The First & the Last

Switzerland's Karl Barth, the greatest living Protestant theologian, could hardly be accused of being soft on Rome. "I cannot hear the voice of the Good Shepherd as coming from this Chair of Peter," he once said. But in the current issue of the quarterly Ecumenical Review, published by the World Council of Churches, Theologian Barth declares that Protestantism is in danger of being overtaken by the pervasive changes that are in process in Roman Catholicism, as evidenced by the Vatican Council (which is scheduled to reconvene Sept. 29).

Barth argues that Protestants have paid too much attention to the "conversational contacts" with Rome that the council has opened up, and too little to the spirit of inner renewal that is visible in much of present-day Catholic theology and Biblical scholarship, as well as in the new directions in worship proposed by liturgical reformers. Far from being a "static power group," Rome, like Protestantism, lives "by the dynamics of the evangelical Word and Spirit," and Catholicism today may well have in it more "spiritual motion" than the Protestant churches.

"How would things look,'' Earth asks, "if Rome were one day simply to overtake us and place us in the shadows, so far as renewing of the Church through the Word and Spirit of the Gospel is concerned? What if we should discover that the last are first and the first last, that the voice of the Good Shepherd should find a clearer echo over there than among us?" The renewal of Roman Catholicism, Earth concludes, summons Protestantism to seek its own renewal, "to sweep away the dust before the door of our own church with a careful but nevertheless mighty broom."

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