X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Karl Barth


Max Lackmann

Lackmann studied theology at Bonn and Basel as a pupil of Karl Barth.

Michael Wyschogrod

His emphasis on the radical and sublime shock and force of God's choice to enter human history in and through the people of Israel, a unilateral and non-abrogable event, shows an affinity with the thought of the Neo-Orthodox Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whose work Wyschogrod considered relevant to Jewish theologians.

S. Parkes Cadman

On December 2, 1934, he wrote an article condemning the Nazi German government for the firing of theologian Karl Barth from a German university post as a result of the professor's outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime and adamant refusal to sign an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.


Jean Bethke Elshtain

In 2006, she was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and also delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, joining such previous Gifford Lecturers as William James, Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Paul Vitz

The thesis of Faith of the Fatherless holds that famous believers—e.g., Blaise Pascal, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—had strong and loving fathers, whereas their atheistic counterparts—e.g., Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Sigmund Freud, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler—all had fathers who were weak, unloving, or absent.


see also

Rudolf Otto

Others to acknowledge Otto were, for instance, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, John A. Sanford, Richard Rohr, Hans-Georg Gadamer (critical in his youth, respectful in his old age), Max Scheler, Ernst Jünger, Joseph Needham and Hans Jonas.