Community, State, and Church. Karl Barth
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