Church Dogmatics
Basel · 1932
K
Karl Barth
Karl Barth
1886 CE–1968 CE · Modern · Basel
Karl Barth (1886–1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian widely regarded as the most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. His commentary on Romans (first edition published December 1918, conventionally dated 1919) marked a decisive break with liberal Protestant theology, asserting the radical otherness of God against the optimistic cultural Christianity of the previous generation. His unfinished magnum opus, the multi-volume Church Dogmatics, articulated a thoroughly Christocentric theology that reshaped Protestant systematic thought across denominations. In 1934 he was the primary drafter of the Barmen Declaration, the confessional statement in which the Confessing Church in Germany rejected Nazi interference in church affairs; in 1935 he was expelled from his professorship in Bonn after refusing to swear an unqualified oath of loyalty to Hitler, and he returned to Switzerland. His work gave rise to what is variously called dialectical theology, neo-orthodoxy, or the theology of the Word, movements that continue to shape Protestant academic theology worldwide.
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Stop 1 of 71886Born
BaselבאזלSwitzerland
What they did here
Born in Basel on 10 May 1886 to Fritz Barth, a Reformed minister who was soon appointed professor of New Testament and early church history at Bern; the family relocated to Bern shortly after Karl's birth, and he was raised and educated there.
About Basel
Basel, on the Rhine in northwestern Switzerland, a bishop's seat since the eighth century, hosted the Council of Basel (1431-1449), and its university, founded in 1460, is the oldest in Switzerland. An early printing centre, the city was home to Erasmus, who died there in 1536; it adopted the Reformation in 1529, and the first edition of Calvin's Institutes was published there in 1536. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler, all natives of the city, made it a centre of mathematics. Its medieval Jewish community was destroyed in the massacre of 1349 during the Black Death; in 1897 Basel hosted the First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl, and many later ones.
Across the traditions, in Basel at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Karl Barth’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Karl Barth’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
Dogmatics in Outline
Basel · 1947