Karl Barth (1886-1968)

A family of Reformed theologians

Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886 in Basel, a Reformed city since the 16th-century Reformation, into a family where theology is handed down from generation to generation. His father, Johann Friedrich "Fritz" Barth (1856-1912), was a Reformed pastor then professor of New Testament and Church history, first in Basel then in Bern; his mother, Anna Katharina Sartorius, also belonged to a family of pastors^[27]. Karl is the eldest of five children; his younger brother Heinrich Barth (1890-1965) would become a recognized philosopher, professor at Basel.

A turbulent child — by his own recollection he led a street gang in Bern, where his family settled in 1889 — Barth first resisted classical schooling before discovering, in adolescence, a theological vocation^[28]. He chose to study theology against his father's initial wishes, who would have preferred to see him embrace a more prudent career, but Fritz Barth eventually supported his son's choice and steered him toward the best German universities of the time.

Under the magisterium of liberal theology

From 1904 to 1908, Barth studied successively at the University of Bern, then in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the great historian of dogma Adolf von Harnack, then briefly in Tübingen, and finally in Marburg, where he became the student of Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922), a leading figure of neo-Kantian liberal theology^[29]. This formation profoundly shaped the young Barth: it taught that the Christian faith must be reformulated in terms compatible with modern moral conscience and religious experience, that historical-critical exegesis must take precedence over the dogmatic reading of Scripture, and that Christianity ultimately comes down to an inner experience of communion with the Father through the moral personality of Jesus.

Ordained a pastor, Barth first served as vicar in Geneva, from 1909 to 1911, in the German-speaking Reformed parish — an occasion for him to meditate, not without unease, on the gap between the theology he had learned and the concrete preaching addressed to ordinary parishioners^[30]. This tension, still discreet in Geneva, was about to become explosive in his next pastoral charge.

A parish ministry among workers

In 1911, Barth accepted the charge of pastor of Safenwil, a small industrial parish in the canton of Aargau where many textile workers lived. Confronted daily with social misery and conflicts between employers and workers, Barth actively committed himself to union defense and joined the Swiss Social Democratic Party, earning the local nickname of the "red pastor"^[31]. In 1913, he married Nelly Hoffmann, a violinist; the couple would have five children, two of whom — Markus (1915-1994) and Christoph (1917-1986) — would themselves become recognized biblical exegetes.

But it is above all the weekly preaching, exercised in a rural parish with no academic prestige, that pushes Barth to wonder whether the liberal theology he learned really has anything to say to his parishioners about God himself, and not only about human religious experience. With his friend Pastor Eduard Thurneysen, settled in a neighboring parish, he begins to explore other theological paths, notably that of the Württemberg pastor Christoph Blumhardt, whose insistence on the Kingdom of God as a sovereign irruption rather than a progressive moral ideal profoundly marked both men from 1915 onward^[32].

The shock of August 1914

The decisive turning point comes in early August 1914. Barth discovers, stupefied, that a majority of his German theological masters — including Adolf von Harnack himself — support Kaiser Wilhelm II's war policy, a rallying that will culminate in the Manifesto of the 93 German Intellectuals to the Civilized World, published in October 1914^[33]. Barth would later recount that this day marked for him the collapse of an entire theological conception: if the same men who taught the ethics of Jesus could sign a bellicose propaganda text without blinking, it was because their theology had never really distinguished the Word of God from the culture and the nation in which it was uttered.

"The ethical and dogmatic theology of the 19th century had, in my eyes, no future." — Karl Barth, quoted by Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts^[34]

This break is not only personal: it will become the organizing principle of his entire future theological work — the conviction that God can never be identified with a culture, a morality, a nation, or a human religious experience, but reveals himself sovereignly, from above, in Jesus Christ alone.

The first edition (1919)

From the summer of 1916, in the quiet of his Safenwil manse, Barth undertakes the writing of a commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which he publishes in December 1918 (with the date 1919 on the title page)^[35]. Against the dominant historical-critical exegesis, which treats Romans as a document of the history of religions to be placed back in its Hellenistic and Jewish context, Barth reads the epistle as a direct address from God to every man of every age, including the 20th-century reader.

