Religion: Yes & No in Basel

The bright, modern auditorium was packed to the last seat with notables and students—Swiss and Germans, Americans and Japanese—and the air was electric with expectancy. About to make his farewell lecture last week was Basel University's professor Karl Earth, at 74 the Grand Panjandrum of Protestant theologians, whose multivolume work-in-progress, Kirchliche Dogmatik, may well ride out the centuries as a theological landmark, whose post-World War I sermons on Paul's letters to the Romans lit a cannon cracker under Europe's bourgeoisie, whose resounding no to Hitler stiffened intellectual resistance to Naziism, and whose...