Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 10, 1886, the son of a professor of Reformed theology. He studied theology in Switzerland and Germany, in Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg, under masters of the liberal Protestant theology then dominant in Europe.
As a young pastor in Safenwil, between 1911 and 1921, he watched that liberal theology fail in the face of the First World War: professors he admired signed manifestos supporting the Kaiser. The crisis led him to reread Paul’s letters with completely new eyes.
The result was his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, published in 1919 and almost entirely rewritten in 1922. In it, Barth broke with liberal theology and affirmed the radical distance between God and humanity, overcome only in Jesus Christ.
He became a professor in Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn. In 1934, he drafted almost single-handedly the Barmen Theological Declaration, a document of the Confessing Church that rejected the submission of the Christian faith to Nazi ideology and affirmed Jesus Christ as the only Word of God to be heard and obeyed.
In 1935, he refused to swear unconditional loyalty to Hitler and lost his chair in Bonn. He returned to Basel, where he taught until his retirement in 1962, and there wrote most of the monumental Church Dogmatics, a work he left unfinished.
His personal life also had its shadows. For decades, he maintained an intimate relationship with his assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who lived in the family home alongside his wife, Nelly, with whom he had five children. He described the arrangement as the least imperfect solution, without ever resolving it.
After the war, the firmness with which he opposed Nazism was not repeated in the face of Soviet communism. He refused to publicly condemn the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an attitude that drew criticism even from close allies, such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Even so, his legacy remains alive. His insistence that the Church has only one Lord, and that this lordship is not negotiable with any human power, continues to inspire theologians, pastors, and Christian movements around the world.
