Karl Barth on War as God’s Judgment: Romans 13 and Degrees of Guilt | Faith & Politics #9

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm here, I'm Dr. James Spencer and I'm here with Dr. Ashish Varma and we are gonna be discussing the second question in Bart's letter to the United States. We did the first question last time and so we're gonna continue and see if we get through two or maybe two and three this time, we'll see how it goes. But this is a really interesting second question and I'll just read it and then we'll obviously kind of return to it, but just to kind of prime the pump on what this is, Is this war to be conceived as the judgment of God on mankind? And if so, is there a distinction to be made between the more guilty and the less guilty? That's the question that Barth is posed in this letter. This is one of those that they asked him to answer. And so he's going to try to answer that in this relatively short section within the second part of the letter.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: Ashish?

00:00:55
Speaker 3: He is very brief compared to the way he addresses the other two questions that were posed to him. But he's not lacking for depth and intrigue. So I think that's important. Additionally, when we take this question in isolation, it could be very easy to read one thing, but when you put it in the context of the fuller letter, you get another thing, right? And then again, he appeals to Romans 13, which we can probably talk a little bit about later, which could again give you one reading if you just read that as a blanket statement meant to be a once and for all time claim. And when you consider Bart's actions and the actions of others around Bart, it makes that even intriguing. So that's all to say that there's not a definitive, even though it's short, there's not a definitive takeaway. It's more of a, there's a lot to consider here. So I look forward to discussing this.

00:01:59
Speaker 1: I thought it might be interesting to start and just clarify a couple of things here. We've talked about dominion an awful lot in various other episodes, and we had a great conversation with Norman Wiersbo. It's going to be coming out where he talks a little bit about mastery and human notions of mastery.

00:02:17
Speaker 2: So you all can watch for that one.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: It'll actually come out after this episode airs. But I think it's really crucial to understand this idea of the judgment of God and And so one thing that I'm sort of developing that I think is more and more compelling every time I sort of go back through it is this notion that as the image of God, we are reflecting God out into the world. This is part of what it means to be God's image. We represent him within the world and we reflect him out to the world. And so that happens in Genesis 1. We're made in God's image, male and female. God makes us in his image. This continues after the fall. We could go to passages like Genesis 5, Genesis 9, 6. There's plenty of passages that demonstrate that the image still continues. After the fall, though, my sense is that we reflect God in slightly different ways. Now, we usually think about that as the distortion of God's image. We're not reflecting him quite as clearly as we were previously. But I think there's also additional facets of God's character that start to come out after the fall that human beings actually reflect, one of those being judgment. I think that a lot of what Bart is going to talk about here is not necessarily derived from Genesis. He doesn't, as I recall, cite Genesis or do anything with Genesis. But what I would argue is that as God's representatives, as humankind continues as God's representatives after the fall, as we continue to work out what it looks like to reflect God after the fall, judgment has to be part of that mix. And so when I'm reading this question from Bart, is this war to be conceived as the judgment of God on mankind? I'm sort of sitting back and saying, sort of, yeah. And it's enacted.

00:04:20
Speaker 2: Humankind to humankind.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: And so the people who are reflecting God's image are going to reflect a right judgment about this, maybe even a righter judgment, which probably gets into his more guilty and less guilty kind of concept. But I think we see this as we think about the conquest, for instance, ancient Israel's conquest of the various lands, when we see Israel displaced by Babylon, Babylon displaced by Persia, Persia displaced by the Greco-Roman Empire. I think these are moments where God is using these different nations to enact judgment.

00:04:55
Speaker 2: Yes. But I think there's also a sense in which as God's image, we are reflecting this aspect of who God is after the fall.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: Whereas before the fall, it was unnecessary for that reflection to come out. This sort of notion of judgment where we're enacting some sort of punitive judgment, punitive punishment. if that's not too redundant, is unique to us after the fall and will ultimately go away because all the judgments that we make, all the right judgments that the authorities make, all the different judgments that the church makes are anticipating the final judgment of God.

00:05:41
Speaker 2: So I just feel like that helps. Maybe it helps frame it.

00:05:44
Speaker 1: Maybe that's a good way for us to enter this conversation, but I'll let you chime in Ashish and see what you think.

00:05:50
Speaker 3: Well, I have questions. I think that does help frame judgment. I think it's important to recognize that judgment is an important thread that we've seen in the biblical narrative. Things don't make sense if we don't have space for judgment. That said, I don't know that the answers concerning judgment to me are all that clear. So I think, for instance, the book of Hosea, where God establishes Hosea sort of in the place of God relative to his covenant people. He wants to make a point through the character of Hosea about the nature of covenant Israel. And so covenant Israel is typified by the prostitute that Hosea is told to marry, knowing full well that she won't be faithful to him. And Hosea is now supposed to play the role of the long-suffering covenant God, right? is a role that ultimately none of us can bear. And so my conclusion from that is, regardless of whoever this Hosea was, that in the way that the parable is being told to us, ultimately none of us are Hosea. We're much closer to the position of covenant Israel and this dynamic, right? Even when we experience things that might be closer to Hosea, we have a character lapse, right? But the way that that letter unfolds, or that parable or that book, whatever you want to call it, God has this moment in which he expresses the fullness of his anger. And I think that's important because we have an uneasy relationship with anger. On one side, we have Jesus who flipped over tables, clearly out of anger, right? I don't think we can call that anything but anger, over people taking advantage of others in the way that they sold things in the temple. And yet we also have the realization that that we are told to be slow to anger. We're told that anger itself can be toxic to us. Right. And so we need to know in some sense, anger in what sense, how do we, how do we allow for anger in the way that God expresses it in the book of Hosea or Jesus in the temple and not the way that anger is seen as the sort of thing that creates a, creates a toxicity.

