Christ, Power and Mammon: Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder in Dialogue 9781472551139, 9780567146915

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Acknowledgements I suspect that appropriately naming one’s gratitude is always difficult, but it feels particularly inadequate to do so for the first time in a format such as this. Because this book was first conceived and written as a doctoral project, it seems right to begin with those most directly involved in nurturing the research and writing process during my years as a doctoral student in Aberdeen, Scotland. I first applied to Aberdeen at the behest of Stanley Hauerwas, who, at the end of my Master’s programme at Duke, kindly told me that he ‘wanted me in the field’ and suggested that, if I wanted to read Barth seriously, Scotland was the place to do it. I looked forward to doing so under the tutelage of John Webster, and throughout my time at Aberdeen, especially as I was first finding my way around Barth and into this topic, John served with kind cheerfulness and sophisticated encouragement in a supervisory role. As all gifts are, it was an unexpected delight to be initially assigned a co-supervisor in the form of Brian Brock, perhaps due to some wise administrator who could read between the lines of my eager research application well enough to link my ethical concerns to Aberdeen’s one moral theologian. However it happened, working with Brian was one of those graces that one does not have to endure before recognizing it as such; his sharp insight, quiet piety and compelling readiness to take on all comers for the sake of a serious argument about the way things are was immediately edifying and educative. Brian helped me see that faith and hope are not opposed to but in fact require paying attention to the world, and he did so by living out those specific forms of attention called ‘teaching’ and ‘friendship’. This work’s existence is owed as much to Brian as anyone else, perhaps including myself, and not nearly as much for his explicit supervision (essential as that was) as for his being in my corner at every turn. Brian is insightful enough to know that it takes nothing away from my gratitude for him, personally, when I acknowledge that gratitude’s inseparability from the friendship of his lovely wife, Stephanie. Many other teachers and mentors who led me here deserve thanks: John Meadors, for modelling a love of wisdom that inspired me to pursue graduate

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work in the first place; Stan Wilson, for the honesty and the steadfastness with which he held open Northside’s doors; Stanley Hauerwas, for his academic encouragement and life’s work, which showed me that Christian faith does not have to be intellectually fearful or ethically conformist, and which played no small part in shaping this project. Philip Ziegler always lent a willing ear and a mound of necessary books, and it was an honour to have him sit alongside Hans Ulrich, another intellectual inspiration, in a serious engagement with the first phase of this work. Aaron Denlinger, Dave Gilland, Graham MacFarlane, Ken Oakes and Irene Garcia Losquiño were friends who made the first leg of a long journey endurable. I miss you all, and look forward to a future Scottish-Thanksgiving reunion at the bothy, with your better halves in tow. James Merrick and Mark McDowell were necessary partners in crime towards the end, and Justin Stratis especially helped me across the finish line. Tyler Atkinson, a true-blue Southern compatriot, sang the blues when it was needed, but was always humming gospel. If I were to widen my horizon of gratitude beyond the writing of this project at all, the landscape would be immediately filled with loving family members. In addition to the teachers and mentors mentioned above, my mom was the first, teaching me to love to read and learn and seek out the truth. My dad was and remains one of the most caring people I know, and even though my studies took me, for a time, a long way from Mississippi, I am confident that my parents will recognize who they taught me to be in these pages. When you have brothers as close as I do, the limitation of words arises again. There is not much that can be said beyond the recognition that Wes and Chris are my brothers, in every sense of the word. That inability to speak adequately brings me, finally, to Molly, who bore with the dignity of love the burdens of time, resources and energy devoted to this work. She has supported me through thick and thin, and her presence through it all has signalled the wholeness that can only be found through the love of another.

Introduction

In his writing on Tocqueville, Sheldon Wolin argued that the meaning of modernity lies in the organization of social life around new forms of power. The ‘revolutionary force’ of capitalism, as Marx saw it, was grounded in the modern coordination and endless extension of the human powers of science, technology and capital.1 Karl Polanyi similarly understood the capitalist market economy as the definitive system of the modern age, describing it as a mode of social relations whose internal logic is such that, once its force is unleashed in a given time and place, it will not stop until it commodifies everything, including the human, the earth and whatever other agents, powers, laws or values we might have once considered in some sense ‘sacred’.2 Although this book is not directly a meditation on that archetypal modern power, it has been written with an eye towards its implosion. The aim of this work is to directly name not the formal characteristics of a ‘capitalist economy’, but that inner drive towards commodification in theological terms. As the reader will see, the two modern theologians whose work forms the basis of my argument – Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder – complement one another in that they help us name that great opponent of God the Gospel of Matthew calls ‘Mammon’ (Mt. 6.24) as both a commodifying spirit (Barth) and as a world-ordering form of power (Yoder). While this work is not ‘exegetical’ in the narrow modern sense, it moves from the biblical injunctions to test every spirit (1 Jn. 4.1– 3) and not be conformed to the patterns of the present age (Rom. 12.1–2), towards the naming and resisting of that form of economy whose spirit and power grips our lives. Our analysis will conclude by naming the power of contemporary capitalism as a manifest disaster, spiritually and sociopolitically, but the route to that naming is necessarily indirect. The build up to it consists in a close reading of two theologies of the powers which presume that all who

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would find hope or direction in the humanity of Jesus have good reason to link the powers and possibilities of human social and political life with the life of the Spirit. That the latter can and should be conceived quite differently than along the lines of what used to be called ‘the spiritual realm’ is indeed part of the point, but readers looking for a general treatment of how and why the New Testament ‘principalities and powers’ have been wrongly understood as referring to a form of agency or set of occurrences above and beyond human history will need to look elsewhere.3 Our treatment is both more systematic and more ethically charged in that it focuses on the christological reasons as to why our two thinkers have similarly understood ‘the powers’ to be a theological discourse that is always also about the social and political exercise of creaturely power. Before outlining the specific arguments set forth below, it may help to frame this work in terms of its structure and overarching aims. This book offers a descriptive analysis of a single doctrinal theme, one that plays what I show to be a significant role in the thought of Barth and Yoder. The theme is grounded in the biblical concept of the ‘principalities and powers’, although the theme is not the biblical concept, tout court. Rather, the theme is how this concept finds expression in various central Christian dogmas, and as a text-based analysis and description of this theme, our focus falls on its dogmatic function in Barth and Yoder’s work. Although it is, I contend, a theme that is central to each thinker in their own way, this is less obviously the case with Barth, whose explicit discussion of the powers is easily overshadowed by the verbose eloquence with which his oeuvre weaves his great insight – God’s being-for and -with us, and our being-for and -with God, in Jesus Christ – in and out of the major doctrinal themes of revelation, election and justification. Even though Yoder appeals to the powers more regularly and explicitly than does Barth, his own less ‘systematic’ modus operandi4 means that in his case, too, readers nowhere find a clear and concise statement of the doctrinal import of the powers. The primary aim of this book is, therefore, to demonstrate how and why the powers are theologically significant for both of our thinkers. In so doing it stands in contrast to a reading that would place sole or even primary emphasis on, for example, the relevance of the powers to our thinkers’ exegetical method, hermeneutical theory or ethical concerns. All of the latter are, of course, in play and worthy of attention in their own right, but to begin analysis of this topic at any one of those points

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of technical ‘relevance’ would be to delay the more fundamental task of trying to hear what Barth and Yoder are attempting to say when utilizing this concept, by attending to how they say it. One of my working presuppositions is that attending to the way in which this biblical theme dogmatically functions for Barth and Yoder – what doctrines it relates to, explains or nuances; which aspects of the church’s faith or the human condition it illuminates, and in what way – uncovers a layer of shared conviction that cuts more deeply than their dis/agreement on this or any other single matter of ‘belief ’. The weight this topic bears for each of our thinkers, precisely because it falls just outside (or, more precisely, in the shadow) of the central tenets of creedal Christian confession, and yet is biblically central in a way that cuts across all the major doctrinal loci (creation, fall, redemption), unearths the christological grammar of their thought in a unique way. This book is one attempt to demonstrate that when placed side by side, their theologies of the powers manifest not one and the same such grammar, but substantive overlap and key differences between the ‘christocentric’ grammar each thinker inhabits and deploys. Another thing to be noted at the outset is the near absence of any sustained treatment of our theme in Barth and Yoder studies. To my mind, the main (if not only) notable exceptions are Sabine Plonz’s Die Herrenlosen Gewalten5 and Martin Hailer’s Gott und die Gotzen,6 both of which offer readings of ‘The Lordless Powers’ discussion in Barth’s ethics of reconciliation fragments.7 An invaluable starting point for those seeking further engagement with these texts is Timothy Gorringe’s Karl Barth: Against Hegemony, which utilizes a host of Plonz’s claims in relation to its own reading of Barth as a politically oriented theologian.8 While a christological orientation common to Barth and Yoder is by now well-established,9 no sustained attempt has been made to bring them together in analysis of a single doctrinal or ethical theme. Thus, for example, Craig Carter’s book on Yoder, which makes the influence of Barth primary, focuses on the general methodological and doctrinal overlap between our thinkers over the space of a couple of chapters.10 However, since Douglas Harink’s incisive reading of Yoder as, at root, a ‘Pauline theologian’ in 200311 – a reading which placed Yoder, it should be remembered, alongside Barth and Stanley Hauerwas – we have seen a strand of Yoder interpretation emerging that is undoubtedly the most promising in terms of our own dialogical aims. What

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Harink and, more recently, Daniel Barber12 and Nathan Kerr13 have done vis-àvis Yoder-interpretation, is to emphasize the internal co-inherence between the clear sociopolitical tilt of Yoder’s understanding of Jesus – what Yoder himself called Jesus’ ‘political meaning’14  – and his christological reconfiguration of concepts such as creation, history and salvation. Moreover, each of these Yoder-readers finds, in their own way, that the relation of ‘apocalyptic’ to ‘history’ is fundamental to the powers’ ongoing rule, or conversely, to the eschatological fissures in their dominion through which human-historical hope may be glimpsed. My reading of Yoder may be seen as an attempt to explicate why this co-inherence between Jesus’ sociopolitical form and the newness of creaturely history is, in fact, exousiological.15 My analysis of Barth is restricted in one noteworthy respect: its point of departure is the Barth of the World War II rather than the World War I era, which means that the ‘Red Pastor’ of Safenwil (1911–21), the much discussed ‘break’ with the liberalism of his formative education surrounding the war, and the significant insights of Barth’s two Römerbriefe remain largely implicit in my argument.16 This narrowing in scope has largely to do with my focus on the wealth of insight to be mined in the exousiology of the ‘mature’ Barth of the Church Dogmatics era. While a lengthier project could easily justify tracing our theme backward into the judgements of ‘the early Barth’ about the state, or as related to the Red Pastor’s early profanations of Mammon and advocacy of a socialist politic from the pulpit and the pew,17 our account begins with the 1938 text in which Barth begins to explicitly ground his thought about state power in a more wide-ranging conception of the ministerial ends of all the powers in heaven and on earth.18 If I, like Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt and recently Kenneth Oakes, among others, am right that there is in fact a greater continuity of perspective between the earlier and later Barth than most of the standard readings recognize (spanning the ‘break’ with liberalism), our focus finds at least partial warrant. That does not imply, of course, that fuller analysis of the ‘origins’ of Barth’s exousiology would prove unfruitful. That historcizing connection, like the translation into English of Marquardt’s work on Barth’s enduring socialist commitments, remains a task in need of fulfilment.19 In terms of Barth scholarship itself, then, here we are only making a beginning. Our focus on Barth’s developing exousiology, however, has the additional benefit that it allows us to make sense of the Barth transmitted and

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much admired by Anglo-American Protestant dogmatics and its peculiar evangelicalism. When it reads Barth sympathetically, this dominant English language tradition seems to find in his meditative reworking of traditional doctrines the intellectual sophistication to defend a faith that understands itself not just as anti-liberal, but, more relevant to our purposes, as resting beyond human ideology. This is the Barth of many of my own esteemed peers and their mentors, and while I have learned too much from them to be wholly ungrateful for this Barth’s existence, the spiritualizing form of consolation enabled by his presence is fundamentally opposed to the good news I once heard in an ode to the humanity of God.20 The sensibility that, for those who are from time to time gripped by it, Christian faith is ever a state of existence or in/activity ‘above and beyond’ the situation of being-together in this world, as humans, is the enemy with an eye upon whom my account of Barth, Yoder and the powers has been written. So as not to tarry with the negative, however, few words are explicitly devoted to this enemy. The problem does come through in the critiques raised in Chapter 3 and specified in Chapter 4, and especially in the final chapter, where we poise as a response to the ‘positivist’ spectre of the mature Barth that more vulnerable and, just so, positively dangerous spirit who so haunts Marquardt.21 Part of the effect of our focus is thus to allow some of the more salient limits and contradictions of taking the (rather de-contextualized) mature Barth at his word to emerge. To then end at the beginning of Barth’s work, as we finally turn to his early naming of capitalism as Mammon in Chapter 5, rather proves Marquardt’s point about the dual promise and threat of Barth’s own way of identifying ‘the theological and the political’.22 According to Marquardt, Barth’s urging the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the 1930s European church to go on doing theology ‘as if nothing happened’ certainly allowed for a spiritually and intellectually retarding depoliticization, one this work targets in its contemporary Anglicized form. And yet, the radical sociopolitical meaning of what Barth always meant by ‘theology’ would not have been missed if those who heeded this call had seen Christian proclamation’s inner connection to the contingencies of circumstance, by virtue of its being an intractably social and political form of thought. Part of seeing this inner connection is giving due weight to the historical contextualization and formation of Barth’s thought, and on this score it is not just Marquardt, but others such as Eberhard Busch,

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Gary Dorrien, Timothy Gorringe, Bruce McCormack and Kenneth Oakes from whom I have learned.23 Yet the flipside of Marquardt’s thesis is that if one seriously attends to the this-worldly message Barth speaks ‘in the language of dogmatics’24  – that is, if the message is discerned as a speaking in and through the intrinsic connection of biblical proclamation and contemporary occurrence  – then laying bare the inner ratio of the dogmatic cannot but announce a definite social posture. It is my hope that, precisely because our focus on Barth’s developing christological exousiology leads to both the problem and the hidden promise of the mature Barth, and without needing to give its historical origins pride of place, this work helps confirm both aspects of Marquardt’s thesis. Yoder is not simply an additional expansion to this endeavour, but an integral piece of the puzzle. In part this is because his theological and ethical concerns, which were nurtured in the soil of Barth’s christological ethics, show themselves in an exousiological emphasis which turns out to be just the missing piece of the Barthian framework. To pre-empt much of what is to be argued below, I read Yoder’s emphasis on the powers as historical structures of creaturely life as resolving a set of related problems that arise in Barth  – most centrally about the apparent split between personal-spiritual idolatry and matters of lived injustice, yet this potential divorce is bound to other theological tensions, such as that between eschatology and history; political and economic power; the revelatory presence of God’s Word and faith’s material-social embodiment and resistance and hope. Somewhat ironically, even though Yoder spoke less directly about ‘Mammon’ than Barth, couching his own christocentric ethic more in political than economic language, it is Yoder’s keen insight into the powers as socially structuring forces which allows him to address these common theological polarities in a way that both differs from and complements Barth’s basic christological concerns. The basic aim of this book is, therefore, to construct a ‘dialogue’ about the Christian theological possibility of taking the powers seriously as a discourse about socially and materially enacted creaturely powers, by moving back and forth between the christological exousiologies of Barth and Yoder. As suggested above, this dialogical movement, if performed well, may help guard Christian theology from long-standing temptations of certain world-denying dualisms (such as that between spirit and matter, soul and body or between ‘heaven’

