Christian belief and Christian nationalism, according to Karl Barth

 

Does what we believe matter? You bet it does! And it matters very much when it comes to so-called “Christian” nationalism in our own time.

Twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth had no doubt that belief mattered. And that is the point of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac post for today, Barth’s birthday anniversary (1886). Find the whole post if you can.

Keillor writes that Barth “became disillusioned with the liberal theology he had learned at the university, and this came to a crisis point in 1914. Liberal theology was optimistic about modernity and felt that humanity's progress was part of God's plan and therefore had divine blessing. Barth believed that there was a fundamental divide between humanity and God, and that the line was too often blurry. He believed that the truth about Christianity came only from the revelation of Jesus Christ — he called Christ "the one word of God." He was particularly upset when governments used Christianity as a way to justify actions that he considered very un-Christian. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals signed a manifesto declaring their support of the German cause in World War I, and among the signers were several of Barth's former teachers. Barth was disgusted, and he began to doubt ‘everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.’”

Keillor’s Barth birthday essay ends with this: “When the Third Reich came to power in Germany, Barth was strongly opposed to Hitler and the ‘German Christians’ who merged the Gospel with Nazi nationalism. He wrote most of the famous ‘Barmen Declaration,’ which rejected the idea that the state could have power over the Church, or that the Church could have power over the true essence of Christianity. When he refused to begin his classes with ‘Heil Hitler!’ or to swear allegiance to him, Barth was kicked out of his teaching post and Germany. He moved back to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life writing his monumental work Church Dogmatics, which at the time of his death was 13 volumes and more than 9,300 pages.” (italics are mine)

Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” can be slippery and their meanings certainly change with the passage of time. And thank God we don’t have to read all 9,300 pages of Church Dogmatics to get to the gospel truth that the melding of state and church is heresy. But maybe we should dust off at least some of Karl Barth's writings to help us clarify what we believe and how that belief informs our political convictions.