The work, published by an unknown country pastor, does not go unnoticed. The Catholic theologian Karl Adam, in a famous article in the review Hochland, writes that Barth's book "falls like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians"^[36] — a phrase, repeated for a century since, that sums up the shock wave caused by this radically theocentric rereading of the Pauline epistle in a German academic world still dominated by liberalism.

The 1922 reworking and dialectical theology

Dissatisfied with this first version, Barth rewrites it almost entirely between October 1920 and September 1921; the second edition, published in 1922, breaks openly and definitively with the liberal theology of his youth^[37]. It is in the preface to this second edition that Barth explicitly places his method in the wake of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:

"If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity." — Karl Barth, preface to the 2nd edition of Der Römerbrief, 1922^[38]

This "infinite qualitative distinction" lies at the heart of what will be called dialectical theology or theology of crisis (from the Greek krisis, judgment): God is never an extension of man, however religious he may be; he is reached neither by mystical experience, nor by metaphysical speculation, nor by moral conscience, but only by his own Word, which always comes from above (senkrecht von oben) to interrupt and judge every human claim — including religious ones — to reach God by its own means.

"God's righteousness reveals itself as the sound of a trumpet from another world, interrupting our obligation to the nation, and interrupting also our care for our religious thoughts and feelings. A 'No' to these claims throws you to the ground, but a 'Yes' to God's righteousness and glory raises you up." — Karl Barth, lecture given in Aarau, 1916^[39]

An immediate reception, Catholic included

The second edition of Romans lastingly establishes Barth as one of the leaders of a new theological movement, alongside Eduard Thurneysen, Friedrich Gogarten and, for a time, Emil Brunner and Rudolf Bultmann. Without having defended a doctoral thesis, Barth is called as early as 1921 as honorary professor of Reformed theology at the University of Göttingen — an exceptional appointment testifying to the immediate impact of his work.

Dialectical theology also attracts Catholic attention, still rare at the time for a contemporary Protestant theologian. As early as 1926, Karl Adam devotes an in-depth study to him, Die Theologie der Krisis ("The Theology of Crisis"), published in the review Hochland^[40] — a sign that Barth, from that date, is perceived by Catholic theologians as a phenomenon to be taken seriously, well beyond Protestant circles.

Göttingen, Münster, Bonn

In Göttingen (1921-1925), Barth teaches Reformed dogmatics and begins systematically rethinking the whole of Christian doctrine in the light of his dialectical theology; it is there that in 1924 he meets Charlotte von Kirschbaum (1899-1975), who will become his closest collaborator. In 1925, he is called to Münster, where he teaches dogmatics and New Testament exegesis, then to Bonn in 1930, where he begins writing his great work: the first volume of the Church Dogmatics appears in 1932^[41].

Charlotte von Kirschbaum, a lifelong collaborator

In 1929, Charlotte von Kirschbaum moves into the Barths' own home, where she will remain for thirty-seven years, until 1966, as secretary, research assistant, and theological collaborator (she would die in 1975)^[42]. This situation, unique and publicly assumed by the couple despite the tension it introduces into the household, has been documented by the correspondence of husband and wife, made public in 2017, which reveals a "deep, intense and all-embracing" relationship between Barth and his collaborator^[43]. Charlotte von Kirschbaum contributed substantially to the bibliographical research and to the writing of several volumes of the Church Dogmatics, though her exact role in the genesis of the text has never been precisely quantified by specialists. Nelly Barth, the lawful wife, never left the family home and herself had Charlotte von Kirschbaum buried in the family tomb in 1975, before dying herself the following year.

Theologische Existenz heute! (1933)

As soon as Adolf Hitler came to the chancellery in January 1933, the movement of the "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen) set out to subordinate the German Evangelical Church to National Socialist ideology, promoting a racialized reading of the Gospel and the exclusion of pastors of Jewish origin. In June 1933, Barth replied with a resounding pamphlet, Theologische Existenz heute! ("Theological Existence Today!"), in which he calls theologians to do theology "as if nothing had happened" — that is, to keep uttering the Word of God without letting its content be dictated by the political mood of the day^[44].

