KARL BARTH, POST-CHRISTENDOM THEOLOGIAN John Howard Yoder, unpublished, 1995.

Presented to the Karl Barth Society; Elmhurst IL, June 8, 1995. I) Prefaces: My assignment demands that by way of preface I begin by relativizing, or at least by situating, the focus of our event in what the planning for this conference called "a Post-Christian World. One of the subdisciplines of our guild is the game of world-watching. Recently some describe that game in biblical language, perhaps deceptively, as "discerning the signs of the times." The players in this game enjoy labeling phases, epochs, landmarks. A specialized subdiscipline within that game is futurology. Once that standard itinerary of important events in a meaningful sequence has been labeled, we then discuss who is obsolete and who was first to see the next milestone down the road. Taken straight, this kind of use of "where things are going" or "where it's at" is one of the primary modes of natural theology. Within that genre it belongs to the subtype that might be called "progressive" or "linear" or even "triumphal." It assumes that there is "out there" one primary narrative; if we do not join it we are left behind. If on the other hand we are the first to name and join the next phase, that is a truth criterion. With the assignment stated that way, my task would be to claim it as a virtue of Karl Barth that he was one of the first to see the end of Christendom coming. Now, we all know that Christendom has ended; so he was right. To that way of praising him Karl Barth himself would have responded, as he did in the thirties to an analogous position on another subject, which was also a form of natural theology, with a simple "Nein!" Just as he wrote then, in the face of the Nazi program for taking over the country and the churches, that the discipline of theology should go on "as if nothing had happened," he would challenge the relevance of the question. Yet Karl Barth's statement about doing theology "as if nothing had happened" appeared in the context of Barth's launching a pamphlet series entitled "Theological Existence Today."Existence" was at that time still an "in" code word, even though existentialist language was less current in the mid-thirties than it had been a decade earlier. The title term "Today" still affirmed that if we do go on doing theology proper, properly, in its own terms and by its own rules, this will enable us very properly to have weighty and timely things to say about the principalities and powers of the present evil age. Theologizing authentically is not an alternative to contemporary pertinence but its precondition. In an analogous way, we shall do well in 1995 to mine the Barth corpus for the places where his aptness to speak to where western culture is now going is especially discernable, precisely because he asked the questions theology should always ask. Our conference title calls our present world "post-Christian." I prefer to say "post-Christendom," or "post-Constantinian," since a part of what is at stake is the room for debate about the sense in which some specific bygone world ever was anything which could accurately be called "Christian." II) Side glances, paths not taken

In the very broadest sense, the original scandalous outbreak of the "Theology of the Word" in the 1920s, represented in legend by Barth's commentaries on Romans, was already the beginning of a post-Christendom reconstruction. The liberal vision constructed by Ritschl and Troeltsch, Harnack and Herrmann enclosed the differences among those men within a far-reaching commonality. Christianity had matured, for them all, into a nondenominational, nondogmatic cultural establishment, supported by but not dependent on the erudite retrieval of history and scripture, supported and governed by the state through the University and the Consistory. II/A) In the face of that consensus, for Barth and others to claim in the 1920's to have to go back to the basic job, beginning with the notion of God's Word, then expanding that retrieval to include the careful reading of scriptural texts, then even re-appropriating the Reformation, was not explicitly anti-establishment, but it did presuppose, almost without argument, the inadequacy of explaining where we ought to be organically in terms of how we got here, which is the basic Christendom epistemology. So the entire wave of new beginnings that began in German Protestant theology in the 1920's was in one sense the beginning of post-Christendom theology. But that would be too large a reading of my topic. II/B) In another broad sense, the socialism of the young Barth has been shown by Friedrich Marquart and George Hunsinger to have been the precursor of a radical ecclesiology. It was not that explicitly; the term "socialism" had and has too many meanings. Socialism can (as with Marx himself) make high Hegelian assumptions about the dialectic of history, which are (or were) a secularized form of triumphal Christendom raised to a higher power. We can well ask how a socialist commitment could be saved from that triumphalist Hegelian subservience, and whether that was what the young Karl Barth was doing. But in this meeting I am happy to let George does that. II/C) In the third broad sense, Barmen and the Bekennende Kirche were potentially the beginnings of what could have become a free church in institutional terms. Local parishes were sometimes able to call their own ministers. Bootleg seminaries were created, some of them the theologische Hochschulen which later grew into permanent theology faculties. They took advantage of the relative autonomy of institutions (missions, schools) created by pietism and not under state church control. Yet the movement as a whole was not driven by anything like a self-conscious freechurch ecclesiology, except for Dietrich Bonhoeffer's close friend Franz Hildebrandt, who migrated to England and became a Methodist. It is too little to say that in the Confessing Church milieu there was no explicit free-church vision; the Confessing Church had a strong sense of claiming to be the authentic bearer of mainstream protestant identity. It was Ludwig Mller's Reichskirche project which in their eyes was sectarian and heretical. To challenge head on the notion of Volkskirche would have seemed to them to be pietistic, methodistic.

