page_title: Karl Barth
section_title: Barmen Declaration
hierarchical_section_title: Karl Barth / Barmen Declaration
caption_attribution_description: English: 50 years of Barmen Declaration Deutsch: 50 Jahre Barmer Theologische Erklärung Graphics by Schmitz Ausgabepreis: 80 Pfennig First Day of Issue / Erstausgabetag: 8. Mai 1984 Michel-Katalog-Nr: 1214
context_page_description: Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian who is most well known for his landmark commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, and authorship of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished five volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics. Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962 and Pope Pius XII said Barth was "the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas."
  Barth's theological career began while he was known as the "Red Pastor from Safenwil" when he wrote his first edition of his The Epistle to the Romans. Beginning with his second edition of The Epistle to the Romans, Barth began to depart from his former training – and began to garner substantial worldwide acclaim – with a liberal theology he inherited from Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Schleiermacher and others. Barth influenced many significant theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who supported the Confessing Church, and Jürgen Moltmann, Helmut Gollwitzer, James H. Cone, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Thomas F.
context_section_description: In 1934, as the Protestant Church attempted to come to terms with the Third Reich, Barth was largely responsible for the writing of the Barmen Declaration (Ger. Barmer Erklärung). This declaration rejected the influence of Nazism on German Christianity by arguing that the Church's allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ should give it the impetus and resources to resist the influence of other lords, such as the German Führer, Adolf Hitler. Barth mailed this declaration to Hitler personally. This was one of the founding documents of the Confessing Church and Barth was elected a member of its leadership council, the Bruderrat.
  He was forced to resign from his professorship at the University of Bonn in 1935 for refusing to swear an oath to Hitler. Barth then returned to his native Switzerland, where he assumed a chair in systematic theology at the University of Basel. In the course of his appointment, he was required to answer a routine question asked of all Swiss civil servants: whether he supported the national defense. His answer was, "Yes, especially on the northern border!" The newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung carried his 1936 criticism of the philosopher Martin Heidegger for his support of the Nazis. In 1938 he wrote a letter to a Czech colleague Josef Hromádka in which he declared that soldiers who fought against the Third Reich were serving a Christian cause.
caption: A stamp celebrating the Barmen Declaration's 50 year anniversary
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