Community, State, and Church. Karl Barth

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