Karl Barth

Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian born on May 10, 1886, in Basel, Switzerland. The eldest son of New Testament scholar Fritz Barth and Anna Sartorius, he grew up in Bern, where his father taught at the university, and he studied theology at Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg under leading liberal Protestant teachers including Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann.

Ordained in 1908, he served as pastor of the village of Safenwil in Aargau from 1911 to 1921. Confronted there with industrial poverty and disillusioned by his German teachers' public support for the Kaiser at the outbreak of the First World War, he broke with liberal theology. The 1919 first edition and far more radical 1922 second edition of his commentary Der Römerbrief on Paul's Epistle to the Romans launched what came to be called dialectical or neo-orthodox theology.

He held professorships at Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn before being expelled from his Bonn chair in 1935 for refusing to swear an unconditional oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. He had drafted the 1934 Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church, which rejected Nazi attempts to subordinate the German Protestant Church to the state. From 1935 he taught at the University of Basel until his retirement in 1962.

His monumental unfinished Church Dogmatics ran to thirteen part-volumes and over six million words, reorienting twentieth-century Protestant theology around the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He died in his sleep on December 10, 1968, in Basel, having that day completed a radio address.

Karl is a masculine Germanic name from the Old High German karl meaning free man, cognate with the English Charles. He carried the masculine name throughout his life.