Karl Barth

Karl Barth died in the early hours of 10 December 1968, God's greatest gift to theological science in the whole of the modern era. Albert Einstein once wrote of Isaac Newton: ‘To think of him is to think of his work. For such a man can be understood only by thinking of him as a scene on which the struggle for eternal truth took place.’ That is surely the way in which we must remember Karl Barth, for in him there took place a profound struggle for the eternal Word of God in which the whole framework of the Church's understanding of God from ancient to modern times was subjected to critical and constructive inquiry in the search for a unified and comprehensive basis in the Grace of God for all theology. He has no need of praise from us, for the work he was given to accomplish will endure to bless the world for many centuries to come. If Karl Barth has left behind no school of ‘Barthians’, it is because he belongs to the whole universe of theology in a way that no mere leader of a new movement of thought ever could.