Historiography and Theology Weimar

Historiography and Theology.
Theology in the Weimar Republic

and the Beginning of the Third Reich
Arne Rasmusson
One aspect of German twentieth century theology is especially controver-

sial, namely its role during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It
is well known that Karl Barth saw a direct connection between mediating
Culture-Protestantism (both conservative and liberal) and the strong sup-
port given by much theology to the revolution of 1933.1 He had in mind
not only the German Christians (Deutsche Christen, a Protestant group
highly supportive of the Nazi revoluion) but also theologians opposing the
German Christians, yet supporting National Socialism.2 Furthermore, the
importance of Barth’s theology in the early formation of the Confessing
Church and in the drafting of the Barmen declaration tended to deter-
mine the writing of the history of German theology after the war.3 This
made it difficult for liberal Protestantism. Ernst Troeltsch, perhaps the
greatest of the early twentieth century liberal theologians (he died in
1923) and the one most highly regarded in later German Protestant liber-
1 He can describe the German Christians ‘als die letzte, vollendetste und schlimm-
ste Ausgeburt des neuprotestantischen Wesens’ of the theological era of Harnack and
Troeltsch. See Karl Barth, ‘Abschied (1933)’, in Barth, ‘Der Götze Wackelt’: Zeitkriti-
sche Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe von 1930 bis 1960, ed. Karl Kupisch, Berlin 1961,
66.
2 ‘The whole proud heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth century proved in-
capable of resistance, obviously because it contained nothing that had to resist and
could not give way.’ (Barth, The German church conflict, ed. Ernst Wolf, Richmond
1965, 41.) These accusations were not made lightly. During the spring semester 1933
he was actually giving his later famous lectures on nineteenth-century Protestantism
that was published after the war (Barth, Protestant theology in the nineteenth centu-
ry: Its background and history, Grand Rapids 2002) and he repeats this judgment in
his likewise famous lecture ‘Evangelical theology in the 19th century’ first published
1957 (Barth, The humanity of God, Atlanta 1982, 9–33, see esp. 28). For an overview
of Barth’s critique of theological liberalism, see Jan Rohls, ‘Barth und der theologi-
sche Liberalismus’, in Michael Beintker, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (eds.),
Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921–1935): Aufbruch – Klärung – Widerstand, Zürich
2005, 285–312.
3 Cf. Manuel Schilling, Das eine Wort Gottes zwischen den Zeiten: Die Wirkungs-
geschichte der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung vom Kirchenkampf bis zum Fall der
Mauer, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2005.
© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

ISSN 0932-9951
156 Arne Rasmusson
alism, was similarly seen in the light of Barth’s criticism. Emanuel Hirsch,
arguably the most brilliant German Protestant liberal theologian4 of the
1930s, was, publicly at least, totally compromised by his enthusiastic sup-
port of the Nazi revolution, although his influence on Göttingen students
continued after 1945.5 To be able to rehabilitate and retrieve the tradition
of liberal Protestantism, the history of early twentieth century German
theology had to be rewritten or liberated from the history writing of the
Confessing Church. This attempt to rewrite the history is most clearly
seen in the work of the ‘Munich school’ centered around the now-retired
theologian Trutz Rendtorff and including people like his successor
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, the late Falk Wagner, Klaus Tanner, and others.
The conflict between the two theological and ecclesiological programs rep-
resented by Barth and Rendtorff is thus in part an historiographical conflict.
Trutz Rendtorff’s account
The story Rendtorff tells is therefore very different from the one offered
by Barth. It goes something like the following.6 The Weimar Republic was
weak and in great need of legitimacy. But it did not find much support in
the Protestant Church and among Protestant theologians. Among sup-
porters were liberal theologians such as Troeltsch and Adolf Harnack and
the group around the journal Die Christliche Welt and its editor Martin
Rade. These people tried to develop a positive, although qualified, recep-
tion of the Western liberal political tradition. But the majority were criti-
cal, both traditionalists and the leaders of the new theological movements
of the twenties, the Luther renaissance (including Karl Holl, Hirsch, and
Paul Althaus, but Friedrich Gogarten may also be counted in this group)
and dialectical theology (including Barth and again Gogarten).7 Barth did
not, like Hirsch or Gogarten, criticize the democratic system, but
Rendtorff seems to argue that Barth’s fundamental criticism of Culture-
Protestantism and liberal theology had the function among his students of
4 Theologically liberal, that is. He was never a political liberal.

5 He was forced to retire, but he continued with private seminars in his home.
Many later prominent German theologians participated in these seminars.
6 On this, see e.g. Trutz Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restau-
ration: Politische Wirkungen neuzeitlische Theologie, München 1970, 113–117,
Rendtorff, Vielspältiges: Protestantische Beiträge zur ethischen Kultur, Stuttgart
1991, 101–120.
7 It is very difficult to define these two movements. On several possible ways of
classifying the so-called Luther-renaissance, see Heinrich Assel, Der andere Auf-
bruch: Die Lutherrenaissance – Ursprünge, Aporien und Wege: Karl Holl, Emanuel
Hirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910–1935), Göttingen 1994, 17–22.

ISSN 0932-9951
Theology in the Weimar Republic and the Beginning of the Third Reich 157
putting the philosophical legitimacy of liberal democracy in doubt.8 His

theology was part of a general understanding in the Protestant theology of
the 1920s that ‘die Zeit sei reif für eine tiefgreifende Wende, weg von den
Traditionen liberaler, sozialistischer, bürgerlicher und humanistischer
Einstellungen und Auffassungen, reif für einen neuen Anfang mit der
Aufgeschlossenheit für verpflichtende Autorität und klare Eindeutigkeit’.9
Rendtorff argues that this critique of liberal ways of thinking deprived lib-
eral structures of the theoretical legitimacy they needed. He even says that
the theology of Barth’s commentaries on Romans in practice subscribed
to the war-aims of the Western nations. The negation of history and the
contrast between God and human culture in dialectical theology corre-
spond, so Rendtorff’s argument goes, to the abstract and history-less
Western understanding of democracy as described by Troeltsch. The out-
come was that it became impossible to see democracy as also a result of
the specific German political and Christian tradition. The effect of this
was that there was no direct way from dialectical theology to democracy.
It opened the way for democracy through its opposition to anti-democrat-
ic Protestant theology, but it could not directly support it. It is during the
1920s primarily a movement of opposition against German Protestant lib-
eralism and its type of mediation between the Enlightenment and Christi-
anity, and thereby becomes part of a general anti-liberal culture.10
He sees this analysis confirmed by the way Barth and other theologians
in the Confessing Church drew a continuous line from liberal Protestant-
ism to the German Christians. For them the resistance against German
Christians was just part of the resistance against ‘modern’ theology in gen-
eral, and therefore also against the theological acceptance of the
Enlightenment. Rendtorff himself sees it, of course, the other way around.
8 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 114. He here refers to, but seems also to agree with, the
testimony of the historian Karl Dietrich Erdmann.
9 Ibid., 110.
10 For similar descriptions, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?
Erste Überlegungen zu Karl Barths Liberalismuskritik’, Evangelische Theologie, 46
(1986), 422–441, Klaus Tanner, ‘Protestantische Demokratiekritik in der Weimarer
Republik’, in Richard Ziegert (ed.), Die Kirchen und die Weimarer Republik,
Neukirchen-Vluyn 1994, 23–35, Tanner, ‘Antiliberale Harmonie: Zum politischen
Grundkonsens in Theologie und Rechtswissenschaft der zwanziger Jahre’, in Horst
Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (eds.), Umstrittene Moderne: Die Zukunft der
Neuzeit im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs, Gütersloh 1987, 193–208. Tanner
concludes the latter article by contrasting Troeltsch: ‘Die große Koalition der
Liberalismuskritiker verweigerte sich damit der Aufgabe, vor die Troeltsch gerade die
“Jüngeren und die Träger der Zukunft” gestellt sah: die “demokratische Republik im
Grundsatz” zu bejahen, sich zu einer “gefühlsmäßigen Entscheidung und Einsetzung
für die Republik” durchzuringen.’ (‘Antiliberale Harmonie’, 207f., the internal cita-
tions are from Troeltsch, Die Fehlgeburt einer Republik: Spektator in Berlin 1918 bis
1922, Frankfurt am Main 1994, 297, 299).

