Karl Barth, one of the most important theologians of the 20th century, died 41 years ago today in his hometown of Basel, Switzerland, at the age of 82. Many people know about his multivolume Church Dogmatics or his intellectual leadership of the German Confessing Church, which resisted the formation of the Protestant Reich Church under Adolf Hitler. Some might even know that Barth refused to sign an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler, was forced to resign his teaching position in Germany, and returned to Switzerland as a professor of systematic theology at the University of Basel. Little known, however, is the fact that he would from time to time preach to inmates of the local prison in Basel. There’s a wonderful collection of his prayers and sermons in that setting entitled Deliverance to the Captives. Here’s a quote from that book that I’ve been contemplating during this season of Advent:
Believe me, there is a captivity much worse than the captivity in this house. There are walls much thicker and doors much heavier than those closed upon you. All of us, the people without and you within, are prisoners of our own obstinancy, of our many greeds, of our various anxieties, of our mistrust and in the last analysis of our unbelief. We are all sufferers. Most of all we suffer from ourselves. We each make life difficult for ourselves and in so doing for our fellowmen. We suffer from life’s lack of meaning. We suffer in the shadow of death and of eternal judgment toward which we are moving.
Barth continues this sermon with an emphasis on God’s grace, which has saved us and set us free from this prison. The door is open to “the beginning of the true life of freedom, of a carefree heart, of joy deep within.” Yet so often we choose to remain inside our little cell, isolated from our neighbors and community, isolated in our imagination even from God. Barth reminds us that this is not true and that all of us – not only the pious or those somehow better than us – have been embraced by God in Jesus Christ. Therefore all of us can walk through that door into new life.