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and our given life with others), even though its more fundamental aim is the positive one of moving contemporary Christian thought itself further in the direction of the freedom to name and resist the destructive lure of Mammon’s power. And, to restate, there is the small but significant matter that if Barth’s exousiology is convincingly displayed as positively transformed  – ‘fulfilled’ rather than abolished  – in Yoder’s clear historical-structural emphasis, then perhaps one more noose will have been placed around the neck of the non-ideological and thus socially conservative Barth. As a work of textual analysis and dogmatic-ethical (re)construction, the theological promise I see in Barth and Yoder will, I hope, emerge as the reader’s own conclusion. All that remains here is to lay out the general structure of the dialogue. Chapter 1 sketches the major contours of Barth’s developing exousiology (from 1938 onwards), emphasizing the following interlocking themes: the centrality of a broadly conceived ‘political’ task which, as a form of correspondence between God’s justification and human justice, determines all creaturely powers, but which Barth identifies most properly with the ‘political angelic power’ of the state; the angelic-ministerial function that defines the being-in-act of all creaturely power; the ‘ontologically impossible’ yet historically actual demonization of this function and the practical identification of all forms of ‘earthly’ or human-historical powers with either the angelic attestation of God’s justifying work, or with the demonic opposition to the coming of God’s reign and to creation’s own freedom for and in that coming. All of these themes are shown to be christologically determined in important ways, but my treatment of them in Chapter 1 refers most properly to their location in Barth’s doctrine of creation. Each informs the broader reading of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, and his mode of describing the sovereign freedom of God’s power over the powers in Jesus Christ, which I discuss in Part 3.I. Chapter 2 describes what I refer to as Yoder’s ‘structural exousiology’. It does so first in relation to the conceptual background of Yoder’s emphasis on power-structures, by detailing his (negative) theological response to the kind of ‘political realism’ seen in Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, and then his (positive) theological appropriation and development of Hendrik Berkhof ’s exegesis of the Pauline powers. Yoder’s relation to Niebuhr and Berkhof allows us to see the theological rationale behind Yoder’s own coming to speak of the powers as the structures ordering human social life. According to Yoder, Niebuhrian

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realism spatiotemporally isolates the realm of human social and political life from the sustaining grace and judgement of God, and thereby leaves this vast arena in the hands of fundamentally self-centred and antagonistic forms of creaturely power. Berkhof ’s reading of Paul helps Yoder see a way through this eschatological and historical-social polarization (one he had already glimpsed in Barth’s ‘christocentric’ realism), by giving him a way to speak of the purposes of God accomplished in Christ as definitively about the ordering of human life-together in this world. Part 2.II clarifies how Yoder can speak of human social history as, at one and the same time, the object of God’s eternal love poured out in Jesus’ humanity, and a world that is constantly ordered by powers that have detracted from their own creaturely vocation of serving human freedom for God and neighbour by justly preserving social life. Chapter 3 then places our thinkers side by side, shifting focus from the initial doctrinal register of Chapters 1 and 2 – a doctrine of creation, or the powers as ‘fallen creaturely’ realities  – to the register of eschatology. Several claims established here are fundamental to the exousiological dialogue enacted from this point forward, specifically: (1) that creaturely history is the context in and for which Christ’s prophetic confrontation of unjust power unfolds, and thus in which all persons are called to have faith in and bear witness to God’s victory over the powers of evil, and (2) the shared logic of our thinkers’ exousiology as requiring the dialectical interrelation between human idolatry and injustice. These two claims, when taken together, show the importance of another facet of both exousiologies: namely, the need to account for the powers’ resistance to the lordship of Christ in ontologically negative terms (e.g. as ‘privation’ of the good), precisely because God creates, sustains and remakes human history in and through the new humanity of Jesus Christ. At this juncture, the key interpretive line of my argument opens up around the tension between Barth’s and Yoder’s different ways of conceiving the form of human-historical agency open to the promise and claim of Jesus’ humanity, in its distinction from creaturely powers that remain closed to its grace and judgement. The argument here is that Barth appears to ground all human enslavement to the reign of das Nichtige (‘nothingness’) in a metaphysic of intrapersonal idolatry, without any corresponding historical-structural emphasis upon common captivity and subjection. When tied to Barth’s preference to cast the difference between spiritual captivity and the hope of liberation in primarily epistemic

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terms, Barth’s clear concern to then address the negative effects of the powers’ dominion within the common realm of sociopolitical life is found wanting. This leads us, in Part 3.III, to a Yoderian critique of Barth’s preference for understanding the confessional distinction between church and world principally in terms of knowledge or ignorance of God. Yoder’s exousiology, because it conceives the church’s awareness of Christ’s lordship as inseparable from a distinctive way of being in and for the world, is shown to offer a more adequate rationale for conceiving shared human captivity in a manner that bridges the personal/structural or individual/collective divide. Beyond exemplifying a sophisticated christological exousiology, the grammar of which is in many ways responsible for Yoder’s own theological maturation in this direction, our reading of Barth here picks up key insights for why such a discourse must needs take creaturely history and human co-existence seriously. Yet Barth’s account is finally shown to need supplementation and even correction by Yoder’s structural exousiology; for taken on its own, the discursive register of Barth’s account, even though ethically oriented in fundamental ways, betrays several interrelated tendencies that mitigate against his own deepest insights about God’s being for and with the life of the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The key problem explored here has to do with those material convictions that are betrayed if and when human idolatry is seen as prior to the materially and socially enacted injustices of power’s self-serving execution, rather than the latter being a means by which ‘pre-individual’ or structural idolatry occurs and is perpetuated. Chapter 4 further specifies the similarities and differences in our thinkers’ exousiologies, chiefly by examining how they conceive the creaturely form and fallenness of political power. The primary aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that the connection between creaturely political power and socio-economic life bespeaks the deepest overlap in the exousiological grammars of Barth and Yoder. An insight that had been building throughout the first three chapters comes into the foreground at this point: namely, that humane political power is that which orders human material and social relations in such a way that creaturely freedom may be commonly received and lived. This means that state-power, the power of ‘the sword’, finds its own provisional legitimacy and divine limitation in the freedom of the cross – the freedom to follow God’s providential sustenance of creaturely power and possibility for the sake of a new

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socio-economic order, by giving up all that one has for those particular others whose material and social life is presently being devoured by the destructive forces of self-exalting power. In this freedom of the cross, the dominion of Leviathan and Mammon is subverted, as a liveable path opens up for a very definite human freedom – the freedom of shared resistance and hope. Chapter 4 also further specifies the tensions between our thinkers that previously emerged. This is seen primarily in that whereas Barth identifies political power itself with the ‘being’ of the state, Yoder’s critique of Constantinian forms of power does greater justice to Barth’s own insight into the being-in-service of creaturely powers. Additionally, the ethical implications of Barth’s eschatological ‘relativization’ of all forms of human-historical power are specified with respect to his account of Mammon. Barth brilliantly conceives of Mammon as the demonic corruption and idolatrous exploitation of humanity’s own powers and capacities; yet with Kathryn Tanner’s help, we note that the most serious problem of Barth’s exousiological ‘formalism’ is that it invites (or at least allows) an ethical discourse in which dogmatic or intra-ecclesial description of God’s reign is prioritized over sociopolitical awareness of its presence. We then turn to Yoder’s critical sympathy with the economic orientation of liberation theology, which further illumines this deficit in Barth’s exousiological ontology. After uncovering the intrinsic connection between political and economic power in Barth and Yoder, Chapter 5 ends by displaying three examples of ethically charged awareness of this connection. A key part of the argument here is that a living recognition of this inner connection – that is, of the actual threat constituted by the two faces of power, Leviathan and Mammon  – is blunted by an understanding of Christian faith as non- or trans-ideological. To that end, the chief task undertaken here is to turn finally to the early Barth, juxtaposing his initial clarity about the threat of Mammon encountered in contemporary capitalism to the problems found in our reading of his mature exousiology. As the broader purpose of this work is, however, to provide doctrinal resources for Christianity’s moving towards a clearer focus on the powers of Mammon at work in our midst, our closing turn to the early Barth is sandwiched between two other examples of naming Mammon’s ubiquitous presence in modern social life. Chapter 5 begins with a look at Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow, two modern theologians influenced by Barth, each

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of whom help us name the dehumanizing spirit of Mammon as flexing its social muscles in and through humanity’s investment in the false promise of justification by money. Ellul and Stringfellow’s namings of Mammon better position us to grasp just what is at stake in the freedom to resist and subvert the ruling powers of our day. After showing that the spirit of Barth’s initial alignment with socialism does not contradict, but in fact augments and strengthens the spirit of his mature exousiology, we then end, briefly, where a contemporary economic ethics that takes exousiology seriously might begin – that is, with a concrete reflection on contemporary capitalism as a disaster that is at once spiritual and social-political. The critical note emphatically struck in Chapter 5 is, however, wrongly heard if the positive tone generating the critique does not ring out. The word that Christian exousiology may and must declare to others, if it is to be good news for all whose creaturely powers and possibilities are thwarted by self-seeking ends, is that just because the liberating freedom of God has come to dwell among us as the humanity of Jesus, we need not fear Mammon’s power nor flee from its domain. As persons are freed from the inhumanity of self-concern, resistance and hope become one.

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Karl Barth’s Theology of the Powers

This chapter discusses the major contours of Barth’s theology of the powers, structured according to the three texts in which they are most explicitly discussed. Part I begins with Barth’s 1938 text ‘Rechtfertigung und Recht’,1 which opens up several claims about the powers that will remain with us throughout our analysis. Of particular importance here is the correspondence between God’s justification and human justice, a correspondence Barth identifies with the ‘political angelic power’ of the state. Part II focuses on a short excursus from Barth’s doctrine of creation (CD III/3) in which he offers an illuminating typology of (the) creaturely power(s); in so doing, the angelic-ministerial function arising in Part I is shown to determine the being-in-act of all creaturely power. This leads into a general overview of the ‘ontologically impossible’ yet historically actual demonization of this function, grounded first and foremost in Barth’s conception of nothingness (‘das Nichtige’) (Part II.B), but concretely expressed in the demonic powers of hell on earth (Part III), the latter of which are discussed as ‘the Lordless Powers’ in Barth’s ethics of reconciliation.2

I. The powers in ‘Justification and Justice’ That an essay addressing ‘the problem of church and state’ was the context of Barth’s first extended treatment of the principalities and powers gives an initial insight into the practical relevance of this theme. Written on the brink of World War II, ‘Justification and Justice’ probes the relation between God’s justification of sinful humanity in Christ and the question of human justice. This historically attuned treatment of ‘justification and justice’ was followed

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by a more concrete denunciation of the Nazi state in Barth’s 1939 lecture The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, as well as a host of politically charged writings during and following World War II. The theology of the powers delineated in ‘Justification and Justice’ thus reflects Barth’s concern to hear in the scriptural witness to Christ’s victory a word concerning real forces at work in his own time and place. It exemplifies Barth’s commitment to the unity of dogmatics and ethics, and to the significance of exegesis for contemporary ethical reflection,3 tied as these commitments are to Barth’s conviction that the Word of God is always spoken and heard concretely.4 One senses the pressure of this concreteness, for example, when Barth states: ‘If the intensity of our present situation is to be our salvation and not our ruin, then the question [of the relationship between justification and justice] must be put.’5 Barth’s articulation of the deep interrelation of justification and justice is, moreover, resolutely eschatological: God’s justifying work and human justice are not finally two separate realities, because each refers to a history in which human order, peace and freedom truly come to be; and yet such order, peace and freedom, as we know and live these realities in our historical past and present, are ‘no longer, or not yet’ the order, peace and freedom of human life in the fullness of God’s kingdom.6 In ‘Justification and Justice’, Barth is attempting to describe the nature of what he calls the ‘political service’ of God, which he had recently delineated in his Gifford Lectures of 1937–38 as being related to but distinguished from the ekklesia’s moral and liturgical service. That it is appropriate to see a connection between these two texts is clear not simply from chronological proximity, but, more significantly, from thematic overlap with respect to ‘the state’. One finds the same distinctions between the service of God in Christian life, in the gathered church’s worship, and in political life operative in both texts. Moreover, in the Gifford lectures’ treatment of ‘The State’s Service of God’ Barth describes the distinction between the ecclesial and political orders in terms highly reminiscent of those noted above with respect to the relation of justification and justice: ‘The political order is . . . not yet the order of faith and love, but, as it were, the shadow which that order casts before it – the order of outward justice, outward peace and outward freedom. It is not yet the order of inward, spiritual justice and peace, nor yet the order of the freedom of the children of God’.7 Hence Barth’s first extended discussion of the powers occurs

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in the context of an inquiry into the ‘inner and vital connection’ between the gathered church’s worship of God, the ongoing tasks of Christian fidelity, and the concern for and establishment of justice in human society. The powers appear in ‘Justification and Justice’ as an exegetical lens by means of which one can glimpse something of how ‘political power’ is founded upon ‘the power of Christ’.8

A. The christological sphere of the powers Given Barth’s characteristic insistence on interrogating any given doctrinal question from the perspective of the identity and action of God in Christ, it is unsurprising that this particular exegetical inquiry yields a christological basis for the existence and activity of the state. In his opening remarks Barth notes that the insights of Zwingli and ‘Reformation theology as a whole’ on this matter ‘begin to fade’ when considering the christological specificity of the connection between divine and political power.9 One cannot reflect theologically on political life or human justice as though their foundation lies in the ‘ruling of a general, somewhat anonymous Providence’. One must rather seek that foundation at the heart of the gospel, in the gracious work of the triune God. Barth thus rejects both the pietism which considers the question of human justice a ‘foreign addition’ to the ‘truth of divine justification’, and the secularism in which ‘human justice . . . is in no sense the Justice of God’ – at least the God who is ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’.10 Yet ‘Justification and Justice’ not only illuminates political power from the perspective of the gospel, it locates the state within a broader biblical and dogmatic scheme as a particular instantiation of the ‘angelic powers’, making this piece of exegetical-political theology an invaluable resource for understanding how Barth’s christology funds his theology of the powers, of which political power is one significant dimension. The description of the state as an ‘angelic power’ runs throughout this text.11 The significance of this designation is discussed below, but first it is important to note its christological determination in Barth’s usage. Barth’s exegesis of Romans 13.1–7 adopts the scholarly insight that εξουσίαι, used in Romans 13.1 (as well as Tit. 3.1 and in Luke/Acts) ‘to indicate political authority’, is used elsewhere in the New Testament to indicate that ‘group of those angelic powers’ which correspond, Barth says, to the general biblical depiction of ‘the