The Barmen Theological Declaration (1934)

The ecclesial opposition movement takes shape as the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which holds its first general synod at Barmen, in the suburbs of Wuppertal, on May 29 and 31, 1934. Barth writes most of the adopted text there, the Barmen Theological Declaration, with the contribution of the Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen for the fifth thesis, on the doctrine of the two kingdoms^[45]. The heart of the text, formulated in the first thesis, affirms:

"Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey, in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God's revelation." — Barmen Theological Declaration, Thesis I, May 31, 1934^[46]

Barth himself personally sent a copy of the declaration to Adolf Hitler^[47]. The text, still recognized today as a confession of faith by several Reformed and united Churches, does not explicitly mention the persecution of the Jews — a silence later historians, including Barth's heirs, have regretted — but it lays down the theological principle that will make possible, in some members of the Confessing Church, a more determined resistance to the total Nazification of the Churches.

The "No!" to Emil Brunner: the quarrel over natural theology

The year 1934 is also that of a resounding personal and theological break with Emil Brunner (1889-1966), the Zurich Reformed theologian until then a close ally of Barth in the dialectical movement. Brunner publishes Natur und Gnade ("Nature and Grace"), in which he defends the idea that divine revelation finds in human nature, created in the image of God, an authentic "point of contact" (Anknüpfungspunkt) — without which, in his view, man could not even understand that he is addressed by the Word of God^[48]. Barth replies the same year with a stinging pamphlet soberly entitled Nein! ("No!"), which breaks their friendship for many years^[49].

"Without grace, reason is incurably sick and incapable of serious theological knowledge." — Karl Barth, Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner, Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Munich, 1934^[50]

This disagreement is not a mere personal quarrel: it touches the heart of what separates Barth not only from Brunner, but also — more radically still — from the whole Catholic tradition of natural theology, as will be seen below. For Barth, admitting the slightest natural point of contact between God and fallen man amounts to leaving the door open to exactly what the "German Christians" had just done: erecting race, nation, or religious experience into competing sources of revelation.

The expulsion from Bonn (1935)

In November 1934, an oath of unconditional loyalty to Hitler is required of all Reich officials, university professors included. Barth proposes to take it with an added clause — "insofar as I can do so as a Christian" — which the authorities refuse^[51]. He is dismissed from his Bonn chair in spring 1935 and returns to Switzerland, where he immediately obtains a chair of systematic theology at the University of Basel, a post he will hold until his retirement in 1962. From Switzerland, Barth will remain a constant voice of support for the Confessing Church, for persecuted Jewish communities, and for refugees from Nazism.

An unfinished theological cathedral (1932-1968)

The Kirchliche Dogmatik (Church Dogmatics) occupies Barth from 1932 until his death in 1968, without his managing to complete it: over nine thousand pages and six million words spread across four great parts (Doctrine of the Word of God, Doctrine of God, Doctrine of Creation, Doctrine of Reconciliation), themselves subdivided into thirteen volumes or half-volumes^[52]. A fifth part, devoted to eschatology and "redemption," was planned but never written.

Reading the table: the Church Dogmatics proceeds by great doctrines (Word of God, God, creation, reconciliation) published over thirty-five years; the announced fifth part, on final redemption, was never written.

The God who reveals himself: Trinity and the Word of God

The first aim of the Dogmatics is to restore — against what Barth perceives as its erasure in 19th-century liberal theology — the doctrine of the Trinity as the very structure of revelation: God is at once the Revealer, the Revelation, and the revealed being — Father, Son, and Spirit — so that God alone can make God known^[53]. Barth distinguishes a threefold form of the Word of God: the revealed Word (Jesus Christ himself), the written Word (Scripture, witness to revelation), and the proclaimed Word (the Church's preaching, which must in turn bear witness to Scripture)^[54]. This scheme has a momentous consequence, which will be found again in the final Catholic assessment: for Barth, Scripture is not itself, in itself, revelation; it is its normative witness, but distinct from it.

