Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration

133 Pages·2014·10.504 MB·English

by  Eberhard Jüngel, Philip G. Ziegler

CHRIST, JUSTICE AND PEAGE
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+CHRIST, JUSTICE AND PEACE
Toward a Theology of the State
in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration
EBERHARD JUNGEL
Translated by
D. Bruce Hamill and
Alan J. Torrance
With an Introductory Essay by
Alan J. Torrance
Foreword by Philip G. Ziegler
B L O O M S B U RY
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English translation first published in 1992
Reprinted with a new foreword in 2014
© Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014
D. Bruce Hamill and Alan J. Torrance have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
Authorised English Translation of Barmen;
Kirche Zwischen Versuchung und Gnade
By Ernst Wolf, published by Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1984
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Contents
Foreword vi
Translators* Preface xiii
Introductory Essay by A.J. Torrance xv
The Barmen Theological Declaration
A New Translation by Douglas S. Bax xxvii
Introduction 1
Chapter One 5
Chapter Two 20
Chapter Three SO
Chapter Four S7
Foreword
Philip G. Ziegler
"Let us respond to the world when it wants to make
us fearful: Your lords are leaving, but our Lord is
coming. " 'l
Conversing with a gathering of Berlin pastors on Reformation
Day in 1933, Karl Earth contended that in view of the emerging
status confessionis in German Protestantism the most pressing
dogmatic need was "to address the domain of the first article
on the basis of the second."2 When the German Confessing
Church adopted the Barmen Theological Declaration (of which
Barth was primary framer) in May 1934, it both owned and
acted upon this demand amidst the trying circumstances of the
Church Struggle in Nazi Germany. The demand the church
took up was to clarify and reframe in a substantively christo-
logical way all questions most commonly associated with the
doctrines of creation and providence as such, including those
concerning theological anthropology, race, nation, the state
and the public political responsibility of Christians. But when
1 Eberhard Busch sees in these words of Gustav Heinemann—him-
self Barmen synod delegate and later President of the FDR—an extraor-
dinarily apt summary of the meaning of the fifth thesis. See, Eberhard
Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now, translated and annotated by
D. Guder and J. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 72.
2 Karl Barth cited in Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, "Theologi-
cal and Political Motivations of Karl Barth in the Church Struggle"
in Theological Audacities: Selected Essays, edited by A. Pangritz and
P. S. Chung, translated by D. McCord, H. M. Rumscheidt and P. S.
Chung (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), p. 196.
vi
FOREWORD
it confessed its faith in the words of the Barmen Declaration,
that church also bequeathed this demand—together with its
own answer to it—to posterity with enduring theological and
church-historical consequences. In executing this task for the
sake of the freedom and faithfulness of the church's witness
and service to Christ in the world, the Barmen Declaration calls
all those who hear its testimony to take up their own present
responsibility for the same essential evangelical truths and their
worldly consequences.
Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, Eber-
hard Jüngel adjudges it to be a powerful confession of Christian
faith that continues to call the church "forwards" by making a
continuing claim upon "our own decision making" (93). In this
he echoes Ernst Wolf's judgment that,
... to hear Barmen as a call forwards entails above all
the task of a strong, self-critical theological awareness
which knows that the truth entrusted to it can only be
known to the extent that it is done. For this reason the
theological reception of 'Barmen' is always of a piece
with the 'practical exercise' of 'Barmen'.3
Jüngel emphasises that such a hearing of Barmen must begin by
discerning the revolutionary thrust of its foundational theses:
the first article drives faith and theology "out to" nature, his-
tory and politics in new and unprecedented ways on the basis
of a renewed confession of sola Christi and sola fides (28); the
3 Ernst Wolf, Barmen: Kirche zwischen Versuchung und Gnade
(München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1957) cited in J. Beckmann et. al, Dann
