ABSTRACT
On the day in 1914 when the First World War broke out, a group of 93 leading German intellectuals issued a statement giving unqualified support to the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The young pastor of Safenwil in Switzerland, Karl Barth by name, who had recently completed his theological studies in Germany, read this ‘terrible manifesto’, and discovered to his dismay among the signatories almost all his German theological teachers. ‘It was,’ he wrote, ‘like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation.’1 Theological scholarship, it seemed to Barth, had been converted into an ideological weapon of war, and his teachers had been fundamentally compromised. This ethical and political failure, he believed, called into question the theology he had been taught, and ‘a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching, which I had hitherto held to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it all the other writings of the German theologians’.2 Schleiermacher, the father of German liberal theology, was, Barth believed, ‘unmasked’. A new and very different theological beginning must now be made.
