Jesus Christ,
as he is attested in Holy Scripture,
is the One Word of God
which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey
in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine,
as though the church could and would have to acknowledge
as a source of its proclamation,
apart from and besides this one Word of God,
still other events and powers, figures and truths,
as God’s revelation.
These words, composed by Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, constitute the first thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen. The Declaration was drafted by the leaders of a minority of Christians in Germany in 1934, in response to the taking of power by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The new government was attempting to do what governments in Europe generally had done for centuries: control the national, State-funded, church. Though they may not have understood it at the time, we now see that Barmen stands as the first real statement of the Christian Church in opposition to Fascism and therefore to Modernity.
Fascism remains a constant liability and subtle attraction in the Modern world, as we see in far right ideologies and conspiracy theories seeking to maintain and strengthen the shackles of ignorance, paranoia, bigotry, and division among us today. For all its propensity to dress itself up in high-minded language about "human rights" and "freedom," the essence of Modernity, the thing it most wants to be and impulsively trends towards, is Fascism. Fascism reveals Modernity's true nature as a manifestation of Empire.
I use the term "Empire" to talk about the political/economic system that has dominated the West for four-thousand years. Its identifying characteristics include militarism, expansionism, patriarchy, social and political stratification, subservient religion, and a general hegemony of the wealthy, powerful, and famous. The economy is designed to extract wealth from human labor and the natural world, to benefit and solidify the status of those at the top. This describes the dominant regime from ancient Egypt, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, to the Greeks and the Romans, to the Feudal order in the Middle Ages, to its manifestation in our present era of Modernity.
Modernity likes to think of itself as a departure from this model, but history shows that, while it exuded self-serving propaganda, summed up in calling itself "Enlightenment." In reality Modernity has been dramatically worse than previous manifestations of Empire in the disastrous effects it has had on people and planet. Its ideology of individualist, techno-materialist rationalism may have felt liberating compared with the Feudal regime it replaced, especially to the class that felt unjustly excluded. But its expression in colonialism, slavery, Capitalism, industrialism, racism, misogyny, genocide, and constant and increasingly sophisticated and deadly warfare belie this rosy assessment. It preaches "democracy," but the political economy of Modernity has always been an elitism that favored, privileged, and prioritized the owner class. And even when it does allow more or less actual democracy, Modernity may always rely on the depravity of the human ego. If everyone acts in their own personal interest, Fascism is assured.
Modernity has been driven by a self-righteous, dualistic/binary, objectifying mentality from the beginning. This is proved by the fact that among those most enthusiastic about the Enlightenment were... slave owners. Modernity tends inevitably towards the nihilistic narcissism of Fascism. It is in fact where we are headed fairly inevitably, given the deepening ecological crises we face today, and their festering consequences in terms of catastrophic changes in climate and weather patterns leading to mass migration, mass extinction, habitat loss, and intensifying "natural" disasters.
Empire also always utilizes religion. It domesticated and coopted most of mainstream Christianity beginning in the 4th century. It may seem odd that, for adherents of a religion with "Christ" in its very name, so many Christians are so regularly clueless and ambivalent about Jesus Christ. Discipleship has been exchanged for the arrangement called "Christendom:" Christianity domesticated and subservient to Empire. Christendom rendered Jesus Christ little more than an quaint and empty logo, a useful mascot defined, projected, and managed by the owner class in their interests, or an embarrassing ancestor whose crazy ideas we may safely dismiss and ignore, even as we piously keep his picture on our walls -- invariably an ethereal white man with perfect hair -- and his Name in our hymns. He was inevitably reduced to a nice, white, patriotic, middle-class, ineffectual, inoffensive, and fairly irrelevant, man of the past, someone to remember and revere, but under no circumstances actually follow.
