Safenwil is a municipality in the district of Zofingen in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.
Safenwil is a municipality in the district of Zofingen in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.
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The Epistle to the Romans (German: Der Römerbrief) is a commentary by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth on the New Testament Epistle to the Romans.
In the summer of 1916 Barth decided to write a commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans as a way of rethinking his theological inheritance. Barth was a pastor in Safenwil at the time. Protestant Liberal theology had played a significant role in the rise of German nationalism prior to World War I. The first edition of the commentary was published in December 1918 (but with a publication date of 1919). It was the first edition of the work, which earned Barth his invitation to teach at the University of Göttingen and which Karl Adam said fell "like a bombshell on the theologians' playground." In October 1920 Barth decided that he needed to revise the first edition and worked for the next eleven months on rewriting the commentary, finishing around September 1921. The second edition was published in 1922 and translated into English in 1933.
Karl Barth (/bɑːrt, bɑːrθ/; Swiss Standard German: [bart]; 10 May 1886 – 10 December 1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship (except for a single phrase) of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics (published between 1932 and 1967). Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.
Like many Protestant theologians of his generation, Barth was educated in a liberal theology influenced by Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Schleiermacher and others. His pastoral career began in the rural Swiss town of Safenwil, where he was known as the "Red Pastor from Safenwil". There he became increasingly disillusioned with the liberal Christianity in which he had been trained. This led him to write the first edition of his The Epistle to the Romans (a.k.a. Romans I), published in 1919, in which he resolved to read the New Testament differently.