KARL BARTH
AND
A MISSIOLOGY OF PREACHING
Our life
is like the journey of a wanderer through the night;
and each one, advancing slowly, knows: deep sorrow is his
plight.
Karl Barth was quoting from a
well-known Swiss song as he made his opening remarks to the
inmates in a Swiss prison. He continued his sermon, saying:
Each
one! Sorrow is your plight, and so it is mine. We suffer
here within the walls of this house, and so do the
people of this city, even of the whole world. Behind the
sorrow of each individual there lies the sorrow of a
world in disorder. There also lies the sorrow of man as
he is: not good but living in misery.
The preacher and the audience
were from two different worlds. What a contrast of
spiritual, educational, and social backgrounds! The preacher
was Professor of Theology at Basel University; the audience,
inmates in the city prison. But with few words Barth was
able to enter the situation of his audience and speak to
their needs!
Barth earned the reputation of
being a preaching theologian, one who translated the
profundity of the gospel into the simplicity of preaching.
He was a theologian by title, a pastor by heart, and a
missionary preacher in actual ministry.
Ironically, when I came to
seminary in the United States, I had resolved I would never
read Barth again. During my seminary years in Korea, Barth
had strongly influenced my theological thinking. But my
subsequent church planting experience had left me to
disappointed with an abstract theology that seemed
irrelevant to the needs of real people. I became aware of
the tension between theology and proclamation.
I also became aware that
effective preaching was not just biblical exposition but
missionary communication, and, while there must be a deep
understanding of the Bible, there also must simplicity in
communication. With the motivation to seek a missiological
understanding of preaching, I came to Fuller, saying good
bye to Karl Barth along the way. I wanted no more
sophisticated theological language understood only by
seminarians, but rather a theology that would serve the
evangelistic proclamation of the gospel.
But in a class of mission theology I discovered Barth's
Credo was a required text! The professor even told us,
"Karl Barth was a missiologist of his day." Karl Barth-
a missiologist? I was puzzled. Yet, reading Karl Barth from
a missiological perspective and encountering his as an
evangelistic preacher has given fresh insight as I seek to
understand missionary proclamation.
A. Brief Biography
Although many seem to not
recognizing it, Karl Barth was very cross-cultural person.
He was a Swiss who spoke both French and German—and English
occasionally. He began his Christian ministry as a pastor in
Switzerland, taught theology in Germany, then in Swiss, and
preached occasionally for a French-speaking congregation. He
was very devoted to mission to Eastern Europe by
correspondence with pastors in those countries. He also
mentored many church leaders in Southeast Asia by
correspondence.
In addition to these, Barth
was a missionary preacher to his own culture. He described a
nominal society as a mission frontier, and he himself was in
the forefront of outreaching ministry, especially to those
inside the prison wall.
Karl Barth was born and raised
in the tradition of the Swiss Reformation. His father, Fritz
Barth was teaching at the Evangelical School of Preachers in
Basel when Karl was born May 10, 1886. Three years later
Fritz Barth was called to Berne to become professor of
church history and New Testament exegesis. It was natural,
then, that Barth would develop a strong interest in
theological study in his early formative years.
At the age of eighteen Barth began his theological studies
at Derne under the direction of his father who passed on a
thorough grounding in Reformed theology. Although his father
stood for a more orthodox position against developing
liberalism, Barth himself came under the powerful influence
of liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack in 1906. This
influence dominated his thinking for the next ten years.
Upon the completion of his studies in 1909, Barth spent two
years as an apprentice pastor in Geneva. Then he moved to
Safenwil in north-central Switzerland to become a pastor in
the little village in 1911. He was twenty-five years old.
Geoffrey Bromiley remarks that at that time Barth had little
message to preach except the Christianized culture so well
expressed in Harnack's What is Christianity?
During his ten years as pastor in this little country
village Barth went through all the agonies of heart, mind,
soul that finally led to a change in theological position.
Bromiley observes, "Experience in the pastorate quickly
produced a sense of incongruity between commission and
performance. Liberal platitudes answered neither the demands
of his calling nor actual problems in his parish." During
these ten years we see Barth giving his attention to
preaching- to the problem of the
content of the message that, Sunday after Sunday, is the
heavy responsibility of the one commissioned to enter the
Christian pulpit.
