Only What is Said Kindly is True

Here are some evocative observations from Karl Barth in a letter to a man in Switzerland shortly before Barth’s death:

Basel, 26 November 1968

You very kindly sent me your writing along with an accompanying letter. I thank you for this but also have to admit quite openly that I took no pleasure in reading it.

As opposed to what you learned from the other side, I have to say that precisely “in essentials” I am not at one with you and that I do not expect this publication of yours to have any salutary effect.

Why not? Because I do not detect in your work the slightest trace of what is called in holy scripture the peace of God that passes all understanding.

You say many correct things. But what is correct is not always true. Only what is said kindly is true. You do not speak kindly in a single line.

You utter a powerful No on all sides. It is indeed necessary to say No too. But the right No can only be one which derives from and is upheld by an even more powerful Yes. I hear you say only No.

You accuse. That, too, has to be done. But, again, if this is Christian accusation, it has to be enclosed in the promise, in the glad tidings of God’s grace. In you it is naked accusation.

You demand that others repent. Sometimes one must dare to do this. But only he may do so who himself repents and lives in repentance. You preach down from your high horse, righteous among the unrighteous, pure among the impure.

Dear Mr. N. N., I am in my eighty-third year, I am ahead of you by many years along with their experience of life, and I can only say: It cannot be done as you are trying to do it in your book. A Christian should not speak as you do either to his fellow-Christians or to his fellow-men nor should the church speak to the world.

. . . I concede you mean well. But in my serious opinion you must mean well in a better way.

(Karl Barth Letters, 1963-1968, p. 328-329)

This has me wondering (and I do not have the philosophical or theological background to do more than wonder). I wonder: If God is love (1 John 4:8)  and love is kind (1 Corinthians 13:4), might we say with Barth that mere facts, however correct, do not fully participate in the Truth unless they are expressed with kindness and toward loving ends? And unless we are able to do so, can we claim to know what we are talking about? How might the answers to these questions inform our speech to and about one another and, for that matter, the rest of creation?

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

Karl Barth & Dorothy Sayers

Last month I attended a  fascinating lecture by David McNutt at the Marion E. Wade Center on “"A Surprising Correspondence: Dorothy L. Sayers and Karl Barth on Artistic Creativity." You can listen to the lecture here.

Sometime in the late 1930’s, one of Karl Barth’s English theology students gave him a collection of essays by Dorothy Sayers. It turns out Barth was already familiar with Sayers having learned English partly through reading her detective novels. But, he liked the essays enough to write her an appreciative letter which led to a brief exchange of letters between the two in 1939 just as WW II was breaking out.

Given Barth’s strict Reformed theology and Sayers’ Anglo-Catholicism, it seems an unlikely correspondence. As one might imagine, while Barth was mostly appreciative of Sayers’ articulation of the Christian vision, he was not wholly uncritical. For example, he suggests she has a (very Anglican) tendency toward semi-Pelagianism. Still, he appreciated her work enough to translate into German and publish in 1959 – two years after her death – two of her essays on Christianity. In the introduction to those essays, he wrote:

She vigorously made the message of the gospel her own in breathless astonishment about its central content and in a way that was open to the world but undaunted and quick-witted without any hint of apology – but above all: joyfully and in a way bringing joy, she produced stimulating work, and regardless of what one might think of its individual statements, we may be thankful.

One can only pray that God will raise up Christians in our day, lay and ordained, about whom something similar can be said.

In one of her letters to Barth in 1939, Sayers wrote of her own work:

All I try to do is tell people that the creeds are not arbitrary formulae; that they were intended to mean something, and do still mean something.”

Again, one might pray for reclamation of such confidence among preachers and teachers of the Church.