Word: barth
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Thin Ice. Barth's pessimism is enough to cast the optimistic reader into deepest depression. "Everything we see before us today." he writes, "is more or less polluted, diluted and devalued . . . Men were never good, are not good, and never will be good . . . The morality of modern civilized man has turned out to be a terribly thin covering of ice over a sea of primitive barbarity . . . There is no doubt but that in recent years the whole conception of a Christian civilization in the West has been pitilessly exposed as an illusion-not least in the eyes...
With these sorry foundations under them, can Christians hope to build any systems of just governance? Barth doubts it. He first makes the point that, since every political system has some elements of good and evil in it, there is really not much to choose between them all. Continues Earth: "Something of God's wisdom and patience (though it may be only a reasonable traffic regulation!) will be revealed by even the worst political system. It has often been observed, and rightly, that the 'government' of whose divine institution the Apostle Paul spoke* was the 'State...
...Mixture. "The Church," Barth repeats, "cannot ally itself with any political system, old or new, for better or for worse, just as it cannot oppose any system unconditionally." What about new political systems, e.g., Communism? Barth has his own question for that: "Can a new political system arise without the Christian Church asking itself how, with what fresh insight and strength, it can make a new and better appeal to men in the new situation...
Theologian Barth has consistently urged that Christians in Communist countries come to terms with the new regimes. The churches should accept restrictions on them as "penance," protesting only when some really flagrant state violation of their rights as Christians occurs. As for ideology: "The Church can never defend and proclaim-or even attack-abstract norms, ideals, historical laws and sociopolitical ideologies as such ... It cannot make itself responsible either for any ism or for rejecting...
Equipped with this kind of reasoning in the '50s, why did Karl Barth come out so boldly against the Nazis in the '30s and after? His answer: "Naziism . . . was a mixture of madness and crime in which there was no trace of reason." Barth seems to think that Communism is different, and, like other European neutralists, he is fond of the old balancing act equating Russian Communist "materialism" with U.S. capitalist "materialism." The evils of Communist living, furthermore, are all too apparent to Barth from where he sits in Western Europe. Only "a few Western European Communists...