Excerpt from How to Serve God in a Marxist Land
Many people have been involved in providing this book of materials for Americans. The authorized translation into English of Karl Earths Letter to a Pastor in the German Democratic Republic was made by Henry Clark and James D. Smart, of Union Theological Seminary, New York. This letter was originally published by Evangelischer Verlag Zollikon in 1958, under the title Brief an einen Pfarrer in der DDR. It is translated and published fully in the United States now for the first time, with their permission and on authorization of Karl Barth.
Thomas Wieser, of the United Student Christian Council, made the authorized translation into English oi An Answer to Karl Barth from East Germany, by Johannes Hamel. This was first printed as Antwort an "Karl Barth" in Kirchenhlatt fur die Reformierte Schweiz, March, 1959.
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century.
Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century Protestantism. Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy -- a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election.
Barth tries to recover the Doctrine of the Trinity in theology from its putative loss in liberalism. His argument follows from the idea that God is the object of God's own self-knowledge, and revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling to humanity of the God who cannot be discovered by humanity simply through its own efforts.
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