Karl Barth on Church and Politics: Is the Church at War? | Faith & Politics #10

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined by Dr. Ashish Varma. And today we are finishing up our series on Bart's letter to the United States. And we're on the third question here. And the third question is sort of like parts 3A through E. There are five questions embedded there. And then Bart sort of turns this around and he asks his own question. And so I'm going to read through the six A through B, the multi-part question that the folks who prompted him to write this letter gave him. And then I'm going to read Bart's response to them and how he is sort of framing the question back to them. And because I think the way he frames the question back to them really does shape the rest of his argument. So here was the third set of questions, we might say, in Barth's letter to the United States. What is the true function of the church and its ministers in relation to this war? Should church bodies and pastors actively support the prosecution of the war by preaching about the issues involved, by urging the membership of the churches to serve in the armed forces, to buy war bonds, etc.? Or should they confine their activities to the timeless spiritual ministries? What are the limits beyond which the church should not go in identifying itself with any political cause? And in what sense is it true that the church is not at war? So those are the questions that Barth was posed, and then he offers this question back as part of the letter, and he says this. Is the church clearly aware that its mission in every and therefore also in this time is solely— and this in the fullest sense of the concept, to preach the word of God to the mankind of today, according to the Holy Scripture. Really interesting set of questions here. And I think the way that Barth turns this, Ashish, he is gesturing toward how he's going to answer every single one of these questions that is posed in the third set of questions. It's a very Barthian move.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: It is a very Barty move, and perhaps it was frustrating to the people who read it, as it is to many people that hear Bart's way of thinking through things. But I think for us, it's pretty instructive, and it's a good climax to the sort of answers he's giving to the first two questions. You can see a building in his response question. Our mothers told us, don't answer a question with a question. But Jesus did it, and now Bart did it. you can see that building in this fullest sense of what he wants to say. And if we can encapsulate the first two questions in a way in which he's really trying to nail home this idea of the kingdom of God as the righteous state, and the kingdom of God as righteous state just cannot be identified identically with any state. The nature of what a nation state is is by definition different because it has a bound set, versus the kingdom of God is theoretically open to all, to all who are willing to enter. What might that mean now about a war, in this case, that's bound to the idea of the nation-state, when what he really wants to emphasize is the church belongs to something else. It belongs to this righteous state or this kingdom, you know, your kingdom come, your will be done sort of a thing. And I think this is the beauty of what Barth's doing, that he can answer questions, but he refuses to be trapped within the parameters of what those questions are assuming. So even when we talk about an American church, that is a real thing if what we mean by that is the church as it exists within the boundaries of the idea of the nation-state of the U.S. But you see hints in here of Barth saying, That sense of what the American church is, while historically real, is ultimately theologically trivial. Because what the church is, is bound by another allegiance to a different program, to a different operation within creation, that doesn't know the sorts of desires, expectations, agendas that the nation-state has. And I think that's what makes this interesting. a beautiful responding to a question with other questions and then working his way through that. What do you think about that? Can you hear me still?

00:04:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, he does something at the beginning of the next page. He says this, he says, you know, he's going to take the liberty of proposing another counter question. And he says, what is being done today in the church bodies, ministerial conferences, theological faculties, but above all in the studies of the individual pastors of all the dominations in the United States to the end that the church shall again be the church, understand itself as such and act accordingly. And so what we see here in Bard is very much that he's wanting to resituate the church as something unique and different. This resonates with what He was extremely influential in writing the Barman Declaration, if not the basically sole author of the Barman Declaration. And so you see that in the Barman Declaration as well, that Barth's concern is that the church act as the church, that it be something different and distinct from the state, from politics, from anything else, that it's answering to God as its authority. And I think your point about, you know, sort of the American churches, while we can speak of it in that way, I can remember when Stanley Hauerwas was named America's most influential theologian. He took pains to make the point he wanted to be most influential theologian in America. He wanted to make sure that America was the location, that he was not sort of prefixing himself as a theologian. And so he has a whole riff on that that he does. And I think Bart would resonate with that. I think what he's looking for is not an isolated church, a decontextualized church, but a church within a context. Not a church determined by that context, but a church that is determined by God and preaching to that context. And you see that come out in all the rest of the way that he answers each one of these questions. I mean, even just as he's addressing the first question about, you know, how the church should, you know, be thinking about the war, he prefaces it with, if the church is really preaching the word of God, then this will mean active support of the war effort insofar as it testifies with a clarity consistent with the word of God, that the carrying through of this stern police action against Hitler's nihilism is a necessary task of the righteous state. But that if-then construction, really does reroute this question. It takes it out of the position of politics. Hey, what do you think about Hitler's politics? Hey, what do you think about Great Britain? Hey, what do you think about the decision to get into World War II? This is not what he's talking about. What he's talking about is if the church is really preaching the word of God, then this consensus around the war is going to emerge and it's going to be recognized as an act of a righteous state. It's going to be recognized as commensurate with and in attunement with God's word. And he does that in the first few questions here, always coming back to the notion that God's word is the governing presence here and that the church is always acting in accordance with it. And that is the basic guidance that he gives to the church during this time in this back half of his letter.