Martin Niemller told me twenty years later that in the mid-thirties, or even in the liveliest time of the "Confessing Church" an alternative ecclesiology would never have come to mind, any more than conscientious objection, or resisting the government as such would have. The small Freikirchen within Germany (Mennonites, Baptists, Open Brethren, Methodists) were no more critical of the Nazi vision than were the big churches. The antifascist resistance after Barmen was not at all militaristic, but it was also afraid to appear unpatriotic, and it enjoyed the participation of military officers. When a minister rejected the Nazi project in principle, he did not thereby become a pacifist, a sectarian or an anarchist, even if he expected and willed the defeat of his government. He went to the front as a chaplain (e.g. Helmut Gollwitzer), or he joined the government as a double agent (Bonhoeffer). II/D) Fourthly: earlier than all of the above, also basic but also too broad to pursue here in depth, more systematically theological than the above, is the treatment of "The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion" in the Church Dogmatics, Volume II/2 17. Barth comes to his historical survey after having described "True Religion" as characterized by weakness. He uses the label Corpus Christianum, describing the "idea of the unity of church and state" as an "extremely promising offer" whose temptations Christianity in the fourth century had not been prepared to resist. The same failure recurred in the later Middle Ages, the renaissance, and modernity, a story which Barth sweeps over in a fine-print single paragraph two pages long, after which he concludes: ". . . a history of Christianity can be written only as a story of the distress which it makes for itself. It is a story which lies completely behind the story of that which took place between Yahweh and his people, between Jesus and his apostles. It is a story whose source and meaning and goal, the fact that the Christian is strong only in his weakness . . . can in the strict sense nowhere be perceived directly. "Reformation will not fix this sinfulness, gracelessness of Christian religion. Barth alludes wistfully to the thought of a future stage of history which might move beyond this "distress," but only to declare it impossible. Thus the fact of establishment power in its contradiction to Grace cannot be corrected from inside by human action. The meaning of the true church responding authentically to the Word will by definition never be empirically discerned. Barth is epistemologically postConstantinian here, in that his grace-driven critique relativizes all notions of progress or getting a better deal from the world; yet he offers no hope of a different setting (coming from outside) which would save us from that temptation, nor does he propose that a recovery of even the most adequate theology of Grace could ever (from inside) restore the fidelity of the faith community in an empirically discernable way. In each of the four above-named ways, we might by hindsight see the beginnings of the end of the Christendom synthesis, but they were not visible as such then to trend-watchers. Were they visible as such then to the actors? I think yes, but to demonstrate that would call for a different kind of research.

