Neo-orthodoxy, liberalism and war: Karl Barth, P. T. Forsyth and John Oman 1914–18

There is a theological renaissance today’, proclaimed the American theologian Daniel Day Williams in 1952. ‘The rebirth of theology means a renewal of the effort to discover the foundations of the Christian life’. He maintained that following the publication of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans in 1918 ‘there has been a deepening consciousness that there is a radical settlement to be made between Christianity and the thought and values of the modern world’. Williams’ assertion is better read as an indication of the mood of ‘pessimistic optimism’ manifested by many American theologians in the post world war two era than as an accurate description of the development of American theology from 1918. Moreover one man’s ‘renaissance’ is another man’s ‘reaction’, and there is something distinctly bizarre in the use of the former term in connection with a thinker like Karl Barth who devoted the most productive period of his life to total opposition to those intellectual assumptions which were characteristic of the sixteenth-century renaissance and were further developed in the European enlightenment. Nevertheless the historian of religion would be the last to deny the importance of investigating the factual basis of mythical beliefs, especially when they were as widely held as those put forward by Williams.