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world and of man’.12 It is this basic insight, this location of the political power that the state exercises within a broader nexus of power(s), that allows Barth to illuminate the nature of state-power on a more surely christological basis. For these powers, Barth notes, ‘do not belong to themselves. From the first they stand at the disposal of Jesus Christ’.13 The eschatological subjection of the ‘rebellious angelic powers’ to Christ is manifest in Colossians 2.15 and 1 Corinthians 15.24 ff., but this signifies more than their final end, since ‘the beginning and middle of their story also correspond to this ultimate destiny’.14 In this respect it is interesting that R. E. Hood finds in Barth’s view of the powers the ‘ontological origins’ or basis of the state.15 Hood states that ‘these powers as affected by Christ’s triumph provide the theological foundation of the state’, shaping it and comprising its ‘outer shell’.16 Hood is surely right, given Barth’s location of state-power within this wider exegetical and dogmatic framework, that his account of the state’s ‘nature’ is inseparable from an understanding of the powers, and Hood is to be commended for at least gesturing towards this insight nearly three decades ago, of which even most ‘political’ readers of Barth have made surprisingly little use. We will return to the specific question of state-power in dialogue with Yoder in Chapter 3, but this Part moves in the opposite direction from that taken by Hood, working towards a more nuanced account of the powers themselves by exploring what Barth says of the state as a political angelic power subject to Jesus Christ. In Barth’s reading these New Testament texts17 convey that even though the powers themselves are not integral to the gospel proclamation of divine justification – which has to do first and foremost with God and God’s work of redeeming humankind – Christ’s work is relevant to the powers in a ‘concentric’ way, for they appear in the biblical narrative as created powers whose existence and agency is bound up with that of God’s covenant creatures. Thus Barth notes that if the God ‘by Whom all powers that be are ordained’ is understood on the basis of Christ’s person and work, then even though the powers of the non-human creation are strictly speaking ‘outside the sphere [most directly] characterized by the word “justification”’, the confession of God’s saving work in Christ nonetheless entails the particularly Pauline recognition ‘there was embodied in the angelic world another secondary Christological sphere’, one that concretely unites the ekklesia and the kosmou, and that within this sphere ‘the necessity and reality of the establishment and administration of

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human justice was clearly important above all else’.18 What Barth says of the state, seen by him as the archetypal institution of human justice, is therefore paradigmatic for all created powers: they ‘belong originally and ultimately to Jesus Christ’, and thus in the ‘comparative independence’ – anticipating our dialogue with Yoder, we might here say secularity  – of the powers’ ‘dignity, function and purpose, [they] should serve the Person and Work of Jesus Christ and therefore the justification of the sinner’.19

B. The powers’ angelic mode of being The first mention of the powers in ‘Justification and Justice’ introduces a characteristic that preoccupies Barth in all three of our principal texts: namely, the powers’ angelic nature or function, and the correlative possibility of their demonization. Drawing upon the 1936 lecture of a Basel colleague, Barth describes the state as ‘one of those angelic powers (exousiai) of this age, which is always threatened by “demonization,” that is, by the temptation of making itself an absolute’.20 Exousia is one of a cluster of Greek terms – others mentioned are archē, archōn, thronos, dymanis, kyriotēs and anngeloi21 – that refer to ‘entities which are so difficult to distinguish’ from one another, but which in their totality constitute a group of ‘created, but invisible, spiritual and heavenly powers, which exercise, in and above the rest of creation, a certain independence, and in this independence have a certain superior dignity, task, and function, and exert a certain real influence’. Given these characteristics – their creatureliness, invisibility, heavenliness, their possession of a distinctive ‘function’ related to their distinctive place in the created order  – Barth sees it as sensible to include them all ‘under the comprehensive heading άγγελοι (angels)’.22 This willingness to embrace such a comprehensive designation for the powers is, of course, not reflected in the varied judgements of exegetes who are concerned about demonstrating the meaning of biblical references to the powers primarily on historical-critical grounds.23 Yet as will be seen below in connection with his doctrine of creation, for Barth the designation ‘angel’ or ‘angelic’ most fundamentally designates a created being or agent who bears a specific relation to Jesus Christ, a relation which is exegetically derived and theologically specified. This relation, of which a systematic account is given in

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CD III/3, is intimated in what Barth says of the angelic powers in ‘Justification and Justice’: those beings or forces are ‘angelic’ which exist in service to the ordering of creaturely life by the Word of God, a service which is distinct from yet, for Barth, always related to the existence of human beings and the service of God rendered by them. In what follows this angelic service of the powers – its distinction from yet relation to human service of God – will be highlighted, before turning to its ‘demonic’ perversion, and to the overcoming of that perversion in the providential and eschatological work of God. In addition to his interpretation of Pilate’s authority (exousia) as the ‘power from above’ (Jn. 19.11) given to him as a representative of civil order (Rom. 13.1), Barth cites 1 Corinthians 2.8 – which states that the ‘rulers [archontes] of this age’ displayed their ignorance of the God’s eternal wisdom in the act of crucifying ‘the Lord of glory’ – as evidence that the New Testament can denote with these terms both material and immaterial forces.24 Those agents by whom the powers’ historical influence is mediated can be human or non-human, as is intimated in Barth’s remark that the biblical language itself suggests that an angelic power is ‘represented by’ and ‘active within’ the state. Here a distinction remains between the angelic, spiritual powers in themselves and the visible human or earthly agents in or through whose work the powers’ ‘real influence’ within history acquires concrete expression. Barth further confirms this view by remarking that according to Romans 8.39, with its wide-ranging catalogue of creaturely powers unable to separate humankind from God’s love in Christ Jesus, ‘we may not be far from the truth of the matter in describing the State as an ανθρωπίνη κτίσις (1 Pet. 2.13)’.25 The sense of Barth’s language here is that the state is one example of a host of earthly institutions or ‘spheres’ whose purpose is to structure or administer a certain kind of order to human life. It is to accomplish an ordering that is not identical with but transparent to the ordering of human life by God’s Word. In this way Barth seems to refuse an either–or dichotomy between the agency of ‘spiritual’ and ‘earthly’ powers, though (as his discussion of angels makes further evident) he clearly intends to maintain a theological distinction between these categories, refusing to collapse the angelic powers into their earthly counterparts. As noted above, Barth’s description of the state as a ‘political angelic power’ gives warrant for adapting the contours of his assessment of the power of the state to the powers as such, because it locates ‘political power’ within the

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broader category of spiritual ‘angelic powers’ – the latter viewed by Barth as creaturely powers given by God in service of God’s justification of humankind and Christ’s lordship over creation. This is confirmed in that the ‘secondary Christological sphere’ in which Barth locates the angelic powers impinges upon God’s work of justification by means of the powers’ role in the administration of human justice. Referencing passages which speak of angels (1 Tim. 3.16; 1 Pet. 1.12) and the archai kai exousiae ‘in the heavens’ (Eph. 3.10), Barth notes that Christ’s death (Col. 1.20) and the ‘summing up’ of all things in Him (Eph. 1.10) affects the entire creaturely realm of heaven and earth. The powers are not themselves the object of God’s justifying work, but as heavenly powers they reside within that sphere of Christ’s presence whose embodiment in ‘the angelic world’ unites his church with all things. This unity of church and cosmos is rather opaque in ‘Justification and Justice’, but what is clear and of utmost importance is that Barth sees the angelic powers as spiritual forces for which Christ’s work is relevant primarily in connection with ‘the establishment and administration of human justice’.26 It is the relation of the heavenly and earthly powers – the angelic function both bear as creatures called to serve and to bear witness in their own respective ways to God’s justification of humankind  – which here captivates Barth, undergirding his confident assessment of the political angelic power he identifies with ‘the State as such’.27

C. Demonization and providence Barth’s reading of the encounter of Jesus and Pilate in John 19 clarifies the service of this political angelic power, and thereby clarifies also how the powers’ angelic service of God’s salvific work, precisely as the fount of human justice, is correlative to the limited but real possibility of their demonization. This insight can be unpacked according to two key notions manifest in this exegetical foray, both reinforcing the powers’ christological underpinning. First, it becomes clear that for Barth power in its demonic form is tied to injustice; a power is demonic to the extent that it acts or is used towards unjust ends. Pilate represents the state ‘in its demonic form, and thus its authority as the “power of the present age”’.28 It is important to note, however, that this particular power (of state) is not demonic because of its secularity. Jesus confirms Pilate’s claim ‘to have “power” over Him’ (Jn. 19.11), a power which is not ‘in itself,

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and as such’ opposed to the claim of Christ. Moreover, Pilate could in Barth’s view use the power given him either to release or crucify Jesus without that power ‘losing its divine character’.29 Yet this latter claim affirms the ground and origin of all authority and power in the ordinance of God (Rom. 13.1), and thus does not preclude that a human-historical power can, according to its own agential powers and capacities, resist God’s will for it and so become demonic. Precisely that occurs in the encounter between Jesus and Pilate – not because Pilate does not recognize and confess Jesus to be God’s messiah, but because in handing Jesus over to the power of death, the specific task for whose execution political power is ordained (the ‘administration of human justice’) is obscured and, so far as it is possible, forfeited. Barth is of course aware of the biblical claim that the ‘rulers of this age’ displayed their ignorance of God’s wisdom in the act of crucifixion (1 Cor. 2.6–8), yet the presence or absence of such recognition concerns the difference of church and state, or what Barth later distinguishes as ‘the Christian and the civil community’.30 In Barth’s view ‘the state’ is a power whose task is to carry on the work of human justice within that difference, within the realm in which faith and faithlessness live side by side.31 Barth’s understanding of the secularity of state-power, as well as the key question raised here about the sense in which the ordinatio of the political exousia obtains in an unjust state, is more fully and critically discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.32 Here the point is simply that the exercise of political power – or, in the language of ‘Justification and Justice’, the activity of the ‘political angelic power’ as represented by and active in the earthly power of state – is demonic because it ‘allows injustice to run its course’, and in so doing contradicts its raison d'être as a minister of God for the sake of human justice.33 Simply put, if the creaturely purpose of the angelic powers is an existence in service of Christ’s person and work ‘for the justification of the sinner’  – whose positive and fundamental connection to the work of human justice ‘Justification and Justice’ was written to explore – then the demonic negation of this end consists in an opposition to God’s grace concretely manifest in unjust acts. Second and directly following from the first, the creative work of God which grounds the being and action of every power also circumscribes the scope of potential rebellion. The effectiveness of the powers’ demonic aversion of God’s determination of their being, as a being-in-service to the grace of God and thus on behalf of human welfare, is not without limit. In ‘Justification

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and Justice’ this limitation is best exemplified by the effects of Pilate’s unjust condemnation of Jesus. As noted above, the authority Pilate represents is not in Barth’s view capable of manipulation: God’s claim upon political power cannot be revoked, yet that claim can be recognized or mocked; this power can act or be used justly or unjustly. And ‘Pilate used his power to crucify Jesus’, which is, to repeat, an unjust act according to Barth not because that power itself does not thereby recognize and confess Jesus to be Lord and King, but because by it the state denies its own mandate to preserve the (legal) possibility of such a proclamation.34 Barth’s primary concern at this point is not the material specification of the state’s task of administering justice, but with its inability to finally divert that task regardless of its historically constitutive elements. For ‘Even at the moment when Pilate . . . allowed injustice to run its course, he was the human created instrument of that justification’ accomplished in Christ’s death. This encounter, then, speaks not only of the ‘separation of church and state’ by virtue of the presence or absence of confessing faith but also of the truth that ‘the very State which is “demonic” may will evil, and yet, in an outstanding way, may be constrained to do good’.35 It is important to note at this juncture what my reading shows to be a typical Barthian riff on the ‘providential’ dimension of the powers’ ontological determination: their ontological-providential ordering refers to the divine power originally undergirding and finally judging them, and thus in principle historically able to bring good ‘out’ of the evil they work. To pre-empt another crucial issue, this latter affirmation of God’s de jure transformative power does not amount to a de facto denial of evil’s ‘existence’. It does, however, affirm Hood’s recognition that Barth sees the powers’ relation to Christ’s work as illumining the ‘ontological foundations’ of the state; it is this ontological determination which necessitates the relativizing of the political angelic power’s historical demonization.36 In the case of Pilate it is shown that even as it acts ‘in “demonic” form’ the political angelic power ‘cannot help rendering the service it is meant to render’, not because its demonic injustice is not real, but because the kind of reality it possesses and exerts is grounded in and so circumscribed by its divine origin and telos. Barth finds in the evangelist’s rendering of this encounter (and in the synoptic parallels) not simply the portrayal of a demonic power or an unjust human act, but in and behind precisely such a power and act the power and act of God. It is the claim of God upon the angelic powers and upon those in

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and by whom they appear in the history of humankind  – God’s own active presence undergirding the powers’ existence and work – which signals God’s providential ordering of the powers even in their fallenness. The doctrine of providence here retains the claim of God on creaturely forces which are actually, simultaneously, demonically opposed to God’s humane purposes; it refers to God’s freedom to subvert unjust human-historical action for the human good.37 This presence and claim of God, rather than any essential goodness, is for Barth the reason to recognize the authority of the ‘political angelic’ exousia, and insofar as this power is paradigmatic, of all powers in heaven and earth.38 This invocation of providence also infers the eschatological determination the powers receive in subjection to Christ. Pilate did not ‘submit himself to the will and the verdict of a general divine providence’, but rather his (wholly unjust) act became the occasion for human fidelity and redemption; through God’s governance of sinful humanity, this act was fully in accord with ‘the fulfillment of the gracious will of the Father of Jesus Christ’.39 For Barth, it is only as an aspect of Christ’s active presence – because he is the beginning and end of all created powers  – that ‘providence’ can be truthfully averred with respect to the demonic powers; only in him can it be known that the fallenness or unjust activity of the powers is not the only, or the most determinative, aspect of their existence. In typical fashion, for Barth the ‘No’ of God’s judgement and rejection of creaturely rebellion is founded upon and set within the context of a deeper affirmation, God’s fundamental ‘Yes’ to creation in Jesus Christ. The destiny of the rebellious angelic powers which is made clear in Christ’s resurrection and parousia is not that they will be annihilated, but that they will be forced into the service and glorification of Christ, and through him, of God. And both the beginning and the middle of their story also correspond to this ultimate destiny [. . .] According to Colossians 1.15 it is rather the case that they have been created in the Son of God as in the image of the invisible God, by Him and unto Him, and further, according to Colossians 2.10, that in Him they have their Head. From the first, then, they do not belong to themselves. From the first they stand at the disposal of Jesus Christ.40

This emphasis upon the powers as created forces coming from and going towards Christ, forces which are intended to reflect this origin and telos in their own action and history, stems from Barth’s reading of the eschatological

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determination of the powers in 1 Corinthians 15. One has to exercise care in the translation of 1 Corinthians 15.24 – ‘then comes the end, when [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when he has καταργέιν all rule and all authority and all power’ – for a literal rendering καταργέιν could denote ‘abolition’ or ‘annihilation’, while the sense of the text, according to Barth, shows the decisive issue to be the unopposed sovereignty of Christ. ‘For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet’ (1 Corinthians 15.25), a victory which, in the light of the rest of the New Testament witness, is shown to occur through the resurrected Christ’s exaltation above the angels and all of the created order – his being seated ‘at the right hand of God’, ‘far above’ any other authority – rather than the destruction of creation or the abolition of creaturely power as such.41 The powers fulfil their angelic service insofar as they serve human life and society as it is in God, insofar as they sustain or direct human life in ways that aid rather than hinder the faithful hearing of and response to the Word of God declared in and as Christ’s humanity. The ‘political’ dimension of all the powers’ work, rather than simply that of the state, is therefore fundamental, because the end to which this Word is spoken – the Word whose human-historical hearing and response the powers exist to serve – is, as Barth says, the eschatological constitution of just and peaceful human existence in ‘the real πόλις’ of God’s kingdom.42 We have noted that for Barth the ability of the powers to fulfil this purpose of ordering human life so that obedience to God’s Word is unimpeded is correlative to the persistent historical possibility of what he calls the powers’ ‘demonization’. This is merely a possibility, because demonization is not inevitable, in time or for eternity.43 From the beginning of their history, in their ‘concrete encounter with Christ and His Church’, the powers are capable of fulfilling their respective services ‘and in so doing remaining true’ to themselves, instead of forfeiting their distinctive identity as angelic servants of God’s Word.44 Yet correlative to the continuing presence of human sin, the powers do rebel – the restoration of their being and work, and the eschatological ‘abolition’ of their rebellion, is complete only in the eschatological fullness of Christ’s presence. Their subjection to Christ is final only in God’s kingdom, but it is final there, and the finality of that subjection is manifest already on earth to the extent that even their ongoing rebellion is providentially overruled.