III) Affirmative theses For my present task I propose rather to look at five other angles, some of them slightly later developments, some of them less doctrinally basic perhaps, but representative. Together these five traits and the four above constitute a coherent global Gestalt. III/A) The high scholastic vision of the reading of scripture which dominated the protestant universities from the late sixteenth century to the late nineteenth, which is still with us in fundamentalism, subordinated the actual reading of scriptural texts to an a priori discussion of how the texts were so written and preserved as to be infallibly revelatory and how they should be so read as to coincide with an all-inclusive system of propositions. What replaced that vision, by the time Barth began to preach, was another dominant university system. It filtered the ancient texts through a different a priori grid of questions about how they got written and what they can possibly mean in our age. When Barth began his Romans commentary with the simple axiom that the author knew what he as saying, that was postmodern rather than precritical, even though that reading in the early 1920's carried kierkegaardian overtones which he was later to outgrow. When later in the Dogmatics he broke the flow of his own exposition with his long fine-print exegetical "tunnels," he made full use of all of the tools of linguistic, historical, literary criticism, yet quite without any apologetic worry about who really wrote the texts or whether modern readers can enter into that world view. This straightforward reading of canonical texts, respecting but not genuflecting before the dominant modes of the time, is essentially the free-church approach to the Scriptures. The reader is not the accredited possessor of the hermeneutic, but the congregation created by the message they read together. III/B) When Barth began to deal with Baptism, in such a way that the case for infant baptism came up for review, he had no intention of entering interfaith dialog with Baptists or Pentecostals or Mennonites. His only purpose was to bring to bear on the issue of sacramental praxis the light of his neo-reformation vision of the centrality of the Word of God. His neo-reformation definition of the concept of sacrament was that Baptism or Eucharist is a form of the Word of God; acting out of the same message as in the spoken preaching of that same Word. The Word is operative as such as it is preached, and thereby constitutes the church. But then the recipient of a Word cannot be an infant. Modern Baptists reject infant baptism because an infant cannot have a born-again experience; sixteenth-century Anabaptists rejected it because an infant cannot commit herself to the covenantal process of binding and loosing under the Rule of Christ. But for Barth, as for Thomas Mntzer and John Oekolampadius in the 1520's, the significant variable is the baptizand's capacity to be a receiver of the Word. That does not require adulthood; but it cannot be a newborn. The Word cannot be heard by proxy. It was not until IV/4 that Church Dogmatics turned to the baptism issue, which had been opened already in the occasional writings of the 1930's, and had been kept open in seminars over the years. Barth's rejection of the aptness or the normativeness of infant baptism never turned the corner into denying its validity and consequently affirming baptism upon confession of faith as normative.

He continued, as did the Faith and Order "convergence" document of 1982, to reject anything which can look like "rebaptism." I am not aware of any historical study detailing the effects of Barth's antipedobaptism within the mainstream churches. I do know from personal contacts that its influence went farther sooner within the french-speaking Reformed churches, both in France and in francophone Switzerland, than in the German- or English-speaking churches. From the 1920's to the 1950's, Barth had less competition in French than in German. Most of the intellectual leaders in those churches (Suzanne de Dietrich, Andr Dumas, Philippe and Pierre Maury, Jacques Ellul, Roger Mehl, Paul Ricoeur) were his disciples, though of course in their independent gallic way. The Geneva NT theologian Franz Leenhardt supported Barth's view on baptism with historical argument. Already a generation ago, in Geneva or Lausanne or in the Eglise Rforme de France, a newborn child would not be baptized unless the parents required it, and no pastor would be obligated against his will to perform the baptism. The major forces in the evolution of liturgical theology in the last few generations in America have not been influenced by Barth, but they have been going in similar directions, influenced partly by reaching back before the Middle Ages in historical retrieval, and partly by pastoral realism about the social setting of the churches in the modern world. Both Geoffrey Wainwright and Aidan Cavanagh, perhaps the most respected names in liturgical theology in their respective denominational settings, have affirmed the theological priority of baptism on confession of faith as best representing most of what baptism signifies, even though (like Barth) they do not declare pedobaptism invalid. It is rather a "benign anomaly." What I said about Barth is true of these men as well; they have been driven to this conclusion by their own concerns, not by any general, principled ecumenical openness to conversation with the antipedobaptist denominations.This observation makes it all the