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Karl Barth’s Theological Politics

David Haddorff

St. John’s University

Writing an essay on Barth’s political thought presents the particular challenge of relating his politics to his theology as a whole. The crucial point is that one must generally begin with Barth’s theology before one ventures into a specific area of his thought, like politics. Failure to do this leads to both theological and political misrepresentations. The most common misreading is that Barth’s Christocentric theology (and rejection of natural theology) leads to an ambivalent and even bewildering view of theological politics. Such is the view of Will Herberg’s extensive essay, “The Social Philosophy of Karl Barth,” which was the original introduction to the 1960 printing of this book.1 Known best for his work in sociology of religion, Herberg appreciatively traces the development of Barth’s political thought from Der Römerbrief, whose ‘transcendent word’ breaks asunder all liberal utopian thought, to his defiance against Hitler’s regime and the formation of the Confessing church and the writing of the Barmen Declaration. Herberg rightly argues that it was Barth’s Christological conception of the state (and subsequent rejection of traditional Catholic and Protestant views of the state) that provided the substance of his theological critique of the Nazification of the state and church. Yet, for Herberg, Barth’s heroic stature during the German church struggle eviscerates after World War II against Soviet communism, when a different Barth emerges. The problem is, as Herberg sees is, that Barth uses his Christocentric view to reject the anti-communism of the 1950s, and instead drift toward a middle position ‘between East and West’, condemning German remilitarization and nuclear proliferation. In short, Barth’s theological politics—because it depends on Christology—remains ambiguous and confusing; Barth’s political ethics is relevant in the 1930s but not in the 1950s. It is Herberg’s essay that prompts John Howard Yoder to say that Barth’s political thought is a “continuing story rather than … an oscillation between ‘now you have an ethic’ and ‘now you don’t,’ an oscillation for which one cannot find a respectful explanation.”2 Yoder’s core argument against Herberg is that he misunderstands the later Barth because he misunderstands his theology as a whole, and its relation to the ongoing Evangelical tradition in theology. Yoder, in the 1960s–70s, was one of the first to adequately describe the internal consistency of Barth’s theological ethics, and its how it led to a particular yet open-ended political trajectory.

Since Herberg’s essay there has been renewed interest in the political Barth. In addition to Yoder, a fresh view of the political Barth emerged in Europe, especially through the work of Frederich-Wilhelm Marquardt, who argued that Barth never really broke with socialism, but provided a new Christological foundation for socialism in the Church Dogmatics.3 Although generally rejected today, Marquardt’s thesis rightly presents Barth not as a non-political dogmatician, but as a theologian who politically engaged his own social-historical circumstances. More recently, in Against Hegemony, Timothy Gorringe continues this line of thinking, demonstrating how Barth’s dogmatics must be interpreted in response to the various hegemonies he confronted, including theological liberalism, Religious Socialism, Nazism, political nationalism, lassiez-faire capitalism, and both communism and anticommunism.4 Barth offers more than a No to hegemony, says Gorringe; he also offers the Yes of freedom and liberation grounded in the Word of God. Gorringe’s political reading of Barth as a kind of proto-liberation theologian remains one perspective, among many, that have emerged in the last decade exploring his theological ethics, including his political thought.5 Perhaps the most important book on Barth’s politics is Frank Jehle’s Against the Steam, which clearly presents a political Barth actively engaging politics throughout his life.6 The overall consensus is that he was political, and his thought remains important to this day.

The way Barth addressed political issues always begins with his theological presumptions. In agreement with Alan Torrance, Barth’s thought is better seen as a kind of “theological politics” rather than the more popular term, “political theology.”7 Unlike many approaches of political theology that tend to speak about theology within a political framework (theology interpreted politically), Barth reverses this view and speaks about politics within a theological framework and its relationship to the church (politics interpreted theologically).8 Unlike Barth’s approach, political theology usually begins with a social-scientific analysis of the state and civil society (including the church), and then correlates theological belief or practice. Theology becomes an appendage to language of political science, sociology, or political philosophy. In contrast, Barth develops a political perspective based entirely upon God’s action in and through the revelation of the Word of God. His commitment to the Word of God led him to be a dialectical thinker moving between absolute Yes and No, between absolute positive or negative views of the state, between absolute Christian claims of the legitimacy of the state and anarchic denial of legitimacy, between Marxist socialism and free market capitalism, and between right-wing nationalism and left-wing revolutionary politics. Once these extreme ideologies are ruled out, Barth remains committed to a practical “non-ideological politics, strictly orientated toward political issues themselves.”9 His practical politics led him to be generally supportive—but not an apologist—for liberal constitutional democracy and a more left-leaning ‘social market’ position of economic justice. And although he presumed that the state was to be the guardian of the common good, which meant using force to protect the state, he also saw the state called to a higher purpose of peace and justice, namely to be a witness to the kingdom of God.

This essay looks more at the issue of how the church and state (and world) relate to one another and less at the issue of war. Nevertheless, it is my contention that Barth moved between the absolutes of just war and absolute pacifism and promoted an active peacemaking role for the state.10 Barth’s peacemaking perspective (or as he called it, “practical pacifism”) is not a reversal of an earlier just war position, but remained his continuing perspective, like his commitment to democratic socialism, throughout his life. Once war begins, however, the state (and Christians within it) must choose between participating and not participating, between supporting the state’s decision and not supporting that decision.11 For example, Barth’s general commitment to the state led him to say No to violence in 1914, but Yes in 1939; by the 1950s, in a time of relative peace, he returned to a more definitive No position. This is not a reversal of positions, but movement within a dialectical position that begins with the peacemaking function of the state, but also acknowledges that there are very unusual circumstances when the state can only preserve peace through the use of force. Barth’s understanding of Christian witness allows the Christian to move freely between an affirmative Yes or No, in response to what God’s commands require in particular circumstances. To forget that Barth’s ethics is one of openness and movement is to forget his basic point, namely that ethics is responsible action in relation to God’s command of grace.

Therefore, this essay presents a continuous—yet dialectical—portrait of Barth’s theological politics, which includes the following points: 1) like all theology, his theological politics is not an independent science but one that begins with the revelation of the Word of God and the deliberative response of the Christian community (church); 2) politics begins with God’s action in Jesus Christ, in judgment and grace, which negatively delegitimizes all ideologies, but also positively commands responsible (and non-ideological) political action; 3) like theology, political thought is dialectical, namely, it remains in constant movement of distinguishing and relating without falling into the extremes of separation and identification; and 4) this dialectical movement allows him to move back and forth, taking different positions at different times, while remaining firmly committed to the priority of God’s action in history; and 5) by placing both church and state within the kingdom of God, he rejects the extreme positions of, on one side, the church standing absolutely against the ‘demonic’ state, and, on the other, the church standing absolutely for the ‘divine’ state, and instead affirms the church standing with the secular—yet redeemed—state.

Finally, we must remember that Barth lived this theology as well as wrote about it; we cannot separate the man from his thought. Hence, it is important to examine the historical context of the three essays included in this volume, in light of Barth’s life and the development of his theology as a whole. With this in mind, this essay includes four parts: 1) a brief political biography of Barth; 2) important themes prior to the publication of “Gospel and Law” (1935); 3) a description of the three essays, “Gospel and Law,” Church and State”, and the “Christian Community and the Civil Community”; and 4) Barth’s later thought and his relevance for contemporary discussions in theological politics.

The Political Barth

Barth’s first political involvement was as a theology student in 1904, when he joined the Swiss Zofinger Union of Bern, the oldest student political union in Switzerland, dating back to 1819.12 This liberal union supported constitutional republican governmental reform, including the rights of public assembly, trial by jury, freedoms of speech and press, and the right of self-government. No doubt as a student he became further interested in Religious Socialism, which was making a significant impact in Switzerland during the first decade of the twentieth century through the efforts of Leonhard Ragaz (1868–1945), Hermann Kutter (1863–1931), and the German Christoph Blumhardt (1858–1919). When Barth was called to his first pastorate at Safenwil in 1911, he not only served the spiritual needs of the congregation, but as a theological liberal and a committed Religious Socialist, he sought to address their economic ones as well.13 Later, in 1915, the ‘Red pastor at Safenwil’ decided to join the Social Democratic party, not out of ideological commitment, but to stand in solidarity with the working-class members of his congregation who joined the party, and suffered various injustices in their factory work. In addition to his ministerial duties, he helped form local unions, began serving as a party delegate, and attended socialist conferences.

Barth’s activity in politics was matched, if not superseded, by his serious commitment to the relevance of theology. He longed for an authentic voice for theology in the world; this, in fact, is why he turned to Religious Socialism in the first place. Regardless, the young Reformed pastor’s life was first tested in 1914, when neither the liberal establishment of German theology nor Religious Socialism were able to challenge the political war aims of Kaiser Willhem II. It was the disruption of World War I, and its horrendous aftermath, that forced Barth to question the liberal theology that undermined the church’s commitment to the nationalistic and militaristic goals of Germany and the other nations.14 Barth struggled to develop a theology that began with the otherness of God and challenged the political, moral, and religious, idealistic aims of humanity, which had collapsed in the War.15 This turn toward theological objectivism, and critical realism, begins with the premise that to take human moral action seriously, we must first take God seriously; the problem, however, is that liberal theology, and consequently Religious Socialism, had turned this basic principle around.16 God’s otherness reveals a diastasis that exists between human righteous actions, including political praxis, and God’s righteous action. Therefore, if he was to begin in a different place than the anthropocentrism and immanentism of liberal theology (and much Religious Socialism), then he would have to take God seriously and open himself to the otherness of God’s mystery and revelation.

