Matthew Rose on Karl Barth on Secular Politics

Following on the discussion below about the limits of the state, my friend and Villanova colleague Matthew Rose writes the following in his splendid book Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics, and Morals (Ashgate, 2010), which provides a Catholic reading of the great twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth and here makes a powerful case for the place of secular politics in an adequate political theology:

[O]ne might suggest there is an implicit deference paid to the kingship of Christ wherever a politics views itself critically and at a distance. The state announces its penultimacy, in Bonhoeffer’s useful term, when it boasts of no ambition to achieve absolute consensus or perfect harmony among citizens. By putting itself on endless trial, by conceding it must be limited in its claims and open-ended in its decisions, by seeking peace over perfection, and by refusing to be a site of ultimate loyalty, a secular politics affirms its own servanthood and bears implicit witness to God.

For Barth, then, it is precisely in and through its secularity—its incapacity to take responsibility for word and sacrament; its inability to define a full account of human flourishing; its repudiation of any salvific powers—that a politics discloses “not I, but one greater than I.” It is precisely in the recognition of its own impermanence and imperfect justice that the political discloses itself as a way station in a journey toward the end of human history. A secular state that respectfully shrinks from questions of theological truth does not therefore indicate theological insouciance or, worse yet, dissemble its own thinly-veiled totalitarianism. In its confession that it cannot bestow ultimate meaning or provide final consolation, secular politics instead (tacitly) acknowledges that there can be no easy correlation between the broken middle of the saeculum and the new Jerusalem. On Barth’s view, the secular state indicates (if unwittingly) that after Christ there is no other all-decisive political event for which the world must await with fear or an optative sigh. It discloses (if unknowingly) that no government can be seen as God’s chosen instrument for the salvation of humankind or as indispensable for the unfolding of his providential plan. Secular politics pay silent homage to God by its professed incapacity to embody the promise of the kingdom proclaimed and inaugurated in Christ. Human governments, an influential political theologian [Oliver O'Donovan] recently wrote, are instead “marked for displacement for when the rule of God in Christ is finally disclosed. They are Christ’s conquered enemies; yet they have an indirect testimony to give. . . . Like the surface of a planet pocked with craters by the bombardment it receives from space, the governments of the passing age show the impact of Christ’s dawning glory" (pp. 166-67).