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| Charlotte Kirschbaum worked for Barth for almost nothing, agreed with his Marxism, and wrote the bulk of his Dogmatics. |
The Evangelical world is still rocking from the decades-old story that Karl Barth moved his mistress into his home with his wife Nellie and his children. Although some made a point of not drawing the obvious conclusions, the facts were already known in the 1970s.
Moreover, my classmate at Yale, George Hunsinger, was and is a Barth scholar who published about the avid Marxism of Barth and his lovely mistress/assistant Charlotte Kirschbaum. Precious few realize how important Marxism was to this couple, but that can be studied in Hunsinger's book, Karl Barth and Radical Politics.
Perhaps Charlotte was assigned by the Party to control Barth and keep him on the straight and narrow path to world conquest. No one will touch that for now.
The real scandal is Barth's wholesale plagiarism of Kirschbaum's work. He was only a parish pastor who became an overnight sensation from his Romans commentary. Suddenly he was teaching at a university and expected to lecture on a variety of subjects. He was not prepared and could not keep up.
Kirschbaum came along at just the right time and began helping him. Everyone agrees that his most productive work began with her help and ended when she was too sick to help anymore. Frank Fiorenza, former president of the Barth Society, taught us in class that his fellow Barthians concluded this - Kirschaum wrote the fine print in the Dogmatics and Barth wrote the large print outline.
Most people think the fine print is the better part of the Dogmatics.
We know Barth was a shameless plagiarist from other sources. If an academic was was asked to write material related to Barth's current effort, Barth simply included those notes in his book, pages of it, without giving any credit. The theologian was flattered by being included, because Barth was the Elvis Presley of theology at that time.
The earlier Dogmatics effort was a failure. But when Charlotte helped out, one volume after another kept appearing over the years, until she became sick. He did not dedicate a volume to his wife Nelly until the end, but he dedicated one of the first volumes to Charlotte. I went to the library when I heard that in class and checked it out.
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| Karl Barth and his mistress assistant in their later years. |
The dedications tell me more about Kirschbaum's work than her ambiguous life with Barth. He had to have felt a great sense of dependence upon her for elevating him to international star. After all, many other theologians were known at the time but are largely forgotten because they did not leave behind a massive set of books.
Paul Tillich was another apostate who combined adultery and plagiarism. He slept with the wives of his graduate students and stole the academic work of those students. His star was dimmed greatly by his widow's frank autobiography and his obtuse theological nonsense.
But Barth remains the backbone of modern Protestant theology, to the shame of all. He is THE theologian of Fuller Seminary, a favorite among the academics, the CFW Walther Great Prophet on all topics. Have an issue? - cite Barth/Kirschbaum. Whoever quotes the most wins.
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| Where do we find the same kind of dialectic mumbo-jumbo? Ja - in Marxist philosophy. |
Thus Protestant theology - and Catholicism - owe their weakness to the bog of Barth's thinly disguised political rhetoric. He did not spell it out, but the radicals realize this truth - Barth/Kirschbaum is quite convenient for those who want to double-talk their way into political radicalism. Theologians of the Left can always duck back into the Yes and the No of every phony tidbit offered in the Dogmatics.
But believe me, no one dares claim that the emperor of theology has no clothes on - and is hiding behind his mistress. I said far less than that to a conservative Evangelical professor and he jumped on me like a hobo on a hotdog.
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| Awkward! The Barth children have two mommies. They are the ones who published the incendiary letters. |
