Karl Barth und die Okumenische Bewegung, Das Gesprach zwischen Karl Barth und Willem Adolf Visser 't Hooft auf der Grundlage ihres Briefwechsels 1930-1968. - Review - book review

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Thomas Wieser

Thomas Herwig, Karl Barth und die Okumenische Bewegung, Das Gesprach zwischen Karl Barth und Willem Adolf Visser `t Hooft Auf der Grundlage ihres Briefwechsels 1930-1968, Neukirchen-Vluyn, Neukirchener Verlag, 1998, 280pp., DM68.

This study documents an important period of ecumenical history, seen through the lens of the exchange of letters between K. Barth and W.A. Visser 't Hooft which began in 1930 and ended with Barth's death in 1968. While Visser 't Hooft's importance for the ecumenical movement, and especially for the origin and development of the World Council of Churches, needs no comment, the contribution of Barth is probably less known. And yet Visser 't Hooft himself affirmed in 1966, on the occasion of Barth's 80th birthday, that he (Barth) had "created a theological situation in which a theologically relevant ecumenical movement could develop", and that without the new theological orientation he (Visser 't Hooft) "would probably have perished in some ecumenical nook" (p.264).

The relationship covers six periods: the years prior, during and following the second world war, the assemblies in Amsterdam and Evanston, and Vatican II. In the 1930s, when Barth was one of the central figures in the Kirchenkampf (the attempt to prevent the churches in Germany from being coopted by the Nazi regime for its imperial and anti-semitic schemes), he looked to the ecumenical movement as an ally in the fight. The Oxford conference in 1938 was for him a disappointment, in that it was unable to come out unequivocally in support of the Confessing Church which had emerged from the 1934 Barmen declaration. During the second world war, when Visser 't Hooft had become general secretary of the WCC-in-formation, Barth again called for a clear word regarding the situation in Germany -- and again to no avail. Only at the end of the war, when Barth (who was always in correspondence with Visser 't Hooft) urged the WCC to get the German churches to issue a self-critical declaration about their role under the fascist regime, did he find a positive response from Geneva.

Given this (in Barth's view) poor record of the WCC, it is not surprising that in 1947 it took all the persuasive powers at Visser 't Hooft's command to get Barth to consider participating in the WCC's constituent assembly, to be held at Amsterdam in 1948. And it is indeed a testimony to these persuasive powers that Barth agreed, not only to participate in one of the preparatory commissions, but also to deliver the opening address on the main theme.

Barth returned from Amsterdam with a much more positive view of the WCC and it was, therefore, not very difficult for Visser 't Hooft in 1951 to secure his participation as a member of the advisory commission on the main theme of the WCC's second assembly at Evanston in 1954, "Christ -- the Hope of the World". Barth was so satisfied by the commission's final report, to which he had made several important contributions, that there was every reason to hope that he would accept the invitation to attend the Evanston assembly. In the end he declined, to Visser 't Hooft's great disappointment, not because of any reservations regarding the WCC or the assembly, but because attendance at the assembly would have inevitably entailed a series of speaking engagements in the United States, and he felt that at this juncture his basic theological work on the series of volumes on church dogmatics needed to take precedence.

But by now the ecumenical perspective had become part of Barth's thinking, and the volume of his Church Dogmatics published in the late 1950s contains an appreciation of the ecumenical movement -- as an example of the church's turning towards the world. But this also meant that developments in the WCC were being followed by Barth from a certain distance, with the exchange of letters becoming less frequent. (It briefly resumed once more in the 1960s focusing on the question of the ecumenical significance of Vatican II.)

Although in many respects the period described by Herwig is definitely one of the past, not only chronologically but also ideologically, certain continuities can be traced to the present. Two examples might be mentioned.

First, what Herwig calls "christocentric universalism" is actually derived from something much more comprehensive, and at the same time much more simple: the centrality of the Bible. It was Barth's theology which, in the 1930s, opened up the Bible in a new way, not only for professional theologians but for generations of laypersons. Even if this christocentric universalism is today no longer central to the life of the ecumenical movement, Bible study, and the preoccupation with the biblical witness from wwhatever perspective -- contextual, liberationist, feminist, and so on -- has become a permanent feature of any ecumenical undertaking, whether this be a local group, a large interchurch and lay gathering such as the Kirchentag in Germany, or a WCC assembly.

Second, Barth's initial interest and involvement in the ecumenical movement and the WCC grew out of his struggle for the renewal of the life and witness of the church in Germany under Hitler in the 1930s. The notion of renewal as an integral and essential part of the meaning of ecumenism owes, in tact, much to Barth's theology and to his involvement in the WCC's activities. It is still central to every major WCC programme, although the focus may have shifted beyond the renewal of the church to include the renewal of all areas of life.