Karl Barth died in the early hours of 10 December 1968, God's greatest gift to theological science in the whole of the modern era. Albert Einstein once wrote of Isaac Newton: ‘To think of him is to think of his work. For such a man can be understood only by thinking of him as a scene on which the struggle for eternal truth took place.’ That is surely the way in which we must remember Karl Barth, for in him there took place a profound struggle for the eternal Word of God in which the whole framework of the Church's understanding of God from ancient to modern times was subjected to critical and constructive inquiry in the search for a unified and comprehensive basis in the Grace of God for all theology. He has no need of praise from us, for the work he was given to accomplish will endure to bless the world for many centuries to come. If Karl Barth has left behind no school of ‘Barthians’, it is because he belongs to the whole universe of theology in a way that no mere leader of a new movement of thought ever could.

Some years ago Barth fell seriously ill, and no one, least of all he himself, dared hope that he would ever again be capable of adding another volume to the twelve volumes of his opus magnum, the Church Dogmatics, which had appeared from 1932 till 1962. After his remarkable recovery in autumn 1965, however, he has paid a visit to Rome in September 1966, the fruit of which was his highly instructive report Ad Limina Apostolorum (reviewed in SJT, vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 110f), and now he has presented us with another volume of his Church Dogmatics, though, for the reasons given in the Preface to K.D. IV.4, the latter had to be confined to a fraction of what Barth had originally hoped to achieve in that volume. To understand what follows, we must call to mind that Barth, treating ethics as an integral part of dogmatics, had dealt in his doctrine of God (C.D. II.2) with the command of God as an essential element in the very Being of God (general ethics). In his doctrine of creation (C.D. III.4) he had discussed the command (special ethics) of God the Creator. In his teaching on reconciliation he had so far expounded (C.D. IV. 1–3) the three aspects of Jesus Christ's work of reconciliation, namely His priestly work as the Lord (Son of God) who became a servant to accomplish the work of reconciliation, His kingly work as the servant (Son of Man) who became Lord and by His exaltation exalted man to fellowship with God, and His prophetic work as the Godman who as the Mediator of man's reconciliation with God is the Guarantor and Witness of that reconciliation.

In different ages man has asked different questions about God and himself.

In the Apology Socrates moves immediately to focus the issue: ‘Let the witness speak the truth and the judge decide with equity.’ Truthfulness is an implied claim in every kind of judgment we make, even as justice raises a norm for living at its best. These inseparables shadow our every decision within the knowing process. A scrupulous honesty in thinking is as necessary for the natural scientist as for the ethicist. That common necessity is too often slighted, but the cost is never reduced. In one way or another this kind of conscience identifies us all. Every caricature of it proportionately restricts the prime conditions for human advance. One of the commonest ways of distorting the situation is to confuse morals with morality, transient ideas about the right and the good with valid ethical principles. Both suneidēsis and conscio put descriptive conditions within a moral value-context as the pivotal point of experience. Here truthfulness sets conditions for weaving judgments together and a moral climate guarantees integrity in the product. If this idea has validity, the perennial problem concerns keeping the way open for a genuine forum on conscience in its efforts to epitomise the thinking process at its highest reach. At this point our intellectual climate contributes special difficulties.

I. Is there anything distinctive about Christian ethics? Many recent writers have claimed that there is, but have at the same time denied that this distinctiveness depends upon the truth of any factual assertions about the being of God. Some have gone even further, and claimed that the Christian faith is nothing but commitment to a distinctive ethic—of concern for others, or ‘agapism’—and does not involve any belief about the existence of supernatural beings.

Aremark of E. G. Selwyn, in the course of his essay ‘Eschatology in 1 Peter’ contributed to the C. H. Dodd Festschrift, deserves more attention than it has yet received. He mentions his misgivings over the term kerygma which has been so prominent in the last decades and suggests that the word martyria would be more appropriate to describe the primitive and indispensable core of the Christian message. ‘At any rate’, he writes, if we examine the comparative occurrences in the New Testament of the two sets of terms, we find that the occurrences of the verbs alone which speak of ‘witness’ considerably outnumber the occurrences of κηρύσσειν while the occurrences of the noun μαρτυρία outnumber those of the noun κήρυγμα by more than six to one. (p. 395)