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Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

George Harinck

Introduction

It may be true that the Barthians for a long time have neglected the evangelicals, but they knew at least one of them by name: Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987). This Dutch-American theologian and professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia was about ten years younger than Karl Barth (1886-1968). He entered the world of Barth and the Barthians with a bang in 1946, when he published his first book, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner. In this book of close to four hundred pages — one of the first major publications of the Westminster faculty — Van Til offered a full-scale analysis of the theology of Barth and Emil Brunner (1889-1966), especially of its philosophical presuppositions. In the 1940s Van Til had read Barth's volumes of the Kirchliche Dogmatik thoroughly, and in his book he presented many arguments for his initial suspicion that Karl Barth's theology was not a corrective to Protestant liberalism, but a "heresy," "deeply and ultimately destructive of the gospel." "Barth's theology, for all its historical theological vocabulary" was, according to Van Til's thesis, "nothing more than neomodernism."

Van Til's book was not very favorably received among Barthians, to put it mildly, especially not in Europe. I think the Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) was quite correct in 1952 when he wrote that The New Modernism was received among the Barthians with "howls of an Indian." The Dutch theologian Theodoor L. Haitjema (1888-1972), who had hosted Barth on his first visit to the Netherlands in 1926 and had published the first book on him in Dutch in that same year, labeled Van Til's analysis of Barth as a "horrible misunderstanding." Barth's Catholic interpreter, Hans Urs von Balthasar, dismissed as "ridiculous" Van Til's attempt "to explain the whole theology of Barth and Brunner on the basis of their earlier positions and in terms of the philosophical principles that are supposedly at the root of their system." But the main reason why Barthians know and remember Van Til's name is that the master himself took up his pen against the Westminster Seminary theologian. In his personal correspondence Barth complained about "the fundamentalist Cornelius Van Til": "I have read two books by Dr. van Til. In both of them, especially in the second one, he ... accused me of being the worst heretic p. Chr. n. [post Christum natum]. It is a long time ago since I read them. But I remember my feelings." But much more influential was what Barth wrote in his introduction to volume IV/2 of his Kirchliche Dogmatik, published in 1955. Van Til biographer John-Muether stated: "Barth likely had Van Til in mind when he wrote [in this introduction] that while he could discuss his view with some fundamentalists, there were 'butchers and cannibals [who] are beyond the pale (e.g., the one who summarily described my theology as the worst heresy of any age).'"

By the 1950s Barth was a world famous theologian who was unable to respond to the myriad of praise for and critique of his work — though silence and neglect had always been important weapons for Barth. There were many publications on Barth that were sent to him by its authors in the hopes of getting a substantial reply. Understandably, the only thing he usually did was flip through the pages to determine if the author appreciated his theology or not, and then put the book on his shelves without ever responding to the author. But apparently in 1958 Barth could no longer abide Van Til. So we can safely conclude that with opinions like those expressed in his magnum opus The New Modernism, Van Til made himself a name in Barthian circles, though it was a very bad name indeed.

The New Modernism was not only read by Barthians but also by evangelicals. In these circles the book was well received and it is hard to overestimate the impact of Van Til's rejection of Barth's theology on the general attitude of the Evangelical movement toward Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy. According to Bernard Ramm The New Modernism "became the official evangelical interpretation of neo-orthodoxy.... Hence Barth had a bad press among evangelicals long before his Church Dogmatics was translated volume by volume into English." And Francis Schaeffer wrote to Van Til in 1970 on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday: "You have pointed out for all the world to read that Barth's theology [was] wrong at its core, and not just in the details." The New Modernism may have been as influential as Ramm suggested, but the book was tough reading, its prose being tense and tedious, and George Marsden's observation that "few fundamentalists read the book, but many repeated the title" might very well be to the point.

Seen from the perspective of Van Til's book and the consistent "small library of criticism of Barth" he has written during his academic career, the answer to the question in the title of this conference is clear: Barth and the evangelicals were foes and not friends. Much attention has been paid to the theological and philosophical issues that made them into enemies. The issue I would like to address in this essay, however, is a historical one: how did Van Til become such a fierce opponent of Karl Barth? Where did his opinions originate? And how did he develop views on Barth that resulted in the ostracizing effects he experienced in the mid-1940s and 1950s? I hope the answers to these questions will help to clarify the historical context of the confrontation between the Barthians and the evangelicals and take us beyond the antagonism that dominates their relationship, sometimes up to the present day. I will address three issues: (1) the way Van Til came to his opinion on Barth, (2) the strong antithetical character of his opinion, and (3) the reason why Barth was such a serious opponent of Van Til.

