Towards an Ethno-theological Critique of Barth’s Humanist Ecclesiology
In these circumstances, a critical re-assessment of Barth’s theology of the anti-nation is long overdue. Let us examine the tortured trajectory of Barth’s long campaign against the ideal of the Volkskirche. Barth asserts that no particular place or people can be holy. “God alone is holy”.123 But he must acknowledge that God willed Old Israel to become a holy nation. To minimize the normative force of that concession, he contends that the covenant between God and Israel was only a provisional arrangement that was fulfilled by the advent of Christ and his suffering on the Cross. In other words, the central role in the economy of salvation is played by Christ. Ironically, Barth’s Christocentrism left him open to charges of supersessionism; i.e. the belief that the New Israel incarnate in the church superseded Old Covenant Israel.124
Struggling to resist the supersessionist logic of his Christology, Barth denied that the unbelief of Jews excludes them from “the community of God” because their “election…exists according to God’s eternal decree as the people of Israel (in the whole range of its history in past and future, ante and post Christum natum.)”.125 In effect, Barth provides theological support for the claim that the Jewish ethno-nation is a unique order of creation — even though Jews still flatly deny that the coming of Christ changed everything. Of course, Barth does not want to promote the “direct or indirect renewal of Jewish nationalism (which is the prototype of all bad nationalisms)”.126 He does, however, situate contemporary Jews (and the modern State of Israel) in a direct line of descent from Old Israel. As a holy nation elected by God, Israel remains — despite its continued disobedience — the chosen people, an ontological status not open to Gentile nations.
According to Barth, neither in “the sphere of creation” nor “in the eschaton, in the light of the final revelation,” does Scripture advert to “the problem of nations”. He asserts that “we can read…the whole context of Genesis 1–9…without finding a single reference to the presence of individual peoples”.127 A better view is that Genesis 1–9 represents a creation myth; it presupposes the existence of other peoples such as the Egyptians and the Babylonians; it also provides the Israelites, emerging from exile and ignorant of their own identity with a narrative which distinguishes their holy nation from the mythological origins of those other peoples.128 Throughout Scripture, the sea and the land serve as recurrent metaphors for Gentiles and Jews, respectively. As God created his cosmic temple in Genesis One, the Israelites were set apart from the Gentiles on the third day; it was then that “the waters under the heavens” were “gathered together into one place” called the “Seas,” thereby allowing “the dry land” to appear (Genesis 1:9).129 Contrary to Barth’s claim, therefore, the relationship between “nations” and “humanity” was foreshadowed in the sphere of creation.
Barth believes that a final solution to the naggingly persistent problem of national identity will come with the eschaton (i.e. the last days). Only by appealing to an abstract, ahistorical, and passively futurist eschatology can Barth paper over the tension between his doctrine of Israel and his teaching on near and distant neighbours. As we have seen, Barth casually dissolves primordial biocultural distinctions between strangers and neighbours, out-groups and in-groups, into the lowest common denominator of “humanity”. He then declares grandly that an allegedly divine commandment of xenophilia is mandatory for every Christian people.
Barth also licences — in perpetuity — an obdurate, self-assertive, Jewish ethno-nation whose identity is grounded firmly in the collective rejection of Christ as the Son of God. Accordingly, Barth was no more interested than the Deutsche Christen in continuing the Christian mission to convert individual Jews to the faith. His utopian vision of the collective conversion of Jews in the last days left him indifferent to “the role of personal choice in the matter of Jewish salvation”.130 Only through the mysterious work of God, he believed, will Jews come to recognize the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Until the apocalypse, however, Jews remain their own Messiah with a self-proclaimed mission “to heal the world”. Barth insists that “the church” must “not dispute…the eternal election of Israel”. While expressing sorrow over “the nationalist legalistic Messiah-dream of the Synagogue,” Barth affirms that “the bow of the one covenant” still arches over both unbelieving Jews and faithful Christians. In Barth’s humanist ecclesiology, such contradictions and double standards — like the “possibility of unbelief, false belief, and superstition, of ignorance, indifference, hate, and doubt” forever dividing the visible from the invisible church — “all lie close at hand and will continue so to lie as long as time lasts, as long as the final revelation of the victory of Jesus Christ has not yet dispersed these shadows”.131
Conclusion
The key to understanding the Protestant deformation of Christian nationhood lies in Barth’s futurist eschatology, the belief that all the earthly divisions of race, class, and gender, between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, will be overcome in the apocalyptic appearance of a new heaven and a new earth. In the present age, all the nations of the earth are separated from God in his heaven by an impassable gulf. Alienated from the incarnate Word of God, humans face the constant temptation to worship instead “the gods of power, wealth, nationality, and race that clamour for our allegiance”.132 In the age to come, the elect will be taken up into the Kingdom of God, into a New Jerusalem where Christ will be seated on his throne with all the saints of Old and New Israel by his side. Barth’s highly refined brand of millennialism contributed to a broader ecumenical movement that led liberal Protestants to embrace mass Third World immigration while pointing conservative evangelicals, especially in the USA, toward Christian Zionism. Christian humanism is not alone in its addiction to millennial teleology. Every revolutionary movement in the modern era has invoked its own secularized version of the apocalyptic myth of the Second Coming. The religion of humanity simply translates the eschatological hopes of Christian believers into secular utopias and myths of human perfectibility. In concurrent campaigns to engineer the salvation of the chimerical abstraction they call “humanity,” both Christians and Communists committed countless excesses. In pursuit of the millennium, “progressives” of all stripes brought Christendom to the brink of extinction.
