The Protestant Deformation of Christian Nationhood
Andrew Fraser
Part 1
Introduction
Contemporary Protestants try hard to be nice. Church leaders ceaselessly call upon Christians to be "inclusive" and "compassionate" when dealing with "the Other." Introductory texts in theology teach that the "church is always threatened by a false unity that does not allow for the inclusion of strangers and outcasts." Among White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in particular, the compulsory embrace of humanity's "rich diversity" is the prescribed antidote to "the ominous coupling of a shadowy religiosity with a militant nationalism or racism in such slogans as "God and Fatherland" or "God, family, and country."[1]
According to Princeton theology Professor Daniel L Migliore, such "vague but uniformly comforting references to God and religious values" shaped "the ideology of too many German Christians during the Third Reich and are still invoked by "chauvinistic movements in the United States and other countries."[2] The notion that nationalism is a social pathology owes much of its all-pervasive influence to Karl Barth (1882–1968), a Swiss Protestant theologian who achieved fame and more than a little notoriety in the 1930s through uncompromising opposition to the National Socialist takeover of both church and state in Germany. The fact is, however, both Barth and Migliore seriously misrepresent the relationship between Christian communities of faith and the blood bonds of national identity.
The Bible provides ample warrant to designate "nations" and "peoples" as essential building blocks in the constitution of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Christ. Indeed, Christ directed his disciples to "make disciples of all the nations."(Matthew 28:19) The Old Testament people of Israel thus became the prototype of the Christian peoples of God in the New Covenant creation. Accordingly, the Russian Orthodox Church affirms that all peoples have the "right to national identity and national self-expressions" within the Body of Christ. In the nineteenth century, even an Anglican theologian such as FD Maurice saw the Old Testament as the history of a "peculiar nation" whose destiny is fulfilled and completed in the New Testament. God's covenant promises to Old Israel are fulfilled when "a universal Church [unfolds] itself out of that nation," taking "root in other nations and peoples throughout the ancient world."[3]
But during the twentieth century ethnonationalism lost its religious aura of sanctity. In the erstwhile "Anglo-Saxon countries," in particular, few Protestants any longer believe that it is part of God's plan to form the character of each nation by means of the "spiritual body" within it, giving rise to what the Germans call a Volkskirche. Even Anglicans reject the idea that the Church of England was and should be again the Church for England and the English people, at home and in the diaspora. That decisive break with the past is very largely due to the Protestant Deformation produced by the theological crisis afflicting the German church during the 1930s.[4]
Ideological Civil War and Theological Crisis
The Protestant Deformation in Germany was part of the collateral damage inflicted on Christian civilization by the "ideological civil war of the twentieth century" in which "the universalist extremism of Bolshevism provokes the extremism of the particular in Nazism." Ernst Nolte portrays the role of German National Socialism in the europäische Burgerkrieg between 1917 and 1945 as an "excessive" reaction to Bolshevism. In his view, an "excess in what is justified at the outset leads to the unjustifiable."[5] The same dynamic operated in the theological crisis which engulfed Protestant churches in Germany as growing numbers of academic theologians, pastors, and parishioners eschewed neutrality and took opposing sides in the ideological conflicts dividing society at large. Soon after the Machtergreifung (the Nazi seizure of power) of 1933 which endowed Hitler with dictatorial powers, open ideological warfare broke out between a breakaway Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church, hereafter BK) under the intellectual leadership of the Karl Barth and the Deutsche Christen (DC) movement in mainstream Lutheran and Evangelical churches. The latter were soon united under a Reichsbischof sworn to serve the Führer.[6]
Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972) was just one of many prominent theologians whose loyalty to the National Socialist regime placed them at daggers drawn with Barth and the BK. Very early on in the ideological civil war tearing Germany and Europe apart, Hirsch aligned himself openly with the right.[7] Meanwhile, on the left, Barth, began his life-long journey as a fellow-traveler, a radical anti-Nazi widely suspected to be soft on Communism. Early in his career, he was known "as the notorious 'red pastor' of Safenwil;" late in life during the Cold War he excused "his peculiar attitude towards aggressive Communism in Hungary" by reference to the "good intentions" that inspired leftist totalitarianism. Barth's ideological allegiances account for his "excessive" reaction to the rise of the DC movement. Even "Barth's 'friends' in the Confessing Church thought him too difficult and not diplomatic enough." In fact, he was seen as the "greatest danger" to the church "because he picked too many specific battles with National Socialism."[8] Few would call Barth's "rationality" into question. Barth was not, however, always so generous to his DC opponents, whose teachings he dismissed contemptuously as a "blatantly nonsensical" and "irresponsible pseudotheology."[9]