00:08:24
Speaker 2: Okay, in light of this preamble that you and I have both attached to what Bart's doing here, right? With the questions posed to Bart, we have his brief answer to the questions before he says, here's what I really want to ask. And now we've got our preambles attached to them. So we've got a lot of material to wade through here. Maybe it's worth just jumping into what is it that he wants to say, right? What's behind this? His question, is the church really aware of what its task is to preach the word of God to mankind today according to the Holy Scriptures? Do we get that? And you can kind of sense a little bit of sarcasm under there, maybe a friendly sarcasm of, you wouldn't really ask this question if you got your ducks in a row. That's a strange saying, by the way, ducks in a row. If you get your ducks in a row and you have.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: A clear understanding of who you are, that your goal here is not to be a recruitment body, in some sense, for whatever the state's doing, even in a task like this one, where he's saying there needs to be, as we've already covered in the previous episodes, there needs to be a response to the Nazi regime and what Hitler's doing in leading them. But you get the sense that even though there needs to be a response on the national level, because of the way in which he understands the local, national, the nation-state, As itself, at best, an incomplete riff upon this larger reality of the righteous state, the kingdom of God. If you get who you are as the church, you know that your task is bigger than this. So of course that means speaking in a way that calls out the sort of stuff that we see as horrible, but one of the things you can kind of hear in the background that I think is sort of the friendly sarcasm is that if we're thinking about the church with regard to what its true mission is and the true state that it belongs to, then we can't help but see that the sort of thing that's present in the Nazi regime is the sort of thing that's present in every nation state, and it's present in every regime of the world. So you're not just simply saying, I back up what my state is doing in response to this. You're calling out evil, is the sort of idea that I'm getting from him here. And calling out evil means, of course, you're calling out, even if it's not in name, Hitler and the Nazis. But in the process of doing that, you're calling out the evil in your midst. And that could be on the national level, it could be on the local level. So you can sort of hear here that one of the things that we brought up in previous episodes on this topic is the quagmire that we find ourselves in with someone like Churchill, who does some terrible things. that some would argue, I'd probably be in that category, is every bit as horrible as the sort of thing Nazis were doing. So of course you stand up there, but the church's preaching should also, from what I'm understanding, what Bart's saying here, should also be calling out this sort of stuff, to the degree that they're aware of it, obviously, what Winston Churchill is doing. And then right down to the local level, there's sorts of things in our community that we can't lose sight of, where at the end of the day, that's where the church is embedded, not ultimately as an American church, but in the Hauerwasian sense, a church in America in specific places, in communities that have issues that continue to need to be contended with. Is that a fair reading of Barth here?

00:11:56
Speaker 1: I think so. And I think one of the concepts that I would draw out of all that you just said is it's this notion of allegiance. And in the fourth question in this series, he asks about should the church identify with a particular political party? And he gives it an emphatic no, that the church should not identify with any particular political party. And part of what I see there is this is a splitting of allegiances when that's done. That when you start to affiliate with these other political parties, when you start to identify with them in the sense that This particular political party now becomes our political party. You draw it into yourself. You fundamentally changed who and what you are, and you fundamentally changed who you serve. And so there's a splitting of allegiances that happens when you identify too closely with a political party. That then diminishes the ability of the church. Again, I think at Barth's reading, and I would tend to agree with it, As we get more and more entailed with these other sort of minor allegiances or split allegiances, it becomes much more difficult for us to speak out against those allegiances. And there's a book written on Dwight Moody, and I'm blanking on the gentleman's name who wrote it, James Findlay. He was making just sort of an offhand comment about church in this deep era in the 1800s of industrialization and urbanization. And he says something to the effect of the church became so tied to the economic structures of the time that it was difficult for the church to speak out against those institutions and really lost anything except the the personal moral standard sort of argument. Hey, you should do your best practices in business. You should practice your business morally, those kinds of critiques and exhortations. But because it was so intertwined and dependent on the revenue that was coming in from these business people and from the economic situation overall, it lost its vision and lost its sight, lost its ability to speak against some of what was going on because it was too beholden to it. And I think that that sort of situation is what Bart is trying to avoid in asking these three, in answering this set of questions. It's let's be beholden to the word of God, Let's make sure that we're actually preaching according to the scriptures, that we're aligning with the scriptures, and that we are being an entity apart while we're being an entity embedded. And I think that that's a little different than the way we usually say it, you know, being in the world, not of the world, right? Because you're both and. You're an entity apart, but you're embedded within a particular context. And so Bart does not want to abandon that context. He rejects this notion of timelessness. And one of the questions he talks about, you know, that we're not timeless. We're in time. And so the church doesn't have a, you know, sort of a timeless spirituality. We have a moment to moment spirituality that we exercise in time. He's very much wanting that allegiance to show forth in an embedded context. And I think that he's arguing that the best way to do that is to sit subject to the word of God.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: So the exact words that came to my mind as you were, as you begun, what you were saying was the, in the world of the world dialectic. Um, and I think often in my experience, when the church thinks of that, we're thinking really small scale. We're thinking ethical things, right? So perhaps early to mid 20th century, the way that manifested is don't dance. Don't go to movie theaters. Um, don't listen to rock and roll music. And that's evolved in certain kinds of ways. Some communities continue to have it on that low level, sort of these things don't do, but it always seems to entail there are the things of the world and the agenda of the world is tied to being attached to creation, right? World seems to be a gloss in many Christians' minds on creation itself. And I get it, right? Because we talk about our planet as the world. But I think the point that I hear you making, and I think the point that I understand Bart making, is to reimagine what it is we're thinking about when we say be in the world, but not of it. That this isn't a statement of abandoning creation, so it's not on one side saying, well, you know, those problems belong to creation, we're looking on higher things, and therefore we're looking on higher things, means that we don't pay attention to social issues. We don't pay attention to care of creation. We don't pay attention to what could happen to the body when we should be concerned about the soul, which is certainly taking words of Jesus, but I think misappropriating them. Conversely, it seems to me what's at stake here is the ability to be able to say that in the world is a statement of structure. You are in structures that organize creation. The nation state is one of them. It's the most obvious one in the sense of our current organization of the world according to how we've carved up the land. Here's the border. On this side of it is the U.S. On the other side of it is Canada. Here's the border. On this side of it is the U.S. The other side is Mexico.