00:08:12
Speaker 2: Right.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: Um, So when I think of Hosea, you've got that dynamic. The anger is present. God is wrathful. He's trying to communicate through this character Hosea just how upset he is with Israel and what that entails for Israel breaking the covenant relationship and what that might mean now for Israel's judgment, to get us back to that point. And yet, and I believe the chapter is 11, Hosea 11. I didn't go back to look at it precisely, so it could be off on the chapter. you get sort of a, I take that back. And the I take that back is not a, I'm not angry, and it's not a, there's no judgment. It seems to be a declaration that something else supervenes, that if we look at it through New Testament lenses, there's a mercy and a grace that somehow is able to put aside the judgment. Now, in the New Testament lens, we can speak of the sacrifice of Jesus. however we want to categorize the atoning work as we theologians refer to it, there's something atoning about it, about what Jesus does on our behalf. And in some sense, there's a substitution at play. Theologians debate what that sense is, how we want to look at it. And that seems to be read back into Hosea, that you have this sense, whatever it is, that Hosea is bearing in his very life, in the sense of his being betrayed. whatever judgment that is that goes upon covenant Israel. And the payoff is God out of love, and the language of love is used, God out of love embraces the unfaithful covenant bride. So what does that make of judgment? Judgment is real. The anger is real. The necessity of judgment is real. But I don't think on the other side we can find it fully satisfying to just simply say, well, you know, people have done some awful things and to get us to the point of Barth's letter being written in light of World War II, so we can put a name on this, in light of what Hitler and the Nazi party are doing. We can't just sit by, is sort of what Barth's saying. He's not embracing a live and let go, this stinks, but we can't respond sort of attitude. Judgment does that play? But it's not clear where that line now exists. Okay, Hitler and the Nazi party, judgment. But Hosea's unfaithful wife, judgment? You know, do you get the sort of question that's built into my confusion of, I don't think it's nearly as straightforward of a thing. And now when we're thinking in terms of ultimate consequences, when does that judgment make way for that mercy and that love?

00:11:16
Speaker 2: Yeah. So really helpful.

00:11:22
Speaker 1: I think I wouldn't, I think in part judgment is going to be relatively clear cut. There aren't a lot of gray areas with judgment. Let me start there. So it's either guilty, not guilty. And what we see in a book like Hosea is obviously judgment. Israel is guilty. That's a judgment.

00:11:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, no question.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: The question is whether God is going to act on and in response to the way that Israel has treated him, or whether he is going to restrain himself in mercy and.

00:12:13
Speaker 2: In grace.

00:12:14
Speaker 1: To allow Israel to continue despite their ongoing whoredom, as one of my favorite books on Hosea goes. Great, great book on Hosea. If anybody wants to read anything on Hosea and this dynamic we're talking about, Whoredom is a great book.

00:12:31
Speaker 3: That's the name of the title, Whoredom.

00:12:33
Speaker 1: But the question then becomes, yeah, great title. The question is, does that Does Israel's way of doing things, do they actually escape judgment? Or does God simply delay judgment, which is then ultimately what we would see in the cross?

00:12:55
Speaker 2: Now, that draws in a whole lot of stuff.

00:12:59
Speaker 1: But I would argue that God's judgment is never fully suspended. What we're seeing are delays. We're watching him give us time, right, to repent, time to reform, time to come about to his way of thinking and his way of life. But ultimately, judgment is not suspended forever. And this is what we see in things like the book of Revelation, for instance. There are moments where God is going to act. And I think that part of the tension we have with judgment is when do we participate in this? And so I had mentioned I read Bart's letter to Great Britain after we started this series.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: I read it over the week.

00:13:51
Speaker 1: And you see in Bart this really interesting dynamic where he seems to think that there is a fundamental difference between what happened 25 years prior to World War II, World War I.

00:14:06
Speaker 2: And now what's going on in World War II?

00:14:09
Speaker 1: You see him making completely different judgments, at least alluding to completely different judgments about World War I than he's making about World War II.

00:14:19
Speaker 2: And in that there, you can either read it as a vacillation.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Like Bart just in this moment, he can't bring himself to not condemn this war. Or you can see it probably for more what it is, which is him trying to wrestle with the intangible differences between World War I and World War II. Not that there weren't atrocities in World War I, but that World War II has some sort of sense in which it's far worse. And whether that's a, I say intangible because of this, I don't know whether that's us being more sentimental about it, applying the this is more problematic than the other thing sort of framework to it, or whether there is actually something deeper in it that is.

00:15:21
Speaker 2: Far more.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Worthy of judgment, let's say. My sense is it's the former, but I definitely would not deny the latter. I think that what we're seeing in Bart is that sort of tension. He doesn't feel the same way about World War I as he feels about World War II. And part of that is simply the way that he's looking at it, the way that he's framing it. He can't get his head around how you would go about letting this one go, not acting on it as a matter of course. Whereas in World War I, he may have been a little bit a little bit more flexible on these things. All that to say, I think as we dive into this question that he's asking, is this war to be conceived as the judgment of God on mankind? I think that one for me is a yes, as it is for Bart.

00:16:20
Speaker 2: Is there a.

00:16:21
Speaker 1: Distinction to be made between the more guilty and the less guilty?

00:16:24
Speaker 2: I never loved the more or less kind of stuff.

00:16:29
Speaker 1: I think it's just too opaque. Like it doesn't really give you anything to work with. Basically, when you're saying he's more guilty or less guilty, you're basically just saying, well, I'm privileging these bad acts versus these bad acts. And I'm saying these are less problematic. Like there's a sense in which I think that that is a little bit too squishy for my taste to use a real technical term. Yeah.

00:16:58
Speaker 3: I like that term.