Such vituperative rhetoric was both unjust and lacking in Christian charity. Robert Ericksen, a historian who shares Barth's anti-Nazi stance, nevertheless describes Hirsch and two other prominent theologians supportive of the Deutsche Christen as "well-meaning, intelligent and respectable individuals who also happened to support Adolf Hitler." He carefully demonstrates that each of these men developed an intellectually defensible theological rationale for his political stance. But, he continues, in and of itself, reason could not ground their political judgements. Like Barth, they made "an existential leap of faith" when choosing sides in the ideological civil war raging around them. In the end, however, Ericksen agrees with Barth that DC theologians were on the wrong side of history when they portrayed Jews as "a destructive force in Germany."[10] Ernst Nolte is not so sure; he suggests that the anti-Judaism of the National Socialists had a "rational core" which "consists in the factual reality of the large role played by a certain number of personalities of Jewish origin at the centre of the communist and socialist movement, evidently because of the universalist and Messianic traditions proper to historical Judaism."[11]
No doubt Jews were heavily over-represented in both Russian Bolshevism and the German Communist Party, a circumstance often cited by Hitler to justify his anti-Jewish policies. Such empirical data made little impression upon Karl Barth. As an intellectual leftist, Barth was predisposed to philo-Bolshevism; as a Christian humanist he naturally leaned towards philo-Semitism. He shared in the cosmopolitan universalism inherent in the messianic traditions of both historical and contemporary Judaism. For Barth, Jews, far from being an especially evil race were God's ever-present reminder to Christians of the essential sinfulness of mankind at large. Barth broke "radically with those more traditional Christian thinkers who see in Israel's refusal to receive Christ a purely human refusal, a merely human blindness to the messiahship of Christ." For Barth, according to John Johnson, "the Jews do not receive Christ because God has ordained their rejection of him." Israel's disobedience, whether in killing Christ two thousand years ago, or in siding with the Bolsheviks in their ideological civil war against bourgeois Christians in modern Europe, "is really a sign of humanity's rebellion against God."[12]
Barth went further, suggesting that the existence of the Jews was, in itself, proof of God's existence. But the Jews cannot "fully convince the rest of the world of its need of God until the Jews themselves acknowledge their own need and enter the church." God's salvific plan for humanity therefore requires the mass conversion of the Jews at the Second Coming of Christ. Barth insists that the "Church can understand its own origin and its own goal only as it understands its unity with Israel. Barth denied that God has rejected the Jewish people. The New Covenant of Christ did not supersede the Old Covenant with the seed of Abraham. Old Israel remains under the bow of one covenant joining it with the New Israel of the Church until the last days when "Jesus Christ will come again in His glory with all His angels." Jew and non-Jew would finally be fused together in the Body of Christ.[13]
Barth and other "progressive" German pastors worked to undermine the theological foundations of the deeply-ingrained Christian wariness towards Jews. While they were successful in destabilizing orthodox theology on the Jewish Question, their efforts attracted the law of unintended consequences. On the traditional understanding, God cursed the Jews because they rejected the Lord Jesus Christ. If a Jew is baptised, therefore, the theological case for discrimination against him collapses. But, once German Christians were persuaded to find the source of a Jew's ethno-national identity not in his theology but in his genetic make-up, the seeds of an intractable ethno-racial conflict were sown. However well-intentioned it may have been, Barth's ecumenical enthusiasm brought the biological dimension of Jewish racial identity into sharper relief. Just as the murderous excesses of the revolutionary left heightened the horror attached to the Schreckbild of "jüdischer Bolschewismus," Barth's frankly irrational faith in the divinely-ordained, messianic role of the Jews inevitably provoked counter-excesses among Christians sympathetic to the cause of German national revival.