Barth’s theological struggle was essentially with the liberal theology behind Religious Socialism and not with overall commitment to social justice and its practical policies. We may recall that the two most important Swiss socialists who had direct influence on Barth were Leonhard Ragaz and Herman Kutter. Ragaz, more of a classic left-wing activist, merged his Christian beliefs into the secular movement of Social Democracy, and sought to work with other secular socialists in seeking the goals of pacifism and social justice. In contrast, Kutter, who was less political and more prophetic, envisioned the kingdom of God emerging only with God’s action. Kutter believed that God would use both religious and secular movements, like Marxism, to bring about these socialist changes. On the surface, Barth politically supported Ragaz’s practical commitments to change the political and economic structures of injustice and his stance against political nationalism and the war. It would seem odd to preach and teach Christian socialism, but not actually attempt to transform the human structures that would necessarily lead to these changes. On a deeper level, however, Barth became more theologically sympathetic to Kutter’s “watching and waiting” perspective, which shifted the focus from human action to divine action, thus more generally, from humanity to God. Although he disagreed with Kutter’s politics, he became convinced that if the socialist movement would lead to God’s kingdom, it would have to be God’s doing, not humanity’s.17 Leaning toward Kutter, therefore, in 1915, Barth met the German Lutheran Pietist Christoph Blumhardt, who had significant influence on both Ragaz and Kutter. Blumhardt had previously been active in Social Democratic politics and even served in the German parliament a decade earlier. The theology of Christoph and his father Johann Christoph Blumardt (1805–80) appealed to Barth because it offered a strictly eschatological and God-centered understanding of God’s action in this world in its total human context, in terms of both the personal and social good. The younger Blumhardt’s theology involved waiting upon God’s action but also hastening toward full realization of the eschatological hope; the kingdom of God is both present and future, and remains entirely dependent upon God’s action through ‘Jesus the Victor.’ Unlike the more extreme positions of Ragaz and Kutter, Blumhardt offered a dialectical position, which Barth found appealing, and provided a good argument against the ideological theory of Religious Socialism.18

The most acute and salient theme during Barth’s World War I writings is the obvious reminder that God is God and we are not! By 1916 he wrote essays on God’s righteousness and the “Strange World of the Bible,” both of which reveal a significant diastasis between God and humanity, between the world of the Bible and our world.19 If we are to be true to ‘God’s otherness’ as revealed in the strangeness of the Bible, we must go beyond allowing it to provide answers—as was the case in liberal theology and Religious Socialism—and allow it to provide the questions we seek to ask. These early writings culminate in his 1918 commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief), where he further challenges liberal anthropocentrism, Pietism, Religious Socialism, Idealistic ethics, and established religion (including Christianity, or preferably Christendom).20 Although he continued to support the Swiss social democratic movement, he denounced the self-divinization of Religious Socialism, and its apparent blending of divine and human action in and through the socialist movement. Christians were to remain committed to social democracy but not ‘Religious Socialism.’ In the revolutionary year of 1918, Barth called Christians to remain committed to the otherness and radicalness of God’s kingdom, which cannot be ushered in through human action, nor verbalized and actualized in any human ideology. If there is a legitimate form of politics, it must be theological and non-ideological.

These themes continue in Barth’s 1919 ‘Tambach lecture,’ which served as a bridge between the theology of the first and second editions of Der Römerbrief. This speech redirected his Religious Socialist audience away from a strict identification of their action with God’s divine action, and toward Christ, who is and remains the source of both the Christian’s “affirmation” and “criticism,” both the Yes and No, of the social order.21 Since Barth views moral action as an analogy or parable of divine action, the Christian view of society should neither be entirely culture-affirming nor culture-denying, but a mixture of both and seen in light of God’s Yes and No. Nevertheless, by this time Religious Socialism in Switzerland was in disarray. In 1919 it had split into two groups, with the more radical wing joining the ‘Third Communist International’ and forming the Swiss Communist party, and the more moderate wing continuing to support earlier platforms of the Social Democratic party. Belonging to this latter group, Barth rejected Bolshevism as well as the moderate-capitalism of the Weimar republic in Germany. Both movements failed to take true democratic socialism seriously, so neither provided any future example for Swiss politics. So, although Barth denounced the theory of Religious Socialism, he continued to remain active in practical politics. God’s No against ideology provides an opening for the Yes of political action! This subtle shift toward the Yes of political responsibility is evident in Romans, 2nd edition, published in 1922. Barth continues his attack on ideologies that underlie power politics, whether left or right. Unlike Romans I, however, which was more critical of the principle of legitimation linked with the conservative/nationalist establishment, the second edition, written in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, is more critical of the principle of revolution liked with the idealistic hope for a new regime. This disparagement is counterbalanced by a more extensive discussion of Christian ethics grounded in love, which provides the basis for a more positive political ethic. Barth sees the love ethic as a “parable” or analogy of God’s actions of love, which can lead to “an unconditional, genuine preference for the good of the other.”22

Barth left Safenwil and was appointed Professor of Reformed Dogmatics at Göttingen in 1921, where he immersed himself in the historical tradition of theology and proclaimed its importance for the contemporary church. In this way, Barth began seeing himself as standing within the church rather than as a critic or prophet on the margins of the church, or worse yet outside the church. Although he continued to support democratic socialism throughout the 1920s, his journey into dogmatics sealed his fate with the Religious Socialists. By turning to dogmatics as the way to speak about ethics, he continued to demonstrate his desire for a theological politics rather than a political theology. Barth began seeing that theology offers a distinctive viewpoint for ethics and politics, which cannot be found in philosophy or the sciences. This is not a radical departure from his earlier period, but in fact the logical outcome of his Romans period; it was an attempt to provide a theology that can bear witness to God’s revealed truth. Barth’s dogmatic theology was further refined while serving as professor at Münster in 1925 and at Bonn in 1930. It was during this time that he gave his Ethics lectures.23 These lectures set in motion the basic themes that would occupy him throughout his career, including the revelation of the Word of God, its threefold embodiment in God’s actions of creation, reconciliation, and redemption, and the divine command that emerges within these relational spheres. In these lectures, we see a culmination of his early thought, where the No of God’s judgment is matched by the Yes of God’s commanding Word; where the vertical diastasis is matched by horizontal responsibility for the good of the other. Despite the fact that God’s Word stands in judgment of all human ethical speech, it also provides the opportunity to encounter the good, through the divine command, which draws us toward hearing and then responding to God’s Word. Barth’s No to ideology, whether left or right, is also supplemented by the Yes of responsible action within civil society and the state. He endorses neither revolution nor the political status quo, but calls for a democratic movement for a more peaceful and just society. In themes that go back to the Romans period, Barth develops a view of society, culture, and the state in which they are neither demonic nor divine, but are affirmed through the relationship of humanity (and the world) and the Word of God, revealed in creation, reconciliation, and redemption.

Beginning in the tumultuous years of the early 1930s, Barth’s life seems to accelerate in constant movement. He was not only conducting his normal duties of teaching and writing, but actively organizing and consolidating the Christian response to the emerging church conflict over the rise of Adolph Hitler and National Socialism in Germany. Remaining somewhat practically aloof from German politics during the Weimar era, in 1931 the Swiss professor joined the German Social Democratic Party—like he did the Swiss party years before—because he believed this was the most hopeful and practical means by which society could maintain a healthy political system. Barth’s worst fears were realized when Hitler rose to power in 1933 and began dismantling the Weimar Republic and religious freedom in Germany. The nationalist ideology of the German Christian movement began to spread into the Lutheran and Reformed (Evangelical) churches. In the spring of 1933, a constitution was created that established a united German Evangelical Church, with a strong hierarchical polity including the new office of ‘Reich bishop.’ This shift in ecclesiastical polity proved to be not only a victory of the Lutheran church over less numerous Reformed, but a specific branch of Lutheranism, including the German Christians, that desired to strengthen the office of bishop within the church and develop a closer relationship to the state. The German Christian movement was the offspring of liberal theology and German nationalism; theologically they were anthropocentric and immanentist and ideologically they supported the National Socialist party, including its rejection of Marxism, Jewish German nationality, internationalism, interracial degeneration. When Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, the German Christians were already well organized into a substantial movement and thus would have considerable influence on the Evangelical church. Yet after the constitution of the new national church was written in the spring of 1933, to the dismay of the German Christians, their principle candidate for the office, Ludwig Muller, was not elected. Nevertheless, Hitler’s government in July had taken significant action by meddling in church affairs with the replacement of church and state administrators, seeking to control local synods and consistories, which led to a rewriting of the constitution and the elevation of Muller into the office of Reich bishop in 1934.

In response to these events, Martin Niemoller, a friend of Barth’s, formed the Pastor’s Emergency League in 1933, which later became the basis for the Confessing church. Although largely conservative and patriotic (many supported Hitler’s regime), this group of pastors and some academics stood against the emerging Nazification of the church. Their main concern was the state’s infringement upon the church. Barth’s uncompromising No to Hitler and the German Christians made him a target for both admiration and disparagement.24 He became the principal theological voice of the Confessing church movement principally through his contacts and the publication of a new pamphlet series, Theologishe Existenz heute, which was first published in 1933, and the drafting of the Barmen Declaration (1934), which remained this movement’s primary confessional document. Barth’s theological attack against the heretical German Christians was based on their liberal theological underpinnings (i.e., natural theology), the false understanding of the church based on race and nationality, and their gospel which emerged from a particular political ideology. In the Barmen Declaration, with Barth as its principal author, the Confessing church made a public commitment and confession to the exclusiveness of Jesus Christ as Lord of the church and state. At its core, Barmen was a theological document, but it did have political implications for the church and state. It was against the takeover of the church by the German Christians and their strict coordination of church and state, of gospel and politics, which corrupted the church internally through heretical dogma and externally by absolutizing the power of the state. No doubt Barth was personally critical of the Nazi’s anti-Semitism, and later regretted that the document did not take a firmer stand against this horrid ideology, yet he needed to compromise with those who criticized the ‘Aryan paragraph’ in its application only to the church but not the state. Although he continued to give speeches, his works were banned, and when he refused, as a professor, to give public allegiance to Hitler’s rule, Barth was expelled from Germany in July, 1935.

