This translation of Eberhard Busch's original Karl Barth und die Pietisten (first published in 1978 by Christian Kaiser Verlag) offers English-speaking audiences access to his fine analysis of the ‘dialogue’ between the early Barth and an important, early twentieth-century Pietist movement known as the Gemeinshaftsbewegung (‘community people’). The Gemeinshaftsbewegung arose from within the established Protestant church in Switzerland and Germany. In common with other Pietist movements, they emphasised an experiential ‘inner life’ of faith activated and accompanied by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. The experience of dynamic fellowship with God, lived out in Christian community with other ‘born again’, ‘spiritually alive’ believers, was at the heart of their understanding of the New Testament. Hence they saw themselves as a vital witness to living biblical tradition and personal Christian faith in the midst of ‘dead orthodoxy’ and liberalism. In their self-understanding as faithful interpreters and defenders of biblical truth, they generally ignored dismissals or attacks from their theological ‘foes’.

Hence they were wholly unprepared for the kind of critique they found in the second edition of the Romerbrief. Pietism was being challenged from an authoritatively biblical perspective. They were suddenly dislocated by Barth from an exclusive position as those who ‘speak for God’ and, in terms of direct experience of God, were instead relocated alongside their greatest theological adversary, liberal theology! As certain members felt goaded into responding, a kind of confrontational ‘dialogue’ began.

Busch's study is limited to Barth's writings up to 1930 and the literature of the Gemeinshaften through the 1920s. He begins by asking (1) which Pietists was Barth referring to in his critique, and thus was it accurate, and (2) how did the Pietists respond to Barth's critique, and did they properly understand his method or concerns? The first question requires taking into account at least three historically interrelated phenomena: the Pietism of the eighteenth century, the spiritual awakening of the nineteenth century and the Gemeinshaftsbewegung (community movement) of the twentieth century. Because Barth's critique in the second Romerbrief was directed more towards the first two movements, Busch seeks to identity those among the Gemeinshaftsbewegung who so closely identified with the concerns of these movements that they believed themselves targeted as well. (The introduction and appendices by translator Daniel Bloesch and the foreword by Donald Dayton help to identity these different movements and their place in the larger landscape of twentieth-century Pietism.)

The book is organised in three main parts. The first part covers Barth's developing critique of Pietism, including the positive influence of Barth's Pietistic roots and his attempt to integrate a particular understanding of Pietistic experience into his liberal theology. From the outset Busch challenges any assumption that Barth's relation to Pietism was that of a critical, distant enemy. Rather, Barth is presented as an irenic if ‘troublesome’ friend of Pietism and its concerns. Barth's description of his family heritage and upbringing speaks of his great-grandfather as ‘an edifying and joyous Pietist in the best sense of the word’ and his grandmother as a ‘gentle Pietist’. His father, Fritz, describes his own ‘conversion’ as ‘new birth’ and an entrance into lasting ‘personal contact with Jesus’. Barth praised both his father and Wilhelm Herrmann as expressing ‘Pietism in the best sense of the word’. Hence, says Busch, Barth got to know Pietism ‘in its best light’, ‘from the inside with the eyes of a friend’, so that his liberal theology embraced a positive Pietistic ‘type’.

This first part also focuses on Barth's critiques of Pietism in the first and second editions of the Romerbrief. Busch carefully examines Barth's interpretation of Romans in both editions as they relate to Pietistic theology. In the first edition, Barth goes after Pietism's emphasis on individual experience of God – the very thing he praised as liberal. This theme shifted its emphasis in the second edition. By the late 1920s, Barth returned to positing an affinity between Pietism and the Enlightenment in terms of experience and revelation. Whereas Pietism was to be lauded for taking up the critical question of the daily life/discipleship of the individual believer, it was to be strongly challenged on its ‘“independent interest in man”, by which it paves the way for “Schleiermacher's reversal of theology into anthropology” in the form of centering theology around the “statements of pious man's experience”’ (p. 265). Here revelation is again a ‘predicate of man’.

In the second edition of the Romerbrief, Barth's focus shifts towards what it means actually to ‘possess God’ in one's ‘inner life’. Of particular concern is the understanding of the efficacy of grace in conversion and its practical effects on the life of the believer as an experience of the Holy Spirit. Barth appreciated Pietism's conviction that works could never create the possibility for God's grace. Nevertheless, he argued that in Pietism, sola gratia failed to keep the cross central and moved beyond it into a life in the spirit that ceased to acknowledge the continuing reality of their fallenness. As he put it, they moved from Romans 7 into Romans 8 like walking from one house to another – and with the new house was the assurance of grace as a security or ‘possession’ rather than the free gift of God to sinners who never cease to be so.

Moreover, he considered Pietism's renunciation of meritorious works to be compromised by the belief that one can confidently and directly lay hold of the divine through the ‘negative works’ of repentance, humility and self-denial. Barth labelled this the ‘Pharisaism of the tax collector’. In an extreme statement made in 1927, he spoke of such ‘attainment’ of grace as a ‘Semi-Pelagianism which entered Protestant theology in the eighteenth century through the doubly opened gate of Rationalism and Pietism, achieving a triumph in Schleiermacher, the like of which had hardly been experienced in the Middle Ages’.

The second part of the book deals with the Pietistic response to Barth's second Romerbrief (they largely ignored the first edition). Among the things they considered lacking, besides an adequate understanding of scripture (why else would Barth challenge them?), was a serious understanding of the lived experience of God's presence. While it is not human experience that counts, there is nevertheless a divine experience effected in human beings where one inwardly but really participates and shares in divine reality that is immediately present.

In this case, as with most others, however, they failed to hear the full extent of Barth's argument and responded to his statements out of context. This was due mainly to their difficulty in understanding both the form and the content of Barth's dialectical theology. They regularly missed the affirming ‘yes’ in their reaction to the resounding ‘no’. The temptation was to ‘correct’ his thought by supplementing its perceived weaknesses with their own theology in a ‘yes, but’ approach or to reframe his argument in liberal terms and then dismiss him out of hand. In the process, they often overlooked the crucial point of his critique which applied to them as well.

The last part of the book asks whether Barth and the Pietists learned anything from each other in this ‘dialogue’. Busch argues that both parties start from positions that make it difficult to enter into serious ‘inner Christian dialogue’. Barth attempts to ‘correct’ the theology of the whole church from an unaccountable, unlocatable, sovereign position, and the Pietists accuse Barth of lacking faithfulness to scripture from an unassailable high ground as ‘biblical authorities’.

This leads Busch to reflect on a second critical issue, raised even more eloquently in a later essay summarising Barth's life-long engagement with Pietism, which serves as the Epilogue. That is, when we start from a different set of assumptions and organise a whole theological system accordingly, are we in fact saying the same thing differently, as Barth liked to assert, or are we actually saying something different? If each party says ‘yes, but’ and supplements the original with something foreign, doesn't that change the ‘yes’? Busch cries ‘foul’ at attempts to keep a favourable ‘half’ of another's theology and then ‘supplement’ it with one's own (a cry unevenly raised against the Pietists more than Barth). Christian dialogue today generally takes this form of ‘yes, but’, however. Theological positions are increasingly ‘supplemented’ with others while failing to acknowledge that particular meaning is derived from that theology's underlying assumptions and system as a whole. Busch does not tell us how dialogue would occur, what the result would be if whole theological systems were critiqued by other whole systems, or if it is even possible in this pluralist era.

Although the English translation is rather wooden (even confusing in its abundant use of double negatives), the volume is marked by Busch's critical rigour and his empathy. It is an excellent addition to the Barth literature in English for the period it covers and the issues it raises.