Barth vs. the Volkskirche
In a speech at the Berliner Sportpalast on 13 November 1933, a prominent DC leader, Dr Reinhold Krause, vowed that the National Socialist Revolution was not going to halt before the gates of the church. On the contrary, he looked forward to the full assimilation of ecclesiastical matters into the realm of politics; the Volkskirche was to be folded into the Volksstaat. When Krause went on to reject both the Old Testament and the theology of St Paul because of their Jewish origins, it was clear that the DC had become the "mirror-image" of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism. Both Germans and Jews were to be defined as members of a race not a religion. Conceiving the Jewish Question in racial rather than theological terms, Krause condemned the church's mission to the Jews as a serious threat to the racial integrity of the German Volkstum. Accordingly, the DC supported the so-called Aryan Paragraph requiring the dismissal of pastors who happened to be baptized Jews.[14] In the face of such provocations, Barth rapidly assumed leadership in the creation of the BK, drafting much of the Barmen Declaration of 1934 which formalized the split within the German church.
Eleven years later, the bloody denouement of Europe's ideological civil war left Germany lying prostrate in Schutt und Asche. Barth emerged as the clear victor over völkische rivals such as Emanuel Hirsch who received what amounted to an immediate dishonourable discharge from the Göttingen theological faculty. In 1935, Barth had lost his position as "the most highly regarded professor of law in Germany" when he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer.[15] But, back in Switzerland, he continued his campaign against Hitler's Germany while working on his magnum opus, the twelve volumes of Church Dogmatics—which remained unfinished at his death. By the Sixties, he was a world-renowned religious thinker, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine. His massive body of work is not, however, without its critics. Barth's "excessive" reaction against the ideal of the Volkskirche led him not just to deny that the "ordo of nation and nationality" is "immanent in human nature" but to "dichotomize" Christ as the head of the Church from the ecclesiastical body which is the earthly-historical form of his existence.[16]
Barth denied that the Church can "be regarded as a human production." It does not owe its existence to this world; rather the being of the Church is "secured, unthreatened, and incontestable only from above, only from God, not from below, not from the side of its human members." What Barth "finds important about the church is not its empirical or historical dimensions, but its essential identity with Jesus Christ." His "understanding of the church oscillates between the poles of the essential (Christ is his body, the church) and the merely accidental and empirical." As a consequence, "Barth's ecclesiology lacks…a sense of persistence or durée." Many of Barth's critics identify "the Spirit's work with persistent, enduring social forms" and advocate "a critical historicism focused on the practices, structures, and traditions of historic Christianity." But few, if any, of Barth's academic critics dare to redeem the ideal of the Volkskirche from the shame and ridicule heaped upon it by the victors in the ideological civil war of the twentieth century. Generally speaking, theologians who are critical of Barth's "reluctance to see God's revelation 'captured' in human time" join with him to deny that "in the national determination of man we have an order of creation no less than in the relationship of man and woman and parents and children."[7]
According to Barth, "the concept of one's own people is not a fixed but a fluid concept." Such ideas have become the conventional wisdom of our time. Similarly, few theologians today demur from Barth's claims that "the majority of peoples have for centuries been physical mongrels." Mainstream Christians in every erstwhile Anglo-Saxon country now "confess our people as a historical construct," their purely contingent national identity cannot be identified as a command of God or a presupposition of the divine order of things.[18] In his struggle to overturn the orthodox Christian doctrine of nations, Barth's ideological triumph was complete. But that victory exacted a steep price.
