Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 11

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Karl Barth

Lesson Transcript

Now we look at the prayer life and the teachings on prayer of Karl Barth, who lived in a completely different generation. He was born in 1886 and he died in 1968. And, in contrast to Kierkegaard, the childhood of Barth is much less understood and explored because, in a sense, we don’t need to know. He lived a very happy life.

He was a son of a Reformed professor of Church History and New Testament at the University of Berne. And precociously he began his theological studies when he was only 18 years old, when his father was already teaching at Berne, and then he went to the universities of Berlin and Tűbingen and finally to Marburg. But they were all liberal schools. So of course, he was educated to be a liberal theologian, like Bonhoeffer was later to be, as well. And there, he was greatly influenced by von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann. And so in 1909–11, he came an assistant minister in Geneva and having his own parish church in the canton of Aargau, which was a farming community. And there he was introduced to a talented musician called Nelly Hoffman, whom he married in 1913. She loved Mozart. They had then five children: a daughter as the eldest and four sons. Tragically, the second youngest son in his early twenties was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which left a great scar in their inner family life. But one of his sons Marcus followed his steps to become a Biblical scholar and writing an excellent commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians.

But really, what profoundly changed his pastoral life and indeed his theological life was his friendship with Edward Thurneysen. Thurneysen was a remarkable pastor and I would recommend you strongly to read his book on pastoral theology, which is a classic on the perspectives and emphases that we should all have as pastors to each other. In their friendship together, they became shocked by the pastoral failure of the liberal theology of their professors. But the shock didn’t come first of all so much from their own understanding of faith; it came rather from the much greater shock of the whole of that culture not having a social conscience with the impact of World War I. The total indifference of these academic Kantian scholars to the effects of the war on the German soul made them realise that theology had become totally remote from the people and from the needs of the society. It was in this context then in 1919, just at the end of the war, that Barth wrote his The Epistle to the Romans. It was like a great earthquake that shocked the academic theology of Germany. Within two or three years there were six successive editions of the work. For what he was doing in a very scholarly way was to stress that the holiness of God and the sovereignty of God need to be reinterpreted and understood in the consciousness of Lutheran theological scholarship. The rationalism, the psychologism, the historicism that prevailed in liberal Protestantism had totally lost any perspective of the skyline of a transcendent God. It was all self-immanence.

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Karl Barth reacted violently and perhaps he can be faulted that, unlike Kierkegaard’s more balanced synthesis, Karl Barth took God above the radar screen of where ordinary Christians live. And this is why his friendship with Thurneysen helped to modulate, to enable him to have at least something of a pastor’s heart. As we all experience, we may legitimately take a reaction, but the reaction is at the same time exaggerating and therefore it needs to be balanced. And perhaps Barthian transcendence was unbalanced. It’s something that Bonhoeffer was himself to react against. We have to be ordinary, domestic Christians. But what he was helped by God to do was to rise up, to confront politically the whole national ideology. So though he was not the best of counsellors, yet he was a great political theologian, which is what Germany needed in the crisis of Nazism.

Barth was appointed to the University of Tűbingen in 1921 and then to Münster in 1925 and then to Bonn in 1930. And it’s interesting that Karl Barth never had a doctorate, for what really had catapulted him into the academic acclaim that he had with The Epistle to the Romans was all that he needed. It reminds me that when I first went to Oxford in 1945, my snobbish colleagues said oh, so you need to have a PhD. They didn’t. Lewis never had. So he belonged to that generation where if you were bright, the PhD was just a crux. And there he formed a group around him, a dialectical school, where he was able to argue with Rudolf Bultmann, with Gogarten and Emile Brunner and, as so often happens, that creates its own synergy of creativity and together they produced a journal called Between the Times.

Of course, between the times was the time between the two world wars. It was the time of demoralisation of the German people, that the shame of defeat in first war, the social and economic impoverishment of the socio-political conditions of the time, were very hard. It, of course, explains the embrace that was given to Hitler and the acceptance by the state church in January 1933 of their compromise with the Nazi Party in Germany. Now the argument was made by some pastors that Fűhrer bishops had to be compatible with a Fűhrer leadership of the nation. We need supermen in the Church that are Nietzschean, Dionysian, frenzied supermen. This was all the boiling up of the Romantic cult of authenticity of having a pure Aryan race in Germany. It was Romanticism at its climax, but what a deadly poison it was. It had started as a small weed. Now it threatened the collapse of Western Civilisation.