The good news is that futurist eschatology may lose its hold over the Christian social imaginary during the next Protestant Reformation. The neo-communist theology now peddled by Protestant divinity schools draws its emotional force from the as yet unrealised promise of Christ’s Second Coming. That promise is wearing thin, much like secular humanist hopes that the Bolshevik Revolution would usher in a worker’s paradise. For centuries now, atheists and sceptics have mocked the Christian creeds which look forward to the parousia; the New Testament, they say, clearly shows that first century Christians were convinced that Christ was coming in their near future. In the Book of Revelation, Christ proclaims, “Behold, I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:7). During his lifetime, Jesus promised that “this generation will not pass away” before they see “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and glory” (Matthew 24:30–34). Barth encouraged mainstream Christians to join with sceptics in assuming that first century Christians were wrong, that their expectations were left unfulfilled. But what if they were right? What if the Parousia did come before all those who had heard Jesus speak had passed away? What if Christ came back, as promised, on clouds of glory, in the first century AD? What if the evidence for such a startling proposition has always been present, in plain view, readily available to all with eyes to see in the Holy Bible?
One of the most interesting and potentially world-shattering developments in the history of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is emerging, outside the theological seminaries and divinity schools, in a Bible studies movement known as preterism (from the Latin præter meaning “past”).133 Preterist pastors teach that Old Covenant Israel was d
estroyed, once and for all, with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70. By any standard, that event was of world-historical significance; more than a million Jews died as a consequence. What might now be called the First Holocaust did not come as a surprise to first-century Christians. Jesus had warned them to leave Jerusalem when the signs of its imminent destruction began to appear. He told his disciples that “not one stone” of the temple “will be left on another, every one will be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian and eyewitness of the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, reported that armies of angels were seen moving through the clouds as the gathering storm of destruction swept over the city.134 The Old Covenant with Israel was superseded when a New Covenant came into force in which the church became the New Israel. This teaching marks a return to Christian orthodoxy in which neither individual Jews nor the modern State of Israel are to be set upon a pedestal as avatars of ancient Israel. On the contrary, Christians must not rest until they have made disciples of every Jew.
Old Israel no longer exists. God is no longer bound hand and foot to the Old Covenant. The advent of Christ changed everything; in particular, it changed what it means to be a Jew. Until the New Covenant was consummated in AD 70, while every “jot and tittle” of the Law remained in force, to be a Jew was to be a member of God’s holy nation; but, even during Christ’s lifetime, as can be seen most clearly in the Gospel of John, the meaning of the word “Jew” was changing, until finally after AD 70 it denoted a people which defined itself mainly in and through the continuing rejection of Christ.
Once the New Covenant creation was inaugurated, the church was called to exercise and expand Christ’s spiritual dominion over a world without end. Barth, of course, explicitly rejected a theology of dominion. “The sign which [the church] is called to erect is a sign other than the sign of dominion. For this reason, it will not conceive its task to be the establishment of a rule of its own. It will not proceed to build a city of God in opposition to the cities of the world, a realm of the pious against the realm of the godless, an island of the righteous and blessed in the midst of the sea of wickedness”.135 Barth designed a defeatist theology to accommodate the church to “post-Christendom”. The early church, by contrast, set forth to make disciples of every nation. Having been rejected by the Jews, and driven out of the Middle East by the Muslim conquest several centuries later, Christ found his only secure earthly habitation in the hearts and minds of the European peoples. It was in Old Europe that the first and greatest Christian nations came into being, thereby fulfilling Christ’s prophecy that the leaves of the tree of life will be “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). Barth’s ever-so-nice Christian humanism threatens to undo that glorious achievement.
Postscript
The lecturer, Dr Ben Myers, awarded this essay a Distinction grade and made the following comment:
In many respects, this is a strong and well-argued paper. You’ve done excellent research on the 1930s German church struggle, and you’ve made some interesting and pertinent criticisms of Karl Barth’s theology.
There are a few points at which your enthusiasm for the topic seems to have run ahead of the research. In particular:
Invoking an “orthodox Christian doctrine of nations” is question-begging — the paper presupposes this instead of demonstrating or defending it. (The opening reference to Russian Orthodoxy is relevant, of course, but also very contestable — since Russian Orthodoxy is probably the most deeply nationalistic church in history! I.e., it’s not exactly representative on this point — and you’d have to give some account of the immense differences from Catholicism on this point. For instance, the Catholic Church used Latin for all the opposite reasons that the Russian Church uses Slavonic!)