00:18:05
Speaker 1: And you see the.

00:18:06
Speaker 2: Effects upon creation of it. creation legitimately looks differently the moment you cross the border oftentimes because now you have different schemes for understanding the place that then import that vision of the structure upon the ground. And Jesus clearly gets that because he lives as a Jewish person within an occupied Roman regime. And he gets that a lot of the things that go on in this regime are don't allow Jewish people to be Jewish people in some sort of isolated setting, but instead they have to adapt to whatever it is the rule of law is. And you get hints of that at, do we pay taxes? Whose image is on that coin?

00:18:52
Speaker 1: Caesar's.

00:18:53
Speaker 2: Okay, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And the implicit thing within that is, whose image is upon you? Render yourself to the one whose image you bear, right? And that to me is sort of a gloss on be in the world but not of the world. You recognize the structures that are at play that especially in the case of a non-political church in the sense of being tied to a political party, that the church just has to accept as a given reality. We accept that there are nation states. We accept that within this nation state there are primary political parties and then some adjacent ones that have minimal amounts of influence. But we don't see ourselves where our lines are drawn by the nation state. And that's what I gather is at play with the Hauerwasian. I'm a theologian in America, not an American theologian. I'm a church in America. not an American church. But that doesn't mean an abrogating of responsibility within that place. And so I think of, the way I often like to think about this is we're to work in for the margins. We feel the margins, not because we're essentializing not being in power, but because we're again, our goals are different. And our goals are absolutely related to creation and of seeing the presence of Christ be the one that redraws our lines ultimately. That's the kingdom of God. So that creation in full thrives. But we live in a state in which we imagine one reality that has begun to enter in but is not yet consummated. We're not in the new heavens and the new earth yet. And we recognize the reality, the present, to seek out the margins again, not to essentialize the margins, but to begin to poke holes in the structures, poke holes in the ways that we have a tendency to view the structure as everything, as creation itself. But instead to show that we are in this, we are not of this, look, there's something else. And I see that as what Bart's doing here. And the way that he's trying to call the church to be conscious of real issues and to speak out against real things without reducing itself to an agent of that structure. In the world, but not of. Is that fair?

00:21:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I think that the reason I was trying to avoid the in the world, not of it, and I agree with the way you've construed it. I think a lot of times, to your point, when we think of in the world, not of it, We think of those, you know, don't drink, don't chew, don't date girls who do sort of mantras, right? And so we're supposed to stay away from these, the evils of the world that are trying to seduce us away from Christ. But I think Barth is saying something far more profound than that. I think he's also saying that even in the world where there is a, we'll call it a moral must, that the righteous state is right. to go in and police what's going on with Hitler, that our agreement with that must emerges from somewhere else. That it comes out of an allegiance, not to the state, not to humanity qua humanity, sort of in a humanitarian sort of sense, but it's derived from a deep theological conviction that we're living according to the scriptures. And I think that that's a really crucial aspect of this, because otherwise what happens in the in the world, not of the world sort of scenario is we get to engage in the good things of the world, the things that seem like they agree with Christianity with no particular distinction between the way these things tend to emerge. And I think that's a real challenge here. as we think through the issue of the in versus the of. There's a way for us to do things that are, you know, somewhat aligned with God's order as part of our nation. But if we do those because we are, as I like to say, settling for wholesomeness, we will ultimately end up not pursuing holiness. And I think what Bart is calling on here is Listen, church, be the church. And as you're being the church, some of these things are just going to start making sense. Like you're going to understand now that the governments of the world need to come about and act in this instance as a righteous state, bringing judgment on something that is abhorrent. You're going to understand that. And you're also going to understand that as you're being the church, you have certain roles and responsibilities with this whole thing. But it all starts with you being the church, not with you debating the issue, but with you actually allowing God's word to form and shape you such that you are his people. And again, that's sort of a very Bardian answer. You know, and it sounds really esoteric and sort of complicated. And I could see why people get frustrated and just be like, Bart, why don't you just give us some practical advice, jerk? Like, just tell us what you're thinking. But I think he's right. I mean, I think if it doesn't start there, right, if you lose that connective tissue of, hey, church, be the church. Now, let's look at the downstream implications of being the church. What you end up with is something that drifts very quickly away from the word of God and toward either conservatism, liberalism, you know, whatever have you. I think that actually happened in the German Christian church, where we see the lack of mooring that the church actually has as church. It's now going to subject itself to the state. It's going to put itself under the authority of Nazism more deeply than it needed to. And it's going to adopt some of the ideas and principles of sort of we need a German church, an ethnically German church. And this is an appropriate expression of our contextualized witness. And so we need to engage in a lot of these things that that Hitler and the Nazi party are doing. like that sort of capitulation, I think is what Bart is at pains to say to all nations. These are things, or I'm sorry, not to all nations, to all churches. This is the sort of surrender to worldly authorities that we have to avoid. And the best way to avoid it is be the church.