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Barth sees in the New Testament the confident assertion that in Christ the angelic powers are called to order and, so far as they need it, restored to their original order. Therefore any further rebellion in this realm can, in principle, only take place in accordance with their creation, and within Christ’s order, in the form of unwilling service to the Kingdom of Christ, until even that rebellion, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Christ, is broken down in His Resurrection and Parousia.45

What might be called the powers’ instrumentality is constituted by the fact that in Jesus, God negates the powers’ negation of their own existence as a being-in-service; God circumscribes their demonization – which continues as a possibility and reality  – by transcending their attempts to become autonomous or absolute powers. It is crucial to keep in mind that, in Barth’s view, this ‘instrumentalizing’ of the powers in no way justifies their demonic existence; it does not lessen their potency to rebel against God’s justice, nor the definitiveness of God’s ‘No’ to this rebellion, nor the sincerity with which the church must discern and resist it.46 It is an affirmation that the wholly good power of God is able to transcend creaturely rebellion, rather than a lurking suspicion that talk of ‘providence’ legitimates any kind of generic optimism or status-quo conservatism which seeks to detect an ‘intrinsic’ goodness and justice hidden beneath or within the concretely evil workings of unjust power(s). In this sense Barth’s reading guards against that widespread, inherently conservative-interpretive tradition which finds in Romans 13’s description of governmental authority ‘ordained by God’ a tacit justification of governments as they exist, in their sinfulness. The latter reading becomes possible, and has been sustained, as Christians adopt a standard for practical judgement that presumes some principled measure of distance between norms for state power and norms for fidelity to the new world drawn near in Christ.47 In ‘Justification and Justice’ the principalities and powers, created by God in and for Christ, are seen by Barth as agents, forces, structures or institutions whose purpose is to facilitate a proper order for human life. Barth’s reflections on the state as a power elucidate the powers’ angelic nature, how this nature is tied to the existence of heavenly and earthly powers as a being-in-service, and how the powers are capable of contradicting this nature and function by ordering human-historical life in ways that deny their existence as ministers

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of Christ, the one Word of God. This angelic function of ordering social life in ways that serve God’s work of justification intimates the political dimension of the powers’ work, which is not restricted to the state because it has to do with the mediatorial transparency of all creaturely powers to the eschatological reign of God. Finally, even when the powers fail to be so transparent – acting, and thereby falsely posing themselves, as self-subsistent or absolute powers – God’s providential rule of creation preserves the powers as a being-in-service over against their own rebellion, even though this rebellion in its perverse reality still has to be reckoned with and resisted. Christ’s work in relation to the powers here has to do with the judgement and restoration of those powers of heaven and earth that are themselves at odds with God’s original and eschatological intention for humankind, and thereby at odds with God’s redemption of humankind to that end.

II. The powers in Barth’s Doctrine of Creation The short excursus on the powers in CD III/3 engenders a host of questions that are not adequately put or answered by recourse to that single text, as it is the final paragraph of an excursus on the ‘nature’ of angels, sparked by Hebrews 1.14’s description of spiritual worship (‘leitourgika pneumata’), and ending with the question of the existence of an angelic ‘hierarchy’ or ‘rank’.48 Yet the typology Barth sets out there remains helpful for framing his more substantive discussions of the powers elsewhere. Moreover, the locus of this paragraph in the doctrine of creation, amid Barth’s highly ‘functional’ discussion of angelology and the kingdom of heaven, implies certain conceptual demarcations for an appropriate doctrine of the powers, as it sets questions regarding their nature – particularly whether it is to be considered ‘angelic’ or, correlatively, ‘demonic’ – within a framework of dogmatic and moral concerns that resists restriction to an ontological register.49 In this part, these concerns, which revolve around what Barth is and are not willing to subsume under the category of God’s ‘creature’, will be addressed by tracing several major themes of this excursus out into Barth’s doctrine of creation. Such a treatment furthers the above discussion about the powers’ being-in-service by locating the angelic, demonic and earthly powers within a thick conception of created order.

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Given the powers’ role in ‘Justification and Justice’, it comes as no surprise to see them reappear in CD III/3 – a volume which for the most part articulates a doctrine of providence – in the context of Barth’s treatment of ‘angelology’ and ‘the kingdom of heaven’. Barth there says that each of the relevant terms in the Pauline corpus obviously denote power, having ‘a ring and scope which are political in the widest sense’. This broad sense of ‘politics’ is that of a sphere of creaturely activity concerned with the ordering or construction of human life; it refers to those ‘powers which control and fashion human history’.50 Such a description is in Barth’s view a typical characteristic of biblical powers language, and its occurrence at the fore of his typology clearly implies that even heavenly powers are political in this broad sense. This confirms the intuition gained in the above inquiry, that the angelic powers and their earthly counterparts serve God’s redemptive work, and thereby have a positive relation to Christ and his church, insofar as they enable or assist the just ordering of human-historical life. As an aside, it should be noted that this characteristic (‘political’ in this broad sense) would equally apply to the ancient cosmological identification of the powers with angelic intermediaries who, to a greater or lesser degree, determine the course of creaturely and human life. Barth is, on this point, formally paralleling the ancient cosmology, though materially his doctrine of angels eschews the concept of cosmological hierarchy and reinterprets angelic ‘being’ in terms of a specific mode and sphere of activity  – namely, that of ‘heaven’. Barth’s doctrine of angels is a subset of a broader interpretation of all reality – that of heaven and earth – from the perspective of the work of God in Christ, and in this sense there are quite interesting connections to the articulation of a Pauline ‘apocalyptic cosmology’ as represented, for example, in the pioneering work of Ernst Käsemann.51 Barth sees three general definitions or meanings given to the powers in the Pauline corpus. First, there are ‘the powers of state’ which, pending an analysis of that in which the ‘state’ consists for Barth, one might more generically dub powers of ‘governmental authority’. These are earthly powers, ‘instituted by God but exercised by’ human beings (Rom. 13.1; Tit. 3.1). Second are those ‘heavenly powers’ created to serve Christ, ‘controlled’ by him until his parousia, when the witness they give to humanity is no longer needed (Col. 1.16, 2.10; Eph. 1.21, 3.10; 1 Pet. 3.22). In correspondence to the latter there are, finally,

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the demonic powers ‘which imitate and rival the heavenly’, powers that have ‘already been taken prisoner by Christ’ so that ‘although we still have to fight (Eph. 6.12) we do not need to fear them (Rom. 8.38)’. Barth sees these three types as ‘intersecting’ strands of meaning, of which one may be more or less prominent in a particular text. Thus it is already to be noted that for Barth, whatever may be said of the heavenly or hellish powers in themselves, their biblical illustration always has the powers which correspond to them in human history also in view. The method in this part will be to draw out the theological significance of these types by locating them within Barth’s account of the objective order given to heaven and earth in the divine act of creation, and the way in which the life of the inhabitants of those spheres is to reflect this ordering. To that end, creation’s proper order and its illumination of the angelic powers will be treated first, before turning to the question of the disruption or negation of this order in the activity of demonic powers. The next and final part continues Barth’s typology of the powers, with specific focus on how the first type of powers (those ‘governing’ on earth), which are given by God to carry out and reflect the witness of the heavenly powers on earth, are also aligned with the demonic powers the Christian is called to resist.

A. ‘Powers of Order in the Covenant and Grace’: The service of heaven In a way that parallels the ‘secondary christological sphere’ of ‘Justification and Justice’, Barth first broaches the question of the extent to which the Pauline powers should be considered creatures in the doctrine of creation by means of dogmatic exegesis focused on Christ’s lordship. Several pages into his discussion of the relation of ‘Creation and Covenant’ (CD §41) Barth refers to a strand of New Testament passages which speak of the ‘ontological connexion between Christ and creation’, describing his opening discussion of the basis of this connection in the triune being of God as an attempted exegesis of these texts.52 In this series Barth includes several passages relevant to the question of the creaturehood of the powers. Barth cites Colossians 1.16–17, Colossians 2.10 and Matthew 28.18 to the effect that the ‘unlimited exercise’ of the Creator’s lordship over all the powers of heaven and earth is ‘unquestionably

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ascribed to Christ’; moreover, he notes that the ‘most important passages’ treating Christ’s role in God’s creative work (Jn. 1.3f., Heb. 1.2f. and Col. 1.15f.) are concerned with the relation of God and world only against the backdrop of the incarnate Word’s transcendence of all creaturely being and power. This is in Barth’s view part of the apostolic witness to God’s kingdom come near in Christ, which takes leave of the ancient search for ‘intermediate’ cosmological principles and radically breaks with ‘all mediating philosophy, theosophy and cosmology’. Reading these texts primarily as witnesses to Christ’s lordship over creaturely reality, Barth is led to a disavowal of the notion of ‘intermediate beings’ standing between God and humankind,53 and his reflections at this point anticipate his fuller account of the nature of the heavenly powers in CD III/3. For example, Barth reads Colossians 1.16 (along with 1 Cor. 8.6’s ‘so-called gods’ in heaven) as attesting Christ’s distinction from the angels. Inhabiting the realm of heaven, the ‘world of angels’ does indeed stand ‘between’ God and humankind, but it occupies a mediatoral place only from within the created order. Yet Christ himself is superior to the angels, as the fully human person in and through whom the eternal love of God has come to dwell. As such, faith recognizes his power as greater than that of even the heavenly powers: Whatever other powers the believer in Jesus Christ knows, and rightly or wrongly thinks in their way he ought to respect, Jesus Christ has intervened for him as the Bearer of this power [of the Creator] over all other powers – the power which is qualified and distinguished from all other powers, not only because it is greater and has dominion over them, but decisively because it is itself their origin, and that without it they would not be powers at all, this being the reason why they are subject to it. Jesus Christ is the Bearer of the power of the Creator.54

Consequently, Barth considers the Creator-creature distinction, as well as the transgression of this distinction in the person and work of Christ, to be more determinative of the nature of heavenly inhabitants than their sphere of residence within creation; or rather, their unmitigated creatureliness must inform our understanding of the way in which the angelic powers coexist with earthly creatures, since their heavenly existence is by nature one that attests the God whose grace towards all creation finds concentration and direction in God’s Yes to humankind in Jesus. Indeed, much in Barth’s discussion of

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angelic or heavenly powers hangs on his declaration that not just the earthly but also the heavenly sphere – the ‘space’ of creation as such – was created for the realization of the covenantal ‘encounter, history and fellowship’ between God and human persons.55 Though Barth remains decidedly agnostic on the metaphysical nature of heaven or its inhabitants as such (i.e. apart from their functional relation to the work of God in Christ), Christ is nonetheless known to faith as that ‘movement and history’ in which ‘we can know this whole sphere [of creation] theologically’.56 A brief treatment of the divine ordering of creation as the totality of the distinct spheres of heaven and earth will further clarify Barth’s understanding of the angelic nature and task of the heavenly powers, opening up the question of its denial in the activity of the demonic powers.

The ordering of heaven and earth For Barth, the distinct spheres of heaven and earth together constitute creation as an ordered whole. The order given to creation and its inhabitants – inclusive of the ontological and moral boundaries which creatures cannot transgress, as well as those whose transgression are conceptually irreconcilable with their existence, though they occur in fact – is christological. Such boundaries exist because creaturely life has not only a source and goal but also a sustaining centre. All creaturely life is oriented to and circumscribed by God’s election of humankind in the life-history of Jesus, by what God has affirmed and rejected from all eternity; for Christ himself is the Word ‘by which God has fulfilled creation and continually maintains and rules it’, and so the Word by which creatureliness itself is revealed to creatures.57 ‘He (in his humanity) is the centre of all creation’ because he is the one in whom its purpose and goal is actual and is actually fulfilled.58 For Barth, the new humanity of Christ is the telos of the old (fallen, sinful) human creature, the Word whose eloquent presence reveals the meaning or purpose of all things.59 Thus to say that creation is ordered by the triune God is to make a claim about its ontological, moral and epistemological centre and ground, about that in which human life is given and may willingly receive its proper structure and meaning, its form and content. Yet this centre and ground is a lived and living history, the event of one person’s life, death and resurrection, and thus the ‘order’ God gives to creation’s own life-history cannot be conceived as a kind of

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metaphysical stasis  – it is neither a rigid, alien ‘imposition’ from without, nor a complex of immanent laws and processes severed from and without need of God’s ongoing sustenance and direction. This ‘order’ is simply what creaturely life has been, is and may become through the active presence of Jesus Christ. Barth’s concept of God’s ordering of creaturely life is in this way akin to Bonhoeffer’s dynamic refiguring of the Lutheran doctrine of divine ‘mandates’ as the concrete structures given to the world by God, the (conceptually distinct) ‘forms’ of human-historical life, which truly are and are known only in their alignment ‘with their origin, existence and goal in Jesus Christ’.60 Bonhoeffer, it should be noted, thought that the concept of ‘order’ would do the job for whose purpose he took up the term ‘mandates’ were it not dogged by a tendency to conceive ontological (and thus moral) order in overly ‘static’ terms, a problem that sits easily with a ‘romantic conservatism’ concerned to protect existing structures or institutions from divine judgement.61 This kind of christological intuition about God’s structuring of human history obviously informs Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s roles in the Confessing Church struggle of the 1930s. More to the point, the account of angelic and demonic creaturely power signalled here propels the increasing emphasis in the remainder of this book on the relation between the christological specificity of the divine ‘ordering’ or ‘direction’ of creaturely life, and the critical role of exousiology vis-à-vis the sociopolitical status quo. While Bonhoeffer’s insight on this score is not an explicit concern for us, the instinct to christologically specify the loci of humane social forms (the ‘mandates’), and the related worry with stabilizing conceptualizations of normative institutions, marks his thought as an undeniable parallel to my reading of Barth and Yoder.62 The divine ordering of creaturely life in the history of Jesus Christ bears upon a consideration of the service of the heavenly-angelic powers, for God’s covenant with and grace to humankind in him – as the source, goal and centre of human history  – sheds light on the existence and activity of heaven and earth. Heaven’s ordered relation to earth (and vice versa) both positively and negatively informs the angelic powers’ being-in-service. Positively, it is the unity of heaven and earth that undergirds Barth’s strong identification of the goal and purpose of all creatures as one of praise of and witness to the grace of God; negatively, the ‘totality’ of the created order, as all that God has willed