Barth taught theology in Gotting Munster and Bonn, Germany
between 1921 and 1935. While there he challenged Harnack,
contending that Harneck¡¯s scientific theology is only a
preliminary to the true task of theology, which is identical
to that of preaching. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, Barth
emerged as one of the Confessing Church leaders who sought
to resist the Nazi encroachments. He expressed his
theological position regarding this in the Barmen
Declaration of 1934.
Deprived of his chair at Bonn,
he returned to Switzerland, and from 1935 to his retirement
in 1962, he taught theology at Basel. While working on his
Church Dogmatics during this period, he had a hidden
ministry of frequently conducting worship at the main
prison of the city. There he preached with touching
simplicity the gospel of freedom to a large congregation of
inmates. A collection of his sermons, Deliverance to the
Captives, is moving testimony to his preaching ministry
to this particular group. It is also testimony how one's
missiological understanding of preaching can help us to
present our profound gospel message in a way it can be
easily and clearly understood by the unchurched people.
B. Barth's Mission Theology
The Christian community is by
nature a missionary community whose evangelistic mandate is
to proclaim the Kingdom of God in the world and to the
world. From his reading of Matthew 28:19, Karl Barth
declares: "Sending or sending out to the nations to attest
the gospel is the very root of the existence and therefore
the whole ministry of the community."
In his theology of the
election of the community, Barth convinces us that the
Christian community has been chosen out of the world for the
very purpose of performing for the world the service which
it most needs—for the missionary task of witnessing to Jesus
Christ and summoning it to faith in Him." The Christian
community is a body of Christians who are essentially
witnesses. The community is comprised of those who hear
God's word of atonement in order to represent it to others.
It is a missionary community in that it does not exist only
for Christians, or for its own sake, but for non-Christians
as well. Indeed, it exists for the sake of the world
reconciled in Christ to God. In every age and situation the
church community stands in definite relation to the world
around, that is, non-Christians.
With Barth it is impossible
that the Christian community as the missionary people of God
should pass by those who are without as the priest and
Levites passed by those who had fallen among them. All those
who are without are waiting for the helping action of the
Christian community. Whether they are aware of it or not,
their whole being and striving and existence utters the cry
of the Macedonia: "Come over and help us" (Acts 16:9). This
is true of every man and woman, since none can evade what
God is and has done for him or her in Jesus Christ and what
it is appointed that he or she should know in His Word.
Therefore: "Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and
look on the fields; for they are white already—not in four
months but already—to harvest" (Jn. 4:35). This is why the
community has the commission for the missionary task in this
world. It has no option but to follow the saying of Jesus to
His disciples in Mark 6:37, "Give ye them to eat," and
therefore to give hungry men and women what they need.
The true community of Jesus
Christ does not rest in itself. It exists as it actively
reaches beyond itself into the world. It acts and works
within it. The true Church can never cease wholly or
basically from activity in the world. In every respect, even
in what seems to be purely inner activity like prayer and
the liturgy and the cure of souls and biblical exegesis and
theology, its activity is always ad extra (to those
who are on the outside). It is always directed extra
muros (in an outward direction of its boundary) to those
who are not, or not yet, within. It is recognized as the
true Church by the fact that it is engaged in this venture
of obedience. The world exists in self-orientation; the
Church in visible contrast cannot do so.
For Barth, each individual is
responsible for its actually being a missionary community.
Mission is of vital importance if they look with longing
eyes beyond the existing boundaries of the Christian world
for new people. Every Christian is a missionary in the sense
that he is a brother who is in royalty to the brethren whom
he already had looks out among those who are not yet
brethren. (1961:505).
Indeed, Barth has a lot to
offer for our cross-cultural vision. The Christian community
has the vocation to take the gospel message to the nations
or to unreached people groups. As the community is obedient
to the command, it engages in foreign missions. The
community is an acting subject in foreign missions.
Otherwise, it is not the Christian community. In this
chapter, however, I want to focus on his emphasis on the
context of nominality as a new mission frontier, which has a
significant implication for the mission of the Church in the
twentieth-first century.