ISSN 0932-9951
158 Arne Rasmusson
In its critique of the Enlightenment, in the way it required a new start,

and in its understanding of the authority of revelation, dialectical theolo-
gy had much in common with the German Christians.
This theme was most bluntly developed by Falk Wagner, who tried to
show the close kinship between Barthian theology and socialistic and fa-
scist totalitarian ideologies. Wagner claimed that ‘die inhaltliche Struktur
der Bartschen Theologie nicht nur dem Sozialismus, sondern auch dem
Faschismus und seiner Theoriebildung verwandt ist’. With socialism he
meant the ‘‘hard-ware-Sozialismus” eines Lenin, Stalin und Genossen’.
He gave the article the telling title ‘Theologische Gleichschaltung’, which
is the word used for the Nazi attempt to totally control and coordinate all
aspects of society, which included the attempt to eliminate alternative in-
fluences. Wagner concluded that ‘das Defizit der Barthschen Theologie in
ihrem Zwang zur Gleichschaltung besteht’.11
Rendtorff is somewhat more careful, but he stresses that Barth does not
deny the totalitarian nature of his Christological concentration.12 The at-
tack on liberal pluralism by the National Socialist state was answered by
the Confessing Church through its own absolute confessions that exclud-
ed Christian pluralism. Instead of a free discourse of a free church there
were binding confessions and declarations.13
Heinz Eduard Tödt once asked Rendtorff whether he agreed with the
Fascism-thesis of Wagner (that Tödt thinks is followed by Graf). In his an-
swer Rendtorff denied that any such thesis has been promulgated.
Wagner, Graf, and he himself had only tried to understand Barth’s cri-
tique of the liberal understanding of freedom in the light of the contem-
porary political and philosophical discourses during the interwar period.
The result is that Barth’s critique of liberal theology can be understood as
11 Falk Wagner, ‘Theologische Gleichschaltung: Zur Christologie bei Karl Barth’,

in Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit: Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie
Karl Barths, Gütersloh 1975, 10–43, at 41f. See also Graf, ‘Die Freiheit der Entspre-
chung zu Gott: Bemerkungen zum theozentrischen Ansatz der Anthropologie Karl
Barths’, in Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit, 76–118, at 116f. Cf. also
Falk Wagner, ‘Politische Theorie des Nationalsozialismus als politische Theologie’,
Theologische Existenz Heute, 175 (1973), 29–51, and Wagner’s critique of Barth’s
discussions of democracy after 1945 in Wagner, Zur gegenwärtigen Lage des Prote-
stantismus, Gütersloh 1995, 169–171.
12 Rendtorff, Theologie in der Moderne: Über Religion im Prozess der Aufklärung,
Gütersloh 1991, 142.
13 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 107. Cf. Wolfgang Trillhaas’s statement: ‘Die Beken-
nende Kirche gilt nicht ohne Grund als eine hauptsächliche Trägerin des Wider-
standes. Aber sie hat im Kampf gegen den Liberalismus fast die gleichen Formeln
gebraucht wie der Gegner, und auch in ihren Disziplinforderungen (“Unterstellung
unter die Brüderräte”) hat sie oft das Modell des Systems, das sie bekämpfte, widerge-
spiegelt.’ Aufgehobene Vergangenheit: Aus meinem Leben, Göttingen 1976, 173f.

ISSN 0932-9951
part of a common cultural critique during the time. However, it does not
say that Barth’s theology in general is fascist. This analysis of Barth is on-
ly a way of situating him in historical context.14 It is difficult to find this
answer convincing, at least in the case of Wagner.
However, Rendtorff’s evaluation of the Confessing Church is not sim-
ply negative. He stresses that its resistance was not a direct political re-
sistance, but an ecclesial and theological resistance. It fought for the in-
dependence of the church. Rendtorff does think this was important. In
practice this struggle defended the independence of the church that was a
result of the Weimar constitution, and thereby it defended also indirectly
a pluralistic society, and thus created a free space open for dissent. So
even if the resistance was not directly political, that is, directed against the
national socialist state, it did have indirect political functions.15
The Politics of Historiography
It is obvious that Rendtorff’s research program (followed up by many of

his colleagues and students) suggests a very different way of describing
and understanding the role of theology in the Weimar Republic and in
the early Third Reich than that of Barth and his followers. Not infre-
14 See Heinz Eduard Tödt, ‘Karl Barth, der Liberalismus und der Nationalsozialis-
mus: Gegendarstellung zu Friedrich Wilhelm Grafs Behandlung dieses Thema’,
Evangelische Theologie, 46 (1986), 536–551, esp. 550f, and Rendtorff, ‘Zur Krise und
Kritik des neuzeitlichen Liberalismus: Eine Anmerkung’, Evangelische Theologie, 47
(1987), 567–569. Cf. also Graf, ‘Die Freiheit der Entsprechung zu Gott’, esp. 116f.
15 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 102–106. As support for this view, he also refers to the
experiences of his own childhood in the family of a pastor of the Confessing Church
(106). Cf. ‘Trutz Rendtorff’, in Christian Henning and Karsten Lehmkühler (eds.),
Systematische Theologie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, Tübingen 1998,
58–77, at 60. He was born in 1931. His father Heinrich Rendtorff was bishop in
Mecklenburg, but he was more or less forced to step down as bishop in 1934 and be-
came minister in a church closely related to the Confessing Church, after having been
an early supporter of National Socialism. Earlier, as bishop, Heinrich Rendtorff had,
both before and after the Nazis’ assumption of power, partly and with some enthusi-
asm supported the National Socialist movement and also applied for party member-
ship. Cf. his strongly supportive statement on the Nazi movement from 1931 cited by
Gerhard Besier, Die evangelische Kirche in den Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts:
Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1994, 63. Scholder says that this was
the ‘the first official statement by a leading member of the clergy’ on the Nazi move-
ment. (Klaus Scholder, The churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, Philadelphia 1988,
140.) He was also an important player in church politics during the upheavals of
1933. See Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, passim. On his resignation
as bishop, see Niklot Beste, Der Kirchenkampf in Mecklenburg von 1933 bis 1945:
Geschichte, Dokumente, Erinnerungen, Göttingen 1975, 50–55. This volume in-
cludes also several declarations by bishop Rendtorff from 1933. See 235ff.

ISSN 0932-9951
160 Arne Rasmusson
quently is this polemically described as a turn away from a moralistic and

hagiographic approach internal to the discipline of theology to a more
strict historicization where theology is put into a wider and non-theologi-
cal historical and theoretical context. For example, Graf, in what may be
the most systematic analysis of Barth’s relationship to the political liber-
alism of the Weimar-republic from this school of thought, pleads for ‘eine
Historisierung der Barth-Interpretation’.16 He says that he uses the meth-
ods of the sociology of knowledge, social history, and political culture in
a general modernization-theoretical approach. He contrasts his own ap-
proach with the theological and moralistic approach of his critic Tödt: ‘H.
E. Tödt vertritt ein von unmittelbar Zeitgenossenschaft geprägtes, stark
moralisches Geschichtsbild, das wesentlichen an Werturteilen aus der
Zeit des Kirchenkampfes orientiert ist.’17 This type of rhetoric is, of
course, common in the academy. I do history, you do politics, theology,
and so on. But it is quite disingenuous, especially so in this case. The his-
tory writing of the Rendtorff-Graf type is so obviously embedded in a the-
ological program. This is no problem in itself. It is quite unavoidable.
What is question-begging is the description of one’s own approach as rig-
orously historical and the opponents’ as moralistic and theological.18
This is, of course, not a specifically theological problem. The same is-
sues are raised in any writing of history, and especially so when the histo-
ry dealt with is related to contemporary interests and identities. The un-
derstanding of German history is just as controversial in secular historical
research as in church history and theology. German historiography, just
like theology, was deeply implicated in German nationalism. It was an im-
portant part of the national project and closely interconnected with a lib-
eral Protestant theology of history. However, post-1945 German historiog-
raphy is also embedded in the political, social, and historical currents and
conflicts of the post-1945 German society.19 The well-known ‘Historiker-
16 Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 422.

17 Graf, ‘Der Weimarer Barth – ein linker Liberaler?’, Evangelische Theologie, 47
(1987), 555–566, at 555f. The citation is found on 555.
18 One finds the same type of struggle over history inside ‘Barthianism’. Some
have, for example, tried to minimize Barth’s relativization of politics, others maxi-
mize it. Before 1989 much of the discussion concerned his degree of commitment to
‘democratic socialism’. After 1989 we have found an increasing interest in defending
Barth’s commitment to ‘democracy’.
19 On German historiography, see Stefan Berger, ‘The German tradition of histo-
riography, 1800–1995’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German history since 1800, London
1997, 477–492. German Church history is similarly a very conflict-filled field of re-
search. For overviews by one who himself is a highly involved and controversial his-
torian, see Gerhard Besier, Religion, Nation, Kultur: Die Geschichte der christlichen
Kirchen in den gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Neukirchen-
Vluyn 1992, 171–218, and Besier, Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im 20. Jahrhun-
dert, München 2000, 59–126.

