Karl Barth's Letter to American Christians (1942) | Faith and Politics #8

In 1942, Karl Barth was asked to write to Christians in the United States. He didn't know the American context well, so he asked his hosts to send him the questions they were actually wrestling with. James Spencer and Ashish Varma work through the first of them: how can a Christian be a loyal citizen of a national state and a loyal member of a church that transcends national interests?

Barth's answer turns on a distinction between the national state and what he calls the righteous state — the God-instituted order the church prays toward when it prays for God's will on earth. James and Ashish trace what that means in practice: that a state serving only its own interests forfeits any claim to righteousness, that the church is not identical with the kingdom it hopes for, and that protest and resistance are forms of loyalty rather than betrayals of it.

The conversation sets Barth against the German Christian church of his day, the Augustinian figure of the pilgrim, Jeremiah's shock that God would use Babylon, and the question of what any of it means at a ballot box. First of a series on the letter.

Chapters (approximate, from speaker turns — verify against the final cut):

00:00 The backstory: why Barth wrote this letter

02:19 Question one: loyal citizen, loyal to the church universal

03:25 Is the nation state a recent invention?

04:55 The righteous state and the kingdom of God

08:13 The church hopes for the kingdom but isn't identical with it

13:31 Volk, blood, and the purity of the land

19:32 Reading Barth: resist everything incompatible

24:37 Why resistance is loyalty, not betrayal