more weighty that "doing theology in its own terms" has retrieved the indispensable voluntariness of membership in the confessing community. III/C) The little tract on "Christian Community and Civil Community"represents another step in the same dimension. Here it has been noted by most readers that this text gives no signals of where it is coming from. It does not signal clearly what the problem is which Barth wants to resolve. In the 1940's Swiss protestantism was not beset with self-doubt about the status of establishment or the acids of secularity. He was rather following through the implications of the basic epistemological shift of a generation earlier. If the Word of God becomes manifest in the event of its being proclaimed and heard, then that part of the wider humanity which has not participated in that event of hearing must be recognized as such. The Word does not coerce; therefore the world which has not responded to it in faith is to be recognized in its creaturely autonomy (i.e., rebellion), and other structures, like that of the civil community, (20) need to be somehow addressed without ascribing faith to them. Barth's first sentence in this essay sets up his agenda with deceptive simplicity: "By the 'Christian Community' we mean what is usually called 'the church' and by the 'civil community' what is usually called 'the State'." It makes more difference than the reader in the 1990's

recognizes, that he goes on to correct for that narrowed institutional accent: "we are concerned . . not primarily with institutions and offices but with human beings gathered together . . . in the . service of common tasks." This personalization or humanization is a significant corrective, after a millennium during which as the problem was classically defined, "Church" meant bishops and what they do, and "State" meant princes and what they do. Once the distinction has been posited between two definitions of community, both defined in political terms, both under the same Lord, one defined by faith's response to the Word and the other without it, the next question is how the substantial norms governing the life of those communities are to be related. The old standard answer has been "natural law" i.e., that since the wider community does not have the Word the alternative source of moral insight, which is accessible to them without faith, is "nature." This would be to stand the relation of the two communities on its head, ignoring human fallenness and confusion. But then what is the alternative? Barth reaches, whimsically or hastily, for the notion of "analogy." Commentators, among them Will Herberg, who edited Barth's three essays on Community, State and Church, (21) have rightly called the list of specimens strange and arbitrary. Barth looked first for an unexceptionable list of bourgeois democratic virtues. Then he juxtaposed them to an oddly assorted list of Christian ideas: - Because God chose to reveal by means of incarnation, the concretely human matters more than abstract causes; - Because the Church witnesses to justification, the civil order should be based on impartial justice; - Because the Son of Man came for the lost, the Church should side with the underdog; - Because God's call frees us the Church will not support authoritarianism government; - Because the Church is community it relativizes individualism; - Because baptism equalizes the State is called to treat all citizens equally; - Because the Church recognizes multiple gifts the state should have a separation of powers. - Because the Church lives from the proclaimed Word the State should have no secrecy; - For the same reason there shall be freedom of speech; - Because Christ's disciples serve, all governing should be service; - Because the church is ecumenical the state should relativize boundaries; - Knowing the anger of God, the church may need to support civil violence, but knowing God's mercy, the church will inventively maximize the call to peace. There is about this grab-bag of social desiderata none of the architectonic elegance we are used to seeing when Barth organized a question. I am prepared to argue strongly for the paradigmatic role of the people of God in offering the world a vision of God's restoration of humanity, in Christ, in the faith community, and beyond. (22) Barth's whimsical effort in this outline weakened the case he could have made, and thereby dispensed some readers at the time from any effort to take it seriously in detail. Yet that is not our present concern. The basic point of the essay on the two kinds of community remains, and its validity became

more evident as time passed. If one takes seriously the challenge of how the faith community is to communicate, respectfully but non-coercively, with the value systems which dominate the world of unbelief, renouncing the co-option claimed by the other two major views which have dominated the landscape for a millennium, that is a major step forward. Will Herberg's introduction to the above-mentioned pamphlet characterizes well the two older traditions, thereby clarifying Barth's originality. The Thomistic/Roman/Greek vision claims reliable "natural" knowledge of what the civil order shall be, thereby privileging things as they are, and underestimating the noetic twist imposed on our moral vision by sin, especially that of people who dominate. The Augustinian/Reformed vision on the other hand separates the orders of creation, fall, preservation, redemption in more critical and dialectical ways, taking