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to bring into being and preserve, precludes the possibility of any perduring or final creaturely rebellion.63 In the words of the Te Deum, ‘All the earth doth worship’ the Father of Jesus Christ, to him ‘all angels cry aloud: the heavens and the powers therein’. The song of the cherubim and seraphim is that the ‘Lord God of Sabaoth’ is thrice holy; that heaven and earth together are filled with the glory of the triune God.64 Heaven and all its powers exist in ‘a definite superiority over earth’,65 but this superiority is manifest only in that the ‘double kingdom’ of heaven and earth – as the ‘totality (`τα πάντα in Col. 1.16; Eph. 3.9 and Rev.  4.11) of that which is created’  – provides a practical ‘orientation’ for creaturely life.66 For Barth, creaturely life is given a ‘definite, irreversible direction’ by the fact that earth is ‘under’ heaven; the life of its inhabitants is oriented by and to heavenly occurrence, because earthly creatures, their powers and the powers by which they live, depend upon and are ordered by the service of God rendered by ‘heaven and all the powers therein’. The presence of the heavenly powers conditions earthly life even if it is unrecognized or misapprehended. Barth’s exegesis of ‘the heavenly bodies’ of Genesis  1 helps clarify this point. The luminaries of the skies, although inhabitants of the lower cosmos and thus not ‘angels’ in the strict sense,67 are a prime example of the way in which heavenly powers orient creation to new creation by fulfilling the angelic function of giving to humankind witness of God’s covenantal rule. Irrespective of human recognition, the heavenly bodies mediate the light God gives to creation and therewith the ‘time and history’ humans need for ‘conscious and active’ partnership with God. Their ‘office’ is to summon humans ‘to sight, consciousness and activity’ in relation to their Creator, and they fulfil this office even when the meaning of their summons is obscured.68 To elucidate the full significance of their witness would allow a more detailed account of Barth’s theology of the powers, but for present purposes what is most significant is that Barth’s insight into the purpose (and hence nature)69 of the heavenly bodies allows him to register in the cosmological realm the presence and work of powers whose very existence serves God’s structuring of creaturely life, such that the cosmos, the allotted ‘space’ of these powers’ existence and activity, ‘should not merely be orientated by God but orienting for man’.70 These cosmological powers do not ‘rule’ human beings directly, Barth says; rather they serve God’s rule by ordering time as day and night, the coming and going of which is itself a testimony to God’s objective

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distinction of light and darkness and thus the ‘pattern’ which conditions earthly-historical life.71 Their service is to ‘rule’ in the lower cosmos in such a way that it is possible for humans ‘to live a life which is . . . marked by a wakeful consciousness of time and of history’,72 structures of creaturely existence which find their direction and purpose in the light of God’s Word.73 These powers thus find their end – the cessation of their historical angelic ‘function’ but not of ‘the heavenly bodies themselves’ – in the new creation, the day of God’s radiant presence and the time of created life oriented only by God’s ‘own shining as the eternal light’.74 Faith’s knowledge of Christ as the Word in whom these powers have their origin and goal brings the issue of idolatry to the fore. In Barth’s view, ‘an objective order of God’s creation is disturbed when man erroneously alienates the heavenly bodies from their specific destiny as images of the divine creation of light’. This error, as Galatians 4.9 and Colossians 2.16 make clear, is at once intellectual and practical. Failing to hear the testimony they objectively give – that is, failing or refusing to discern the meaning of their existence, and hence their meaning for human existence ‘in the grace and judgment of the Word of God’ – fosters rather than hinders human enslavement to the stoicheía tou kósmou.75 Before turning to the service of angels itself, a final cosmological parallel from CD III/1 may best elucidate how the place of heaven and its powers in the divine ordering of creation serves God’s will for creaturely life on earth. Barth’s nuanced exegesis of Genesis  1.6–8 depicts the heavenly firmament (raqia‘) as that which objectively reflects and manifests God’s separation of creation and chaos and thus the limitation of the scope and efficacy of creaturely rebellion.76 In Barth’s view, the whole upper cosmos, as witness of and participant in earthly history, ‘bears the image and character’ of the raqia‘ which divides the ‘upper waters’ from those of earth. Heaven as this raqia‘ is the removal of a real metaphysical threat to human existence, not merely ‘the demons of its own natural force’ but that ‘higher power’ whose triumphal entry ‘would change the cosmos into chaos’ and so bring about the destruction of all things.77 As with the luminaries and the angels themselves, the existence of the raqia‘ is bound to and explained by its function: its existence is ‘not an end in itself ’, for it must divide and keep at bay the destructive celestial waters and in so doing proclaim God’s ‘refusal to will chaos’ and ‘decision and capacity to uphold the cosmos’. In this way, too,

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to live on earth under heaven means ‘to live under the conditions fixed by God’ and thus in dependence upon the role given to heaven and its powers within God’s ‘protection and lordship, but also His jurisdiction’. For this reason, too, human life is ordered and should be oriented by the power of God operative there. Like the luminaries and angels, the raqia‘ has its end in the eschatological opening and outpouring of heaven (‘the divine horizon of earthly life’) to and on earth; it too is not annihilated, but completely ‘transformed’ in the new heavens and earth, where its historical function in the providential work of God finds its end in the immediacy of Christ, in whose person and by whose spirit this opening and outpouring, and thereby the definitive removal of this real threat, take place. The point of these comments upon Barth’s reading of the ‘heavenly powers’ of Genesis 1 is not to defend Barth’s exegetical conclusions,78 but to show how his theology of the powers is informed and expressed by exegetical-theological decisions which see the divine work of creation and its providential ordering as ordered to and fulfilled by Christ. According to Barth, the world itself is ordered to and sustained by the promise of God’s coming kingdom, and the powers of heaven serve creaturely life on earth by being and giving witness to its nearness. The witness of heaven and its powers is opposed to the chaos that refuses and resists what it means to live humanly, as a creature whose life-history is formed and sustained by the divine Word. Turning briefly to Barth’s angelology allows a development of these insights into the service rendered by the heavenly powers, by showing how Barth identifies these powers with angels per se.

Angelic being-in-service The angels find their distinctive place within God’s ordering of creation as those who with the power and glory of heaven bear perfect witness to the cosmic lordship of Christ, in both its providential and eschatological dimensions. For Barth, all creatures come to play their proper part in the divine economy as witnessses of that which God has willed and accomplished in Christ, as their own lived existence (objectively) corresponds or (subjectively) responds to the grace God has there shown humankind.79 Barth’s oft-repeated formulation that creation is the ‘external basis’ of the history of the covenant80 finds concrete expression in this connection between angelology and the powers:

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namely, that heaven ‘and all the powers therein’ are what they are only in obedience and service to the God who is and is known in the movement of that grace. The angels are those heavenly creatures who, lacking the relative but real autonomy God gives to earthly creatures – which is in no case freedom for sin (Rom. 3.8, 6.1–15)81 – can do no other than be such witnesses. With angels ‘the possibility of deviation or omission does not arise’, for their ‘perfect willingness and readiness, but also their [heavenly] capacity to speak and act from and with and for God’ is that in which their ‘heavenly nature consists and expresses itself ’.82 The angels, and the heavenly-angelic powers, are thus first of all distinguished from earthly creatures and powers by the purity and perfection in which they render the witness to and praise of God which is the destiny of all creatures. That God addresses human beings in and by means of angelic witness also means that God reveals himself in both the (heavenly) majesty of God’s deity and in (creaturely) cosmic form, such that the Word and work of God can be truly received by creatures. The ‘angelic mode’ of God’s presence to those on earth is that ‘heavenly vesture’ which allows them to be ‘before and with’ God in God’s proper ‘mystery and deity’;83 the majesty or glory of angels, their own ‘heavenliness’, resides in the way in which their presence signals the presence of God. This fact of their presence to and in God’s action, however, does not of itself constitute the uniqueness of angelic witness, for as Barth notes, ‘we can and must say’ of some earthly or human-historical powers too that ‘they are present with their action in that which God does’. Yet those on earth cannot of themselves render the Word God speaks to them and in which God works for them audible and perceptible; it is the ministry of angels which ‘gives to this relationship . . . its cosmic character, the concrete form of the divine mystery perceptible on earth’.84 Here we see Barth cautiously adopt the concept of angelic mediation, while emphasizing that God remains the subject of God’s work – ‘God Himself speaks with man’, but in doing so ‘by His angels’ God’s Word is given ‘the sound and form of the divine direction’ that claims human life; God alone grounds and directs creaturely history, in both the ‘covenant of grace and the community which recognizes and proclaims this covenant’ and in cosmic occurrence as such, but where God ‘exercises this lordship’ the angels are present as God’s own heavenly and cosmic powers. As such, these forms of the one order and power of God ‘are here and now valid orders and

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precepts, determinations and directions’.85 Barth’s concern in articulating this aspect of heavenly being and power, with respect to the ordering of creation itself, is the dynamic concreteness in which God in the manifold but unitary revelation of God’s grace encounters, addresses and claims human life. Both of these characteristics  – the perfection and heavenly-creaturely form of angelic witness – serve and attest God’s own self-revelation and work, and so require the basic assertion of angelic presence to and before God.86 Barth distinguishes between two modes of angelic presence implied by the term ‘witness’, both of which illuminate the telos of heavenly service of God. The notion of ‘passive witness’ serves to underscore that it is God alone who reigns in and over creaturely history; it denotes the angels’ sheer presence, as ‘spectators’, ‘when the will of God is executed’.87 Barth finds exegetical support for this notion in the heavenly entourage of Revelation 4–5, those angelic ‘witnesses of the will of God as it commences above and is fulfilled below’,88 and in the New Testament passages which declare that the angels look upon, learn from and anticipate the fulfilment of God’s purpose for creation in the incarnation of God’s Son (1 Tim. 3.16; 1 Cor. 4.9) and the gathering and proclamation of the ekklesía on earth (Eph. 3.10; 1 Pet. 1.12).89 Though angelic being is in Barth’s view ‘really exhausted in this seeing and hearing’ what God says and does, he nonetheless goes on to stress a second determination of angels ‘as those who are ordained . . . to attest or confirm to earthly creatures the Word and work of God’.90 Indeed, their passivity ‘is only the presupposition’ for considering their ‘true and active witness . . . in the service of the saving and cosmic events overruled by God’. Significantly, Barth finds the ‘strong statements’ regarding Christ’s lordship over ‘the heavenly dominions and powers’ in Colossians 2.10, Ephesians 1.22, 1 Peter 3.22 and Hebrews 1.6 to be ‘unforgettable’ expressions of the way in which this active service of angels is best viewed in its concrete connection with ‘the centre of divine action’ in the work of Christ.91 Indeed, this ‘centre’ illuminates both angelic passivity and activity, for as the absence of angels ‘in the centre of the evangelical record of Jesus’ makes clear, the heavenly service of God  – and so that of the angelic powers  – finds its fulfilment and end in the eschatological accomplishment of divine and human fellowship realized in Jesus Christ. The angels’ historical service of God is rendered superfluous in ‘the perfect kingdom of God’, and so, according to Barth’s reading of 1 Corinthians 15.24,92 it is there that heavenly

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beings lose the ‘power’ that they are given – indeed, the powers that they are – within God’s direction and preservation of human history.93 These aspects of Barth’s angelology, especially the latter distinction between active and passive witness, reveal that Barth most explicitly equates the ‘heavenly powers’ with ‘angels’ under the rubric of God’s heavenly rule of or lordship over creation and human life. As with the powers of ‘Justification and Justice’, this gives the work of the heavenly-angelic powers an explicitly political dimension – ‘political’ in the broad sense Barth delineates, discussed above. For here ‘angelic’ being and power is placed in a direct relation to the ‘power and order’ of God’s kingdom as it comes to, in-forms and claims earthly human life. In Barth’s doctrine of creation there is conceptual overlap between angels per se and the heavenly powers insofar as the former have an active role in God’s comprehensive rule of creation, as heavenly witnesses who accompany, testify and give creaturely form to God’s own historical self-attestation. The heavenly powers are minor characters in the drama of creaturely history because God and humankind  – and principally the One who accomplishes their reconciliation  – occupy centre stage; they can ‘fade away like stars before the dawn’ because in the biblical drama, even ‘before’ and ‘after’ Jesus’ earthly history, the coming and speaking of the divine Word remains the historical centre that directs creaturely life to its proper end.94 Yet because and insofar as humans must and do encounter God indirectly, due to some measure of ‘distance’ from final order in which God will be all in all, these minor characters play an integral role. As with the angel of the annunciation, the significance of angelic witness is not primarily its heavenliness, but the fact that it announces, precedes and follows the grace of the heavenly Word made flesh.95 The service of the heavenly powers reaches its goal in the earthly creature’s response of praise, in lived response to the angelic annunciation of God’s reign – the readiness and ability to ‘look and move’ in the direction of the One who comes to humankind in the manger and the cross, and who is to come again in the unimpeded power and radiance of God’s eternal love.96 In sum, angelic being, and thus the being of the heavenly powers, is wholly determined by the fact that what it presents to or signifies for humankind, in its creaturely speech and action, is the Word and work of the triune God. The angels have no ‘independent’ word to speak or work to do; the powers of heaven can be nothing other than the power of God as it comes from heaven

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to earth, acquiring creaturely and cosmic form. To return to the typology initially sketched, the angelic powers represent the order of God’s kingdom as it comes to, reorders and renews creaturely life, because their being and activity is ‘determined by the divine action in respect of the covenant and salvation’. They are as such ‘salutary forces for the establishment of a relative peace, the relative aversion of chaos and therefore in this sense the furtherance of the kingdom of God’ on earth.97 The existence and work of the heavenly powers, in both the history of ‘cosmic and natural occurrence’ and by means of the gathering and maintenance of ‘His community and its service’,98 is God’s providential guarantee that ‘earthly history can never be given up wholly to chaos’ – that because such powers exist and are at work, human history may and can reflect angelic service and praise of God by means of its own ‘real forces of peace and order’. Yet the peace and order so established are ‘relative’, because they come to and are fashioned by human beings whose lives are still and continually disordered by sin and the powers it unleashes. Barth’s third type are these ‘forces of disorder’ – the ‘demonic powers’ which live by and as the ‘imitation’ of the angelic powers of heaven and earth.99 It is to their place in Barth’s doctrine of creation that we now turn.