1. The way Van Til came to his opinion on Barth

Van Til published New Modernism in 1946, but the first publication in which he dealt with Karl Barth was a review of Alvin S. Zerbe's (1847-1935) book The Karl Barth Theology or the New Transcendentalism (1930), dating from 1931. At that time not much of Barth was known in the United States and hardly anything of Barth had been translated and published in English. The 1922 edition of Der Römerbrief, the book that made Barth famous in Germany, was published in English in 1933, the first volume of the Church Dogmatics in 1936. The stream of books and articles in English on Barth started to appear from the mid-1930s on. So Van Til was an early bird with his 1931 article. A reason for this early recognition of Barth's importance certainly was Van Til's mastery of the German language. He did not have to wait for English translations. But his first acquaintance and his first impressions of Karl Barth were not received in the United States but in the Netherlands, and therein lies the main reason for his early recognition of Barth's importance.

To explain this, a bit of biography is needed. Cornelius — or, Americanized, Case — Van Til was born in 1895 in Grootegast, in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands. His parents were farmers and belonged to the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, founded in 1892 by Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and representing the ecclesiastical branch of neo-Calvinism. He immigrated to the United States with his family in May 1905, a few days after his tenth birthday. The Van Tils settled in Hammond, Indiana, where they joined the Christian Reformed Church — a sister church of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the home of many Reformed Dutch immigrants — and continued their life as farmers. But Case sensed a call to the ministry and in 1914, at nineteen years of age, he enrolled at Calvin Preparatory School in Grand Rapids, and later on at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. In these educational institutions of the Christian Reformed Church he devoured the works of Kuyper and Bavinck. Because almost all the professors at Calvin College and Seminary during Van Til's years as a student had been born in the Netherlands and had been educated there, the content of Van Til's basic education was Dutch in character, and his thinking clearly had a Dutch bent. But the Dutch connection was not without problems. After 1914, Calvin College and Seminary went through years of transition. Partly this had to do with the growth of these educational institutions and with a process of Americanization within the Christian Reformed Church that accelerated during the First World War. But it also had to do with the Dutch theological tradition Van Til devoured. An important issue in his student years was the question whether, in view of the recent anti-naturalist developments within Western culture, the tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck needed an update or not — especially with regards to its epistemology and engagement with culture.

Interestingly, Van Til avoided this issue by enrolling at Princeton Seminary in 1922. Despite the absence of Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921), who had died a year before, Van Til was able to get acquainted with the Old Princeton theology. In his four years at the seminary he mixed the tradition of what he called the "inimitable trio" — Kuyper, Bavinck, and Warfield — into a new blend of Calvinist apologetics in which the foundational importance of creation and its intimate connection with covenant were the most characteristic ingredients. Muether, Van Til's biographer, argues that in bringing the Reformed tradition to a more consistent epistemological expression, Van Til stood on the shoulders of this trio, especially regarding the exclusion of a zone of neutrality or common epistemological ground. I think this process of blending was more complicated than Muether presents. It is not fully clear which elements of these three theologians were rejected as being "scholastic," and it is also unresolved whether Van Til ever came to a balanced mix. Now and then this blending of the neo-Calvinist "Old Amsterdam" and Scottish-Presbyterian "Old Princeton" traditions by Van Til has been oversimplified. A decade after his study at Princeton Seminary he admitted in a private letter:

For a long time I felt that there is really a breach between the theology of Warfield and the Apologetics of Warfield. In his theology Warfield is as sound as can be, for instance on the point of regeneration. In Apologetics, however, he says we can and must reason with the opponents by setting ourselves to begin with on common ground with them. Now this was seemingly quite the opposite of Kuyper's Encyclopaedie and Bavinck's Dogmatiek. With that difference I have struggled ever since.

After receiving his master's degree in 1926, he enrolled at Princeton University, because in engaging this "struggle" he experienced himself as having a lack of philosophical schooling. This university granted him a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1927 for a dissertation on God and the absolute.

