Karl Barth and Radical Politics

Karl Barth and Radical Politics . Edited and translated by George Hunsinger. Westminster Press,1976. $6.45 paperback.

Two years ago (see Post American, January, 1975, pp. 30-31) we noticed the emergence in Germany of a bitter controversy about the interpretation of the theology of Karl Barth -- a controversy that also has the potential to illuminate the experience of the American church. The center of this controversy is the bold new thesis of Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (expressed most fully in Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths, Chr. Kaiser, 1972). Marquardt’s thesis is that earth’s early involvement in socialist political action and labor union organizing in the second decade of this century was not a false start in the search that culminated in the massive Church Dogmatics, but is actually the key to understanding the whole of Barth’s theology.

Barth remarked toward the end of his career that “I decided for theology because I felt a need to find a better basis for my social action.” The Marquardt thesis radicalizes this statement to argue that Barth’s mature theology (often rejected as biblicist, transcendental, and therefore politically and socially irrelevant) was, in effect, an elaborate construct designed to ground his radically socialist (even anarchist) politics. This thesis is supported not only by documentation of Barth’s socialist commitments at various stages of his life, but also by a highly technical theological argument, claiming that only thus can the particular formulations of Barth’s Christology and “concept of God” be properly understood.

Such questions are not the product of “ivory tower” theologizing. They are raised, at least in part, by Marquardt’s efforts to relate his study under Barth (the preface to Church Dogmatics IV/1 acknowledges Marquardt’s help) to his commitment to the student movements of the 1960s. Nor is the thesis being analyzed politely in the seminar rooms of German theological scholarship. Marquardt’s book upset the efforts of some European scholars to bend Barth’s work to the support of bourgeois church life. Before the book was published it was rejected as “unscientific” by the faculty of the Kirchliche Hochschule of Berlin. Helmut Gollwitzer (who had been prevented by the Basel “burghers” from succeeding Karl Barth because of his leftist politics) resigned his position in the seminary in protest. Marquardt’s thesis was then accepted at the Free University of Berlin (where Gollwitzer still served), and its author granted an assistant professorship. Barth scholars in Europe have been largely split into “right wing” and “left wing” camps by their response to Marquardt’s thesis.

But neither is this debate of significance for the European scene only. It raises some fundamental questions for Christians in every social and political context: Do the scriptures offer the modern Christian concrete guidance for a political and social stance? Will a fundamentally biblical theology inevitably distance one from modern social problems, or will it actually provide the leverage from which to offer a radical critique of modern society and an alternative to it? Are contemporary theologies of liberation the only route to the radicalization of theology or may one find another route through fuller penetration into the classical traditions of theology? Does a radically Christocentric and transcendental critique of theological liberalism have implications for the political arena? Could one make a comparable critique of political liberalism? And so forth.

With these questions in mind, one can only welcome an anthology devoted not only to the Marquardt thesis, but also to the broader questions it raises. Editor George Hunsinger, a graduate student at Yale, has translated five essays from the European discussion. These include a 1911 “socialist” address by Barth on “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice”; an early statement of Marquardt’s thesis entitled “Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth”; an abridgment of a sympathetic defense of this thesis by Marquardt’s mentor, Helmut Gollwitzer; a sophisticated critique by Hermann Diem; and a more general essay by Dieter Schellong, “On Reading Karl Barth from the Left.”

These five translations are supplemented by an essay by American Joseph Bettis who, sympathetic to Marquardt, attempts to relate the discussion to the country and to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. A concluding essay by the editor summarizes the debate and offers a reading of Barth’s theological development that supports a “chastened” version of the Marquardt thesis.

Some issues raised in this book are extremely technical and must be left to close students of the development of Barth’s thought. Here it is sufficient to agree with the editor that Marquardt overstates his thesis to the point of misstatement by making Barth’s theology instrumental to and a function of his politics. Marquardt is not in error in pointing to Barth’s socialism, but he is wrong, as Hunsinger says, “in stressing this dimension to the exclusion of all else and at times subordinating all else to this dimension.”

Though I would not wish to make too much of the fact, something of Marquardt’s distortion can be seen in that the general index to all 13 volumes of the Dogmatics lists only one reference to “socialism” and that these two pages shrivel in significance when compared to the 50 pages devoted to angels and demons. Nor would Barth ever have permitted an “instrumental” view of theology. One must give full weight to Barth’s own claim and desire to be first and foremost a theologian of the Word.

But at the same time, Barth clearly understood the scriptures in general and the doctrine of justification by faith in particular to push the Christian consistently in a leftist direction. “Christian realist” John C. Bennett expresses appreciation in his recent book The Radical Imperative (Westminster Press, 1975) for Barth’s early recognition of the “divine partiality” in which “God always takes his stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.” From this Barth deduced that the church must not only side with the poor in love and service but must also push the state in a similar direction. For Barth this will most often mean gravitating toward those political parties (generally those of the “left”) that share this orientation.