B. The power(s) of nothingness Compared with those of heaven, the demonic powers receive little attention in Barth’s doctrine of creation. Barth explicitly disallows a systematic ‘demonology’, noting the impropriety of taking these defeated opponents of God’s reign too seriously.100 Given Barth’s own approach, these powers are most appropriately reflected upon in their concrete connection with the sinful human forces at work in the world. Barth thus gives a more detailed account of the demonic powers in his ethics of reconciliation, which I examine below, and what is to be said here is in a real sense grounded in what is found there. Yet Barth’s concern with that which concretely opposes truly human existence does find conceptual grounding in his doctrine of creation, and his account of the demonic powers with respect to that doctrine is crucial for understanding their historical character. The perverse existence and work of ‘the demonic powers’ can be neither equated with fallen creaturely powers nor disconnected from them, and the fact that Barth does not wish to elaborate their perversity

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by means of a ‘systematic’ demonology is a necessary corollary of his view that they have no ‘authentic’ place ‘within’ the created order at all. Rather, in Barth’s innovative adoption of the Augustinian tradition of evil as privation, demonic forces can only be conceived as the inconceivably real forces that deny and deviate from ‘creatureliness’ by opposing the work God undertakes on the creatures’ behalf. They are, in other words, the powers of ‘nothingness’ (das Nichtige), and a discussion of these powers must locate them within Barth’s treatment of this theme. According to the negative insight mentioned above, it is the totality of heaven and earth, as all that God has willed to bring into being and preserve, which precludes the possibility of any perduring or final creaturely rebellion. The unity of God’s one creation means that ‘there is no reality outside this sphere apart from that of God Himself ’, and thus that in both the lower, visible, material and the higher, invisible, spiritual cosmic realms, ‘there may be pretended but no genuine gods and lords’.101 This is first and foremost a secularizing claim about the lordship of God over all creaturely being and power: ‘For according to this insight even the most powerful [spiritual] dominion’ is subject to God’s rule as surely as ‘the most obvious impotence’, just as ‘that which is most miserable’ on earth is ‘in His hand’ no less than that which is in the highest heaven. Yet this insight that there can be ‘nothing totally contemptible either in heaven or on earth’, because there is no true creaturely existence outwith this totality, also clarifies how the unity of the distinct spheres of heaven and earth in CD III/1 form the conceptual background of Barth’s treatment of nothingness in CD III/3, and the whole question of the reality and significance of its ‘demonic’ forces. Nothingness is in Barth’s view that ‘alien element’ inconceivably existent within the created order  – that which essentially contradicts and opposes divine and created being, existing ‘only as it denies all true being, and is denied by it’. In other words, it is a false being, whose conceptual origin can be traced back to God or to creatures only in relation to the ‘No’ God speaks to its existence.102 Wolf Krötke notes the fundamental difficulty with Barth’s account: the coming to be of nothingness ‘has nothing to do . . . with the coming into being of creation. And yet Barth has no other categories at his disposal with which to describe the intended state of affairs’. Thus Barth’s descriptive account necessarily makes use of ‘creaturely categories’

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(e.g. being, existence, activity), though this ‘reality’ is in his view completely disanolagous with  – because opposed to  – what must be affirmed of the creaturely realities God’s Word calls into being.103 Despite the conceptual dilemma of describing privative evil, and the apparent contradictions involved in asserting a ‘necessary’ divine No in relation to God’s free Yes as its ‘ontic ground’,104 Barth’s concern with nothingness is misunderstood if one presses for firm conceptual resolution regarding the ‘cause’ of its existence.105 For as Timothy Gorringe puts it, Barth ‘is not trying to provide an “answer” to the problem of evil, but to spell out its unintelligibility’ as that which, by the standard of divine and created being, should not but does exist.106 In this light Barth’s rigorous refusal of the well-entrenched doctrine of fallen angels can be understood as an inevitable consequence of his doctrine of creation.107 The devil and demons can receive no more justifiable place within the created order than does nothingness itself, for they ‘are not different from the latter’. They ‘derive’ from nothingness and indeed are nothingness ‘in its dynamic, to the extent that it has form and power and movement and activity’.108 Recognition of this point poses a new challenge to those who reject Barth’s rejection of ‘fallen angels’, which is grounded in large part on the inexplicability of such a ‘fall’, given the meaning of angelic existence. As Robert Jenson rightly notes, sin itself is a surd, but that does not lead to a denial that sinners are fallen ‘creatures’. Yet Barth understands the devil and demons to be the agents of nothingness, those whose ‘mythological’ naming signifies oppositional power as it appears and acts in concrete form; and so to affirm the devil and demons as ‘fallen beings’ would require an ontology in which they were not themselves part and parcel of nothingness.109 The devil and demons are in Barth’s words ‘the myth of all myths’, but that in no way amounts to a denial of their existence. Rather, it signals its perversity, and suggests that their ‘being’ – which is their active opposition to the work of God and so the good existence of God’s creatures – can in no way be brought into positive correspondence with a divine or created being, but must rather be ‘demythologized’ from the standpoint of faith in God alone.110 All of this brings to light why, on Barth’s reading, the ‘demonic powers’ must not be exhaustively identified with the creaturely powers unleashed by sinful humankind. As with the powers of heaven, there may and do exist earthly creatures whose agency and influence correspond to the demonic  –

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these powers too have their ‘specific human replicas’ and cosmic-historical analogues, creaturely forces whose sinfulness or perversity opposes the gospel’s claim upon them in a specific time and place.111 As shown above, this is the logic at work in ‘Justification and Justice’ when Barth refers to ‘government’ as the ‘political angelic power’ whose ordination for a specific task can be demonically negated by concrete acts of injustice. The present point is not the correspondence between angelic or demonic powers and those on earth itself, but the recognition that its existence, alongside Barth’s view of the demonic powers as concrete manifestations of the power of nothingness, structurally requires that the manifold powers of earth be contextually identified with the agency of heaven or hell; simultaneously, it precludes the possibility of their exhaustive conceptual equation. For Barth, a Christian theology of the powers must discern whether the creaturely powers operative in any given context or sphere of life attest the ministry of heaven or the hound of hell, whether their work is just or unjust according to the one Word God speaks to and for humankind in Jesus – and such a theology must yet recognize that the determinative forces in any particular time and place, which may attest or obscure the coming of God’s kingdom, exceed that which is demonstrably grounded in human intention and ability.112 The demonic powers by which nothingness seeks to destroy and disorder creation are themselves as wide-ranging as those of heaven, for their goal – what moves them, and that towards which they move – is the actual antithesis of the all-embracing will and work of God for creaturely life, whose drawing-near the angelic powers serve.113 The beings and powers of heaven and hell are thereby related only in conceptually irresolvable antithesis – ‘as creation and chaos, as the free grace of God and nothingness . . . as the light of revelation and the darkness which will not receive it’.114 This third type of the powers names for Barth precisely those cosmic-historical powers which – rapt in the spirit of grace’s refusal, as the concrete forms of nothingness’s totalizing drive – also come to oppose the revelation of God’s being-for-us in human history. A final word needs to be said on both aspects of this description: the character of these powers in their opposition to the angelic service of God’s rule, and the concreteness of this opposition in the demonic powers’ connection with human sin. Having established that the demonic powers are, for Barth, neither heavenly nor earthly powers gone awry, but rather the concrete dimensions of that

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destructive power that ‘exists’ in and, indeed, as opposition to God’s work, we may expound their essence as the negation of angelic being-in-service. Despite Barth’s principled rejection of thinking these powers ‘fallen’ (which presumes their creation by the positive will of God), they are still properly called a ‘perversion’ – for although it is purely negative, Barth does establish a historical (rather than an ontological) correspondence between (1) the heavenly-angelic powers and the earthly powers in and by whom they work, and (2) the demonic powers and their human analogues. This relation is dialectical and antithetical, and is established by the fact that the demonic powers are the forces which oppose and obscure the angelic task of giving creaturely witness to the historical revelation of God’s grace. Barth signals this in his typology by speaking of those ‘illegitimate and perverse demonic powers which imitate and rival the heavenly’.115 Imitation and rivalry are key concepts for understanding Barth’s view of demonic power, for they capture its character as pretension, falsehood and hostility. If the heavenly powers are those spiritual and cosmic-historical forces that serve God’s self-attestation by announcing the gospel in a specific form and time and place, the demonic powers are the inhuman forces by which nothingness ‘ascribes and arrogates to itself ’ a role and significance it cannot finally have for creatures – they are its desire and attempt ‘to rule and reveal itself alongside’ God; that which denies, hampers and ‘even destroy[s]’ the being of creatures by pointing away from the One by whose power they are created, sustained and made new.116 The demonic powers are nothingness as it presents itself and appears in this way, assuming ‘form and power for a particular purpose’, namely, to oppose and obscure the active presence of God’s life-giving Word. The demonic powers oppose angelic witness by proclaiming not God and God’s ordering of the cosmos in Christ, but another ruler and order and law – the chaos which God did not will or create, and to which God relates only as negation – to be the source, goal and centre of creaturely life. Heaven is given authority and power as it attests and represents the work of God to and in creaturely life; the demons pretend to divine authority and power while directing human ‘attention, adoration and gratitude to themselves’117 – which is to say, away from God’s specific affirmation of the creature in Christ, and towards that which is judged and refused by his life, death and resurrection. It is thus clear that for Barth nothingness is not a ‘thing’ but the alien, improper but nonetheless real power or, more precisely, ‘host of powers’ that

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concretely opposes the revelation of God’s lordship in human history. Scripture does not see this reality ‘as a being . . . somewhere and somehow at repose in its improper nature’, but rather as a kingdom ‘based upon a claim to [divine] power and seizure of [creaturely] power’ that it does not possess. Consequently, the demonic powers in which it works do not ‘consist’ anywhere, but are ‘always on the march, always invading and attacking’ the real world constituted and held open by God’s living Word.118 Their movement and activity is hostile and opposed to God’s kingdom and that which heralds its coming, but for Barth even conceptually maintaining this negative ‘relation’ risks overstatement, for this kingdom lives by the active propagation and historical concretization of falsehood.119 Nothingness’s ‘imitation’ and ‘rivalry’ of the kingdom of heaven is real – for it too exists in spiritual invisibility and cosmic incomprehensibility, with a kind of ‘substance’ and ‘vitality’; it too has ‘in its midst a kind of throne and ruler’; it too has its messengers and its servants, and is ‘an enterprise and movement aimed at earth and man’. Yet the powers by which it does all this can only be the ‘powers of falsehood’, for they are ‘in a thousand different forms’ the lie that what God opposes and has overcome in Christ is a kingdom which can finally stand; that the powers of sin, death and evil too are ‘superior powers’ by which humankind may and should live on earth ‘in opposition to the will of God’.120 In other words, the demonic powers are this kingdom of nothingness in its active opposition to the coming of God’s reign, yet scripture depicts this kingdom only with a retrospective glance to God’s triumph over it in Christ’s death and resurrection, and so in the hopeful knowledge of its final abolition and unreality.121 These powers, then, can be seen for what they are only through the knowledge of faith, but faith’s hope in the decisive revelation and manifestation of Christ’s victory over the powers in no way legitimates denial of the real and chaotic potency they exert in creaturely history.122 A final glance at the connection between the demonic powers and human sin may further illuminate this spiritual potency, and so pave the way for a consideration of the fallen creaturely powers which enact and reflect it. We have seen that for Barth the reality of the demonic powers cannot be reduced to fallen human capacities, and that as the powers of nothingness, their work negatively parallels that of the angels whose witness they oppose and obscure. In short, their work is cosmic in scope, for they too are the powers of a kingdom. Nothingness itself names the ‘total power’ of that which opposes

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God and so the creature – it is that other kingdom in whose service the demons and demonic forces work, the entire complex of sin, death and evil, whose scope and power is not just moral or intellectual but physical and total.123 Thus Barth can claim both that human sin is the ‘concrete form’ or mode of action by which the demonic powers of nothingness are unleashed in creation, and that nothingness is not exhausted by sinful acts.124 The ‘performance’ by which this kingdom of falsehood is enacted is, as it were, set in motion by the human covenant partner’s primal breach of fellowship with God,125 but given the indissoluble connection between this rebellious earthly creature and the cosmos of which he is a part, not only human beings and activity but all that shapes and shares in its history become subject to the dehumanizing play of nothingness’s powers.126 The fallen human being is thus both transgressor and victim, for sin is ‘not only an offence to God; it also disturbs, injures and destroys the creature’. In and through sin persons become subject to a power which is ‘superior, like evil and death, to all the forces which the creature may oppose to it’.127 Thus the demonic powers, which are the myriad forms of this attack, are both internal and external to the human being, and the real question, Barth says, is not where they are but ‘Where not?’: They are there in the depths of the soul which we regard as most properly our own. They are there in the relationships between man and man, and especially between man and woman. They are there in the developments of individuals and their mutual relationships . . . in the concern and struggle for daily bread, and especially for that which each thinks is also necessary in his case. They are there in that which man seeks his satisfaction or which he would rather avoid as undesirable, in his care and carelessness, in the flaming up and extinguishing of his passions, in his sloth and zeal, in his inexplicable stupidity and astonishing cleverness, in his systematisation and anarchism, in his progress, equilibrium and retrogression, in the great common ventures of what is called culture, science, art, technics and politics, in the conflict and concord of classes, peoples and nations, in the savage dissensions but also the beautiful agreements and tolerances in the life of the Church, and not least in the rabies and even more so the inertia theologrum.128

In sum, the demonic powers are present in and as the all-pervasive attack of that spiritually hostile power to which the fallen human creature is subject. That the disorder these powers bring to human life is real and not just apparent, that

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it is within and not just external to the sinner’s own history, leaves humanity with no hope for successful resistance other than the God who is Lord on both the right hand and the left. That God is the Lord not only of God’s good creation and creatures but also of the powers that intrinsically oppose them is revealed decisively in the triumph of Christ’s death and resurrection. ‘It is Jesus Christ, God in His person, who as the Lord and Victor overthrows nothingness and its lying powers’. It is ‘the history of His conflict, of the kingdom of God dawning in Him’, in which it not simply is but becomes for us true ‘that nothingness and the demons have nothing to declare’.129 In the light of Christ’s death and resurrection, this power and its forces are exposed. Nothingness is shown to be what it is – a false kingdom; a vast network of promises which humankind may construct and obligations with which it may be presented, but within which it does not and cannot find a life worthy of the name. Such exposure thereby illuminates the peculiar situation of persons as sinners whose life-history is woven into an inhumane and idolatrous web. Krötke insightfully remarks that sin – as the actual contradiction of the ‘Yes’ God speaks to humankind in Christ – is the height of abstraction, such that its powers can only enact their falsehood by arrogating concreteness to themselves, thereby appearing in human history precisely as what they are not130 – namely, as one or another aspect of historical ‘reality’, with its own set of laws and tasks and techniques which the human can or must obey, take up or master without detriment. The demonic powers of sin, evil and death remain hidden in every facet of human life. As the quote above demonstrates, Barth’s primary concern is that these inimical powers be known and confronted precisely where their assault is forged, in the thick of lived human existence; for it is truly human life for which God created and has redeemed the world, to which God holds history open. The history of Christ is the declaration that such a life not only lies behind and before us, but as such may be ever-sought and –found as the structure of our present, as the manner of presence we can and should seek as life together in this world. Barth’s account of the demonic powers as the powers of nothingness does not, therefore, lead to a denial of the evil powers that foster and derive from human sinfulness. Rather, it stands as a challenge to know and relate to them in accordance with God’s judgement upon them in the death, resurrection and

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ascension of Christ. In this way ‘biblical demonology is in fact only a negative reflection of biblical Christology and soteriology’, and true knowledge of these powers is in fact only a reference to faith in and commitment to the one by whose work God is Lord and Saviour of human beings also in respect of the corrupting powers that afflict them.131 Barth’s analysis of the powers of nothingness, and the heavenly powers which attest and give form to Christ’s providential and eschatological lordship over them, is thus a call for all of human life to find its direction in him, to allow the gospel to expose the manifold captivity of human existence and so liberate persons to reflect in their own creaturely manner, time and place, heaven’s praise of God. Yet short of the kingdom come in fullness the ‘forces of disorder’ abound ‘in, with and under’ the heavenly powers that so order the lower cosmos, frustrating the human vocation of ‘de-demonizing’ the earthly powers which God provides and institutes to be, in correspondence with the witness of heaven’s powers, a sign and attestation of the kingdom come in Jesus Christ.132 Further analysis of Barth’s first type – what he calls the ‘powers of state’ – is best undertaken in dialogue with his treatment, almost a decade later, of the creaturely powers which, in their ongoing subjection to nothingness, betray their angelic function of bearing witness to the justice and peace God gives to humankind in Christ.

