“The New World” of Karl Barth: Rethinking the Philosophical and Political Legacies of a Theologian

ABSTRACT

It is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth (1886–1968) a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history.

KEYWORDS:

• Karl Barth
• political theology
• Weimar intellectual history
• twentieth-century political thought

“Opposites,” said Naphta, “may be consistent with each other. It is the middling, the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other that is preposterous. Your individualism, as I have already taken the liberty of remarking, is defective. It is a confession of weakness. It corrects its pagan State morality by the admixture of a little Christianity, a little ‘rights of man,’ a little so-called liberty—but that is all. An individualism that springs from the cosmic, the astrological importance of the individual soul, an individualism not social but religious, that conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society, but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit—a genuine individualism like that sorts very well with the most binding communism.”

—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

As a young pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil, Karl Barth (1886–1968) had expected the onslaught of the Great War and expressed his fears to his congregation.¹ What he had not expected was its feverish glorification by the European Protestant clergy many of whom personified the war a “saviour, a reformer with a frightful face,”² seeing it as a “religious uplifting” that ended a spiritual decline.³ Though commonplace, the claims made by the Protestant clergy and intellectuals alike that the war was fought “in the name of God … with God for King and Country, for Kaiser and Reich, for honour and freedom,”⁴ shocked Barth. Patriotism and Christianity seemed to have become inseparable. This unity was notoriously sealed by an address “To the German Nation” by Kaiser Wilhelm II, composed by Adolf von Harnack, the prominent liberal theologian and Barth’s former theology professor, which ended with a declaration: “We will resist to the last breath of man and beast. We shall fight out to the struggle even if we must fight against a world of enemies. Never before has Germany been defeated when it was united. Forward with God who will be with us as he was with our ancestors.”⁵

Before becoming pastor of Safenwil in 1911, Barth had studied theology under several eminent German theologians, including Harnack and Wilhelm Hermann, at leading universities—Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. At the break of the war, as Barth later recounted, he was abhorred to discover that the sacralising warrant for Kaiserreich’s militarism had been signed by “almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could no longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history.”⁶ Barth was convinced that it was not the erroneous political judgement of his teachers that had led to a flawed theology, but the other way around—that their flawed political judgement was a consequence of their liberal theology. The nineteenth-century divinisation of Man, or “natural theology” as Barth later called it, had justified submission to the cause of nationalism and imperialism. Modern man had no patience for a distant and tempestuous God and thus moved, Barth ironically recounted,

more and more to a religious veneration of nature and modern culture. By the sea, in the mountains, in the desert (he became a great traveller), in the roar of machinery, in the bustle of great cities, in the iron structure of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and of the Frankfurt railway station, he now sought and found all sorts of revelations of God. Why not? God speaks everywhere. But without noticing it, everything that existed began to be surrounded with a peculiar halo of religion—the State and the Hohenzollerns and the Prussian military, the German citizen with his incomparable “efficiency”, capitalism, trade, enterprise, in short, the whole Germany.⁷

For Barth, the political implication of the theological inability to distinguish truth from heresy was the failure to recognise and confront utter evil, including the ideologies that had led to the war, let alone the failure to speak up against the war itself. Thus nothing less than a root-and-branch rethinking of God and the meaning of religion in its relation to the human condition and politics had become an urgent need.⁸ With these pressing even if radical corrections in mind, the young Barth embarked on writing his widely read commentary, The Epistle to the Romans (first published in 1919, with a substantially revised second edition published in 1922).⁹ In his quest for new horizons for normativity in an already intensely post-metaphysical age, Barth’s commentary asserted God’s absolute otherness—God is the “Wholly Other”—and the sovereignty and timelessness of the divine as a transcendent horizon against which either transient human truth or heresy could yet again be measured.

It was mainly through his Romans II that Barth became the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, his place in theology being comparable to that of Wittgenstein and Heidegger in philosophy, Weber in sociology, and Keynes in economics. While the revolutionary implications of the works of these thinkers extended far beyond their particular disciplines, Barth studies have remained, perhaps because theology seems to have only limited relevance beyond its esoteric domain, a strictly disciplinary affair. Moreover, the untangling of the ethical, social and political thrust of Barth’s thought has been largely confined to the specialised field of theology. Indeed, only a small number of recent intellectual histories have highlighted the interwar debates over the ethical, social and political crises by drawing on the ways Europeans rethought and debated God.¹⁰ Thus the main aim of the present article is to restore Barth to a more prominent place in twentieth-century intellectual history.

Furthermore, on the few occasions when Barth does make an appearance in wider debates about the content and legacies of Weimar thought, he does so mainly in the genealogies or pedigrees of political theology. While it is anything but clear what exactly political theology (or its variants) means and implies, Barth’s placement in such pedigrees has commonly led to denunciatory, yet as I will argue, simplifying and at times mistaken accounts of his political and intellectual legacy. The label “political theology” as such often simply translates into a licence to present Barth’s thought as “a form of irrationalism,”¹¹ or “an absolutist idea of religion that allowed for neither interpretation nor criticism.”¹² It is alleged to have had political consequences that “were profoundly conservative, rejecting as it did the relevancy of human action.”¹³ In exploring the political dimensions of Barth’s anti-liberal and anti-historicist theological revolution, his readers outside theology often voice slogans like neo-orthodoxy, anti-modernism, apocalypse, absolutism, submission, irrationalism, and tend to build overgeneralised and sometimes misleading connections between them.¹⁴

Just how misguided these explicit or tacit allegations of compliance or support for intellectual absolutism and political authoritarianism are becomes clearer by examining Barth’s own work and life. Certainly, Barth’s political concerns and themes changed considerably during his life, which is unsurprising considering the tumultuous times he lived through. Yet at no point did his anti-liberalism, theologically or politically, translate into an apocalyptic or absolutist agenda. There are a number of far more detailed and illuminating, even if at times diametrically opposed, studies of Barth’s political thought, yet these rarely inquire into his interdisciplinary impact or reach out to an interdisciplinary audience. It is precisely the latter that is the main thrust of my study. With this in mind, I will focus mainly on Barth’s Weimar writings, which, I argue, became influential in scholarship outside theology. I will then explore in greater detail the inspiration Barth’s theology offered to thinkers across disciplines. I shall conclude with a brief discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in twentieth-century intellectual history.

