by Karl Müller (University of Erlangen).

Text output

  • The Letter to the Romans (first version) . Edited by H. Schmidt, Zurich 1985 (Karl Barth Complete Edition, Volume II / 1919). An unchanged reprint of the first edition appeared in Zurich in 1963.
  • The Letter to the Romans (Second Version). 9th edition. Zurich 1954.
  • The Letter to the Romans (Second Version). Edited by Cornelis van der Kooi and Katja Tolstaja (Karl Barth Complete Edition, Volume 47). Theological Publishing House Zurich, Zurich 2010. ISBN 978-3-290-17562-7 .

literature

  • Christiane Tietz : Karl Barth: A life in contradiction. Beck, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-406-72523-4 (first version: pp. 99–112; second version: pp. 133–162)
  • Eberhard Busch : Karl Barth's curriculum vitae: based on his letters and autobiographical texts. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-459-01022-3 .
  • Christofer Frey : The theology of Karl Barths. An introduction. Athenaeum, Frankfurt / Main 1988. ISBN 3-610-09112-6 .
  • Friedrich Lohmann : Karl Barth and Neo-Kantianism. The reception of Neo-Kantianism in the "Letter to the Romans" and its significance for the further elaboration of Karl Barth's theology (= Theological Library Töpelmann , Volume 72). De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1995, ISBN 3-11-014883-8 (also dissertation, Mainz 1995)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 67 .
  2. ↑ Bengt Hägglund: History of theology. A demolition . 2nd Edition. Chr. Kaiser, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-459-01850-X , p. 313-314 .
  3. ↑ Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans (Second Version) . 2010, p. XII .
  4. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xxxix .
  5. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xxxix .
  6. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 110 .
  7. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 111 .
  8. ^ A b Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barth . 1988, p. 66 .
  9. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 113 .
  10. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 114 .
  11. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 116-117 .
  12. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xxxiv .
  13. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 133 .
  14. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 135 .
  15. ↑ Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans (first version) . 1954, p. 520 .
  16. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 65-66 .
  17. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 76-77 .
  18. ^ Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt: Theology and Socialism. The example of Karl Barth . Munich 1972, p. 127 .
  19. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 87 .
  20. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 81 .
  21. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 128 .
  22. ↑ Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans (Second Version) . 1954, p. 294 .
  23. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 67-68 .
  24. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 69-70 .
  25. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 71-72 .
  26. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 73-74 .
  27. ^ Christofer Frey: The theology of Karl Barths . 1988, p. 78 .
  28. ^ Gerhard Ebeling: Karl Barths wrestling with Luther . In: Luther Studies . tape 3 . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1985, p. 437 .
  29. ↑ Christiane Tietz: Karl Barth , Munich 2018, pp. 99-102
  30. ↑ Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans (Second Version) . In: Karl Barth Complete Edition . tape 47 , 1954, pp. 7 .
  31. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 128-129 .
  32. ↑ Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans (first version) . In: Karl Barth Complete Edition . tape 46 , p. 3 (preface).
  33. ^ Konrad Schmid: Karl Barth's interpretation of the writing. (PDF) p. 3 , accessed on December 10, 2018 .
  34. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xvi-xvii .
  35. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 149 .
  36. ^ Konrad Schmid: Karl Barth's interpretation of the writing. (PDF) pp. 5–6 , accessed on December 10, 2018 .
  37. ^ Konrad Schmid: Karl Barth's interpretation of the writing. (PDF) p. 6 , accessed on December 10, 2018 .
  38. ^ Johann Friedrich Lohmann: Karl Barth and Neo-Kantianism . 1995, p. 317 .
  39. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xii-xiii .
  40. ↑ Cornelis van der Kooi, Katja Tolstaja: Der Römerbrief (Second Version) . 2010, p. xiv .
  41. ^ Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth's curriculum vitae . 1975, p. 136 (In January 1922 the theological faculty of the University of Munster appointed him Dr. theol. "Because of his manifold contributions to the revision of religious and theological questions" (ibid., P. 141).).