Karl Barth's Sixteen Answers to Adolf Harnack: God, Liberalism and the End of Theological Method

Abstract

This article deals with one of the most important skirmishes in the modern debate over authority in Christian theology: the public correspondence between Karl Barth and his great teacher, the church historian Adolf von Harnack, in the spring of 1923. In one sense, of course, this engagement was an academic enterprise of the highest order. Much of the argument between Barth and Harnack turned on such questions as the nature of revelation, the role of historical knowledge in relation to faith, and the place of theology in the research university-questions that had been the stock-in-trade of liberal Protestant theology in Germany throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, the debate had profound practical ramifications for the life of the Church.