Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung

Fritz Barth became tired of his son’s wild goings-on and sent his son off to Adolf Schlatter in Tübingen. Dismayed at Schlatter, Barth made acquaintance with Christoph Blumhardt for the first time on December 27, 1907, and then frequently visited him in Bad Boll, “though my eyes were not yet fully open.”25 With his father’s final consent, Barth studied under Herrmann and Adolf Julicher in Marburg, and together with Rudolf Bultmann later assisted Martin Rade (1857–1940) editing Die christliche Welt in 1908. At the Aarau Student Conference before the beginning of the semester at Marburg, Barth had already been able to hear Herrmann’s lecture (“God’s Revelation to Us”) and Ragaz, whose theme was that God was meeting us today in socialism. Incidentally, it was in Marburg where Barth also renewed his acquaintance with Eduard Thurneysen, his lifelong friend from Zofingia. During his stay at Marburg, Herrmann became the great theologian for Barth. In acclaiming his greatness, Barth said, “I soaked Herrmann in through all my pores.”26

      Johann Wilhelm Herrmann

What underlines Herrmann’s lifelong concern is the possibility of securing Christian faith from a metaphysical or scientific knowledge of the world. Herrmann distinguished himself from the old liberalism and also from all orthodoxies and all positivistic theology. Herrmann became the leading theologian among the faculty at Marburg (1879–1917) and was regarded as one of the most important systematic theologians of his time. His teaching gained an international reputation by including not only such students as Barth and Bultmann but also American students in pre–World War I Germany.27 As Barth recalled,

The air of freedom blew through his auditorium. It was certainly not by chance that for decades every semester a small caravan from Switzerland made the pilgrimage to Marburg and felt especially at home there. Our rebellious minds, repudiating all authority, found satisfaction there. We listened gladly when traditionalism on the right, rationalism on the left, mysticism in the rear were thrown to the refuse dump, and when finally ‘positive and liberal dogmatics’ were together hurled into the same pit.28

In his essay “Why Does our Faith Need Historical Facts?” (1844),29 Herrmann strove to answer the problem of the relation of faith to history with concentration on the inner life of Jesus, which is the essence of religion for Herrmann. It is the inner life of Jesus on which faith is grounded as historical fact. He banned every trace of metaphysics from theology. His project for the exclusion of metaphysics from theology was not meant to denounce science and morality as unnecessary life-expressions. Rather ethical claims held a special place for him in relation to religion. For Hermann, historically grounded theology meant being grounded in the inner life of Jesus as a historical fact. Historically grounded theology in Troeltsch’s sense is also grounded in the communion of the Christian with God, who comes about in history. Besides, Schleiermacher’s Speeches had a deep influence on Herrmann and helped to improve his mature understanding of religious experience.

Herrmann’s deep interest in securing the independence of religion from science and ethics moved him back from Ritschl toward the direction of Schleiermacher. In Barth’s recollection, Hermann praised Schleiermacher’s Speeches as “the most important pieces of writing to have appeared before the public since the closing of the canon of the New Testament.”30

Herrmann’s way to religion is first of all to distinguish religious knowing from all other forms of scientific knowledge. According to Herrmann, God is transcendent and supramundane. Therefore, God is not known through the way science knows the world. In fact, God lies beyond all of what science can prove and have access to. The self-revelation of God offers the basis for the rise of religion; religion lives from revelation. That being the case, the scientific method cannot prove God’s reality. Science and philosophy cannot touch the reality of God. The object of Christian faith does not lie within the realm of scientific knowledge of the world. The human situation is too easily marginalized and ignored in Cohen and Natorp. True religion is neither produced by the moral will (Kant), nor identical with it (Cohen). Besides, religion is not the objectless emotion that accompanies the moral will (Natorp). “True religion, which ‘carries in itself the energy of the moral purpose’ . . . has also its own root and its own life.”31

In the concluding sentence of Die Metaphysik, Herrmann stated: “When we seek to do theological work, we do not clutch at the goals of metaphysics.”32 However, Herrmann’s concepts of religion and revelation are not in opposition to the anti-Christian position of modern philosophy and of natural and historical science. “The real enemy’s position is on the right, within Christian theology itself.”33

Our knowledge of God becomes possible only based on the fact that God has come to us in history. Independent of nature or natural science, Christian faith stands on its own foundation because religion lives from revelation alone. The self-revelation of God on which religion is based is the miracle that occurs beyond the natural and against nature. Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence in his Glaubenslehre stands under a critical reservation because, for Herrmann, religion is not identical with feeling without reservation. Religion is an ability given by God in which humans see and experience God’s work in their lives.34

As Herrmann defines religion “in relation to empirically demonstrable objects, the decision must be made whether the subject can hold his ground in a life which he has for himself alone, an ‘inner life.’ The awakening of the individual to a consciousness, based on itself alone, of such a life of his own is religion.”35 Revelation, as the reality of God, confronts us. What stands in opposition to the reality of revelation are traditionalism, rationalism, and mysticism.

According to Herrmann, Troeltsch “was ‘just a bit too fastidious’ to assume for himself the decoration of ‘positive.’”36 Herrmann stood in opposition to positive confessionalist theology, the liberal-freisinnig theology, and the mediating theology. Just as he critiqued metaphysics or mixed theology, he protested orthodox confessionalism. According to Herrmann, religion arises from Erlebnis (experience), which is not to be demonstrated or disputed. The religious Erlebnis is to be found in the concept of Vertrauen (trust) or Wahrhaftigkeit (trustfulness): trust in Jesus Christ as the historical fact of the person of Jesus. Religion and ethical demand are inseparably connected with the concept of Wahrhaftigkeit. The human being as an inwardly independent being has an inner dependence and a moral autonomy. Keenly aware of Feuerbach’s critique of religion as a projection of human wish fulfillment, Herrmann granted for faith a spiritual importance to historical fact: “An honest atheist stands in all circumstances closer to the Christian faith than a representative of a religion of wish, no matter how christianly it is garbed.”37

The only place where faith is to be located lies in the inner world of human consciousness. The locus of self-certifying faith consists exactly in the Erlebnis of “a communion of the soul with the living God through the mediation of Christ.”38 However, what differentiates Herrmann from mysticism is that the latter is unhistorical, seeks God in the depth of the soul, and absorbs the soul into God. What Herrmann aims at doing is Christian Erlebnis, which is bound to a historical fact, that is, to the inner life of Jesus. What constitutes our consciousness of God’s communion with us consists in the historical fact of the person of Jesus and ethical