“The Red Pastor”

A few years before he became a theological revolutionary, the young Barth was already a political revolutionary. After completing his studies in Germany, he returned to his native Switzerland and as a young pastor immediately felt uneasy about the theological-political teachings to which he had been exposed. Harnack and Hermann had sought to separate God from politics, as well as ethics from politics, or at the very least to lay out separate frameworks of normativity for each domain. The political realm was and should be allowed to remain amoral, while the demands of God and Christianity belonged to the morality of the private individual. Even if they did not believe that Christians should not care about politics or social inequality, they insisted that the answers to questions regarding political justice or injustice cannot be derived from Christianity.¹⁵ In other words, their answer to political problems was that the domains of Caesar and God must not be understood in confrontation with each other, since “God and Caesar are the lords of two quite different provinces.”¹⁶

Already in his early years as a pastor Barth strongly disagreed with this position. In the small farming and industrial community of Safenwil, he witnessed how its members had to work in factories in dangerous and dismal conditions, as well as living in extreme deprivation and exhaustion, in stark contrast to the comfortable life of the flourishing upper middle class of the factory owners. As he later recalled, “in the class conflict which I saw concretely before me in my congregation, I was touched for the first time by the real problems of real life.”¹⁷

He was not the first Swiss pastor to be appalled by the darker side of bourgeois capitalism. Since the turn of the century, a wave of radical Christian social democracy had swept across the country and was preached in its churches. Upon his return from university, Barth was immediately drawn into his native land’s radical Christian socialism:

Every young Swiss pastor who was not asleep or living somehow behind the moon or for whatever reason errant, was at that time in the narrower or wider sense a “Religious Socialist”. We became—in negative things more certain to be sure than in the positive—powerfully antibürgerlich.”¹⁸

Like other Swiss Christian socialists, Barth did not remain silent about his political beliefs and, unlike Harnack’s and Hermann’s teaching that religion was above politics, he both preached and acted upon his beliefs.

The young Barth was convinced that Socialism constituted the true Christianity for modern times and demanded that the Church shed what at best was its silent indifference or at worst its complicity with the bourgeois, and start to speak out and practice the gospel of social justice. Christ, he argued, related and spoke in a special way with and for the poor and the oppressed, in a speech at a workers’ union meeting, provocatively adding that “Jesus was more socialist than the socialists.”¹⁹ He insisted that adhering to Socialism was not a matter of political opinion or pursuit but a Christian obligation, the only political alternative for a Christianity that wished to remain true to the message of the Gospel. “I have said that Jesus wanted what you want,” he insisted in addressing his “socialist friends”—

that he wanted to help those who are least, that he wanted to establish the kingdom of God upon this earth, that he wanted to abolish self-seeking property, that he wanted to make persons into comrades. Your concerns are in line with the concerns of Jesus. Real socialism is real Christianity in our time.²⁰

But he not only preached social justice in church but also joined the workers’ meetings and encouraged them to take joint action to improve their lot and thereby soon earned himself the nickname “the red pastor.” His social-religious criticism was by no means only intellectual, nor was his political criticism moderately advocating fairer social policies or graduate social reform. Instead, Barth championed a radical socialist position, insisting that “private property as a means of production” must “fall.”²¹

Only few of Barth’s readers have argued that it was his socialist commitment that triggered his theological revolution, or, put differently, that he turned to theology in order to articulate the collapse of the bourgeois world in other than materialist political terms.²² However, most studies of Barth suggest that he shed his radical political stance during World War I and increasingly moved away from endorsing particular political ideologies, let alone revolutions. Yet according to this reading Barth’s calls for a political revolution were replaced by, rather than translated into, a call for a theological revolution.²³

There are, however, several problems with detaching Barth’s theological pursuits from his socio-political concerns. First, Barth insisted throughout his life that there was no purely theological discourse that was somehow beyond politics and that a non-political Christianity was therefore “impossible.” More than that, “such indifference would be equivalent to … a rebellion against the ordinance of God—and rebels secure their own condemnation.”²⁴ Secondly, while soon after his Safenwil years, Barth’s theological fervour began to dominate his earlier, more vocal political fervour, he nonetheless remained socially committed, non-conformist, and outspoken about his beliefs throughout the decades of political disasters and challenges. Before World War I, he joined the Socialist Party, but during the war he spoke out against its support for the war. During the Weimar years, when he was offered a professorship in Germany, he was already disappointed with the Bolshevik Revolution, yet even during these years he repeatedly insisted on the unavoidability and relevance of political questions for theology.²⁵ His lectures on Ethics in the late 1920s, address a wide range of political issues, such as war, pacifism, revolution, liberalism, anarchism, political authority and social justice at considerable length. In 1935, he lost his professorship in Bonn for refusing to take the allegiance pledge to the Führer, whose dictatorship Barth continued to criticise when he was sent back to Switzerland, where during World War II he was similarly banned from speaking publicly about politics. During the Cold War, he refused to approve the Western cause against the Soviet Union and infamously insisted that the real threat to Europe was subtler: the uncontested, yet erosive and sedative capitalism. At the same time, Barth always declared himself to be committed to democracy and the rule of law.²⁶ Moreover, in all these varying political contexts, he continued to reaffirm his commitment to politics and claimed that his entire theological corpus “was never a private matter … remote from the world and man. Its theme is God for the world, God for man, heaven for earth. This meant that all my theology always had a strong political side, explicit or implicit.”²⁷ Similarly, he did not regard political engagement as a personal matter of a theologian and citizen but as an unavoidable part of Christian life and faith, insisting that a “silent community, merely observing the event of time, would not be a Christian community.”²⁸

On the other hand, from the early 1920s, in parallel with his continuing political commitment, Barth insisted that a much needed overhaul of theology would be at least potentially more revolutionary politically than any political revolt or reform. This stance that God and not the human revolutionary “overcomes the unrighteousness of the existing order”²⁹ clearly marked a change in Barth’s theological-political views, laying less emphasis on the idea of a political revolution and more on the urgency of a theological revolution.