[00:09:19]

At the Barmen Declaration of May 1934, Barth convened a conference with Martin Niemöller and others who were in the resistance and claiming to represent the true evangelical church in Germany, not a pro-Nazi church. And the first text of the declaration was entirely Barth’s work and the first article states this: ‘Jesus Christ, as he’s attested for us in holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.’ As we know, the imprisonment of some of these pastors, like Niemöller, still are heroic in our mind, but many, many nameless died in the resistance.

As soon as the declaration was out in the streets, Barth was suspended by the University of Bonn. He lost his position as a professor. But fortunately, because he was Swiss, he was able immediately to accept a new position at Basel. And from the safety of the neutrality of Switzerland, he had immunity that many of his friends never had. And then he began to write many letters to encourage the persecuted. And it was there in Basel that he now began to write furiously the Church Dogmatics like a man possessed. They consist of 13 volumes, although reduced to four volumes, but 13 different parts. It’s an extraordinary document of over 9,000 pages. He was still doing it when he was interrupted by his death. He also preached over 500 sermons proclaiming the Word of God within the Word of God.

[00:11:45]

Barth too began to travel widely, to influence theologians in America and, indeed, in Rome. There, he became an observer of Vatican II and, in fact, had a strong influence on its progress during the 1960s. He began a theological dialogue with Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was a Catholic chaplain at the University of Basel where Karl Barth was a professor. And so, again, another very significant book that you should read is the approbation that is given by von Balthasar on how Barth influenced the reform of the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II.

All this is prelude, so now what’s his teaching on prayer? The first criterion that he gives is that prayer is Christ-given freedom to be the children of God. That God has given us the status to approach to Him so that we can know Him as Abba, Father. This is the heart of our prayer life. It’s because we are His children that we can say Abba. And he elaborates on this and the document that is most significant for his teaching on prayer is his Church Dogmatics, volume 4, part 4, which are really fragments that were left unfinished about his lifelong meditations on prayer.

The second criterion that he sees prayer is it’s decisively petitionary. Now, when we read Paul or read Augustine. it seems as if prayer is decisively thanksgiving. But of course, it depends on the view of the landscape spiritually that you’re looking at and for Barth’s time decisively petitionary prayer discloses the basic relationship between man and God. Because petitionary prayer is really seeking to recover the loss of theo-anthropology. It’s disclosing the need to see God in a creaturely way as our creator and redeemer, made in the Imago Dei, but having forfeited it as a sinner. This ontological human condition that we’re utterly helpless before God, that we’re sinful in our creatureliness is his Pauline message. We have petition. Because of Him we live and move and have our being, as Paul preached on Mars Hill. This is Barth’s Pauline message.

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Thirdly, and this is where he would distinguish himself from Kierkegaard, the criterion of prayer is more we than I. It’s our Father in Heaven that we address, not my Father. We’re reminded that prayer is the self hyphenated with the other, that the exercise of prayer is, in fact, othering. Our consciousness has to be social, not individualistic. The Christian community must be related then to our prayer life. And so, for Barth, Christian community is made up of those who pray together. And that’s why his premise is to talk about Church dogmatics. It’s not Barth’s dogmatics; it’s that which is for the wellbeing of the Church. And so if you were to ask Barth what was the purpose of theology, it’s to relate to God and therefore you cannot separate prayer from theology, like Evagrius Ponticus had said way back in the 4th century.