After thirteen years of study and college life, Van Til was free of duties and made a vacation trip to his native country, to meet family and to learn about the present state of the vast Reformed community in the Netherlands. Van Til had not known anything about Karl Barth up until this point. But that would change soon. When he arrived in the Netherlands in the summer of 1927, Karl Barth had recently made two trips to the Netherlands, one in May and June of 1926 and another in March and April of 1927. These were the first foreign trips Barth undertook. He enjoyed the Netherlands and would return many times. Here Barth "discovered a quite independent form of Reformed Christianity," or as Barth himself put it in 1926, "unmistakably Calvinism, with the problem of ethics instead of the 'assurance of salvation.'" "Barth found astonishing perception about his theological concerns." The atmosphere was "a bit dry and solemn, but still full of movement, like Rembrandt's 'The Syndics' and 'Night Watch.'" When Van Til arrived three months later, Barth was in the air in Holland.

Van Til visited his uncle and aunt in the village of Oegstgeest and also called on their pastor, Klaas Schilder. Schilder was not at home, but later that year they corresponded. Schilder was a young minister in the Reformed Churches, and he was intrigued with Karl Barth. Barth had been known by the neo-Calvinists since his appointment as a professor of Reformed theology at Göttingen University in 1921. They had supported the young professor and co-financed a Konvikt (house and community) for Barth's students. The neo-Calvinists considered Barth an outsider who had discovered Calvinism and was now approaching their position. In order to foster this exclusive international relationship, they helped him in many ways, for instance, by presenting him publications by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, "together with a Dutch-German dictionary." This favorable attitude changed, however, when Dutch Barthians like the Groningen professor Haitjema in 1926 introduced Barth in the Netherlands and started to use his theology to criticize the neo-Calvinists by labeling their attempts to Christianize culture as haughty. After Barth's first visit to the Netherlands his popularity was on the rise, and neo-Calvinists lost their Dutch monopoly on Barth.

Schilder was impressed by the secularization of society and culture after World War I. Like Barth he was influenced by Søren Kierkegaard and very skeptical of the civilized character of Christian religion and the concurrence of Christianity and culture. But he consistently stressed the intimate relationship between God and created reality, and wondered what made Karl Barth so attractive to many. He attended a lecture by Barth at Leiden University in the spring of 1927 and had a conversation with Barth the day after at the home of church historian Albertus Eekhof (1884-1933) at Oegstgeest, where Barth had spent the night. Schilder had read Barth's Römerbrief and several other publications, but he hesitated to call Barth a Reformed theologian. Was Barth a like-minded thinker after all? His overall impression was not favorable, as he wrote to Van Til:

I found out that he does not know anything of the background of the Reformed [neo-Calvinist] tradition. His wrestling with the Calvinist tradition is not over yet. Considering his background and development I would say that he came to his conceptions by way of negation more than by careful, quiet study, descending to the roots of philosophical systems.

Van Til was impressed by the vivid debates on Barth in the Netherlands and tried to visit him in the summer of 1927 in his hometown of Münster—situated close to the Dutch border — but he did not succeed. Barth was also the reason why Van Til wanted to meet Schilder. Schilder was the first neo-Calvinist to pay serious attention to Barth's theology, and his interpretation would dominate the neo-Calvinist appreciation of Barth for almost twenty years. He had published his first essay on Karl Barth half a year before Van Til arrived, titled "The Paradox in Religion," and published his next one, "In the Crisis," in September 1927. In these two essays Schilder analyzed the theology of Karl Barth and concluded that it would not stop secularization, but on the contrary would support it.

Schilder appreciated Barth's stress on the objectivity of theWord of God as a "delight," but he disqualified Barth's use of the paradox in religion as a revolution in theology. Barth, and Haitjema in his footsteps, seemed to have given up the classic aim to resolve discord in thinking. Instead, Barth labeled this aim as a sin. In his view belief does not fit in, but breaks through the logical laws of reasoning. According to Schilder, this view harmed Reformed theology. This theology presupposed the possibility of congruency of belief and reason in stating the perspicuitas, efficacia, claritas, and sufficientia of Scripture. Schilder therefore concluded: this difference implies a fundamental disagreement on the possibility of knowing God and His will. In Schilder's opinion, Calvinism does not accept and employ paradoxes as such. Barth, however, emphasized the paradox and declared God to be incognito in this world. To Schilder this either meant that Barth's philosophical commitments were leading him astray in his theology, or that it was indeed impossible for humans to serve God.

(Continues...)

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