00:25:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a section early in his response questions that I think makes this point in a really helpful way. Um, He says, recently we read here in Switzerland a pronouncement by 93 leading American Protestants, and we were informed that this was a statement characteristic of the majority of the American churches. In this statement is the sentence, quote, we abhor war, but upon the outcome of this war depends the realization of Christian principles to which no Christian can be indifferent, end quote. Barth then returns, I venture to doubt that this is the unequivocal language appropriate to God's word, which should be employed today. And we've heard this, I'm sure you have, I've heard this kind of talk all the time, right? It's equivalent to, this is the most crucial election. And there might be good reason to say this is an important election because of X, Y, and Z. But we often hear, this is the most crucial election. Or we've both heard, we need, fill in the blank, God's institution. to be this institution more than ever before. God needs this to happen, right? It's an elevation of a particular institute tethered to the idea of in order to ensure that the American environment continues to be this superlative notion of God's place, which is failing to make that distinction between a nation-state And again, what Barth terms the righteous state or the kingdom of God. All right, continuing, he says, I venture to doubt that this is the unequivocal language appropriate to God's word, which should be employed today. If the realization of Christian principles depends upon the outcome of this war, then there is no point in the assurance that war is abhorrent, for it is surely only unnecessary and unjust wars which are condemned as abhorrent, and among this Among this number, the present one is not really to be classed. If, conversely, war as such is really condemned, then the realization of Christian principles must definitely not be made dependent on its outcome. That would mean the determination to do evil in violation of conscience in order that good may result. What is he getting at right there? He's trying to strip away, I think, the language that remains hidden underneath or it shows our alliances that make us not the church in America, but the American church, such that we're really concerned with a particular idea of civilization being upheld. And that's what makes this war that otherwise would be abhorrent just, because that enables us to be able to uphold this idea of civilization. And this idea of civilization is ultimately necessary for the unpacking of the kingdom of God. That's the idea that Bart's pulling out and that he's also reacting to, where he wants to say no. So I might say that he is implicitly articulating an understanding of divine providence where things could look really bad, things could look terrible, and that doesn't mean we've undone the providence of God. Things could have gone in a different way where the allies lost that war, and I can hear Bart saying within this that The goal here wasn't to ensure the way of life of the so-called Western world. The goal here was to stand up against something that was horrific. And whether or not those who stood up succeed, and whether or not their notion of civilization moves forward, is sort of... of a secondary issue to the real issue. And the real issue is the gospel entails that we stand up against certain things because this is the sort of work that Jesus does in his work of reconciliation. It's not just to draw people back to himself, but it's in the process to call what is evil, evil. and to stand against it and to place his very body in that way. And you can see him now calling the church, and that's what he says in his next point after that. You can see him calling for the church to say, this is why we stand up, because we are doing a work that these allies are, in this case, allied with, even if not intent. And that work is to place ourselves right in the midst of of the work of reconciliation, to participate in the work of reconciliation of Jesus by standing up to what is truly evil.