ISSN 0932-9951
streit’ is just one example of this. Should history be written from, for ex-
ample, a national, social, structural, everyday, or gender perspective?
Should one describe the politics of the nation or a politics of emancipa-
tion? How do international systems, social structures, mentalities, human
agents, internal meanings, and so on, relate? Even if one works inside a
tradition of political history, how one interprets the First World War, for
example, will have immense effects on how the rest of twentieth-century
history is told (cf. the bitter ‘Fischer-controversy’20 ). After 1945 Catholic
historians reassessed the national history approach. In the 1980s the vari-
ous schools of social history were convinced that the nation-state period
of Germany was over and that Germany had reached a post-national stage
characterized by ‘constitutional patriotism’. But after 1989 the ‘national
history’ approach has again been revitalized, both in conservative and rad-
ical versions. This is, of course, in no way unique for the writing of Ger-
man history. We find similar controversies concerning the writing of the
history of the United States, France, or Sweden. It is simply the nature of
the writing of history.
The writing of history and theological background convictions
So, how one writes and judges this history has to do with the perspectives
from which it is seen. If we start with the broadest level, one can say that
Barth and Rendtorff tell very different ‘salvation histories’. For Rendtorff
it is the realization of Christianity in modernity, and specifically in mod-
ern liberal Germany, that is at the center of the story. He shows how the
Reformation, the German Christian Enlightenment, and the formation of
a free Christianity outside the churches contributed to the formation of
the modern secular, liberal, and democratic German welfare state.21 It is
thus the nation-state of Germany, not the church, that constitutes the pri-
mary context for doing theology and ethics. And this context determines
the content. Rendtorff’s own ethics therefore reads like a description of
contemporary Germany, though dressed in a universal language where
current Germany implicitly tends to represent the forefront of Western
civilization and, thereby, universal values.22 He would, of course, object
that he presents actual universal values, though mediated through
Western civilization and German history. Yet, the narrow German-cen-
20 Berger, ‘The German tradition of historiography’, 486.

21 See, e.g., Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration,
München 1970.
22 Rendtorff, Ethik: Grundelemente, Methodologie und Konkretionen einer ethis-
chen Theologie, vol. 1–2, Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln 1990. An earlier edition of this work
is translated into English, Ethics, vol. 1–2, Philadelphia 1986.

ISSN 0932-9951
162 Arne Rasmusson
tered approach of Rendtorff and his allies is certainly striking for a non-
German.23
For Barth it is Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church that are at the cen-
ter. The state and even more the nation are relativized, though not made
unimportant. If Rendtorff’s theology is in service of Germany, Barth’s the-
ology is in service of the church. Thus the importance of the independ-
ence of theology from the national perspective. Its primary base is the
church. According to Barth the church is for the world, but the world is
not identified with such contingent phenomena as specific nation-states.24
Nations exist but they are relativized by many other factors. The intimate
relationship between church and theology was, of course, one of the deep
dilemmas for Barth. The actual German Protestant church did not have
the independence from the German political and cultural system that
Barth’s theology presupposed, and it is difficult to see how it could have
even on Barth’s own grounds as developed, for example, in his ethics lec-
tures.25 It is only later that he starts to develop a more adequate ecclesi-
ology given his theology.26
Another way of putting the difference is that these two theological tra-
ditions represent different views of the nature of reality. Barth reads the
world theologically in terms of a Trinitarian theology, which can incorpo-
rate any form of knowledge of the world, but read through a Christian
grammar.27 According to Rendtorff, modern theology has reached its eth-
ical, political, or world-historical stage, in which Christianity is realized in
23 It is interesting and illuminative to compare Rendtorff’s account with the simi-

lar story told by the Reformed American theologian Max Stackhouse. Both are
strongly influenced by Troeltsch. However, Stackhouse gives a more negative picture
of the German Reformation and the political role of the Lutheran tradition in
German history. Instead he tells a story in which America early on becomes the cen-
tre partly as mediator, partly as discoverer and explorer of a universal ethos in which
human rights play a principal role. This American tradition is, he thinks, founded on
a synthesis of Free-Church Calvinism and Lockean liberalism. See Stackhouse,
Creeds, society, and human rights: A study in three cultures, Grand Rapids 1984.
24 See Barth, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, New York 1981, 191–196 (this is his
ethics lectures from 1928/29 and 1930/31). He develops the same theme at much
greater length in Church Dogmatics III:4, Edinburgh 1961, 285–323.
25 Barth, Ethics, 440–451.
26 I have tried to show this in Rasmusson, ‘The politics of diaspora: The post-chris-
tendom theologies of Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder’, in L. Gregory Jones, Rein
hard Hütter, and Rosalee Velloso Ewell, (eds.), God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging St
anley Hauerwas, Grand Rapids 2005, 88–111.
27 See again Rasmusson, ‘The Politics of Diaspora’. This theme has been empha-
sized and developed especially by John Webster in Barth’s ethics of reconcilia-
tion, Cambridge 1995, esp. 214–230 (cf. also his Barth’s moral theology: Human ac-
tion in Barth’s thought, Grand Rapids 1998) and by Stanley Hauerwas in With the
grain of the universe: The church’s witness and natural theology, Grand Rapids 2001,
141–204.

ISSN 0932-9951
liberal modernity. This makes sociology crucial for him, because sociolo-
gy (in a sort of Hegelian form) can be seen as the self-description of
modernity; one might say, the theology of modernity. Any intelligible
Christian theology therefore has to be mediated through the sociological
perspective.28 But on this level, which is the most important and determi-
native one, it is extremely difficult to know how even to start a conversa-
tion between Barth and Rendtorff.29
‘1914’ or ‘1918’: On Nationalism and Liberalism
It is somewhat easier if we move to a less ambitious level and confine our-

selves to the interpretation of theology’s role in German history of the first
half of the twentieth history. When Rendtorff describes liberal Protestant-
ism as providing legitimation for the liberal democracy of the Weimar
Republic, he begins in 1918. For Barth the important year is 1914 and the
theological legitimation of nationalism and militarism that contributed to
‘1914’.30 Rendtorff, however, does not seem to see the role of churches
and theologians before and during the war as especially problematic. They
28 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 128–133. Cf.

Rendtorff, Ethik, vol. 2, 74. Rendtorff and his allies therefore confront Barth in two
quite different ways. On one level, his theology is described as part of an anti-liberal
backlash. It is this which is described in this article. But on another level, Barth’s the-
ology (and dialectical theology in general) is described, not as antimodern, but as one
moment of the realization of modernity. Barth recapitulates, inside the Christian dog-
matic system itself, in a radical way the Enlightenment process, and thereby gives
“die dogmatische Legitimation für den Eintritt der neuzeitlichen Autonomie ins
Zentrum von Theologie und Kirche selbst”. Rendtorff, Theorie des Christentums:
Historisch-theologische Studien zu seiner neuzeitlichen Verfassung, Gütersloh 1972,
179. See further ch. 9, and Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit.
29 Rendtorff is, of course, critical of what he considers the biblicist reductionism
in dialectical theology shown in the way Barth formulates his Trinitarian theology.
On the other hand, Rendtorff’s way of showing the meaningfulness of the Trinitarian
structure of the Christian ‘God-language’ would for Barth be an example of the an-
thropological reductionism his whole theology was a reaction against. Rendtorff can
say that to talk about God as Creator is to say that there is wholeness to life which im-
plies participation in a reality that goes beyond my own life. Christological language
expresses the fact that this life is a gift in the sense that we are dependent on a hu-
man and social context we have not ourselves created and therefore that this life is al-
so a task to realize possibilities thus received. Finally, the talk about God as Spirit is
a way of saying there is unity in the diversity of experiences we make, that there is an
essential unity of the human race and that therefore history has become a task for hu-
manity as a whole. See Rendtorff, Gott – ein Wort unserer Sprache? Ein theologis-
cher Essay, München 1972.
30 I have discussed Barth’s early theology from this perspective in Rasmusson,
‘Church and Nation-State: Karl Barth and German Public Theology in the Early 20th
Century’, Ned Geref Teologiese Tydskrif, 46 (2005), 511–524.

ISSN 0932-9951
164 Arne Rasmusson
were time-bound in their reactions. One may ask why it is so easy to un-
derstand 1914 in this way, but not 1933. Today we know that 1914 turned
out to be much more fateful for the twentieth century than anyone could
have guessed at the time.
However, this issue goes deeper. In Rendtorff’s history nationalism and
especially war play subordinate roles for the formation of modernity and
the modern nation-state. He describes modernity not in relation to the na-
tion-state, but as the emergence of liberalism or of the constitutional lib-
eral welfare state. He describes positively the connections between
Protestant liberalism and the early liberal nationalism, but he separates
this sharply from the later conservative nationalism. War and nationalism
seem therefore incidental or part of reactionary counter-movements and
are not part of his main plot. 31 At no point is the difference between
Troeltsch and Rendtorff greater than here. For Troeltsch the nation-state
together with capitalism is at the center of modernity. Nationalism is the
primary moral principle of the modern state and war is an inevitable in-
gredient in the modern international system.32 This Troeltsch is almost in-
visible in Rendtorff’s writings. Rendtorff’s Troeltsch is, besides being the
most important liberal theologian at the time, mainly an ardent defender
of and active participator in the early Weimar Republic. He describes oth-
er leading liberal theologians in similar ways.
On this point the Barth of the 1920s is, in a way, closer to Troeltsch
than Rendtorff is. The combination of, on the one hand, nation-state, na-
tionalism, and militarism, expressed in the 1920s in the growing völkisch
ideology, and, on the other hand, capitalism, tended to dominate Barth’s
descriptions of the current society as well. The difference is, of course,
that while Troeltsch saw these phenomena as unavoidable, Barth was
deeply critical.33
31 See, e.g., Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration.