Part 2
The Revolutionary Excesses of Christian Humanism
Throughout the Western world, both State and Church have adopted Barth's doctrine of "near and distant neighbours." When we encounter foreigners or strangers—whether as citizens or Christians—we must not allow "being in one's own people" to become "a prison and stronghold." Every man must instead obey God's command "to move out from his beginning and therefore seek a wider field." The result has been that neither the State nor the Church works any longer to preserve and protect what even Barth conceded is our divine disposition to love kith and kin over both neighbours and strangers. On the contrary, political and religious leaders, alike, now act as if "our only impulse" should be "so to strengthen the inner forces of our own land and people that we can not only tolerate many foreign countries, and many foreigners who find a second home among us, but make them our own."
Barth denied that the church can legitimate its own division along racial lines "because the community owes to the world a witness…to the mutual fellowship of human beings."[1] In the years since his death, the "inner forces" pushing both State and Church to embrace the neo-communist program of open borders and mass Third World immigration have become so powerful that the national identity—indeed the very survival—of every Anglo-Saxon Protestant (and European Christian) country has been thrown into doubt. The universalist humanism invoked to justify the globalist program is based not upon reason but upon an "existential leap of faith" entailing a host of unknown and potentially dangerous consequences. Unless and until Protestant theology recognizes the ecclesiastical legitimacy of the Volkskirche, it may be impossible to avoid "excessive" reactions from the forces of ethnoreligious particularism demonized by Barth. Christian ethnopatriotism is down but not out.
Barth acknowledged that loyalty to one's own people does not exclude the recognition and respecting of other nationalities or the will to experience fellowship with them. He also knew that it was not wholly impossible to speak in rational and Christian terms with at least some defenders of folk-centred, national churches. The need for many such conversations has become much more urgent since the abstract humanism of Barth's theology has transgressed the boundaries within which he sought to confine it. Barth denied that the nation was an order of creation but he affirmed that there were at least "two distinct circles of natural fellow-humanity." Unlike national identity which is inherently fluid and contingent, Barth maintained that the relationships between man and woman and parent and children are posited "irreversibly, inflexibly, and indestructibly" by the God-given nature of mankind.[2] Unfortunately, the ideological civil wars of the twentieth century did not come to a permanent end in 1945.
By the 1960s, the forces of cosmopolitan universalism had launched an ongoing cultural revolution that seems set to dissolve the last two orders of creation recognized by Barth. Relationships between men and women and between parents and children are becoming as fluid, reversible, and removable as national identity now that both the State and many ostensibly Christian churches "tolerate" feminism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion-on-demand, artificial insemination, illegitimacy, and single-parent "families" slavishly dependent upon the corporate welfare state. An incremental, creeping, toleration of incest, polygamy, and paedophilia is following not far behind. Already, Muslim colonies in the West have normalized cousin marriages; feminist journalists suggest that, all things considered, polygamy offers the best balance between autonomy and intimacy for today's emancipated career woman;[3] and who knows what happens when fashionably transgressive homosexual couples invite "their" children into the privacy of Frankenfamily bedrooms?
Towards an Ethnotheological 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."[4] 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 Old Covenant Israel was superseded by the New Israel incarnate in the church.[5]
Struggling to resist the supersessionist logic of his Christology, Barth denied that the unbelief of Jews excludes them from "the community of God" because "its 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.)"[6] In effect, Barth provides theological support for the claim that the Jewish ethnonation 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)."[7] 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 non-Jewish 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."[8] 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 that distinguishes their holy nation from the mythological origins of those other peoples.[9] Throughout Scripture, the sea and the land serve as recurrent metaphors for Jews and non-Jews, respectively. As God created his cosmic temple in Genesis One, the Israelites were set apart from the non-Jews 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).[10] 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, or the Second Coming of Christ.) 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 ethnonation 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.[11] 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.[12]
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 non-Jew, 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.[13] 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 praeter meaning "past").[14] Preterist pastors teach that Old Covenant Israel was destroyed, 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 to 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.[15] 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 the still-holy nation of ancient Israel. The parousia of Christ is in the past; it did not herald the physical end of planet Earth; nor will the Temple in Jerusalem be restored sometime in our future so that Jesus will at long last reign in glory over his Kingdom. 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, in other words, while every "jot and tittle" of the Law still 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 whose collective, ethnoreligious identity was—and remains—rooted in its rejection of Christ. Christians, on the other hand, are duty-bound to pray for the conversion of the Jews—only by recognizing the Lordship of Jesus Christ can the "synagogue of Satan" (Revelation 2:9) be saved from itself.