00:30:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think two things. Number one, I think it's easy for people listening and reading Barth to be frustrated by his theological precision. I think there's a sense in which And, you know, when I try to wade through the church dogmatics, you get a lot of you get a fair amount of this. Right. For sure. Yeah. It's part of the reason I really. Yeah. It's part of the reason I really like these shorter pieces from Barth that are more occasional, because I think he I think his theological precision hits harder in these letters. But that's directed at real issues. It's directed at real issues. And I think that section you read, people couldn't. listen to that and feel like, hey, Bart's just playing word games. But the reality is he is actually trying to get at an underlying dynamic. He's trying to root out assumptions that are just sitting there and allowing for this sort of loose quasi-theological assertions that we all nod our head to and go, yep, yep, but never actually examine. And I think it's a really important role that he's playing as he's addressing some of these issues here. I would also agree that when Bart's looking at this overall, he is not looking at it in terms of a cause and effect. He's not looking at it as an instrumental war necessarily. He's looking at it from a very much a do what is right regardless of the outcome sort of war. And so to your point, I think, yes, the allies could have lost the war. And he would not sit back and go, ah, we shouldn't have fought it. I guess I was wrong. He would say, we fought, we tried. That's what we're called to do. And now we're living with the consequences of this other regime winning. But there is no sense in BART that a loss should have prompted different actions. And I'd say the last thing that maybe we should probably unpack a little bit is, you know, when you say the allies are now allied in this instance, right, with sort of something that the church would agree with. I think that's a very difficult point for people to navigate because what we see is we see humanity living into the good, the true, and the beautiful. They're attuned now with God's order to a certain degree. even if they're not loyal to God, they are acting. And this is where we go back to, I mentioned Oliver O'Donovan last episode, I think. He calls the nation state, you know, and the governing authorities, the secondary witness or a secondary theater of God's glory, right? And I think the idea here is just this. It's that the pursuit of something good and right and just is even when motivated by emotions, intellect, rationality that excludes God from the picture, is something that Christians should recognize, acknowledge, affirm, and point beyond. And so I think for Barth, yeah, he's looking at it and saying, yes, in this instance, these states are acting as the righteous state. but only in this instance. And he doesn't want to expand that to, this is the righteous state. It's a, they're doing what the righteous state is to do. Right. But that is very different than saying church be the church. He's not suggesting that the allies are the righteous state. He's just saying that they're acting along the line that the righteous state should act in this instance and would not hold it beyond this instance. It's a very in-time argument. I think that that is difficult for people to parse because we tend to want to– I remember Daniel Kahneman wrote this. He wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. It was a book on cognitive psych and decision-making. He talks about the halo effect. We want people to be all good or all bad. And he's actually got a line in there that says, you know, you don't want to think that Hitler loved puppies and babies. You just don't want that. You want this guy to be full on evil. But the reality is that most of us are a mix of these things, that we do have good character traits and bad character traits, and that we shouldn't be totalizing one way or another necessarily. We should be operating in as Bart's talking about here, in this instance, this needs to happen. But after this happens, that does not mean that these nation states that were allies get, you know, sort of a carte blanche to do whatever the heck they want because they acted as the righteous state right now. And I think part of the reason that he wants to keep the church separate from these things is so that the church can retain a degree of objectivity and judgment, right? about where these nation states fall because they are not to be aligned with the nation states in every instance, we might say.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: So to your point, you mentioned the timeless bit, that we are in time and the church is in time and the states are in time. That's the third point that he makes in his own response to his own question back, where he says, when the church is truly preaching the word of God, To the man of today, there can be no question of confining itself to a, quote, timeless spiritual service. What exactly is that anyway? Mark's question. There is a, quote, timeless religion, a timeless standard of morals. The word of God, however, is never timeless. And that could be a little bit scandalous, right, for him to say that. He says the time in which we live is the time accorded to us through God's patience between the resurrection of Jesus and his second coming. Therefore, it is God's time.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: No.

00:37:03
Speaker 2: I'll say as a side note, for anyone interested, then go dig into his church dogmatics. I'm intrigued that he says that here because he kind of sets up three senses of time in his church dogmatics. The first one is what we tend to think of as natural history, and it's what historians are trying to get at, natural scientists are trying to get at, physicists are trying to get at when they date the universe according to red and blue shifts in cosmic light. And he says that's stuff that's all predicated upon our method in the present, and that's what we tend to think of as history. And comporting to that is what counts as history. But then he says there's biblical time, and that's what he describes here as God's time, and that's the narrative of creation to consummation, new creation. But actually in his dogmatics, he says the true time is what he calls Christological time, and it's the time that's measured from from the cross of Christ. So everything exists either on the shadow of the cross on one side looking forward to it, or in the shadow of the cross on the other side with the unpacking of that reality. Now, I'm intrigued that he has left that number three out and he's identified the true time or God's time here with number two. That's a nerd moment. But I think for our purposes, what's significant is the way that he wants to describe this cuts away from what we tend to want to believe, as you've said, that There's a single timeless truth that we've set up in the clouds, and that's what we have to access as these eternal principles, and that's what helps us make the decision in the moment to say, this war is justified, or this political season requires this kind of action, as opposed to that political season. But what he wants to say against this idea of timeless is that the word of God and the work of reconciliation that the church participates in, by the grace of God and his spirit, It means that every moment is us trying to discern what it looks like to enact that ministry of reconciliation in the present. So that, to your point, had the allies lost, I want to take you a step further and say I don't think Barth would say, well, at least we did the right thing and now we have to adjust to this new reality. I think for him it's the nation state might have failed, the allies might have failed, but the mission of the church remains unchanged because it's now trying to discern in this time where there's no longer that particular lever to pull to resist Hitler.

00:39:30
Speaker 1: How does the.

