Conclusion

This study has explored how Barth and Bonhoeffer provide resources for a chastened defense of the politics of liberal modernity. This chastened defense acknowledges the tensions inherent in modern politics, including the potential for violence and terror in the utopian strand of modern thought. For Barth and Bonhoeffer, a theological account of history liberates politics from salvation history. These theologians saw the hopes of the modern age shipwrecked during their lifetimes. Yet even in the midst of this crisis, they sought neither the retrieval of a premodern synthesis, nor the supersession of modern politics by some postmodern alternative. The goal of this study has been to show how Barth and Bonhoeffer responded to the crisis of modernity in their own historical context, avoiding despair as well as the temptations of political utopia.

Introduction

Recent political events around the world have raised the specter of an impending collapse of democratic institutions. Contemporary worries about the decline of liberal democracy harken back to the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and each reflected on what the rise of totalitarianism meant for the aspirations of modern politics. Engaging the realities of totalitarian terror, they avoided despairing rejections of modern society. Beginning with Barth in the wake of the First World War, following Bonhoeffer through the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany, and concluding with Barth’s postwar reflections in the 1950s, this study explores how these figures reflected on modern society during this turbulent time and how their work is relevant to the current crisis of modern democracy.

Karl Barth and the Crisis of the First World War

This chapter explores how Karl Barth responded to the social crisis in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Barth’s experience as a pastor and professor early in the twentieth century led him to seek an alternative to nineteenth-century theological liberalism, which he had imbibed during his own education. Many of Barth’s critics, as well as his supporters, have mistakenly assumed that Barth’s rejection of theological liberalism entailed and included a matching rejection of political liberalism. This chapter argues that Barth supported democratic liberalism even while rejecting theological liberalism. Focusing primarily on his early lectures, the chapter examines how Barth’s vision of the legitimacy of modern politics was not in tension with his theological project; on the contrary his politics afforded him the theological freedom to work toward a renewal of dogmatic orthodoxy.

Karl Barth on the Rise of National Socialism

Karl Barth’s political theology was concretized by his involvement in the German Church struggle early in the 1930s as well as his political engagement in Switzerland after 1935. During the Second World War, and from the relative safety of Basel, Barth addressed public letters to several countries, thereby developing a rich political theology applied to the distinctive cultural and historical contexts of his readers. This chapter focuses on Barth’s wartime letters to France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, exploring how in these public documents Barth interprets the meaning of National Socialism in light of modern political aspirations. In so doing, Barth provides an enduring defense of modern democratic politics.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Ethical Life of Modern Society

Turning to the 1930s and 1940s, this chapter explicates how Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected on modern society amid the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Bonhoeffer’s insights are relevant beyond the confines of theological studies, as Nazism has become a central motif in reflections on the legitimacy of the modern age. Whether National Socialism is seen as modernity’s culmination, or conversely as a warning against any temptation toward backsliding from the progress of modern society, the historical events in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are a focal point in any narrative of modernity. Bonhoeffer thought about these matters in real time, even while being held in a Nazi prison. Bonhoeffer’s reflections on ethics in the modern world have implications for the viability of modern democratic societies.

Critics of Modern Politics

This chapter sets up the central question of the project by examining three recent critics of modern politics. For historian Brad Gregory, the ills of modern society are traceable to the Protestant Reformation, which destroyed the unified society that Catholicism once provided in Europe. For Alasdair MacIntyre, modern society lacks an account of the human good and thus of the virtues that help human beings achieve this good. Stanley Hauerwas agrees with MacIntyre about the hopelessness of liberal modernity, and suggests that the Church can provide an alternative to the barbarity of the wider society, bedeviled as it is by disagreement, distrust, and violence. For these critics it is the marginalization of religion that is the source of modernity’s ills. The remainder of the book will examine the works of prominent religious thinkers who reflected on the ethical life of modern society at a time when that viability was even more questionable than it is today.

The Divine Mandates and Political Resistance

Building on the framework established in Chapter 3, this chapter interprets Bonhoeffer’s account of the divine mandates as a Hegelian-inspired account of the “ethical life” or Sittlichkeit of modern society. For Bonhoeffer, the divine mandates constitute the forms of ethical life that gives substance to our lives in society, establishing the possibility for an authentically “modern” form of social life that can endure through time. In outlining the mandates, Bonhoeffer describes the actual, existing norms and practices constituting the ethical life of society. The grounding of ethics in the social institutions that the divine mandates name wards off alienation even while making space for social criticism. Bonhoeffer links the conception of freedom represented by the French Revolution with the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The modern commitment to rational autonomy, unmoored from the actual ethical life of a determinate culture, leads to the “absolute freedom” on display in the Revolution’s descent into terror, and later in the rise of National Socialism. Bonhoeffer saw this utopian impulse as modernity’s enduring temptation. Living amid the social ruin wrought by absolute freedom’s destructive power, Bonhoeffer sought a solution to this central problem of modern political life.