Shortly after his return to Switzerland, Barth became a professor at the University of Basel. Although through the latter 1930s he principally worked on Church Dogmatics, he did publish the two essays of political importance, namely “Gospel and Law” and “Church and State”, which are included in this volume. Once the war began, in his political speeches and writings, he became increasingly critical of Swiss neutrality, and how Swiss collaboration with Germany restricted certain freedoms and liberties within Switzerland. In fact, by 1941 the Swiss government censured his speeches, and eventually banned him from giving public speeches altogether, and even tapped his phones. In Barth’s mind, it was more responsible to be true to the convictions of justice and freedom, and allow refugees a place to live, and accept the possibility of hardship and war than to lose your freedom and dignity as a nation, and gain peace, employment, and food. Barth’s critical stance against the Swiss government led to ongoing tense relationship between Barth and state authorities throughout the post-war years, and even until his death in 1968.

After the end of the war, Barth changed his political message from one of resistance to the Nazi regime to one of forgiveness and reconciliation with Germany; thus, political responsibility had shifted from resistance against evil to helping a neighbor in need. It was in 1946 that Barth wrote arguably his most important essay in theological politics, also included in this volume, entitled “The Christian Community and the Civil Community.” This essay builds upon earlier themes in Barmen and “Church and State,” but draws a stronger more intimate analogical connection between church and state within their relationship to Christ’s kingdom. In contrast to his early writings where a negative tension between church and state predominates, in this essay a positive relation between the two predominates. He remains faithful to his non-ideological understanding of politics, but not unlike his Ethics lectures, genuinely prefers a constitutional liberal democratic state to other forms, whether of the far right or left. This commitment is obvious in a series of short political writings collected in Against the Stream.25 Since there is no “perfect system” of government (just “better or worse ones”), says Barth, a “proper state will be one in which the concepts of order, freedom, community, power, and responsibility are balanced in equal proportions, where none of these elements is made an absolute dominating all the others” (95). Far from idealizing one viewpoint, however, Barth adds that Christians may “speak very conservatively today and very progressively or even revolutionarily tomorrow—or vice versa” (91). “Christian politics are always bound to seem strange,” and, he adds, “incalculable and surprising in the eyes of the world—otherwise they would not be Christian” (92). It was the ‘strangeness’ of Barth’s stand ‘between West and East,’ between a Christian ‘anti-communism’ and a Christian ‘pro-communism,’ that led to a growing controversy over his political views. He was severely criticized for not taking a negative stance against Soviet aggression, like he had done against Nazi Germany. For the Swiss theologian there was a difference. In 1949 he wrote: “Ten years ago we said that the Church is, and remains, the Church, and must not therefore keep an un-Christian silence. Today we say that the Church is, and remains, the Church, and must not therefore speak an un-Christian word” (137). Barth’s controversial ‘silence’ concerning Soviet communism was rooted in a practical (not ideological) politics that was governed by what was most practically beneficial to persons within their communities. In the emerging world of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear weapons, Barth’s position ‘between West and East’ became the logical outgrowth to his commitment to an ideologically free politics that strove for peace and justice. For Barth the main difference between the Nazis and the Soviet Communists was that the latter was blatantly atheist and secular and did not attempt to cloak itself in the form of nationalist Christianity, as did the former. It was the integrity of the church and its gospel that was primarily at stake. Moreover, because the state is neither divine nor demonic it is not necessary, at every instance, to blatantly eulogize or condemn every historical manifestation of the state; sometimes the church must simply be silent and wait, while continuing to bear witness to Christ’s rule. Barth saw it as unnecessary to jump on the anti-communist bandwagon because he had doubts that this inflammatory rhetoric would really succeed in the long run, and, indeed, may eventually lead to violent conflict, possibly even nuclear war. Today, after the fall of the Soviet empire, his stance seems to be a rather moot point; he appears more of a long-sighted prophet than a short-sighted anti-patriot, which he was seen as at the time.

Meanwhile, during the 1950s and 60s, he was pressing his Christian humanist concern that the church—and the state—as the ‘inner and outer circles’ of the kingdom stand in solidarity with all humanity. Barth’s Christian humanism led him to defend human rights and the peacemaking function of the state. As Stalinist atrocities became better known, he often publicly denounced the tyranny of Stalin, as he had Hitler. In The Christian Life, for example, he argued that the “lordless power” of “leviathan” was exemplified in twentieth-century Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism.26 Moreover, in 1958, Barth, as a participant in the Kirchliche Brudershaften (church brotherhoods), took further action through the writing of a petition (Anfrage) addressed to the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany. This document remained critical of West Germany’s rearmament (as a member of NATO) and, more importantly, the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons. “The prospect of a future war to be waged with the use of modern means of annihilation has created a new situation, in the face of which the Church cannot remain neutral.”27 Barth’s stance against the preparation, development, and deployment of nuclear weapons remained perhaps his last great cause; a cause in which the church could rightly declare a status confessionis.

In summary, Barth’s political thought was theologically critical and dialectical. It was critical in that he discriminated among positions and unmasked the hidden ideological commitments that stand contrary to the Word of God, and dialectical in that he often maneuvered between two uncompromising poles of thought, that is, between an absolute Yes and No. Yet in this movement, there was a lifelong persuasion toward a socialist-democratic conception of constitutional liberal democracy. In Against the Stream, he writes: “[A] proper State will be one in which the concepts of order, freedom, community, power and responsibility are balanced in equal proportions, where none of these elements is made an absolute dominating all the others” (96). Barth’s concern, above all, was with human freedom and responsibility before God. Toward the end of his life, Barth said his concern with human freedom and responsibility, as a basic “style” and “human posture,” could be characterized as a “liberal” attitude, and could be applied both to his theology and politics. He said,

when I call myself liberal what I primarily understand by the term is an attitude of responsibility. For freedom is always a responsible thing. And that means further that I have always to be open—here we come, do we not, to what is usually meant by freedom. Being truly liberal means thinking and speaking in responsibility and openness on all sides, backwards and forwards, toward both the past and in the future, and what I call a total personal modesty. To be modest is not be skeptical; it is to see what one thinks and says also has limits. This does not hinder me from saying very definitely what I think I see and know. But I can do this only with the awareness that there have been and are other people before and along-side me, and that others still will come after me. This awareness gives me inner peace, so that I do not think I always have to be right even though I do say definitely what I say and think. Knowing that a limit is set for me too, I can move cheerfully within it as a free man.28

From Safenwil to Barmen: Early Themes in Barth’s Thought

In this section we examine more closely several early writings, from Der Römerbrief to the Barmen Declaration (1918–34), with the purpose of developing the main themes of Barth’s theology of politics. All these writings were written before the essays included in this volume, yet prove to be benchmarks for these later essays and his later political writings. The themes explored are: 1) his dialectical reasoning; 2) how this shapes his view of secular society’s relationship to the church; 3) how this leads to his No against political ideology but Yes for political responsibility; 4) how it further affects his view of church and state in the Barmen Declaration; and 5) his criticism of natural theology.

Since all later themes are dependent upon the first, we begin with the dialectical pattern of Barth’s theology. In contrast to the earlier scholarship of Hans Urs von Balthasar, which insisted on a radical shift in Barth’s thinking from his dialectical stage of the 1920s to ‘analogical’ stage of the 1930s and beyond, today there is a general consensus, following Bruce McCormack, that both dialectical and analogical themes existed throughout his work.29 There is, in short, both diastasis and synthesis in the Church Dogmatics and also his earlier works, including his lectures on the ‘Reformed Confessions’, ‘John Calvin’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘Dogmatic theology’, all given while in Germany prior to 1931, and now published in English.30 These works show a continuity of thought between the Romans period and the Church Dogmatics a decade later. The link between these two periods of Barth’s thought is grounded in Barth’s newly developed Christology in the mid-1920s, which enabled him to speak about the eternal Word as both veiled and unveiled, both hidden and revealed, in the humanity of Jesus Christ.31 There is no doubt Barth’s theology changed over time, but it does not consist of radical disruptions in method or thought as was previously supposed. In fact, it is the combination of being theologically open-ended, while remaining centered on the Word of God, which remains the core of his dialectical method.

So what is meant by dialectical? We may distinguish between two kinds of dialectical thinking, with one being vertical and the other horizontal; one being the relationship of human and divine and the other relating to human thought more generally. For Barth, the horizontal dialectic depends entirely upon the vertical. Both kinds are developed in his 1922 lecture, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry.” Here Barth argues that the task of theology remains a difficult but a necessary task of the church. Because of their sinfulness, theologians, like all persons, can only speak about God with caution and embarrassment, yet because God has spoken through God’s Word, theologians must give an account of this revelation. “We must recognize both, our obligation and our inability, and thereby give God the glory.”32 Like Calvin, Barth argues there is distance, a diastasis, between God and humanity that cannot be bridged by human reason, but by God’s revelation, which, through grace, is accommodated to sinful human reason.33 This implies that the task of theology, and human thought more generally, must also remain cautious about its ability to make absolute statements of Yes or No, grounded in foundationalist reasoning. Dialectical thinking, says Barth, must “correlate every position and negation one against the other, to clarify ‘Yes’ by ‘no’ and ‘No” by ‘yes’ with persisting longer than a movement in a rigid Yes or No.”34 So, unlike Hegel’s dialectical method, where what is posited and negated is unified in a higher synthesis, Barth’s use of dialectical reasoning emerges first from the vertical diastasis between God and humanity, but extends to the horizontal diastasis of human reasoning. As McCormack put it: “Barth’s dogmatic method presupposes an initial dialectical movement of negation in which God’s judgement is invite to fall on all previous efforts (including our own).”35 Still, because God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ, the synthesis of the divine and human, the ‘No’ of human sin is also addressed by God’s Yes of reconciliation. This makes the task of theology and political ethics (as well as other sciences) possible but not infallible. In his early thought the vertical diastasis of judgment prevails, which provides difficulties for Barth to explain the task of Christian ethics. As his theology becomes more Christological, more centered on the Word of God, he begins to develop a stronger theological basis for ethics and political responsibility. These themes are more fully developed in essays after the later 1930s, including the essays found in this volume, later political writings, and the Church Dogmatics. Even in these writings, however, the negative judgment remains. Jesus Christ, the Word of God, makes human knowledge possible but also always stands in judgment of such knowledge.