III. The lordless powers The Christian Life consists of translated fragments from Barth’s lectures on the ethics of reconciliation, which if completed would have concluded CD IV. Barth’s discussion of ‘the Lordless Powers’ appears in §78’s discussion of the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, compiled under the heading ‘The Struggle for Human Righteousness’. During revision, Barth excised the original summary of §78, which ran as follows: Christians have been given the certainty that God has taken in hand and actualized order in his creation for the good of man and that he will finally manifest and enforce it in its perfection. They thus revolt against all the oppression and suppression of man by the lordship of the lordless powers.

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The preface that replaces that formulation, obviously revised according to Barth’s decision to structure the ethics of reconciliation by the act of invocation, is worth comparing: Christians pray to God that he will cause his righteousness to appear and dwell on a new earth under a new heaven. Meanwhile they act in accordance with their prayer as people who are responsible for the rule of human righteousness, that is, for the preservation and renewal, the deepening and extending, of the divinely ordained human safeguards of human rights, human freedom, and human peace on earth.133

Both summaries reflect themes Barth was concerned to explicate regarding the moral dimensions of the Christian life by taking up again, more explicitly than elsewhere in the CD, a theological account of the New Testament powers. It is noteworthy that the original emphasizes the order God gives to creation for the sake of humanity, an order which Christians believe God will finally establish in fullness, such that the revolt they undertake is bound to and guided by their hope in its coming. This way of putting the matter obviously resonates with the above inquiry, and suggests that the ‘lordless powers’ are those that rule the human being-in-sin, directing persons towards a way of being in the world out of sync with the nearness of God’s reign. The latter preface, while not at odds with the former, delineates the specific mode of resistance to the powers called ‘Christian faith’ as the invocation of God to come once again, making God’s ways with and for us known afresh. It suggests that so long as other gods direct human knowledge and activity, the Christian task is to act in accord with Jesus’ eschatological prayer, such that human righteousness may flourish, however partially and fragmented, giving its own witness to God’s active preservation and extension of human dignity, freedom and peace. Of primary significance here is that the more explicitly negative and responsive theme of ‘revolt’ against the lordless powers has been replaced by the identification of ‘the rule of human righteousness’ with the God-ordained ‘safeguards’ of human rights, freedom and peace. The exposition itself, however, makes abundantly clear that these ordained safeguards are preserved precisely by means of the human revolt against the ‘forces of disorder’ that afflict humankind insofar as its history is the history of nothingness. The thematic organization of §78 alone emphasizes that the Christian struggle against the disordering of human life is the struggle

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against the ‘lordless powers’ governing human history, and that the social order which gives meaning to Christian resistance is God’s coming kingdom, by whose light all may glimpse the justice which has come to them and which is yet to be done.134 The first type of powers outlined above – those ‘governing on earth’ – are located here as the powers of the lower cosmos, not angelic or demonic power in the strictest sense, but earthly powers created to fulfil in their respective times and places the angelic function of witness to the one order creation receives within the providential and eschatological lordship of Christ. Yet these earthly powers govern demonically rather than angelically, they represent and assist the disordering and not the sustenance of human life, insofar as they remain under the guise and influence of humanity’s own resistance to the Word Jesus’ lives. The connection between human sin and the total power of nothingness undergirds Barth’s view that the evil dis/order Christians petition God to set aside is ‘also the enemy’ God commands them to stand against and resist. What the Christian is called to resist for the sake of the humanum is ‘the great disorder that controls and characterizes the state and human course of things’, the ‘human unrighteousness’ that opposes the order and righteousness of God. The fall of human beings in sin is ‘the final and true basis’ of this disorder. Yet alienation from God is simultaneously alienation from all that one is before God – it is alienation from oneself as the good creature of God and from the fellow-creatures with whom each ‘self ’ exists in indissoluble relation. In Barth’s terms, for the human to be in sin is ‘the denaturalising of the humanity and fellow humanity of his own existence’.135 Here another dynamic comes into the foreground of Barth’s theology of the powers: namely, the active role of humanity at the root of cosmic disorder, and the subsequent passivity which must be attributed to human beings as the disorder unleashed into the cosmos by their sin comes to characterize their own being and also that of the non-human creation with which they exist in an intrinsic relationship. In other words, humanity in its sinfulness ceases to be the sole subject of its creaturely life, which is as such a life of fellowship with God, and becomes subject to the power(s) at work in the disordered and disordering cosmos. Barth treats his account of the ‘lordless powers’ of human being-in-sin as a specification of the more formal designation of the reign of evil as the ‘great disorder’ that opposes God’s kingdom.136

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The prideful human attempt to be one’s own lord is, of course, incapable of perfect realization. By it humans can only achieve pseudo-godlessness, thinking, speaking and acting according to a dreadful ‘as if ’. Yet this ‘imagined godlessness and lordlessness’ is not harmless; as the human turns away from God, he loses the relative but real self-possession and earthly dominion proper to himself as one created and sustained by the image and Word of God. His misdirected human capacities ‘become spirits with a life and activity of their own, lordless indwelling forces’ that act ‘according to the law by which they arose’ in human self-assertion  – namely, ‘as absolutes’, as if they were not subject to but masters of the creature at whose disposal they are meant to stand, in opposition to rather than in service of the real human being.137 At this point, however, a note of disanalogy between the rebellion of creaturely powers against humankind and the rebellion of human persons against God must be registered. There is a real correspondence, in that the ‘law of rebellion’ remains the same; yet whereas the human achievement is for Barth merely ‘imagined’ lordlessness, the consequent rebellion of those powers created to be subjected to humankind is, to some extent, efficacious. God does not become subject to human mastery, but in the attempt to so master God the human becomes a real victim of its own rebellious powers and those unleashed by their corruption.138 This insight must also be qualified, for the mastery of the human by the rebellion of its own powers and those it unleashes is not absolute but circumscribed by the lordship of God. This rebellion and victimization is real, but (recalling the limitation of the demonic powers above) it does not place the demonic earthly powers nor the human being really subject to them outside the providential and eschatological rule of God. They are not, therefore, ‘ontologically godless forces’. Barth does overstate his case, perhaps in the interest of stretching the analogy between human rebellion and the rebellion of creaturely powers, by describing their reality and efficacy as ‘imagined’ or ‘pseudo-objective’; but it should be noted that Barth intentionally emphasizes that the deviation of these powers from their created end is not ‘finally valid, effective, and irreversible’.139 This deviation is overcome in the eschatological triumph of God in Christ, rendering their work in the here and now a relative rather than absolute determination of human history. That determination is real: the sinner ‘cannot deny their power or shake it off ’. Yet through the

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presence and power of the one who rose above the demonic opposition of both God and creature, there is hope – hope that, through Christ’s life-history, persons have been, and so may now and ever again be liberated from the ‘contingent and relative’ patterns of life which enslave them in their own time and place. Thus the powers of the disordered cosmos find their place in Barth’s treatment of the Christian life as those ‘lordless forces’ exalted against the good of the human being who has rebelled against God.140 Three characteristics can be noted in relation to their perversion. First, the non-absolute character of creaturely rebellion renders the existence and activity of its powers ‘obscure, ambivalent and unintelligible’. Insofar as they remain those of God’s creatures, Barth must admit of these powers ‘some kind of existence and dominion of their own’, even if their alignment with the power of nothingness denies or renders imperceptible their creatureliness. As creaturely powers that have rebelled against the Word of God and so deviated from their created end as that Word’s witness, thereby becoming anti-creaturely forces, their mode of existence is that peculiar state of actively corrupting spirits, forces and abilities, whose corruption stands condemned by and finally consigned to non-existence. Related to this strange existence is the fact that these powers need not remain ‘fixed’ in a single form or time or place, but can and do ‘manifest themselves’ in ‘wraithlike transitoriness’ in a variety of social settings and cultural forms. Finally, given the intangibility of the evil that can appear here and now in one guise and then and there in another, these powers are difficult to aptly conceptualize and name. Their reality and efficacy demands, Barth says, that theology speak of these powers, yet the perversity of their historical existence means that it can do so ‘only in consciously mythological terms’.141 Barth is insistent that, though alienated from human persons and exerting a kind of mastery over them, these powers remain those of humankind: their history is that of ‘the overpowering of [human] desires, aspirations and will’ by the incorrigible ‘superpower’ of human resistance to God’s grace.142 One might legitimately worry, however, about the range of Barth’s analysis, for on the one hand he describes these powers as the ‘abilities loaned to [human] nature and peculiar to it’  – desire, aspiration, will, thought, speech, action, indeed all particular human capacities and ‘possibilities of life’.143 Yet on the other hand, Barth is aware that the human person possesses these capacities and

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possibilities, becoming what it is, only in dependence upon and in fundamental relation with other persons and the non-human creation. Consequently, Barth considers under the heading of the lordless powers not just personal capacities, but the social, political and cosmic-historical forces which sustain and shape each and every human life. They are ‘more than life-size realizations of man’s powers’, but are in scripture ‘related especially to humans’, such that they possess their ‘relative autonomy’ only through oppositional relation to the real life of humankind.144 This point is crucial for guarding against too narrow a rendering of the lordless powers: they are ‘truly and properly man’s own’, yet the history of ‘Adamic humanity’ is in Barth’s view ‘world history’ as such, and the concrete sociality and materiality of human nature ensures that no proper account of the creaturely forces governing the former would be complete in abstraction from the latter.145 This is another key reason for affirming an idea already proven above, which is that Barth’s first type of powers – those ‘instituted by God but exercised by men’ – must be viewed in a much broader fashion than simply the ‘powers of state’.146 They are the spiritual powers of human capacity and activity – indeed personal, yet simultaneously social and material – which have gone awry and taken on a life of their own, such that their corruption pervades human history and casts it as the history of inhumanity. They are the demons who haunt and posses the achievements of human persons in rebellion against God and so themselves. ‘They are not just the supports but the motors of society’, Barth says: ‘the secret guarantee of man’s great and small conventions, customs, habits, traditions, and institutions’; ‘. . . the real factors and agents of human progress, regress, and stagnation in politics, economics, scholarship, technology, and art, and also of the evolutions and retardations in all the personal life of the individual’.147 In all these realms and aspects of life persons may retain some semblance of control and maintenance of order while remaining blind to the numerous ways in which their efforts and accomplishments are actually captive and subject to a ‘host of absolutisms’ that works not with but ‘without and above man’, not for but against human beings.148 Barth’s comment that these elusive powers must be seen ‘mythologically’ signifies not only the perversity of their ‘being’, but also the difference of modern rationalism and scientism from a biblical-theological account of reality. While it may be a theological error to glorify or vilify any age in

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respect of its secularization, Barth notes that the admittedly provincial ‘world picture’ of the early church, and so the New Testament writers, seems to have proved less a hindrance for recognizing the ‘strange reality and efficacy of the lordless powers’ than does modern empirical clarity regarding the real and the illusory.149 The difference, however, is not primarily that the former admits or requires ‘belief ’ in a host of spiritual powers with which modern science has done away  – the pagan and Jewish worlds of antiquity, too, believed in immaterial and influential powers of this kind. Rather the New Testament ‘exhibited and named’ the powers recognized in human history and culture as the ‘negative presupposition and target’ of faith’s proclamation that Christ alone is Lord. They are there as the powers and forces (dynameis), sovereignties (exousiai), spirits (pneumata), dominions (kyriotntes, kyrioi), authorities (archē, archōntes), world rulers (kosmokratores) and thrones (thronoi) of the creaturely world, the ‘background forces’ that govern and afflict sinful human history.150 The New Testament does not systematize or develop a comprehensive doctrine concerning these powers, and the church has a word to proclaim with regard to them only because it proclaims Christ, by whose light the capacities and aims of human history are seen in both their creatureliness and their corruption. The disordering rule of the powers of sin is the negative target of Christian proclamation because it poses a challenge and threat to the creature with whom God has made peace in Christ, and so attempts to thwart the manifestation of that peace in creaturely life. It is by now clear that Barth concedes a kind of ‘reality and efficacy’ to the demonic powers which oppose the Creator and its creature, though this reality and efficacy is most properly viewed as the sheer antithesis (in the case of nothingness itself) or total corruption (in the case of sinful human powers) of creaturely being and activity. In the discussion of ‘Justification and Justice’, it was shown how Barth’s reading of 1 Corinthians 15 informs his understanding of God’s eschatological negation of the demonic powers, reflected historically in the providential lordship of Christ. Here Barth refers to the demonic powers as the ‘penultimate enemies’ against which the church militant must continue to fight (Eph. 6.12), though she need not finally fear them.151 As the power of nothingness in its historical diversity and particularity, they are conceptually distinguishable from the ‘last enemy’ to be dethroned (1 Cor.  15.26), though their ‘merited end’ in the

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consummation of God’s kingdom is also destruction. What is ‘abolished’ in the new creation is in Barth’s view not the creature and its God-given powers, but the ‘pseudo-reality’ and ‘appearance of autonomy’ – real and efficacious enough – ‘in which they now live and have their being’.152 The proclamation of the church, indeed its very existence and life, is to ‘display’ not just to human beings but also to the forces that oppress them ‘the fulfilment in Jesus Christ of the counsel of God’ and thus God’s definitive limitation of their lordless reign in him. God’s coming kingdom is present in the one who overcame the tyranny of hell’s power in living by a different spirit (Col. 2.14ff.), and thus where Christ himself is present and known his disciples are commissioned to face these powers in the knowledge and hope of their real end in him. The eschatological tension is felt here too, for according to Barth the gospel attests that the cosmos ‘has been basically dedemonized already in Jesus Christ, and will be so fully one day’. To deny that the world remains possessed by inhumane powers – ‘palpable for all their impalpability in every . . . newspaper’ – would be to misunderstand not only their obscure reality but also the ‘known or knowable factors of historical life and society’. It would, moreover, confuse the church’s prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom, leaving Christians ignorant that to so pray is at least in part to ask and hope for God in God’s grace to expose, overcome, and finally remove the disordered and disordering powers ‘that rule us per nefas’.153

2

John Howard Yoder’s Exousiology

If one were to reflect on which themes and figures lend continuity to Yoder’s theological project, a reasonable starting point would be two of the first essays Yoder penned as a graduate student at the University of Basel, between 1954–55, one of which engaged his teacher Karl Barth, the other Reinhold Niebuhr, on their respective positions on the problem of war.1 That the essay on Barth was much more clearly a critique ‘from within’ than the polemical (but respectful) treatise on Niebuhr signals that much of Yoder’s theological insight developed out of a positive but critical appropriation of Barth. It also signals that Yoder’s lifelong concern with a defensibly Christian articulation of ‘politics’ was at least in part spurred on by a negative assessment of Niebuhr’s political heritage. It is legitimate to read The Politics of Jesus, for example, as a response to the theological challenge which a Niebuhrian account of ‘politics’ represents, but the exegetical and theological concerns at the heart of Politics signal how Yoder’s sustained critique of the Niebuhrs’ influence in modern Christian ethics is but the flipside of his appropriation and development of Barth’s dogmatic identification of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom with Christ’s presence to human history.2 Recognizing this generally positive reception of Barth as a major influence on Yoder’s work,3 as well as the centrality of a Christian theological ‘politics’ to Yoder’s work, this chapter defers an explicit engagement between Barth’s and Yoder’s exousiologies in order to explore the decisive features of Yoder’s own account.