32 See my account of Troeltsch in Rasmusson, ‘Historicizing the historicist: Ernst
Troeltsch and recent Mennonite theology’, in Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner,
Harry J. Huebner, and Mark Thiessen Nation (eds.), The wisdom of the cross: Essays
in honor of John Howard Yoder, Grand Rapids 1999, 213–248.
33 Graf’s analysis in ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 428f., of Barth’s critique of the ‘‘lib-
eralen’ Kultur und Gesellschaftsordnung’ (Barth, Der Römerbrief [Erste Fassung],
1919, ed. Hermann Schmidt, Zürich 1985, 242) in the first edition of his Romans
commentary also ignores this context. It is, Barth says, this ‘liberal’ (note the quotes)
order that led to the catastrophe of the World War. Graf’s description is here in gen-
eral exceptionally tendentious in its use of Barth-quotes and of Ulrich Danne-
mann, Theologie und Politik im Denken Karl Barths, München 1977. This is not to
say that Barth here, or elsewhere, would say that the Christian understanding of free-
dom is the same as Graf’s liberal concept of freedom. In the passage discussed by
Graf Barth is commenting on Romans 6 and 7 (Barth, Der Römerbrief, 1919,
242–253) and I think it would be difficult for anyone to square what Paul says here
with dominant current liberal worldviews.

ISSN 0932-9951
I have elsewhere tried to demonstrate that the sort of theology (and so-
ciology) Troeltsch represented actively participated in the shaping of the
cultural imagination that contributed to the disastrous developments in
European history during the early twentieth century.34 The description of
social and political reality became itself a social and political reality. The
necessity of war was a central part of this cultural imagination, shaping
the elites in Germany as well as in many other countries. This war-culture
was to a large extent responsible for World War I. The leading war histo-
rian John Keegan has written: ‘Politics played no part in the conduct of
the First World War worth mentioning. The First World War was, on the
contrary, an extraordinary, a monstrous cultural aberration, the outcome
of an unwitting decision by Europeans in the century of Clausewitz ¼ to
turn Europe into a warrior society.’35 The result of this nationalistic war-
culture was not only the catastrophe we call the First World War, but al-
so its many direct or indirect historical consequences. The Third Reich
and the Second World War were direct results or continuations of the
First World War. The second war was then followed by the Cold War,
which was not especially cold for millions in the Third World, and which
was a result of both World Wars. The Russian Revolution was, after all, a
direct result of the First World War. Without that war Russian history and
world history would have been very different.
If European history is thus described, Barth’s understanding of it, and
the role of theology in shaping it, appear quite plausible. Modern
Protestantism, both in its conservative and its liberal forms, was deeply
implicated in the formation of the modern nation-state, and very much so
in Germany. These developments have of course many different sources
far back in history (the ‘Constantinian turn’, theological and political de-
velopments during the Middle Ages, the close connections between the
Reformation and the rise of the modern state, and so on). But in recent
German history there is a close relationship, partly described by
Rendtorff, between liberal Protestantism and German nationalism from
Schleiermacher on.36 Liberal Protestantism was national more than it was
churchly, or rather its church critique was to a large extent a function of
34 Rasmusson, ‘Historicizing the historicist’. He was, of course, not alone. German

universities were in general crucial agents in this development. However, we should
remember that 12 percent of all German university professors in 1903 were theolo-
gians (Mark D. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and liberal theology: Religion and cultur-
al synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany, Oxford 2001, 3). They were doing the sort of in-
fluential public theology that theologians today often dream of.
35 John Keegan, A history of warfare, New York 1993,, 21.
36 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration. For a short de-
scription of this development by a leading historian, see Thomas Nipperdey, Religion
im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918, München 1988, 92–106. For a longer discus-
sion of the roots of German nationalism in Pietism and Romanticism, see
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five roads to modernity, Cambridge 1992, 275–395.

ISSN 0932-9951
166 Arne Rasmusson
its nationalistic character. It saw the idea of the nation as the embodiment
of the principle of freedom, and thus the unification of Germany as the re-
alization of the Protestant Reformation.37 German culture and the
Reformation were combined in a nationalistic theology of history in
which the nation slowly became more important than the state. Con-
servative Protestantism and the established church were initially more re-
served toward this new nationalism. It was more directed towards local dy-
nasties or territories or the idea of a Great German federation. But after
the victory in the German-French war of 1871, the nationalist perspective
also took over most conservative theology. The völkisch ideology did not
play an important role until the interwar period, but these earlier devel-
opments created a discourse world open to such developments.
The type of theology and sociology Troeltsch and other liberal theolo-
gians represented not only positively legitimated German nationalism and
militarism, it also actively subverted any forms of theology and church
practice that would have made resistance intelligible and possible, even if
they seemed moderate in relation to conservatives like Reinhold Seeberg.
People like Troeltsch and Harnack were very close to the political power
and thought that democracy was a necessity in 1918. Hirsch interpreted
the historical developments differently and took another road.38 But his
theological strategy is not that different. Not without justification did
Hirsch understand his own theology – and more so after 1933 than before
– as standing in critical continuity with the era of Harnack and
Troeltsch.39 He took up and developed both the way Troeltsch stated the
problems and his suggestions of solutions.
Eilert Herms has, for example, argued that Hirsch’s concept
‘Geschichtswende’ is a constructive development of Troeltsch’s idea of
‘Kultursynthese’.40 This was a basic concept in Hirsch’s interpretation of
the German crisis of 1918 in Deutschlands Schicksal and again in his analy-
sis of the national solution of this crisis in the National Socialist Revo-
lution in the book Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage from 1934.41 Troeltsch
and Hirsch did not agree about the Weimar Republic, but Herms does
argue that the agreement between Hirsch and Troeltsch is not only about
the philosophy of history. He thinks it is more substantial than that.
37 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 78.

38 Hirsch, Deutschlands Schicksal: Staat, Volk und Menschheit im Lichte einer
ethischen Geschichtsansicht, Göttingen 1922.
39 Hirsch, Christliche Rechenschaft, vol. 1, Tübingen 1989, 8.
40 Eilert Herms, ‘‘‘Kultursynthese” und “Geschichtswende”: Zum Troeltsch-Erbe
in der Geschichtsphilosophie Emanuel Hirschs’, in Hans Martin Müller, Kultur-
protestantismus: Beiträge zu einer Gestalt des modernen Christentums, Gütersloh
1992, 339-388.
41 Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theolo-
gischer Besinnung: Akademische Vorlesungen zum Verständnis des deutschen Jahrs
1933, Göttingen 1934.

ISSN 0932-9951
Troeltsch’s idea of cultural synthesis was an attempt to find a way of over-

coming historical relativism, and thereby to make society into one subject
able to shape its own future. Cultural synthesis or unity is thus also a po-
litical program. This is, so goes Herms’s argument, very similar to Hirsch’s
conception.
Saying this is not, of course, to say that Troeltsch would have support-
ed the revolution of 1933 had he lived so long. But it does say that
Hirsch’s historical and political interpretations were one possible way of
applying Troeltsch’s theological strategy. That is precisely what Barth
thought. Moreover, Hirsch’s own analysis and critique in the 1930s and
1940s of Barth is basically the same as Rendtorff’s (unscientific, anti-
Enlightenment, ahistorical, apolitical, narrowly churchly and authoritari-
an, understandable in terms of the national and spiritual crisis of the
1920s but impossible after the resolution of this crisis in the great nation-
al revolution – Rendtorff would say after the creation of a democratic
Germany – and so on).42 So it is not difficult to understand that Falk
Wagner can say that German liberal theology has to continue where
Hirsch left off, and that includes Hirsch’s critique of Barth.43
Barth and Liberal Democracy
However, according to Rendtorff the tragedy was that so few theologians

and church leaders followed people like Troeltsch, Harnack, Rade, and
other liberals in actively supporting and theologically legitimating
Weimar’s liberal democracy. Most theologians were deeply critical. It is,
as we have seen, Rendtorff’s thesis that Barth’s theology and the move-
ment of dialectical theology in general also participated in the subversion
of the Weimar democracy, although he recognizes that Barth himself sup-
ported democracy.
Barth did not, theologically or otherwise, write much about ‘politics’ af-
ter he moved to Germany and before 1928, and he was not personally po-
42 See, e.g., Hirsch’s short account from 1940 of the development of twentieth cen-
tury theology in Christliche Rechenschaft, vol. 1, 8f.
43 Wagner, ‘Geht die Umformungskrise des deutschsprachigen modernen
Protestantismus weiter?’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 2 (1995),
225–254. Wagner stresses the continuity between Troeltsch and Hirsch and says that
Hirsch more than any other German theologian has described and systematically as-
sessed the ‘Umformungsprozeß’ of modern Protestantism. On Hirsch, see esp.
225–231, and for Barth, 245–250. It should be noted that Rendtorff does not deal
with Hirsch in this positive way. Cf. Rendtorff, ‘Das Wissenschaftsverständnis der
Theologie im “Dritten Reich”’, in Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten
Nicolaisen (eds.), Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, Göttingen 1993,
19–43, at 41–43.