Election in Jesus Christ, Elect and Reprobate

Volume II/2 of the Dogmatics, published in 1942, contains one of the most radical reworkings of classical Reformed theology: the doctrine of divine election^[55]. Against the traditional Calvinist double predestination, which teaches that God elects certain individuals to salvation and reprobates others by an eternal and hidden decree, Barth makes Jesus Christ himself the sole object of both divine election and divine reprobation. In Christ, God chooses to bear himself the judgment and reprobation that would fall to sinful humanity, and God elects the whole of humanity to communion with him, in Christ.

"Jesus Christ is not only one elect among others: he is God's Elect, and as such, he is also the only truly Reprobate One." — Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik II/2, §§ 32-35, 1942^[56]

This reworking constitutes an absolute Christocentric concentration of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, hailed by several Catholic theologians — including Hans Urs von Balthasar — as an objective rapprochement with the Catholic conception of a universally offered grace, against the arbitrary decree of strict Reformed theologians on double predestination^[57]. But it immediately raised, including in the Reformed camp, a redoubtable question: if Christ alone bears the reprobation of all, how could a single man ever be finally lost?

Creation, the creature, and the ethics of freedom

Volumes III/1 to III/4 (1945-1951) unfold the doctrine of creation as "covenant history": God creates the world with a view to his covenant with man in Jesus Christ, so that creation is never a neutral given, but already oriented toward grace. Barth develops there an anthropology of the creature as a being-in-relation (Mitmenschlichkeit) and an ethics of human freedom understood as responsible obedience to an always concrete commandment, never reducible to an abstract general rule.

Reconciliation and the question of apocatastasis

The four volumes devoted to the doctrine of reconciliation (IV/1 to IV/4, 1953-1967) develop Barth's most complete Christology: in Jesus Christ, God humbled himself (the Lord become servant) and man was exalted (the servant become, in Christ, lord), so that the reconciliation of all humanity with God is already, objectively, accomplished in Christ, even before each man becomes aware of it through faith.

It is from this structure that the question arises — never quite settled by Barth — of apocatastasis, the final salvation of all men. Barth explained himself directly on it in volume II/2, where he explicitly refuses to teach universalism as doctrine but equally refuses to exclude it as a possibility the Church must hope for by grace, without ever being able to claim it as a right:

"I do not preach the universal salvation of all men; what I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God will save all men at the judgment." — Karl Barth, quoted in Time magazine's cover story, "Witness to an Ancient Truth," April 20, 1962^[58]

This reservation did not convince all his readers. The Dutch theologian G. C. Berkouwer, in a thorough 1954 study, judged that the inner logic of the Barthian system — universal election in Christ, the negation of all human synergy in salvation, the total triumph of grace — led almost inevitably to universalism, whatever Barth's verbal denials^[59]. Emil Brunner, for his part, called his former ally's position a "disguised apocatastasis"^[60]. It is precisely this point — the shadow of apocatastasis cast over the doctrine of election — that most clearly distinguishes Barth from the Catholic doctrine of particular judgment and the real possibility of eternal damnation, as will be seen in the final assessment.

A final fragment: baptism as human response (1967)

The last fragment published in his lifetime, volume IV/4 (1967), devoted to baptism, constitutes one of Barth's most radical breaks with his own Reformed tradition: in it he categorically rejects paedobaptism (the baptism of little children), which he judges to lack solid exegetical foundation and to be contrary to the very nature of baptism as an act of free and responsible human response to the work of the Holy Spirit^[61]. For Barth, water baptism is no longer, strictly speaking, a sacrament in the sense in which grace would be objectively communicated in it: he sharply distinguishes Spirit baptism, an exclusively divine action, from water baptism, an exclusively human act of obedience^[62].

