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INTRODUCTION

IN CONNECTION with a visit to Switzerland in September and October, 1942, it was my good fortune to become acquainted with Karl Barth. I first saw him in Liestal, when he was in the uniform of a captain in the Swiss Army, completing a period of active military service. The next day, while sitting at tea with him in Basle—only a few miles from Nazi fortifications—in the home of Pastor A. Koechlin, President of the Swiss Church Federation, I discovered that the Swiss theologian was intensely interested in knowing what American. Christians were thinking about the international situation. When the conversation turned to his own convictions about the war, and particularly to views which he had expressed in a letter to British Christians published a year earlier, I suggested that he write a letter of similar character to Christians of the United States.

Dr. Barth’s first reaction to the suggestion was decidedly negative. He feared that he would appear intrusive and presumptuous if, never having been in America, he should undertake to give advice to American Christians. He also felt that he had too little knowledge both of America and of American Christianity to be able to say anything of value or even of interest to us. Ten days later, however, when we were both in Geneva as guests of W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, General Secretary of the Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches, I reopened the question. Dr. ’t Hooft reinforced my plea that a friendly communication from Dr. Barth to American Christians would help to build up ecumenical understanding. We urged that Dr. Barth’s great service to the entire Church by his prophetic and courageous opposition to National Socialism in its earlier days had placed all Christians in his debt and meant that his words would receive an eager welcome. He finally agreed that if I would formulate certain questions in which American Christians are especially interested he would answer them frankly.

The reader should bear in mind that the Letter to American Christians is only a partial exposition of Dr. Barth’s views. It is the latest in a series of similar letters addressed to Christians in several countries. In 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, he wrote to the Czech Christians, praising their resistance and declaring that in fighting for the “righteous state” they were also indirectly fighting for the Church of Christ. In 1939 he wrote a Letter to the French Protestants, shortly before the collapse of the Republic. In 1940 he wrote again to the French Protestants, while they were in an agony of suffering after the Nazi triumph. A letter to the British Christians was penned in April, 1941, after the repulse of the attempted Nazi invasion. The French and the British letters have been published under the title “This Christian Cause.”

Each of these letters, including the American, is an ad hoc document, addressed to a particular group of Christians in particular historical circumstances. A more formal and systematic interpretation of Dr. Barth’s position vis à vis the war is given in his little book, “The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day.” In it he sets forth his conception of both the State and the Church. Over against this he interprets National Socialism as at once “the radical dissolution of the just State” and also a pseudo-religious institution of salvation “fundamentally hostile to Christianity.”

Dr. Barth’s service in exposing the anti-Christian character of National Socialism is too little known in America. It was his teaching in Germany in the decade before Hitler’s rise to power that paved the way for the resistance that took form in the Confessional Church. The Confessional Church was not a new Church but a group within the German Church that “confessed” with fresh insight and devotion, relevant to the immediate political situation, the historic statements of faith associated with the Reformation. In 1934, the year after Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany, a conference of the Confessional group, held at Barmen, drew up the short declaration of six points which became a great rallying-ground for opposition to Nazism in the Church. Dr. Barth was more responsible than any other person for the Barmen declaration. Its keynote is that “Jesus Christ, as He is witnessed to in the Scriptures, is the Word of God which we have to hear, which we have to trust and give heed to.” This was the theological basis for rejecting the Nazi “revelations” of blood and soil and denying that a Christian’s final loyalty could be given to an earthly fuehrer.

The extent to which the heroic stand of Christians in Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Norway, Holland, and several other countries has been due to Karl Barth no one can estimate with confidence, but certainly his teaching and testimony were a most timely and potent force. The Nazis knew what they were doing when they forced him out of his university post in the year following the Barmen Synod and compelled him to seek refuge in his native Switzerland! Probably history will record that his influence was one of the great preservers of Christianity in Europe’s crisis.

