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The following message is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "Great Twentieth Century Christians," a third in the series. Number three, Karl Barth. Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as

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it is recorded in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 2. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom.

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For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

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Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.

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None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him, God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

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For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man's thoughts except the Spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that

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we might understand the gifts bestowed upon us from God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Many preachers of today regularly illustrate their sermons by references to yesterday.

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If they want to talk about a theologian, they mention Augustine. If they want to illustrate martyrdom, they bring up Polycarp. If they are interested in stimulating mission zeal, they talk about Livingston. And if they are going to discuss the Reformers, they mention John Calvin.

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Now all of these are great names with honored places in the pantheon of Christian heroes. But when illustrations are drawn almost exclusively from yesterday, one cannot help but get the impression that the greatest days of the Church are past, and that the present and the future holds very little.

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Now it is precisely to counteract this idea that I have scheduled this series of sermons stretching across this calendar year, entitled "Great Twentieth-Century Christians." There are thousands whom I might have selected. As a Social Reformer, I chose Martin Luther King, Jr.

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You might have chosen Walter Rauschenbusch or Mother Teresa. As an ecumenist, I chose John XXIII. You might have chosen Wissertorft or Neubegen. Today we come to the area of theology, and I suggest here we really have no choice.

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There is one man who is above and beyond all others, the premier theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth. Not only is his writing, "The Church Dogmatics," the most massive theology written since the days of the Reformation, but both Protestants and Roman Catholics, who call him friend or

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who oppose his theology, both groups, must make account for him. His thought is so massive, the question he raises so profound, the answer he provides so biblical, that no one, whether they seek to stop him or to encourage him, can do anything without at least taking him on.

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He is the theological colossus of the century. And I ask you to think with me this morning about Karl Barth. Barth was born in Switzerland in 1886, and he lived 82 years, dying in 1968. He had the standard education of one preparing for the ministry, although he did not go on

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and take a Ph.D. degree. In 1909 he became the assistant minister of a small church in Geneva, and two years later he went to become the pastor in 1911 of Saffenwil, a town in Switzerland, an industrial town surrounded by the Alps.

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And it was while he was serving as the pastor of that congregation that he developed his theology. And what got him to wrestling with the questions of theology was this query, "What makes a sermon truly a sermon?"

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Now during the time that he served there in Saffenwil, he wrote many articles which were published. He wrote two books which he did not permit to be published. And then in 1919 he wrote a commentary on the Book of Romans.

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He revised it and reissued it in 1922, and that commentary on the Book of Romans turned the theological world upside down. After writing that book, he went on to become a professor of theology, and he spent the rest of his life studying and teaching.

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Although it's interesting to notice that he never lost his pastoral concerns, and even in the days of his heaviest lecturing and writing schedule, he served as the pastor to the prisoners in the local jail, preaching there every Sunday morning. What I'd like you to notice at the outset is that he came to his seminal ideas while

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he was serving as a pastor. The seeds of his theology were sown in the midst of his ministry. He read, he wrote, he prayed, and he pondered during the time he was serving his congregation. And out of this came his great thought.

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It's very unlikely that anything like that could happen in this country today. The Fuller Institute has recently released a survey of ministers of all denominations taken from all across the country. Ninety percent of those ministers report that they work more than 46 hours a week.

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I checked my own calendar and discovered that I worked an average of 84 hours a week until my health broke a year and a half ago. Thirty-five percent of the ministers surveyed said that their work was so capturing of their time that their relationships with their own family were endangered.

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Thirty-three percent said that they had felt burned out by the end of the first five years of their ministry. Seventy percent of those clergymen acknowledged that they did not have one single intimate friend.

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Seventy-five percent reported that they had had at least one serious physical illness as the result of stress. And forty percent said that they were engaged in at least one major conflict in their congregations every month.

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Now with schedules like that, how is a man to study and to pray? You see, most congregations today, if they see their minister staring out the window, think he's wasting his time, when in fact he might be doing the most important work of the week.

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The ministry has become a kind of rat race, and that is the reason pastors are producing no theology today. They have no time to listen to the voice of God. Forty percent of the professors in our theological seminaries have never served as the minister

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of a local congregation. They are teaching men and women to be ministers, but they themselves have never walked in that path. If I were a parishioner today, I would fling my minister into his study.

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I would bolt the door. I would see that he was provided with the best books. I would cancel all of his invitations to give the invocation or to put in an appearance or make remarks here or there.

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I would tear out his telephone. I would censor his mail of all junk mail, whether it was written by hand or came in published form. And I would say to him, "Please know nothing amongst us except Jesus Christ and him crucified."