The Darmstadt Declaration and German guilt

After the defeat of National Socialism, Barth takes an active part in the debates on the responsibility of the German Churches. In 1947, with the Lutheran theologian Hans Iwand, he co-signs the Darmstadt Declaration, a text more demanding than the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (1945), which attributes the complicity of large parts of German Protestantism with Nazism to a prior idolatrous attachment to the bourgeois order, to the nation, and to established authority^[63].

The Cold War and the refusal of anticommunism as a principle

In the 1950s, Barth opposes nuclear armament and refuses to make anticommunism a theological absolute, a position that earns him accusations of complacency toward the Soviet bloc from part of Cold War Western opinion. In 1960, in an article published by the American review The Christian Century, he writes:

"I hold anticommunism, as a principle, to be an evil even worse than communism itself." — Karl Barth, The Christian Century, 1960^[64]

The Time cover and the 1962 American lectures

In April 1962, Time magazine devotes its cover and a five-page article to Barth, a sign that his influence has now gone beyond European university and ecclesial circles to reach the American general public^[65]. That same spring, at the age of 75, Barth makes a lecture tour of the United States — Princeton, Chicago, Union Theological Seminary in New York, San Francisco — where he notably meets Pastor Martin Luther King Jr.^[66]. Barth retires from the University of Basel in 1962, without ceasing to write or to receive visitors from around the world in his Bruderholz home.

"The invention of the Antichrist": the analogia entis quarrel with Erich Przywara

The harshest — and most fruitful — dialogue between Barth and Catholic theology concerns the analogy of being (analogia entis), the doctrine developed by the Jesuit Erich Przywara (1889-1972) in his work Analogia Entis (1932), according to which there exists, between creature and Creator, a true likeness within dissimilarity that makes possible a human discourse — always imperfect — about God starting from created being^[67]. In 1929, Barth had nevertheless invited Przywara to lecture in Münster and had called his presentation a "masterpiece"^[68]; but from the end of that same year, he begins to harden his criticism.

In the preface to the very first volume of the Church Dogmatics (1932), Barth delivers his most definitive and most famous judgment on this doctrine:

"I regard the analogia entis as the invention of the Antichrist, and I believe that because of it, one can never become Catholic." — Karl Barth, preface to Die Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1, Theologischer Verlag Zollikon, Zurich, 1932^[69]

For Barth, grounding the very possibility of speaking about God on a structure of being shared between Creator and creature amounts to giving fallen man access to God independent of grace and revelation in Christ — exactly what his dialectical theology absolutely refuses. He himself would acknowledge, decades later, at a 1962 lecture in Princeton, that this extreme formula was "very nasty"^[70].

Gottlieb Söhngen and the analogia fidei: a bridge

The Munich theologian Gottlieb Söhngen (1892-1971) proposes, in the 1930s-1940s, a mediation that deeply touched Barth: he distinguishes the analogy of being, understood as a metaphysical structure prior to faith, from the analogy of faith (analogia fidei), which claims to ground no natural knowledge of God but only describes the likeness — established by grace itself — between the human language of faith and its divine object^[71]. Barth, moved by this precision, would acknowledge that, so understood, "then of course I must withdraw my earlier statement"^[72] — while wondering about the representativeness of Söhngen's position within official Catholic theology.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, a friend and a Catholic interpreter

It is the Basel Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), a student of Przywara, who will offer the most thorough and most generous Catholic reading of the Barthian work. Himself residing in Basel from 1940, Balthasar enters into a demanding and friendly dialogue with Barth that will last nearly three decades^[73]. In 1951, he publishes Karl Barth. Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie ("Karl Barth: Presentation and Interpretation of His Theology"), a work hailed as one of the finest presentations ever written of Barthian theology — an appreciation Barth himself acknowledged^[74]. Balthasar defends there the thesis that the analogy of being, correctly understood as a "suspended middle" between identity and the radical otherness of God and creature, does not frontally contradict the best of Barthian theology, whose later trajectory — notably the "analogy of being-in-Christ" he develops in the subsequent volumes of the Dogmatics — draws imperceptibly closer, without ever explicitly admitting it, to the Catholic position^[75].

