Barth in America: On the Strange Career of Karl Barth in the PC(USA)

Karl Barth is often remembered as the theologian who stood against the tide of 20th-century liberal Protestantism, insisting on the sovereign grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ over against any domesticated deity of human culture or conscience. His magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics, continues to loom large over theological discourse. But beyond the abstract citations and classroom discussions, one might ask: what has Barth actually meant for the church? More specifically, what has Barthian theology meant for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), that sprawling, often contradictory body of Reformed witness shaped by American pluralism, denominational mergers, and a century of social and theological upheaval?

This is the question at the heart of a research project I’m undertaking: tracing the reception, appropriation, and contestation of Barth’s theology within the PC(USA) and its predecessor denominations across the 20th and early 21st centuries. The goal is not simply to assess “influence” in the abstract, but to follow the concrete paths through which Barth’s ideas were taught, debated, canonized, resisted, and—perhaps most revealingly—selectively forgotten.

American Presbyterians began reading Barth seriously in the 1930s, especially after the publication of The Epistle to the Romans and the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics. What drew many to Barth was not only his intellectual force, but his clarity of conviction: here was a theologian who rejected both the sentimentality of liberal Protestantism and the rigid literalism of American fundamentalism. In Barth’s Christocentrism, many Presbyterians found a third way, one that reclaimed Scripture as divine address without falling into naïve Biblicism.

Barth’s theology gained traction in seminaries like Princeton, McCormick, and Union (NY), where postwar faculty introduced generations of ministers to his doctrine of the Word of God and his rejection of natural theology. But Barth was not merely a classroom figure. His theology became a reference point in key moments of denominational debate and doctrinal redefinition.

Consider the Confession of 1967. Crafted in the midst of civil rights ferment and Vietnam-era unrest, this confession drew deeply from Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. Its authors aimed to re-center Presbyterian identity around God’s reconciling work in Christ—articulated in deliberately Barthian terms—and to press that theological claim into the church’s social witness. Predictably, the confession was controversial, criticized by some for departing from the Westminster tradition. But for others, it offered a timely renewal of Reformed theology in service to justice.

This is one of several case studies the project will examine. Another is the Re-Imagining Conference of 1993, a watershed moment for feminist theology in the mainline church. While not directly about Barth, the conference’s critics often cited his Christocentric theology as a corrective to what they saw as the conference’s doctrinal drift. Here, Barth became not a shared resource but a battlefield—a symbol of theological boundaries being either enforced or dismantled.

More recently, debates over LGBTQ+ inclusion have featured Barth in similarly ambivalent ways. Some opponents of queer ordination invoked his views on creation and humanity as grounds for exclusion. Yet others, especially younger theologians, have returned to Barth’s account of election, covenant, and personhood as potential resources for a more expansive vision of ecclesial belonging. In short, Barth continues to be read—but not always in the same direction.

The PC(USA)’s reception of Barth is marked by both intimacy and estrangement. At times, his theology functioned as a unifying grammar, a shared language for doctrinal renewal. At other times, it was used to police boundaries or elevate certain voices over others. Often, Barth’s theology was domesticated—refracted through the peculiar needs of an American denomination shaped by institutional decline, social change, and theological pluralism.

By tracing these moments—the Auburn Affirmation’s prelude to neo-orthodoxy; seminary curricula and ordination exams; the Confession of 1967; the fallout from the Re-Imagining Conference; the long road to LGBTQ+ inclusion—this project aims to uncover the lived history of Barth in the PC(USA). It’s a story not just about theology, but about translation, contestation, and ecclesial identity.

I hope this research will serve both scholars and the church. For scholars, it offers a map of how theology travels—how doctrines are reinterpreted and redeployed in new contexts. For the church, it may illuminate why certain theological debates feel so intractable—and whether we are truly arguing with Barth, or with the ghosts of our own denominational history.