Second, it was Barth’s Christologically centered dialectical thought in the 1920s that enabled him to move beyond his earlier diastasis of Christ and culture (crisis), and instead offer a new dialectical construal, of both crisis and hope, grounded in the divine-human nature of Jesus Christ.36 In his 1926 essay “Church and Culture,” Barth rejects Schleiermacher’s, and liberal theology’s, optimistic theology of culture emerging from its union with God’s Spirit through religious consciousness, and instead argues that the “work of culture takes its place among the earthly signs by which the Church must make God’s goodness, his friendship for men, visible to itself and the world.”37 In short, culture needs to be dedivinized before it can be sacralized or humanized. His dialectical theology stands both against and for culture, principally because the Word is with culture in the humanity of Jesus Christ.38 Moreover, this leads to a similar dialectical understanding of how non-theological sources ought to be used in theological ethics. In contrast to the method of modern theology that begins with human experience and reason and then correlates the inner world of faith to that objective world, Barth begins with the objective world of faith and then integrates the outer world of human experience and reason. Yet Christians have a duty to seriously listen to the voices of others. Just as the Word mysteriously comes to the person its otherness, so too, she must be attentive to the Word in the other. Christians must remain skeptical, however, of other words replacing or altering the message of the Word of God. This was the correlationalist strategy of “apologetics” that he rejected in his early writings, which he equates with liberal theology and Schleiermacher.39 This is when theology relies on the use of any correlative or synthetic principle, as articulated by the conjunction and, which places on equal footing theology with other non-theological sources. If there is to be a theology of politics, it must begin with the Word of God, but cannot presume that God may speak in the voice of the other, including non-theological sources.

The third theme explores how Barth’s dialectical thought serves as the basis for Barth’s critical stance toward political ideology but also an affirmation for political responsibility. We begin first with his No against ideology. It was pointed out that Barth’s early search for the otherness of God finds its fruition in Romans I.40 In his discussion of Romans 13:1–7, Barth distances himself both from traditional Protestant legitimating of political authority, whether the Lutheran ‘two kingdoms’ or the Reformed ‘orders of creation’ theology, and instead seeks to contrast the state with God’s kingdom. Against the various ideologies that caused and supported the Great War in mind, Barth’s No is louder than his Yes; he emphatically rejects the hegemony and legitimacy of the state and political ideology that underlies power politics.41 The Christian task remains neither to maintain or transform the state but to “replace it” with the kingdom of God, which can only be ushered in by “God’s revolution” (504). True revolutionary politics seeks to replace the human state with God’s state; Christians are to “starve the state religiously” (508). Does this imply that Barth is an anarchist? What does it mean, in Pauline language, to “be subject to governing authorities”? Barth responds that although “God’s revolution” is God’s action, Christians can prepare for it by acting in solidarity with others and critically engaging the existing society and its institutions. Barth rejects anarchism because he argues that Christians do have political obligations such as paying taxes, engaging in political activity, and military service, yet they are to accept political authority and fulfill their political duties “without illusions.” God uses the state to protect the innocent from injustice and to punish evildoers. Yet, since the state belongs to the ‘old aeon’, Christian duties to the state should never be seen as intrinsically “Christian duties”; Christians must never combine “throne and alter,” nor should they preach “Christians patriotism” (520). Even though his sympathies lie more with the political left and revolutionary politics than with the political right and conservative reactionary politics, Barth’s core argument is a politics that is free from all ideology.

Barth’s ideological critique, as mentioned earlier, continues in his Tambach lecture and Der Römerbrief (2nd edition). In Tambach, he argues that Christian responsibility begins not with some abstract conception of the good, understood as an Enlightenment universal standpoint of “perfect criticism,” or in the absoluteness of Christian social activism, as is the case in Religious Socialism.42 Christians should neither simply accept the current social order or the status quo (“perfect naiveté”), nor accepting the false belief that God’s kingdom is realizable through ethical action (“perfect criticism”) or revolutionary protest (320). Resistance against the powers, including political power, rejects the options of complacency, utopianism, or anarchy! In Romans II, he more persuasively grounds his eschatology and Christology, and develops for the first time an ‘ethic of witness’ that depends upon responding to God’s divine command in Jesus Christ.43 God’s grace as judgment stands in contrast to any scheme or theory of modern anthropocentric ethics, or in Barth’s more expressive language: “Grace is the axe laid at the root of the good conscience.”44 This leads Barth to be critical of both the conservative politics but also the “Titianism” of revolutionary politics, both of the political right and left.45

Therefore, the No of judgment is answered dialectically with the Yes of God’s movement of grace, which leads to positive ethics of political responsibility. In Tambach, he admonishes his Religious Socialist audience to not abandon the world to itself, where it is “ruled by its own logos” and “its own hypostases and powers” (280). Instead, Christian action must be guided by “an affirmation of the world as it is” (298). “Only out of such an affirmation can come that genuine, radical denial which is manifestly the meaning of our movements of protest” (299). Human action remains only parabolic of divine action, and in no way is divine action, but it is still parabolic of its “heavenly analogue.” Likewise, in Romans II, Barth distinguishes between “primary” and “secondary” ethical action, with the first being a response to God in worship, and the second a response toward our neighbor and community.46 It is worship and prayer as “primary” ethical activities that provide the basis for other human “secondary” actions.47 Positively speaking, “secondary” ethical action consists of love of neighbor, and, negatively speaking, any strict identification of God’s command and human causes, whether political, economic, or social-cultural.

Only later in the decade, in his 1928–31 ethics lectures at Münster and Bonn, do we see the true emergence of the positive command ethics of the Word of God.48 We are reminded that after Göttingen, Barth took positions in Münster in 1925 and Bonn in 1930 and remained in Germany until 1935, when he returned to Switzerland. Nevertheless, the 1920s was a significant period of development in Barth’s theology, and this can be seen in his Ethics, which John Webster says is a “strikingly anti-modern text.” “In its own way,” adds Webster, “it is as subversive of some of the axioms of modernity as is the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.”49 Barth’s theological ethics most basically is a ‘Trinitarian ethics of witness’ that lies “in the reality of God’s commanding, of God’s Word so far as it claims us men and finds our faith and obedience” (35).50 True freedom is the freedom for obedience, and true obedience is freedom for the other, and, by implication, the various communities and institutions of society.51 As God’s “emergency orders,” the church and state “both presuppose sin, and they thus embody God’s order as his contracting of sin and its reality as grace and law” (243–44). Like Calvin, who saw the state as an ‘external means of grace’ Barth says the state

is the sign, set up by God’s revelation, of the concrete and visible order of life by which and in which, on the basis of accomplished reconciliation, we are summoned to serve our neighbor. This order, too, is effective in the free act of God’s grace and, under the presupposition of this act, but only under it, is both a divine institution and a divine willed human society … It, too, is a sign of mediated fellowship between God and man. It, too, once was not and one day will not be, so that it belongs with the church to the time between the times, to the kingdom of grace. (445)

At first glance, Barth appears to be more of a social conservative in Ethics than in his earlier writings and in what he would write after Word War II. Yet the main trajectory of his thought remains the same, as calls for practical responsible action within the state. The church’s primary task is to be a witness to the Word of God, and remind the state of its need for repentance and its purpose of promoting justice and peace.52 The Christian stance is one of responsible management and reform of the state. Because the mission of the state is to provide for the welfare of the entire society it, and its best form, has the form of the constitutional democracy, balance of power between legislative executive and judicial powers, although in general “the power of the state comes from the people” (449). In Ethics we see, really for the first time, a synthesis between Barth’s theological politics and practical political action within democratic society; a Christian witness to the state and the state’s witness to the world. Barth’s more positive theological politics is largely the success of his theological ethics as a whole. Responsible political action emerges in response to God’s divine command; God’s action provides the basis for human responsive action. The horizontal substance of God’s command, in our relations to others, depends on its vertical substance. God brings freedom to the conscience and the moral life in and through our obedience and responsibility to the Word. Christian ethics is not conformity to some posited value or standard of excellence but responsible actions of “witness,” says Barth, one that depends upon the relational action of God toward humanity. What is fundamental to the human subject is not her moral consciousness, but her relationship to God’s Word.

The fourth and fifth themes explore, in more detail, the Barmen Declaration and Barth’s critique of ‘natural theology’, which, in his view, was the underlying theological heresy of the German Christians and their apology for the Nazification of the church. Thus, it is rather shortsighted to speak about Barmen without talking about Barth’s Nein to natural theology and the role that both of these play in the three essays in this volume. As stated earlier, Barth was the principal author of the 1934 Declaration of the Confessing Church at Barmen. This document includes six succinct paragraphs: 1) the church must hear and obey the one Word of God (Jesus Christ) and no other voice, person, events, powers, or sources of truth as God’s revelation; 2) Jesus Christ claims our whole life, and rejects the idea that other “lords” rule over other areas of our lives; 3) the church, too, must not be forced to have its message altered by prevailing social ideologies or political convictions; 4) the church does have a proper form of government, but rejects the notion that there are special leaders (Fuhrer) of authority over and within the church; 5) draws for a separation of duties of church and state, and rejects the state becoming the church and the church becoming the state; 6) the church’s task and mission should not be corrupted by its pride and desire for power and prestige.