sin more seriously. It is by implication in favor of democracy, (23) but it also tends to relegate "redemption" to a corner of the world, and to ratify the civil order's autonomy claim. Barth must reject both of those approaches on Christological grounds. The "natural" school swallows Jesus Christ up in an a priori system where his Lordship adds nothing to the picture; the "Augustinian" separation screens his dominion through the autonomy of the other orders. What matters for our present purpose is that the step back from the ethos of establishment which this pamphlet represented was driven primarily not by the lessons of our general cultural experience with modern doubt, nor by the more traumatic most recent experiences with idolatrous Fascism and the suffering witness of the Confessing Church, but from "doing theology as if nothing had happened," reaching back to the core message of Cross and Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost, which define the faith community as the polis properly so-called which Grace constitutes. Barth is not post-Constantinian because he draws realistic conclusions from how easy it was for traditional Christians, trained by centuries of establishment, to fall prey to Hitler's vision of national renewal. He is post-Constantinian because a shrewd reading of history enables him to be pre-Constantinian, not in a primitivistic but in an historically realistic and accountable way. (24) By definition the faith community is epistemologically prior to the wider world. One of Barth's last passages, the section on true church order as exemplary (IV/2 ET 719), makes this case in a profound way which restores the reader's faith in his architectonic genius. III/D) Barth was a kind of pacifist when World War I broke out; that was part of the liberal vision which collapsed. He was personally offended by the radical style of Leonhard Ragaz, who remained aggressively both socialist and pacifist when both went out of style. Then the drama of the Third Reich made the best case for war as the command of the hour. (25) So when in his 1950 lectures, which became volume III/4 of the Dogmatics, Barth came to "Reverence for Life," he was concerned to avoid a principled pacifism, as he rejected anything "principled" in ethics. Even then, his critique of war was more sweeping than that of any of his peers,

(26) but that was only the beginning. In 1957-58 he took the lead in the firm nuclear pacifist position of the Kirchliche Brudershaften resisting the incorporation of the Federal Republic in the nuclear escalation of NATO. Meanwhile the Dogmatics retrieved the notion of Christ as exemplary man (IV/1 709f) and went on from there to discipleship under the heading of "Sanctification" where he described the challenge of what he called "practical" pacifism. (27) A rejection of war rooted not in social optimism, or social engineering, or sermon-on-the-mount legalism, but in discipleship, is again a true-to-type radical reformation posture. III/E) There is one trait of Barth's churchmanship which the English translation regularly fails to render. German-speaking baptists and pietists regularly used the noun Gemeinde (assembly or congregation) as a theological signal of low-church identity. So did Karl Barth; this does not show in the translations. He also related respectfully, amicably to Moravians and Mennonites in his later years. (28) IV) In Sum As I indicated at the outset, my positive presentation was not much longer than the prefaces. It does not take much to make the point, and the occasional writings made it most simply. The two specimens I have noted first, baptism and the disentangling of the communities, presuppose Barth's new christological epistemological foundations, but they can be articulated very simply, formally. These two new beginnings are of course interlocked. Believers' baptism acts out the fact that the faith community is surrounded by a wider world whose faith cannot be presupposed, and thinking seriously about how the believing community can find a language the wider one can follow is a structurally necessary challenge. (29) Our own society's recently renewed courtship with the "Christian America" rhetoric of the new religious right reinforces our awareness that the renunciation of the claim that "error has no rights" has never been profound. Or to say it the other way 'round, baptism upon confession constitutes afresh in this time and place the covenanted community whose members have confessed the normativeness for their life of the Cross and Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. (30) Each person's memory of her baptism and the periodic Eucharistic reaffirmation of its meaning make the Christ even perennially present as the basis for the call to "present your bodies as a living sacrifice." This founds the calls to love the enemy as does the Father, and to forgive as we have been forgiven. The internally consistent Gospel epistemology needs no supplemental external propping up from "nature" or "reason" or "consensus." As I argued in my essay "To Serve God and Rule the World," (31)

