Preface

Karl Barth and Calvin in 1922. Barth’s interest in Calvin had first been kindled during his initial semester at Bern in the winter of 1904/5 when he attended his father’s course on the history of the Reformation age. He referred to this influence in his own lectures.! He became interested on his own account in the fall of 1909 when he took his first post as auxiliary pastor to the German congregation in Geneva and when the great commemoration of Calvin's birth in 1509 was held there in the summer of 1909. The German congregation worshiped in the auditorium of St. Pierre where Calvin himself had once lectured. The idea of mounting the same rostrum as the reformer excited Barth, and during his Geneva years (up to 1911) he began to study the 1559 Institutes in depth. His letters from this period bear ample witness to this, as do his many markings in his copy of the Institutes, vol. I] of the Corpus Reformatorum series. His lecture on the Christian faith and history (1910, published 1912) shows the impact of this reading, though Barth would say fifteen years later that it would have been better left unpublished.”

That Barth left Calvin’s city with a real interest may be seen from the fact that he knew its local history so well and immersed himself in the study of the archives conducted under the Basel professor Paul

1. See 131.

2. For the former see Vortriige und kleinere Arbeiten 1909-1914, vol. II of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1993), 149-212. See the autobiographical sketch in Karl Barth-Rudolf P Bultmann Letters 1922-1966 (Grand Rapids, 1981), 150ff.

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Wernle.3 More research remains to be done into Barth’s early sermons to determine when, as he said,4 he began to use Calvin’s commentaries regularly in sermon preparation. By 1919 he had certainly read Kampschulte and Stahelin, whom he quotes so often in these lectures, and in his 1919 and 1922 Romans he constantly consulted Calvin's 1539 commentary. Intensive preoccupation with Calvin thus helped: to form his theology even before his switch to an academic career.

When he accepted the call to Géttingen in 1921/22 to become honorary Professor of Reformed Theology, Barth saw it as his primary task to acquaint his students and himself with the classical documents of this theology.> The first winter he lectured two hours a week on the Heidelberg Catechism. The summer of 1922 he ventured on four hours a week on Calvin. He would then give courses on Zwingli, the Reformed confessions, and. Schleiermacher.®

Calvin, then, was his first larger theme. The lectures show both diligent daily study of the material and fascination with it. We find both again, sometimes in language reminding us almost of contemporary Expressionism, in his letters to Thurneysen. Thus in a letter dated June 8, 1922, he calls Calvin a cataract, a primeval forest, something demonic, directly descending from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, marvelous, mythological. He saw no way of even receiving this phenomenon, let alone depicting it. Only a thin trickle passed into him, and he could pass on only a small portion of this. He could gladly spend the rest of his life with Calvin.7

Barth found himself forced at this time to gain his own understanding of the genuine Reformed tradition and to determine the specific character of what he called the second turn in the Reformation and therefore of the epochal significance of Zwingli and Calvin in relation and antithesis to Luther. He saw the historical mission of the Reformed version of the Reformation in its taking up again of what he took to be a common theme of the Middle Ages and the modern period, that of ethics, but now on the basis of the fundamental insight brought to light by Luther. We

3. See P. Wernle, Calvin und Basel bis zum Tode des Myconius 1535-1552 (Basel, 1909), 107 n. 391.

4. See below, 392 n. 23.

5. Cf. Bw.Th. I, 357£, 360f.

6. The Gesamtausgabe plans publication of the first two courses, while the third is already available: The Theology of Schleiermacher (Grand Rapids, 1982).

7. Bw.Th. I, 80.