Karl Barth had trained under the leading liberal Protestant theologians of his day and, by his own later account, lost confidence in their whole approach almost overnight when, in August 1914, nearly all his former teachers signed a public declaration supporting the Kaiser's war policy. For Barth this was not a political disagreement but a theological verdict: a theology that had taught him to locate God's revelation in the depths of human religious experience and cultural achievement had produced, at the moment of real testing, an unhesitating blessing on nationalist war-making. If that was where nineteenth-century liberal theology's confidence in human experience led, the confidence itself, Barth concluded, had to be wrong at the root.
His 1919 commentary on Romans and the Church Dogmatics that followed it built the alternative from that diagnosis: God is not to be found by looking more deeply into human culture, conscience or religious feeling, however sincere, but only where God has chosen to be found, in Jesus Christ as attested by scripture, address to humanity from wholly outside humanity's own resources. Neo-orthodoxy's name records that stance as a return, not an innovation, a claim to recover the Reformation's own sense that revelation comes as address rather than discovery; its later name, dialectical theology, records the same claim from the other side, the irreducible gap, or dialectic, between the God who speaks and the humanity that can only listen.