Community, State, and Church. Karl Barth

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.