Karl Barth, on his development of a human sexuality, rails against the malady and disobedience represented by any expression of a homosexuality; or any other deviances further downstream, as those also develop therefrom. The 21st century Barth world, ironically, is dominated by progressives and sociological liberals. Such postBarthians, in order to keep their status, mostly in the halls of the academy, must attempt to marginalize or altogether avoid Barth’s thinking on a human sexuality; particularly as he develops that in Church Dogmatics III/4 §54. In order, to provide a register of this Barthian development, since I have never seen anyone else ever do so, I am going to supply Barth’s most explicit statement on this particular matter. The passage is quite lengthy, but worth your while if you want to receive a fuller Barth exposure than you will elsewhere; i.e., in other Readers and the secondary literature.
Barth writes:
As against this, everything which points in the direction of male or female seclusion, or of religious or secular orders of communities, or of male and female segregation—if it is undertaken in principle and not consciously and temporarily as an emergency measure—is obviously disobedience. All due respect to the comradeship of a company of soldiers! But neither men nor women can seriously wish to be alone, as in clubs and ladies’ circles. Who commands or permits them to run away from each other? That such an attitude is all wrong is shown symptomatically in the fact that every artificially induced and maintained isolation of the sexes tends as such—usually very quickly and certainly morosely and blindly—to become philistinish in the case of men and precious in that of women, and in both cases more or less inhuman. It is well to pay heed even to the first steps in direction.
These first steps may well be symptoms of the malady called homosexuality. This is the physical, psychological and social sickness, the phenomenon of perversion, decadence and decay, which can emerge when man refuses to admit the validity of the divine command in the sense in which we are now considering it. In Rom. 1 Paul connected it with idolatry, with changing the truth of God into a lie, with the adoration of the creature instead of the Creator (v. 25). “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the man, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves the recompence of their error which was meet” (vv. 26–27). From the refusal to recognise God there follows the failure to appreciate man, and thus humanity without the fellow-man (C.D., III, 2, p. 229 ff.). And since humanity as fellow-humanity is to be understood in its root as the togetherness of man and woman, as the root of this inhumanity there follows the ideal of a masculinity free from woman and a femininity free from man. And because nature or the Creator of nature will not be trifled with, because the despised fellow-man is still there, because the natural orientation on him is still in force, there follows the corrupt emotional and finally physical desire in which—in a sexual union which is not and cannot be genuine—man thinks that he must seek and can find in man, and woman in woman, a substitute for the despised partner. But there is no sense in reminding man of the command of God only when he is face to face with this ultimate consequence, or pointing to the fact of human disobedience only when this malady breaks out openly in these unnatural courses. Naturally the command of God is opposed to these courses. This is almost too obvious to need stating. It is to be hoped that, in awareness of God’s command as also of His forgiving grace, the doctor, the pastor trained in psycho-therapy, and the legislator and judge—for the protection of threatened youth—will put forth their best efforts. But the decisive word of Christian ethics must consist in a warning against entering upon the whole way of life which can only end in the tragedy of concrete homosexuality. We know that in its early stages it may have an appearance of particular beauty and spirituality, and even be redolent of sanctity. Often it has not been the worst people who have discovered and to some extent practised [sic.] it as a sort of wonderful esoteric of personal life. Nor does this malady always manifest itself openly, or, when it does so, in obvious or indictable forms. Fear of ultimate consequences can give as little protection in this case, and condemnation may be as feeble a deterrent, as the thought of painful consequences in the case of fornication. What is needed is that the recognition of the divine command should cut sharply across the attractive beginnings. The real perversion takes place, the original decadence and disintegration begins, where man will not see his partner of the opposite sex and therefore the primal form of fellow-man, refusing to hear his question and to make a responsible answer, but trying to be human in himself as sovereign man or woman, rejoicing in himself in self-satisfaction and self-sufficiency. The command of God opposed to the wonderful esoteric of this beata solitude [blessed solitude]. For in this supposed discovery of the genuinely human man and woman give themselves up to the worship of a false god. It is here, therefore, that for himself and then in relation to others each must be brought to fear, recollection and understanding. This is the place for protest, warning and conversion. The command of God shows him irrefutably—in clear contradiction to his own theories—that as a man he can only be genuinely human with a woman, or as a woman with man. In proportion as he accepts this insight, homosexuality can have no place in his life, whether in its more refined or cruder forms.[1]