The paragraph that deals most explicitly with church and state is paragraph five, which provides glimpse into Barth’s theology of church and state. It is worth quoting in full:

“Fear God, honour the King!” (1 Pet 2:17) Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which also the Church is situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability makes this possible, by means of threat and use of force. The church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence towards God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Kingdom (Reich), God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things. We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the state should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfill the vocation of the church as well. We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the state and thus become itself an organ of the state.53

The content of paragraph five builds on his earlier discussion of the state in Ethics, but also moves beyond it in several important ways. Barth refuses to separate the state, as an ‘order of preservation’ (creation), from the church, as an ‘order of redemption’, and consequently places them into two separate functions and tasks. Instead, directed by divine authority, both church and state remain committed to peace and justice, in a world that is “not yet redeemed.” The state is not completely governed by autonomous devilish principles of power and force, and the church by merciful spiritual principles of love and hope. This false separation, in Barth’s view, leads to the ideology of non-interference of the church in state affairs and the state’s excessive use of force. This ‘two kingdoms’ theory, once grossly exaggerated, became an apologetic doctrine for the German Christians’ support for the Nazi regime. Instead, Barth argued that the state is distinct (although not separate) from the church. The church, in gratitude toward God, must not seek to undermine the state’s legitimate task in principle, but must draw attention or remind the state that God’s kingdom stands above the church and state; through its witness to the gospel, the church reminds the state of its proper task to be a responsible agent of peace and justice in the world.

Hence, once the positive relations of church and state are explained, the document rejects a totalitarian conception of the state. When the state becomes totalitarian it takes upon itself an idolatrous spiritual function, and further challenges the church to act politically against the state. In response, the state must resist the temptation to become the sole power in society, and the church must resist the temptation to control society through the methods and strategies of the state, thus becoming an “organ of the state.” It is important to remember that paragraph five does not stand on its own, but remains in concert with the other paragraphs, particularly paragraph one, which places both church and state under the “one Word of God.” This Christological basis for the state becomes more saliently expressed in his later political writings, but is also present in this document as well as earlier in his Ethics lectures.

How was Barmen received by the opponents of the Confessing Church? The German Christians never attempted to address the theological grounding of Barmen, but only its political ramifications. As implied earlier, the German Christian movement was not strongly theological, and except for a few theologians like Emmanuel Hirsch, did not attempt to speak theologically about politics. A more important theological reaction can be noticed at an academic conference that was held at Anbasch, a few weeks after Barmen, which included many of the more well-known theologians who did not belong to the Confessing Church. This so-called Anbasch Counsel denounced the Declaration as faulty theology because it failed to distinguish between the ‘two kingdoms’ and two principle loci of law and gospel, which invariably denied the existence of natural theology. Led by Lutherans like Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, the council affirmed that “God’s word speaks to us as law and gospel.” “The law,” they added, “binds us to the natural orders to which we are subject, such as family, folk, and race (i.e., blood relationship).”54 Indeed, regarding natural theology, Elert later wrote: “The proposition that apart from Christ no truth is to be acknowledged as God’s revelation is a rejection of the divine authority of the divine law beside that of the gospel.”55 Since Barmen did not address the longstanding debate between Lutherans and Reformed about the relationship of the law and the gospel, what worried Elert and Althaus is that Barth was implicitly placing the gospel before the law, by placing them both under the Word of God. This pattern of gospel-law stands in contrast to the traditional Evangelical pattern of law-gospel, which on one hand affirmed the theological legitimacy of the state and orders of society, and on the other kept the gospel ‘pure’ by limiting its use only to the church. From this viewpoint, Barmen reflected a kind of ‘anarchist theology’ that undermined the authority of social institutions established in God’s ordered creation. Yet, as we know, Barth was no anarchist but a democratic constitutionalist; in fact, he realized that the traditional law-gospel pattern was incapable of challenging the ideology of the German Christians, who identified the divine law with the human laws in society. Barth rightly surmised that this law-gospel pattern, once blended with a liberal naiveté, was the basis for the natural theology of the German Christians. A year later, in his essay “Gospel and Law,” he eventually worked out his position more clearly, but before that he was forced to write his famous Nein to natural theology.

This debate over natural theology peaked when Barth’s friend, and fellow Swiss Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner, published his pamphlet Nature and Grace in which he attacked Barth’s apparent unbending rejection of natural theology. Brunner and Barth had been debating the theological implications for the dialectic of law and gospel for several years, and what was the proper Reformed position. On one side, Brunner insisted that the law, as a ‘point of contact’, prepared the way for the gospel by reveling both an incipient knowledge of sin and God’s righteousness (including God’s judgment), and on the other, Barth claimed that such a point of contact effectively removed the priority of the gospel, a mistake found in the ‘two kingdoms’ theology of the German Christians, and before that, theological liberalism. For Barth, Nature and Grace completely undermined the first paragraph of Barmen, namely that “Jesus Christ is the one voice” in revelation. Why Barth so vehemently responded in his essay Nein!, published a few months after Barmen, was the fact that Brunner’s essay had won the praise of German Christian theologians like Hirsch and other mainstream confessionalists like Althaus and Elert. The fact that Brunner was Swiss Reformed and an outspoken critic of the German Christians made it more poignant, because being “closer to the truth” he was “much more dangerous.” Barth has seen others like his longtime friend Fredrich Gogarten become swayed by the ideology of the German Christians, which led to the demise of their journal Zwischen den Zeiten, and no doubt feared that many others in the Confessing Church would be swayed by Brunner’s argument in Nature and Grace.

Barth was sharply focused on arguments that would lead to an alternative or second source of revelation. The central error of natural theology is that it places humanity at the center of the universe, and claims to know God, apart from God’s own self-revelation. To argue that God speaks in history, nature, culture, or society apart from what God has spoken in Jesus Christ is to deny the true revelation of the Word of God. In so doing, it denies God’s freedom to act, and with it, God’s own nature, or in short, it denies God as God is known in revelation.56 The knowledge of God, for Barth, is always mediated through a sign or sacrament, which represents, indeed embodies, God’s truth. The principal sign or sacrament of God is the humanity of Jesus Christ. When theological ethics begins with nature or creation instead of the Word made flesh, it rejects the background picture (moral ontology) that God has revealed in history, and with it God’s freedom to act. This means, for example, that when Christians formulate a political theology from the doctrine of creation or natural law, they begin at the wrong place, and endanger themselves to inevitable borrowings of non-theological viewpoints. Without the theological realism, discovered in God’s revelation of the Word, a Christian form of political ethics inevitably becomes a philosophy or a theology that may be inclusive of other ideological viewpoints, but ironically not the Word. What this means is that not only theology and ethics but political thought as well can be corrupted by a reliance upon natural theology. There are only a few small steps from natural theology to the German Christians, and the German Christians to the Nazis. Barth feared that this pattern toward theological, ecclesial, and political corruption could happen anywhere, including Western Europe and the United States, where a commitment to natural theology (and liberal theology) were dominant.

Three Essays: 1935–46

In the Fall of 1935, pastor Karl Immer of Barmen asked Barth to come to that city to deliver his address “Evangelium und Gesetz” (“Gospel and Law”) as a farewell address to Christians in Germany.57 Once Barth began his journey, he was stopped by the Gestapo and was forced to return to Switzerland. So, in instead of Barth, Immer publicly read the address to the overflowing church at Barmen, with the Gestapo present. This important document indicates on the surface that Barth was doing theology and “only theology,” yet the discussion of this document invariably had political overtones. It was a theological criticism of the German Christian falsifications of the law, and their justification for the Nazi’s ideology of family, folk, and race. Still, the least known of the three essays in this volume, it is more important as a theological rationale for the later more overtly political works.

Similar to the dialectical relationship of church and state, Barth argues law and gospel can be distinguished but not separated. The false separation of ethics from theology, human action from divine action, and human law from God’s law, all derive from the separation of law and gospel in modern theology and ethics. This separation, says Eberhard Busch, has led to an “emancipation of ethics from the gospel of grace.”58 In other words, because the law is not ‘formed’ by the gospel it remains formed by other non-Christian or non-theological moral frameworks such as philosophy or the natural and social sciences; secular ethics replaces the gospel of grace with the human moral law. When ethics becomes either autonomous or heteronomous it becomes reduced to duty or strict obedience to non-theological principles. In contrast, Barth argues the divine law comes to us in “the form of the gospel,” which permits persons the freedom and responsibility to act within this covenant relationship. Most basically, Christian ethics begins with God’s covenantal action and not in human autonomous decision-making. This continues the same line of thinking that goes back to the Romans period, and forward into his Church Dogmatics IV (Reconciliation), concerning the relationship of human and divine agency. In the humanity of Jesus Christ, human agency is restored, healed, and allowed to live in free response to God’s gracious command. Barth writes: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.”59

So what does it mean for the church to be responsible in its freedom? The “Church would not be the Church,” says Barth, if it would not become “visible and apprehensible also for the world, for state and society,” if it failed to obey the law in “its commands, its questions, its admonitions, and its accusations” (79). Indeed, he adds:

The Church would not be the Church if these aspects of the Law would not, as such, become the prophetic witness for the will of God against all of men’s sinful presumption, against all their lawlessness and unrighteous. Thus, we can certainly make the general and comprehensive statement that the Law is nothing else than the necessary form of the Gospel, whose content is grace. (79–80)

As the “form” and “content” of the Word of God, law and gospel are distinguished but not separated into “more and less, better and worse,” or “between divine and human or good and evil!” (81). The gospel takes “priority over the law” because it declares firmly what God has done for us in Jesus Christ; this is the ‘content’ of the gospel. In contrast, the law—as form of the gospel, tells us what we must do for God, but only in light of the content of the gospel, of God’s reconciliation of the sinner. Prayer, repentance, and forgiveness become the foundation of Christian moral action; Christian witness to the gospel leads to a free obedience of God’s commands as found in the Decalogue, for example. “Thus there can never be claims and demands which would have legal validity from another source or in themselves: there can only be witnesses” (83). Christian witnesses are primarily concerned not with the law, but with “the grace of God, which has accomplished everything for us and whose end must be this accomplishment” (83).

