§1 Connection
The first and most direct impression that the comparison gives us is of something strikingly new and different, especially in Luther. We find this man and his thinking moving in the reflection of a great and strange light that falls lightly upon him. We see him faced with an incomparable,
2. Barth had in view the thesis of Troeltsch that the Reformation belonged to the Middle Ages and the replies of Loofs and Seeberg. See below, 65f. unheard-of question and then at once, in and with the question, in possession of an equally incomparable, unheard-of answer. The thoughts in which he tried to give an account of what he saw both to himself and to others are disturbingly and wildly contradictory. Only with difficulty could he put them together, and even then they largely exclude one another. No specific, or, at any rate, no systematic or planned deeper meaning rules in these thoughts; he would clearly have liked to say everything much more simply, but with great embarrassment he constantly ventured paradoxes that in their significance may be placed alongside the boldest insights of philosophical thinking and that in their immediate force put far in the shade the formulations of most philosophers. Even where he does not speak in paradoxes a light like that of the morning sun shines constantly over his trains of thought. They breathe like fresh air after a storm. Was he offering edification? Was he preaching? Was he thinking academically? Who would be so pedantic as to make a distinction? What do categories? mean here? In these thoughts something takes place, a decision, a breakthrough, an event. We have the feeling regarding them that the words are not just words. We witness a process of knowledge that we cannot distinguish from an act. And this act, the longer and more radically we let it speak to us in its own true sense, does it not significantly, but also with a claim, and erasing all the borders between here and there, thrust itself into our own existence? Can we escape this word, this act, or do we not feel, like those who heard Zwingli, that we are taken by the hairt when we really hear this voice? That is Reformation theology, not just in Luther but also in Zwingli and Calvin and the lesser lights around them, for what counts here is not the genius or originality of the individual thinker but the quality of what all of them were thinking with more or less force and depth.
But precisely when we take seriously our direct impression of this theology, precisely when we believe we have to do here with something new and wholly different, precisely when we are inclined to ascribe to the event that unfolds before our eyes a dignity and significance that a word
3. On the relation between edification, preaching, and academic lectures cf. Barth's Ein Briefwechsel mit Adolf von Harnack (1923), in Theologische Fragen und Antworten, Gesammelte Vortréige, vol. III (Zurich, 1957, 2nd ed. 1986), esp. 19f., and Harnack’s reply, 30f.
4. According to Thomas Platter; see H. Boos, Thomas und Felix Platter... (Leipzig, 1878), 39. For an edition of Platter’s work in modern German cf. Thomas und Felix Platters und Theodor Agrippa d’Aubignes Lebensbeschreibung, ed. O. Fischer (Munich, 1911), 64.
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like “experience”> does not really cover even though we do experience something also, precisely then we must be careful in describing this as a new theology compared to the old. If we take the word “different” seriously, what does it mean to confront something totally different?¢ If we are not finally to be guilty of mere bombast, can the totally different be one thing in contrast to this or that other different thing? What do “new” and “old” mean when it is a matter of this new thing, when it is a matter of the knowledge of God in this theology? Who gives us the courage at once to divest the terms of their meaning again by excluding the poor Middle Ages, the old, from this new thing? Precisely when we sense somewhat the superiority of this theology, we must maintain its newness and difference on the plane of historical things only with reservation, only in a relative sense. On the plane of time one thing always and everywhere stands alongside another, certainly with significant differences, but in such a way that great differences often mean very little and little differences mean a great deal.
In assessing what we can see here, those who can only reckon, count, and measure run the risk of hardly being able to avoid serious confusion and mistakes. For the absolute is not directly visible on this world’s stage. The great light in the reflection of which we see the reformers and their thoughts move is not itself a phenomenon; it does not become one thing among others. And what we see in the reformers, the reflection in which they stand, is only relatively and not absolutely different from what we see around them, in their predecessors and successors. It is a new and different thing, but not the new thing, she different thing. It is at every point in continuity with what came before and what came after. The new thing is not something that we can establish in the reformers, and the old
5. Experience was a basic theological and religious category early in the 20th century in the theology of Barth’s teacher W. Herrmann, which Barth at first rated highly; cf. Herrmann’s Communion of the Christian with God (1913); cf. also R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1923; German, 1917); and many other authors. For Barth’s criticisms cf. his Romans passim and Briefwechsel mit Adolf von Harnack, 10.
