The Crisis of Preaching Politics: Homiletical Insights from the Young Karl Barth

Jacob D. Myers

doi:10.15695/hmltc.v45i2.4998

The Crisis of Preaching Politics: Homiletical Insights from the Young Karl Barth

Homiletic ◽

10.15695/hmltc.v45i2.4998 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 45 (2) ◽

pp. 25-35

Author(s):

Jacob D. Myers

Keyword(s):

Karl Barth ◽

Great War ◽

The Great War

Many contemporary preachers and homileticians address what they believe to be a “crisis” of preaching. Without denying these claims, this essay offers theological and homiletical insights from the young Karl Barth on what he believed to be a more fundamental and pervasive homiletical crisis subsuming all others. Just what this crisis was for Barth becomes clearer when we look to the sociopolitical commitments of two of Barth’s pastoral mentors: Friedrich Naumann and Christoph Blumhardt. Drawing from his theologico-political discernment leading up to the Great War, Barth offers us ways to challenge unjust and oppressive policies and systems through our preaching ministries today.

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Realists and Pacifists

10.1093/oso/9780190867577.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Ruse

Keyword(s):

Just War ◽

Just War Theory ◽

Original Sin ◽

Karl Barth ◽

Great War ◽

Reinhold Niebuhr ◽

Christian Realism ◽

The Great War ◽

Christian Leaders

Christians, in the years after the Great War until the end of the Second War, continued divided. There were those who regretted war but felt it sometimes necessary. Prominent here was the American Lutheran theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. His “Christian realism” started with original sin but did not follow a strict just-war-theory line. He argued that privately we ought to follow Jesus and eschew violence, but as members of society we sometimes need to fight. Karl Barth, who broke from his mentor Adolf von Harnack over the morality of the First War, stood against the Nazis and, although also not a just war theorist, argued the necessity of conflict against Hitler. Countering all of these were the pacifists, notably in America the preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, and in England the Anglican priest Dick Sheppard. When war was again declared in 1939, the Christian leaders on both sides again took up the call to arms in the name of Jesus. A notable exception was the still-undergraduate, recent Catholic convert, future Wittgensteinian philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who was no pacifist but who argued that entering the conflict against Hitler did not fill the requirements demanded of an Augustinian just war.

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Martin Luther in Dialectical Theology

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.300 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Alister E. McGrath

Keyword(s):

Martin Luther ◽

Karl Barth ◽

Great War ◽

Secondary Sources ◽

High Profile ◽

Dialectical Theology ◽

The Reformation ◽

German Speaking ◽

Theological Debate ◽

The Great War

Following the deep and unsettling questions raised about the legacy of German Protestant theology as a result of the Great War (1914‒1918), a new interest emerged in returning to the fons et origo of Protestant theology in the writings of Martin Luther and other reformers. This was given additional impetus through the work of Karl Holl, who is widely credited with shaping the “Luther Renaissance” of 1919‒1921. Dialectical theology was a movement focused on Karl Barth that arose within German-speaking Protestantism in the aftermath of the Great War. The reception of Luther within the dialectical theology movement is complex and not easily reduced to simple categorizations. The diverse theological and confessional commitments within the movement led to various readings of Luther, generally mediated through secondary sources or channels. The movement portrayed itself in terms of a theocentric new reformation, breaking free from the cultural compromises and entanglements of German liberal theology in the first two decades of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to anthropology, Christology, and the understanding of sin. The movement presented itself as both the heir and reinterpreter of the theological legacy of the Reformation, particularly the theology of Martin Luther, most notably its emphasis on divine revelation. Yet its leading representatives—Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Gogarten—understood Luther in somewhat different manners. It is therefore important to consider the use made of Luther by each of these figures individually, rather than try to collapse them into a single generic approach which is held to be representative of dialectical theology. The high profile these four writers accorded to Luther unquestionably stimulated Luther studies in the postwar period and contributed significantly to the current appreciation of Luther in contemporary theological debate.

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