In the following year there appeared the first part of his massive Church Dogmatics. During his years in Germany Barth also wrote several small commentaries, expositions of the Apostles' Creed, and the Heidelberg and Geneva catechisms, together with a series of essays directed toward the renewal of theology, such as Die Theologie und die Kirche (1928; Theology and Church) and Offenbarung, Kirche, Theologie (1934; God in Action).In 1934 he published Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner (Eng. trans., "No!" in Natural Theology [1946]), a response to Brunner's essay "Nature and Grace." In his response, Barth traced the religious syncretism and support of anti-Semitism of the "German Christians" to natural theology and the perversion of historic Christianity. This brought him into conflict with those who wanted to bring theology into line with the new ideology of National Socialism. With the accession of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, Barth became deeply involved in the church struggle. He was one of the founders of the so-called Confessing Church, which reacted vigorously and indignantly against Nazi nationalist ideology of "blood and soil" and the attempt to set up a "German Christian" church. The famous Barmen Declaration of 1934 (see Barmen, Synod of), largely based on a draft that Barth had prepared, expressed his conviction that the only way to offer effective resistance to the secularizing and paganizing of the church in Nazi Germany was to hold fast to true Christian doctrine. Although a Swiss citizen, Barth was not immune from persecution; his refusal to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to the Führer cost him his chair in Bonn in 1935. He was quickly offered the chair of theology in his native Basel, however. From that date until the end of the war, he continued to champion the cause of the Confessing Church, of the Jews, and of oppressed people generally.
After the war and the collapse of the Third Reich, Barth was much concerned about the future of Germany, declaring that, although responsible for the disasters to themselves and to the world, the Germans now needed friends to help them become a free people. He hesitated to show toward communism, though no less opposed to it, the same kind of direct hostility he had adopted toward Nazism, and he worked instead toward a peaceful solution of political problems through a correct understanding of Christianity. --Encyclopedia Britannica
Karl Barth: Years in Germany 1, 2