Once God’s law is stripped of its gracious content, its perverted form can be applied to the terms of civil law or social custom. The law cannot simply stand on its own, but has to be interpreted, or filled with a ‘particular content,’ which in the context of natural theology can take upon itself many social, cultural, or historical forms. In defining the gospel as the content of the word of God and the law as its form, he challenges the ideology of the German Christians. Therefore, when the German Christians argued that the gospel must be ‘contextualized’ or take a new ‘form’ in the “Volksnomoi (people’s laws)” of nation, race, and people, this not only changes the form of the law but the content of the gospel (91). Saying this, the movements of German nationalism, civil obedience and citizenship, and even ethnic and racial purity, can all be seen as a “deformation and distortion of the Law” (91). In this case the content of the law is deformed; the Word of God is replaced with some other word.

In summary, the dialectic of law and gospel remains a core issue within the Reformers, and a longstanding tension between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. By placing the gospel before the law, Barth reverses the usual understanding of how law and gospel interrelate. In traditional Evangelical dogmatics, the law (what God wills from us) in a sense prepares the heart for the gospel by declaring our sinfulness and need for God’s grace, or, in short, prepares us for salvation. In contrast, the gospel (what God wills for us), responds to the law’s preparation by releasing the repentant from sin’s bondage. By placing the gospel before the law, Barth argues that “[F]rom what God does for us, we infer what he wants with us and from us” (78).60 This leads him to criticize any other law other than the one that remains the ‘form’ of the gospel whose ‘content’ is grace. He writes,

If the Law is also God’s Word, if it is further grace that God’s Word is spoken aloud and become audible, and if grace means nothing else than Jesus Christ, then it is not only uncertain and dangerous but perverse to want to understand the Law of God on the basis of any other thing, of any other event different from the event in which the will of God, tearing in two the veil of our theories and interpretations, is visible as grace in both and content. (77)

Three years later, in 1938, Barth more resolutely shifted his theology into a more explicit political direction in Rechtfertigung und Recht (Justification and Justice), which later was translated with the title: “Church and State.” Barth’s purposes for this address were both theological and political. Most obviously, he was theologically attempting to find a positive link between God’s divine action of justification and human action of justice, but politically he was advocating a notion of responsible political action that would embolden Christians in Germany, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia against Nazi aggression.61 What should the human action of justice be in relation to God’s prior action of justification? In the past, inadequate connections between these two led to “pietistic sterility on one hand, and the sterility of the Enlightenment on the other” (105). The pietistic error leads to a preoccupation with one’s spiritual state and indifference to the concerns for human justice—and often a rather pessimistic view of the state, and the enlightenment error leads to a preoccupation with human justice (“secular gospel”) and indifference to God’s act of justification.

Looking for the “vital” and “positive” connection between the “two realms” of Christian community and the “principalities and powers,” Barth begins with the relationship of Pilate to Jesus. Even though Pilate, whose ‘power comes from above’, acts unjustly in condemning Jesus to death on the cross, he also was a “human created instrument” of God’s act of justification. Ironically, the “Roman governor” is the “virtual founder of the Church,” because had he acted correctly, according to canons of “human justice” (Recht), then he would have altered God’s act of justification (110–11). By altering God’s decision in this way the state would be in a position to “proclaim divine justification” and become a idolatrous divine state. So, in its “decisive movement” the state was not “true to itself” in serving human justice, yet in this failure, it placed itself under God’s redemption. Pilate does in fact belong in the Creed, Barth says, but to the “second article in particular!” (114). A theological analysis of the state belongs to the “Christological sphere” (120).

Hence, both the church and state belong to Christ’s kingdom. God’s gracious relationship to the sinner and the church is no different than God’s relationship to the “powers” of the state. All powers, even though seen by some as demonic, nonetheless, belong “originally and ultimately to Jesus Christ” (118). Barth admits that the state can deny “its true substance, dignity, function, and purpose,” under God’s redemption, and become idolatrous, claiming for itself its own divine myth and demanding worship (118). Yet there are “no circumstances in which the demonic state can finally achieve what it desires”; it is not “inevitable” that the state should become a “demonic force” and become the “Beast out of the abyss” (118–19). So, even though this demonic state may publicly stand against God’s purposes in the world, the Christian cannot say No and “refuse the state his service.” “A fundamental Christian No cannot be given here, because it would in fact be a fundamental No to the earthly State as such, which is impossible from the Christian point of view” (142–43). The kingdom of God—not the earthly church or state—is the “true system of law, the true State” (123). Therefore, the “heavenly Jerusalem” can be distinguished from the “earthly State,” but the “future kingdom” still remains a “real State” not an “imaginary” or “ideal” state (123).

Meanwhile, living ‘between the times’ empowers the church to give the state its intercession. “Far from being an object of worship,” says Barth, “the State and it representatives need prayer on their behalf” (136). Christians should pray for their political authorities, pay their taxes, and obey the civil laws, not only because they respect their civil authority, but also to remind themselves that the church is not the sole human authority. As an agent of intercession, the church’s authority resides in its “priestly duty,” whether the state is just or unjust, whether it’s free to preach the gospel or suffers persecution. The state deserves to be respected because it too falls under God’s authority. So even though the state’s power turns from “protection” to “suppression,” the church will continue to grant the state power as guardian of the law and the common good. Nonetheless, the church must not be naïve about the power of the state. “[T]hus there is clearly no cause for the Church to act as though it lived, in relation to the State, in a night in which all cats are grey” (119). The fact remains there are ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ states, and Christians must act responsibly in each of these situations. For Christians, says Barth, the “fulfillment of political duty means rather responsible choices of authority, responsible decision about the validity of laws, responsible care for their maintenance, in a word, political action, which may also mean political struggle” (144). Being responsible to the state implies that Christians respond in moral judgment and action to the actions of their state without seeking to be the state. Indeed, this is why the church needs the state because it reminds itself that it is the church—not the state.

It follows that the best way for the state to serve the church is not to give it power but its freedom, that is, allow the church to be the church. The church’s only task is to be the church, but in this role, it also “expects the best” from the state (140). Indeed, through its work, prayer, and struggle, the church seeks to establish a “just state” (Rechtsstadt) that seeks to create and maintain an earthly peace and justice. What the church offers the state is what it also desires from the state, namely, “nothing but freedom” (148).

Wherever this right [freedom] is recognized, and wherever a true Church makes the right use of it (and the free preaching of justification will see to it that things fall into their true place), there we shall find a legitimate human authority and an equally legitimate human independence; tyranny on the one hand, and anarchy on the other. Fascism and Bolshevism alike will be dethroned; and the true order of human affairs—the justice, wisdom and peace, equity and care for human welfare which are necessary to that true order—will arise. (147–48)

The freedom of the state depends upon the church being the church, for without this witness, the state remains clueless to its true mission. As a witness to the Kingdom, the church enlightens the state of its true calling, a “just state” (Rechtsstadt) whose purpose is to seek peace and justice. The demonic quality of the “unjust state,” in contrast, denies the church’s witness, and demands its citizens to worship or ‘love’ the state as they would God or to demand that its citizens believe a specific “philosophy of life” (weltanschauung) or ideology propagated by the state. Because of its commitment to the Word of God, the church cannot give its “unquestioning assent to the will and action of the State,” since this would replace its commitment to the Word. “For the possibility of intercession for the State stands or falls within the freedom of God’s Word” (139). Yet even in this case, the church can never be the enemy of the state by refusing to resist, when the state deviates from its task of creating and administering justice. The state is honored by the church’s criticism because it helps save the state from its own misuse of power; in resisting the “unjust state” the church is being responsible to the state and God’s rule over the state. “All this will be done, not against the state, but as the church’s service for the state! Respect for the authority of the state is indeed an annex to the priestly function of the church toward the state” (138–39). In its resistance, the church should never seek to become the state, or replace the state with a powerful church. When the church seeks to be the state, it becomes an “idolatrous church”, and when the state seeks to be the church it becomes an idolatrous “clerical State” (132). The church, in its essence, is not an activist or political church; in doing so, it ceases being a witnessing church and replaces its task of preaching, teaching, and administering the sacraments with the temptation of political power. In bearing witness to God’s justification of the sinner and the state, and acting in justice, the church remains committed to its true political task.

The third and most important essay is Barth’s 1946 essay, “The Christian Community and the Civil Community.” The most obvious difference from the earlier writings is that the main categories of Church (Kirke) and State (Stadt) have changed to Christian community (Christengemeinde) and civil community (Bürgergemeinde). As Yoder points out, this document stands as one of earliest testaments to how the church and state ought to interact in a post-Christendom world.62 Instead of beginning with “institutions and offices,” Barth begins with communities of persons gathered “together in corporate bodies in the service of common tasks” (150). The Christengemeinde, the ecclesia, becomes most apparent in the gathered community, of Christians “in one place, region, or country” through the Holy Spirit and who seek to hear and obey the Word of God. The Bürgergemeinde, in contrast, is the “commonality of all the people in one place, region, or country insofar as they belong together under a constitutional system of government that is equally valid for and binding on them all, and which is defended and maintained by force” (150). The kingdom of God remains the center of two concentric circles, of which the Christian community is the “inner circle” and the civil community is the “outer circle.” Therefore, both “a simple and absolute equating” and “a simple and absolute heterogeneity” between church and state remain impossible options. Instead, “the existence of the State [is] an allegory, an analogue to the Kingdom of God which the Church preaches and believes in” (169). Barth’s breakthrough emerges in how these two dynamic communities remain distinct yet interdependent with each other in relation to their larger place within the Kingdom of God.

