This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whose 1919 commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, revised sharply in 1922, broke with the liberal Protestant confidence that human culture and religious experience stood in continuity with divine revelation. In its place Barth insisted on God's own self disclosure in Jesus Christ as the sole ground of theology, rather than on human religious experience as a starting point.
That break became the central reference point of twentieth century Neo-Orthodoxy, a movement that took its bearings from Barth's insistence on revelation over cultural continuity. He taught at Bonn and then, after refusing an oath of unconditional loyalty to Hitler, at Basel, a refusal that placed his theological position and his political position in direct alignment rather than in separate spheres.
His multi-volume Church Dogmatics, left unfinished at his death in 1968, remains the most extensive work of systematic theology written in the twentieth century, a scale of output that grew directly out of the theological program the 1919 and 1922 Romans commentaries had first set in motion.
Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1886, and it was to Basel that he returned after his years teaching at Bonn ended, so the city of his birth and the city where he wrote most of the Church Dogmatics were, in the end, the same place, a return that closed the geographic distance his career had opened between a Swiss theologian's origins and a German academic career interrupted by political conflict.