Karl Barth -- On nationalism, politics, and Christian witness

What is God’s providential relationship to the nations and nationalism? This paper seeks to constructively connect how Barth’s theology reckoned with nationalism and nations with his doctrine of divine providence and das Nichtige. This paper contends that Barth’s positive and negative distinctions between nationhood and nationalism parallel the distinctions he makes between providence and Nothingness. This paper briefly describes Barth’s positive account of nations as part of God’s providential overruling of the world-occurrence and related to God’s right-hand and positive willing. Further, this paper argues that when nations fail to remain open and peaceable toward their neighbors—by seeking to become a totality—nationhood has morphed to nationalism. Barth’s vehement opposition to nationalism, its destruction, and “national gods” means nationalism can be best understood as a virulent manifestation of Nothingness that exists only under left-hand of God’s rejecting will as that which is overcome in Christ’s death and resurrection.

In this paper, I will first critically analyze the recent rise of Christian Nationalism in Brazil and the US by engaging the work of scholars like Benjamin A. Cowan and Willie James Jennings. After a brief provisional exploration of social diagnosis, I propose Karl Barth's theology as a potentially fruitful correcting theological force against religious nationalism movements. In particular, Barth's Christ-centered theological anthropology exposed in CD IV/1, § 58.1, and § 58.2 offers us a useful theological tool to counter the collapsing of religious and national identity underlying these movements. I will develop Barth's insight by engaging Kathryn Tanner's work Christ the Key, where Tanner develops a Christ-centered view of human nature as radically "open-ended," corresponding to an "apophatically-focused anthropology." I will conclude with practical suggestions of how this theological view of human identity might foster new forms of political resistance in Brazil and the United States. 

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.