DID KARL BARTH REJECT A LITERAL CREATION?

Swiss theologian Karl Barth was famously described by Pope Pious XII as the greatest Christian thinker since Thomas Aquinas.  The fact that it was a Catholic pope who said this should not distract believers from the fact that Barth’s theology was as deeply Protestant as any one might find.

  His life work was from first to last a theology of the Word, grounded in a sense of the absolute authority of the God disclosed in Scripture and accepted by faith.  Sola scriptura.  Sola fides.  One could not point to a stronger champion of these principles among twentieth century Christian theologians.

Yet Karl Barth was not a biblical literalist.  In a letter to his niece Christine he wrote: “one’s attitude to the creation story and the theory of evolution can take the form of an either/or only if one shuts oneself off completely from faith in God’s revelation or from the mind (or opportunity) for scientific understanding.”

 What led Barth to describe a literalistic approach to the creation narrative not simply as incorrect but as shutting oneself off “completely” from faith in God’s Word?