KARL BARTH AND THE RELEVANCE OF DOGMATICSToday is the third in our series of autobiographical sermons, using the stories of modern persons to illuminate the struggles of Jesus as he made his way toward Jerusalem. One of those struggles was about the tendency of the people of god to blame and exclude. In our Gospel lesson today people were buzzing about Pilate’s slaughter of Galilean worshipers at the temple: were these less deserving of life than all the other Galileans? Were they somehow to blame for their fate? And Jesus responded: that’s like asking if the 18 people who died when the tower of Siloam crumbled were somehow to blame for their fate. Jesus said everybody should be repenting for their own wrongs, not fixing blame for others. Blaming was raised to an art form in Nazi Germany, when Hitler and his henchmen put out the word that Jews and non-whites and gays and unionists were to blame for the difficulties of the nation after World War One. So it was incumbent on every loyal German, especially the church, to join in suppressing them. In 1934 a group of brave Christians met in Germany to address the influence of the Nazis on the German church. Since the rise of Hitler, the spirit of nationalism was coming to be seen more and more as the Holy Spirit. The spread of the church documented in the New Testament was just the down payment on the glorious flowering of the spirit in German culture. Ministers in churches were expected to preach this babble from the pulpit, and if they didn’t, various ways were employed to put someone else in that pulpit. Professors of religion were expected to find ways of denying that Jesus was a Jew, or else they were expelled from the universities. Meanwhile Jews and gays and union leaders were rounded up and imprisoned. The group that met in 1934 was led by Swiss theologian Karl Barth, and they issued the Barmen declaration, decrying that the demagoguery of popular sentiment and the changing tides of nationalism should dictate the Christian teaching of the church. They called them selves the Confessing Movement, using the term “confessing” the same way we would use “affirming,” and the declaration became a Confession of Faith, reminiscent of the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed and the Augsburg Confession and Heidelberg Confession. Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland in1886, his father Fritz a professor of theology. Karl followed suite, studying under some of the great theological teachers in Switzerland and Germany: von Harnack and Herrmann. The main trend in those days was what we now call old line liberalism. As science came to talk more and more confidently about the things of the external world, theologians talked less and less about the externals (about God) and more about the internals (faith and feeling of dependence on God). If you want to think of an American version of old line liberalism, you might remember the name Norman Vincent Peale. Barth became a pastor of a little Reformed congregation in Geneva in 1909 (the Reformed movement was a predecessor in the UCC merger 50 years ago) and submitted himself to the weekly routine of preaching, becoming more and more concerned that old line liberalism was leading him to speak not the Word of God from the pulpit but what he called the “Word of Man.” His own good advice. This was even more compounded by the optimism of old line liberalism: there was a general feeling of inevitable progress. But that optimism crumbled after the experience of World War One. In 1919 Barth published a commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the outgrown of his struggles in the pulpit and the need to say something about the work of God in the external world. It immediately sold 25 thousand copies! Barth later described the response as “one who, ascending the dark staircase of a church tower and trying to steady himself, reached for the banister, but got hold of the bell rope instead.” So when faithful people in Germany needed someone to rally around as Nazis began to take over the church, they didn’t rally around those who could only talk about their inner religious feelings. They rallied around the one who had an external sense that God was still at work in the world, was still speaking the Word through the scriptures, the one who had the theological ground on which to stand and say “No!” The leaders of the Confessing Movement were systematically removed from their pulpits and university professorships by the Nazis. Barth went back to Basel to teach and write. Another leader came to Boston: Paul Tillich. Still another came to New York, then turned around to Germany and went underground. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he carried messages for the resistance movement that attempted to assassinate Hitler. He was caught and hanged. When Barth went back to Basel, he was active in writing letters and pamphlets and tracts on behalf of the Confessing Movement, but he also revived a project from years earlier called Church Dogmatics. At the end of his life a few decades ago, it had reached 14 volumes. He often joked that, when he stood before Saint Peter and was asked to give an account for himself, he would produce his 14 volumes, and Saint Peter would wag his head. “Dogmatic” may be a bad word in your lexicon. It implies being unsusceptible to reason and argument. For a person who is dogmatic about something, it is not up for debate. The theological discipline of dogmatics is about those things that are “compatible with Christian teaching,” to use the words in the United Methodist book of law. It’s about the core understanding of what we have learned about God through Jesus Christ. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the discipline of natural theology, what we can learn about God from nature and reason. When one of Barth’s friends and allies, Emile Brunner, decided to write a natural theology, Barth published his famous tract simply entitled “NO!” You don’t debate with the Nazis about blood and soil and race and culture on your way to talking abut God. You take a stand and oppose them. NO! In the name of Christian teaching, NO! In the name of all that is holy, NO! Some of Barth’s friends got on his case about the Dogmatics: if you weren’t doing this abstract intellectual work, surely you would have more time for the battle at hand. Barth replied that a fresh understanding of the dogma of the church, those things at the core of the church’s teaching, was indeed a contribution to the effort of the Confessing Movement. Today in the United Methodist Church there is a movement that has the gall to call itself the “Confessing Movement” and claim the heritage of Barmen and the courage of those who opposed the popular influence of the Nazis, all the while trying to exclude people from the church and diminish their participation in society. This time it’s gay people. Before that the same folks or their antecedents were trying to oppose racial integration, women in ministry, and the legal protection of unions. Up with that we must not put! There are some people who believe that if they say something and sound reasonable, they make it so. The prophets warned: “woe to those who call day night and call nighttime day.” Friends, green is not red. Up is not down. Day is not night. No! And to those who try to make the church of Jesus Christ exclusive and call it compatible with Christian teaching, NO! So today I’m going to get dogmatic. “God so loved the world that God gave the only son, that whosoever…. believes might not perish but have eternal life. For God sent not the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world… through him might be saved.” That’s what is compatible with Christian teaching. And what is incompatible is the exclusion that the Nazis tried long ago. No! Just No! And Jesus said: “Come unto me, all…who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I’m dogmatic about that. That’s what is compatible with Christian teaching. Barth came to be known as a “happy Calvinist.” Many think that is a contradiction in terms. Calvin believed that the grace of God saves the elect and not anything that the elect do themselves. But Barth’s theology did not limit that salvation to a few elect. Rather the grace of God is infinite and relentless and extended to all. And that changed the whole way I think about God. I had been raised on a version of the old line liberalism, with a heavy dose of Biblical literalism mixed in. Constant self examination: am I fully committed to God? Is there any little corner of my mind that does not belong to God? Born again? At least twice. At peace with my maker? Not at all. One sunny afternoon in the spring of 1965 I sat on a hillside in southern Virginia and read Karl Barth’s Introduction to Evangelical Theology. (I am holding that very book and turning to the page that changed my life.) “The content of God’s Word is his free, undeserved Yes to the whole human race, in spite of all human unreasonableness and corruption.”
So Jesus has the vine dresser say to the owner: be patient. I’ll give some more attention and then let nature work. This is not about being eager to blame, eager to root out. That’s not compatible with Christian teaching. Knowing people by their fruits---that’s compatible with Christian teaching. Giving people a change to grow, giving all people a chance to grow---that’s compatible with Christian teaching. And to you who carry a burden that the church universal and the church denominational and the church local might be more welcoming, I say to you: be of good cheer. Hear the Word of God. God is not going to give up on us. And we know that because we know God through the great reconciler Jesus Christ. Be dogmatic about that. |