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Against liberalism's social optimism (progress by reform) and the social optimism of the revolutionary left (progress by force), Dostoevsky asserted the eternal necessity of the soul to be itself. But he discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom to the point where he was also free from God, it led him into tragedy, evil, and often the exact opposite of what he had intended. In human terms there was no solution for the problem of evil. This insight Dostoevsky dramatized on a scale of titanic tragedy in The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, and of titanic comedy in The Possessed.
Kierkegaard too was obsessed with "the ultimate potentialities of the human soul." And like the great Russian, the great Dane was haunted by the tragic sense of life whose full implication only the presentiments of religious faith could grasp.
Karl Barth, too, heard the Voice from the whirlwind. But this time the Voice spoke in the tones of cannon. During World War I, Barth was a Christian Socialist and pastor of a small Swiss Reformed Church near the Alsatian frontier. As he preached, on quiet Sunday mornings, about the fulfillment of God's intentions as evidenced in human progress, the thump and slam of German and Allied artillery punctuated his periods. It caused him, said Barth, acute embarrassment.
It also caused him 1) to doubt that the will of God was being fulfilled by man's good works, or could be; 2) to re-examine the Bible, where, to his surprise (since he, too, had been an optimist), he discovered that most of the principal characters shared his new pessimism about human nature. God, Barth decided, was above and beyond all human effort. Between man's purposes in history and God's purposes in eternity was what Kierkegaard had called an "infinite qualitative difference." Man, said Barth, cannot define God by talking about man, in however loud a voice. God is ganz anders—wholly different.
Theology of Crisis. Earth's "neo-orthodoxy" was called the "theology of crisis." By crisis, Barth did not mean the present crisis of Western civilization. He meant, like Dostoevsky, that permanent crisis in which man lives.
The relationship between God and man, said Earth's neo-orthodoxy, is a one-day affair; it proceeds always from God to man, never from man to God—the desperate situation that Franz Kafka dramatized in The Castle (TIME, April 28). Between the ages of God's revelation in Christ and His final judgment, man must live by faith and wait upon God's will for that grace which He alone can bestow.
Barth and his theology have both undergone changes. But his importance as a prophet of the new orthodoxy and the crisis of the soul are best reported in his own disclaimer: he merely climbed the steeple to get his bearings. No one was more surprised than he when, in the darkness, his hand touched the bell rope and the great bell of prophecy began to toll.
Reinhold Niebuhr heard the bell. Though the term "neo-orthodox," applied to himself, makes him wince, Niebuhr matured in the climate of crisis. Though he charges Barth with a paralyzing pessimism and a Bible worship that amounts to obsession, Niebuhr shares Earth's view of the perpetual crisis of the soul and Kierkegaard's "infinite qualitative difference" of God.