Twenty‐five Years On: A Catholic Commemoration of Karl Barth

Abstract

Karl Barth was bom in Basle in 1886, the descendant of a long line of Swiss Protestant pastors and burghers, who included in their ranks Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Italian Renaissance. His family were patricians and devotees of music and the arts, but they also had a simple devotion to Jesus. In the biography of Barth written, on the basis of his autobiographical essays and letters, by his last academic assistant, Eberhard Busch, we hear that Barth’s earliest theological formation came from religious nursery-rhymes in the Basle dialect. His subsequent theological pilgrimage can be seen as a flight from, and then return to, the religious assurance of these children’s songs - albeit in an infinitely more sophisticated manner. As he himself wrote, these songs were the textbook from which I received my first theological instruction in a form which was appropriate for my immature years. What made an indelible impression on me was the homely self-assurance with which these unpretentious verses spoke of the events of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, as though they could have taken place that very morning in Basle or nearby, like any other exciting event. History? Doctrine? Dogma? Myth? No. It was all things actually taking place. You could see everything for yourself, listen to it, and take it to heart by hearing one of these songs sung in the language you were hearing elsewhere and beginning to speak. Holding your mother's hand, you went to the stable in Bethlehem, along the streets of Jerusalem into which the Saviour was making his entry. hailed by children of your own age. You climbed the grim hill of Golgotha and walked in Joseph’s garden at daybreak … Was it all rather naive? Indeed, it was very naive, but perhaps the deepest wisdom, with its fullest force, lies in naivety, and this kind of wisdom, once gained, can cany a man over whole oceans of historicism and anti-historicism, mysticism and rationalism, orthodoxy, liberalism, and existentialism. He certainly will not be spared trial and temptation, but in the end he will be brought back relatively unscathed to firm ground.