The Crisis of the First World War
The Crisis of the First World War
The impact of the First World War (1914–1918) upon European culture cannot be overstated. The immediate post-war years were widely perceived as witnessing the final collapse of the cultural heritage of the nineteenth century, with shock waves that were felt in every sphere of intellectual and creative activity. The Russian Revolution seemed to many to confirm the fragility of western culture and raised questions about the future of democracies in Europe. In an unrelated development, much of western Europe suffered a ‘flu pandemic, which probably spread so rapidly on account of the Great War, with its mass movements of armies, especially aboard ships. It is also likely that widespread malnourishment made people weaker and less able to recover. It is now thought that between between 50 million and 100 million people died from the pandemic worldwide.
It is very difficult to summarize the situation in which Christian theology found itself following the trauma of the Great War. Many believed that the conflict had exposed deep inadequacies in existing assumptions about the nature of the church and human nature, which would have to be addressed before progress could be made. These questions were felt with particular force in Germany during the 1920s, as a defeated nation struggled to make sense of what had happened to it. The German churches and the theological establishment had backed Kaiser Wilhelm in his aggressive war policies. Adolf von Harnack and other leading German theologians had given their support publicly to the Kaiser in August 1914. After the war, German theology found itself with a burden of guilt concerning its earlier and somewhat uncritical advocacy of militarism.
One of the most important outcomes of this was the “theology of crisis,” particularly associated with the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968). Barth, who had studied theology in Germany, found himself disillusioned with the dominant approach to theology he found within Liberal Protestantism. This approach to theology – often dubbed “Culture-Protestantism” – took its lead from cultural trends. Barth saw the Great War as having destroyed the credibility of such an approach. How could a theology that was grounded in contemporary cultural norms ever presume to criticise such cultural norms?
Barth’s approach to theology, which began to develop while he was the Reformed pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil in the aftermath of the Great War, placed an emphasis upon God’s discontinuity with culture. There was, he declared, a chasm – a “glacial crevasse” – between God and human culture, which could only be bridged from God’s side. Human culture could never become the basis of an authentic knowledge of God.
Picking up on a phrase from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Barth argued that there was an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and human beings. Like an Old Testament prophet, Barth emphasized God’s total holiness and remoteness from humanity in general, and from human culture in particular. God “stands over and against humanity and everything human in an infinite qualitative distinction and is never, ever identical with anything which we name, experience, conceive or worship as God.”
Barth adopted a strongly iconoclastic approach to theology, rejecting any attempt to anchor God in the natural world, on the one hand, or human culture, on the other. God is known only as God chooses to be known – in other words, in God’s act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ. We shall consider some aspects of these moves for theological renewal and reform in this chapter.