For Barth this meant socialism, and while he argued that the church should never commit itself to any particular socialist platform as the shape of the kingdom of God in our time, he nonetheless insisted that we should not be afraid to support concrete political and social goals in terms of the options presented in a particular historical context. It should be obvious that such a socialism is not ideologically Marxist; it is in many ways closer to social democracy. It is, at least in the case of Barth, eclectic and pragmatic rather than theoretical and ideological.

The resulting complex of values may be seen in a quotation in which Barth speaks of his implicit commitments in the 1920s (after the earlier radical decade of activism). In it he describes “the direction I silently presupposed or only incidentally stressed: ethics -- co-humanity -- servant church -- discipleship -- socialism -- peace movement -- and, hand in hand with all of that, politics.”

There is behind Barth’s vision an eschatological relativizing of all political programs, socialist schemes, and revolutions. This is expressed by Gollwitzer as “the true socialism is the kingdom of God” and “God’s socialism always infinitely surpasses whatever we can create as socialism.” In such a kingdom vision Barth finds the leverage to critique the revolution and to relativize all new orders -- while at the same time constantly pushing in the same direction. It is here that we see the basis for Marquardt’s claim that there is in Barth an anarchistic side in which all existing orders are seen as partial and evil.

This is one of the most puzzling features of Barth’s thought -- and perhaps one of the most biblical. It is what allows Marquardt to argue that Barth is even more radical than Marx -- in that the kingdom of God carries a critique even of the Marxian vision. It is also possible to see here why biblical faith is subversive to all political systems: It denies them the ultimate allegiance they always seek. (Was not this at the root of much early persecution of the Christians?)

On the other hand, this same relativizing of all revolutions also takes some of the radical punch out of Barth’s thought in a way that would be very distressing to a doctrinaire Marxist. Gollwitzer, for example, argues that this relativizing also means that “reformism and revolution no longer stand in exclusive opposition” and that “it is possible to work for social progress within the existing system,” in a style of “immanent opposition to the system.”

I would have appreciated in all of this a fuller discussion of Barth’s rejection of “natural theology.” Doctrines of natural theology often become the means of smuggling into Christian faith the accumulated, subliminally shared vision of a culture in such a way as to “de-radicalize” the gospel and blunt its critique of the existing order. The point of contact thus established with the existing order becomes the bridge by which the order can be ultimately affirmed and finally sacralized. In Barth’s methodological rejection of natural theology for the Christological starting point we see a significant step toward the Anabaptist hermeneutic and a certain convergence in their common rejection of the ultimacy of the existing order. It is no accident that John Howard Yoder, for example, gravitated toward Basel to study with Karl Barth.

Here too is an important angle on editor Hunsinger’s claim that Barth’s break with theological liberalism was intertwined with his repudiation of political liberalism. It is this statement of Marquardt’s thesis that Hunsinger accepts: “Barth’s political rejection of liberalism naturally preceded, but actually facilitated, his theological rejection of liberalism. His political break with liberalism had led him to a new sense of God’s sovereignty.”

It was the political accommodation of his professors that revealed to Barth the poverty of the cultural accommodation of their theology. One cannot help but wonder whether a similar dynamic might not underlie the experience of many Americans involved in the radical movements of the last decade. If so, there might be some point to the apologetic concerns of Marquardt and others that these breaks in liberal continuity might be the occasion for an opening up to the radical vision of the scriptures and a renewing of theology.

That would be difficult in America, where the terms in which this discussion are cast are strange and even frightening. Our anticommunism is still so strong that all that socialist talk is unnerving. Joseph Bettis even grounds in this fact the tendency of American theologians to ignore Barth. Since his thought implies a “radical socialist and humanistic ethic,” it is a “direct threat to the liberal capitalist ethic that dominates the American mentality,” says Bettis. He is convinced that “people have said Barth was non-political and didn’t have a social ethic, when what they meant was that they didn’t like his socialist politics or radical ethics.” That is, they have so limited the spectrum of option that Barth does not even appear on it.

I must affirm, however, the growing conviction that the American church scene needs profound interaction with Barth. Even apart from the political discussion (which would surely have to be recast for our context), I find what he is saying to be crucial. His is one of the few viable paths out of the impasse in evangelical conflicts over scripture. (Another reason for Barth’s cold reception in America was his advocacy of a “post-critical” theological exegesis precisely when Americans were polarized into parties that found Barth, on the one hand, too critical and, on the other hand, too willing to speak biblically in continuity with the classical Christian tradition.)

In Barth I find important elements of the theological, historical, and biblical analysis that force me toward the vision of Sojourners as the most pertinent and the most biblical response to the current cultural situation.

When this article appeared, Don Dayton was Sojourners book review editor and served on the faculty of North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago while pursuing graduate study at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.