the pre-Constantinian sociology was a stronger, not a weaker base from which to address the Powers. Its eschatology was a more not less realistic frame in which to affirm for this world the hope of the resurrection. (32) The words were my own, but I think the position expressed was the Barthian one I have been describing here, when a lifetime ago I read in a lecture at Drew Seminary the words that have recently been reprinted in my Royal Priesthood Christ's victory over the world is to be dated not AD 311 or 312 but AD 29 or 30. That church will partake most truly of his triumph that follows him most faithfully in that warfare whose weapons are not carnal but mighty. The church will be most effective where it abandons effectiveness and intelligence for the foolish weakness of the cross, in which are the wisdom and the power of God. The church will be most deeply and lastingly responsible for those in the valley of the shadow of death when it is the city set on the hill. The true church is the free church. How then do we face de-Constantinization? If we meet it as just another turn of the inscrutable screw of providence, just one more chance to state the Constantinian position in new terms, then the judgment that has already begun will sweep us along in the collapse of the culture for which we boast that we are responsible. But if we have an ear to hear what the Spirit says to the churches, if we let ourselves be led out of the inferiority complex that the theologies of the Reformation have thus far imposed on free church thought, if we discover as brethren in a common cause the catacomb churches of East Germany (33) and the Brderschaften (34) of West Germany, if we puncture the "American dream" and discover that even in the land of the Godtrusting post office and the Bible-believing chaplaincy we are in the same essentially missionary situation, the same minority status as the church in Sri Lanka or Colombia; if we believe that the free church, and not the "free world," is the primary bearer of God's banner, the fullness of the One who fills all in all, if we face de-Constantinization not as just another dirty trick of destiny but as the overdue providential unveiling of a pernicious error; then it may be given to us, even in the twentieth century, to be the church. For what more could we ask? (35) NOTES 1. I personally would have to argue even more strongly that, once the Constantinian mistake has been made, the compromised posture cannot be escaped merely by going forward; to press "forward" without some canonical appeal, without somehow looping back to the roots as a resource for repentance, one only replaces one out-of-date triumphal claim with a newer but equally corrupt one. Cf. the passage on Constantinianisms old and new" in my The Original Revolution Scottdale, Herald Press, 1971, pp. 141ff., reprinted pp198ff in The Royal Preisthood (1994). Without looping back to our roots we cannot know which of the paths before us

authentically leads "forward." 2. I name these Germans because they were the background to Barth. In Great Britain or America we could, of course, name their counterparts. 3. Some would discern the trigger for this new awareness in the phenomenon of the first World War as a kind of cultural trauma; for others the motor was more intrinsically one of theological logic. 4. Cf. my paper "Continental Theology and American Social Action" in Religion in Life 30 Spring 1961 225-230. 5. sources needed here if published 6. The Karl Barth Society is a roughly semiannual gathering, of a few dozen colleagues. George Hunsinger (just named above) was also on the program of this session at Elmhurst College, 8-9 June 1995. 7. What Hunsinger actually spoke about in the Elmhurst meeting was something else, namely a conversation with Ren Girard. 8. For Bonhoeffer "methodism" was a special epithet; it referred not to a denomination but to a spirituality or a personality type. 9. In fact there were some petty ways in which the free churches found they were better off than before. The Mennonites were granted by Heinrich Himmler himself the privilege of not needing to use the form of an oath to affirm their loyalty as citizens. Baptist and Methodist churchmen who attended the 1937 ecumenical conferences in Oxford and Edinburgh, when representatives of the Confessing Church did not, could testify to their being freer to live their free church church life than they had been under the Kaiser's consistories. I heard similar testimonies from Baptists and Methodists in East Germany and in Czechoslovakia in 1965. Such relative advantage for the little churches is one of the natural tactics of an authoritarian regime to use against the establishment of the previous age. 10. p. 334 in the Clark ET 11. It is not fully clear in English what "lies completely behind" means; but I renounce in principle the effort to reach past the frequently imprecise ET to clarify what the original meant. 12. ibid. ET 337 13. One could hypothesize historic changes which would replicate the pre-Constantinian weakness; whether a rising secularity of the world (with Nazism or Stalinism as strong instances) or perhaps a providential post-colonial weakening of the missionary presence within the nonEuropeanized world. 14. I said it this way already in my contribution to Donald K. McKim, How Karl Barth Changed My Mind Grand Rapids Eerdmans 1986 p. 169. 15. I would say more strongly now than ten years ago (in McKim op. cit.) or than twenty-five years ago (Politics of Jesus 1972 p. 14, second edition 1994 pp 12-16) that this respectful but critical independence would properly apply as well to the more recent university-based critical grids. The rabbis call the straightforward reading pesach. 16. The very notion that an ecclesiastical practice could be tested for its meeting a theological norm, and found wanting, probably would have been too high-church, or too free-church, for him.