ISSN 0932-9951
168 Arne Rasmusson
litically active, which he had been in Switzerland. He was a Swiss working

in Germany, he concentrated on his teaching and the development of his
theology, and his critique of his earlier religious socialism required new
thinking about which way to go for church and theology. However, in his
ethics lectures first given in 1928/29 he dealt with these issues extensive-
ly.44 The tone is very different from his more critical accounts of state and
politics in the two Romans commentaries, being much more positive
here. He does not theologically legitimize a specific political constitution,
but what he describes is something like a modern liberal or social demo-
cratic constitutional state. It is a state under the law (that should be true
even for a non-democratic state), with clear separation of legislative, ex-
ecutive and judicial powers, based on the consent and participation of the
population, that protects the freedom of the ‘civil society’, and that leads
to something like a social democratic economic policy. Timothy Gorringe
thinks that the difference from the perspective in the Romans commen-
taries should be understood as Barth’s response to the context of the
young democratic republic. ‘These lectures, in the Weimar Republic, give
us a political ethic which supports neither reaction nor revolution but re-
sponsible, critical participation in the democratic process.’45 He adds:
‘The message that students took away from Barth’s packed lecture halls
was quite unequivocal: of course Weimar is not the kingdom, for that is
true of no state, but our task is to engage in all the duties of society in or-
der to forge something more human, more open, more just.’46
The way Rendtorff and Graf downplay this is odd.47 One of Graf’s
problems with Barth’s account seems to be that Barth does not make lib-
eral democracy the overarching concept and that Barth can say that non-
democratic governments might be legitimate. For Barth it would have
been strange to say that all non-liberal governments are necessarily ille-
gitimate, in other words most governments throughout history, and most
governments before the last war. He clearly prefers a democratic ‘Rechts-
staat’, but he refuses to sacralize any political form.
The reader should also remember that both the state and the church
are dealt with under the heading of ‘humility’. If one compares Barth’s ac-
count with the current Protestant political theology at the time, for exam-
ple with Hirsch or Gogarten, one will appreciate the vast difference. In
44 Barth, Ethics, 440–451, see also 363–390.

45 Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth against hegemony, Oxford 1999, 91.
46 Gorringe, Karl Barth, 93.
47 See the criticisms and alternative accounts by Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Zum Verhältnis
von Kirche und Staat nach Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Beiheft
6 (1986), 76–135, esp. 118f, Günther van Norden, Die Weltverantwortung der
Christen neu begreifen: Karl Barth als homo politicus, Gütersloh 1997, 24–45, Frank
Jehle, Lieber unangenehm laut als angenehm leise: Der Theologe Karl Barth und die
Politik, 1906–1968, Zürich 1999, 61–90, and Besier, Die Evangelische Kirche, 252–259.

ISSN 0932-9951
these lectures there is an ongoing polemic against what he sees as the cur-
rent one-sided criticism of the Weimar-democracy from people like Hirsch
and Gogarten, with their criticism of its ‘mechanical individualism’ and
‘universalism’ and its lack of institutionalized understanding for the or-
ganic and historical aspects of society, such as the Volk, authority, and
war. The sharp contrast to the dominant conservative nationalistic views
is seen not least in his nuanced discussion of people- and nationhood.48
He does not deny their ethical relevance, but they are radically relativized
and qualified by many other loyalties such as marriage, family, state,
church, and humanity. The concept of humanity is more foundational
than that of people or nation. In his 1925 discussion of a possible
Reformed confession, he even argues that one should make the issues of
völkisch nationalism, anti-Semitism, and militarism into confessional
issues.49
Leading advocates of völkisch, non-democratic, and militaristic views
such as Paul Althaus, Wilhelm Stapel, and Hirsch also understood Barth
as an opponent representing Western rationalistic views of democracy, so-
cialism, and pacifism.50 These early criticisms of Barth are interesting al-
so because the Barth they deal with is partly the Barth of the Romans
commentaries, and one might say, as does Graf, that the anti-liberal, anti-
political, and anti-state views of the commentaries, for which Barth was
known during the early 1920s, support the view that Barth’s theology was
not supporting the Weimar democracy. Graf says that Barth’s early radi-
cal socialism, which entailed sharp criticism of capitalism and the bour-
geois ethos, was part of a general search for harmony that characterized
both the right and the left at this time. He developed no constructive ap-
proach. His goal was something more radical than Leninism. It finally
ends up in a totally unpolitical theology at a time when the young Weimar
democracy needed all the support it could get.51
There may be more to this criticism than to the one directed to his
work in Germany. But it does represent a very distorting undialectical
48 Barth, Ethics, 191–196 (later developed in Barth, Church dogmatics, III:4,

285–323). In Rasmusson, ‘The Politics of Diaspora’, I have tried to show why I think
his discussion of peoplehood and nationhood is more satisfying than his discussion
of the state. This article is also, more generally, a critical discussion of Barth’s chang-
ing views on church, state, and politics.
49 Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922–1925, ed. Holger Finze, Zürich
1990, pp. 604–643.
50 See e.g. Paul Althaus, Religiöser Sozialismus: Grundfragen der christlichen
Sozialethik, Gütersloh 1921, Hirsch, Deutschlands Schicksal, 155–166, and, for
Stapel’s text, see Karl Barth, Offene Briefe 1909–1935, ed. Dieter Koch, Zürich 2001,
98–105. These are only very early examples. The confrontations between these peo-
ple and Barth will become much more extensive in the 1930s.
51 Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 422–432.

ISSN 0932-9951
170 Arne Rasmusson
reading of Barth. He is not critical of political activity as such, but of the-

ological legitimation of politics or the state. Moreover, the commentaries
were written when he was pastor in the more ‘western’ and more demo-
cratic Switzerland. At the time he was very active in the Social Demo-
cratic Party, worked hard against the bolshevization of the party, and
defended democratic politics.52 His critique of the state was not only a
function of his socialism, but also of his critique of the militarism and
nationalism (so strongly supported by theologians, including Graf’s he-
roes) that had created the recent catastrophe, and his theological convic-
tion that the state is not the primary carrier of God’s historical action.
But it may be that when his theology was transplanted to the German
context and discourse world it could be read differently.53 He was, more-
over, not read for himself but as part of a movement, where people like
Gogarten could be understood quite differently. Barth did not do much
publicly to differentiate himself from Gogarten. Although he was skepti-
cal from early on about Gogarten (after some initial enthusiasm),54 it
seems that only later, when he saw how Gogarten’s theology developed,
did he recognize how far away from each other they really were. Gogarten
may fit Rendtorff’s description of a crisis theology in a way Barth does not
during the 1920s. Gogarten’s well-known programmatic article ‘Between
the Times’ from 1920 begins with the following lines: ‘It is the destiny of
our generation to stand between the times. We never belonged to the pe-
riod presently coming to an end; it is doubtful whether we shall ever be-
long to the period which is to come, and, if through our own efforts we
could be a part of the future, whether it would come as soon.’55 Gogarten
was, it seems, doing theology in the context of the German political, cul-
tural, and spiritual crisis brought about by the loss in the war and the
democratic revolution. Barth did not, though he could use the language of
crisis, but with a very different meaning. He was, after all, not German
and was not traumatized by the loss of the war or the fall of the empire.
But contemporary German readers may not have seen this sharp differ-
52 Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s critically realistic dialectical theology: Its gen-
esis and development 1909–1936, Oxford 1995, 184–203.
53 So Norden, Die Weltverantwortung der Christen, 41–43.
54 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 314f. For the
early enthusiasm, see e.g. Karl Barth – Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: Band 1,
1913–1921, ed. Eduard Thurneysen, Zürich 1973, 399, 431, 435 from 1920, and for
his scepticism see e.g. Karl Barth – Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: Band 2,
1921–1930, ed. Eduard Thurneysen, Zürich 1974, 47 and 97f from 1922 (in the latter
– a letter to George Merz – he asks if Gogarten does not represent ‘eine überstiegene
romantische Neuauflage von Stock-Luthertum’).
55 Friedrich Gogarten, ‘Between the times’, in James Robinson (ed.), The Begin-
nings of Dialectic Theology, vol. 1, Richmond 1968, 277–282, at 277.