This change can be traced back, as several of Barth’s readers have observed, to the three years between the publications of Romans I (1919) and Romans II (1922).³⁰ Barth rewrote the commentary substantially, but in the present context the most significant difference between the two editions is that the earlier version was explicitly political even if still primarily a theological criticism of nationalism and capitalism, while the second edition was driven by a profound disillusionment with the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, Barth had become less confident in committing as a theologian to one or another political option and instead prioritized challenging the theological roots at the base of both religion and politics that he thought had gone desperately astray. Only a far more radical revolution than the political one could aim at “the possibility of a new order,”³¹ and it was precisely this appeal that made Romans II resonate so strongly with the concerns of his peers. It is also the rethinking of this aspect of Barth’s thought that should become the ground for rethinking both his intellectual and political legacy.

The Epistle to the Romans: An Ethical, Political and Hermeneutic Agenda

Politically, both editions of Barth’s Romans were written against the exaltation of the nation and the worldly hegemonic powers to a metaphysically legitimised absoluteness (Rom. II, 50). Theologically, their refutation required the undoing of what he judged as the annihilation of theology by theologians—the undoing of positivist theology and historicism.³² Much of nineteenth-century theology since Friedrich Schleiermacher had been engaged in historicising and demythologising the Christian dogma—one could say, in modernising it. Modern readers knew, after all, that the Scripture was a historical document written and perhaps even coined by humans in history. Yet this did not discredit Christianity, Barth’s teachers had argued, because its teaching coincided with the moral law inscribed in the human conscience and heart. For Barth, such historisation of the Christian faith was based on a progressivist self-conception of Western man and history, whilst the Great War in its horror had disqualified all such optimism. Culture and history no longer testified to man’s greatness; they attested instead to the human ability to commit previously unimagined atrocities.³³

Against a historical and cultural understanding of religion, Barth asserted an absolute void between humankind’s transience and what he called the timeless transcendence of the divine. Against the theologies of immanence, he insisted that God does not reside in the human mind or human heart but is “above him—unapproachably distant and unutterably strange,” “unknown,” “Wholly Other” (Rom. II, 27, 56, 49). We need to be reminded of Ecclesiastes 5:2: “God is in heaven, you are on earth,” which Barth argued had been obscured by a romantic, historical and subjectivist religiosity. In the same vein, Barth’s Paul of the Epistle asserted the “essential, sharp, acid, and disintegrating ultimate significance” of “the distance between God and man” (Rom. II, 49). In the context of the familiar story of the spirit of dislocation in the 1920s, Romans II was among “the books that most excited us”—so recalled Karl Löwith, one of Martin Heidegger’s many influential students.³⁴ Why, and in what sense, did Barth’s biblical exegesis speak to so many contemporaries in Germany and, as we shall see, elsewhere in Europe?

To begin with, Barth’s Romans was not based on an accidental exegetic choice. Paul’s Epistle establishes in forceful terms the legacy of revelation against human self-sufficiency and the belief that righteousness can be warranted solely by law, tradition, the community, or human reason. Paul—it has often been claimed—should be understood as the second Christ, the founder of political Christianity. He forces the age of Moses to come to its end in order to announce the beginning of an entirely new world, that of faith. Yet this announcement does not limit itself to faith alone, even if Paul’s message is that without faith human efforts, including the trust people place in the law, tradition, community and reason, remain ultimately in vain. To use perhaps the most familiar examples: Nietzsche’s Paul accomplished the “transvaluation of all values,” with the most far-reaching consequences, and Nietzsche judged Pauline Christianity to be a “slave morality.” Barth also attributed a world-transforming role to Paul, yet his judgement could not have been more different from Nietzsche’s condemnation: the young Barth’s quest was for a reaffirmation of the Pauline message for all time and in particular for his contemporaries.

In claiming that “if we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul,” in the preface to the first edition of Romans in 1918, Barth suggested that his contemporaries too stood at the doorstep of a new era. In other words, Barth pronounced the theological, ethical, philosophical, and political bankruptcy of the world that had sleepwalked into war. His insistence that this historical rupture needed to be followed up with a formal fracture, the emergence of a “new world,” was received with a widely shared sense of urgency. There would be no mere picking up the of pieces, he announced along with many contemporaries, reminiscent of the Paul of the Epistle, “the old world has passed away”; the “era of old ethics is gone forever.”³⁵ On the one hand, Barth argued that mankind’s self-divinisation had been theologically destructive, diluting God into a subjective feeling or “a railway station.” Yet on the other, it was also world-destructive, in its tacit or outspoken legitimation of nationalism and militarism, capitalism and the economic exploitation of fellowmen. Anthropocentric Christianity, he argued, had removed boundaries to human volition, not only in regard to oneself, but inevitably in regard to our fellowmen. While Barth’s criticism was clearly a refutation of the omnipotence of human reason, he insisted that he was not condemning reason, agency and humanity, but their distortion: “Men have imprisoned and encased the truth”—he wrote in Romans II, anticipating the fall of Neo-Kantianism—as men “have trimmed it to their own measure, and thereby robbed it both of its earnestness and of its significance. They have made it ordinary, harmless, and useless; and thereby transformed it into untruth.” This fall into heresy had for Barth, as for many of his peers, immediate political consequences: “this ungodliness will not fail to thrust [men] into ever new forms of unrighteousness. If mankind be itself God, the appearance of the idol is then inevitable” (Rom. II, 45).