00:39:30
Speaker 2: Church continue to act in a manner appropriate with participating in the triune mission of reconciliation? Now what that looks like might require looking to churches around the world who have not lived under the condition of being able to pull levers of power. It could mean looking at the church under ISIS occupation and what that's looked like. It might look like or look at churches in places like China or India or Japan that have never had a Christian political presence. It might mean looking to the so-called liberation approaches that are in Latin America that have more or less relationship to political power. But I think Barth's point in this at the time was to say regardless of what it looks like and who we have as a model, The Church's mission is precisely timed in that it's a discernment within places with what's available to us to make the appropriate choice to participate in the ministry of reconciliation, which means standing up to evil. And in the moment of the Nazi regime, it meant these countries and the Church to support the standing up against Hitler, but not to be limited in its scope as if the fullness of its of its witness of its reconciliation ministry. It was tied up in the military actions. That's how I read him here.

00:40:55
Speaker 1: I agree. I think there's a, and this is always one of those things that I kind of go back and forth in my mind when we're talking about time and the way that Bart is talking about it here, it always feels like time and space collapse. Like there's a dislocation that I think he's talking about and trying to avoid here. Don't dislocate yourself. You're always located. You're always in, in the place where you are and you can't sort of, he even talks about it a little bit, you know, like don't, don't pull out and talk about this vacuum of timelessness, right? Don't, don't pull away from the context, embed yourself within the context. And so I think the way you described it is really helpful. It's I think that element of what we're looking at here is number one, really difficult for anyone to handle. I think it's very hard to recognize that there's a stability in our convictions and our beliefs and who we are as the church that maintains across time. And that what we're always doing is renegotiating how to execute that faithfully in any given moment. Because even though we have this sort of stability in who we are in Christ and what the church is and what our mission is, what our convictions are, we want more stability on the day-to-day level than I think often we get. And so we end up sort of vacillating on some of these issues as opposed to really rethinking what does it mean for us to offer a faithful witness in this moment? period. And, and if we started there, if we said, you know, what does it look like for this next decision that I make to point other people to, uh, or to, to point to and glorify God, what would it mean for that next decision to look like that? That's a whole different decision matrix that we, that we would, than we normally employ. We're not thinking now, beginning with sort of a rational response where we sit back and say, okay, what do we think this would lead to cause and effect wise? What do we think? Would this be an effective decision? Would this be an efficient decision? The first decision for the church is, is this going to point to and glorify God? And if it won't, these other options are off the table. I think that's what Bart's trying to underscore. And that's what I hear you saying. It's just in different words, I suppose. Right.

00:43:32
Speaker 2: I mean, who can repeat the exact words of Barth, but Barth himself. But it's worth noting that for Barth, everything boils down to the ministry of Jesus as the incarnate word. And Jesus is the one who fully unveils or fully reveals the persons of the triune God in his march to and death upon the cross. And then out of that, the resurrection. So if we take away that, we've lost the litmus test for understanding God's time. Because all of God's time becomes meaningful in that moment. So it's precisely the case that one might have to suffer. In fact, we should expect that one might have to suffer for that purpose. And I think that's important because I think often I hear Christians hearing disagreement as suffering or hearing attempts to grab control being rebuffed as therefore suffering. And that's not what Barth's getting at here. For him, it's about a participation. So he says, woe betide if the church should desecrate itself in this cause instead of seeing to it, on the contrary, that this cause be consecrated through the church, this cause being the resistance against Nazis and Hitler. So that this cause is consecrated through the church, that the righteousness and necessity of this war for the defense of the righteous state be preserved to the nations, to their governments and armies consciously, thus giving them a clear conscience in the conduct of it, but also preserving the moderation necessary to its proper conclusion. This mission, by virtue of which it preaches a righteous peace in the midst of war, and thus approves the war only for the sake of righteous peace, but for its sake does so in wholehearted earnest, is the prophetic mission of the Church in this war. I think that's telling. Because again, he's making sure that the church understands it's not that we're joining in for some righteous purpose that the state already has, but it's that in this moment, the church, like in every moment, needs to be attentive to what it means to stand up against the powers and principalities, to use Paul's language. And within standing up to the powers and principalities, to do so in a political climate in which it's possible for the state as a local entity, as a nation state, to join in for whatever their purposes are to the same task, but to continue to recognize that the church's purposes are different. And that again gets them to the same conclusion, that should the state fail, the church's mission has not changed, even if its mechanism of achieving it might be changed by the levers it has to pull.