ISSN 0932-9951
ence.56 The total public break did not come until 1933.57 However, we
have already noted how sharply he criticized Gogarten’s political ethics in
his ethics lectures.58
A related argument is that Barth’s intense critique of the tradition of
theological liberalism, and therefore also of the Enlightenment heritage
and the bourgeois and individualistic ethos it represented, is in practice,
if not in intention, a critique of the basis of modern democracy. The oth-
er side of this argument is that Barth’s theology is inherently authoritari-
an or even totalitarian because of its understanding of the authority of
Scripture and the church’s confessions. No other word could be put be-
side the Word of God. Such criticism is, of course, very basic. It is partly
built on a caricature of Barth’s theology, but it also signifies a radical dif-
ference between these two theologies. A treatment of it would require dis-
cussions of, among other things, the nature of knowledge, truth, and au-
thority. However, it is empirically false to say that a liberal democracy
requires subcommunities (that is of course not how Barth would describe
the church) that themselves are liberal in the sense of Rendtorff. Many
theorists would instead argue that liberal democracy is, in fact, dependent
on moral and cultural sources it cannot itself create.
This leads to a closely related issue mentioned by Rendtorff. We have
seen that he argued that the defense of the independence of church and
theology in the Confessing Church was important as an indirect support
of a pluralistic society. It created a space for dissent. Compare this with
56 See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 209–216.

McCormack thinks that during 1914 and 1915, but not later, Barth could be described
as a crisis theologian in Gogarten’s meaning, seeing the war as itself a divine judg-
ment (214f). Barth could, however, even in 1919, discussing socialism, talk about ‘das
Gebot des Stunde’ (Barth, ‘Das was nicht geschehen soll’, Neuer Freier Aargauer,
15 Aug. 1919, 1–2, at 1) and ‘die Notwendigkeit der geschichtlichen Stunde’, which
‘die Gehorsam von uns verlangt’ (Barth, ‘Vom Rechthaben und Unrechthaben: Rede,
gehalten zu einer socialdemokratischen Volkversammlung’, Das Neue Werk: Der
Christ Im Volkstaat, 1 (1920), col. 635–641, at col. 639 and 640). This is not
Gogarten’s crisis-theology, but history ‘speaks’. He also greeted the mentioned article
by Gogarten positively. See Barth – Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1913–1921, 399, and
also his positive comments on Gogarten’s later article from 1920 ‘The Crisis of our
Culture’ (printed in Robinson [ed], The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, vol 1,
283–300) in Barth – Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1913–1921, 431.
57 See Barth, ‘Abschied (1933)’, and also Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life
from letters and autobiographical texts, Philadelphia 1976, 191f. For an overview of
the development of Gogarten’s political theology, see L. E. Shiner, The secularization
of history: An introduction to the theology of Friedrich Gogarten, Nashville 1966,
191–221.
58 He similarly criticized Gogarten in his 1927 Dogmatics, although without nam-
ing him. See the editorial notes to Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf. Erster
Band: Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes: Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik, ed.
Gerhard Sauter, Zürich 1982, 91–93 and 524f.

ISSN 0932-9951
172 Arne Rasmusson
Troeltsch’s, Hirsch’s, and Rade’s ideas of cultural unity, which in the case
of a liberal like Rade could lead to the acceptance of separate laws for the
Jews. This idea of cultural unity is also one reason behind the strong de-
fense of the Volk-church against a Confessing Church. So in this sense,
Barth’s theology was more in congruence with a certain understanding of
liberalism than Troeltsch and Rade. It also shows that political liberalism
and the attempt to create cultural unity have often gone together. As not-
ed earlier, German liberal Protestantism was an integral part of the grow-
ing nationalism of the nineteenth century.
Barth and Theological Liberalism in 1933
Another argument is that Barth’s theology, as it was developed in the

1920s and early 1930s, was basically apolitical. Again that was, of course,
also what Hirsch and Stapel thought. This becomes especially clear, it is
said, in 1933. Barth’s theological interest was only the independence of
the church. He was not, as theologian, concerned with politics. For peo-
ple like Hirsch or Rendtorff the nation of Germany is the primary context
and the church’s role is seen in this light. However, for Barth the church
is much more important than Germany. And both world and church are
greater than Germany. In his ethics lectures he had said, discussing
Richard Rothe, that in liberal Protestantism the church gradually tended
to disappear into the state, and therefore ethics tended to swallow dog-
matics. Without the church as the main context for ethics, the nation-state
will (in the modern period) explicitly or implicitly become the main con-
text for doing ethics.59 Hirsch was an example of what the consequences
could be.
I will not here discuss Barth’s activity 1933–1935, but I think the criti-
cism for being apolitical is to a large extent misdirected as a general state-
ment.60 However, even if one thinks in terms of the more narrow political
role of the church in Germany, its independence was crucial for its abili-
ty to resist. This is something Rendtorff also recognizes. In 1933 the
Protestant church faced the threat of being completely taken over by the
German Christians. At that point Barth’s theological protest was crucial.
It is often said, especially by the critics of Barth and the Confessing
Church, that one cannot deduce the positions of theologians in the face of
the Nazi state from their theological positions. There were liberal, conser-
vative, and dialectical theologians both among German Christians and
59 Barth, Ethics, 8.
60 See Rasmusson, ‘Church and Nation-State’, and especially Rasmusson, ‘“De-
prive them of their pathos”: Karl Barth and the Nazi Revolution Revisited’, Modern
Theology 23 (2007), 369–391.

ISSN 0932-9951
among its opponents.61 But it was hardly an accident that a theology of

Barth’s sort was the one that gave theological leadership to the resistance,
although he did not have many close theological allies. In many respects,
he was an outsider also in the Confessing Church. Protestant liberalism
did not by itself provide theological or institutional leadership for resist-
ance. It was true both for the more radical dissent Barth represented and
the more mediating groups he was critical of. There were important and
very active liberal theologians in the Confessing Church, but they worked
under premises of a nonliberal Confessing Church. The Marburg New
Testament scholar and church historian Hans von Soden is a well known
example. Other liberals could not for theological and political reasons par-
ticipate in the Confessing Church. Many resisted in various ways on a per-
sonal level, but liberal Protestant institutions did not provide any relevant
resistance.62
And it is difficult to think that the sort of individualistic free
Christianity or Volk-church Christianity supported by Rendtorff could
have created a strong resistance, even if the Troeltsch-Harnack-Rade tra-
dition of theology had continued to dominate German theology.
Rendtorff might of course say that in such a situation the whole cultural
climate would have been different and Hitler would have never succeed-
ed. It would also have been different if Barthian theology had dominated.
But in 1933, as it actually turned out, what should a politically responsi-
ble liberal theology do? Direct political resistance might seem futile in a
situation where one represents a tiny minority. The dominant political
force will increasingly shape the political discourse and the formulation of
the problems and thereby even to an increasing extent shape the political
imagination of the responsible political opposition. In addition, political
criticism was quickly silenced. It may be better to say something, rather
than opposing outright and then being silenced. So a critical but accom-
modating position may seem the most responsible.
Of the usually mentioned liberal heroes from the Weimar period, the
only ones who lived through the 1930s were Martin Rade and Herman
Mulert.63 Both are quite typical of this development. Barth had once been
61 Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus und Kir-

chenkampf’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 87 (1976), 298–320, at 298–301, Graf,
‘‘‘Wir konnten dem Rad nicht in die Speichen fallen”: Liberaler Protestantismus und
“Judenfrage” nach 1933’, in Jochen-Christoph Kaiser and Martin Greschat (eds.), Der
Holocaust und die Protestanten: Analysen einer Verstrickung, Frankfurt am Main
1988, 151–185, at 151–153. Cf. Barth’s comment in Theological existence today!
A plea for theological freedom, London 1933, 47, and Stoevesandt’s notes to this
comment in Barth, Theologische Existenz heute! (1933), ed. Hinrich Stoevesandt,
München 1984, 126–128.
62 Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 319.
63 For the following, see especially Anne Christine Nagel, Martin Rade – Theologe
und Politiker des Sozialen Liberalismus: Eine politische Biographie, Gütersloh 1996,

ISSN 0932-9951
174 Arne Rasmusson
Rade’s editorial assistant on the liberal flagship Die Christliche Welt, and
Barth’s brother Peter was married to Rade’s daughter Helene. Barth and
Rade kept up an ongoing correspondence until Rade’s death in 1940.64 In
1914 they had their first major conflict, when (the near pacifist) Rade, to
the great disappointment of Barth, publicly celebrated the war. Rade, pro-
fessor in Marburg until his retirement in1924, continued as editor of Die
Christliche Welt until 1931. He was a leader in the Free Protestant move-
ment, a very active liberal politician strongly supporting the Weimar
Republic, and had often worked together with Troeltsch. He is one of the
most cited examples of the support given by liberal theologians to the
Weimar Republic and to the resistance against National Socialism.65
Personally he also suffered from the Nazi takeover. Because of his earlier
political activities, he was in November 1933 removed from his professor-
ship (though he was emeritus) and his state pension was reduced.
Before 1933 Rade was a long-time critic of National Socialism. And af-
ter 1933 his criticisms continued, especially against the German
Christians and the application of the Aryan-paragraph to the church, but
he argued for a more accommodating attitude to the Nazi state than Barth
did. He did not become a member of the Confessing Church because as a
liberal he was critical of binding confessions and because he supported
the idea of a broad Volk-church.66 He could therefore write as critically
about the Confessing Church as about the German Christians. For a long
time he had been more interested in a dialog with Barth than other liber-
al theologians, for example his successor as editor of Die Christliche Welt
Herman Mulert, who argued that dialectical theology, German Christians,
and the National Socialists were rooted in the same understanding of au-
thority and orthodoxy.67 That Rade was more interested in dialog and mu-
tual understanding with Barth is, I suppose, partly explained by the fact
of their close personal relationship. In a letter to Barth he wrote positive-
esp. 233–260, Franz G. M. Feige, The varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany:

