Karl Barth, Pacifism, and Just War
Finnish soldiers advancing on Hanko front in 1941. |
Earlier today @dwcongdon inagurated his #TwitterSeminary initiative with a tweet storm on #tradition. https://t.co/wIkkRliaY6
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
Now I will claim the privileges of friendship and offer a #TwitterSeminary Guest Lecture on #KarlBarth and #JustWar.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(1) I feel compelled to say a few words about #KarlBarth and #JustWar in response to @thomaswhitley and @samharrelson, who kindly
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(2) mentioned me in the most recent Thinking Religion podcast (https://t.co/cfW4JwdYta) episode, and included me in the show notes (which
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(3) fulfilled a personal goal of mine - thanks, guys!). Barth served as a jumping off point to a wider discussion of just war theory and
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(4) pacifism. They pointed out (correctly) that Barth is not an absolute pacifist; his is a practical pacifism that does not altogether rule
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(5) rule out the possibility that it might be necessary for the Christian to engage in the use of coercive force. My sense from
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(6) @thomaswhitley and @samharrelson is that they incline much more toward an absolute pacifist position. So I want to make two points
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(7) about Barth's position on this, and a third point of my own (that I nonetheless think is consistent with Barth). First, it is very
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(8) important to understand exactly what Barth means when he talks about the "exceptional case" in his ethics of creation in Church
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(9) Dogmatics 3.4. @matthew_puffer has done really great work on this, attending to the proper meaning of Barth's term "Grenzfall." Read
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(10) his article on this subject: https://t.co/n6Zh6sIMqm
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(11) Barth does not argue that there is an otherwise absolute command of God against coercive force to which there are certain exceptions.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(12) If that were the case, wars meeting certain criteria pertaining to their just-ness might be deemed such exceptions. But, again, this
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(13) is not what Barth means. He means that there are certain situations / contexts that lie on the boundaries or borders of normal human
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(14) socioethical life that are so disordered that this particular instance in the trend-line of God's commands (in this case, the
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(15) trend-line is toward the preservation of life) meets us in surprising and counterintuitive ways. In other words, it may be necessary
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(16) to take life precisely in order to protect and preserve life. Thus, the Christian should have an exceedingly strong predisposition
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(17) toward pacifism in practice, but also cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that God's command may - in unusual cases - demand the
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(18) use of coercive force. Second, the reason Barth is careful to deny absolute pacifism and maintain the possibility that Christian
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(19) obedience to God's command may require surprising and counterintuitive action, is because that obedience is to ***God's*** command
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(20) rather than to some abstract ethical imperative or generalized account of virtue. Rather than fitting pacifism or just war into an
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(21) abstract ethical system, Barth thinks through matters with reference to the Christian's living relationship with the living God.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(22) And one can never foreclose on the possibilities of God's liveliness, for God - and God's command - always meets us in the freedom of
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(23) God's love. For Barth, Christians owe obedience to a person rather than to a principle - even a principle so well-meaning and humanist
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(24) (in the best sense) as pacifism. OK, those two points explain Barth's position a bit. So what's my position? Third, I don't think
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(25) there is such a thing as a just war. That idea implies to me that it is possible to engage in coercive violence without engaging in
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(26) sin, and that's just not true. In fact, I reject all "purity politics" - politics that are motivated by somehow establishing or
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(27) maintaining the individual or group's purity. The simple fact of human life, which is always life together (i.e., social) and
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(28) therefore always political, is that every single one of us is always already caught up in webs of sin at all levels: from our
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(29) relationship with our own self and with the world around us (i.e, "nature"), all the way up to the national and international levels.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(30) We are always entangled in sin, and our actions are never perfect. So there are no conditions under which Christians can participate
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(31) in the use of coercive force without participating in sin, and there are no conditions under which Christians can successfully avoid
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(32) participating in sin by declining to participate in the use of coercive force. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The only
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(33) question, then, is this: is the use of coercive force what is necessary in this particular circumstance in order to serve the
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(34) God of the gospel, the God of love? This rules out all wars of aggression, but leaves open the possibility that it may become
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(35) necessary to serve the God of love by loving the neighbor, even to the extent of using coercive force to protect their lives. Mind
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(36) you, I'm hard pressed to find examples for this from actual wars in history. There are elements of it on the side of the Union in the
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(37) US Civil War, and on the side of the Allies in World War 2, but these are also not unambiguous cases. In any case, I would not say
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(38) that there are "just wars"; I would say that there may be times when war is necessary to serve justice (i.e., concrete love-in-action).
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(39) Coincidentally, the same goes (mutatis mutandis) for revolutions and revolutionary violence. In fact, we should be quicker to
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(40) acknowledge revolutionary violence as performed in the service of justice / love than we are with coercive use of force in war because
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(41) revolutionary violence is always counterviolence – it resists the violence inherent in the sociopolitical and economic status quo.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(42) The important thing for #American #Christians to remember is that we are the empire, not the rebels (#StarWars). Time to switch sides.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
(43) FIN. Thanks again to @samharrelson, @thomaswhitley, @thinkingfm, @matthew_puffer, @dwcongdon, and @k_barth / @TheBarthCenter.
— W. Travis McMaken (@WTravisMcMaken) March 8, 2017
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