Many postBarthians today would simply relegate (in an attempt to periodize and thus marginalize) Barth to his own sitz im leben. In other words, they would, and do, assert that Barth was simply conditioned by his own time and culture, and thus not “come of age,” in regard to where we have currently “progressed”; that is, with reference to human sexuality and sex, in the 21st century milieu. In Barth’s mid-twentieth century context, when he was writing Church Dogmatics, in fact, Switzerland was known to be rather progressive on what today would be identified as the LGBT movement. Notice:
1950s: Adapted and hidden
Karl Meier believed that it would take years for society to call for legal recognition of LGBT people, and that LGBT people could only achieve this by living in an adjusted and normal fashion. The Circle was the first magazine to feature edifying texts in German, French and English, and artistic photos of men. Members and subscribers referred to each other using pseudonyms rather than their real names.
Nevertheless, the Der Kreis club, being one of the first LGBT civil rights movements and groups founded in Europe, influenced and even inspired the formation and development of similar movements throughout Europe by the time of the Second World War. Examples are Die Runde (The Round) camaraderie in Reutlingen, Germany, the Journal Arcadie in France, the Cultuur- en Ontspannings Centrum in the Netherlands, Kredsen af 1948 in Denmark, and the Mattachine Society in the United States of America.
1960s: The end of the Ice Age
In 1960, the Der Kreis club was wound up. This occurred after a series of murders of gay men brought the attention of the Zürich press, who published their address. Major events were no longer possible, and the climate was more liberal in some European countries, causing subscribers to fall away. The last issue of Der Kreis appeared at the end of 1967, whereupon young men from sources close to Der Kreis immediately founded the new Journal Club 68, which was renamed hey ab in 1970. The topic of homosexuality was first mentioned by Swiss Television, under the theme of “youth protection”, in programmes broadcast in January and February 1967. The Swiss Organization of Homophiles (SOH) was founded in this environment in 1970. The SOH was the first gay umbrella organization, and was regarded as rather conservative, and “adjusted”. Above all, it could not reach left-wing gays and gay students. The period of history between the founding of the Freundschafts-Banner in 1932 and the SOH is known as the first LGBT movement.[2]
The above is shared to underscore Barth’s Swiss context during the time he was writing the Church Dogmatics in earnest (at least the latter half of the CD). Switzerland itself was on the leading edge of the gay rights movement in the mid-twentieth century, as the aforementioned attests. The point, for our purposes, is to note that Barth was not naïve to the zeitgeist of his own cultural current, in regard to the socio-cultural movements of his day. Indeed, insofar as Barth was a “modern man,” current attempts to periodize and thus marginalize Barth’s views on human sexuality and sex, fail. Insofar, that he was led himself to stand against such trends, as those were effervescent in his own time and day. If anything, our current situation with the highly “progressive” trending of the LGBTQI movement vis-à-vis Barth’s own concerns with it as a ‘malady’ of his own time, suggests that Barth would see this issue as a bigger problem to be addressed rather than a lesser one. If so, the progressives can neither marginalize nor own Barth, not really; since, Barth’s stand against LGBT statuses is grounded, at a fundamental level, on the inner-ground of the way he thinks a theological-anthropology, and its attending implications as those flesh out in his thoughts on a human sexuality and sex coram Deo.
For Barth, as this article has been arguing, with substantive reference to Barth in making his own case, the Word of God must be used to demythologize the idolatries of the ages; inclusive of the LGBT mythos.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §54 [166] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 159–60.
[2] LGBTQ history in Switzerland, “Wikipedia,” accessed 09-24-2025.