As unfamiliar as Barth’s theological language may sound today, which has perhaps contributed to the omission of his name in the canon of Weimar intellectuals,³⁶ his quest was effortlessly translatable into the early postwar discourses addressing the ethical and political predicaments of the time. Characteristically, while Barth asserted the absolute urgency and primacy of ethical questions—“the peculiarity of our own time is that, in much greater measure than the time just preceding, it presents the problem of ethics as a real concern, that is, as a true problem”³⁷—he coupled it with an imperative to accept the uncertainty of all answers. The ethical question “is no question for an idle hour, but it is the question which haunts every hour, forever demanding answer and forever remaining unanswered.”³⁸ So what Barth essentially did not say was that the ethical questions must be answered yet cannot be answered. Instead, he insisted that the question concerning truth and untruth cannot be answered in the contemporary rationalist or scientific sense, yet that we must continue to seek an answer. In other words, he argued not only for the significance of ethics but also made a case for questioning and doubting ethics and theology alike. This makes the commonplace view that his Weimar work advocated or implied theological, ethical and political absolutism at the very least questionable.

As one of the aftermaths of the Great War, the certitude of the self-knowing subject had lost its credibility with Barth’s Romans I and especially the more widely read Romans II being among the earliest pathbreakers, and it was the Pauline faith that Barth set against this decline in certitude. And yet, as he insisted, neither was faith a certitude, but rather “a scandal, a hazard, a “nevertheless.” … It is a leap into the void. And it is possible to all because it is impossible” (Rom. II, 99, 57). While Barth’s commentaries, like his early sermons, have the coming of the “new world” and the “new man” as one of their leitmotifs, these are presented in terms of “hope,” as the “not yet,” as the “unknown,” and “uncertain.” Faith can only hope for “the dawning truth of God, the disturbance of all disturbings” (Rom. II, 57). True theology for Barth, like all genuine thought, is an inherently inconclusive, uncertain, unending mode of inquiry, “in which every answer is once again a question.” It never offers readymade systems or solutions. It cannot be defined by its results, but is more accurately understood as always a sort of a countermovement. It challenges not only the inclination to certainty but even the hope of ever finding guarantees: “Whoever now desires certainty must first of all become uncertain.”³⁹

Further, Barth reinforced his zeteticism with his dialectical manner of writing, which resonated with young interwar intellectuals who felt it was an expressive if not exclusive form for voicing their experience. Barth’s writing used an imagery of a wrecked and dismantled earth, of fragmentation and violence, of an utter foundering of the self-sufficient, self-centred subject and its world, as well as comapring revelation to a “purifying”, “carbonizing” and “destructive” stroke of lightning (Rom. II, 257).⁴⁰ Additionally, Barth constructed his argument through deliberately emphatic oppositions, contradictions and paradoxes, such as “time” and “eternity,” “sin” and “righteousness,” “visible” and “invisible,” “the impossible possibility of faith” (138), Adam and Christ, “the old world” and “the new world,” statements and counterstatements. An illustrative example is his presentation of the historical crisis of his time in a positive sense as “direct[ing] our attention to time which is beyond time, to space which has no locality, to impossible possibility … to affirmation in negation, to salvation in the world, to acquittal in condemnation, to eternity in time, to life in death” (92).

This dialectics aimed on the one hand to reinforce a sense that truth is an “enigma” (258) that can only disclose itself in movement or contrasts as “essentially a riddle” (100), or as Barth phrased it:

our thought must share in the tension of human life, in its criss-cross lines, and its kaleidoscopic movements. And life is neither simple, nor straightforward, nor obvious. … Only dialectical thought can lead to genuine reflection upon its meaning and make sense of it. For when our thought moves onwards direct and unbroken, when it is comprehensive, it is quite certain that we are not thinking about life. … Genuine thought is always strange to the world and unsympathetic. (Rom. II, 425)

Yet on the other hand, Barth refused both reconciliation between the opposites that make equal demands on our lives, dismissing it as mere concealment of existing tensions, and any deceptive substitute for what he characterised as the “inconspicuous” (Rom. II, 100), “questionable, disturbing, dangerous” character of truth (258).

Further, the dialectical rhetoric articulated Barth’s rejection of either causal explanation or causality as a principle of understanding. Not only Barth’s God, but similarly our humanity, is defined by moments that untie the chain of causality: by the unexpected and external revelation, by the miracle against all odds, a new beginning, an act or a stroke of lightning, the exception that defies the law, in other words, the moment when normal ways of acting break down (Rom. II, 112, 491).

With this assertion, Barth and dialectical theology found themselves at the forefront of emerging anti-historicism across disciplines that radically reinvented both the human world and methods for its study. In the newly dehumanized world, pre-1914 notions of teleological history not only seemed grotesque misrepresentations of modernity but also as the ideological accomplices of nationalism and imperialism, the very mainsprings of the war. Considering the dominance of the historicist theoretical and political world-view especially in Germany, this was anything but a trivial task. Anti-historicists like Barth needed to do no less than explode the perceived circular structure between (1) the ontological framework based on history as continuity and causality; (2) the epistemological claims of the historical nature of all knowledge; (3) the political ideology of progress; and (4) the ethics of historical relativism.⁴¹

On the ontological level, Barth and dialectical theologians sought to break with the modern linear and homogenous concept of time and replace it with broken temporalities wherein ruptures possess more significance and promise than any alleged totality.⁴² The very opening lines of the preface to Romans I provocatively assert that “Paul spoke to his contemporaries as a child of his age. But much more important than this truth is the other that he speaks as a prophet and apostle of the Kingdom of God to all men in all ages.” What is presented as a fundamental and irreconcilable opposition between “time” and “history” as attributes of the earthly life—“History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others”—and the “timelessness” and “eternity” of God and revelation—“one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things” (Rom. I, 77)—is one of the leading threads of Barth’s interpretation. It explicitly challenged the hegemony of the historicist imagination at the time, inviting readers to radically rethink historicist epistemology and ontology, as well as thereby to radically reimagine the human condition. For human beings for Barth are not deemed to remain imprisoned in time, and it is precisely the situation of a crisis that may open a new possibility for its overcoming: “The judgement of God is the end of history, not the beginning of a new, a second, epoch. By it history is not prolonged, but done away with” (76).