Perceiving the nominal segment
of "Christian" society as a mission field. Barth employs the
term "non-Christian Christendom" for what we might call "the
context of nominality." He depicts the universal presence of
nominal Christians as following:
Since the dawn of the
post-apostolic period, and then more clearly in the
Middle Ages, and in the earlier as well as the later
modern period, there has always been this as it were
non-Christendom, and it no doubt exists also even in the
sphere of the so-called younger churches of Asia and
Africa.
These kind of men and women
are among those who need to hear the gospel preached not
just as a theory but as an evangelistic message relevant to
their life-needs. They are Christians only by name—even
though they might have heard the gospel—but have no
participation in the cause of the community. Those countless
nominal Christians are undoubtedly the immediate neighbors
of the community as the assembly of committed Christians. In
this context, "The concern of evangelization is precisely to
sound out the gospel on the shifting frontier between true
and merely nominal Christians" urges Barth.
Barth invites us to reorient
our preaching as a missionary proclamation—as an
evangelistic address when ministering in this context of
nominality. In addressing our evangelical messages, his
suggestion includes delivering our sermon in a way it become
relevant to the felt-needs of the audience—to those who are
within the Christian community in theory but not in
practice. We are, therefore, to proclaim freedom rather than
propagating a law, to preach the promise of life rather than
threatening with the terrors of hell.
C. Barth's Missiological
Understanding of Preaching
In his missiological
understanding of preaching Karl Barth raises the fundamental
issues of preaching as a missionary proclamation. For
example, he accentuates the element of evangelistic address
in a missionary preaching. Traditionally, geographical
advance or cross-cultural thrust has been considered as a
primary factor of a missionary preaching. But it is not
necessary the case with Barth. He has no intention to make a
distinction between preaching in general and missionary
preaching. With him, the very neighborhood of a local
congregation can be a mission field. He helps us to
understand preaching as a missionary proclamation whether it
is implied to the context of ¡®domestic mission or foreign
mission.
C. 1. A Mission Theology of
Proclamation
One might wonder how a
great theological mind as Karl Barth would be so devoted to
the preaching ministry to those who were on the margin of
the society. Yet, out of these challenging situations he
found opportunity to shape his mission theology of
proclamation. His theological reflection for missionary
proclamation—that is, proclaiming the divine Word of Grace
for effecting acceptance, conversion, and redemption—had led
him to write books such as The Word of God and the Word
of Man.
The mystery of preaching
is that it is at once the Word of God and the word of man.
Preaching has to be the Word of God because the message
comes from God, because it is God's message of grace and
pardon, and because it is God who Himself speaks the
message. Yet, it has to be also the word of man because it
is human speech spoken by God's herald.
On the ground of this
understanding Barth defines that: (1) Proclamation is human
speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king
through the mouth of his herald; (2) Proclamation is meant
to be heard and accepted as speech in and by
which God Himself speaks; and (3) Proclamation is the
message of divine pardon, therefore, the eternal gospel. In
a word, proclamation is a missionary communication of the
message of divine grace.
The missiological issue in
question is, then, that the preacher is a messenger between
a biblical text and contemporary context. With Barth, the
preacher is more than a messenger. He views preachers or
ministers as priests (Geistliche) who mediate between
God and men by hearing God's answer and their answering the
question of men. Hence, "Not until our preaching arises from
need will our work become a mission. Mission alone
can legitimize preaching."
Arnold Come observes that
it was the practical problem of preaching Barth faced that
formed his theology:
Barth's whole unique
theological formulation had its origin and rise from the
specific problem of the sermon. He tells us that the
theology he had been taught appeared less relevant as he
was confronted each week with the needs of the people on
the one hand, and Bible on the other, and the task of
bringing the two together in the sermon. Out of this
torment came his commentary on Paul's Epistle to the
Romans, and a new theological era was born.
Theology for Barth has not
only its origin but also its goal in the problem of
preaching. Formulation of Christian faith into documental
statements cannot be an end in itself. Theology does not
replace the Bible or revelatory event in which God speaks
his own words to people.
