Will Return January 2 or 3

***

Karl Barth's Last Advent on Earth

***Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth's biographer and live-in secretary recorded his last memory of the great theologian, just two nights before his death. It was Advent, 1968:

In his last year he was not so busy and I think very ill. There were some times in the spring and summer when it seemed he would die. But he survived. In the Netherlands that summer, the radio already announced that Karl Barth had died because he was so ill. But I remember the last weeks. It was the high point of the time I lived with him. After his death, my wife said to me, "He was a little bit like an angel in his last weeks." I could also say he was like a child. He really returned a bit to his youth and very often he sang simple songs he learned in Sunday School.

The last evening, two days before he died, I was with my wife in his house. And I think in the last times he feared the night. Therefore he didn't want us to leave his house. At one o'clock we said we'd like to go home because we had a one-hour walk. So Barth said to go when we wanted to but that he would go to his bed and that we should come and sing songs. It was 1:16 A.M. and his windows were open facing onto the street. I said, "We'll have to close the windows because other people will be awakened by our song." Barth said, "Oh, it doesn't matter, it will be a good song." And first he began with his children's songs, then he said to take a church hymnbook and we would sing an Advent song that spoke of the great comfort that Christ is coming with joy. And that was the last time I saw Karl Barth.