Epistemologically and methodically, Barth’s Romans II was one of the earliest and most influential statements to undermine the hitherto almost uncontested hegemony of historical methods and historicism across a whole range of scholarly fields. Theologians had once been at the very forefront of historical scholarship, which became methodologically so dominant as to be compared to “the leaven, transforming everything and ultimately exploding the very form of earlier theological methods,” so that “we are no longer able to think without this method or contrary to it.”⁴³ Historical approaches had similarly become the main method in legal scholarship, philosophy, philology, and literary and classical studies. Against this dominant convention, Barth provocatively claimed to inquire into “what is there,” until the “wall” between our time and Paul’s becomes “transparent.” The critical-historical readings set out to liberate the sacred texts from some of their mythical-naïve elements, yet resulted in concealing the core of the Christian faith. Relying on the historical reading alone may, Barth argued, hinder access to what the text originally was intended to reveal, as there is an inherent tension between ahistorical normativity and historical interpretation. Moreover, historical approaches are in no way a guarantee against imposing one’s own agenda on past sources, as he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Romans.⁴⁴ Barth was also one of the first scholars to insist on the imperative of returning to the original sources of the Western tradition for gaining a critical perspective on his own century, as well as to encourage an immediate encounter with them, as opposed to the mediation of the historical methods. Very similar anti-historicist principles soon emerged elsewhere and triggered some of the most innovative hermeneutics across various scholarly fields.⁴⁵

Historicism’s political companion, progressivism, seemed nothing short of obscene to Barth and many of his contemporaries. Clearly, the idea of the “meaning of history,” of some inherent meaningfulness or sense behind the historical unfolding of events had, after 1914, become unacceptable if not grotesque. Barth was among the first to dismiss the historicist world-view for its ethical implications, insisting that “the failure of the relative type, consisting of experience, metaphysics, and history, is so palpably, so unmistakably before our eyes.”⁴⁶ The ethical question is of absolute primacy, whilst “its roots reach beyond its temporal beginnings and beyond all its possible and actual temporal solutions.”⁴⁷ Again, this did not mean that Barth would then posit perennial ethical guidelines, but that the question or the problem of ethics presupposed the possibility of a horizon of “eternity.”⁴⁸

Barth and Beyond: Theological Trajectories in Twentieth-Century Thought

The interdisciplinary legacy of Barth’s thought has finally been partly acknowledged in recent research on German-Jewish thinkers who completed their university studies in the 1920s and 1930s, and who later emigrated, most commonly, to the United States, Israel, or France. For example, Benjamin Lazier’s God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars explores the afterlife of Weimar theology in the thought of three notable Jewish scholars: Hans Jonas, a philosopher of bioethics who first fled to Israel and then emigrated to the United States; Gershom Scholem, one of Israel’s most prominent historians of religion; and Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who made his name in the United States. Lazier argues for the central role of heresy as a model for twentieth-century Jewish intellectual life and identity, and he traces its roots back to post-liberal theology. All three thinkers, even if they were not advocating a return to religion, were critical not only of the liberal reconciliation of faith with reason, thereby compromising the thrust and demands of both, but also of attempts to similarly synthesise man and nature, and to do away with the tensions between philosophy and politics. In other words, the effort to close what Barth called “the infinite qualitative difference” was for them a symptom of the quest to conquer the earth and what is beyond, to conquer nature, and eventually, even if contradictorily—to subject human agency to progressivist social utopias. Jonas, Scholem, and Strauss shared a sense that the loss of limits to contain the human will—not least manifest in the totalitarian reshaping of societies, in eugenic politics, in the creation of atomic bombs—was rooted in the self-divinization of humankind. Lazier’s book unearths how in the interwar period the language of theology was used and translated into philosophical, political, and historical vocabularies.

Strauss, like Karl Löwith, believed that “most characteristic of the post-World War I world was the resurgence of theology: Karl Barth,”⁴⁹ while claiming that his own political thought constituted an “answer of unbelief to the Barthian … belief.”⁵⁰ Others, like Walter Benjamin (whose criticism of modern “empty” historicities, “piling wreckage upon wreckage,” has clear links with Barth’s) even boasted of not having read Barth as one was bound to know his work from the debates of the time alone.⁵¹ Though less so in Löwith’s case, it certainly was the case with Strauss and Scholem that dialectical theology had become a source of inspiration. This was partly through the influence of Franz Rosenzweig, the most important thinker in the Weimar Jewish post-assimilationist movement and founder of the immensely popular Jewish Free Study House (Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus) in Frankfurt. After the war, the imperative to return to Judaism became a central theme in Rosenzweig’s philosophical and political work, with the new currents in Protestant theology as his main interlocutors. While history devours all other peoples—“history”, for Rosenzweig, had come to denote war and violence, a stage for brutal struggles for power and ruin, and the Jewish people were the only “unhistorical people.”⁵² Their unique proximity to God had allowed them to remain aloof from their historical-political environment, and for this reason they had become the only people to embody eternal peace.

It was this very experience, however, that Rosenzweig’s own generation had lost, and the only way of regaining it was to seek it in a past untouched by history. Accordingly, the Lehrhaus sought to offer German Jews a path to return to their Jewish roots through knowledge of their premodern sources.⁵³ The main emphasis of their text-based, anti-historicist scholarship was, again, the intactness and autonomy of the textual sources. The meaning of the text was only obscured by references to its historical context; instead, the reader ought to be guided by the text’s specific integral clues, its component parts: its narrative structure, style, language and use of metaphors. In addition to Scholem and Strauss, the list of teachers at the Lehrhaus included, among others, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Rabbi Leo Baeck, sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, and psychologist Erich Fromm, most of whom explored anti-historicist methods in their own fields by interweaving biblical themes in their studies.