From his own ministry
experience Barth expresses the specific minister's problem,
that is, the sermon which theology alone does not address:
I sought to find my way
between the problem of human life on the one hand
and the content of the Bible on the other. As a minister
I wanted to speak to the people in the infinite
contradiction of their life but to speak the no less
infinite message of the Bible, which was as much of and
riddle as life. Often enough these two magnitudes, life
and the Bible, have risen before me (still rise) like
Scylla and Charybdis.
How can a preacher get close
enough to life of the audience, and yet get equally close to
the biblical text? While Barth struggled to pursue both of
them, he perceived that there is an ongoing tension between
closeness to life and closeness to the text. The message of
the text must be the Word of God for the audience in their
contemporary context. His recognition of this problem of
preaching had opened the way to his missiological
understanding of preaching.
We need this missiological
understanding of preaching because we mediate the eternal
Word of God to ever-changing world. Again, we want use the
phrase, a missiological paradigm of homiletics, primarily in
the sense that the task of a preacher is to bring the gospel
message to audience in their unique situation, in their
particular place and in their particulate time. This is why,
as Charles Van Engen declares, missiology continuously
attempts to interface reflection and action. He states, "It
is a critical reflection that takes place in the praxis of
mission. It occurs in the concrete missionary situation."
Barth has a theme that
parallels Van Engen's "reflection and action"—"explication"
and "application." For Barth reflection on the Word of God
does not take place in a void. It takes place at the
transitional point between explication (observation)
and application (assimilation), between the
understanding and the practice of the Scripture. He
argues: "Preaching is not to be explication alone. It may
not be limited to expounding with no regard for the hearers.
Every sermon must also take the form of application. An
exposition, no matter how true to the text, will die away
ineffectually in a vacuum, if there is no possibility of a
responsive echo from those who hear it." To this effect,
Barth accentuates the need for the contextualizaion of
preaching, especially when addressing evangelically, so
"that they [the audience] come to see its crucial
application to them, that so far as any human word can do so
it pricks their hearts (Ac. 2:37), that it brings them to
realize that the reference is to them."
Now, returning to our
question, "How can a preacher get close enough to life of
the audience, and yet get equally close to the biblical
text?", The following excerpt from Barth's sermons
illustrates how he translated the profundity of the gospel
into the simplicity of preaching. The text reads, "By grace
you have been saved!" and his audience is the inmates in a
Swiss prison:
We are all great sinners.
Please understand me: I include myself. I stand ready to
confess being the greatest sinner among you all. Sinners
are people who in the judgment of God, and perhaps of
their own consciences, missed and lost their way. We are
such sinners, and we are prisoners. Believe me, there is
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 obstinacy, of our
many greeds, of our various anxieties. We are all
sufferers. We spend our life in the midst of a whole
world of sin and captivity and suffering.
But now listen. Into the depth of our predicament the
word is spoken from high: By Grace you have been
saved! To be saved does not just mean to be a
little encouraged, a little comforted, a little
relieved. It means to be pulled out like a log from a
burning fire. You have been saved! We are not told: you
may be saved sometimes, or a little bit. No, you have
been saved, totally and for all times. You? Yes, we!
Not just any other people, more pious and better than we
are, no, we, each one of us.
Barth expected good preaching
to be plain and simple. What preachers should not do is any
display of doctrinal erudition. Rather, they should see
biblical truth as they unfold in actual experience.
Christian truth is always new when it is set in the context
of daily life. We are to preach as the people we are: in a
history, on the way that the Bible takes with us. Christian
truth is constantly won afresh in history. We must preach as
the ones we are today."
C. 2. A MISSIOLOGY OF
COMMUNICATION
Barth is well aware of
communication barriers between the pulpit and the pew,
between the church and the world. His missiology of
preaching seeks to overcome those barriers through
exposition that brings the biblical text alive in a
contemporary situation. H e states, "Preaching is
exposition, not exegesis. It follows the text but moves on
from it to the preacher's own heart and to the
congregation."
C. 2. 1. Preaching as
Person-to-Person Communication
Since preaching is not a
monologue, but an interactive communication between God and
the preacher, between the preacher and the audience, Barth's
missiology of communication has a special emphasis on
knowing the audience from personal interaction. This will
suggest unexpected ideas and associations that will be with
the preacher as he or she studies the biblical text and will
provide "the elements of actuality, the application of his
text to the contemporary situation." Preaching is addressed
not to humanity in the abstract but to the living, breathing
man of today, whether within the Church or still outside it.