00:46:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this last section of his letter, section five, really underscores everything we've kind of been saying here, because he gets to this point where he asks the question, you know, is the church at war? And basically says, no, it's not, if in the sense of the church being at war, we mean that it's an instrument of the state. And he justifies this by saying that It can't be an instrument of the state because whether we're at war or at peace, the church belongs to the Lord. And it's taking its marching orders from him. And so he says, you know, in war as in peace, it serves its own Lord. The church serves its own Lord, pursues its own cause and speaks its own language. The cause and message of the gospel, which is directed to friend and foe alike, is not dependent on the outcome of the war, whatever it may be. And I think here we have that sort of return to Barth's original question that he posed, right? Because you have the Lord owning the church. The church is answerable to a different authority than the nation state. And it's not taking its marching orders from the nation state. Again, it's hard not to hear sort of echoes of the Barman Declaration in this. Because in the Barman Declaration, he very much scopes this out in a very similar way. And I think that this is sort of at the heart of how Bart is reasoning through this whole thing, that the church is not at war in the sense that it is serving the state, but the church may very well be at war in the sense that it's fighting to continue its mission faithfully in the midst of hostile powers and pressures that are trying to get it to compromise that mission. Right. Part of the fight then of the church becomes making sure that we're continuing to pursue our own cause, making sure that we're continuing to speak our own language. These are the things that I think Bart would say, yeah, these are the things that we should never give up. These are part of what are constitutive of what it means to be the church. And if we lose these things, we do in some sense lose our war. And that's not World War II. That's not World War I. It's this fight against, you mentioned, the principalities and powers that try to suck us into a world that we're really not part of and that try to get us to live on terms that it defines. I like to say the world always tries to get us to love it on its own terms. but the church's job is to love the world on God's terms. And so we're constantly, that's the battle we're fighting. That's the moment of resistance that we're trying to execute well is making sure that we're loving the world on God's terms. And I think this last section in Bart's letter really underscores his whole vision of for how he thinks these things through and it begins very much with the church is not its own it belongs to the lord and the lord only and thus anything it does and says has to conform to the image of.

00:49:54
Speaker 2: Christ yeah so i think i think one of the key phrases there is the terms the terms of engagement so even to the degree that they have a similar pursuit the church doesn't have a military, the true sense of the military. So the idea of resistance doesn't even necessarily look the same. What exactly it looks like when the purposes of the church are to resist and the allies are allied with them enables a certain kind of resistance in this regime. But if we pull out of that setting and we come to the present time, it can be very easy for the church's rhetoric. You use the You used the issue of language, which I think is an important one. For the church's language to start to sound like the language of a political party. And that should be a moment of pause to ask the question, whose cause is this? Now note that that doesn't mean that a particular political party doesn't have an agenda item that overlaps with what the church should stand for. That's entirely plausible. But that's not what's at issue here. What's at issue here is when the language of the church is reduced to the language of a party. Or the language of the church begins to be formed by the talking points of a party. And that could be their party. Of course, we know that one is more dominantly tapped into the church, but it's not restrictive to just that party. The church should be asking itself in that moment, have the things that I have to stand for, the things that characterize the ministry of Christ, been reduced now to the party that has co-opted it as a cog within its agenda? And if so, that should be a problem. Again, that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bathwater. There might be particular issues to continue to stand for, but the language has to be adjusted so that that becomes part of a larger rhetoric. And that larger rhetoric is holistic, right? So perhaps the issue is a respect for life. It needs to be a respect for life that's rooted in the notion of people as created image bearers before a God who cares about life from beginning to end. but also the same God who also cares about the life that the image barriers are embedded within. There's life all around us. And the Creator is their Creator as well, or its Creator as well, however you want to put it. And all of the things in the ways that we're created are implicated within our very bodies. As I often get my students to chuckle at, all of our mothers are glad that we weren't born the sizes that we are now. But what led into us getting this size? It's the fact that we are deeply entangled with a larger creative environment that we do need to be protective against, not least because our personal survival depends on it, but also because the very beginning of the creative order, as marked out by God, entailed giving us to the rest of creation to care for it, to have a kind of mastery over it that wasn't forceful control, but was rather a kind of mastery that was artistic. It's to understand deeply what a thing or a set of things needs to be able to work from within that. Now we're talking about a language and a rhetoric that belongs to the church as shaped by the time that Bart Schmidt was saying is God's time, the narrative of creation to new creation, and recognizing within that where we stand, that we live somewhere between the cross and the shadow it lays upon creation in anticipation of the consummation. That's a different rhetoric, and I think that's really important to what Barth is trying to get at here to draw this distinction. And if one wants to push back, I'll at least say it's important for me to be able to articulate what I think is that same spirit in the present and how that has to be something that directs the church, not particular sloganeering that one party is used to co-opt us, one or the other party.

00:54:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I think going back to that issue of language and how it influences the way that we think, there was a fascinating TED talk, and I'm forgetting the doctor's name, but she talks about a tribe in Africa that uses the cardinal directions instead of right and left. And so, you know, at any given moment, you're You may have a north hand and a south hand. You might have an east hand and a west hand. And they might switch depending on which direction you're facing. When we think about how that way of using language would reshape our understanding of the world. I mean, I couldn't tell you what direction I'm facing right now if you paid me. I have no idea whether I'm facing north, south, east, or west. Yeah, I have no clue. But But if you grow up in an environment where those cardinal directions are so crucial because they're governing everyday activities, that language now starts to shape the way you perceive the world around you. These directions, north, south, east, and west, become far more significant than right or left, which are ingrained in our understanding of directionality. Far more, I would argue, than north, south, east, and west. And so I think that these issues of language, if we take that sort of analogy and we say, okay, then why is Barth so keen on theological language? And why is it that we need to make sure that we're not adopting the language of any given political party, even if we share some sort of, even if we agree with some of the concerns of that political party? And I think in large part, it's because the language we use begins to shape our imagination. And so using these theological terms, rooting ourselves back in, being careful about how we articulate this theological precision that we've seen Barth use at various points in the letter, is not him being esoteric. It's him trying to be thoroughly theological and rooting the church back into itself. And I think that we need to get our heads around that because the way we use language actually does matter. And if we go around talking as if we're all Republicans or all Democrats, I just had an interview with a gentleman who said that he'd had an issue in his church where someone was listening to a podcaster who said, you know, if your pastor says the word justice from the pulpit, you should just leave. And his comment was, how much of the Old Testament do you want me to skip? Like, it's a biblical word. But these are the things that if we start allowing the political rhetoric to shape the way we talk, to shape the way our language works, to shape our understanding of these deeply biblical terms, we are going to lose more than just language. We're going to start loosening our grip on reality. We're going to start losing our identity, and we're going to stop being able to affirm the good, the true, and the beautiful that we see before us while also pointing beyond it to the triune God who is its source. And I think that's basically one of the basic missions of the church needs to be Look, we're not saying that the world is completely and totally off base on everything. You know, there's a righteous state. And as Bart is arguing in his letter, nation states can do good things. So it's not like they're evil and we need to just jettison them completely. We need to recognize when they're doing good things, just as we recognize when they're doing bad things. But in either case, we need to be pointing them not just to some sort of vague moral standard. What we need to be reminding them is that the authority that owns the church, the God who owns the church, he is the authority over all things, not just over the church. And so we've got to be pointing these nations to that God who is going to judge, that God who has authority over them, to the God who establishes reality. And if we're not, we're not doing our job. And I think that's just a crucial aspect of all of this. that Bart's emphasis on language. I noticed it when I was reading through his church dogmatics, like back in the day. But I mean, here, I think it comes out so well and so clearly that to be the church, we have to speak the language of the church. And in speaking the language of the church, we're signaling that we're living life on God's terms, not on the terms of the world.

00:59:37
Speaker 2: And to be clear, you and Bart are not saying we invent our own languages so that no one understands us.

00:59:43
Speaker 1: No, no Klingon.

00:59:45
Speaker 2: Correct, correct. But the issue at play, I've said that a lot this episode, it's an important one, is sort of akin to Norman Worsba has a book where he's advocating, speaking of creation rather than nature. Not because he sees nature as a four-letter word, but because what he's really trying to do is to emphasize that when we're talking about the rest of the things around us that include us, we are making an explicit linguistic connection to God in the moment. That it's not just the tree out there. It's not just my body, your body. It's not just the dog. but all of us are the work, the handiwork of a God who created. And that places us, again to the Bart point, within a timeline, or if you prefer, a story. And that story is one that sees us between creation and new creation. And more specifically in our moment, between the cross and new creation. And that's what I think Bart's getting at. That's where the saltiness of the church comes in being deliberate with language, even poetic with language. Sometimes poetry can seem too opaque, but there's a kind of prose that can be poetic, as Owen Barfield talks about, that enables us to take something and signal to something bigger. And that's the call, maybe on the little level, to say creation instead of nature. But it's also a call to say we won't just simply repeat the talking points that a group of people want us to consolidate their political power base. Our goal here is to testify to the work of reconciliation that might include some of those talking points, but never on their linguistic terms. And includes a lot of other things that invariably any given party is leaving out. Thoughts? I think we lost each other again.

01:02:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's always a re-situation. A little bit. I'll clip it there and then I'll start over again. Because we need to close it out anyway. Yeah, I think what Bart talks about here is there's a re-situation that has to happen for the church to be the church in the world. And we're always under pressure to adopt the identities that the world gives us. And to somehow think that we're defined by those identities as opposed to being defined by Christ. And I think what he's trying to get at in this whole letter is, look, if the church is being the church, that's what needs to be done. And the decisions that come from the church being the church are going to be the faithful decisions that are according to the scriptures. And if they end up, you know, supporting the war, not supporting the war, people go out and buy war bonds. They don't go out and buy war bonds. These are things that I think he would leave up largely to individual discernment, so long as the church is being the church. And so, man, I don't know. I think this series has been interesting. I always love reading Barth. Like I said, I've enjoyed the Barman Declaration. I think it's a fantastic document, and I could see it informing a lot of what he's writing here. I'm not exactly sure the timeline of when these were written, whether Barman was first and this was second, but I think Barman was first. But either way, this has been a really great conversation and appreciate you throwing this letter out there so we could discuss it as part of our faith and politics series. So thanks, man.

01:03:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been great.

01:04:02
Speaker 1: All right, everybody. Well, we're going to close this episode out. Keep listening to Thinking Christian. We're in the midst of a faith and politics series leading up to the midterm elections in November. And the goal really is to provide you with some different frameworks to think through how your faith connects to politics and how really these things should emerge so that you can love politically on God's terms as opposed to loving politically on the political party's terms. And so hopefully this has been helpful, good, helpful discussions, and just encourage you to take a listen to some of the other guests we've had on. We've had some great people on. So check out those episodes. And otherwise, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.