There were others, however, who were less outspoken about their affiliation with Weimar theology. Hannah Arendt, another iconic German-Jewish political thinker to flee to the United States, began her undergraduate degree in theology, studied with Rudolf Bultmann, a theological revolutionary, and wrote her dissertation on Augustine. Arendt’s later call for a radically new understanding of politics—as action in a public sphere where people make “new beginnings,” a metaphor borrowed from Augustine—shared several assumptions and sensitivities with the anti-historicist revolts of her youth. It was largely devised against all sorts of Hegelian approaches, as well as liberal progressivist, teleological and holistic concepts of history, wherein “no man can actually do what he intends to do” because “the invisible “ruse of reason” directs the hands of the actor.”⁵⁴ When history becomes “the gigantic stream” of necessity, the very idea of new beginnings—let alone the idea of a doer behind the deed—has become superfluous.⁵⁵ For Arendt “the moment man acts into the world, everything becomes unpredictable, he has begun something whose end he cannot foretell.”⁵⁶ Arendt’s politics was thus embodied in the singular, interruptive and memorable moments that break with the history of forces and processes. “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability,”⁵⁷ it is a “miracle”; she claimed and insisted that causal and holistic philosophies of history had lent themselves all too readily to the service of totalitarian ideologies.

Furthermore, what stood at the centre of Arendt’s genealogy of the modern eclipse of politics was not the self-alienation, as for instance in the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and of many other critics of modernity, but what she called mankind’s “world-alienation.” While it is only later that she fleshes out its political dimension, most of its concepts are rooted in her postdoctoral work on German Romanticism, her philosophical-phenomenological criticism of Schleiermacher and her consequent turn to Innerlichkeit.⁵⁸ For the young as well as later Arendt, the horizon of meaning emerges from the reality of the world in people’s shared speech and practices. In political modernity, in contrast, the emphasis on subjectivity signified the modern “flight into the self.”⁵⁹ The prioritization of the private vis-à-vis the public human being, the concern with Innerlichkeit rather than with the realm of shared experience, which Arendt placed “outside of men,”⁶⁰ had turned citizens into isolated subjects. The retreat of the citizen into the private sphere had turned politics into a realm of “absolute obedience” where political matters were “regulated by the state under the guise of necessity.”⁶¹ Thus while, for instance, liberalism is associated with the intention to protect the individual against the state, modernity, in Arendt’s view, by excluding the citizen from politics, had made the state more irresistible than ever.⁶²

The implications of Arendt’s theological roots have recently become the subject of intense debate, generating disagreement over whether her theory of politics as “beginnings” contains elements of messianism and crypto-theology, and whether her insistence on the key role of forgiveness can survive secular scrutiny, with most interpreters tacitly assuming that the closer Arendt moved to the theological debates of her youth, the less adaptable her ideas became to a changing reality.⁶³

Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of the other,” addressing, like Arendt’s political theory, the possibility of ethical thought after the Holocaust and World War II, is more pronouncedly secular. Its quest for a novel kind of transcendence explicitly positions itself against revivals of the religious foundations of ethics. However, as argued by Samuel Moyn, while Levinas’s “ethics of the Other” can be traced to Heidegger’s insistence on the sociality of the self as one of the pillars of being Mitsein, Heidegger’s reluctance to translate it into any kind of ethics, led Levinas to turn to Judaism and the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig.⁶⁴ And yet, while Rosenzweig at many points supported Barth’s offensive against what he too judged as “atheistic theology,” he ultimately rejected Barth’s assertion of God’s infinite and ineffable alterity. In fact, Rosenzweig first used the idea and term of “otherness” in response to Protestant theology. Rosenzweig’s God, in contrast, was free from such totalizing definitions and limitations, and could make himself visceral in revelation, as well as momentarily immanent and accessible in transformative offerings of love. Rosenzweig’s Judaism, as detailed by Moyn, remained ultimately insufficient for Levinas’s conceptualisation of the self through an ethical bondage to “something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.”⁶⁵ Instead of becoming Rosenzweig’s philosophical heir, Levinas was guided by him towards the concept of the transcendent other in interwar Protestant theology. It was thus in Barth’s work that Levinas found a horizon for his radically rethought concept of intersubjectivity in which the other is not deemed to be constantly reduced to the self, to the “same,” nor the world—to use Arendt’s parallel idea—interiorised and subjectified. Barth spoke not only of the alterity of God but also of the neighbour as “the uplifted finger which by its ‘otherness’ reminds us of the Wholly Other.”⁶⁶ Moreover, Levinas’s claim that “when man truly approaches the other he is uprooted from history” resonates with what was originally a theological anti-historicism. Thus only when we unearth the historical and philosophical lineage of Levinas’s intersubjective ethics as a secularization of the Barthian encounter with the divine, Moyn argues, can we fully grasp its radical intent and ambitious scope, even if we will have to question its success in aiming to ultimately cut itself loose from its theological origins.⁶⁷

“Heidegger’s Children”? and Other Reflections on Authoritarianism

While Heidegger was clearly indebted to the Christian theological tradition, which has been a topic of numerous book-length studies, one of the implications of the above conjunctions is that Heidegger was not alone in creating the “intellectual background,” “context” or “roots” of the impressive list of younger thinkers such as Levinas, Löwith, Jonas, Strauss and Arendt. They were the “children” not only of Heidegger but had been exposed to a variety of debates, languages, and approaches, the acknowledgment of which makes for a more varied and fragmented intellectual history. A reconstruction of their individual genealogies, beyond the conventional Heidegger-influences, not only discloses the wealth of resources these thinkers were exposed to, but also points to the intellectual discourses they could instrumentalise in order go beyond Heidegger.

Moreover, such a decentering of the various influences, themes and approaches opens possibilities for their normative re-assessment: while Heidegger’s political choices have been used to discredit his so-called philosophical heirs, as almost a matter of course, widening the scope of their theoretical, ethical and political roots challenges such oversimplified assessments. It also means we should rethink a commonplace strategy of pedigree-shaming in twentieth-century political thought, perhaps most vocally present in condemnatory accounts as implied in the title of Richard Wolin’s Heidegger’s Children.

