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Whether you have read them or not, your instincts about the role of law in society and its relationship to the Christian faith has probably been shaped by one of a couple theologians: St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, or Karl Barth. Our series this autumn — Theologians and the Law — will look at their most important ideas about law and may even encourage you to be brave enough to read them for yourself.
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland, he studied first at the University of Bern and then at the German universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. At the German universities, he was trained in German liberal theology. When World War I broke out, Barth’s teachers including Adolf von Harnack signed a Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals to the Civilized World, which excused Germany from responsibility for starting the War. Barth was horrified to see how liberal Christianity was complicit with imperialism and nationalism. In the first edition of his commentary on Romans (1919), he was moved in a different direction. In 1922, he published a completely revised second edition of his commentary, Der Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans) in which he decisively rejected liberal theology and its methods. Barth argued that the God who is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus challenges and overthrows any attempt to ally God with human cultures, achievements, or possessions.
Barth was professor of theology at three German universities between 1921 and 1935. Very early on, he saw the danger in Nazism and that German liberal Christianity would be co-opted to support Hitler’s Anti-Christian ideology. Barth thought that Lutheran theology was vulnerable to being co-opted because of the strict separation of Law and Gospel, discussed in an earlier blog post in this series. Barth lectured on Calvin, whom he regarded as one of the fathers of modern democracy (The Theology of John Calvin, p.225). He believed that Calvin’s study of law always remained an important factor in his theology, and that for Calvin, “law was … the very foundation of the state” (The Theology of John Calvin, p.87). You can see our Calvin and the Law for more.
The starting point for Barth’s theology was that the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit has been revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Karl Barth understood the first implication of the kingship of Jesus for politics. He knew that it meant the dethroning of all human pretensions to absolute power or absolute authority. If Jesus is king, then no one else is.
In 1934, Barth was part of the leadership of the Confessing Church which resisted Nazi attempts to control the Churches in Germany. This led Barth was largely responsible for drafting the Barmen Declaration as a rallying point for Christian opposition to Adolf Hitler. Article 5 of the Barmen Declaration states:
“Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which the Church is also situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability make this possible, by means of the threat and use of force. The Church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence toward God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Dominion [Reich], God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.
We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfil the vocation of the Church as well.
We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State.”
In 1935, Barth was deported from Germany because he refused to sign the Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler. He returned to Switzerland, where he taught at the University of Basel from 1935 to 1962. From 1932 until his death, Barth worked on a massive systematic theology called Church Dogmatics.
Barth’s insisted that Christian theology must start from the conviction that Jesus Christ is truly God. As he worked out his theological method, Barth seemed to leave little space for common grace (see the blog post on Abraham Kuyper). Barth’s friend and fellow Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner developed a social ethic which gave a large place to natural law, termed by Brunner the orders of creation, conceived of in conservative terms. The Nazis twisted the idea of natural law under the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche, declaring that the role of women was to have children, to make home, and to attend Church (which would be part of the Nazi indoctrination of the people). Barth thought that even mentioning the idea of natural law opened the door to this Nazi distortion. Barth and Brunner had a debate in 1934, whose title when published in English needs its own spoiler alert: Natural Theology comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr Karl Barth.[1] Barth led many Protestants who were influenced by his thinking to reject natural law and/or to reject the idea of human rights. His aversion to natural law, whilst fully understandable in its context, was a harmful overreaction to an idea which Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and even Abraham Kuyper had all found to be biblically based and helpful in thinking about God’s purposes for law and government.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Barth also wrote a number of short works on the relationship between Church and Government. Barth rejected the Lutheran division of church and state founded on the law/gospel distinction. Law is the form of the gospel and its content is grace, so the gospel determines that sphere commonly regarded as under law. The basis of both church and state is christological, the state being appointed by Christ to serve the work of redemption by means of preservation. Christ’s kingdom is a final goal for both church and state, yet the spheres are not identical. Barth insists that the job of the Church is to speak prophetically. If the Church speaks prophetically and government responds obediently, God is glorified by the government’s response. If the Church speaks prophetically and government responds defiantly, persecuting the Church, then God is glorified by the witness of the Church in its sufferings and martyrdoms.
[1] K. Barth and E. Brunner, Natural Theology comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr Karl Barth, P. Fraenkel tr. (Geoffrey Bles 1946).
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