Karl Barth: Dialectic Method

Karl Barth: Dialectic Method
Karl Barth was the most significant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. He studied at the universities of Bern, Berlin, Tubingen, and Marburg. After serving as a pastor in Geneva from 1909 to 1911, he was appointed to the working class Parish of Safenwil, in Aargau canton. He spent 10 years as a minister. It was the formative period of his life. His ministerial experience led him to ask questions. It changed his theological view.
Deeply shocked by the tragedy that had reached Europe in World War I and let down by the collapse of the ethic of religious idealism. In this situation, he questioned the liberal theology of his German teachers and its roots in the rationalist, historicist, and dualist thought

He wrote a commentary on the epistle to the Romans. In this commentary Barth did not follow historical-critical questions about the Bible, which he considered to be a human attempt to bring the Word of God under our control. Instead of it, he tried to understand what the book of Romans says. Through study of the teaching of St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans he struggled to clarify the relation between justification and social righteousness which governed all he had to say in later life about the relation of the Gospel to the power of the state and the oppression of the poor. His first major works established his position as a notable theologian with a new message about the sheer Goodness of God and the unlimited range of his grace. The critical and explosive nature of his theology came to be known as dialectical theology or the theology of crisis, it initiated a trend toward neo-orthodoxy in Protestant theology. Barth concluded that we must recognize God once more as God. God is qualitatively different from humanity. God cannot be known as other things are known. Instead he breaks out like a flash of lightning, revealing himself as he is. He highlighted that God is superiority and humanity is

All of them reduced humanity and the universe is nothing in comparison with God. For Barth, his existed a "theology of crisis," since the revelation of God is the crisis of the world. God, who is wholly other, advances on this world from beyond it, like a cry of alarm, shattering everything here below,. In Christ, God interconnects the level of human reality up and down, from above. The divine touches this world only as refraction touches a circle: like a mathematical point, this connexion has no historical or psychological breadth, said Barth. Revelation covers more than it establishes, and to us God remains unknown. The finite cannot comprehend the infinite and time cannot comprehend