Hans Küng and the doctrine of justification (1957)

In 1957, the young Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Küng publishes his doctoral thesis, Rechtfertigung: Die Lehre Karl Barths und eine katholische Besinnung ("Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection"), in which he argues that the Barthian doctrine of justification, correctly read, converges on essentials with the Catholic doctrine of Trent on justification by grace^[76]. Barth agreed to preface the work with a letter in which he confirms that Küng has faithfully represented his thought, while reserving a cautious doubt about the ecumenical conclusion his young interlocutor draws from it:

"How one would like to believe it!" — Karl Barth, prefatory letter to Hans Küng, Rechtfertigung, Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln, 1957^[77]

This reservation, often quoted, well illustrates Barth's final position toward postwar Catholic ecumenism: a real interest and loyal recognition of the theological rigor of his Catholic interlocutors, but never full assent to the idea that the divergences between Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism were already overcome.

Vatican II seen from Basel: Ad Limina Apostolorum (1966-1967)

Invited as an observer to the last sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Barth was unable to attend because of his declining health. Once his condition improved, he nevertheless undertook, from September 22 to 29, 1966, a pilgrimage ad limina Apostolorum ("to the threshold of the Apostles") to Rome, where he conversed for several days, in French, with leading Roman theologians on the meaning of the conciliar texts, before a brief meeting with Pope Paul VI^[78]. For this journey Barth had prepared some ten sets of precise questions on the conciliar constitutions, notably on Dei Verbum (Revelation) and on Catholic mariology. To the pope himself, he put a question that has remained famous:

"What does aggiornamento mean? An accommodation to what?" — Karl Barth, to Paul VI, as reported in Ad Limina Apostolorum, 1967^[79]

The account of this journey appeared the following year as Ad Limina Apostolorum: An Appraisal of Vatican II — the last major text published by Barth in his lifetime, mixing real admiration for the conciliar theological renewal with critical questions, notably on the mariology of Lumen Gentium VIII, which remained in his eyes insufficiently cautious toward what he continued to regard as the excesses of popular Marian piety^[80].

The courage of Barmen and the refusal of political idols

An attentive Catholic can only admire, in Barth's trajectory, the theological courage of Barmen: refusing that the Führer, race, or nation could compete with Christ as the source of revelation is a sound intuition, deeply compatible with Catholic teaching on the uniqueness of Christ the Mediator^[81] and on the sin of political idolatry. The Barthian insistence on the absolute sovereignty of grace, on the radical gratuity of salvation, and on the impossibility of reducing God to a human culture or religion joins, by another path, Catholic teaching on divine transcendence.

Natural theology and Romans 1: a head-on disagreement with Vatican I

But it is precisely on this ground that the doctrinal disagreement is sharpest. Barth absolutely rejects all natural theology — any possibility for human reason, without revelation in Christ, to know anything authentic about God from the works of creation — and makes this rejection the keystone of his whole system, from his break with Brunner in 1934 to his critique of the analogia entis in 1932. Yet this is exactly what the First Vatican Council solemnly defined as Catholic truth of faith:

"Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 36, quoting the Dei Filius constitution of the First Vatican Council (1870)^[82]

The council goes so far as to attach a solemn canon to this doctrine, against every form of radical fideism that would deny this capacity of reason^[83]. On this precise point, the Barthian reading of the Epistle to the Romans — which refuses to see, in the first chapter, the affirmation of a true natural knowledge of God accessible to every man through contemplation of creation — therefore opposes head-on, and not by secondary nuance, the constant Catholic dogmatic teaching since St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the First Vatican Council. Catholic theology readily acknowledges, with Vatican I itself, that this natural knowledge remains fragile and exposed to many obstacles in the concrete historical conditions of fallen humanity^[84] — but it never denies it in principle, as Barth does.

