Community, State, and Church. Karl Barth

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