About That One Barth Quote
Disregard for a Manmade Method of Theological Inquiry Is Not Indicative of a Bad Character
In his Church Dogmatics, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that “the fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet.”1 The theological ‘retrieval’ crowd has latched upon this quote and repeats it with some regularity in their endeavor to promote a renewed interest in ancient and medieval theology. Craig Carter began an article at Credo with the quote, while Ryan McGraw quoted it approvingly elsewhere at Credo, in an article which featured the quote as a ready-made tweet on the side bar: readers had only to click to retweet it on their own X accounts.
The choice is a strange one, to put it mildly. Scripture warns us to beware false prophets and tells us their character that we might recognize and avoid them. Such people are characterized by “sensuality” (1 Pet. 2:2), the Greek for which (ἀσελγείαις) means “wantonness,” “lewdness,” “licentiousness,” and “conduct shocking to public decency,” per Strong’s (see here). They “indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority” (v. 10), and “have eyes full of adultery” (v. 14).
Guess who is marked out as a false prophet by such criteria. Karl Barth. For that man maintained a lifelong, impenitent, and fairly public affair with his research assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, in which he both refused to repent when confronted by his mother and forced his wife (who knew about the affair) to accept his mistress moving into the family home. Christiane Tietze has the story in the Scottish Journal of Theology, available here. I’m not sure that Eph. 5:3 (“sexual immorality . . . must not even be named among you”) and 5:12 (“it is shameful even to speak of the things that they [the sons of disobedience, v. 6] do in secret”) commend reading the whole thing, but suffice it to say that such brazen hypocrisy marks the man out as someone to avoid, not one to learn from.
Indeed, many unbelievers would be appalled at such behavior—and shall the people of God have less moral sense? When a similarly evil thing happened at Corinth (1 Cor. 5:1), what was Paul’s response? “Let him who has done this be removed from among you” (v. 2). And yet our scholars appeal to Barth as an authority! “These things ought not to be” (Jas. 3:10).
Now against all this we assert that the question of embracing or rejecting scholasticism is independent of Barth’s opinions of the matter, just as all questions of doctrine ought to be free of any regard for his opinions. For he is no authority – his behavior has forfeited all claim to that – and even those that quote him approvingly on scholasticism confess that they agree with him on little else. McGraw says he “disagrees with Barth in most things,” while Carter says, “I highlighted that sentence many years ago when I was reading Barth with far more sympathy than I do today,” and spends most of his article critiquing Barth.
What then of the larger question of whether scholasticism is beneficial? We do not broach that question here (though see here), but only insist that the sheep not be pressured into accepting anything because of the opinions of an obvious false teacher. We humbly suggest that, false teachers being wolves (Matt. 7:15), our shepherds ought to be more interested in defending the sheep from false teachers’ ideas than in appealing to them (Acts 20:28). And we might even go so far as to think this a commanded duty of our leaders, and a matter of eternal consequence (1 Tim. 4:16: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers”).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Greenville Co., SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at tomhervey@substack.com. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation.
The location varies: Carter finds it in Vol. I/1, p. 279, whereas the T&T Clark edition I perused from the local library has it on p. 320 of the same volume.