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And when you step into the pulpit on Sunday morning, bring to us that which you have discovered of the word of God. And while you are at it, study also in some particular discipline so that you can make a significant contribution to the thought of the world church.

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Great thoughts take time. Mark had the time as he worked there in Soffenville. And it's only when congregations give to their ministers time to study, time to pray, time to deal with stress, time to build friendships, that they can expect to find their ministers

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not burning out, not suffering from physical illnesses, not becoming spiritually dry, and not, tragically, sometimes wandering into moral failure. Now, I said at the outset that the question with which Barth was particularly concerned as a young pastor was the question of whether a sermon was truly a sermon or not.

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I have no intention of burdening you with a theological lecture this morning. But it is important that you understand the key to his thought. Barth distinguished between the word that God speaks and the word that a human being speaks.

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If I, for example, say, "Let there be light," nothing happens. Someone may be kind enough to get up and flip on a light switch, but that's an act of cooperation and nothing more. But when God says, "Let there be light," there is immediately light.

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The Bible says that God speaks and things come to be. His word has the power to actualize itself. His word, in fact, becomes an act. Now a sermon, when it is a true sermon, reaches down into the heart of the heart of a person

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and there changes that person so that their life is reversed and they become a disciple of Jesus Christ or so that they come to some higher level of commitment or some area of devotion in the faith which is beyond anything that they have known before. This is what a sermon, when it's truly a sermon, does.

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But a man's word does not have the capacity to bring about that change, Barth argued. Only God can say something and have it happen. And that means that the only time a sermon is truly a sermon is when God's word speaks through it.

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Michael Medley mentioned a few minutes ago that one night he sat and heard me preach and felt a call to the mission field and he's been on the field since and is preparing to return again. He works in a difficult area, a dangerous area, under privation and with much less of

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the world's rewards than most people receive. He did not do that, Barth said, because of anything that I said. He did that because in the course of listening to my words, the word of God came through my words and touched him.

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And it's that word and only that word that can change and transform. So what we must do is to listen always for the word of God. Now when Barth says the word of God, he means Jesus Christ. The scriptures say, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the

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word was God." When Barth says the word of God, he does not mean the Bible. He sees the Bible as words about the word of God, an account of what the word of God did while he was here on earth amongst us.

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It is unique, it is inspired, but it is words about the word. The word speaks through it and also through the sacraments and also through preaching. The word reveals himself when he wills and at no other time. Now when Barth announced this, the liberals of the day opposed him.

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They had looked upon the Bible with virtual contempt. They saw cultural influences as being the voice that the church should be listening to. We saw an example of this in the report on human sexuality, which was recently before

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our denomination. Most of those who studied it quickly discerned that it was built much more upon the words of men, the culture of which we are a part, than upon the word of God. And that is the reason it was so resoundingly defeated.

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But conservatives were also angered by what Barth said because he criticized them as being socially irrelevant, all wrapped up in a kind of "I and me" piety. He said they had deified a book. They had made it into a kind of, and this was his phrase, a kind of paper pope.

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They didn't realize that these are only words about the one word who is Jesus Christ. When someone says we must get back to the Bible, Barth replied, "Oh no, we must go further than that. We must go through the Bible to Jesus Christ, for he is the one true word."

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The Roman Catholics were also upset with what Barth suggested. They understand themselves to be part of the one true church, and they believe that it is given to their leaders to infallibly interpret the scriptures and apostolic tradition. Barth said that this was an anthropocentric theology.

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In other words, they were trying to build a pathway to God. Barth says you cannot build a pathway to God. You rely on the fact that God has come through his word to us. In everything, you see, he magnified Christ.

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Not man's efforts, not religiosity, not piety, not any suggestion that we can find our way to God, but rather that God sent his Son as the word made flesh, and that word of God dwelled among us and dwells among us still. No theologian in history has so exalted Jesus Christ as Barth, because Karl Barth made Jesus

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Christ the criteria by which every other theological statement is measured. "I am determined," he said, echoing the Apostle Paul, "to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." I remember the one occasion on which I heard Karl Barth lecture.

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It was here in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Zenia Seminary. And after his lecture, he invited questions. And one young man, very conservative in his religious orientation, stood up, Barth recognized him, and he took his Bible and he held it up and he said, "Sir, is this the word of

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God?" And Barth smiled at him with a very gentle smile and said, "My son, if you believe that you can encompass God on the pages of a book, if you believe that you have all there is of God in the pages of that volume, then you are wrong.

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That is not the word of God. But if you believe that God has so inspired this book and so made it unique in the world that he can convey the word made flesh, his own Son by the power of the Holy Spirit, the word coming through the words, if that's what you mean, then you are holding the word of

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God." So having such a high view of Christ, Barth found himself immediately confronted with a challenge to his living what he believed. For you see, in 1919, Adolf Hitler formed the National Socialist Party.

