1 The Hope of Friendship: Learning from the Ecumenical Conversations between Barth and Balthasar Stephen M. Garrett, PhD Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius, Lithuania Published in Reforming Theology – Migrating Church – Transforming Society: A Companion for Ecumeni- cal Education, ed. Uta Andrée, Benjamin Simon, and Lars Röser-Israel (2017) Introduction Karl Barth was renowned, especially in Catholic circles, for his acerbic remarks regarding Catholic dogma. One of his more well-known comments stemmed from his 1920s and 1930s interaction with Erich Przywara, a Jesuit priest who sought to build bridges between German post-war culture and reli- gion via the analogia entis. Barth saw liberal Prot- estantism’s efforts to ground theology in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s existentialism as akin to Roman Catholicism’s ‘exploitation of the analogia entis’ to pursue ‘natural knowledge of God’. Barth flatly re- jected both, declaring ‘…the analogia entis as the invention of the Antichrist, and…because of it it is impossible ever to become a Roman Catholic, all other reasons for not doing so being to my mind short-sighted and trivial’. Barth would go on to pur- sue theology as dogmatics based on the Word of God spoken in Jesus Christ and bounded by ‘the sphere of the Church, where alone it is possible and meaningful’. 1 Barth’s early antagonism, though, made it difficult to earn a hearing among Catholics in the 1940s and 1950s as the likes of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri Bouillard tried to appropriate aspects of Barth’s thought, particularly his christocentricism, to redress some of the deficiencies they perceived in Catholic theology related to neoscholasticism. Balthasar, like Bouillard, had engrossed himself in Barth’s work, beginning with his doctoral studies in 1 Karl Barth, CD 1.1, p. xiii. The secondary literature details a complicated and lengthy debate surrounding Barth’s opposition to the analogia entis. For a recent the late 1920s that led to the publication of his dis- sertation, History of the Eschatological Problem in Modern German Literature, in 1930. He would later befriend Barth in 1940 after having arrived in Basel for his first Jesuit assignment as student chap- lain at the University of Basel. Although Barth was nearly twenty years his senior, these early encoun- ters matured into a mutual friendship that spanned almost three-decades. Their genuine friendship of- fered ecumenical hope, despite the caustic environ- ment surrounding Protestants and Catholics at the time, especially in Switzerland. The Barth-Balthasar friendship, consequently, serves as an important case study for ecumenical conversations today as evidenced by their March 1954 correspondence concerning some of Barth’s misreported remarks on Catholic-Protestant distinc- tives. The effectualness of this particular exchange, in light of their friendship, came not because Barth and Balthasar strove for some ‘essence’ of Christi- anity but rather because they pursued Christ as telos in the context of a true friendship where honest dis- agreements were discussed. They were never con- tent to let their disagreements stand and were often baffled by them. As such, their ecumenical ex- changes bore fruit in asking the right kinds of ques- tions rather than striving for the right kinds of an- swers. Hence, Barth and Balthasar bore witness to Christ through their distinctive traditions being challenged by the questions posed and the witness appraisal, see Thomas Joseph White, ed. The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or Wisdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).