The context of a sermon is "the concrete situation of the
audience's earthly condition with all its life problem." As
he puts it: "The people we address are people with all kinds
of anxieties and needs. It is in this concrete situation of
their that the call of Jesus Christ comes to them as people
of the present age. Neither preacher nor congregation must
be viewed as an abstract entity."
In Barth's missiology of
communication personal identification is a crucial step
toward the contextualization of preaching. The preacher
needs to humbly recognize him or herself as "belonging" to
the congregation, as one with the people of God. Barth says,
"The preacher must never feel superior to the congregation,
but see that he is set within it as one who must also simply
hear the Word of God again and again." He goes on to
emphasize, "Recognition of this situation of the preacher is
the prerequisite for the proper application of the Word."
Barth warns against the danger
the preacher addressing the congregation from a standpoint
outside it instead of becoming one with it. The preacher has
no right to feel "set on high" because of his knowledge of
theology. Rather he or she should consciously strive to stay
on the level of the people.
C. 2. 2. Preaching as
Cross-cultural Witness
With Barth, We have seen
preaching as communicating God's revelation in human words,
as person-to-person communication. And very importantly,
Preaching is a cross-cultural communication in the sense the
message is transmitted from one sub-culture to another. Thus
we should not assume that a worldview shaped within a clergy
culture is necessary the same with the one from a non-clergy
culture.
A good Bible exposition alone
would not produce a good preaching unless it is interpreted
into the language the audience can understand. How can we
translate the profundity of the gospel message into the
simplicity of preaching? "Adapt the message to the
congregation," says Barth. He believes that life involvement
or incarnational life style will perfect the
contextualization of preaching. The preacher needs to
genuinely love the congregation– with a love that expresses
itself in an incarnational life style. The preacher will
love his congregation and feel that he is one with them. His
or her constant thought will be: "These are my people and I
long to share with them what God has given to me."
One of the recurring themes in
Barth's model of the contextualization of preaching is
"entering into the situation of the audience." The preacher
needs to live the life of the congregation, knowing the same
struggles, hearing the questions, walking alongside. A
preacher does not have to be the wise sage of the people,
but he will continually be concerned with their questions
and struggles. Barth emphasizes this because it is his
practice to reread the Bible in the situation of the
audience. Barth goes a step further to state that preaching
involves a life message. The validity of the preacher's
message will most clearly be seen in the way that preacher
lives.
The following important step
is a concern for relevance. After reading the biblical text
with the worldview of the biblical writers and rereading it
in the situation of the audience, this question should
follow: What demands does the contemporary situation make on
the preacher and his or her congregation? Together they
share a historical experience; the words of the preacher
must be relevant to immediate preoccupation of his hearers.
A preacher is not a hermit dwelling apart. Across the
historical gaps between the biblical writers and the
contemporary audience, the preacher's task is "to cause the
testimony presented in the text to be heard." "Purely
historical material is relevant only insofar as it forms
part of the testimony. In preaching, it is necessary to
follow the direction of the text and relate it to our own
times," says Barth.
This is why Barth emphasizes
originality in preaching, as it will contribute to making
biblical exposition relevant to a contemporary audience.
What he implies by the originality in preaching is the
freedom to express in or translate into one's own words what
has revealed to the preacher from his or her exposition of
the Bible. The vital communication issue we have here is
that preaching does not end in exegesis. The preacher's
calling is to bring the biblical message in a particular
place and time. "Address my own speech," says he. "I myself
am now called upon to be a witness who will remain biblical
but will not be stuck fast in exegesis. From the very first
sentence, preaching must be addressed to the people with
central communication out of the text." In short, Barth
accentuates originality in preaching because the preacher is
a real person of flesh and blood, with a personality and a
history and a background of his or her own, whom God has
laid hold of in the actual situation in which he or she is
placed."
