38 Facts About Karl Barth

Karl Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.

Karl Barth began to gain substantial worldwide acclaim with the publication in 1921 of the second edition of his commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, in which he openly broke from liberal theology.

Karl Barth influenced many significant theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who supported the Confessing Church, and Jurgen Moltmann, Helmut Gollwitzer, James H Cone, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Thomas F Torrance, Hans Kung, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, and novelists such as Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Miklos Szentkuthy.

Karl Barth was born on 10 May 1886, in Basel, Switzerland, to Johann Friedrich "Fritz" Barth and Anna Katharina Barth.

Fritz Barth was a theology professor and pastor and desired for Karl to follow his positive line of Christianity, which clashed with Karl's desire to receive a liberal Protestant education.

Karl Barth began his student career at the University of Bern, and then transferred to the University of Berlin to study under Adolf von Harnack, and then transferred briefly to the University of Tubingen before finally in Marburg to study under Wilhelm Herrmann.

From 1911 to 1921, Karl Barth served as a Reformed pastor in the village of Safenwil in the canton of Aargau.

Later Karl Barth was professor of theology in Gottingen, Munster and Bonn, in Germany.

Karl Barth was deported from Germany in 1935 after he refused to sign the Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler and went back to Switzerland and became a professor in Basel.

Karl Barth first began his commentary The Epistle to the Romans in the summer of 1916 while he was still a pastor in Safenwil, with the first edition appearing in December 1918.

Karl Barth decided around October 1920 that he was dissatisfied with the first edition and heavily revised it the following eleven months, finishing the second edition around September 1921.

Particularly in the thoroughly re-written second edition of 1922, Karl Barth argued that the God who is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus challenges and overthrows any attempt to ally God with human cultures, achievements, or possessions.

In 1934, as the Protestant Church attempted to come to terms with Nazi Germany, Karl Barth was largely responsible for the writing of the Barmen Declaration.

Karl Barth was forced to resign from his professorship at the University of Bonn in 1935 for refusing to swear an oath to Hitler.

Karl Barth then returned to his native Switzerland, where he assumed a chair in systematic theology at the University of Basel.

Karl Barth's theology found its most sustained and compelling expression in his five-volume magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics.

Karl Barth's planned fifth volume was never written and the fourth volume's final part-volume was unfinished.

Karl Barth was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.

From a regulation that limited the tenure of a professorship at the University of Basel to the year they were 70 years of age, which Karl Barth would have reached in 1956, he was exempted.

In 1962, Karl Barth visited the United States and lectured at Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, the Union Theological Seminary and the San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Karl Barth was invited to be a guest at the Second Vatican Council.

At the time Karl Barth's health did not permit him to attend.

Karl Barth was featured on the cover of the 20 April 1962 issue of Time magazine, an indication that his influence had reached out of academic and ecclesiastical circles and into mainstream American religious culture.

Pope Pius XII is often claimed to have said Karl Barth was "the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas," though Fergus Kerr observes that "there is never chapter and verse for the quotation" and it is sometimes attributed to Pope Paul VI instead.

Karl Barth died on 10 December 1968, at his home in Basel, Switzerland.

Karl Barth is most well known for reorienting all theological discussion around Jesus.

One major objective of Karl Barth is to recover the doctrine of the Trinity in theology from its putative loss in liberalism.

Karl Barth's argument follows from the idea that God is the object of God's own self-knowledge, and revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling to humanity of the God who cannot be discovered by humanity simply through its own intuition.

One of the most influential and controversial features of Karl Barth's Dogmatics was his doctrine of election.

Karl Barth's theology entails a rejection of the idea that God chose each person to either be saved or damned based on purposes of the Divine will, and it was impossible to know why God chose some and not others.

In keeping with his Christo-centric methodology, Karl Barth argues that to ascribe the salvation or damnation of humanity to an abstract absolute decree is to make some part of God more final and definitive than God's saving act in Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth holds that Anselm's doctrine of the atonement preserves both God's freedom and the necessity of Christ's incarnation.

Karl Barth maintains with Anselm that the sin of humanity cannot be removed by the merciful act of divine forgiveness alone.

Karl Barth finalizes the necessity of God's mercy at the place where Anselm firmly establishes the dignity and freedom of the will of God.

However, Karl Barth asserted that eternal salvation for everyone, even those that reject God, is a possibility that is not just an open question but should be hoped for by Christians as a matter of grace; specifically, he wrote, "Even though theological consistency might seem to lead our thoughts and utterances most clearly in this direction, we must not arrogate to ourselves that which can be given and received only as a free gift", just hoping for total reconciliation.

Unlike many Protestant theologians, Karl Barth wrote on the topic of Mariology.

Aware of the common dogmatic tradition of the early Church, Karl Barth fully accepted the dogma of Mary as the Mother of God, seeing a rejection of that title equivalent to rejecting the doctrine that Christ's human and divine natures are inseparable.

The Karl Barth Center was established in 1997 and sponsors seminars, conferences, and other events.