Theology as Language of Crisis: Karl Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans

Abstract

It might not be inappropriate, dealing with the theme of crisis, to look back on the traditional offspring of the historical and political way of using the term with which we have become acquainted. The term is derived from the Greek krino or krinomai, which means to decide or to undergo a decision. It takes its origin as a noun from the sphere of either medicine or jurisdiction. In the use of medicine, crisis is under-stood as the decisive moment in which the development of a disease turns to life or to death. Crisis tends to be an expression of a fundamental alternative. In jurisdiction, on the other hand, there is a case to be decided, so that a struggle will come legally to an end. To transfer the term from these fields of application to society makes two presuppositions, not always coherent by the way. The one is that a society can be understood as an organism, which can be ill and be threatened by collapse; the other is that society itself must be understood as a permanent struggle to be decided. At the same time, the social and political use of the term shows that crisis becomes in a way universal. In the cases of a social, economic or political crisis there will not be a physician to heal a society, nor can a lawyer always decide in which direction a historical movement shall turn.