Maintaining the social, political, economic, and moral order of Empire became the main thing for Christendom, with its rationalizations, explanations, and defenses of all manner of cruelty, injustice, and violence. When Christian leaders offer reasoned apologies for slavery, or encourage mass murder in war, or justify rapacious Capitalism, or promote lynching and other types of cruelty towards the weak, or exclude and vilify gender non-conforming people, or wield the flag in nationalism and militarism, or advocate for State-sponsored morality, they do not follow Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture. There is nothing more detrimental to the mission of the Church than the obscene spectacle of Christian leaders spouting the nationalist, militarist, patriarchal, white-supremacist line, and participating in, and benefiting from, the inhuman atrocities it spawns.
Under Christendom, the Empire seduced, bought out, and domesticated the Church, claiming to be itself Christian. It usurped the manufactured role of Christianity's defender, patron, advocate, and agent, keeping and managing the public image of Jesus Christ, while putting other State-approved "events and powers, figures and truths," in Jesus' place, even in the gathering of disciples.
In many countries, the State, as the local jurisdiction of Empire, directly supported and controlled the church. This happened in America too, where churches willingly put themselves under the control of "the people." Of course, if the people were primarily loyal to the State and its economy, of which they were beneficiaries, they tended to shape a faith loyal to the State. (To show this allegiance, they systematically injected a national flag -- often topped by a golden, imperial eagle no less -- into Christian worship spaces.)
Many understandably assume, for instance, that a Capitalist political economy is somehow "Christian." The perpetual projection and amplification in Modernity of "other events and powers, figures and truths" to supplant and distract from the One Word of God, Jesus Christ, makes this apparent. Modernity operates by imposing completely manufactured categories like nation, race, gender, borders, class, and economic inequality on people. This generates divisive enmity, fear, and anger. It feeds the population twisted and spun versions of "history" that favor and glorify the owner class, while vilifying and subjugating everyone else.
And so horrible sins like slavery, conquest, genocide, eco-cide, and colonialism, were carried out by "Christians" imagining themselves to be doing God's will by obeying their supposedly "God-ordained" political and economic authorities. The disgraceful spectacle of "Christian" nations regularly making war on each other culminated in the wanton, but very profitable, industrialized slaughter of the 20th century. This is the consequence of the Church's decision to succumb to the "other events and powers, figures and truths," projected by the Empire, rather than Jesus Christ as "attested in Holy Scripture."
To inhabit its deepest identity as resistance and alternative to Fascism, Barmen insists that the Church -- the gathering of people who trust and follow Jesus -- has always to begin and end with the One whom Scripture refers to as Jesus Christ. Everything we do and are we come to see through the lens and in the Spirit of this Jesus. From creation, to the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures, to its ultimate revelation of Jesus Christ, the liberating, saving, healing, redeeming Word of the Creator has always been the antidote to Empire, of which Modernity is simply the latest and most virulent instance.
The Way of love revealed in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture, is characterized by compassion, gentleness, simplicity, humility, nonviolence, forgiveness, healing, inclusion, thanksgiving, justice, and joy. People who actually live according to the Way of Jesus Christ are therefore inherently and necessarily out of synch with Empire and therefore with Modernity. Empire will always see them as threats to its power, and deal with them accordingly.
From time to time, though, especially when Christianity is in danger of being so degraded and corrupted that it could lose even a tenuous connection to its Essence, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit leads some Christians to hear anew the Scriptural witness and calls the Church back to discipleship. Thankfully, in spite of attempts to dilute or adulterate it, the Church always has the New Testament in which we may rehear the words of, and the Apostles' and Prophets' testimony to, Jesus Christ. Barmen is doing nothing new in the sense that every movement of renewal in the Church is grounded in "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture." This has been the case from St. Anthony to St. Benedict, St. Bernard to St. Francis, The Beguines to St. Teresa, the Celtic Church to the 16th century Reformers, St. Gregory the New Theologian to St. Nilus, Kierkegaard to Barth, to Liberation Theology and Eco-, Feminist, and Queer Theologies today.
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[Part Two will address what "Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture" means, by showing how the Bible is basically a book of liberation inspired by and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.]
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