1914: Christendom At The Cross

CHRISTENDOM AT THE CROSS: World War Witness and the Politics of Impossible Possibility I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; And buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; And rusted every bayonet with His tears. But God was vexed, and gave all power to Michael; And when I woke he'd seen to our repairs. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) Wilfred Owen's poem, The Soldier's Dream, poignantly symbolises themes that I wish to explore in what follows. Owen finds his Christian faith alienated from a patriarchal religio-political establishment. Young men are sent out to die by their fathers in the name of what is perceived to be a cruel distortion of Christianity, a moralistic and aesthetic ideology serving to mask the pursuit of power and economic interest through the Armageddon of trench warfare. Owen's inversion of St Michael's eschatological battle, seen as quite another sort of 'war to end all wars', symbolises the establishment's idolatrous inversion and perversion of faith for politico-economic ends. Since the assimilation of church interest to worldly empire in the reign of Constantine the Great, one might say that Christianity has been habitually ironised in this way, Christendom acting in opposition to the message it purports to espouse, in much the same way as Owen's poem ironises the Trinitarian relations of Father and Son as a conflict of power against mercy, in recognition and indictment. Karl Barth`s Epistle to the Romans is a revolutionary theological protest against just such an ideological perversion of Christianity: the German religious establishment's endorsement of the Kaiser's war in 1914. Barth's protest emphatically underlines Kierkegaard`s earlier condemnation of Christendom in general, in light of a genuine existential encounter with the Gospel of Christ. Drawing on both these thinkers, in this paper I suggest that by identifying with a social, political and intellectual status quo, in time of war, any ecclesiastical structure is in danger of disintegrating into idolatrous tribalism and propaganda. I look briefly at the Church of England during World War One as a case in point.

But how ultimately are we to judge what belongs to Christ and what is only political ideology dressed in borrowed vestments? what is Christian and what is at best ironic self-delusion or, at worst, cynically manipulative hypocrisy? Is it possible to find a theological rubric for right Christian action in the face of war? As William Werpehowski points out, one may discern the outline of a Barthian political theology on the basis of aspects of Barth's Church Dogmatics (vols. II & IV), essays from 1946 and 1948, and, of course, the Barmen Declaration against Nazi idolatry, which Barth drafted in 1934. Nevertheless, Barth's thought in general suggests that there can be no straightforward, outwardly objective criterion of distinction between faith and idolatrous religion; between human works and the activity of divine grace; that in discerning a Christian path there can be no evading the risk and responsibility of faith. I argue, however, that Barth's political theology does provide a fruitful framework of guidance for genuine Christian witness in relation to the always immitigable tragedy of war. In light of Barthian theology, I suggest that a proper Christian response to war cannot be equated simply with pacifism, as merely yet another sort of ideology, when interpreted in light of revelation.

In distinguishing Christian faith from all its ideological surrogates, Barth follows in the footsteps of Kierkegaard. In his articles in The Fatherland, in which he distinguishes Christianity from an ideologically driven 'Christendom' that he finds to be represented by contemporary official religion, Kierkegaard claims that ecclesiastical Christianity often evades any existential contact with Christian truth. Mirroring his condemnation of a secular avoidance of subjective ethical reality in terms of the journalistic category, 'the public', Kierkegaard claims that the established, Danish Church of his time was guilty of estimating the strength of Christian witness by a head-count of nominal affirmers of creeds. The church has lost inwardness, has sold out to a blend of calculative rationalism and emotionally appealing aestheticism; it preaches 'Christendom', rather than Christianity, its actions determined by prevailing, secular norms. Such a church is characterised by its socio-economic conformity, rather than the objectively unassimilable, because essentially paradoxical, reality of Christ: fully secular and particular as fully divine. Kierkegaard's argument in The Fatherland suggests that contemporary religious belief tends to be a nominal and external relation, a so-called sacredness that is merely a symptom of secularisation. I suggest that Kierkegaard's critique of Christendom has direct bearing on the role of the churches in the First World War, to which I turn.

