Professor Philip G. Ziegler

This volume collects several important texts by Karl Barth in new or newly reprinted English translations. The texts— ‘Theological Existence Today!’ (1933), ‘Reformation as Decision’ (1933), The Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934) and ‘The Church and the Political Question of Today’ (1938)—are of signal importance to Barth’s contributions to the German Church Struggle of the 1930s, in which Christians wrestled intensely with their political and theological responsibilities under the conditions imposed by the National Socialist government of the Third Reich. Barth, a Swiss teaching theology in German universities, was a leading voice in the German Confessing Church, a minority of Protestant Christians who variously (and to various degrees) resisted efforts totally to align the church’s life and faith with the fascist programme of the Nazi Party. Famously associated with the text of the Barmen Theological Declaration, Barth also wrote many short timely works intervening in the roiling debates of these years, even after his deportation from Germany and relocation to Basel in 1936. The texts collected here are represent Barth’s fundamental approach to the pressing theological and political questions of his fraught moment, as well as testifying to the progress of his own theo-political discernment. Worked out as they are in the crucible of the Church Struggle, they offer important and hard-won insights into questions of Christian political responsibility, discernment, action, and resistance, as well as into the fundamental theological framing of all such questions. In its own time, Barth’s theology generally and these texts in particular were fundamentally important interventions which served to instruct and orient many struggling to negotiate theological existence and church life in the midst of rapid, disorienting, and often violent social and political transformations. Read with care and insight they may perhaps do so again today.