50 years ago: The deaths of Karl Barth and Thomas Merton

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. James 1:8

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. I John 2:18-19

These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever. Jude 12-13

On December 10, 1968, Swiss theologian Karl Barth died at the age of 82. Professor Barth was a Reformed Protestant pastor who served as a pastor in Switzerland and then in Germany. He opposed the Nazis, and was largely responsible for the Barmen Declaration (1934), which proclaimed that the church's allegiance to Jesus Christ took precedence over loyalty to any human ruler. Prof. Barth was forced to resign his position at the University of Bonn in 1935 and return to Switzerland after refusing to take an oath of loyalty to German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler.

Professor Barth was a man of contradictions, and serves as an example of how a mixture of truth and error still results in error. Although he opposed Nazism, he promoted socialism. He rejected much of the religious liberalism that he was exposed to in his early years, and claimed that God reveals himself to us through Jesus Christ, but denied biblical inerrancy. Prof. Barth rejected the assertion that he was the father of "neo-orthodoxy"--one of whose doctrines is that the Bible isn't the word of God objectively, but becomes the word of God as it interacts with the reader--but he has been hugely influential upon numerous prominent religious liberals. Prof. Barth's best-known books were The Epistle to the Romans (1919/1922) and his multi-volume Church Dogmatics (1932-1967).

Thomas Merton, one of the world's best-known Roman Catholic monks and authors, also died on December 10, 1968, at the age of 53. He was born in France of an American mother and New Zealander father, and lived in France, the United States, and England in his early years. Mr. Merton was generally indifferent to religion, but after reading such books as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Étienne Gilson (which contained an explanation of God that appealed to him) and Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley (which introduced him to mysticism), and meeting visiting Indian Hindu monk Mahanambrata Brahmachari (who recommended traditional Roman Catholic books such as Augustine's Confessions and Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ to him rather than Hindu writings) in New York, he joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1938. He eventually became a Trappist monk, taking temporary vows in 1944 and solemn vows in 1947.

Mr. Merton was a mystic who became increasingly interested in Eastern religions and promoting interfaith understanding. His books included The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) and Seeds of Contemplation (1949). Mr. Merton was also known for advocating a non-violent approach during the Vietnam War and the social and racial upheavals during the 1960s. Indeed, Mr. Merton even took a non-violent approach to World War II. He'd been attracted to the idea of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood, but didn't move on it until he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky at the age of 26 on December 10, 1941, three days after the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, conveniently enabling him to avoid military service. As Sherlock Holmes would say, "Most singular! Most remarkable!" Mr. Merton's brother John Paul, who had also converted to Catholicism, didn't take a non-violent approach during World War II, and was killed while flying overseas in 1943 when his plane was shot down.

Ostensibly a Roman Catholic, Mr. Merton was moving toward New Age belief and universalism at the time of his death, which is where mysticism inevitably leads. He was attending an interfaith conference in suburban Bangkok when he died suddenly, reportedly by accidental electrocution from a fan while stepping out of the bathtub. Fifty years later, Thomas Merton remains popular in some circles, especially with practitioners of contemplative spirituality and the pseudo-Christian movement known as the "Emerging Church." An example of this can be found here.

In addition to dying on the same day, Messrs. Barth and Merton had other things in common. Both men, while claiming to be Christians, promoted truth as being subjective rather than objective. Both men have been hugely influential long after their deaths, and that has been in the direction of influencing subsequent false teachers in the perpetuation of false teaching.

For good information on contemplative spirituality, I especially recommend Lighthouse Trails Research Project and Herescope.