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Fourthly, Barth argues that prayer is unity with Jesus Christ. And this is never in vain. So when we pray in Christ’s name, we’re praying with a certainty that comes not from rational conviction, nor from mental observation, but from communion, from Trinitarian fellowship with the Father through the Son by the Spirit. Barth is reminding us is that the Reformers were united in their conviction that confidence, or parrhesia, this boldness to trust in God and to relate to God, is the sine qua non of prayer. Later, of course, this is to be strongly echoed in his companion colleague von Balthasar in his classic little book called Prayer, which I strongly recommend you to read as I think it’s one of the finest books that’s been written on prayer, which he published in 1955. Prayer will be heard by literally saying it all confidently, boldly, as Hebrews 10:19 assures that we should do. Prayer is omniloquence. It’s the shattering discovery of what the Beloved Apostle speaks of that we have an advocate with the Father. See how John 16 is echoed in 1 John 2:1. So that by this we reassure our hearts before Him whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts and He knows everything—1 John 3:19–20. I’ve often observed, myself, that the apparent silence of God in our prayers is not because God’s not listening, but because our prayers are neurotic and God doesn’t respond to neurotic prayers.

The final criterion for Barth is that prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. And alongside the Catholic Karl Rahner, Barth had revived Trinitarian theology in the 1960s. Here, Barth is one with the Early Fathers and the Reformers. When you ask what is the framework of prayer, the answer is very clearly it’s the Lord’s Prayer. And when, like the Early Fathers, Origen or Gregory or later Fathers, they too said it’s the Lord’s Prayer. But what the Lord’s Prayer is celebrating is the fatherhood of God as well as of Emmanuel that God is with us in Christ and united in the Holy Spirit. So it’s really celebrating there are two realities when we pray: one is to ascribe glory to God and the other is to describe our human need. And as we saw in our third lecture, the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are divided so that the first three are saying let God be God and the second series of petitions are saying and let man accept his humanity. It’s a denial of the serpent’s temptation that we shall be as gods. No. We’re human and we’re sinful.

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We mentioned earlier how when Barth got married his wife introduced him into the musical world of Mozart. All Barth’s Church Dogmatics are written with Mozart being played in the background. And I had a second experience of this in that his brilliant student T.F. Torrance, who was a friend of mine, whenever I went to see Tom in his study, sure enough Mozart was being played. So for both Barth and Torrance, Mozart and prayer belonged together. The elevation of soul and the comfort to the soul that Mozart gave was what made him so appreciative of his music. So not surprising, because of his brilliance, Karl Barth became internationally accepted and recognised as a specialist on Mozart. For Mozart had so centrally elevated his spirit to pray, so he never saw any incongruence between Mozart and prayer. Perhaps it might change your prayer life to have a little music in the background.

Finally, in Barth’s Church Dogmatics we find it is itself, he says, a work of God. It is the echo that we’ve heard so many times before in Benedict and Anselm: the Opus Dei. It’s a unity of action and contemplation. So if you asked Barth what were his Church Dogmatics, he would tell you it’s a work of prayer. His whole consciousness was praying as he wrote. So one of his famous statements is that the first and basic act of all theological writing is prayer. Without prayer, theological investigation is only a human inquiry; it’s only human thought and human speech. So really to pray while you’re doing theology is to recognise that you’re addressing God. Too often in the seminary our theology is talking behind God’s back. It’s not meeting Him in the classroom or in daily life. So yes, it involves us to have grace. It requires the Holy Spirit to connect us with Him, to open our lives and our minds and our hearts to Him.

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So as we close, let me suggest that you also reflect on a later disciple of Karl Barth to explore further how he elaborates for himself Barth’s prayer life in his life of prayer and that’s Jacques Ellul. Jacques Ellul, who was a professor of law and also sociology in the University of Bordeaux and had been in the resistance movement, is the great prophetic voice today against technology. His book on the technological society is an outstanding book for us as we are challenged, and our young people especially, with living in the tech revolution. When you read Jacques Ellul’s book on prayer, because he has, again, a book on prayer, you’ll find it all as an echo of Barth. He’s really voicing Barth in his own life.

So for discussion, let me suggest that you consider these questions. Why do you think that prayer is so decisively petitionary? We tend to think of it as being a bit selfish: give me this, give me that, like a small child. How does Barth correct us in understanding what petition is? The second thing, which is so relevant for you in theological education, is how does Barth so profoundly challenge your theological education in his Church Dogmatics by saying it’s all the exercise of prayer, it’s all the pursuit of prayer? And thirdly, as we seek in our house churches especially to promote Christian community, how does Barth help us to deepen our friendships and relationships in community by emphasising that prayer is the beginning and the end of that friendship and that community? This is where he gets now much closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer is going to tell us in our last lecture.