6. For the wholly other cf. Otto, /dea of the Holy. How far Barth was dependent on Otto for his use of the term in the 2nd ed. of his Romans is contested by scholars. For his view of Otto cf. his letter to Thurneysen on 6.3.1919, in which he expressed his enjoyment of Otto's work in spite of its psychological orientation because it clearly points to the nonrational element in the numinous as the wholly other, the divine in God. He saw here the beginning of a fundamental overcoming of Ritschlianism. There is in it at least a pointer even if things did not go far enough because of the restrained role of the theologian as a spectator, which does not accord with the fairly good understanding of the object. thing is not something that we can postulate of the scholastics and mystics preceding them. On both sides the old and the new confront one another on two fronts, first invisibly, never a perceptible phenomenon, as the distance and fellowship between God and us, eternity and time, infinity and finitude that is the point of the term “sacred history” which we discussed briefly at the outset — and then visibly, in a historically perceptible way, as the historical dialectic of different human possibilities, higher and lower, better and worse, here stronger and there weaker, that point to the original hidden antithesis of old and new, yet never in such a way that a human possibility coincides directly with that which all human possibilities can only indicate, and never in such a way that a human possibility is totally meaningless relative to that hidden antithesis — and we have in mind here the whole range of what is usually called secular history. Always and everywhere that which we see as historical occurrence on the second front stands only in relation to its origin in the primal antithesis, but always and everywhere historical events do to some extent stand in relation to this their origin. Historical events that do so to a higher degree than others can do no more than make us aware that fundamentally even events that do so to a lesser degree do stand in the same relation.
The new thing that in Reformation theology makes on us the impression of something new and totally different is obviously the hidden new thing of the first front. We need not be surprised, then, that as we seriously follow up that direct impression, as we translate it from more or less contingent experience to knowledge, we come to see the relative degree of the distinction between the Reformation and the Middle Ages on the historical plane. Those who let themselves be taught by a study of the reformers what is in truth old and what is in truth new can hardly set up a fixed and more mythological antithesis between two ages and historical groups. They will appreciate the distinction, but they will really appreciate it, that is, value it, see its worth. That is, they will see its worth and meaning and point, and also its context, the deeper problematic of which all historical problematic is only a likeness. It will be impossible for them to point to this or that saying in Luther or Calvin, to this or that day in their lives, and to say that here the new and totally different thing was present or was spoken, as though those men could, for example, experience and express the new and totally different thing as others can experience and express what is beautiful. No, even what was there experienced and said is as such relative. It stands in continuity with the old that is so sharply different from it. Calvin and Sadolet were pieces on the same chessboard.
Only when we see what they experienced and said in this relation of earthly continuity can it take on significance for us in its difference within the relation. And it is then impossible for us to focus too tenaciously on this or that dubious feature of medieval theology and church life, as though that were really te old thing in contrast to the reformers and their position. No, no pope or scholastic was so diabolical as to be able to do or say the old thing absolutely, just as no reformer was so heavenly as to be able even for a moment to embody the new. Let us leave it to the Roman Catholic philosophy of history to place Protestantism under the category of apostasy, which is so freighted with meaning and for that reason, in the judgment of history, so empty of meaning. Let us not in any circumstances play the same game. What was experienced, thought, and said in the Catholic Middle Ages was also relative, relative, we may say, to the origin that things on the historical plane, be they ever so different, have in common. It stands with the Reformation counterposition in the one basic nexus of the first front where the antithesis is not that of Protestant and Roman Catholic but of God and humanity. Apart from that antithesis, which also means unity, the confessional antithesis was a tragedy in the 16th century and has now become a comedy.’ If we are aware of the seriousness of the profound problematic of that antithesis, then we have to see the nonseriousness of the confessional antithesis on the second front between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as historical forces. But one could also put it differently, namely, that the confessional antithesis on the second front can be really serious, important, and full of promise only when we are aware how nonserious it is in the last analysis.
You can check the truth of what I have just said if you reflect again on the direct impression of something new that we get from Luther's commentary on the Psalms or Zwingli’s theses’ so long as we have eyes in our heads. Must we not honestly admit that in these cases the new and wholly different thing that speaks forcefully to us confronts not only medieval and modern Catholicism but no less diametrically what we
7. Cf. K. Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. VIII (Berlin, 1960), 115, in which Marx quoted Hegel’s remark that all great historical persons and events come on the scene twice as it were, commenting that Hegel forgot to add that they do so the first time as a tragedy and the second as a farce.