There is a differentiated hierarchy and unity of the two communities. The church is the inner circle because in hearing and obeying God’s revelation it bears witness to the Word. The state is the outer circle because it often hears and obeys other words, most often found in social and cultural identity (natural law). It is the church’s proximity to the Word that differentiates it from the state. The state is easily corrupted by selfish viewpoints and becomes “ignorant” and “pagan.” “All it can do is grope around and experiment with the convictions which it derives from natural law, never certain whether it may not in the end be an illusion to rely on it as the final authority and therefore always making vigorous use, openly or secretly, of a more or less refined positivism” (164). Still, both state and church exist in a ‘not yet redeemed’ world. The church, too, becomes entrapped in its own misconceptions, ignorance, and forms of paganism. Although the state, as outer circle, is further removed from the realities of the kingdom, the church, as the inner circle, is also a political organization that often fails to perceive itself for what it really is, namely a free church committed solely to the rule of God through Jesus Christ. Both church and state are in a condition of sin and grace; both are corruptible institutions that are, in the eschatological sense, fully redeemed. Yet until the kingdom is fully realized, the church and state (and society) remain in invariably in tension. Although, he clearly states the church, in its witness, should be a ‘nonconformist’ community, and ought not to look to the world for its own identity and vision, but neither should it only look to itself apart from its relation to the outer circle. “The real church must be the model prototype of the real State” (186). This is not because he idealizes the church, but because only the church remains committed to prioritizing the Word of God over the secular ideologies, myths, and philosophies that degenerate God’s name in the world, thus providing a clear witness to the purpose of the state as the outer circle of the kingdom.

Like Rechtfertigung und Recht, Barth argues that the state serves the church by giving it freedom to witness, but by proposing an allegorical or analogical relationship between these two communities, he finds more specific ways to link them together. Avoiding both the demonic and divine temptations, the “just state” (Rechtsstadt), even in its true secularity, seeks to safeguard “both the external, relative, and provisional freedom of the individuals and the external and relative peace of their community” (150). The constitutional democratic state, as guardian, is preserved through its agencies or “forms,” namely “legislation” or the making of laws; the “government and administration” which applies the legislation; and the “administration of justice” which practically applies these laws to particular cases of apparent injustice (150). This threefold system, Barth admits, is most consistent with constitutional democracy and the just state. Politically speaking, he admits “that the Christian line that emerges from the Gospel betrays a striking tendency to the side of what is generally called the democratic state” (181). Nonetheless, although democracy is preferred, there is nothing sacrosanct about its governmental form, as it is possible for even a just state to incorporate any governmental political system from monarchy, aristocracy, and even dictatorship. Still, without the safeguard of a balance of power legally sanctioned within a constitution, it is much easier for these autocratic systems to become a totalitarian state (Totalstaat). There is nothing that presumes that a democracy will always seek order over chaos, justice over injustice, and peace over violent conflict. Yet, it is naïve to assume that all government systems are the same, and they all reflect the purposes of the “just constitutional state” (Rechsstaat).

Therefore, Barth repeats earlier themes when he insists that governmental systems are part of God’s providential plan, in that they preserve order, peace, and justice within the human community by protecting it from various forms of social disorder, violence, and injustice. The threat of political coercion provides the justification for benevolent use of political power and the establishment of civil law within a particular community. The task of the just state should seek to balance the power of individual rights and responsibilities with community rights and responsibilities. The power of the state should not be concentrated either in individualism or collectivism; Barth dialectically opposes the extremes of anarchy and individualism on one hand, and totalitarian and collectivism on the other, because they both deny the ‘law’ that both limits and establishes human freedom. This “two-fold law,” of limiting and establishing, of “no exemption from and full protection by the law,” is what makes a constitutional state just and legitimate and preferable to other forms of political government (172). A constitutional state grounds its authority, not in arbitrary judgments or whimsical power plays, but seeks to base its authority on principles of justice that transcend mere social convention. As a moral realist, Barth assumes that once the state seeks to ground its civil law in the moral law, it seeks to obey the command of God, even though it may not completely understand this command, as a gracious command. For this knowledge, it must seek to rely upon the witness of the Christian community. So even though the state is ignorant of its true center and calling, it desperately needs the church to remind it of its true purposes, functions, and goals. The church stands as a humane reminder that the task of the state is to preserve and defend human freedom, hope, and justice.

However much human error and human tyranny may be involved in it, the State is not a product of sin but one of the constants of the divine Providence and government of the world in its action against human sin: it is there an instrument of divine grace. The civil community shares both a common origin and a common center with the Christian community.… Its existence is not separate from the Kingdom of Jesus Christ; its foundations and its influence are not autonomous. It is outside the Church but not outside the range of Christ’s domination—it is an exponent of His kingdom.… [This] makes one thing quite impossible, however: a Christian decision to be indifferent; a non-political Christianity. The Church can in no case be indifferent or neutral towards this manifestation of an order so clearly related to its own mission. Such indifference would be equivalent to the opposition of which it is said in Romans 13:2 that it is a rebellion against the ordinance of God—and rebels secure their own condemnation. (156–57)

The church stands neither absolutely against the state, nor does it stand always uncritically for the state, but its stands dialectically with the state. The state is genuinely secular, and for it to be otherwise would be to deny its distinction from the church. Since the church encourages the state to be the state in all its secularity, there can be no such thing as a Christian state or Christian political party. The church cannot promote a particular form of government or party to the exclusion of others, without seeking to be itself the state. In fact, the church cannot speak for the state at all, but only individual Christians can speak anonymously for the state. Nevertheless, the church community still remains “the model and prototype of the real state” by serving as “a source of renewal for the state and the power by which the state is preserved.” Indeed the “church can in no case be indifferent or neutral towards this manifestation of an order so clearly related to its mission” (157). As members of the inner circle, Christians “are also automatically members of the wider circle. They cannot halt at the boundary where the inner in our circles meet, though the work of faith, love and hope which they are under orders to perform will assume different forms on either side of the boundary” (158–59). Simply put, it is not possible for the church to be indifferent to the political order because the state’s power is explicitly intertwined with the mission of the church. In this way, the church always remains part of the order of creation just as the state remains part of the order of redemption.

Whereas Barth uses the language of “intercession” in Rechtfertigung und Recht, here he reverts back to Barmen’s language of “reminder.” The church reminds the state of its true purpose, which is to bring honor to God. Although Barth continues the line of thinking established earlier, calling for the ‘priestly role’ of the church, he places a greater activist responsibly upon the church in calling the state to a particular political direction. The church continues to be the church through its intercessory role of being a witness to the gospel, praying and working for the good of the state, making distinctions between just and unjust governments, and declaring firmly that the state falls under God’s rule. However, by “reminding” the state of its function, purpose, and hope, the church becomes more aware of its own political task. Through its own moral deliberation, the church “will choose and desire whichever seems to be the better political system in any particular situation, and in accordance with this choice and desire it will offer its support here and its resistance there.” “It is in the making of such distinctions, judgments, and choices from its own centre, and in the practical decision which necessarily flows from that centre, Barth continues, that the Christian community expresses its ‘subordination’ to the civil community and fulfills its share of political responsibility” (162–63).

In his most concrete example of this analogous relationship between the inner circle and the outer circle, Barth develops twelve analogies between the two communities. The cornerstone of these analogies is the one Barth mentions first, namely because of the incarnation in which God stands with humanity, so too the civil community should defend the dignity and rights of humanity before serving any cause that apparently serves humanity. Humanity should not serve causes, but “causes have to serve man” (172). On this point hangs all the other analogies. Just as church gives witness to God’s gracious justification, so too the civil community, along with the church, will support governments, most clearly embodied in constitutional democracies, of impartial justice. Just as Christ came to the poor and lost, so too the church should support civil governments that seek to address the needs of the poor. Just as God gives freedom to the church and state through God’s gracious covenant, so too the church should reject totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Just as the church is primarily a responsible community of individuals, so too the church should reject radical political individualism and collectivism. Just as the equality of Christians is established in baptism, so too it provides the basis for a political doctrine of equality of all its citizens. Just as the multiplicity of spiritual gifts within the church provide the basis for diversity, so too it provides for an understanding separation of powers in government. Just as the Word of God should be freely proclaimed in the church, so too the state should also forbid secrecy that undermines the freedom of its citizens, including freedom of speech. Just as the church, as a collective body, serves individuals within the church, so too the civil community, as a collective body, serves its citizens. Just as the church is diverse yet one, so too the civil community should relativize its boundaries and be inclusive of difference. Just as God is both a God of judgment and mercy, so too the church reminds the state that it may, as an act of last resort, engage in violence as the way to maximize peace—which remains the final word; only the state, not the church, may use force to bring about peace and justice.

Therefore, moving beyond his earlier writings, Barth argues that the state is not only a guardian but also a witness to the kingdom of God. It is true that the Christian community has no specific political “idea, system, or progamme” to give to the state as the divine form of government, but by way of reminder, it does offer a clear “direction and a line” of thinking that can be recognized and acknowledged as criterion of a ‘just state.’ From these analogies it is clear that Barth did not see all government systems in the same way. Not all cats are grey! Therefore, he concluded that “on the whole toward the form of State, which, if not actually realized in the so-called democracies, is at any rate more or less honestly clearly intended and desired” (182). In its freedom to obey the Word of God, “the Church makes itself responsible for the shape and reality of the civil community” by reminding the state of its own self-limitations, but also seeking to develop the most humane form of political organization possible. The Christian community must never seek to be a ‘state-church’, thus, seeking its own privileges or respect—as a right—in relation to the state. The church never serves Christian causes but human causes. If the church finds that it has such privileges, it risks losing its freedom to “be the Church all the more,” which draws it back to its central commitment to the Word of God. The church’s politics is not to better itself but humanity as a whole. “If the church takes up its share of political responsibility, it must mean that it is taking that human initiative which the State cannot take; it is giving the state the impulse which it cannot give itself; it is reminding the state of those things of which it is unable to remind itself” (170). Because of its witness to the kingdom the church of stands for the welfare of human beings, not abstract causes or universalist ideas however noble and good. The “Church will always and in all circumstances be interested primarily in human beings and not some abstract cause” (171). Yet in serving humanity the church supports policies that promote what’s beneficial for humanity. These include: a constitutional democracy; social and economic justice to the week and threatened; basic human rights guaranteed by the state; political equality and equal protection of all citizens under law; and the right of self-determination or the right to have freedom to engage the institutional life of society through the family, education, art, science, religion, and culture. By affirming these, the church bears witness to the state about God’s purpose for humanity. Only when the state becomes committed to the human good, and not some particular cause or ideology, can it begin to resemble a “just state” (Rechtsstadt).

