Theologizing Insurgent Grounds: An Experiment with Karl Barth

This paper engages Karl Barth’s theology as a potentially generative resource for exploring the theological dimensions of a resurgent form of collective protest and assembly.  Specifically, this paper theologically explores the reclamation, repurposing, and renaming of grounds that we have witnessed in uprisings against police violence and, more recently, encampments on college campuses protesting the ongoing destruction of Gaza. I examine Barth’s own confrontation with and theological critique of state violence, developed in the first edition to the Römerbrief. I highlight elements of his critique that are generative for theologizing insurgent grounds. At the same time, I contend that Barth’s theological dialectic reinscribes the state’s territorial claim over the grounds of social possibility, a claim that excludes possibilities originating from and cultivated upon insurgent grounds. I conclude the paper by turning to James Cone’s theopolitical response to the racial protests and uprisings of the late ‘60s as an alternative site of engagement.