17. Cf. my "Adjusting to the Changing Shape of the Debate on Infant Baptism" in Oecumennisme Amsterdam 1989 pp. 210-214. Already Martin Bucer in the 1530's recognized the antipedobaptist critique by seeking to institute a specific ritual of confirmation, i.e., a functional equivalent of baptism on confession, to restore the meaning which the baptism of an infant denied. Today those who see pedobaptism as anomalous, yet keep it, also tend to add ritual and/or pedagogical correctives in order to restore before entering adult membership the element of conscious confession. 18. In fact the inability of the Faith and Order conversations to deal seriously with the challenge of the free churches is one of the primary failures of the World Council of Churches to live up to its ecumenical mandate. Faith and Order would not discuss episcopacy or papacy in the absence of Roman and Eastern Catholics; yet the proposed "convergence" about baptism was elaborated in the absence of representation from most of the convinced antipedobaptist communions, cf my response in Midstream (July 1984) to the 1982 "Lima Document" on "Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry." 19. Zurich 1946, ET 1954 20. One of the other shortcomings of the way this tract states the problem is that it ignores the many other non-faith communities besides the civil. One cannot see from this approach where Barth would put the world of banking and commerce, that of the arts, that of the school . . . . In this respect he is much less ambitious than some other modern Reformed theologies of culture. 21. Garden City, Doubleday Anchor, 1960, 35ff. Herberg cites Emil Brunner's making some of the same points already in The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption Philadelphia, Westminster 1952 p.319. 22. I did so in my "Sacrament as Social Ethic" in Theology Today April 1990 and in my Body Politics Nashville, Discipleship Resources 1992. I have further built upon Barth's argument in my For The Nations (Eerdmans 1997) 23. Yet its reason for favoring democracy is not the liberal one of trusting majorities or due process. Cf. "The Christian Case for Democracy" in my Priestly Kingdom 151ff. 24. Cf. my text on "The Authority of Tradition" in The Priestly Kingdom 63ff. Also my paper on "restoration" in Richard Hughes (ed) Illinois University Press. 25. "Gebot der Stunde" was one of the last surviving fragments of Barth's existentialism of the 1920's; its meaning comes close to the "discernment of the signs of the times" with which this essay began. 26. CD III/4 453ff cf. my Karl Barth and the Problem of War Nashville Abingdon 1970 pp. 38ff. 27. "One cannot be pacifist in principle, only practically. But let everyone give heed whether, being called to discipleship, it is either possible for him to avoid, or permissible to him to neglect becoming practically pacifist." KD IV/2 621 CD 550; Karl Barth and the Problem... 116f. 28. Cf. McKim p 170; one might add his citing the dispensationalist Ernst Ferdinand Stroeter's 1904 book on the Jewish question, which figured in a recent paper in this group. 29. I first discussed this in my Christian Witness to the State 1964. Some would speak here of "common language;" that is confusing, since it suggests some kind of lowest-commondenominator approach. What is needed is a language derived from faith and yet understandable to the neighbors. Cf. also the analysis of the problematic of speaking to others in my Priestly

Kingdom pp. 160ff. 30. The individual's membership does not constitute the church; it was constituted in the first centuries. In this sense we need to ward off a certain radical Baptist or Congregationalist tendency to think that the church is constituted by baptism as society is by a (quasi Lockean) social contract. The individual's adhesion by confession does however re-enact or "perform" its existence and the faith content thereof for now and for us. 31. 0 Cf. Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 1988 p. 3; The Priestly Kingdom 1994 127ff 32. Cf, my paper on " Ethics and Eschatology" in Ex Auditu Vol 6 1990 pp 119ff. 33. Cf. the works of Johannes Hamel on being a Christian in a communist county. 34. At that time Karl Barth was leading the Kirchliche Brudershaften in a campaign against the nuclear re-armament of East Germany. Cf. in my Karl Barth and the Problem of War Nashville Abingdon 197, esp. pp. 133ff. 35. Royal Priesthood p. 64.