One of the aims of this study is to reflect on the possible reasons and implications of the erasure of the theological legacies from twentieth-century intellectual history. But how, then, are we to evaluate such connections? Is it inherently problematic for much of twentieth-century political thought to be entwined with theological thought, given that we are supposed to live in an increasingly secular age with “increasingly” having normative meaning? Is theology by definition irrational and its influence on sociopolitical debates a symptom of dangerous undercurrents in modern thought that takes pride in the separation of the political and the theological? Indeed, if Weimar thought displays elements of theological debate, does this not confirm the dominant narrative of an apocalyptic and messianic age? So much of the twentieth-century history of political thought seems to answer these questions in the affirmative, whether explicitly or tacitly. I have argued, on the contrary, that both Barth’s thought and life, and the complex layers of his legacies should prompt a certain degree of doubt on such sweeping and speculative connections.

To begin with, the tendency to use theological debates as labels for anti-rationality seems anachronistic. Theology in Germany before World War II was a scholarly, reputable and dialogical discipline. Arendt began her studies in theology, Adorno wrote his post-doctoral work on Kierkegaard, Jonas’s doctoral research was on Gnosticism, Strauss’s on Friedrich Jacobi, to note just a few cases of philosophers engaging with theology. Barth’s teacher, Harnack, was one of the most prominent and respected intellectuals in Berlin before World War I, and his lectures were immensely popular among the wider public, making him almost a household name. The study of theology, at the time, was perceived neither as esoteric, outdated, irrational, nor as falling short of meeting rigorous academic standards. As argued, Barth and his peers, did not revolt against rationalism in the name of irrationalism, but against what they saw as a distortion of reason.

Similarly, the attempt to discredit the political and intellectual credentials of Barth’s theological revolution seems reckless. As noted earlier, while there is wide disagreement on the content, intentions and implications of the Barthian corpus, this has largely remained a disciplinary affair. In theology, as well as at its conjunctions with ethics and philosophy, there are thus very different Barths: a postmodernist, deconstructivist Barth alongside a dogmatist and neo-orthodox Barth; a culturally and politically liberal Barth alongside an ecclesiastic conservative Barth; the social progressivist as opposed to the critic of modernity; and the political theologian as opposed to the advocate of the separation of State and Church.⁶⁸ My aim has not been to defend a particular interpretation of Barth’s key theological themes, but to point to the multiple and conflicting ways in which he was read and used by his contemporaries, and to suggest that Barth’s theology, or some of its key features, and his own interpretation of his theological revolution should not be read along dogmatic or absolutist, or even, decisionist lines. My aim was to suggest why it is problematic to label Barth as a dogmatist or as a thinker sowing the seeds of political authoritarianism. That Barth saw liberal nationalism and capitalism as the underlying causes of Europe’s political catastrophes, along with liberal theology, did not mean that he rejected democracy, the rule of law or the freedom of speech. In fact he went out of his way to defend these values, which not only ended his career in Germany but also risked ending it in Switzerland. Nor did his criticism of liberalism, which always stood side by side with his criticism of nationalism and authoritarianism, mean that he supported absolutist movements or regimes, as attested in particular by his left-leaning political views and actions.

All of which does not mean that there were no tensions in Barth’s work, both theological and political. Yet rather than depriving Barth of his political agency by saying that he was doing the opposite of what he thought he was doing—making the case for authoritarianism while he himself believed his theology resisted it—the task I have attempted was to reconstruct the contexts, problems and debates in which Barth’s anti-liberalism became a powerful statement against nationalism, militarism and irrationalism. Once we recognise Barth’s significance for his contemporaries and the many faces of his legacy, we can avoid compressing his unconventional thought and politics into the readymade Weimar narratives. Instead, what I proposed, is that we consider revising our conventional narratives in the light of Barth’s unconventional theology and politics.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant (TAU17149) “Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe.”

Notes on contributors

Liisi Keedus

Liisi Keedus, professor of Political Philosophy at Tallinn University, Estonia, currently heads an ERC Starting Grant. With a particular interest in the political ideas of interwar Europe, she has worked on twentieth-century German-Jewish political thinkers, Weimar social, legal and humanist thought, historicism, as well as on the making of the “new political science” in post-World War II America.

Notes

1. Barth, Unique Time of God, 52ff. See also Fähler, Der Ausbruch des I Weltkrieges. For excellent accounts of young Barth’s politics, see Dorrien, Barthian Revolt, esp. chap. “The Twilight of the Gods”; and Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony, esp. 1–116.

2. Schneider, Kirchliches Jahrbuch, 140, cited in Gordon, “Liberal German Churchmen,” 40.

3. On the religious glorification of WWI, see Bailey, “British Protestant Theologians,” 195–221; Benda, La Trahison des clercs; Marrin, The Last Crusade; Gordon, “Liberal German Churchmen,” 39–62.

4. Cited in Tilgner, “Volk, Nation und Vaterland,” 155, a claim attributed to Rendtorff (no first name provided), a theologian. Some sermons on war are collected in Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918.

5. Gauss, The German Emperor, 329. Cf. Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, 345.

6. Barth, Humanity of God, 14.

7. Barth, “Past and Future,” 37.

8. Barth, “Desirability and Possibility,” 132–33. For a detailed and helpful analysis of Barth’s theological and political criticism of the entwining of Christianity and nationalism, see Moseley, Nations and Nationalism.

9. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans; hereafter abbreviated as Romans I and Romans II, and cited in the text. In the years 1919–27, five further editions appeared. For its reception, see among others, Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 460.

10. See esp. these groundbreaking studies: Lazier, God Interrupted, and Koshar, “Where Is Karl Barth.” Eberle, in World War I, finds Barth’s work illuminating for analyzing the arts of the 1920s.