warden die Steine schreien. 50 Jahre Theologische Erklârung Barmen
Kirchenkampf im Dritten Reich (Bielefeld: Verlag Kirche und Mann,
1983), p. 142, my translation.
vii
FOREWORD
second article presses—with great originality—an understand-
ing of the ordered interconnection of the indicatives of divine
grace and the imperatives of the divine claim in Christ, the one
Word of God whose lordship is unconstrained. In doing this,
it advances beyond previous applications of the fundamental
insights of the Reformation "without contradicting them" (36).
All this makes it possible to address at length the question of
the church—and within it, the question of church and state—
"in a more powerful way than the Reformers had done" (59).
Jüngel's reading suggests that the Barmen Declaration repre-
sents a decisive event in the continuing Wirkungsgeschichte of
the theology of the Protestant Reformation. This is a welcome
and substantive provocation, especially at a time when the
future viability of Protestant Christianity as such is a matter of
lively debate.
The concise exposition Jüngel offers demonstrates just how
the first and second articles set out the decisive basis and de-
terminative direction of the claims then made in the fifth article
on which his essay concentrates. Indeed, he argues that the fifth
article is rightly understood simply as a "well-grounded exposi-
tion" of the substance of the opening articles in specific relation
to the questions of Christian political existence and the task of
the state (36). We do not change the subject and cease to speak
of faith in Jesus Christ when we take up the theme of church
and state, the Christian life and politics. This is why the fifth
article does not offer any independent metaphysics of the state
as such. On the contrary, it offers a vocational ethic of the state
whose critical force is to demythologise traditional nationalist
pieties which make of the state a "pseudo-church."4 Although
4 The term 'Pseudokirche' is from Wolf Krôtke, Bekennen, Verkündi-
gen, Leben: Barmer Theologische Erklarung und Gemeindepraxis (Ber-
lin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1986), p. 56. The observation that the
fifth thesis works to disenchant the nation state is widely shared, cf. E.
viii
FOREWORD
1 Peter 2:17 stands at the head of the article, we are not wrong
to see here a theological gloss on Romans 13. For the fifth the-
sis hears Paul aright when it confesses with him that the state's
authority is decisively qualified because it is acknowledged to
be "Dei minister tibi in bonum "—i.e., "God's servant to do you
good" (Rom 13:4).5
It is a christologically disciplined restatement of the doctrine
of the two-kingdoms that Jüngel sees worked out here. In it,
the divine appointment and task of the state which constitutes
its vocation and very purpose are understood with exclusive
reference to Jesus Christ as that "Word of Power by which God
maintains all things"(59) in such that way that they are welded
(even unbeknownst to the state) to the formative realities of
God's own rectifying activity, his commands and his coming
reign. The provisional and relative goods of human measures
of peace ana jus tice—and Jüngel would add, following Earth
himself, also freedom (73)—find their decisive criteria here, be-
coming a worldly parable [Gleichnis] of the substance of final
Christian hope in the Kingdom.6
Jüngel emphasises here that Christian theology is commit-
ted to the question of the truth of these political concepts, and it
Wolf, Barmen. Kirche zwischen Versuchung und Gnade, p. 195; F-W
Marquardt, "Theological and Political Motivations," p. 202, and most re-
cently Heino Falcke, who reiterates that "what emerges clearly here is the
tendency to demythologise the state, notably in contrast to the tradition of
German state metaphysics and the mystique of the state cultivated by the
"German Christians"—"The Barmen Declaration and the Churches of the
German Democratic Republic", Ecumenical Review 61:1 (2009), p. 77.
5 See E. Jüngel, "Hat der christiche Glaube eine besondere Affinitat
zur Deomokratie?", in Wertlose Wahrheit: Zur Identitat und Relevanz
des christliche Glaubens. Theologische Erôrterungen II (München:
Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1990), p. 370.
6 The translation reads "similie" for Gleichnis (66), but in view of
the extensive use and development of the concept within Jüngel's theo-
logical work, the biblical term parable may be preferred.
ix