Soli Deo Gloria: For the Glory of God Alone

The Messenger, August 5, 2010
Karl Barth:
In earnest, in error

By R.B. TOLAR
Special to The Messenger
In publishing “Epistles to the Romans,” Karl Barth immediately became a figure of controversy within the Christian theological world. He continued to write prolifically throughout his life, reestablishing, as he thought, the faith and doctrine of the Reformers.
Barth felt the Higher Critics and liberal theologians of his day had stripped Jesus of His divinity, making Christ merely a good man and great teacher. Barth’s idea was to restore the sense of Christ that had been downplayed or rejected throughout the 19th century (especially in Europe). In so doing, he stressed the notion of Jesus as God’s revelation of Himself to humanity.
Like a camera sharply focused on an object in the foreground while the background remains hazy and out of focus, so Barth’s stress on God’s transcendence (his unknowable “otherness”) misses out on the complete picture God gives of Himself in scripture. To Barth, the inerrancy of the Bible was an issue of secondary importance, if an issue at all.
“The Bible is God’s word so far as God lets it be his word,” Barth stated in Church Dogmatics, Volume I. 
In I Peter 3:15, Christians are admonished to “always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that is in you.”
The old hymn states that our “hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”
Paul reminds us this righteousness is imputed to the believer “by faith from first to last.”  “Just as it is written: the righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:17). These very words of Scripture, taken in faith by a German monk in the 1500s, launched the Reformation.
We have these blessed assurances of the validity our faith throughout God’s word if we humbly ask, diligently seek and prayerfully and persistently knock. It is when we seek to lean upon our own understanding that we fall into error and the God-given faculty of reason becomes a snare and an idol. Barth, in setting aside the importance of the doctrine of divinely inspired Scripture, limited revelation to the individual’s experience of God. Admitting no other basis for faith, he thus came full circle to Schleiermacher and his “theology of feeling.”
The importance of God’s written word is stressed throughout the Old Testament as well as the New. The reading of and meditation upon that word is a constant theme of the Bible. The Westminster Confession defines Holy Scripture as “the only rule of faith and obedience.”
In Karl Barth’s eyes, the Bible is not the word of God, but “the word of God is within the Bible.” That, sadly, is the enduring legacy of Barth’s teaching. Without the propositional truth of Scripture, without Paul’s assertion that “all scripture is God-breathed,” we have no revelation of God in Christ, no call to a relationship with God the Father, no offer of redemption and salvation.  In short, we have nothing upon which to base our faith.
Where, then, is truth?
What a fitting question for our postmodern day and age.
Editor’s note: R.B. Tolar, saved by God’s grace alone, is grateful for the opportunity to participate in this writing ministry (www.graceunioncity.com).

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