borrowings of non-theological viewpoints. Without the theological realism, discovered in God’s revelation of the Word, a Christian form of political ethics inevitably becomes a philosophy or a theology that may be inclusive of other ideological viewpoints, but ironically not the Word. What this means is that not only theology and ethics but political thought as well can be corrupted by a reliance upon natural theology. There are only a few small steps from natural theology to the German Christians, and the German Christians to the Nazis. Barth feared that this pattern toward theological, ecclesial, and political corruption could happen anywhere, including Western Europe and the United States, where a commitment to natural theology (and liberal theology) were dominant.
Three Essays: 1935–46
In the Fall of 1935, pastor Karl Immer of Barmen asked Barth to come to that city to deliver his address “Evangelium und Gesetz” (“Gospel and Law”) as a farewell address to Christians in Germany.57 Once Barth began his journey, he was stopped by the Gestapo and was forced to return to Switzerland. So, in instead of Barth, Immer publicly read the address to the overflowing church at Barmen, with the Gestapo present. This important document indicates on the surface that Barth was doing theology and “only theology,” yet the discussion of this document invariably had political overtones. It was a theological criticism of the German Christian falsifications of the law, and their justification for the Nazi’s ideology of family, folk, and race. Still, the least known of the three essays in this volume, it is more important as a theological rationale for the later more overtly political works.
Similar to the dialectical relationship of church and state, Barth argues law and gospel can be distinguished but not separated. The false separation of ethics from theology, human action from divine action, and human law from God’s law, all derive from the separation of law and gospel in modern theology and ethics. This separation, says Eberhard Busch, has led to an “emancipation of ethics from the gospel of grace.”58 In other words, because the law is not ‘formed’ by the gospel it remains formed by other non-Christian or non-theological moral frameworks such as philosophy or the natural and social sciences; secular ethics replaces the gospel of grace with the human moral law. When ethics becomes either autonomous or heteronomous it becomes reduced to duty or strict obedience to non-theological principles. In contrast, Barth argues the divine law comes to us in “the form of the gospel,” which permits persons the freedom and responsibility to act within this covenant relationship. Most basically, Christian ethics begins with God’s covenantal action and not in human autonomous decision-making. This continues the same line of thinking that goes back to the Romans period, and forward into his Church Dogmatics IV (Reconciliation), concerning the relationship of human and divine agency. In the humanity of Jesus Christ, human agency is restored, healed, and allowed to live in free response to God’s gracious command. Barth writes: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.”59
So what does it mean for the church to be responsible in its freedom? The “Church would not be the Church,” says Barth, if it would not become “visible and apprehensible also for the world, for state and society,” if it failed to obey the law in “its commands, its questions, its admonitions, and its accusations” (79). Indeed, he adds:
The Church would not be the Church if these aspects of the Law would not, as such, become the prophetic witness for the will of God against all of men’s sinful presumption, against all their lawlessness and unrighteous. Thus, we can certainly make the general and comprehensive statement that the Law is nothing else than the necessary form of the Gospel, whose content is grace. (79–80)
As the “form” and “content” of the Word of God, law and gospel are distinguished but not separated into “more and less, better and worse,” or “between divine and human or good and evil!” (81). The gospel takes “priority over the law” because it declares firmly what God has done for us in Jesus Christ; this is the ‘content’ of the gospel. In contrast, the law—as form of the gospel, tells us what we must do for God, but only in light of the content of the gospel, of God’s reconciliation of the sinner. Prayer, repentance, and forgiveness become the foundation of Christian moral action; Christian witness to the gospel leads to a free obedience of God’s commands as found in the Decalogue, for example. “Thus there can never be claims and demands which would have legal validity from another source or in themselves: there can only be witnesses” (83). Christian witnesses are primarily concerned not with the law, but with “the grace of God, which has accomplished everything for us and whose end must be this accomplishment” (83).
Once God’s law is stripped of its gracious content, its perverted form can be applied to the terms of civil law or social custom. The law cannot simply stand on its own, but has to be interpreted, or filled with a ‘particular content,’ which in the context of natural theology can take upon itself many social, cultural, or historical forms. In defining the gospel as the content of the word of God and the law as its form, he challenges the ideology of the German Christians. Therefore, when the German Christians argued that the gospel must be ‘contextualized’ or take a new ‘form’ in the “Volksnomoi (people’s laws)” of nation, race, and people, this not only changes the form of the law but the content of the gospel (91). Saying this, the movements of German nationalism, civil obedience and citizenship, and even ethnic and racial purity, can all be seen as a “deformation and distortion of the Law” (91). In this case the content of the law is deformed; the Word of God is replaced with some other word.
In summary, the dialectic of law and gospel remains a core issue within the Reformers, and a longstanding tension between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. By placing the gospel before the law, Barth reverses the usual understanding of how law and gospel interrelate. In traditional Evangelical dogmatics, the law (what God wills from us) in a sense prepares the heart for the gospel by declaring our sinfulness and need for God’s grace, or, in short, prepares us for salvation. In contrast, the gospel (what God wills for us), responds to the law’s preparation by releasing the repentant from sin’s bondage. By placing the gospel before the law, Barth argues that “[F]rom what God does for us, we infer what he wants with us and from us” (78).60 This leads him to criticize any other law other than the one that remains the ‘form’ of the gospel whose ‘content’ is grace. He writes,
If the Law is also God’s Word, if it is further grace that God’s Word is spoken aloud and become audible, and if grace means nothing else than Jesus Christ, then it is not only uncertain and dangerous but perverse to want to understand the Law of God on the basis of any other thing, of any other event different from the event in which the will of God, tearing in two the veil of our theories and interpretations, is visible as grace in both and content. (77)
Three years later, in 1938, Barth more resolutely shifted his theology into a more explicit political direction in Rechtfertigung und Recht (Justification and Justice), which later was translated with the title: “Church and State.” Barth’s purposes for this address were both theological and political. Most obviously, he was theologically attempting to find a positive link between God’s divine action of justification and human action of justice, but politically he was advocating a notion of responsible political action that would embolden Christians in Germany, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia against Nazi aggression.61 What should the human action of justice be in relation to God’s prior action of justification? In the past, inadequate connections between these two led to “pietistic sterility on one hand, and the sterility of the Enlightenment on the other” (105). The pietistic error leads to a preoccupation with one’s spiritual state and indifference to the concerns for human justice—and often a rather pessimistic view of the state, and the enlightenment error leads to a preoccupation with human justice (“secular gospel”) and indifference to God’s act of justification.
Looking for the “vital” and “positive” connection between the “two realms” of Christian community and the “principalities