Five theopolitical positions, Lewiston 1990, 340–394, Graf, ‘“Wir konnten dem Rad
nicht in die Speichen fallen”’, and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalis-
mus’. The major theological analysis of Rade is Christoph Schwöbel, Martin Rade:
Das Verhältnis von Geschichte, Religion und Moral als Grundproblem seiner Theo-
logie, Gütersloh 1980, though one cannot from his account gather the picture I will
give in the following. See 216–220. Both Feige, The Varieties of Protestantism in
Nazi Germany and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’ deal exten-
sively with Mulert.
64 Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Christoph Schwöbel, Gütersloh 1981.
65 See, e.g., Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Gottes Stimme und die Demokratie: Theologi-
sche Unterstützung für das neue demokratische System’, in Ziegert (ed.), Die Kir-
chen und die Weimarer Republik, 37–68, and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer
Liberalismus’.
66 But cf. Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, 274.
67 Feige, The Varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany, 389.

ISSN 0932-9951
ly about Barth’s Theological Existence Today, though he had reservations

especially about the status of the Bible and Barth’s ecclesiology. Interest-
ingly enough, he also recognized that Barth’s theology gave the latter a
critical distance lacking in German Lutheranism. This cannot, he said,
just be explained by the fact that Barth was Swiss.68
However, the picture is more mixed than this, although one would nev-
er guess that from some of the secondary literature. What is most often
mentioned is his rather open liberal attitude to Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s
German Faith Movement. ‘Innerhalb des religiösen Individualismus, der
dank der Reformation für uns Deutsche selbstverständlich ist … soll auch
diese Entdeckung und Botschaft willkommen sein, und wir wollen von ihr
lernen.’69 This might be compared to Troeltsch’s similarly somewhat sym-
pathetic attitude towards Paul de Lagarde’s German Religion as an ex-
ample of a religious awakening outside the churches.70 Lagarde was a
nineteenth century Orientalist, who besides being a strong defender of the
necessity of a national religion based on a form of völkisch thinking, also
was an advocate of a German European colonial empire, and a strongly
anti-Jewish thinker. He is usually considered as an inspiration to later fas-
cist/nazist thinking (his writings were extensively and repeatedly repub-
lished during the Third Reich).71 Also Mulert was influenced by Lagarde.
He even published a Lagarde Reader in 1913, in which Lagarde was posi-
tively presented as a representative of anti-Catholicism, anti-clericalism,
and anti-dogmatism.72 So it is not surprising that Mulert too could express
himself quite positively about the German Faith Movement. He was very
critical of the German Christians, but he stressed that the conflict did not
concern the issue of whether Volk and race should be honored as creation
orders. This, he said, all Protestants agree about, which, of course, was not
exactly true. The problem with the German Christians, he continued, is
the way they glorify martial values and the struggle against external and
internal enemies (especially the Jews), to the exclusion of humility, love,
and peace. Their search for a ‘heroic piety’ is positive, but not the un-
christian form it takes.73
But often ignored is a startling article written by Rade in March 1933
titled ‘Ein neuer Anfang’.74 Here he says that he finds the declaration of
68 Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, 265–267.

69 Cited in Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 309.
70 Troeltsch, Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik (Gesammelte
Schriften. Bd 2), Tübingen 1913, 20–21.
71 Paul de Lagarde, Schriften für das deutsche Volk, 2 vol., ed. Paul Fischer, Mün-
chen 1924. On Lagarde, see Fritz Stern, The politics of cultural despair: A study in
the rise of the Germanic ideology, Berkeley 1961, 1–94.
72 Paul de Lagarde, ed. Hermann Mulert, Berlin-Schöneberg 1913. Cf. Kantzen-
bach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 312.
73 Mulert, ‘Ethische “Irrlehren”’, Die christliche Welt, 48 (1934), 108–111.
74 Rade, ‘Ein Neuer Anfang’, Die christliche Welt, 47 (1933), 377–378.

ISSN 0932-9951
176 Arne Rasmusson
the National Socialists that 1933 represents a revolution an Erlösung. If it

is a revolution one does not need to judge what happens with old criteria.
It is a New Beginning, which means that the new wine needs new wine-
skins. The old is gone. Although in the future one may have to judge this
revolution negatively, it is now meaningless to resist it. Instead he called
for participation in the new building of the nation. Moreover, because it
was a revolution, violence and terror against opponents were legitimate.
That is simply the way of revolutions. In her political biography of Rade,
Anne Christine Nagel compares Rade’s reaction 1933 with his strong and
enthusiastic support of the German war policy of 1914.75 In both cases he
took positions in contrast to earlier stands, although in 1914 with an en-
thusiasm wholly lacking in 1933. In both cases, he saw what happened as
a way out of an impasse, 1914 in the foreign policy, in 1933 in domestic
policy. Central for him in both cases was the interest of the nation. Nagel
writes: ‘Im Sommer 1914 wie im März 1933 argumentierte der Patriot
Rade bei der Beurteilung der Ereignisse vor dem Hintergrund der Nation
als eines Letztwertes.’76
Also significant is his views of the laws against the Jews. Although long
critical of anti-Semitism, he did not think that one should try to resist the
new laws against Jews, except in so far they applied to the church. As late
as September 1935 he wrote an article discussing the Nuremberg laws in
which he basically accepted separate laws for the Jews, while discussing
their details. Actually, already in 1932 he had himself shown some sym-
pathy for separate laws for Jews.77 In other words, he partly accepted the
dominant description, outside and inside National Socialism, of the Jews
as ‘a problem’. Personally, however, he supported Jews in various ways, in-
cluding helping Jews to flee from Germany. One should also, of course,
remember that Rade and his contemporaries thought in pre-Holocaust
terms. While we think of the Jewish policy in light of the Holocaust, they
did not expect something like that. One might compare it to segregation
laws for blacks in USA. Even if someone like Reinhold Niebuhr was
against these laws, it was never a central concern for him.78
75 See Nagel, Martin Rade, 134–156.

76 Ibid., 250. The problem with Nagel’s description is that her concentration on
this article and the one we will discuss in the following paragraph gives a somewhat
one-sided view of Rade’s stance. But it is no less one-sided than other major descrip-
tions that ignore this side of Rade’s public stance.
77 See ibid., 239–244.
78 One understands how unproblematic anti-Jewish sentiments were perceived to
be, when one sees how, in 1928, such a prominent church leader as the General
Superintendent Otto Dibelius could flatly describe himself as an anti-Semite (al-
though recognizing that the word had, as he said, an unpleasant ring). See
Hans-Ulrich Thamer ‘Protestantismus und “Judenfrage” in der Geschichte des Dritte
n Reiches’, in Kaiser and Greschat (eds.), Der Holocaust und die Protestanten, 216–2
40, at 228.

ISSN 0932-9951
Graf thinks Rade’s stand is understandable in terms of the tradition of

German Culture-Protestantism. In the late nineteenth and the early twen-
tieth centuries there existed a strong value consensus between Protestant
liberal ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ and the Jewish bourgeoisie. However, the for-
mer also often thought that assimilation into a Christian culture was a re-
quirement for equal citizenship in the civil society. Behind this was a view
of culture and society that strongly emphasized the need for cultural ho-
mogeneity. And the state, understood as a culture state, was seen as the
‘wichtigsten Agenten sozial-kultureller Integration’.79 This view made it
difficult to criticize the state in terms of concrete human rights.80 This un-
derstanding of the need of cultural homogeneity for creating unified po-
litical action is also the one Herms ascribes to Troeltsch and Hirsch. On
this point Rendtorff and Graf think that a contemporary liberalism has to
accept value pluralism as constitutive of the modern state. How far their
type of liberalism actually is able to do that is, of course, a much debated
issue in contemporary political philosophy.
Barth was critical of the lack of resistance of Die Christliche Welt. Rade
writes in a letter to Mulert (1 February 1934) that Barth has asked him:
‘Warum leistet Ihr keinen Widerstand? Warum versagt die “Christliche
Welt”?’ Rade answered, among other things, that it was no church politi-
cal body, its time for resistance had not yet come, their ecclesiology was
not Reformed, and one could still preach the Gospel everywhere.81
Rade and Mulert are particular instances, though very prominent ones,
often used as examples of liberal resistance to National Socialism. My ac-
count does not prove anything in itself. But it does indicate some of the
weaknesses of theological liberalism. It also indicates that it was no acci-
dent that people like Barth and Bonhoeffer provided the most decisive
theological leadership for the resisting Church.
Conclusion
History writing is controversial, because it impinges on current political,

cultural, and religious identities and practices. The intense interest in the
role of church and theology during the Weimar republic and the Third
Reich has very much to do with the current debate about the nature and
role of church and theology, both in and outside Germany. And the in-
79 Graf, “’Wir konnten dem Rad nicht in die Speichen fallen’”, 175.
80 Ibid., 154, 173-178.
81 The letter is cited in Johannes Rathje, Die Welt des freien Protestantismus: Ein
Beitrag zur deutsch-evangelischen Geistesgeschichte, dargestellt an Leben und Werk
von Martin Rade, Stuttgart 1952, 461, and followed by Mulert’s answer.

