Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung

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Karl Barth - Paul S. Chung


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href="#ulink_c25a87d7-3a13-5059-849b-4564a4696b4b">181 In order to battle Bolshevism, Ragaz calls for a new orientation in socialism. The kingdom of God must overthrow the kingdom of violence and build up the kingdom of freedom. Therefore, socialism has a task of uniting “a powerful sense of community and a passionate consciousness of freedom.”182 Although Ragaz argued that a certain measure of violence becomes inevitable, he denounced every use of violence as a defeat of socialism. Ragaz’s ideal was a social revolution without violence, a victory without violence through a spirit of truth toward “an immediate socialism and an immediate democracy.”183

      The influence of Landhauer upon Ragaz and Ragaz’s emotional participation in Landhauer’s life and destiny become explicit at this point. On the questions of rejection of the state, the condemnation of the war, and the fundamental demand for violence-free activity, we notice a parallel between Landhauer and Ragaz. Gustav Landauer, an activist of the Bayern revolution, founded the “Socialist Alliance” with Martin Buber in 1908 in the attempt to build up a communal socialism, a community without hierarchy or violence. Early in 1919 he was called by the comrades of the Munich counciliar republic and took part for six days in the Bayern council government. After the collapse of the first council republic in April of 1919, Landauer was put under arrest and slain on the way to prison.

      In addition, a Russian, Peter Kropotkin, helped Ragaz to overcome the Darwinian concept of evolution. In his book, Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier und Menschenwelt (1908), Kropotkin, without finally rejecting Darwin’s concept of the fight for survival, did not regard this idea as one single motive in the development and progress of nature and humanity. Kropotkin made an attempt to discuss and build an anarchist philosophy on natural scientific grounds. Against the Darwinian idea of struggle for survival, he proposed that the regulation is the mutual aid that gains significance in the process of evolution. According to Kropotkin, there is in nature and history a structure of reciprocal aid and an attitude of solidarity.

      Given this fact, anarchism as a principle stands in the line of God’s kingdom because the theocracy of God’s kingdom means none other than an anarchist order. The anarchism of God’s kingdom does not mean disorder or chaos but quite the reverse. Here every human being stands in a direct relation to God and in freely ordered


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