Introduction

found a good theological teacher, as I once did in Wilhelm Herrmann,!2 then they will surely know what I mean. We listen, we learn, and then we go our own way and in so doing we give evidence of respect, of doing the teacher justice.

Third, we cannot make Calvin say something other than what he said four hundred years ago. Like Paul, he is dead, and the deposit of what he said in his writings and recorded sermons is the only form in which he can speak to us today. If we want to know what he would say to us today, we must keep to what he tried to say then, and to what in some degree he did actually say, in all its historical necessity and also contingency, in all its limitation and uniqueness. We must pay our first and very serious attention to him, beginning our thinking with him, if we really have it in view to let ourselves be taught by him. It is an open possibility that he might have said then something different from what we with our best knowledge and conscience have to say today. In handling Reformation history we must be on guard against falling into the style of refined Roman Catholic hagiography and presenting the absolute — or what we regard as such — as though it were wandering on earth in the form of Luther, or, if we are Reformed, Zwingli or Calvin. In that way we can do justice neither to them nor to their opponents or critics, nor finally learn from them what is to be learned if we view impartially the way in which they were historically conditioned.

But I must issue a warning here. With any classic it is at any rate a bold venture to claim that he said something different from what we have to say when we seriously tackle the same subject even when the wording formally cries out aloud that he did say something different. It is a bold thing, and in most cases simply out of taste, to assume that, for example, Paul or Luther was mistaken, or, to put it bluntly, that they did not really know what we think we know with our more thorough discussion of the same subject. As a rule it is better to let the alien saying of such an author, for example, what Paul says about the powers that be in Rom. 13, at least put a question mark against our own ever so well-grounded opinion, or to set it in its own living context, throwing light upon it from other dicta of the same author, from his total thinking, or not least of all from the immanent logic of the matter itself, interpreting it and perhaps correcting

12. In the summer semester of 1908 and from November 1908 to August 1909 Barth was in Marburg and heard Herrmann on dogmatics. For statements about his relation to Herrmann cf. Karl Barth-Rudolf Bultmann Letters 1922-1966 (Grand Rapids, 1981); and Barth, Theology and Church (New York, 1962), 157.