In the 1920's, a little theological revolution took place in Germany. With the publication of the second, completely revised edition of his commentary on Romans, Swiss pastor Karl Barth became the focal point of a small group of Christian thinkers who were seriously wrestling with their times. Understanding the impact of Romerbrief necessitates understanding that, even in the first edition, Barth was out in front of many European intellectuals in grasping how the First World War was not just a political catastrophe for Europe; it was also a cultural catastrophe. The self-congratulatory, triumphal attitude of European culture - its philosophy, its theology, its political approach to the rest of the world - had bled out in the trenches of Flanders and France, and Barth recognized that the ground which had seemed so firm, now soaked with the blood of millions, could no longer hold the brave new European poised to stride the earth.
Little noted beyond a small coterie of fellow churchmen and theologians, Barth continued to write and preach and eventually, with his close personal friend Eduard Thurneysen and the Lutheran Friedrich Gogarten, started a journal entitled Zwischen den Zeiten, Between the Times. It reflected their own view that the Christian life was not the culmination of the Kingdom; nor was it existence in some primitive cultus. Rather, it is a life lived in the constant tension between two temptations - the desire to chuck it all, as it were and the desire to proclaim the arrival of the Divine Rule and rest on one's laurels. History would not allow the journal to survive too long; with the rise of German fascism, and with many including Gogarten siding with the demons, Barth took his leave of both the journal and eventually Germany. He published one final, famous, essay in Zwischen, entitled "Nein!" - essentially a huge finger to all the Hitler apologists and those like his fellow Swiss Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner (with whom he refused to reconcile even when Brunner lay dying because Brunner refused to admit that Barth was correct in his criticisms of Brunner's thought) - and retreated to Basel on the triple frontier of France, Germany, and Switzerland.*
Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It marks the end of the first stretch of what is usually considered "ordinary time" in the Church calendar, from the Feast of Epiphany through Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. It marks the real beginning of Jesus' ministry. Not his baptism by John in the Jordan River, not his reading and preaching in the Nazareth synagogue, not even his calling of the twelve marked it out as clearly as this event. Harking back to other mountain tops, Jesus went up to a mountain where he was revealed in his fullness, standing around chatting with Moses and Elijah, the two great prophets of the Hebrews, who themselves knew something of events on mountains. The reaction of the disciples, in particular Peter, demonstrate how far they had yet to go in understanding, even in this fullness of revelation, what Jesus was to be about.
We do not, cannot, live on that mountain, in the fullness of the presence. Nor can we live at the foot of the cross, an event which Jesus predicted even as he descended from the mountain. We are destined to live in the far more ambivalent reality around us; the memory of that moment on the mountain, perhaps, staying with us as a reminder of who this Jesus really is, even as we still wrestle with what that "really" means in the context of the messy, sometimes horrifying, sometimes transcendent, always frustrating day-to-day in which we find ourselves immersed.
While we celebrate that moment on the mountain today, on Wednesday as we recall that we all are nothing more than dust and ashes, destined to die, we need to remember that our real Christian life, the one to which all baptized Christians are called, is a life between those two moments of the Transfiguration and the Cross. Like those so-called "dialectical theologians" of last century, we need to remember that ours is not a calling either to retreat or to final victory. Rather, we travel on, granting to the world its status as neither hell nor heaven, and serve as Jesus called us to serve, between those two poles.
*A detailed history of German theological life in between the World Wars and after is told in Christian Faith in Dark Times, which includes brief sketches of Barth, Gogarten Paul Althaus, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Emmanuel Hirsch.