00:16:59
Speaker 1: But I do think to your point, Ashish, I think this stuff is really difficult to work out because in any given moment, in any given point of time, we're trying to reflect what God's judgment is in the moment. Make a right judgment, but perhaps respond with mercy versus make a judgment and execute that judgment with a punitive consequence. And I think that's a struggle for us. in part because we're not God, right? That's the, that's the simple way to put it. But I also think it's difficult for us because we're not seeing the bigger picture. And when we don't see the bigger picture, we can't always understand what the downstream consequences are going to be of being merciful.

00:17:50
Speaker 2: We don't understand that big picture.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: And so it's very difficult for us to just to let somebody get by with X, Y, or Z.

00:17:58
Speaker 2: That'd be my two cents on it.

00:18:01
Speaker 3: I want your third cent. Okay, there's so much going on here. Where to start? So on the side of, well, there's an issue of mercy. Yes. There's the side of what Bart is doing that he makes a distinction. So I'm not familiar with what distinction he makes between the First and the Second World War. And, you know, Bart's someone who lived through both. So I'm really intrigued to hear what that distinction is and how he weighs that. Someone who was born and raised well after the aftermath of both of them. All I have is what the historians tell me, right? And they tell me quite a bit. And I can understand from this angle what would have possibly made the Second World War worse than the first. But I also know that the second, in some ways, comes out of the first. They're not unrelated events. And the sanctions that come out of them, right? The sense of overharshness that Germany feels. Anyway, those sorts of dynamics. So maybe that's the starting point. Because if the answer is in some sense, so you said you don't want to make the distinction between better and worse, or worse and worser, I don't know how you'd put it, versions of need for judgment. It seems that in some sense, Barth has made that distinction. If he has advocated for pacifism for World War I, but definitely not for World War II. And it seems that maybe Jesus is saying there is no worse and worse-er. I know this is bad grammar, but there's no worse and worse-er when he says, you condemn the adulterer, but I say how many you have lusted in your own heart, you've committed adultery in your own heart, and then does the same with hatred and murder. And yet I'm not entirely convinced that what Jesus is doing there is saying, they're the same thing. I think what's more apparent to me is that he's turning to the religious leaders who've created these lines of me holy, you not holy. And he's saying you not holy either, right? Because I do want to say that there is a difference between murdering someone and hating someone. And I do want to say there's a difference between cheating on a spouse and looking upon someone and saying she or he is beautiful right but the point still stands need of judgment over the person who hates and the person who lusts right yeah so i do want to hear a little bit more about that distinction in bark i do want to press a little bit because i don't think you would disagree with what i just.

00:20:32
Speaker 2: Said And I want to know where that.

00:20:35
Speaker 3: Line is of mercy, because I think mercy, to your point, we don't know what mercy will bring forward, and yet it still holds to reason. Again, I'm thinking Tolkien, and you'll be shocked. The mercy or the pity of Bilbo may yet rule the fate of many is the idea.

00:20:49
Speaker 2: I play there.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: So let me clarify Bart. For one, it seems like he is alluding to or using World War I as more of a foil to think through World War II. So he doesn't actually come down and say why he thinks differently about World War I. He says that he thinks differently about World War I and then encourages that this World War II fight must be fought. There's no way to say that it shouldn't be fought. It must be fought. It's lamentable, but it's something that has to be done. It's sort of where he lands on this. My read of that, and I guess my interpretation of the read of that is he sees World War I as something that didn't require the must. He sees it as lamentable as those events were. He does not see it as a must fight. Is it a different holocaust? He doesn't disagree. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't specify. And I think that's, you know, at least in the part of the letter that I remember where he's talking about this, he doesn't specify. So I think, you know, there's this interesting way in which these two situations, one really, which, you know, World War I was Weimar Republic kind of stuff. It was like, it was a fundamentally different sort of war than what we're looking at at World War II. And that gets into your second point. I don't like worse or better because I always think it lets better off the hook.

00:22:24
Speaker 2: Right.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: We talked last time about Churchill's. I can't remember whether we did this on air or off air. But we talked about Churchill and what he was doing to fund essentially the war, World War II, and the oppression that he wrought on the Indian people, you know, allowing their starvation.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: Right, exactly.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: And allowing this to happen. And so you sit back and you say, well, but he was fighting for the better cause. Like, no, I don't want that distinction at all. So what I want is I want us to sit and say, these are fundamentally different or they have differences. And then I want to talk about what those differences were. And then I want to talk about because they're different, how do we respond differently to God in this situation of difference? I don't like the better or worse or the more or less those kind of weights because it seems like every time we do it, right? We say, oh, we have a better culture than X, Y, or Z. And what we really mean is, so we're not changing. or so that change can be incremental. It's just not a great way to think about it. And so we need to be looking at it, I think, in terms of these differences, recognizing that some of these differences are good on one side and bad on another, right? And that some of these differences are bad on both sides. And that when we're looking at it as bad on both sides, neither of them gets a pass. Like, to me, it's sort of an extension of there is no partiality. And so if we're going to exercise judgment appropriate, that's right. If we're going to look at this appropriately, you cannot countenance what you described to me, what Churchill did to the Indian people. You cannot countenance it by saying, well, he was trying to stop Hitler.

00:24:24
Speaker 2: That's what I think more better gets you.

00:24:26
Speaker 3: Right.

00:24:27
Speaker 2: Or better or worse gets you, right? I don't want that.

00:24:31
Speaker 1: I want both bad, both deserving of judgment, both happened, right? So how do we deal with it from the perspective of God's judgment? What does that look like? And if at the end of the day, people want to say, well, I'm going to let Churchill off the hook because he was fighting Hitler and And so we're going to show mercy on this one, but we're not on this one. That's at least a judgment. The judgment is true regardless. He's done something evil. We're going to give him mercy for it.

