The content of paragraph five builds on his earlier discussion of the state in Ethics, but also moves beyond it in several important ways. Barth refuses to separate the state, as an ‘order of preservation’ (creation), from the church, as an ‘order of redemption’, and consequently places them into two separate functions and tasks. Instead, directed by divine authority, both church and state remain committed to peace and justice, in a world that is “not yet redeemed.” The state is not completely governed by autonomous devilish principles of power and force, and the church by merciful spiritual principles of love and hope. This false separation, in Barth’s view, leads to the ideology of non-interference of the church in state affairs and the state’s excessive use of force. This ‘two kingdoms’ theory, once grossly exaggerated, became an apologetic doctrine for the German Christians’ support for the Nazi regime. Instead, Barth argued that the state is distinct (although not separate) from the church. The church, in gratitude toward God, must not seek to undermine the state’s legitimate task in principle, but must draw attention or remind the state that God’s kingdom stands above the church and state; through its witness to the gospel, the church reminds the state of its proper task to be a responsible agent of peace and justice in the world.
Hence, once the positive relations of church and state are explained, the document rejects a totalitarian conception of the state. When the state becomes totalitarian it takes upon itself an idolatrous spiritual function, and further challenges the church to act politically against the state. In response, the state must resist the temptation to become the sole power in society, and the church must resist the temptation to control society through the methods and strategies of the state, thus becoming an “organ of the state.” It is important to remember that paragraph five does not stand on its own, but remains in concert with the other paragraphs, particularly paragraph one, which places both church and state under the “one Word of God.” This Christological basis for the state becomes more saliently expressed in his later political writings, but is also present in this document as well as earlier in his Ethics lectures.
How was Barmen received by the opponents of the Confessing Church? The German Christians never attempted to address the theological grounding of Barmen, but only its political ramifications. As implied earlier, the German Christian movement was not strongly theological, and except for a few theologians like Emmanuel Hirsch, did not attempt to speak theologically about politics. A more important theological reaction can be noticed at an academic conference that was held at Anbasch, a few weeks after Barmen, which included many of the more well-known theologians who did not belong to the Confessing Church. This so-called Anbasch Counsel denounced the Declaration as faulty theology because it failed to distinguish between the ‘two kingdoms’ and two principle loci of law and gospel, which invariably denied the existence of natural theology. Led by Lutherans like Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, the council affirmed that “God’s word speaks to us as law and gospel.” “The law,” they added, “binds us to the natural orders to which we are subject, such as family, folk, and race (i.e., blood relationship).”54 Indeed, regarding natural theology, Elert later wrote: “The proposition that apart from Christ no truth is to be acknowledged as God’s revelation is a rejection of the divine authority of the divine law beside that of the gospel.”55 Since Barmen did not address the longstanding debate between Lutherans and Reformed about the relationship of the law and the gospel, what worried Elert and Althaus is that Barth was implicitly placing the gospel before the law, by placing them both under the Word of God. This pattern of gospel-law stands in contrast to the traditional Evangelical pattern of law-gospel, which on one hand affirmed the theological legitimacy of the state and orders of society, and on the other kept the gospel ‘pure’ by limiting its use only to the church. From this viewpoint, Barmen reflected a kind of ‘anarchist theology’ that undermined the authority of social institutions established in God’s ordered creation. Yet, as we know, Barth was no anarchist but a democratic constitutionalist; in fact, he realized that the traditional law-gospel pattern was incapable of challenging the ideology of the German Christians, who identified the divine law with the human laws in society. Barth rightly surmised that this law-gospel pattern, once blended with a liberal naiveté, was the basis for the natural theology of the German Christians. A year later, in his essay “Gospel and Law,” he eventually worked out his position more clearly, but before that he was forced to write his famous Nein to natural theology.
This debate over natural theology peaked when Barth’s friend, and fellow Swiss Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner, published his pamphlet Nature and Grace in which he attacked Barth’s apparent unbending rejection of natural theology. Brunner and Barth had been debating the theological implications for the dialectic of law and gospel for several years, and what was the proper Reformed position. On one side, Brunner insisted that the law, as a ‘point of contact’, prepared the way for the gospel by reveling both an incipient knowledge of sin and God’s righteousness (including God’s judgment), and on the other, Barth claimed that such a point of contact effectively removed the priority of the gospel, a mistake found in the ‘two kingdoms’ theology of the German Christians, and before that, theological liberalism. For Barth, Nature and Grace completely undermined the first paragraph of Barmen, namely that “Jesus Christ is the one voice” in revelation. Why Barth so vehemently responded in his essay Nein!, published a few months after Barmen, was the fact that Brunner’s essay had won the praise of German Christian theologians like Hirsch and other mainstream confessionalists like Althaus and Elert. The fact that Brunner was Swiss Reformed and an outspoken critic of the German Christians made it more poignant, because being “closer to the truth” he was “much more dangerous.” Barth has seen others like his longtime friend Fredrich Gogarten become swayed by the ideology of the German Christians, which led to the demise of their journal Zwischen den Zeiten, and no doubt feared that many others in the Confessing Church would be swayed by Brunner’s argument in Nature and Grace.
Barth was sharply focused on arguments that would lead to an alternative or second source of revelation. The central error of natural theology is that it places humanity at the center of the universe, and claims to know God, apart from God’s own self-revelation. To argue that God speaks in history, nature, culture, or society apart from what God has spoken in Jesus Christ is to deny the true revelation of the Word of God. In so doing, it denies God’s freedom to act, and with it, God’s own nature, or in short, it denies God as God is known in revelation.56 The knowledge of God, for Barth, is always mediated through a sign or sacrament, which represents, indeed embodies, God’s truth. The principal sign or sacrament of God is the humanity of Jesus Christ. When theological ethics begins with nature or creation instead of the Word made flesh, it rejects the background picture (moral ontology) that God has revealed in history, and with it God’s freedom to act. This means, for example, that when Christians formulate a political theology from the doctrine of creation or natural law, they begin at the wrong place, and endanger themselves to inevitable 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