On Not Giving Politics the Last Word

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My friend Will Willimon has a new essay in the Journal for Preachers.

Since Will dropped my name in the footnotes, I thought I’d share a preview of the piece here as well as a link to the full article below.

Back when America was preparing to anoint Joe Biden in the election that loser Donald Trump denied, a worshipper emerged from Duke University Chapel, smirking, “You were the fourth guest preacher in a row to condemn Trump and his deplorables. Wow. The guts it must take to stand in the pulpit of an unfailingly, uniformly liberal university and virtue signal your support for an aging, liberal Democrat. How I admire you courageous preachers!” Shut up, I replied, in love. About the same time, I received a pitch for a new book by Eric Metaxas: “Can it really be God’s will that His children be silent at a time like this? Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as godly meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle. Silence is not an option … God calls us to defend the unborn, to confront the lies of cultural Marxism, and to battle the globalist tyranny that crushes human freedom. Confident that this is His fight, the Church must overcome fear and enter the fray …” This is no time for counterfeit meekness! Outshout the opposition! A turbulent, politically vociferous time such as this calls for a dose of Karl Barth’s peculiarly political homiletics. Barth preached during two political convulsions otherwise known as World Wars I and II. Back during Barth’s first days as a small town pastor, he picked up the newspaper and read a statement signed by his most revered professors, all stepping into line behind the Kaiser. Young Barth was aghast. In an instant Barth saw that the theology he had been taught at the university— all that psychological pap about the “inner Jesus” who puts us in touch with our feelings and connects with our existential anxieties (why am I thinking about many of the mainline sermons I hear and some that I preach?)—was bogus. Then and there Barth began working on what was to be his bombshell of a book, The Epistle to the Romans. Rather than read the newspapers, let’s hear some real news delivered by Paul. What God may be up to in the hic et nun is so much more interesting than our anxieties about the Kaiser’s future.

Though Barth openly said that the war was both a disaster for German culture and the just wages for nationalistic sin, in the pulpit he rarely mentioned the war. In a turbulent time we must not allow world events to determine the content of the church’s proclamation. World history is being determined, not by European cataclysm but by Christ. Barth repeatedly preaches that we are privileged to be living in “a unique time of God” not because of the war, but because God refuses to leave us to our own devices, especially in turbulent times.1 God has thrust us into an exceptionally apocalyptic age of unveiling in which the folly of our Promethian myths are self-evident and our dependency upon God is undeniable. In a world of lies and disinformation, God has given us not only the way and the life but also the truth—Jesus Christ, our judgment, our deliverance. If God is not the one who meets us in Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ is not Lord, there’s no hope. Rather than talk about a return to normal, or how the economy might dig out of this disaster, Barth coached his congregation to ask, in effect, “What’s a gracious God up to in this unique time and how can we be part of what God is doing?” Just three decades later, now as a professor in Bonn, Barth watched the German church step into line behind National Socialism. Sure, we may not approve of everything the Nazis say and do, but the oppressed German people have spoken. Church is where we come to lick our wounds and overcome the trauma inflicted upon us by the unjust armistice terms of the Allies. We have a sacred responsibility to step up and do our bit to help make Germany great again, MGGA. Germany was a tense, conflicted, hyper-politicized place in 1932. The July 31 elections were a triumph for Hitler who won an unprecedented 38% of the vote and saw the victory as a confirmation of the inevitability of the power grab that he had been projecting since 1930. Yet the November 6 election results were a political setback for Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Nazi share of the vote dropped to 33.1% as the Communists and antifascist parties surged. (Hitler himself spoke of suicide during the last weeks of 1932.) Amid this seesaw uproar, Barth urged preachers not to be jerked around by events of the moment but rather to be tethered to a peculiar “politics”—Jesus Christ and his church. Barth asserted that we preachers know less about the significance of current events or the future course of history than we know and can say about the relentlessly revealing God who meets us in Jesus Christ. Anybody can see why Hitler is a threat to everything that Christians hold dear, said Barth. More difficult to see how our idolatry, our failure to worship, our confusion of German culture with Christianity, our timid, liberal biblical interpretation, our docile church, flaccid preaching, and self-pity made the collective delusions of National Socialism possible. Christ is God’s answer to what’s wrong with the world. The church is called to be a showcase of what God can do when God commandeers a group of sinners to tell the truth that the world can never tell itself. This truth arises not from within us but graciously comes to us. Truth is a person with a name, it’s an external address, an invitation to come forward and be part of God’s grand, but not always apparent, inevitable retake of history—Jesus Christ. Barth’s Peculiarly Political Homiletic In 1935, the University of Bonn faculty and students fell eagerly into the hands of the Nazis. Barth was Swiss and had signed an oath to refrain from political organizing as a condition of employment in Germany, still Barth felt compelled to make a political statement. What’s the most important political act for a theologian in the present moment? Offer preaching classes, “Exercises in Sermon Preparation.” Without asking the permission of Bonn’s aging, Nazi-sympathizer homiletics professor, Barth began his preaching lectures (later published as Homiletics.) Irrelevance in preaching can be defeated only by a fresh, strict, and urgent attentiveness to the biblical text—the remedy for the bourgeois blather, urbane paganism, and sentimental nationalism that infects too many sermons is Scripture. The text liberates us from modern theology’s preoccupation—analysis of our human experience of God followed by prescriptions for better human behavior—so that we can do the main business of the church, daring to listen to and to talk about the jealous God who is, rather than prattle about the culture’s more accommodating godlets. To the uniformed Nazis who stood at the back of the lecture hall taking notes, Barth quipped jovially, “I didn’t know that Herr Hitler had an interest in preaching.” That spring, a number of congregants walked out of Barth’s sermon in the university chapel in which he fiercely asserted the church’s complete freedom to preach what Christ tells the church to preach and the church’s utter dependence upon Israel and God’s promises to God’s elected people, the Jews. Barth sent Hitler a copy of the sermon.

Click HERE to read the rest of the essay.

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