11. Cremer, “Protestant Theology,” 291.

12. Gordon, “Weimar Theology,” 157.

13. Cremer, “Protestant Theology,” 291.

14. E.g., Haynes, “Between the Times,” 9–44. For the same connections, in addition to suggesting that Barth’s thought was strongly against any political commitment or engagement, as well as against active citizenship, see Lilla, “The Redeeming God” in The Stillborn God.

15. Here there may seem to be a contradiction within Harnack’s and Hermann’s statements on politics and theology, but their 1914 appeal to the divine mission of their nation was to be qualitatively distinguished from economic and social politics. In this sense, one could even say that they lifted the nation out of the sphere of politics. Certainly, national unity was seen as a matter beyond politics. See esp. Harnack, What is Christianity?, 95–109, 115–16, and Hermann, “Religion und Sozialdemokratie,” 463–89.

16. Harnack, What is Christianity, 127.

17. Autobiographical sketch of Barth from the album of the faculty of evangelical theology at Münster, translated and quoted in Dorrien, Barthian Revolt, 34. In the following biographical paragraphs, I rely mainly on Barth’s Unique Time of God, The Early Preaching, and Predigten; and on Dorrien’s Barthian Revolt.

18. Barth, “Rückblick,” quoted in McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 85.

19. Barth, “Jesus Christ,” 30.

20. Ibid., 36.

21. Ibid., 29.

22. E.g., Marquardt, “Socialism.”

23. See, among others, Scholder, Churches and the Third Reich, 45, and Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 45, who argue that with Romans II, Barth denounces political engagement. Also Sauter writes that Barth had no political theology, see his “Soziologische oder politische,” 176f., as does Roberts in “Barth’s Doctrine of Time,” 145.

24. Barth, “Christian Community,” 47.

25. Barth, “Das Problem der Ethik,” 42.

26. Barth, Rechtfertigung und Recht, 41ff., 74; Barth, Ethics, 144–45, 182.

27. Barth, “Music for a Guest,” 24. Cf. Hunsinger, “Toward a Radical Barth,” 18.

28. Barth, Ethics, 79.

29. Barth, Romans II, 481: “There is no word here of the existing order; but there is endless disapproval of every enemy of it. It is God who wishes to be recognized as He that overcomes the unrighteousness of the existing order. This is the meaning of … the 13th Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.”

30. See esp. Moseley, Nations and Nationalism, 63.

31. Barth, “Biblical Questions,” 80.

32. Cf. Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie, ix. Cf. Barth, Romans II, 52.

33. Barth, Unique Time of God, 60ff; Barth, “ Christian Community,” 60ff.

34. Löwith, My Life in Germany, 26.

35. Barth, Predigten, 1915, 13, translated and cited in Moseley, Nations and Nationalism, 48; Barth, “Problem of Ethics Today,” 149.

36. The “canon” is of course often an obscure category, but Barth is strangely missing from some Weimar intellectual history anthologies, esp. in English, such as the widely used Kaes et al., Weimar Republic Sourcebook. There is also no mention of theology in classic accounts such as Peukert, Weimar Republic, and Gay, Weimar Culture.

37. Barth, “Problem of Ethics Today,” 141.

38. Ibid., 143.

39. Ibid., 149.

40. Cf. Domestico, “Twice-Broken World” that stresses the inspirational impact of Barth’s expressionist style, see esp. 7.

41. Classic accounts of anti-historicism include Heussi, Krisis des Historismus, and Wittkau, Historismus.

42. For the most insightful analysis of the ontological dimension of anti-historicism, see Mosès, The Angel of History.

43. Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method,” 12, 16.

44. See esp. Barth, preface to Romans II, xi–xiv.

45. Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, acknowledges the central role of theology in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century hermeneutics, and in particular the crucial contribution of dialectical theology in challenging historicism and shaping post-World War I humanities in general: see Gadamer’s seminal Truth and Method, 123, 157ff., 177ff., 184ff., 326ff., and esp. 510, where Gadamer calls Barth’s Romans II a “hermeneutic manifesto” and “the first revolutionary eruption” of the new hermeneutic currents in humanist scholarship. For the reception of Barthian hermeneutics in Europe, see Leiner and Trowitzsch, Karl Barths Theologie.

46. Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” 75.

47. Barth, “Problem of Ethics Today,” 138.

48. Ibid., 143.

49. Strauss, “The Giving of Accounts,” 460. Cf. Strauss’s letter to Löwith, Gesammelte Schriften III, 636.

50. Letter from Strauss to Krüger, Gesammelte Schriften III, 393. Despite the seeming polemic, Strauss appreciated their scholarship, see ibid., 384. In 1925 Strauss praised Barth and other dialectical theologians as the extraordinarily “able” pioneers who “have already cleared the way for themselves” (“Biblical History and Science,” 134).

51. Quoted in Eiland, “Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness,” 123. There are two essays by Jacob Taubes in the same collection that are also helpful in pointing out the intersections between Benjamin’s and Barth’s anti-historicism: Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, esp. 104–5; and Kambas, “Wider den ‘Geist der Zeit’,” 263–91.

52. Rosenzweig, Stern der Erlösung III, 95–96.

53. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture.

54. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics.”

55. Ibid., and Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 166.

56. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics.”

57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

58. This is argued in more detail in Keedus, The Crisis of German Historicism, 53–62.

59. Here I refer to Arendt’s postdoctoral work, later published as Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess. Cf. The Human Condition, 9.

60. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 17–18, 81.

61. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 141.

62. Ibid., 474. See also Arendt, Jewish Writings, 129–30.

63. E.g., Gordon, “Concept of the Apolitical.” For a contrasting argument, see Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism, 49ff.

64. Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas.

65. Levinas, Totality and Infinity.

66. Barth, Romans II, 444.

67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. Cf. Moyn, Origins of the Other, 12.

68. For an informative overview of competing views of reading Barth, see Dorrien, introduction to Barthian Revolt, and Webster, Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth.