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 duties “without illusions.” God uses the state to protect the innocent from injustice and to punish evildoers. Yet, since the state belongs to the ‘old aeon’, Christian duties to the state should never be seen as intrinsically “Christian duties”; Christians must never combine “throne and alter,” nor should they preach “Christians patriotism” (520). Even though his sympathies lie more with the political left and revolutionary politics than with the political right and conservative reactionary politics, Barth’s core argument is a politics that is free from all ideology.
Barth’s ideological critique, as mentioned earlier, continues in his Tambach lecture and Der Römerbrief (2nd edition). In Tambach, he argues that Christian responsibility begins not with some abstract conception of the good, understood as an Enlightenment universal standpoint of “perfect criticism,” or in the absoluteness of Christian social activism, as is the case in Religious Socialism.42 Christians should neither simply accept the current social order or the status quo (“perfect naiveté”), nor accepting the false belief that God’s kingdom is realizable through ethical action (“perfect criticism”) or revolutionary protest (320). Resistance against the powers, including political power, rejects the options of complacency, utopianism, or anarchy! In Romans II, he more persuasively grounds his eschatology and Christology, and develops for the first time an ‘ethic of witness’ that depends upon responding to God’s divine command in Jesus Christ.43 God’s grace as judgment stands in contrast to any scheme or theory of modern anthropocentric ethics, or in Barth’s more expressive language: “Grace is the axe laid at the root of the good conscience.”44 This leads Barth to be critical of both the conservative politics but also the “Titianism” of revolutionary politics, both of the political right and left.45
Therefore, the No of judgment is answered dialectically with the Yes of God’s movement of grace, which leads to positive ethics of political responsibility. In Tambach, he admonishes his Religious Socialist audience to not abandon the world to itself, where it is “ruled by its own logos” and “its own hypostases and powers” (280). Instead, Christian action must be guided by “an affirmation of the world as it is” (298). “Only out of such an affirmation can come that genuine, radical denial which is manifestly the meaning of our movements of protest” (299). Human action remains only parabolic of divine action, and in no way is divine action, but it is still parabolic of its “heavenly analogue.” Likewise, in Romans II, Barth distinguishes between “primary” and “secondary” ethical action, with the first being a response to God in worship, and the second a response toward our neighbor and community.46 It is worship and prayer as “primary” ethical activities that provide the basis for other human “secondary” actions.47 Positively speaking, “secondary” ethical action consists of love of neighbor, and, negatively speaking, any strict identification of God’s command and human causes, whether political, economic, or social-cultural.
Only later in the decade, in his 1928–31 ethics lectures at Münster and Bonn, do we see the true emergence of the positive command ethics of the Word of God.48 We are reminded that after Göttingen, Barth took positions in Münster in 1925 and Bonn in 1930 and remained in Germany until 1935, when he returned to Switzerland. Nevertheless, the 1920s was a significant period of development in Barth’s theology, and this can be seen in his Ethics, which John Webster says is a “strikingly anti-modern text.” “In its own way,” adds Webster, “it is as subversive of some of the axioms of modernity as is the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.”49 Barth’s theological ethics most basically is a ‘Trinitarian ethics of witness’ that lies “in the reality of God’s commanding, of God’s Word so far as it claims us men and finds our faith and obedience” (35).50 True freedom is the freedom for obedience, and true obedience is freedom for the other, and, by implication, the various communities and institutions of society.51 As God’s “emergency orders,” the church and state “both presuppose sin, and they thus embody God’s order as his contracting of sin and its reality as grace and law” (243–44). Like Calvin, who saw the state as an ‘external means of grace’ Barth says the state
is the sign, set up by God’s revelation, of the concrete and visible order of life by which and in which, on the basis of accomplished reconciliation, we are summoned to serve our neighbor. This order, too, is effective in the free act of God’s grace and, under the presupposition of this act, but only under it, is both a divine institution and a divine willed human society … It, too, is a sign of mediated fellowship between God and man. It, too, once was not and one day will not be, so that it belongs with the church to the time between the times, to the kingdom of grace. (445)
At first glance, Barth appears to be more of a social conservative in Ethics than in his earlier writings and in what he would write after Word War II. Yet the main trajectory of his thought remains the same, as calls for practical responsible action within the state. The church’s primary task is to be a witness to the Word of God, and remind the state of its need for repentance and its purpose of promoting justice and peace.52 The Christian stance is one of responsible management and reform of the state. Because the mission of the state is to provide for the welfare of the entire society it, and its best form, has the form of the constitutional democracy, balance of power between legislative executive and judicial powers, although in general “the power of the state comes from the people” (449). In Ethics we see, really for the first time, a synthesis between Barth’s theological politics and practical political action within democratic society; a Christian witness to the state and the state’s witness to the world. Barth’s more positive theological politics is largely the success of his theological ethics as a whole. Responsible political action emerges in response to God’s divine command; God’s action provides the basis for human responsive action. The horizontal substance of God’s command, in our relations to others, depends on its vertical substance. God brings freedom to the conscience and the moral life in and through our obedience and responsibility to the Word. Christian ethics is not conformity to some posited value or standard of excellence but responsible actions of “witness,” says Barth, one that depends upon the relational action of God toward humanity. What is fundamental to the human subject is not her moral consciousness, but her relationship to God’s Word.
The fourth and fifth themes explore, in more detail, the Barmen Declaration and Barth’s critique of ‘natural theology’, which, in his view, was the underlying theological heresy of the German Christians and their apology for the Nazification of the church. Thus, it is rather shortsighted to speak about Barmen without talking about Barth’s Nein to natural theology and the role that both of these play in the three essays in this volume. As stated earlier, Barth was the principal author of the 1934 Declaration of the Confessing Church at Barmen. This document includes six succinct paragraphs: 1) the church must hear and obey the one Word of God (Jesus Christ) and no other voice, person, events, powers, or sources of truth as God’s revelation; 2) Jesus Christ claims our whole life, and rejects the idea that other “lords” rule over other areas of our lives; 3) the church, too, must not be forced to have its message altered by prevailing social ideologies or political convictions;