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.[16]
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.
Part 1
[1] Daniel L Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2004), 13, 31.
[2] Ibid., 31-32.
[3] Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarchate of Moscow, Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, II. Church and nation, available online at: http://3saints.com/ustav_mp_russ_english.html#2; Jeremy Morris, FD Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4, 93, 103-105.
[4] I have borrowed the phrase "Protestant Deformation" from James Kurth, "The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy," (1998) 42(2) Orbis 225.
[5] François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 4, 11, 29. See also, Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Burgerkrieg, 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1987).
[6] Steffen Recknagel, Evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich-Deutsche Christen und Bekennende Kirche im Zwiespalt zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand (Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2005) 5-6.
[7] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985).
[8] Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906-1968 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans, 2002), 2, 89, 54-55.
[9] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III 4 (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 309
[10] Ericksen, Theologians, 26-27, 154.
[11] Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 28.
[12] John J Johnson, "A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel," (2000) 43(2) Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 229, at 237.
[13] Ibid., 237; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God II 2, 284.
[14] Recknagel, Evangelische Kirche, 6-7; see also Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1998), 146-147, 160-161.
[15] Jehle, Ever Against the Stream, 13.
[16] Barth, CD III 4, 305; Ian A McFarland, "The Body of Christ: Rethinking a Classic Ecclesiological Model," (2005) 7(3) International Journal of Systematic Theology 225, at 226.
[17] McFarland, "Rethinking," 227; Karl Barth, God Here and Now (London: Routledge, 2003), 83; Joseph L Mangina, "Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas," (1999) 52(3) Scottish Journal of Theology 269, at 278, 302; Karl Barth, CD III 4, 291, 305; Joseph L Mangina, "The Stranger as Sacrament: Karl Barth and the Ethics of Ecclesial Practice," (1999) 1(3) International Journal of Systematic Theology 322, at 333.
[18] Barth, CD III 4, 291, 294-295.
Part 2
[1] Ibid., 291-294; Mangina, "Stranger as Sacrament," 331.
[2] Barth CD III 4, 308, 288.
[3] Jessica Mack, "Women can be independent and intimate," The Guardian , October 22, 2011.
[4] Ibid., 292.
[5] R Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 85-94.
[6] Barth, CD III 4, 292, 310, 197-200.
[7] Barth, CD II 2, 280-281.
[8] Barth, CD III 4, 310.
[9] Cf John H Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009).
[10] Norman Voss, "The Six Days of Creation," Covenant Creation Conference, 2010, lecture available online at: http:/br /reteristhosting.com/ad70net/audio/CCC2010/CCC2010_Lecture_02_Norm_Voss_2.mp3
[11] Johnson, "Jewish Rejection of Jesus," 238.
[12] Karl Barth, CD, II 2, 204-205; Gerhard Sauter, "Why is Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics not a "Theology of Hope"? Some Observations on Barth's Understanding of Eschatology," (1999) 52(4) Scottish Journal of Theology 407; Barth, God Here and Now, 84.
[13] Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 5.
[14] A very good introduction to preterism is: Timothy P Martin & Jeffrey L Vaughn, Beyond Creation Science: New Covenant Creation from Genesis to Revelation (Whitehall, MT: Apocalyptic Vision Press, 2007).
[15] Paul L Maier, ed, Josephus: The Essential Writings (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1988), 365-369; Paul L Maier, tr. Eusebius: The Church History (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2007), 73-83.
[16] Cf., David Chilton, Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion (Horn Lake, MS: Dominion Press, 2007). Karl Barth, God in Action (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 34:
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