The leap to eschatology at the end really lets you down, since (unlike other parts of the paper) you haven’t read Barth closely enough. Again the reference to AD 70 functions a begging of the question, rather than a convincing argument.
So those are the reasons why I couldn’t quite give this an HD. Still the paper has many scholarly merits — especially in the first few pages.
2012: Suspended for Misconduct
1: Heresy: The Trials and Tribulations of a Divinity School Dissident
In early October 2011, I received a letter from Dr Beverley Moriarty, the Head of the Dubbo Campus of CSU. The letter advised me that Dr Moriarty, acting in accordance with the Student General Misconduct Rule, had authorized an investigation into a complaint against me lodged by Ms Marian Dayhew, University Ombudsman. The complaint alleged that I had “demonstrated intolerance for female and ethnic students” thereby interfering “with their capacity to undertake their own studies”.
I was provided with copies of the complaints made against me and informed that I had fourteen days to reply to the complaints. Accordingly, I prepared a long submission denying that I had committed any sort of academic or general misconduct. The submission was rejected by Dr Moriarty who found me guilty of all counts. After a long process in which I refused to acknowledge my alleged guilt and contested her power to impose a penalty, Dr Moriarty ruled that I was to be suspended for a period of one calendar year. I launched an appeal (discussed below) against my suspension which was similarly unsuccessful.
The upside of this sorry procedure was that I finally received copies of the following complaints, all of which were emails addressed to the Principal of UTC within a week or so of the public seminar given by the black liberation theologian Dr Anthony Reddie:
Complainant: Stephen Burns (UTC lecturer)
I am writing to express my alarm about comments made by one of our students at the seminar day with Dr Anthony Reddie on The Myths of Whiteness on Saturday March 26, 2011, held at the Centre for Ministry under the auspices of UTC, CSU’s PaCT Research Centre and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Council. I ask that my alarm is noted in the relevant places and held on record.
In a public forum — a plenary session of the seminar proceedings — Andrew Fraser asked a question of Anthony Reddie, beginning by noting that he was “confused by [Anthony’s] comments on race”. Drew Fraser then asserted that “Black people do not share the same blood as White people,” citing a book (which he held in his hand, but the details of which I could not see, other than it was called Race136 ). Anthony’s own response to this offensive statement was to narrate how he, as a Black man, had received a transfusion of a White man’s blood, and was alive on that White man’s account. Hence, himself “stood there in defiance” of the comment. The wider context of the exchange involved Anthony’s narration of how Black people have been subjected to racism, dehumanized, and identified more closely with animals than with White persons. Further less than half the persons in attendance were White, so the immediate “audience” for Drew Fraser’s statement was a Black-majority one. I consider Drew Fraser’s statement to be one this institution (in its various alliances with church and university) would, and should, denounce, as contrary to its commitments.
Complainant: Jione Havea (UTC, Senior Lecturer)
I write to register a complaint about Andrew Fraser, against whom several class members in THL105 Introduction to Old Testament Studies have complained because of his scoffing sexist and racist comments during class discussions. Two instances were troublesome and hindered student’s learning:
Mar 14: Andrew stated that he believed that feminism was “absolutely a huge mistake” then proceeded to insult other students (men and women, most are younger than he) with scoffing responses;
Mar 21: Andrew denied that the holocaust took place.
Not only did Andrew’s hostile comments interfere with other student’s learning but his supremacist views are unethical and most probably illegal.
I appreciate if you would lodge this complaint with the appropriate offices and officers in the University.
Complainant: Benjamin Myers (UTC lecturer)
I am contacting yo
u as Head of School, to submit a formal complaint about one of our current BTh students, Andrew Fraser. I have had a number of verbal complaints already about this student’s comments on race, ethnicity, and anti-Semitism. In my lectures for THL 111, I have noticed that whenever Andrew Fraser offers a comment (and he is very vocal), it is almost always related to ideas about race, ethnicity, the destruction of the Jews, and the marginalization of whites. In Week 3, he used the word “niggers” during one of my lectures.
Yesterday I also received a formal complaint from the class tutor, Steve Wright. His email below outlines a disturbing incident in yesterday’s class, where Andrew Fraser was advocating a violently anti-Semitic interpretation of his Christian faith. The tutor spoke to me about this after class, and he was extremely shaken by the incident, especially since several other students seemed to be taken in by these anti-Semitic remarks.
I would be grateful if you could submit my formal complaint, together with Steve Wright’s complaint, to the University.
Complainant: Steve Wright (UTC, tutor)
Ben, as we have discussed, Drew’s interactions in the theology tutorial have been of some concern to me. When making introductions during the first tutorial, Drew expressed that he wanted to study to find out “why the church is so screwed up”. At the time, I thought this outburst was just a quirk of his personality, but his attitude in the tutorials has been quite hostile to the content under consideration. This in itself would not be so problematic if he didn’t so frequently dominate the discussion with lengthy proclamations about the “issues” he has with the textbook.
Dissident Dispatches Page 10