Implicit in the Letter to American Christians are important theological assumptions. Perhaps it may be helpful if they are more explicitly indicated. At the risk of failing to do justice to Dr. Barth, I venture to give a very condensed summary of some of his convictions.

1. Jesus Christ is Lord of the whole creation, manifested as such in His resurrection, which is the evidence that all power has been given to Him in heaven and on earth. It is this ultimate Kingly authority of Jesus Christ—not any consideration derived from “natural law” or the value of personality or social ethics—which is the foundation-stone of Dr. Barth’s thinking about the relation of the Church and the Christian to National Socialism and the war.

2. The Lordship of Christ cannot be limited to what is sometimes called the “inner life.” His Kingly Rule extends not only over the Church but over the entire life of mankind, confronting the “principalities and powers of this world.” The realm of politics, therefore, is not exempt from His sway.

3. The sole function of the Church is to preach the Word of God and bear witness to the Lordship of Christ. This involves, of course, the definite confession of Him as “the One who has come to us as Son of God and Saviour and will come again”; it also involves “the actualizing of this confession in definite decisions” with reference to contemporary problems. In order to “actualize” her confession the Church must preach the Word of God, not in vacuo but in terms that are clearly relevant to men in the concrete historical circumstances in which they are placed. To bear faithful witness to Christ must bring the Church into a relationship to questions which are agitating both Christians and the world “here and now at the present moment.”

4. The State, as well as the Church, has its own important and indispensable place in the Divine economy. Part of the Lordship of Christ is exercised through the “righteous” (or “just”) State, whose function is to maintain order and justice as against the chaos and injustice to which man’s sinful nature makes him prone. The State would fail in its duty as “an appointed minister of God” if it failed to defend right against wrong—if necessary, by the use of force.

5. It is the duty of Christians to help establish and preserve the just State. National Socialism, it cannot be too strongly insisted, is a “fundamental dissolution of the just State.” The Church must therefore say “No” to it—a “No” as unequivocal as the “No” to any other flagrant evil, like alcoholism or prostitution. Faith in the sovereignty of Jesus Christ and assent to the sovereignty of National Socialism are mutually exclusive. Hence the Christian is doing the will of God in opposing the Nazi conquest.

This does not mean that Dr. Barth conceives the war against National Socialism either as a crusade or as a means of furthering the Kingdom of God. It is rather “a large-scale police measure” for repulsing nihilism and anarchism. As such, he holds, it is something which Christians who understand the nature of National Socialism, in contrast with the true nature of the State, must support.

The superficial impression, rather widely held in America, that Dr. Barth is unsocial and “other-worldly” in his conception of Christianity can hardly survive a careful perusal of his Letter to American Christians, or his other writings about the war.

Dr. Barth wrote his Letter of American Christians” in December, 1942. Due to difficulties in communication with Switzerland after the occupation of Southern France, the Letter was long delayed in reaching this country. It is possible that some of his views (for example, about the role of the Church after the war) might be somewhat modified if he were writing the Letter today.

The questions to which Dr. Barth addresses himself in the Letter to American Christians fall into two groups: first, those having to do with the proper function of the Church in relation to the war; second, those that deal with the responsibility of the Church in post-war reconstruction. The two subjects are here treated in separate chapters (II and III) although in his original manuscript they constituted a single document.

Chapter I, while of a different character, is closely related in spirit and outlook to the Letter to American Christians, and, like the Letter, was written especially for American readers. It is a careful review of the way in which the Protestant churches of Europe had met the crisis of National Socialism and the war up to the Fall of 1942. This statement is of front-rank historical importance and is also significant for its indirect disclosure of Dr. Barth’s judgments on the elements of strength and of weakness in the churches of Europe.

Most of Chapter I appeared in Foreign Affairs, January, 1943. Parts of Chapters II and III appeared in Christendom, Fall Issue, 1943. The courtesy of the editors of these two quarterly journals in permitting the reprinting of their articles is warmly appreciated.

SAMUEL MCCREA CAVERT