The Church and the War. Karl Barth
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sovereignty of Jesus Christ and assent to the sovereignty of National Socialism are mutually exclusive. Hence the Christian is doing the will of God in opposing the Nazi conquest.
This does not mean that Dr. Barth conceives the war against National Socialism either as a crusade or as a means of furthering the Kingdom of God. It is rather “a large-scale police measure” for repulsing nihilism and anarchism. As such, he holds, it is something which Christians who understand the nature of National Socialism, in contrast with the true nature of the State, must support.
The superficial impression, rather widely held in America, that Dr. Barth is unsocial and “other-worldly” in his conception of Christianity can hardly survive a careful perusal of his Letter to American Christians, or his other writings about the war.
Dr. Barth wrote his Letter of American Christians” in December, 1942. Due to difficulties in communication with Switzerland after the occupation of Southern France, the Letter was long delayed in reaching this country. It is possible that some of his views (for example, about the role of the Church after the war) might be somewhat modified if he were writing the Letter today.
The questions to which Dr. Barth addresses himself in the Letter to American Christians fall into two groups: first, those having to do with the proper function of the Church in relation to the war; second, those that deal with the responsibility of the Church in post-war reconstruction. The two subjects are here treated in separate chapters (II and III) although in his original manuscript they constituted a single document.
Chapter I, while of a different character, is closely related in spirit and outlook to the Letter to American Christians, and, like the Letter, was written especially for American readers. It is a careful review of the way in which the Protestant churches of Europe had met the crisis of National Socialism and the war up to the Fall of 1942. This statement is of front-rank historical importance and is also significant for its indirect disclosure of Dr. Barth’s judgments on the elements of strength and of weakness in the churches of Europe.
Most of Chapter I appeared in Foreign Affairs, January, 1943. Parts of Chapters II and III appeared in Christendom, Fall Issue, 1943. The courtesy of the editors of these two quarterly journals in permitting the reprinting of their articles is warmly appreciated.
SAMUEL MCCREA CAVERT
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. SAMUEL MCCREA CAVERT
I.THE CHURCHES OF EUROPE IN THE FACE OF THE WAR
(A Review of Protestant Reactions to National Socialism)
II.THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH IN WAR-TIME
(A Letter to American Christians, Part 1)
III.THE CHURCH AND POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION
(A Letter to American Christians, Part 2)
The Churches of Europe in the Face of the War
WHAT have the Protestant churches of Europe learned, suffered and achieved in the world crisis? What may be expected—for them, and from them—in the days to come?
I
The present world crisis began when the National Socialists came to power in Germany in the year 1933. It found most of the Protestant Churches of Europe in the initial stages of a process of internal and external rebuilding and consolidation on the basis of a renewed consciousness of their peculiar nature and mission.
The catastrophe of the World War of 1914–1918 was widely felt to have been a serious indictment of the Church and of the Christianity of that day, still strongly under the influence of the intellectual and political developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only shallow detractors held this conviction, but also many enlightened exponents of the Protestant tradition and mission. The effect, however, had not been to produce discouragement but rather to lead many to ask themselves, with new emphasis, the question: What is the basic principle and function of the Church in a human society which obviously is sick almost to death? As was the case during the Renaissance, the return to the Church’s historic origins played a decisive role in the posing and answering of this question. It did not produce either a new religious philosophy and orientation or a new program of religious activity, but it did lead to a rediscovery of the unique content of the Bible and of the significance of the Reformation era and the still older Church—a rediscovery which all of us would have thought most unlikely before the present catastrophe.
The diluted bourgeois religion and ethics of the early twentieth century became “the dead past” while the message of the Old and New Testament, as we found it for the most part rightly interpreted by Luther and Calvin, became “the living present.” We did not become orthodox (“fundamentalist”) in the sense of the repetition of some historical dogmas, but we tried, freely and in our own present-day way, to think again biblically and evangelically and to give back to the preaching and life of our churches their biblical and evangelical Protestant conformation. This conformation they had pretty well lost at the time of the First World War, so that actually they were no longer that “salt of the earth” which they should and could be. We felt obliged to restore to its rightful position the elements of objective truth which must ever be the secret of a living Church and which must be given recognition if the Church is to be differentiated from an inspirational conventicle and if its message is to have meaning for the life and living of human beings.
I say “we,” for I am thinking of a whole generation of responsible persons in all the Protestant churches of Europe. Partly in agreement with each other, partly without such agreement or even in opposition to one another, without organization of any kind but nevertheless in an unmistakable objective solidarity, we entered upon this way. I note explicitly that the so-called “dialectic theology,” often associated with my name, was only one phenomenon among others. There were, and are, many and various ways to walk on this road.
Protest and reaction of all sorts made themselves felt, and, of course, unintelligent and undesirable henchmen were not lacking. Above all, indifference was for a time invincible. It is nevertheless true to say that, by and large, this beginning of an inward renewal springing from the living foundations of the Church of Jesus Christ was the answer given by European Protestantism to the question posed by the First World War. The majority of our theological students and of young men interested in things Christian began to seek progress along these lines.
Theology necessarily had to give recognition, favorable or critical, to this transformation. Roman Catholicism and contemporary philosophy took notice of it as they had never previously noticed developments within Protestantism. A Berlin churchman who tried to claim that the twentieth century was the “century of the Church” was, of course, going too far. But it remains a fact that interest in and understanding of Protestant ecclesiastical doctrine and order increased in comparison to what they had been in the second half of the nineteenth century, often