Scripture, witness to revelation, not revelation itself

The Barthian distinction between the revealed Word (Christ), the written Word (Scripture, mere witness), and the proclaimed Word likewise departs — more subtly, though — from the Catholic doctrine of scriptural inspiration, according to which Scripture itself, as inspired text, is authentically the word of God consigned in writing, and not only a human testimony, however normative, borne to a revelation that would ultimately remain external to it. The conciliar constitution Dei Verbum (1965), which Barth himself questioned during his 1966 Roman journey, articulates on the contrary the intimate unity of Scripture and living Tradition as two distinct modes of transmitting one and the same Word of God entrusted to the Church, under the guardianship of the Magisterium^[85].

Infant baptism denied

The Barthian rejection of paedobaptism in volume IV/4 of the Dogmatics (1967) directly opposes constant Catholic doctrine — attested since the early centuries and defined against Pelagian positions at the Council of Carthage (418) and then at Trent — according to which the baptism of little children is legitimate precisely because it objectively communicates baptismal grace through the sacrament itself (ex opere operato), and not only in response to an act of personal and conscious decision by the baptized^[86]. By making water baptism a purely human act of obedience, disjoint from any sacramental communication of grace, Barth moves away not only from Catholicism but from his own classical Reformed tradition, which maintained infant baptism as a sign of the covenant.

The shadow of apocatastasis

Finally, the Barthian doctrine of universal election in Christ, although Barth always refused to draw from it the dogmatic conclusion of a guaranteed universal salvation, leaves hovering over his whole system an ambiguity the Catholic Church cannot share: she teaches, with the Gospel itself, the real and present possibility of eternal damnation for whoever dies deliberately and freely separated from God in a state of mortal sin^[87], without this possibility being contradicted by the legitimate hope, also taught by the Church, that God's mercy may extend beyond what man can know or foresee. Between the Catholic hope — which excludes neither real damnation nor presumes the salvation of all — and the Barthian structure of election — which makes, according to its own Reformed critics, final damnation almost logically impossible — the difference remains, despite appearances of proximity, structural.

Barth officially retires from the University of Basel in 1962 but keeps writing, receiving visitors, and corresponding until the end of his life. On the evening of December 9, 1968, he comforts by telephone his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen, then discouraged, with words that have remained famous:

"Above all, don't let yourself be cast down! Never! For things are governed, not only in Moscow, in Washington, or in Peking, but things are governed — even here below on earth — entirely from above, from heaven." — Karl Barth, last telephone conversation with Eduard Thurneysen, December 9, 1968^[88]

That same evening, Barth still listens to music by Mozart — his favorite composer since always — and works on an unfinished lecture, entitled "Setting out, turning back, confessing," intended for an ecumenical week of prayer in Zurich. The manuscript breaks off in the middle of a sentence^[89]. Karl Barth dies in his sleep in the early morning of December 10, 1968, in his Bruderholz home in Basel, at the age of 82.

Barth's work remains the obligatory reference of all 20th-century Protestant theology, including for those who radically depart from it, like Rudolf Bultmann, for a time a fellow traveler of the dialectical movement before following his own path. His doctrine of election has nourished debates that continue today on the question of Christian universalism; his dialectical theology has profoundly marked 20th-century theology of crisis; his courage in the face of National Socialism remains an ecumenically and unanimously hailed reference, including by the Catholic Church. The dialogue he established with Przywara, Söhngen, Balthasar, and Küng lastingly helped install, between Catholics and Reformed, a climate of rigorous theological discussion whose most visible outcome was the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed in 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church — a text the Barth-Küng dialogue of the 1950s had, without yet knowing it, helped prepare.

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), whose "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity directly inspires the preface of the 1922 Romans.
• Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), author of the reference Catholic study on Barthian theology and Barth's personal friend in Basel.
• Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995), another great Catholic reader of 20th-century Protestant philosophy and theology.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), fathers of the Reformation whose Reformed theological heritage Barth intends to renew and radicalize.
• Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), founder of the Swiss Reformation whose ecclesial heir Barth remains, two centuries later, in Basel.
• Calvinist predestination, the doctrine Barth intends to radically rework around Christocentric election.
• Answers to Protestantism, for the complete Catholic dossier on the points of doctrine separating Catholicism from the Churches born of the Reformation.