Having set out the tensions in the last two posts, let me turn toward how each side—the Barthian and the Schleiermacherian—expresses concern and criticism toward the other.
In this post we'll reflect on the Barthian critique of Schleiermacherian liberal theology.
Recall from part one that Karl Barth launched his attack against liberal theology in 1919 with the publication of his commentary on Romans. This commentary was the “bomb on the playground of the [liberal] theologians.” But what caused Barth to throw this bomb?
The main precipitating event was World War I and how Barth's liberal theology professors quickly jumped on the nationalistic bandwagon in support of the war. Witnessing this apostasy, God being used to justify nationalism and war, Barth came to realize that liberal theology had been evacuated of any prophetic potential or capacity.
The point is easily made. When God becomes identified with and reduced to human experience, as happens in liberal theology, then there is nothing outside of human experience that can criticize or indict with any sacred, moral, or transcendent force. And this becomes a pressing and urgent concern when human experience takes a dark turn, like it did in World War I. Barth needed to proclaim a God who was “Wholly Other” from the world so that God could, in times of moral crisis and confusion, speak a prophetic word. Otherwise, the voice of God would collapse into the voice of men, those clamoring for nationalism, jingoism, and war.
Simply put, Barth threw his bomb against bombs.
And then it happened again.
During the 1930s, as National Socialism began to assert itself in Germany, the German church fell in with Hitler, baptizing the Führer as an agent of God. Barth was provoked again into action, becoming the main author of the Barmen Declaration. Published in 1934, the Barmen Declaration became the guiding document of the Confessing Church movement, of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a notable leader. The goal of the Barmen Declaration was the same as Barth’s commentary on Romans: to get some prophetic distance between God and the world, in this case a world—and a church—bending the knee to Hitler. As the Barmen Declaration would declare, “Jesus Christus ist das eine Wort Gottes.”
Jesus Christ is the only Word of God.
Crucially, the Barmen Declaration sought to prevent the church from becoming a tool of state power and control, the religious wing of the Nazi party devoted to sacralizing and baptizing the state. And it might be helpful for American readers to remember that European states, like England and Germany, had national churches. The American “separation between church and state” was not operative. Consequently, there was a preexisting overlap between church and state in Germany that created the potential for slow, incremental bureaucratic creep as the Nazis worked to bring every national institution, the national church included, under party control. Like a python, the Nazis slowly squeezed the church into submission. The Barmen Declaration saw the squeeze and tried to help the church wiggle free before it was too late. Sadly, the Declaration failed.
Importantly for this series, this historical tale has continuing contemporary relevance.
On the political right we continue to see the church tempted toward nationalism, along with a fascination with authoritarian, charismatic leaders. Like the Nazis, there is a longing for a virile, powerful, masculine Christianity, the church as a nationalistic war cult. The cross becomes eclipsed by a Nietzschean will to power. By and large, these are the demons evangelical Christians must face.
On the political left, Christianity folds into liberal humanism. The moral imperative becomes tolerance. This robs Christianity of prophetic power. Christians must not judge. Sin and the judgment of God fade from the church. Faith comes to baptize and legitimize choice and autonomy as ends in themselves, without reference to any transcendent value or obligating good. The church becomes the handmaiden of the culture and fades into irrelevancy. By and large, these are the demons progressive and mainline Christians must face.
For both groups, right and left, God has collapsed into the human. On the right the collapse looks like nationalism. On the left the collapse looks like humanism. Either way, the church loses its prophetic capacity. Evangelicals find themselves unable to call out the nationalism in their midst. Progressives don't know how to talk about sin and Judgment Day. Both wind up in an echo chamber of ideological sameness, insular political cul-de-sacs, where God is put to use for partisan agendas.
This, then, is the Barthian criticism of Schleiermacherianism: the eclipse of prophetic capacity, the reduction of God to the human, and the inability to hear the Wholly Other who speaks from beyond all human categories, institutions, nations, politics, worldviews, cultures, religions, movements, ideologies, philosophies, and histories. The Word of God who speaks to us outside the categories of right and left, secular and religious, Democrat and Republican, national or foreign.