00:25:05
Speaker 2: Fine.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: That's your call, right? But let's not frame it in terms of worse or better because I get really uncomfortable when that happens because the better tends to become the best and it's never questioned again. That's true to where I sit with it.

00:25:24
Speaker 3: That's fair. Let me press in a little bit further. I'm just curious what you would say. Murder hatred. We want to prosecute the murderer. But with Jesus, we want to say the hatred is not conducive of the pure and the holy.

00:25:43
Speaker 2: 100%.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: We don't want to prosecute the hatred, though, right?

00:25:48
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:25:50
Speaker 3: So, apart from... The language of better, worse, or worse, worser. How do you describe that? Because I'm with you. Don't hear me as saying, let's go prosecute the hatred.

00:26:05
Speaker 2: No.

00:26:05
Speaker 3: No, but I do want to take seriously Jesus as saying, hey, by the way, you're not holy either.

00:26:10
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:26:12
Speaker 1: So I would say that what we do is we say, again, I want to have a moment of judgment that is.

00:26:22
Speaker 2: Let's call it cognitive, right?

00:26:26
Speaker 1: It's a recognition that something is wrong here. It's a recognition that something is right here, right? It's just a recognition. We're seeing it the way God sees it. When I'm saying recognition, what I'm saying is we are looking at reality rightly. And so we make a judgment about these things.

00:26:49
Speaker 2: Hate, not good. Murder, not good. Okay, great. There's your moment of cognitive judgment, of real recognition.

00:27:00
Speaker 1: Now what we have to do is we have to decide what we're going to do with that judgment. Right now, ultimately, these are like more connected than I'm suggesting, but heuristically, this is just easier to explain it, I think. So now we have to decide what we're going to do with that judgment. Well, it's very different to say to someone who has murdered another person, and who seems to like killing people, that we're just going to let this guy go.

00:27:26
Speaker 2: Right? Hey, mercy. It's all good.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: Or even if he doesn't like it, couldn't withstand the impulse.

00:27:34
Speaker 2: That's right. Like he's going to do, he's going to kill again. Right?

00:27:38
Speaker 1: This is not a self-defense. This is like, you know, serial killer, and we just keep giving him extra chances. And so, you know, in that sense, you're looking at the judgment, you're saying, we recognize something has been done wrong here. Now, as we execute judgment on this, now we're going to put this person away for life. We're going to institute the death penalty. We're going to do whatever we're going to do. But there's going to be an execution now of that judgment. On the hate side, we don't look at that and say, we're not going to kill this person. We're not going to put them away. We're not going to prosecute the hatred. These are very difficult things to do in the first place. But what we may do is something different than that. The Bible prescribes social ostracization as a means of dealing with persistent sin.

00:28:26
Speaker 2: Maybe it's that.

00:28:28
Speaker 1: Maybe it's something else. It could be a number of different things. In the abstract, we just know that we're not putting this person who hates other people in prison. We're doing other things to sort of either help them get past their hate, Or to let them live in that hate such that we're hoping it will be that ultimately that pitiless situation will be redemptive. And so there's the judgment and there's the execution of judgment. But then ultimately, there's always this potential to show mercy, right? To let something play itself out further. to forgive the wrong that has been done. But even in saying it that way, you're still recognizing it's wrong. And so that initial sort of cognitive judgment that I described, that recognition that this is not right, that it is not aligned with God's reality, I think is absolutely crucial. Because otherwise, we're running the risk of calling evil good and good evil. And that is the fundamental act of judgment that we are to exercise. We're to recognize good as good and evil as evil.

00:29:50
Speaker 3: This is helpful. So to me, the action points are still hazy to me, right? Because I think about This is going to sound too specific. Forgive me. The person who hates, perhaps as someone who has a very loud and public pedestal to stand upon, to be able to declare that hate. And though that person may not actually go out and commit the heinous act, and you might say, well, you know, it's not the same, so we just excommunicate you. We live in a time in which there's no way to actually silence such people. And inevitably, in the crowd of those listening to him, you have someone more apt to radicalization who takes that hate and internalize it and actually does go and kill, right? Or actually does go and do heinous things. Now, of course, it's the person who does that that we want to hold responsible, but we also want to hold responsible the one that we're saying, that wasn't okay, right? That we're not using the language of worse and worse, worse-er. So it gets complicated. I don't know that there's any way to judiciously deal with that because we don't have the ability to look down and say, well, your actions and your words affected this other person in precisely this way. We're not God, right? I get the uncertainty of it, but that to me maybe further blurs the line between a Barth kind of statement with World War I and World War II without knowing the internal workings of how he precisely adjudicated that.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: Well, let's just say this, because I think it's also important to understand. When Barth cites Romans 13 in this section, right, he's recognizing one authority that exercises judgment. Whatever we think about his reference here, and we can get into that. But the governing authorities that God has established are to execute judgment. And so you have this sort of sense that the governing authorities are to recognize when something is good and bad. And this comes out in Romans 13, right? You shouldn't be afraid of rulers if you're doing good because they're a servant for your good.

00:32:16
Speaker 2: They're God's servant for your good. So you shouldn't worry if you're doing good.

00:32:20
Speaker 1: You shouldn't have a problem with the governing authorities that God has appointed. Now, we know that in practice, that does not necessarily come to pass, right?

00:32:29
Speaker 3: And Barth invariably had to know that, right? Because he's writing this in the middle of precisely the circumstances in which he said, you've got to stand up to Hitler and the Nazi regime.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm kind of mixing my letters, but I think in the letter to Great Britain, he even references the embattled church in Germany, right? So He knows very well that this doesn't always work and that there are corrupt governing authorities who have moved beyond their scope that God has given them and decided to exercise judgment apart from God's reality. They're no longer recognizing judgment. They're determining good and evil, right? Just a slight difference. But in Romans 13, what you're seeing is, I think, Paul instructing the Romans, hey, look, when the government is functioning properly and when you are doing good things, you don't have anything to worry about, right? And we see in other places in scripture that if we're suffering for Christ, that's, you know, that's sort of par for the course.

00:33:35
Speaker 2: And so you've got both those things held in tension.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: Sure.

00:33:39
Speaker 2: So as one.

00:33:39
Speaker 3: Scholar I've read, sorry, as one scholar I read put it, Romans 13 is putting just as much upon the government leaders. It's almost like Paul is saying, I'm speaking of the ideal. Hey, wink, wink, be the ideal, right? Knowing full well that he was living under a regime himself. That was far from that ideal, right?

00:34:00
Speaker 2: A hundred percent.

00:34:02
Speaker 1: And I think that goes then to the second aspect, the second entity of judgment, right?

00:34:08
Speaker 2: Which is the church.

00:34:10
Speaker 1: And so the church does hold the keys. We're making judgments all the time. Now, we don't enact those judgments in the same way that the government can or the government is called to. We don't hold the sword. But it's incumbent upon the Christian community to recognize some of these things as opposed to celebrating them. And so I think part of the complexity of all of this is how does one entity exercise judgment as opposed to the other? How do we as people who sort of belong to these two groups advocate for judgment on either side, whether that's the recognition or the enactment? And then how do we look at a complex situation and say, this one could really deserve some mercy, whereas this one needs to not have mercy given? Those are all really complex situations. And in the hypothetical, I don't think there's any real way to sort of sit back and go, well, here's the pattern that God used. And so we'll just use it. That's not there. But I think we're living in the midst of an imperfect system where the glimmers of God's glory are trying to shine through in the imperfect judgments of political authorities and the church.

00:35:33
Speaker 3: I wonder if we can look at the pattern of God and say there is actually a way forward if what we see as the normative is the long-suffering, which I think is the normative of divine act in Scripture. That the normative is that these things pile up, and it's only in that extreme moment where it's not the divine patience. And I don't think divine patience means look the other way. It's watchful. It's I'm paying attention.

00:36:01
Speaker 2: It's exhort.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: It's It's nudge. It's, you know, this isn't okay. You need to fix this. And to me, the analogy is with kids. Whatever form of discipline one believes in, most assuredly, the normative is not the worst form of that discipline. The normative is to give the child a chance to correct things, to fix things, but to make sure the child knows that things need to be corrected or fixed. And whatever that most extreme form is that one parent is going to enact, that becomes the, okay, we've reached an exhaustion, right? So that's, let's call it three strikes. You've reached your third strike, and now we institute whatever that strong form of discipline is. Or, this moment was an exception, right? You physically and intentionally harmed your sibling. So we're jumping straight to the highest form to make it crystal clear that there's no room here for nudge fix, nudge fix, right? Now the consistent here is the nudge fix. I think that's important. That is not just simply a look the other way. It's no, the thing that needs to be addressed needs to be addressed. And if it's not being addressed with any sense of this is a problem and you need to see this as a problem, But then we're looking the other way, and that's not helpful to anyone. It's not helpful in the micro case of kids. It's not helpful of the boss towards an employee. It's not helpful for the government relative to the student. I mean, I think of the banal reality of sports, but it drives me nuts in the NBA when a ref calls travel because I think you let travel go 10 times, then you call it once. What's the point of that? If I'm a player, I'm thinking, I don't know what travel is then because you let it go those other 10 times. Or maybe more to the point of carrying the ball. If a parent lets it go 10 times without addressing it, the kid should be confused. If the cop lets no seatbelts or phone in one hand, ticket in the other, if he doesn't enforce that the first 10 times, then shouldn't I be confused when the 11th time you do? Those sorts of things. So there's got to be some form of push, but there are certain things where you jump to. There's no strike one, there's no strike two. It's just This needs to be addressed. And maybe that, when we think about the murder situation, murder is that moment where it's, no, this needs to be addressed right away. Whatever, you know, and wisdom has to be involved, right? Where exactly that line is, I'm not sure, and I don't know that anyone is. But murder is definitely on that other side. And in the case of Barth, Holocaust is definitely on that other side.

00:38:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think you gotta, you know, so I agree with the long-suffering comment.

00:38:47
Speaker 2: I agree that that's God's pattern.

00:38:50
Speaker 1: I would say that that's sort of the overarching message We could call it the metanarrative of God's judgment, right?

00:38:57
Speaker 2: That he's long-suffering. Before he executes judgment, he is long-suffering.

00:39:03
Speaker 1: I would say on the micro level, when we look at Old Testament law, for instance, the casuistic law particularly, you do see punishment meted out, and it is pretty clear that it needs to be meted out in the way that it's done. God usually ends up long-suffering because Israel doesn't execute the law in the way that he has asked them to. Now, we see that most prominently probably in things like Sabbath, the strange offering of sacrifices. But there are very day-to-day laws that carry specific consequences if you break them. And my sense is that part of the wrinkle that we'd have to deal with if we were really going to deal with this whole issue is that the law is given to help restrain evil. And so it isn't simply a matter of is this right or is this wrong? It's also a matter of how do we keep it from getting, how do we keep evil from getting out of control? And so that's an aspect of what we do when we make, when we do judgment. I think that part, when we look at World War II, when we look at what Bart is talking about here, if we think about it in terms of Bart saying, if we're not careful, evil is going to get out of control here. Arguably evil is already out of control, but what's going to end up happening is evil is just going to continue to spread and be out of control.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: This now has to stop. It's a must.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: I think that's a really compelling way to read Bart on World War II. It, His framing of, is it more guilty or less guilty in the question? And that's not his framing. That's the question supposedly he was given. I think that framing's off, but I do think that what he's seeing in World War I is like, this wasn't going anywhere, right? This was going to end one way or the other. It was not going to end in world conquest, but World War II feels different. It seems like if we don't get a handle on this guy and what he's doing and the ideology that he's promoting, this could go everywhere. He doesn't articulate it like this. That's just sort of my instinct reading it, I suppose. But to me, that sort of restraint of evil is a crucial aspect of what we do when we execute judgment. It's almost the same thing, Ashish, that you're talking about with somebody who's spewing hate speech. Well, why would we address somebody who's spewing hate speech, broadcasting it or what have you, as opposed to somebody who makes an offhand sarcastic comment? Someone else hears that goes off and kills someone. Those are two fundamentally different cases, right? One is a flippant comment that somebody probably very much regrets.

00:41:54
Speaker 2: That they've made.

00:41:55
Speaker 1: The other is someone who is benefiting from, um, you know, spewing hate speech over the airwaves. They're actually getting something back from doing that. And so I think those are two fundamentally different cases. But the point is, the one is relatively isolated and probably is unlikely to spread beyond.

00:42:16
Speaker 2: Just a few people.

00:42:18
Speaker 1: Whereas the other, the guy who's up on stage promoting this huge YouTube channel or the podcast or whatever, highly likely that this evil is now not going to be restrained. in an appropriate manner. Go ahead.

00:42:35
Speaker 3: I would guess that in the case of the flippant comment that becomes regrettable, there's also a difference in layers of repentance. The person who's up there consistently spouting off this, that, and the other that is in fact hate speech doesn't come off as particularly repentant either for what he or she says or for what he or she has spawned. Versus I would imagine that the person who made a flippant comment that resulted in something directly regrettable would be quite repentant, right? Even as he or she would want to separate from the actions that came out of it would be just deeply mortified over what happened.

00:43:16
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: Because it wasn't something they were anticipating or seeing forward. And I just, I'll let you keep going, but I wanted to say something because I thought about it. I'm not suggesting that restraint of evil is the sole criteria, right? A husband who murders their wife is arguably, you could make the argument, well, he doesn't have another wife. And so I guess it's safe to just let him off the hook, right? That is not a restraint of evil judgment in that point. But I think that restraint of evil has to be sort of in the equation, in the mix of as we think about some of these things.

00:43:56
Speaker 2: That's all I'm saying.

00:43:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, but even to that point, okay, that person doesn't have another wife to kill, but the idea at play perhaps is this person terminated a life because he couldn't control the impulse that led him to that moment, whatever that impulse is. Incredible anger that stemmed from somewhere. So on what basis do we trust that this person, once that can has been opened... will constrain himself next time when anger inevitably rises up, right? This person needs to be dealt with in the fullest way, I think might be the logic there. But I think to the point of guilt, actually, Barth does seem to address that in that second question, where he says, to admit to oneself that over against this judgment of God, that there are no degrees of guilt, is something that he regards as important with regard to the present war, where he's not letting either side off the hook. And he knows full well that the acts at play by the Nazi regime are different than the acts at play for, let's say, the Americans who are part of the Allies, who are, by the way, in the midst of Jim Crow and don't seem to be willing to get over that. FDR, who himself personally seems to have regretted the very reality of Jim Crow, was not willing to shred his political capital to actually take action to undo it. That's guilt-worthy. FDR knew full well what Winston Churchill was doing in India. And he did speak against it, but he spoke against it not with any sort of ultimatum. It was more of a, we don't agree with this, stop that, as he continued to ally with them because he didn't want to lose Winston Churchill as an ally. That's more than regrettable. That's culpability. Even if it's not the same thing as what Hitler's doing or what Churchill is doing. Now, in Barth's case, I have no reason to know that... think that he knew about these other dynamics that Churchill was involved in. But I do think it's important that he recognizes that guilt is guilt. So he's not demonstrating a distinction in degrees of guilt, even as he does recognize for people who are guilty to resist in the name of something righteous, the righteous state, as we've mentioned in the first episode, him calling it, still have a responsibility to So what he does here right after this, he means, who will measure the amount of culpability? It's a rhetorical question. I should like, therefore, to give to the first part of the question the answer that we must heed Romans 13, 1-7. That's where he brings in Romans 13, this sense of the ideal of what government ought to be doing. And so if we recognize what government ought to be doing, our responsibility is just to do well. And if we do well, we shouldn't have the expectation of facing trouble. He knows full well people doing well are facing trouble, right? His own comrades in Germany who are trying to help the Jewish people are not being treated well. Let's put it that way, right?

00:47:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:02
Speaker 3: But he puts alongside that the second part, and this is what stems his notion of degrees of guilt that he also doesn't want to get into. And to the second part of your question that we must place beside Romans 13, 1-7, the above words, the words from Romans 3.23, which is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Meaning, we all bear some guilt. The question here isn't about less guilty and more guilty. The issue here is, regardless of the fact that we bear guilt, what do we do right now? Or if I can quote Thomas Wayne, Bruce Wayne's father, why do we fall? So we can get back up. If we're not going to get back up, shame upon us. But in the case of the guilty, the Romans 3.23 group, which is Jews and Gentiles alike within the context, which is all of us, if we're all guilty in some sense... The question here isn't of who is more and less guilty. The issue is, do we get up and in the moment respond appropriately, or do we continue to justify guilt? Or do we, in the moment, not only continue to justify guilt, but refuse to resist it? I think maybe that's the issue at play here. Is that fair?

00:48:18
Speaker 2: It is, I think. Yeah. I'll say two things.

00:48:21
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting that Bart begins this question with, you know, is this a judgment on mankind? Answers that with a resounding yes. And doesn't exactly clarify who's being judged.

00:48:33
Speaker 2: I think.

00:48:34
Speaker 3: I think he means everyone.

00:48:36
Speaker 2: I do, too.

00:48:37
Speaker 1: I think normally our normal thought is obviously the Germans are being judged.

00:48:42
Speaker 2: Right.

00:48:42
Speaker 1: The Japanese were being judged. You know, whoever their allies were being judged. I don't get that that's what Bart is saying. He's saying, you know, things like they are an indication of the divine judgment on human society. That's not a human society. That's not this particular human society or human society that has run amok. That's human society. He's not making this distinction between the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats. He's basically saying, no, war is a judgment on all of us. It's a judgment on how far this has gone now. in his second part of this, when he talks about the sort of similarities between the police state and nation going against nation, it's clear that there is a nation that is functioning there as the police. They're saying this has gone too far and it can't go any further. We've got to stop this. And so there's a sort of recognition and judgment that happens there that's appropriate. But I don't think that he's suggesting that any of us escape judgment when there's a war on. It's always a human society problem. We've not been able to solve our differences. We've not been able to recognize what is good, right.

00:50:02
Speaker 2: And beautiful in any other way other than to fight one another.

00:50:07
Speaker 1: And so I think he does see this as a judgment on both sides, um, which makes a lot of sense because both sides end up losing things. Um, whether one wins a war or not, whether, you know, you come out and you're like, okay, the allies won.

00:50:21
Speaker 2: Yes. We also lost an awful lot.

00:50:25
Speaker 1: And I think that that is an aspect of the judgment that Bart would probably admit that we does not delve that deeply into it in this letter.

00:50:34
Speaker 3: So to that point, um, And I would imagine, well, maybe not. I was going to say I'd imagine Barth would have some knowledge of this in his time, but maybe not actually. If you go to Nuremberg today, which was the center, it was where the headquarters of the Nazi party was, at the actual ground zero of the Nazi headquarters, there's a museum known as the Document Center, which was also the place, if I remember correctly, where the Nuremberg trials were held.

00:51:02
Speaker 2: Different spot.

00:51:02
Speaker 3: I could be wrong about that.

00:51:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, different spot. Not at the document center. It was a different spot. Okay.

00:51:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there is a museum at the Nuremberg, at the building where they had the Nuremberg trials.

00:51:10
Speaker 2: Or at the place. At both places, yes.

00:51:13
Speaker 3: Oh, okay. So at the document center, which is at the place of the headquarters, which is this great ostentatious grounds that in some ways Nuremberg has retrieved as a stain on its legacy. And what they've done is they've retrieved it by, on the one side, documenting, and that's the museum, and the other side making it a public grounds site. to recapture it as a, as a life-giving creational space. And it's beautiful, but you can't help, but also see the hideous and Nuremberg makes no, no effort to hide that it's the hideous, right? In fact, they want to preserve it as a monument of hideousness so that you know it is.

00:51:47
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:51:47
Speaker 3: So as you walk through the museum, which for my money is actually as a historical museum, the best museum I've been to in terms of its ability to communicate with clarity, the steps that are involved in this.

00:51:59
Speaker 2: Agreed.

00:52:00
Speaker 3: Uh, In one section of it, it's an attempt to show you the rise of the Nazi Party alongside the reception around the rest of the world. And what's particularly hideous about this is that countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, while you have some voices of concern as to what's going on in Hitler's regime, the by and large result is to say, Either he's doing a good job, or yeah, there's some problems, but that's their problem, not ours. As I recall, the only country that consistently voiced concern and sounded the alarm and said, basically, their media was saying, please help, we've got to address this, was Poland. Now, part of that is Poland is the neighbor, and they probably had access to more understanding. Part of that is probably a sense of their own mortality. they know what's coming. And it's quite possible that Hitler's invasion of Poland, to the degree and heinousness that he undertook it, was partly because they sounded the alarm in this way. Now, there's something culpable within that. So if we want to speak of the judgment of the war, how did we get to the point where these are the measures needed? Now, maybe if we go back 10 years before it, it's not quite 10 years before the start of the war when Hitler comes to power, but you know, close and countries take poland's sounding of the alarm more seriously or concern themselves with what is a very concerning and troubling trend that's beginning to happen under hitler's regime and not just simply say well their problem not ours or but look at the good things mr hitler is doing which unfortunately happened a lot um there are there are records from christians in chicago i'll put it that way of prominent places that wrote a letter praising Hitler. Let's say mildly that's problematic. It's much worse than that. Therein is where I think you can see the guilt, the culpability. Sure, I suppose we could start to make rules and say, well, Hitler did it, the other people didn't, so there's the degrees of guilt. But I think to Bart's point, can we really say that one is more guilty than the other? And therein we can begin to see the claim that this is a judgment upon everyone. The fact that we got to this point where we need this kind of war isn't something that happened because we casually went through life not realizing what was happening. No, there was a lot of looking the other way. There was a lot of okay, maybe this problem, but this good thing, right? There was a lot of weighing the scales that meant the sort of function of a Romans 13 was not actually in force anywhere, or in most places, I shouldn't say anywhere, in order to address these issues before they became so intense that conflict had to be done. So to your point that everyone suffered losses, everyone reached the point where they had to deal with this to their own guilt.

00:55:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree.

00:55:24
Speaker 1: I mean, I think number one, I've been to that museum and I think you're right. It's my favorite place to go.

00:55:29
Speaker 2: And not because it's a happy place.

00:55:32
Speaker 1: No, but they do such a good job and it's so fascinating. It's like you walk through it and you see something different every time. You get new wrinkles on the story every time. It's fantastic. I mean, it's a really well done place. The last two times I've been in Germany, it's been a more constrained experience because they were renovating.

00:55:50
Speaker 2: And I'm always a little disappointed.

00:55:52
Speaker 1: So I'm hoping the next time I go, it'll be done and I can actually walk through the whole thing again. But either way, I do think that you're right. I think that we tend to, and this is another one of those reasons I'm not a big fan of the better and worse sort of framing.

00:56:10
Speaker 2: It just lets us off the hook.

00:56:13
Speaker 1: It doesn't require us to do the sort of self-reflection of, and really taking a hard look at how these things came about, it starts to become about, this was Hitler and the Nazis, period.

00:56:30
Speaker 2: Yes, obviously, they have a lot to do with it.

00:56:33
Speaker 1: But there were other factors that came into play there that allowed this to spiral out of control. And if we're not going to address those and consider them, we're opening ourselves up to it happening again or to having a slightly similar situation arise. And I think these are the challenges that Bart wants to hold out for us, or at the very least, if he doesn't want to hold them out for us, the way he thinks through it is leaving this much room for us to open it up and say, okay, how is everyone culpable in this moment? What was going on here and how did it all operate? because you are seeing these reverberations across. And I think it's a really powerful section in this letter, as short as it is. I mean, it's like three paragraphs, but it's just such an interestingly complex. He fits a lot in, in those three paragraphs that you're just going, what the heck did he just do? But at the end of the day, it's a really powerful part of this letter. I, I, That judgment aspect is very difficult to wrestle with, even in a long form.

00:57:50
Speaker 2: Right.

00:57:50
Speaker 3: As we've sort of demonstrated here.

00:57:52
Speaker 2: As we've demonstrated. There's so many questions. Yeah.

00:57:55
Speaker 3: Lack of certainty.

00:57:57
Speaker 1: So many little rabbit trails you can go down. So many components that sort of glob onto it. You know, this idea that, you know, there can be bad judgment. Well, what do we mean by bad judgment? Well, it can mean a whole host of things. And so you have to chase a lot of those down. But here I think Bart just does a masterful job of sort of laying this out in a way that's really intelligible without over specifying things and leaving that room just to go, we're all responsible. We had to do this, but we shouldn't forget that we're responsible. But these people needed to be dealt with. But we're all responsible. He just keeps going. It provides that sort of in and out that I think is really crucial in this conversation.

00:58:45
Speaker 3: So I'm thinking Batman all over the place. Forgive me. So to go with the Thomas Wayne saying to young Bruce, why do we fall so we can learn to get back up? I have alongside that, in light of what you just said, that flag. the Ben Affleck version of Batman that begins Batman versus Superman with what falls is fallen, which is a bit tautological. But I think the larger point is actually meant to be something of a precursor to that tagline of Thomas Wayne that took on a life of its own, that the Batfleck version is living in a state of despair because in his mind, what falls is fallen. so anything that comes down isn't a state of fallenness there's no sense of grace into his actions and that sets the tone for the entirety of that movie and we don't have to get into that movie but to your point here the two kind of have to go together what falls has fallen okay now what do we live in that despair let's not lose what's fall what falls has fallen but now what do we do when we fall why do we fall so we can get back up yeah yeah i think that's a good architects of batman that's right.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: I think, you know, those two quotes really do summarize well what Bart, I think, is in part trying to say here, because he really is trying to say it's all fallen. But that doesn't mean that we live in the despair of it. There are going to be these moments where we do exercise God's judgment. And what always comes to mind is this great quote from Oliver O'Donnell in his book, The Ways of Judgment. He says that the political authorities don't, they're not abolished when Christ takes power. When Christ ascends and is glorified and stands at the right hand of the Father and has authority over all things on heaven and on earth, the earthly authorities don't lose their purpose. It's reframed. It's contextualized in Christ. And so what they do now, they are secondary theaters of the judgment of God, is the way he describes them. Secondary theaters. And what I think he means in part by secondary theaters is a little stronger than imperfect. What I think he means is almost they're incidental. They can't be primary because they're not recognizing God as the person that they're reflecting, as they're judging. And even when they get it right, they tend to own that judgment as theirs, as opposed to recognizing it as a reflection of what God does. And so I think he has sort of that If I'm reading him correctly, that secondary language is designed to sort of say they can't be primary because they're not actually saying glory to God. They're doing what's right, but trying to accrue that glory to themselves. It's almost what we talked about with the city of God and Augustine, right? It's the self-love that sort of gets in the way. And so even though they can gesture toward it, they can't really be the witness to it. We have to have the eyes to see and ears to hear to recognize this is the judgment of God. And it's being enacted by these earthly authorities. And yet they're not recognizing him. And for that, they are also culpable. So you almost get all of it sort of rewrapped up. It's very similar, I think, to what Bart's saying. I think the Batman quotes are great. And yeah, Oliver O'Donovan stuff I always enjoy.

01:02:20
Speaker 2: So I don't know.

01:02:23
Speaker 1: I think we've, I mean, we're at the end of the episode. We could probably go another hour on judgment pretty easily. We shouldn't, at least right now. We'll probably return to this topic later, but really helpful conversation, Ashish.

01:02:37
Speaker 2: I appreciate it.

01:02:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, same. If I have one final thought to leave with is my disappointment that you took my words on Batman and you trumped it with a patron saint of theological ethics, making me look pedestrian. Oliver O'Donovan, come on.

01:02:54
Speaker 2: Somebody's got to do it. I just couldn't think of another movie quote. Yeah.

01:02:58
Speaker 1: I guess I could have gone with Talladega Nights and Baby Jesus Prayer, but that's harder to work in a conversation about judgment.

01:03:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I wouldn't even know what you're talking about at that point.

01:03:10
Speaker 2: You need to get out more, man.

01:03:12
Speaker 3: Apparently, I need to get outside of Batman more.

01:03:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:03:18
Speaker 2: All right. Well, hey, everybody, thanks for listening. Hopefully you enjoyed this.

01:03:22
Speaker 1: We're going to do the third question next episode, so stick with us, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

01:03:28
Speaker 2: Take care.

01:03:29
Speaker 1: 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.