The German Genius

Harnack’s book was translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible, and according to Paul Tillich, “Leipzig railway station was jammed by freight trains carrying Harnack’s book all over the world.” 7
    Troeltsch and Harnack’s near contemporary was Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), possibly one of the most indefatigable people who ever lived. Born in Croatia, the son of a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railways, Steiner studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He made his mark so quickly that even before he graduated he was recommended as the editor of a new edition of Goethe’s works. On the strength of this, in 1896 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche asked Steiner to put her brother’s archive in order, and the young man was very moved by his meeting with the now-catatonic philosopher.
    Steiner’s subsequent life was spent trying to bring together the worlds of science, literature, the arts, and religion into one spiritual synthesis. He founded journals and schools and built two “Goethaneums”—auditoria where people could “experience” lectures about the spiritual life among like-minded souls (“ceremonies of the whole” again), and he established a cult. 8 He advocated his view of the “Threefold Social Order,” in which he maintained that the economic, political, and cultural aspects of society should be independent but equally important. For this, Steiner was attacked by Hitler himself. 9
    Steiner died exhausted at the age of sixty-four, but he left a considerable legacy—900 Waldorf (Steiner) Schools and a number of firms (including banks) and charitable societies operating on his principle that our aim should be “the higher life,” a moral concern for others and an attempt to grasp the spiritual dimension, by which he meant, specifically, the Second Coming of Jesus, which he did not believe would be physical, but “etheric,” only becoming apparent through communal life. 10
    Although he was nowhere near as worldly as Steiner and did not have the same kind of practical innovative genius, Karl Barth (1886–1968) is widely regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest since Luther himself. 11 Born in Basel, where his father, Fritz, was a minister and professor of New Testament and Early Church History, Barth studied at the universities of Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. At Berlin he attended Harnack’s seminars, and it was there that he first encountered the ideas of liberal theology (mainly the search for the historical Jesus), which he would eventually rebel against. 12 After his studies he returned to Switzerland as a pastor. 13
    In World War I Barth was much disturbed by the Manifesto of the 93 (“Among whom I was horrified to discover almost all my hitherto revered theological teachers”), which he believed was a betrayal of Christian principles. 14 He came to believe that the Higher Criticism in Germany, although it had been responsible for many of the new scholarly techniques, nevertheless missed the point. The concern with Jesus as a historical figure obscured Jesus as the revealed word of God. Mankind no longer consulted the Bible in the way that its compilers intended it to be read.
    In the midst of war, Barth reexamined the scriptures and, in particular, in 1916, began a careful examination of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. This proved of great significance for Barth, and in 1922 he published Römerbrief ( The Epistle to the Romans ), the main message of which was, as Paul himself had said, that God saves only those people who “trust not in themselves but solely in God.” 15 This led to Barth’s central, seminal view, what he called “the Godness of God,” that God “is wholly other,” totally different from humans. 16 It was this idea that brought Barth to the attention of other theologians and many of the faithful. In the year that he published The Epistle to the Romans , he, together with a number of other theologians, including Rudolf Bultmann, who is considered next, started a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times), which formed the main outlet for what became known as “Crisis Theology” (the “crisis” being World War I and the “sinfulness,” the very great distance from God of which it was evidence). Zwischen den Zeiten remained a powerful force until it was closed down in 1933. 17
    Barth’s developed view was