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And by 1933, he had become the Reichsfuehrer, the national leader of Germany. Now as the Nazis came to power politically, there was a group within the German church who called themselves the German Christians. But they were nothing but Nazis under another name.

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They held to all of the Nazi heresies and evils, the anti-Semitism, all the rest of it. And when pastors in the church saw this group of Nazis growing under the title German Christians in the church, these evangelical pastors drew apart and established a group they called

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the Pastors' Emergency League. Barth was part of that group. And he sat down and on behalf of that group, he wrote a refutation of Nazi ideas. That was the first written statement that the church ever made against Hitler.

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Well it was immediately banned. In 1934, all such documents were banned. Now the German church had divided itself into three groups. There were those who called themselves the German Christians, no more than Nazis.

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There were those who were genuine Christians and stood against Hitler and all that he represented. And there was that middle group that was afraid to take a stand and so never said anything. So those who were true Christians withdrew from the German church and they formed a new church which they called the Constitutional Evangelical Church of Germany.

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And they gathered together in Barmen, Germany to write a declaration of what they believed. It was in May of 1934. It was a hot day. And after they'd had lunch, the man assigned to write this declaration decided they'd take

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a brief nap before they set to work. But Barth couldn't sleep. And Karl Barth sat down at a table and wrote the entire declaration. And when they came down from their rests, they made only a few minor changes in what

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he had written. Essentially he maintained two things. That no one may be worshipped except God, to bow down before any government or its leaders is idolatry.

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And the second thing he said was this. Jesus Christ is the only Führer. He is the only leader. In a very real sense, it is an embarrassment that we must acknowledge as Christians that

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there were Nazis pretending to be Christians in the church and that so many people in the church refused to take any stand at all. It is a tragedy that they did not stand against him when standing against him might have done some good.

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But that small number led by Barth, who did take a stand, they were the only institutional group in all of Germany that stood against the Nazis. That's the reason that we remember them with honor. And we have made, as Presbyterians, the Barman Declaration one of the confessions in our

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book of confessions. The banner that represents it flies in our flag gallery. It shows a swastika being consumed by the flames of the truth and being replaced by the cross.

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Barth, because he wrote the Declaration, was expelled from Germany. He went to his homeland, Switzerland, and joined the Swiss army when he was 54 years old. He wrote letters to genuine Christians who were still in Germany, urging them to stand

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fast. Much of his correspondence was with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that great martyr for Christ who stood solidly behind his Savior until he was hanged nude in a German concentration camp. Barth wrote letters to Christians all over the world, encouraging them to stand against

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this organized evil. And so great was the influence of this small group of Christians under the leadership of Karl Barth that Albert Einstein was led to write, "Only the Christian church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth.

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And I am forced to confess," he continued, "that what I once despised I now praise without reservation." This was the life of Karl Barth. After the war, he continued to write and lecture all over the world.

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His intellect never failed him, but his body did. And on December 10, 1968, he died. And the greatest and most influential theologian of the 20th century was with us in person no more.

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Why do I take the time to tell you about him this morning? Not because I'm trying to make you his disciples. Barth made it clear many times he didn't want disciples. The Lord Jesus was the one for whom we were to be disciples.

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I do not speak of him to urge you to adopt his theology. I speak of him for these two reasons, that you will first of all see that theological thought is desperately important, that God did not stop speaking when his book went to print, that the word of God still is alive in the world and comes through this and through

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the sacraments and through the proclamation of his word. And that word still reaches down and touches the hearts of those who truly listen with their hearts. And the moment when that word of God, Jesus Christ, touches that heart, what Barth called

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the moment of miracle, then real change occurs. People who are satisfied with the simplistic theology they learned in Sunday school 40 years ago are not only indolent, they are also ignorant. And if to that they add the rejection of every other theology because it doesn't agree with

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theirs, they are not only indolent and ignorant, but they are arrogant as well. And the second reason I call Barth to our minds this morning is because of the rich fruit of his thought. How he lifted up Jesus Christ, the strong emphasis he put on the scriptures as a unique

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tool by which the word of God in Jesus Christ came, the strong emphasis he put on the sacraments and on preaching, the picture of God that he painted, a God of love who came to seek and to save the lost and was willing to suffer to redeem them. And also, I call you to remember how Barth tied his ethics to his theology.

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He showed in his own life that he bowed his knee to no one but Christ. He was in orthodoxy and also in orthopraxis, or to put it in simpler terms, he walked until he died. Would God that there were more Christians like him.

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Would God that we were more like him. Amen.