The historian Paul Johnson writes: If 1914 was a watershed in the history of monarchy and legitimacy, of privilege and liberal capitalism, of western imperialism and the domination of the white race...it was also a devastating blow to Christianity. He points out that 'the doctrinal and ecclesiastical divisions of Christianity... proved equally if not more irrelevant' than the interconnected families of European monarchy, to prevent or put an end to the conflict. All the participants claimed that they were killing in the name of moral principle. All in fact pursued purely secular aims. Religious beliefs...played no part whatsoever in the alignments. On the one side were ranged Protestant Germany, Catholic Austria, Orthodox Bulgaria and Moslem Turkey. On the other were Protestant Great Britain, Catholic France and Italy, and Orthodox Russia [and Serbia].

The state church in England often descended into pure tribalism on the basis of Britain's 'unquestionable' moral superiority over its enemies. Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London fired deadly artillery from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral, calling on Englishmen to 'band in a great crusade - we cannot deny it - to kill Germans. To kill them not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad...'; (it is worth noting that the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, dismissed Winnington-Ingram's remarks as those of 'an intensely silly bishop'!).

Commenting on a British interdenominational report of 1919, The Army and Religion, Michael Moynihan writes: To the average soldier (had he bothered to read it) the 444 pages of the report would have come as no surprise. To most churchmen it must have suggested that for long they had been living in a fools' paradise. Churchgoing before the war had been mostly lip-service. A majority of soldiers (representative of the country as a whole) were in almost total ignorance of what the Christian faith stood for. To the troops on the ground, Christianity meant negative moralism, merely the bleakest legalism, in the recollection of one witness. Described as a 'lady hut worker at one of our great bases in France', this witness noted that 'The Tommy's idea of a Christian man is that he must not drink, must not gamble and must not amuse himself: on the positive duties he must go to church...'

In general terms, the established Church of England seems to come off worst in the evidence collated 'largely from officers, privates, padres, doctors and nurses', in The Army and Religion. Moynihan writes: The statistical conclusion of the committee was that. the churches were widely regarded as being out of touch with reality. The state-endowed Church of England, in particular, stood condemned as autocratic and elitist, its clergy showing little interest in social problems and themselves enjoying a higher standard of living than most. One might say that true to its name, the Church of England faithfully reflected the glaring social divisions with which the country at large was riven. Moynihan continues: Any respect accorded to Anglican padres was in no way connected with their professional status. It was personality alone that counted. C. S. Lewis, elsewhere, described the Church Parades led by such khaki clergy as 'wicked institutions'. These findings echo Robert Graves' account in Goodbye to All That: For Anglican regimental chaplains we had little respect...Sometimes the colonel would summon [the chaplain] to come up with the rations and bury the day's dead; he would arrive, speak his lines and shoot off again. Moynihan writes that while the Church of England could boast of thirty million 'nominal members' at the outbreak of war - and note the applicability here of Kierkegaard's criticism of quantitatively calculable, as opposed to inward or qualitative, assessments of belief - 'what was devastatingly revealed during the war was that much of this religious observance had no deeper roots than social convention or escapism'.

But for Barth, there can be no neutral standing place from which one can assess the Christianity or otherwise of the religion of Christendom. For Barth all human concern with God is a fallen human work: 'religion', in Barth's particular sense of the term, as distinguished from faith in revelation. Even a genuine response to God's self-revelation in Christ, is necessarily also 'religion'. Barth defines religion, in his Epistle to the Romans, as 'the last...human possibility'. Religion can be, and often is peculiarly dangerous, since it bears witness to, and is embraced by, the promise of a new and higher order by which it is itself severely limited. Beyond the humanism which reaches its culminating point in religion we encounter the freedom which is ours by grace. Grace however is not another possibility. Grace is the impossibility which is possible only in God. Thus Christianity, always and unavoidably, will also be Christendom in its prayer, preaching and worship; always under the saving judgement of the Cross. This means that, for Barth, the risk of faith is unavoidable in assessing the genuineness or otherwise of Christian witness. The saving judgement of God is both a 'no!' and a 'yes!'; a 'no!' as the 'yes!' to a faith which is unavoidably also fallen human religion.