D. Conclusions and
Applications
Karl Barth was a missionary
preacher primarily in the sense he sought to bring the good
tidings of the gospel to people on the margin such as prison
inmates, to awaken faith among those in the shifting
boundary such as nominal Christians, and to proclaim the
gospel of redemption to those who are still outside the
Church. Despite his great theological fame, he always wanted
to find himself as a preacher. As a preacher he always found
himself standing in a mission frontier. This understanding
of missionary preaching has implications in contemporary
world mission. In the New Testament era, missionary
preaching involved proclamation of the gospel to an audience
outside the Christian faith.
From Barth's model of
contextualization of preaching with his emphasis on entering
into the situation of the audience, I have found two
implications of missionary preaching. One is for the need of
the contextualization of the Protestant mission preaching in
Russia, the other is for a fresh understanding of missionary
preaching.
Right after the door of
mission to Russia opened in September 1990, a great mission
movement to Russia arose among Korean churches. By the
summer of 1993, it was estimated that already a half
thousand Korean missionaries were present in Russia—with
some of them in other former Soviet Union countries. In
those days, mission churches had been growing very.
Now, the picture is somewhat
different. The remarkable growth is no longer what we read
from the mission reports and we often here that Russian
Christians in mission churches are dwindling in numbers. One
may list a variety of factors of changing mission
environments such as the New Religious Law. But let me
summarize what I have observed from my research and
analysis. At first, Russians had two basic needs apart from
economic needs. One was a spiritual need for faith, the
other for new identity after the collapse the communist
system. Russians are seeking for new identity, which has to
be found from what has their historical roots. If the
Protestant mission churches were going to pay attention to
their need for new identity, there is a clear reason to
develop a contextualized model of preaching in Russia rather
than implanting the western (or even Korean) way. I believe
this gives at least a partial explanation of the current
challenging issues in Russia.
Now, the second implication we
find is that we may rediscover the biblical sense of
missionary preaching for the "domestic mission." With Barth
we see that missionary preaching involves preaching as the
one who is sent to the audience. What Barth reminds us is
that every preacher has this missionary call to enter into
the situation of the audience as we prepare the message and
preach. It invoices the re-reading the Bible in the
situation of the audience.
Though I am far from being a
matured preacher, I may still find one illustration of it
from my own experiences. Years ago I had the privilege to
preach in an evangelical church in Russia for a period of
time. Sitting together in their life situation, but bringing
to them the divine Word of Grace, I preached there not as an
outsider, but as the one sent by God to belong to them.
Before I preached, I reread the bible and there was a fresh
revelation from my text. Then, I saw how my expository
preaching became relevant to the need of each person of the
congregation despite our cultural differences. Moreover,
when I had a fresh revelation of my text in their situation,
I could preach in simple language instead of theological
jargon. There I witnessed that those spiritually hungry
souls were so eager to hear even the preach from Asia. The
need for the Word of God ministry is simply so great in
Russia.
Ironically, when I preached
from the same text in my earlier ministry in Korea, my
audience was not very attentive, nor was my message so
relevant to their felt-needs. But when I came back to Korea,
I applied to that preaching context what I learned about the
missiological understanding of preaching in Russia. What
followed was the very enthusiastic response from my
audience, which was quite a new experience to me in the same
pulpit.
This is how I became aware of
that there are factors that define missionary preaching
other than the element of geographical distance or cultural
differences. Following Barth, I want to suggest a
missiological understanding of preaching in reading the text
with the worldview of the biblical writers and rereading it
in the situation of the audience so that the Word of God
preached by the words of man becomes relevant and accessible
life-giving message. With Barth, we want to response to this
missionary call "to proclaim to the world the free grace of
God and the hope which this carries with it." Yes, we have
this call to missionary preaching wherever we are sent to
announce the Kingdom of God.
"And how
can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And
how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how
can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How
Beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"
(Romans 10:14-15)
© This copyrighted
article by Dae Ryeong Kim (March 2000) is from the second chapter of
"Footprints of God: A Narrative Theology of Mission" (CA, Monrovia:
MARC). This is Dr. Charles Van Engen's new editorial work and Dae
Ryeong Kim is a co-author of the book. For end notes and bibliography,
please refer to the published version of the article (ISBN
1-887983-14-7). This paper was the beginning of Dae Ryeong Kim's
current dissertation because right after the presentation of this paper
I was suggested by Dr. Van Engen to consider a dissertation topic that
has focus on Karl Barth. |