Barth’s Later Writings and Current Discussion

In the 1950s, in the aftermath of World War II, Barth began reexamining the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline accounts of the “principalities and powers.”63 This theme, present from his earliest writings, became a larger theme in his uncompleted ‘ethics of reconciliation,’ which was published as The Christian Life.64 Barth’s task of biblical interpretation does not begin by demythologizing the text in order to make it relevant to a modern audience, but instead uses the biblical narrative to demythologize the various modern hegemonies that repress human freedom. No one was more aware of the multiple faces of hegemony than Barth, who struggled to provide a theological account of the reality of events from World War I to the Cold War. Barth’s Yes to human freedom and No to absolutism rightly situate him as both a “theologian of freedom” and a theologian “against hegemony.”65 These “pseudo-objective” powers threaten human life, always seeking to become hegemonic and determinative of humanity’s future; they are not intrinsically hegemonic, but act ‘as if’ they are because humanity, corrupted by its estrangement from God, infuses them with hegemonic power. In light of God’s ‘objective reality’, they have only a “limited and relative power” because they have been defeated and “dedemonized” by Jesus Christ (215). It is the ignorance of the powers, both in their existence and falleness, which serves as its greatest potential threat to humanity, because even if people are able to name the powers, they may not seek God’s deliverance from their power. In contrast, Christians are to bear witness to the fallenness of the powers by limiting and resisting their influence in the world. In their actions, Christians must be tentative and cautious, while at the same time purposeful and resolute; they must be cautious about making absolute judgments about right principles or courses of action ‘against’ these powers. Resistance against the powers, therefore, is fashioned primarily by the task of Christian discipleship and witness and not by one’s confident dislike for the powers.66 Standing against the powers also means positively standing for God’s cause and good purpose in the world.

The power of political absolutism Barth calls “Leviathan.” The New Testament writers were not naïve about the “political absolutisms” that “work behind and above the attitudes and acts of the great and little potentates, the highly diversified governments of the day” (219). Like them, Barth argues theological politics should not be preoccupied with political theory as such, but the “question of the demonic which is visibly at work in all politics” (219). “The demonism of politics consists in the idea of ‘empire,’ which is always inhuman as such. This can be a monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, nationalistic, or socialistic, idea” (220). ‘Empire’ changes the normal or “just state” into the “marginal” or immoral state. Instead of the state serving humanity and the world, it forces humanity (and the world) to serve its own disastrous ends. Political authority, if it is to be just and right (Recht), must integrate power and the moral law, which are both grounded in a moral ontology that ultimately depends upon God’s revelation of grace in Jesus Christ. Thus, when persons reject God’s authority and say No to God’s established objective order of redemption and place themselves as masters of the political realm, the “demonic” in politics emerges within human society (219). There is a fine line between the dialectical polarity between the demonic’ state that denies God and the divine state that places itself above God. Both are driven by the “myth of the state” as an “earthly God”, as found in the “mythical language” of the “Beast from the abyss” in Revelation 13:1–8. Barth admits that the temptation of Leviathan, the love of power and empire, remains a temptation for any society, at any time, under any system of government.67 With the Nazi experience fresh in his mind, Barth sees Leviathan’s message of Yes and No, of attraction and oppression, as linked with the implementation of a “program and structure” that promises freedom to its adherents and cruelty to its enemies. Thus, the power of Leviathan is not principally located in an evil tyrant or group of tyrants, but a totalitarian system or program, in which all dissenting or alternative voices are eliminated; the state, in all its power, becomes totalitarian, that is, the ‘total’ or ‘end’ of society. Any nation, with the power available, is susceptible to the temptation to replace the “might of right” with the “right of might” (221). Indeed, Barth warns that any state, including the democratic states of Western Europe and the United States, are not “immune to the tendency to become at least a little Leviathan” (221).

So, how is a Christian to resist the power of Leviathan and act responsibly in the world? Although Barth never finished his ethics of reconciliation, in which he was to give his final word about his theological politics, he did leave us with some important trajectories of thought. The Christian revolt against the ‘powers’ implies an active “struggling for righteousness”, a struggling for peace, hope, and freedom (205). In themes that go back to his early writings, Barth’s eschatologically-guided theological politics neither identifies nor separates human action and the kingdom of God, but places it ‘along side’ the kingdom; it refuses to privilege the “already” over the “not yet,” or the “not yet” over the “already” (266). Christian responsibility is “kingdom like” in that it stands for the good and against evil, but without absolutizing any particular moral strategy, because to do so fosters the risk of replacing one potential hegemony with another. Barth writes:

In this field there can be no absolute Yes or No carrying an absolute commitment. One reason for this is that an absolute guarantee of human right and worth cannot be expected from the rule of any idea or the power of any life-form. From one standpoint or another, every idea or life-form will sooner or later prove a threat to man. Hence Christians looking always to the only problem that seriously and finally interests them, must allow themselves the liberty in certain circumstances of saying only a partial Yes or No where a total one is expected, or of saying Yes today where they said No yesterday, and visa versa. Their totally definitive decision is for man and not for any cause. They will never let themselves be addressed as prisoners of their own decisions or slaves of any sacrosanct consistency. (268)

Christian political ethics must remain ‘confident yet cautious’ of its task in the world. Christians must remain confident in resisting the power of Leviathan and standing with the victimized, but they must also be cautious about making absolute judgments or actions of either for or against or Yes or No. In a nice summation, Barth dialectically argues that the Christian action of “Yes and No in this sphere can always be only a relative Yes and No, supremely because if it were more they would be affirming and acknowledging the existence of those absolute or lordless powers, canonizing their deification, and instead of resisting the true and most dangerous enemies of man and his right, life, and work, offering them the most hazardous and fateful help” (268). Even though God invites Christians to act decisively, purposively, and confidently today against powers, that distorts God’s name in the world, by seeking to embody a “little righteousness,” these same Christians must move cautiously between declaring an absolute Yes and No, or for and against anything that is potentially hegemonic. Christian witness remains dialectical and aporetic, and it can easily degenerate into hegemonic personal or communal commitments, which become “absolute principles” instead of “theses” or reasoned arguments (268).

What then becomes the task of Christian moral responsibility in politics? In The Christian Life, Barth further argues that Christian moral responsibility emerges dialectically within the three relational spheres or “concentric circles” of the personal sphere or the relationship to others, the ecclesial sphere or relationship to the church, and the social sphere or one’s relationship to the world. In response to God’s gracious covenant, Christians remain responsible to listen and give witness to the Word of God in these three relational spheres by first invoking God’s action and presence within these spheres, and then seeking ways to be faithful witnesses within them. If the divine-human dialectic provides the theory for moral responsibility, then the individual-church-world dialectic provides the arena of action in which responsible behavior takes place.

Most important for his theological politics is his discussion of the church. In The Christian Life, Barth draws on an earlier distinction he made in Church Dogmatics 4/2 of the ‘secular church’ of “alienation” and the ‘sacral church’ of “glorification.”68 In this latter work he calls the first pole, the “church in defect” and the second the “church of excess.” These two poles, of course, are but two sides of the same coin as they both seek the “self-preservation” of the church. The first pole is a ‘secularized church’ that fails to distinguish itself from the various ideologies of the world. Barth rejects the “church in defect” or the ‘secular church’ because it too easily accommodates itself to the surrounding culture with little critical distance. Unlike the accommodationist church, which denies the importance of God’s Word, the “church of excess” remains supremely overconfident and arrogant of its knowledge of God. As a “holy church” it equates its own “form and action,” its traditions and practices, with that of the Word of God. “It speaks his truth; it extends or denies his grace; it proclaims his law” (137). As an “introverted church” it is more preoccupied with itself than with the “Living Lord” that it serves; “it is primarily interested in itself, and in its Lord only for its own sake” (136). Moreover, as an “infallible church” it is supremely zealous to ‘be the church’, but it often becomes misguided and confused of its own mission and purpose. In doing so, it obscures the Word of God and denies God’s freedom to both reconcile and pronounce judgment on the church. “How can God be confessed,” asks Barth, “when his Word is not free but bound” and “when ostensibly to greater glory of God it is bound to the church?’ ” (137). In short, the ‘church in excess’ is a “presumptuous church which exalts and puffs itself up” (136).

Moreover, like the ‘secular church, the second ‘holy church avoids listening and bearing witness to the Word by replacing it with some other word, but unlike the first extreme, this church prioritizes itself and its ‘religion’ over the world and the individual person. It too sees the growing secularization of the world, but tries to overcome the tension between the church and world by triumphing over the world. This church seeks to remove itself from the world by isolating itself from the needs and voices of others; it seeks its own “self-preservation.” More dramatically, it even becomes resentful and antagonistic toward the secular other. By overvaluing the church it undervalues the individual person and the world. Indeed, by obscuring the Word of God with ‘church-speak’ it invariably distorts its relation to outsiders and the world, by denying that the World of God may speak there as well in its “secular parables.” It too, in the end, fails to “give precedence to the Word” and instead gives precedence to the church. Instead of saying No to non-Christian viewpoints, therefore, Barth advises Christians to “listen to all other ethics insofar as it has to receive from them at every point the material for its own deliberations. To that extent its attitude to every other ethics is not negative but comprehensive.”69 When Christian moral discourse loses its comprehensiveness and becomes esoteric, it becomes parochial and isolated from other voices in the world at large. “Why should it not be possible for God to raise up witnesses from this world of tarnished untruth,” Barth asks, “so that true words are uttered and heard even where it might seem that at very best no more than crude or refined deception may be expected?”70 When Christians prohibit listening to the Word in and through the voice of the other in “secular parables”, they refuse to allow the Word of God to “illumine, accentuate, or explain the biblical witness in a particular time and situation.”71