Given the impossibility of a rationally immanent, or objectively neutral way to draw the distinction between religion as socio-political or philosophical ideology and faith, the path to a true Christian witness in time of war can only be indicated in terms of a broad formal framework, its whole content, in praxis, to be solely determined by the redemption revealed in Christ for faith alone (Luther: sola fide). It is on this basis of 'faith alone' that Barth's political theology lays out possible guidelines for a genuine Christian praxis in relation to armed conflict. Barth's theological position on war might be summed up as a faith-based attempt to discern the right course of political action in the face of national or international emergency on the basis of receptivity to the revealed covenant of redemption alone. Any subsequent action will at all times be a risk for a faith in constant need of divine grace, as always answerable to an ultimate saving judgement that is not within its gift. The remainder of this paper offers an interpretation of Barth's thinking on war. Christians must be politically aware and responsible, but may only orient their political activity from the standpoint of a graced receptivity to Christ, and thus in terms of a fundamental, covenantal relation to redemptive revelation. This covenantal relationship is ontologically constitutive of human being, the created image of which is human fellowship (rather than reason), as the development of individual identities through reciprocal relationship. Thus not only in terms of our ontological identity as creatures, but also in our socially mediated individual identities, relationality is constitutive of human being. As the imago Dei, it is human fellowship that any and all Christian political action must be oriented to serve and promote, exclusively. This means that Christians may not engage in ideologically motivated politics.

For Barth, a state has the right to defend itself from both internal and external threats only insofar as it is ordered towards the promotion and maintenance of free human community. Barth sees political communities, or states, as more than merely postlapsarian phenomena; the state is providentially oriented to redemption in Christ, as Creation's goal. This is because the politically guaranteed freedoms embodied in a given community provide the external conditions under which the Gospel may be preached and heard, and thus such a state is providential (whether it knows it or not) in its enabling of the requisite time and space for evangelism. In providing spatio-temporal possibility for the Gospel, the state as guardian of possible human fellowship can be a relative or provisional analogy, for faith, of the Kingdom of God.

So a political state is at least a potential analogy of the Kingdom if it enables a mode of relationality that can be free for the Gospel of salvation. Such a state has the right to use coercion within its own boundaries only and insofar as an attempt to deny or restrict the full humanity of any individual or group of citizens must be combated. In the same way, only a genuine and otherwise unavoidable threat on the part of another state to the exercise of human freedoms (at home or abroad) might serve to justify warfare in their defence. Since all human beings are, by eternal covenant, related to redemption in Christ, and since the covenant of redemption is the sole criterion of Christian political action, the safeguarding of fellow humanity can be the only ground on which violence might become justified as a genuinely last resort.

Thus the only Christian justification of force is revelatory; as ordered to redemption in Christ, human integrity, both social and individual, must be protected. This means that there can be no other possible justification of war. No calculations of national material self-interest, no ideological cause, not even systems of moral philosophy, can stand in place of the revelatory political norm. For Barth this means that no natural theology or natural law theory of ethics or politics can provide relevant arguments in justification of war, since God can only be made known to us through his own activity towards us, by the grace of the Holy Spirit enabling our receptivity to the Father through the redeeming judgement of the Cross. The national interest cannot ever be regarded by the Christian as a political end in itself, in war or peace. In times of war, no ideology, whether it be militaristic, capitalistic or revolutionary, can serve to justify violence; can be given Christian blessing. Only in making room for faith can a state be regarded as providential. Indeed, Barth draws a very definite distinction between the necessarily and naturally immanent ends of the state, and the peaceful, dialogical direction that these may be given by the life of Christian witness within that state. The state has the right and duty to defend itself or other states or communities from aggression only as a last resort, in the pursuit and defence of human fellowship as the imago Dei. This means that war cannot be considered as in itself necessary, in principle unavoidable, or (still less) good, but only as tragically permissible - its justifiable pursuit an outstanding instance of our need for redemptive grace.

This all implies that Christians must strive tirelessly to unmask the real motives of self-interest that might hide behind ideological propaganda in the ethico-political justification of violent action. Even humanitarian arguments must be tested, as ideological, in the light of revelation. Only when there is no hiding place left for selfish motivation may warfare be tragically justifiable in defence of others, as fellow recipients of Christ's redeeming love. Pacifism, as an immanent philosophical position, must be subjected to the same test of faith, and is not to be regarded as in itself a ground for conscientious objection.

I suggest that Barth's position on war provides a fruitful set of guidelines for a Christian praxis of hope and love, undertaken in faith, when confronted by the sort of violent and senseless reality so piercingly evoked by soldier poets such as Wilfred Owen.