Karl Barth and the Idolatry of the Nation

Karl Barth and the Idolatry of the Nation: Confronting Christian Nationalism tells the story of Karl Barth’s theological resistance against German nationalism in the period 1930-1935.

In the early 1930s, German Christians fused the Christian gospel with their own national identity by telling a story that placed Germany at the center of God’s purposes for history. They merged loyalty to God with loyalty to the state, blurred divine and national identity, and replaced God’s law with human law.

Barth spent years resisting this false theology. The content of this resistance is presented in a fast-paced narrative built upon close attention to Barth’s sermons, lectures, essays, letters, and church-political meetings. These writings and actions are situated directly in the context of the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, the German Christian Faith Movement, and the Confessing Church. The book explains why Barth believed that Adolf Hitler did not create but simply exposed the German church’s theological crisis: a centuries-long theological "both-and" method that set Jesus Christ alongside other authorities and left the church vulnerable to false gospels. Against this captivity, Barth called the Protestant church back to the Reformers’ "either-or" decision for Christ alone, defended the freedom of the gospel, and summoned the church to a theological existence determined solely by the risen Christ’s address through Scripture.

The book’s implications are not information or imitation, but transformation. If the path Barth walked with the Germans feels hauntingly familiar in the United States, the driving question facing readers is Barth’s own: what must the church become in order to remain faithful to Jesus Christ?