ISSN 0932-9951
178 Arne Rasmusson
fluence goes both ways. The way one understands history affects the way
one reads current realities. And current political and theological concep-
tions influence how history is written. The case described in this article is
an obvious example. And it is, of course, also true of my discussion.
This does not mean that history writing is arbitrary. The writing of his-
tory depends on available evidence (records of events, statements, and so
on), interpretative contexts, the methods used, basic assumptions, and so
on. The evidence is limited and in the production of an historical text on-
ly a portion of the known evidences can actually be directly used. What
we do not know and what is not said may be as important for under-
standing as what we know and what is said. Moreover, the pieces of evi-
dence we have can be used, combined, and interpreted in countless ways.
Isolated historical ‘facts’ separate from interpretative contexts and the his-
torical methods used do not exist. The same piece of evidence used in dif-
ferent interpretative contexts may look very different and can be used for
even opposite purposes. It is thus possible to write very diverse, but co-
herent and plausible, narratives about the same historical topic.
However, although different plausible accounts can be produced, not
everything can be claimed, otherwise communication would be impossi-
ble. It is not possible to say that Barth was politically a Nazi or Hirsch a
liberal democrat. But there is no sharp line separating the ‘possible’ from
the ‘impossible’. The debate seldom concerns what most of us think is ob-
viously wrong (such as the denial of the Holocaust). We discuss the se-
lection and interpretation of acts, statements, and structures that in them-
selves are not in question. Although final consensus is often unlikely, the
historical debate is still meaningful and important. It may not lead to
agreement, but both sides in a debate may change in the process.
In this article I have tried to show why I think that the main plot in the
reconstruction of the role of Barth’s theology during the 1920s and 1930s
provided by the ‘Munich-school’ is implausible. I have argued, for exam-
ple, that Graf’s reading of Barth-texts sometimes is exceedingly tenden-
tious, that Rendtorff’s reading of Troeltsch is one-sided, that the way
‘1914’ (and the history shaping ‘1914’) is placed in the background or nor-
malized is a serious error, and that there is some plausibility to Barth’s un-
derstanding of the role of liberal Protestantism. Insofar as these (and oth-
er similar) judgments are accepted it not only problematizes Rendtorff’s
and his allies’ reading of history, it also poses some serious questions to
their theological project as a whole, as this is so closely intertwined with a
specific reading of history. This type of liberal theology has to ask more
self-critical questions about the failures of Liberal Protestantism in ‘1914’
and ‘1933’. It also makes it more difficult not to take Barth’s position se-
riously.
However, to make this challenge more generally effective, I would have
to call into question some of the fundamental theological, ecclesiological,

ISSN 0932-9951
and sociological convictions that, for many, make the reading of

Rendtorff, Graf, and others plausible. That, of course, is not possible here.
These theologians represent a classical liberal theological perspective and
a Volk-church ecclesiology inserted into a form of a broad modernization-
theoretical perspective (often in a nineteenth century German idealist
mould which is quite peculiar for someone outside of this tradition). They
seem to assume that a secular and sociological modernization theory is
more ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ than a theological perspective, that the lat-
ter represents an ideological intrusion into a more ‘objective’ secular so-
ciological or historical discourse. This was a common view in the middle
of the twentieth century when Rendtorff formed his theology, but there is
little reason to accept this assumption and certainly not without argu-
ment. The basic institutional context and carrier of ‘modernization’ has
been the nation-state in conjunction with the market economy and this is
also the self-evident context for Rendtorff’s theology. Economics and so-
ciology (in more complicated ways) have thus functioned as the theolo-
gies of modernity. They have not only described it, they have functioned
as purveyors of certain ways of seeing reality and certain moral perspec-
tives and practices.82 But there is nothing necessary about ‘modernity’,
‘liberalism’, or the ‘nation-state’. Neither is a ‘natural’ outcome or realiza-
tion of this or that historical process; rather, each represents contingent
social formations and ideologies that are no more necessary or universal
than churches.
If one does not, as I do not, accept the specific theological, ecclesio-
logical, political, and sociological assumptions behind the work of
Rendtorff and his allies, it will inevitably influence one’s description of
history.83 Conversely, one’s reading of history may confirm, contribute to,
or require changes in one’s wider theological (or sociological and political)
82 This has been shown in countless studies. Some prominent examples especially
relevant for theologians are from a theological perspective John Milbank, Theology
and social theory: Beyond secular reason, Oxford 1991, from the perspective of eco-
nomics Robert H. Nelson, Economics as religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and
beyond, University Park, Pa. 2001, from a sociological perspective Christian Smith,
Moral, believing animals: Human personhood and culture, New York 2003, Christian
Smith (ed.), The secular revolution: Power, interests, and conflict in the seculariza-
tion of American public life, Berkeley 2003 (see esp. Smith’s long theoretical intro-
duction, pp. 1–96), and Randall Collins, The sociology of philosophies: A global the-
ory of intellectual change, Cambridge, Mass. 1998 (esp. ch. 12 is a fascinating
account of the German intellectual cultural developments basic to Rendtorff’s ac-
count), from a moral philosophical perspective Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After virtue: A
study in moral theory, Notre Dame 1984, and from the view of a political philosopher
Pierre Manent, An intellectual history of liberalism, Princeton 1994.
83 In addition to articles mentioned in earlier notes, see also e.g. Rasmusson, The
Church as polis: From political theology to theological politics as exemplified by
Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas, Notre Dame 1995.

ISSN 0932-9951
180 Arne Rasmusson
perspective. It is an ongoing and reciprocal process. Historiography can-

not be separated from theology, and theology cannot be separated from
historiography.
Arne Rasmusson, Department of Religious Studies, Umeå University, SE-

90187 Umeå

ISSN 0932-9951

Historiography and Theology Weimar

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Historiography and Theology Weimar

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Historiography and Theology.

Theology in the Weimar Republic

One aspect of German twentieth century theology is especially controver-

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

Trutz Rendtorff’s account

4 Theologically liberal, that is. He was never a political liberal.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

putting the philosophical legitimacy of liberal democracy in doubt.8 His

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

In its critique of the Enlightenment, in the way it required a new start,

11 Falk Wagner, ‘Theologische Gleichschaltung: Zur Christologie bei Karl Barth’,

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

The Politics of Historiography

It is obvious that Rendtorff’s research program (followed up by many of

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

quently is this polemically described as a turn away from a moralistic and

16 Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 422.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

The writing of history and theological background convictions

20 Berger, ‘The German tradition of historiography’, 486.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

23 It is interesting and illuminative to compare Rendtorff’s account with the simi-

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

‘1914’ or ‘1918’: On Nationalism and Liberalism

It is somewhat easier if we move to a less ambitious level and confine our-

28 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 128–133. Cf.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

31 See, e.g., Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

34 Rasmusson, ‘Historicizing the historicist’. He was, of course, not alone. German

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

37 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 78.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

Troeltsch’s idea of cultural synthesis was an attempt to find a way of over-

Barth and Liberal Democracy

However, according to Rendtorff the tragedy was that so few theologians

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

litically active, which he had been in Switzerland. He was a Swiss working

44 Barth, Ethics, 440–451, see also 363–390.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

48 Barth, Ethics, 191–196 (later developed in Barth, Church dogmatics, III:4,

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

reading of Barth. He is not critical of political activity as such, but of the-

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

56 See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 209–216.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

Barth and Theological Liberalism in 1933

Another argument is that Barth’s theology, as it was developed in the

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

among its opponents.61 But it was hardly an accident that a theology of

61 Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus und Kir-

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

esp. 233–260, Franz G. M. Feige, The varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany:

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

ly about Barth’s Theological Existence Today, though he had reservations

68 Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, 265–267.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

the National Socialists that 1933 represents a revolution an Erlösung. If it

75 See Nagel, Martin Rade, 134–156.

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG

Graf thinks Rade’s stand is understandable in terms of the tradition of

History writing is controversial, because it impinges on current political,

© 2007, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG