And finally, the working class and the proletariat of all parts of the world are distinguished from the Western bourgeoisie by the fact that they simply cannot turn their backs on the great traditions of humanity. Where the bourgeois class in the profusion of even its intellectual wealth can without serious reservations declare that God is dead, where it can “demythologize” and rationalize the Biblical traditions to make them suitable for bourgeois self-consciousness, where it simply emasculates and abandons dogma and dogmatics, at such points there lives in Barth as in the poor of this earth, who indeed cry out not only for bread, but also for spirit, a knowledge of the indispensability of every particular historical moment of truth. Precisely in the most alienating features of dogma, Karl Barth himself saw the most far-reaching promises for us persons. In that way as a theologian he was completely unbourgeois. He did not clear difficulties away; he broke them open. Precisely that is the hermeneutic of the poor. They do not disrupt, neither do they despise. They knock to see whether it will be opened to them and whether there is something there “for the present day.” And if not, they simply wait.