8. For Luther Barth was thinking of the lectures on the Psalms of 1513-1516, WA 3, 11-652 and 4, 1-467. From 1922 he had these in the 2-vol. ed. of J. K. Seidemann (Dresden, 1880). For Zwingli cf. H. Zwingli, Usslegen und grund der schlussreden (1523), Z 2, 1-457. ourselves think and feel? Can we fail to hear, then, the strong accusation that the writings of Luther and Calvin constantly bring against our socalled Lutheran and Reformed Christianity, church life, and theology, not simply because there has been, declension from the Reformation, true though that is, but because the new and wholly different thing in the writings of Luther and Zwingli accusingly confronts all Christianity, church, life, and theology even when at their conceivable best? If we accept this judgment, if we recognize the antithesis that runs through the whole four hundred years of Protestant history, how then can the new and wholly other thing four hundred years ago simply be one thing among other historical entities, and how can it have been passed on to Protestant theologians to do with it as they like and with the possibility of handing it down to their successors? Is it not obvious that this new thing critically confronts the theology of the reformers themselves, being absolutely other than the old thing that in its relativity here also is part of the historical plane? And if that is so, must we not conclude that the antithesis between the true new and the true old runs also backward to the time before the Reformation, that what is old in time (i.e., medieval thinking) has its own share, as I see it, in what is eternally old, which is the situation and problem of all history, but that it also has, of course, its share in what is eternally new, the solution to the problem??
So far as I can see, the reformers themselves had a much more restrained view of the epoch-making nature of their work than one might expect and than is often stated in later accounts in church history. It is clear that they had a strong sense of the unique importance of the historical moment in which they stood. Luther spoke again and again about the fact that, in contrast to the past, they were now once more in an age when God was sending forth his Word among us as the most precious of all his gifts. He liked to portray the Reformation under the image of a light that was now kindled and shining for a while.!° He knew well — perhaps too well — his own personal significance for the process. Calvin, too, in his
9. Marginal note in pencil: “Chronik v. Bosshart 89.” The reference is to Die Chronik des Laurencius Bosshart von Winterthur 1185-1532, ed. K. Hauser, Quellen zur schweizerischen Reformationsgeschichte, ed. Zwingliverein in Zurich, vol. III (Basel, 1905), 89, where it is noted that God revealed his Word through the Greek and Hebrew languages when Zwingli preached the gospel in Zurich, and that this was not of man’s doing but God’s.
10. Cf, Luther’s admonition against revolt (1522), WA 8, 676, in which he says that it is of God’s grace that the light of Christian truth has arisen again.
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work against Pighius on the Liberum Arbitrium (6, 237) called the Reformation a miracle of supreme divine power, and in sermon 162 on Deuteronomy (28, 466) he could even call it a resurrection from the dead.!! In his work On the Need to Reform the Church he expressly ascribed the same sending to the reformers as to the OT prophets who had to stir people out of the blindness of idolatry (6, 477).!2 In keeping was the eclecticism and the freedom that the reformers allowed themselves vis-a-vis the great theological authority of the early church. “Oh, the fathers were men as we are; we should consider this well and lay what they say on the scales, watching what they say,” said Luther in his Zable Talk (EA 62, 109) of the fathers, and of the scholastics he said that they had good heads but did not live in a time like ours (EA 62, 114).!3 As we know, apart from the Bible, the only strong authority for the whole Reformation was Augustine, but if I am right it was Augustine almost exclusively as the opponent of Pelagius and in such a way that Luther at least in his later years moved increasingly apart from this decisive teacher of his theological youth. It is also striking to me that Calvin in his relation to Scholasticism made no use of Anselm’s doctrine of the atonement or proof of God as he might well have done in his own system, and that he had no links to Thomas Aquinas, so that there is no connection between the greatest Catholic and the greatest Protestant systematician, and how sparse in him are the references to the late Scholasticism of Duns Scotus, with whom we have the impression today that there would have been many positive points of contact.!4
From all this we learn that the reformers were aware of standing at a decisive turning point in theological thinking when much that was old was perishing even if much was also at least quietly remaining. At all events, however, the reformers did not share the philosophy of history that we find in a saying of Schwenckfeld that Seeberg quotes and that he calls “monumental”: “A new world is coming and the old dies away” (Lehrbuch, IV, 2). The Radicals and Humanists talked that way, that is, those specifi-
11. Cf. the defense of the orthodox doctrine of bondage and liberation against the calumnies of Pighius (1543), CR 6, 257. For sermon 162 see CR 28, 466.
1), (SO.G, AUF.
13. On the fathers see WA TR 4, 288, 25f. (no. 4387). On the scholastics, WA TR 3, 543, 18 (no. 3698).
14. So first A. Ritschl, “Geschichtliche Studien zur christlichen Lehre von Gott,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. II (Freiburg, 1893), 67-89; and cf. Seeberg, Lehrbuch, IV, 575, on Calvin's doctrine of the divine will. cally who had little awareness of the deeper antithesis that was being played out before them; but for all the zeal with which they, too, took part in the movement in their own way, they were interested for the most part only in what was taking place on the surface. Those who took part genuinely and radically, who saw what it was all about, felt differently, although they too, as we have seen, experienced powerfully enough the historical antithesis between the old and the new.
At least in Luther, however, a more powerful feeling than that of experiencing the dawn of a new age and being its strongest agents and heralds was that of the continuity of the divine work, his reverence for all that had come into being and was now there —a reverence that rested, of course, not merely on insight but also on nature and setting. It was as a monk and in the context of medieval theology that Luther came to his reforming thoughts that snatched him finally out of that context. We know how unwillingly, in obedience to the need,!> he resolved to build a new church. As long as he lived, his heart still clung to the concept of the one holy catholic church in a way that for reasons deeply rooted in his specific situation was not the case with Calvin.
The fervor of the new age and world, of the new spirit and work, was something that we know again to some extent in our own postwar present. We perhaps find it best among the reformers in Zwingli, it being typically alien to Calvin, although, as I have said, with less sentimental emphasis than Luther, Calvin agreed with the latter that the concept of antiquity was most important for Protestant theology. In the epistle in which he dedicated the Institutes to Francis I he could not protest too strongly that what he and those like-minded with him in France were advocating was not something new.!© He adduced a long list of witnesses from the church’s past in which he thought he saw what he called the gospel, and in the Institutes itself he was at great pains to prove his agreement with the authorities of the early church. We have said already how eclectic his procedure was, but that does not alter the intention. For him as for Luther, if with an essential difference of mood, the break with the Christianity of the past was not felt to be one of principle. In Luther an example of this is the relatively friendly way in which Bonaventura is treated among the medieval fathers, and in Calvin we note the warmth
15. Cf. Schiller’s Braut von Messina, V, 1: “Der Not gehorchend, nicht dem eignen Trieb.”
16. OS 1, 25, also 27.
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even with which he speaks of Bernard of Clairvaux.!7 Both were in their different ways typical representatives of what the reformers zealously combated as papism. —
An even more striking example is the way in which both Luther and Calvin avoided the man in whom they must have recognized, even if he was not then the most widely read author, and whom they ought to have fought as their most dangerous opponent, the true genius of the Catholic Middle Ages. I refer to Thomas Aquinas. We have in his case a demonstration how often even the greatest among us, precisely in fulfilling their deepest intentions, often do not know what they are doing. The reformers engaged in close combat with late scholastics of the age of decline, about whom we say nothing today, when all the time behind these, and biding his time, stood their main adversary Thomas, in whom all modern Roman Catholicism has come to see more and more definitely its true classic; and apart from a few inconsequential complaints by Luther,!® they left him in peace, apparently not realizing that their real attack was not on those straw figures but on the spirit of the Summa, on the Gothic cathedral and the world of Dante. How could it be possible that in the first half of the 17th century a Lutheran theologian from Strassburg could write a book entitled Thomas Aquinas, veritatis evangelicae confessor! (Loofs, 690).!° All this shows strikingly, however, that the reformers did not see their work in the context of a great philosophy of history but in a fairly relative pragmatic context. Perhaps it is precisely the manner of truly creative people to take this view.
If we ask positively in what they saw the importance of their work, Luther's reply, so far as I can see, would be a sober reference to the fact that the Word of God was again being preached loudly and purely. Thus in a Coburg letter to the elector on May 20, 1530, he described the grace that God gives each of us as follows: “For, of course, your Grace’s lands have the most and the very best of good pastors and preachers, more than any other land in all the world, and they teach so faithfully and purely, and help to keep the peace so well. There are thus growing up among us
17. For Luther on Bonaventura see WA TR 1, 330, 1 (no. 683): “Bonaventura the best of the scholastic doctors.” Cf. 1, 435, 25f. (no. 871), and 3, 294, 35f. (no. 3370a); also WA 7, 774, 13ff.; and 8, 127, 19. For Calvin on Bernard of Clairvaux see CO 23.63; 31.540; 49.357; also the many quotations from Bernard in the Institutes, e.g., II, 3, 5; Ill, 2,25, L253 E15; 28
18. Seeberg, Lehrbuch, 74 and n. 2.
19. Loofs, Leitfaden, 690 n. 3, quotes the title in this short form. The work was by J. G. Dorsche and was published at Frankfurt in 1656. tender young people, boys and girls, who are taught the catechism and scripture so well that it does my heart good as I see how young boys and girls can pray and believe and talk about God and Christ more than all the foundations and monasteries and schools could do or still can” (EA 54, 148).2° In face of these happy descriptions, no matter what we think of the catechetical success, we cannot possibly say that Luther made great claims for the breadth of his reformation.
There is a similar passage in Calvin. In his work on the need for church reform he described as follows what the reformers had done and achieved: “They aroused the world out of the profound darkness of ignorance to a reading of scripture; they worked hard at a purer understanding and were able successfully to expound certain important concepts of Christian doctrine, whereas formerly foolish fables and no less unnecessary definitions were heard in sermons, the universities echoed with the strife of words, scripture was hardly mentioned, and the clergy had an eye only to money” (6, 473).2! Calvin did add, of course, that these were improvements that their foes ought to have acknowledged as made, but it is typical that he was content with this rather dry academic description of the significance of the new epoch.
We may note in addition that Luther used the expression “Word of God” both. in the absolute and eternal sense that was naturally primary for him and in a relative sense as the Word that takes its course, that comes and goes, that falls like a shower, now here and now there, that can also be chased away and extinguished.?2 It is plain that the latter is the Word of God whose blessings he can extol so eloquently to the elector. For him it is to this category that his own reforming work belongs. It is part of the new thing in the second and relative sense. It is not for him she new thing. It is not even as new as appears in most of our historical accounts today, the theological at least. Nevertheless, it is something new, something very new, of course, even if he has to recognize its limits and end: “I am concerned that the light will not last and shine very long, for God’s Word has always had its specific course” (57, 19).?3 This looking ahead to the
20. WA B 5, 325, 37-326, 44.
21. CO 6, 473.
22. Cf. Luther’s plea for Christian schools (1524), WA 15, 32, 6-8, in which he says that you know God’s Word and grace is a passing shower that does not come again where it has once been; cf. also WA 17/II, 179, 28-33.
23. Ibid., 4, 151, 11f£ (no. 4123). end of the new time, often stated in a bitter and threatening way, is not uncommon in Luther.
Luther could also say once (57, 17) that God’s Word comes down always on the same time. I would comment that in its sober but very profound sense this statement is much more monumental than the dictum of Schwenckfeld that a new world was dawning. The context is as follows: “The world now faces God’s Word exactly as it did two thousand years ago. God’s Word comes down always on the same time. The world is still the world, the devil’s bride.”24 The meaning, then, is primarily negative and pessimistic, as was befitting the mood of the older Luther. But be that as it may, the saying embodies the thesis that there are no different times in relation to God, or, as I would put it, that there is no progress in world history. The Word of God, when it makes itself heard, confronts the same world reality in the same tension even when the situation in world reality is supremely critical and significant and God’s Word makes itself heard with great power. Indeed, Luther could go so far as to say that at all times from the beginning of the world, when God’s Word is purely taught and preached, people are most offended and sins are at their worst and most horrible (57, 22).2°
Finally, this highly relevant situation had for Luther a positive reverse side. If the world is always the world and even God’s Word in history is transitory in its presence and limited in its effects, it is also true that God is always God even when his Word would seem to be lost in history. “God has preserved his Word,” Luther can say most unexpectedly, and it is plain that he is not now speaking of a relative and transitory Word: “God has preserved his Word and Christ’s kingdom has remained in the world under the papacy” (57, 53). Naturally the fact that this is so, he adds, “is the greatest miracle of our Lord God,” but he does count on this miracle.2° That was the radicalism of Luther’s philosophy of history, and it was much greater than that of people of the stamp of Schwenckfeld with their jubilant shouting about the dawn of a new era. The threads of the kingdom of Christ and of God on the one side snap no more than do those of the world on the other; no matter what may be the specific course of God’s Word. If it is true that in the so-called new age the old is truly present for the first time, it is also true, and even more true, that the new was also
24. Ibid., 3, 500, 2-5 (no. 3663).
25. Ibid., 3, 6-8 (no. 280Gb).
26. Ibid., 3, 6-8 (no. 2806b).
present in the so-called old age. If any had the right to see the old and the new not merely in the light of the kingdom of God but also historically in harsh antithesis, it was the reformers themselves who were engaged in a violent battle in which everything was at stake, life or death. Yet they did not see it that way. They paradoxically left it to those who were further from the fray to view absolutely and mythologically the historical processes of which they were the heroes.
They themselves confirmed the insight that we gained last time by more basic discussion, namely, that nothing really new came into history with the Reformation, that its significance is to be sought instead in a survey of the connection. We must now pursue this insight both negatively and positively.