James Simmon Balagtas

Simmon Balagtas     STEM111-1A

He was a Swiss Reformed theologian who is often regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. His influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on April 20, 1962.
Beginning with his experience as a pastor, Barth rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century European Protestantism. He also rejected more conservative forms of Christianity. Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Many critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy] – a term that Barth emphatically rejected. A more charitable description of his work might be "a theology of the Word. Barth's work had a profound impact on twentieth century theology and figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who like Barth became a leader in the Confessing Church – Thomas F. Torrance, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, Stanley Hauerwas, Hans Kung, Jürgen Moltmann, and novelists such as John Updike and Miklós Szentkuthy.

BODY 1:
        Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886 at Basel, Switzerland. He died on December 10, 1968 at aged of 82 at Basel, Switzerland. He works as an Theologian and author. His notable work is  The Epistle to the Romans Church Dogmatics. His children was named Franziska, Markus, Christoph, Matthias and Hans Jakob.
Body 2:
Barth went into the parish ministry in 1911 (first an assistant pastor in Geneva, then pastor to the working-class parish of Safenwil). In 1913, he married Nelly Hoffman, a talented violinist; they had five children. The 10 years in Safenwill were the formative period of his life. Here Barth experienced conversion away from “culture Christianity.” Barth quickly noticed that he often preached to no more than a dozen parishioners. One day he visited a sick, elderly man in the parish. When Barth asked him to which church he belonged, the man responded resentfully: "Pastor, I've always been an honest man. I've never been to church, and I've never been in trouble with the police." Barth recognized that this man was representative of majority of people in that society with the same basic pattern of scant attendance at worship services and disinterest in church religion. In this context Barth was convinced to reconsider the "culture Christianity" represented by the liberal theology in which he had been trained.It was in Safenwil during World War I that Barth reviewed his theology along with a neighboring pastor and student-friend, Eduard Thurneysen, who was experiencing a similar crisis. Barth was shocked at the conduct of his liberal teachers when they were confronted with the social and political situation of wartime Europe. He read the "Declaration of German Intellectuals," calling for loyalty to Kaiser and Vaterland. How could this happen? It happened, he argued, because of a fatal alliance between Christian faith and cultural experience.He began working through the problems posed by the war and the failure of liberal theology to account for such a dark episode in human history. He initiated a radical change in theology, stressing the "wholly otherness of God" over the anthropocentrism of 19th-century liberal theology. He questioned the liberal theology of his German teachers and its dependence on the rationalist, historicist, and dualist thought that stemmed from the Enlightenment. Barth believed that liberal theology had accommodated Christianity to modern culture, and it had to be changed.

body 3:
 One of the most prolific and influential theologians of the twentieth century, Barth emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his reinterpretation of the Calvinistic doctrine of election, the sinfulness of humanity, and the "infinite qualitative distinction between God and mankind". His most famous works are his The Epistle to the Romans, which marked a clear break from his earlier thinking, and his massive thirteen-volume work Church Dogmatics, one of thelargest works of systematic theology ever written.
Summary/concluscion/suggestion/application:
The theology of Karl Barth may best be understood as an extended response to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Protestant liberalism. Borrowing the language of Sφren Kierkegaard, Barth spoke of the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and the human being. God is the one who is "wholly other," and if one is to know anything of God, it will not be found by gazing into the world of human experience. Barth summarized his own position by declaring, "The possibility of knowledge of God's Word lies in God's Word and nowhere else." The only way we are to know this God is in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and nowhere else. When asked how one knows that this is true, Barth responded, "Proof of faith consists in the proclamation of faith. The proof of knowledge of the Word consists in confessing it."