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I. Yoder’s Paul – Arriving at ‘the structural question’ via Niebuhr and Berkhof The overarching claim of Part I is that Yoder’s theology of the powers is best understood as both a reactive and a constructive alternative to the conceptual distancing of Christ’s lordship and political life that occurs in ‘Niebuhrian realism’.4 While neither Yoder’s exousiology nor his theology in general can be considered merely reactionary, the more precise claim made in Part I is that recognizing Yoder’s theology as a critique of the theological-political realism paradigmatically represented by Reinhold Niebuhr actually illumines the positive contours of Yoder’s theology of the powers. The goal here is to show how Yoder’s pronounced disagreement with Niebuhr’s political realism and its theological presuppositions discloses a set of material problems that Yoder found to be much more fruitfully addressed by a biblical theology of the powers, particularly in light of Hendrik Berkhof ’s reading of Paul. Part I.A thus serves as a necessary contextualization of Yoder’s exegetical and theological indebtedness to Berkhof, which is discussed in Part I.B.

A. An alternative to Niebuhrian realism Reinhold Niebuhr was perhaps the foremost critic of Christian pacifism in the twentieth century, a position for which Yoder is often seen to be that same century’s chief representative. Although Yoder did view the question of political violence as ‘the central issue’ for the overall shape of Niebuhr’s thought, he recognized it was central as a ‘test case’ for Niebuhr’s underlying convictions regarding the nature and significance of human history. Yoder therefore interpreted the maturation of Niebuhr’s thought as the ‘backwards unfolding of his outgrowing of [his early] pacifism’; the decisive break with liberal pacifism in the 1930s coincides, on Yoder’s reading, with deeper conceptual shifts in what he calls Niebuhr’s ‘applied anthropology’.5 It was the latter – Niebuhr’s developing anthropology and theology of history  – which undergirded his pessimistic view of politics as a realm of human activity which compounds human sinfulness in a unique way; and it is this uniqueness – the way in which Niebuhr mapped the inevitability of human selfishness directly onto the substance and aims of social life6 – which informs Niebuhr’s politically ‘realist’ legacy. Hence even though Yoder’s criticisms of Niebuhr often occurred in

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the context of debate on the question of war, or the governmental function of ‘bearing the sword’,7 the primary issue at stake is the more basic question of the nature of human society and its political constitution. The difference between Niebuhr and Yoder on this question reaches far beyond the narrow (though important) question of the proper Christian conception of or practical relation to the state. One’s conception of the political is integrally bound up with larger questions about the forces governing social life, and the theological status ascribed to these forces in turn clarifies one’s view of the meaning and purpose of human society and history itself. In what follows, I outline several facets of Niebuhr’s basic political conceptuality that demonstrate why Yoder emphatically contends for an alternative theological account. First, a look at what roles Niebuhr ascribes to the figures of the martyr, the prophet and the state official provides insight into his convictions about the significance of state-power, itself an index of the nature of society and politics. Niebuhr discusses these figures in ‘The Kingdom is Not of This World’,8 an essay which demonstrates the univocal nature of power on which his understanding of social order and justice are based. Here Niebuhr claims that the martyr, prophet and statesman ‘may each in [their] own way be servants of God’s Kingdom’, a kingdom which is relevant to every moment of history as an ideal possibility and as a principle of judgment upon present realities. Sometimes it [God’s kingdom] must be obeyed in defiance of the world, though such obedience means crucifixion and martyrdom [the martyr]. Sometimes courageous obedience forces the evil of the world to yield, thus making a new and higher form of justice in history possible [the prophet]. Sometimes the law of the Kingdom must be mixed with the forces of nature which operate in the world, to effect at least a partial mitigation of oppression [the state].9

On a strictly formal level the roles ascribed to these figures – the martyr, the prophet and the state official, each differently responsive to the otherness of God’s kingdom  – are perhaps theologically justifiable. Yet the content of the witness that the martyr and the prophet give renders them practically subservient to and encompassed by the work of the state. The martyr’s (‘purely moral’, and thus apolitical)10 witness is valid and necessary because it points to the eternal contradiction of God’s kingdom, yet in human history the martyr signifies only defeat.11 The (‘successful’) prophet aids the state’s ever-nearer

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approximation of egalitarian justice, by morally directing its violence against the injustices of other nation-states. Both martyrological and prophetic witness to God’s kingdom are necessary, but only insofar as they humble and yet support the task of the state official, who is the real bearer of historical power and safeguard of social order. The state authority bears such significance because the social realm is for Niebuhr a fundamentally competitive space. ‘Politics’, says Niebuhr, ‘is always a contest of power’, and so justice – the securing of which is the civil official’s task – is the nearest possible approximation of social equilibrium, a balance of power among self-interested parties.12 The theological underpinnings of this view of sociopolitical life, and thus Niebuhr’s brand of realism finds concise summary in his claim: ‘If we mean by “the world” only the realm of actuality, the Kingdom of God is quite obviously not in it. It may be in the conscience of man but not in his action’.13 Yet whereas Niebuhr can appeal to Augustine’s claim that ‘the peace of the world . . . is based on strife’ in support of his agonistic conception of politics, Yoder follows the strand of Augustinian teaching that understands God’s kingdom to constitute a different ordering of human sociality, which challenges the antagonism of the earthly city not from beyond history but as the history of Jesus Christ.14 For Yoder, this salvific history is not the declaration of an ideal human nature, nor is it ‘politically relevant’ simply because it poses an ultimate or teleological question to the powers that inform human societies. Niebuhr himself could account for as much, with his admission that the love typified in Jesus’ cross will ultimately triumph over sinful but necessary political power.15 This kind of ‘relevance’, however, leaves the historical-political realm intact, for the love of God manifest in the life and death of Jesus then becomes a kind of eternal question that hangs over and humbles, but never actually breaks into or disrupts, the secular political task of securing relative human justice.16 For Yoder, however, Christ’s fidelity to God unto death poses a fundamental challenge to the ‘definition of the polis, of the social, of the wholeness of being human’ that inheres in such an exhaustive identification of politics with statecraft, and of social order with the relative justice secured through state violence.17 Yoder’s critique of Niebuhrian realism and the conception of human sociality and political life thereby entailed is thus a critique of Niebuhr’s view of sin – not its pervasiveness as such, but the nature and scope of its dominion.

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Yoder’s critique of the normativity of sin and the necessity of violence in social life assumes, however, that there are deeper problems with Niebuhr’s christology and soteriology. An idealistic account of the love of God in Christ, such as that outlined above, leads to an ontological divorce of political life from God’s redemptive work  – a separation of divine rule and social order materially supported by a view of divine grace that is effectively present only as the negative function of ‘law’. 18 In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder refers to Niebuhr’s view that Jesus’ coming was not to institute a new way of life, but rather to save us from our inability to live ‘according to his stated ideals’, citing Niebuhr’s telling claim that ‘The Good News of the Gospel is not the law that we ought to love one another. The good news . . . is that there is a resource of divine mercy’ for our failure to do so.19 The real target of Yoder’s account of Jesus’ politics is clarified by his designation of this Niebuhrian position as a refinement of the ‘dogmatic’ divorce of Jesus’ atoning work from ethics.20 The theological presupposition of Niebuhrian political realism is a reification of the Gospel-Law distinction, such that God’s redemptive act appears in social history only as the revelation of human failure, rather than the grace that frees persons for and binds them to life in Christ’s new humanity.21 In a penetrating ‘sermonic essay’ entitled ‘As Deceivers, Yet True’, Niebuhr recognizes that repentance occurs ‘when men cease to make the standards of a sinful existence the norms of life but accept its true norms’ as revealed by Christ;22 yet as Niebuhr’s articulation of the ‘mythical’ doctrines of providence and atonement goes on to show, such repentance occurs not as acknowledgement of God’s actual, historic displacement of these ‘sinful norms’ in Christ, but before Jesus’ revelation of ‘what man ought to be’ and ‘what God is beyond man’.23 The atonement simply is this revelation of an ideal human nature and the divine nature’s transcendence of sinful human history, which is tempered now only by God’s providential ‘trasmutation’ of sin and evil into good. For the purpose of this chapter, the crucial point is to recognize Yoder’s insight that such an account of justification is but one step removed from construing human sociality and politics as inevitably determined by human sin and the agonistic powers it unleashes in social life, since a grace that functions only as the disclosure of human failure cannot in any direct way factor into discussion about ‘responsible’ action in the public sphere. Noting that Ernst Troeltsch’s typological opposition of political responsibility and

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sectarian or monastic withdrawal gained influence through the Niebuhrs’ work, he characterizes the ethical upshot as follows: ‘Either one accepts, without serious qualification, the responsibility of politics, that is, of governing, with whatever means that takes, or one chooses a withdrawn position of either personal-monastic vocational or sectarian character which is “apolitical”’.24 Yoder’s response to this widespread sensibility in modern Christian ethics is not to defend the normativity of withdrawal, but to question the typology itself. As long as the typology remains intact, the working presumption will be that ‘the political’ is ‘best represented by what Jesus rejects’ – that is, that politics is statecraft.25 Politics thus names for Niebuhr, and the ‘realism’ his thought represents, an enclosed system of human power that orders social life through the agency of the state, whose fallen but necessary work alone is capable of securing social justice. Yoder also recognizes the fallenness and corruptibility of political systems, but situates human selfishness and the many violences enacted in personal, social and (inter)national relations within an alternative theological-political conceptuality, central to which is an account of God’s historic triumph in Christ over the destructive powers that are unleashed or legitimated where human charity and fidelity towards God and neighbour are lacking. Whereas for Niebuhr politics remains a non-eschatological enterprise governed most basically by the dominion of sin over social life and the necessary evils thereby legitimated, for Yoder politics names first of all the positive ordering of social relations by the power and grace of God. This work occurs in history  – in part, but by no means exhaustively in the work of the state – as part of the comprehensive eschatological drama in which God has reclaimed and is redeeming his creation by the Word that is Jesus Christ. All of this is important for understanding both the major emphases of Yoder’s exousiology as well as its place within his larger theological concerns. The preceding argument has identified several key theological convictions that led Yoder to criticize Niebuhrian sensibilities regarding the nature of social life and political power, and to begin to develop a more ‘biblically realistic’ and christologically centred theology of politics.26 Below (Part 2.I.B) I turn to another theologian whose work more directly informs Yoder’s theology of the powers, but to understand why and how it does so I first need to address one material specification of the criticisms outlined above. I have claimed

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that Yoder’s work challenges Niebuhrian realism on several related fronts: in following a Weberian conception of politics as statecraft it misconstrues the foundations of justice and humane social order, gives too much credence to the determination of human relationships by the powers of sin (as selfishness), and over-emphasizes the power of nation-states, all of which practically isolate the political realm from God’s historic work of redemption. The question that remains is why Yoder found this division of sociopolitical order and the order of redemption so problematic; what core elements of the Christian gospel does this kind of ‘realism’ ignore and thereby betray? Putting the question this way prepares us to grasp the precise nature of Yoder’s indebtedness to Hendrik Berkhof ’s groundbreaking exegesis of the Pauline principalities and powers. It does so because that reading foregrounds in a positive and direct manner the relation which Niebuhrian realism, as outlined above, can only cast negatively or derivatively: that is, the relation between the gospel of God’s reconciling grace and those historic powers – the entire complex of human institutional and governmental forces  – through which social relations are ordered and unified. Yoder frequently sets up this problem and the constructive alternative he seeks in terms of the ‘apolitical’ or ‘political’ nature of Jesus’ lordship.27 Within a Niebuhrian framework, rational reflection on humanity’s social experience teaches us that sin itself is the most determinative ‘social structure’, which entails, Yoder notes, the view that social institutions ‘are selfish neither by fluke nor by flaw but by nature’.28 The charge that Niebuhr’s Jesus (and thus much modern theology and ethics) is ‘apolitical’ means therefore that the grace God offers humanity in and through Jesus neither purges nor discredits this natural inclination of social relations towards (self-)destruction – ‘No, what Christian faith provides are resources for living with that sinfulness’.29 The material connection between Parts A and B of this section shows itself in Yoder’s own ‘Nein!’ to this deep-seated ‘pessimism about structures’, which in his view leaves human societies captive to essentially competitive institutional forces and thus politically dependent upon the human creation and mastery of techniques designed to secure and maintain relative justice in their midst.30 By contrast, Yoder’s Jesus is ‘political’ precisely because in his history God makes a way through and beyond such pessimism, establishing his kingdom as the foundation, limit and sustaining centre – the present hope and judgement –

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of all humane social order. Though Yoder’s christology and its relation to a social and political ethic certainly gained nuance throughout his career, from his earliest engagements with Barth and Niebuhr he sought to make a positive account of God’s reconciling work in Christ the basis for an ethic capable of theologically addressing the structural organization of social life – which again includes, but is not limited to, ‘politics’ as conceived in the Weberian tradition. The next Part shows how Hendrik Berkhof ’s reading of the Pauline powers, to which Yoder’s own understanding is greatly indebted, addresses precisely this question, and seeks to demonstrate why Yoder himself came to speak of the biblical powers as structures of creaturely life.

B. Pauline exousiology: Berkhof and Yoder Hendrik Berkhof ’s Christus en de Machten first appeared in print in 1953.31 Barth considered but then decided against including a German translation of the essay in his journal Theologische Studien. Berkhof reports Barth’s fear that he was ‘“mythologizing” the Powers too much, and that [Barth] could not approve of such a publication at a time when his own theology was under the crossfire of Bultmann and his disciples’. Despite his hesitation, a general sympathy with Berkhof ’s argument is evident in Barth’s lectures on the topic at the turn of the decade.32 Yoder discovered Berkhof ’s work around the same time, and his sympathy with Berkhof ’s treatment issued in his (much less hesitant) translation of Christus en de Machten into English.33 In the translator’s preface to Christ and the Powers, Yoder claims that mainstream Protestant theology’s ‘resolute ignorance’ of the New Testament’s talk of ‘principalities and powers’ has been, at least in part, a reflection of the West’s own sensibilities about what counts as believable. With ‘Santa Claus and spooks’, Yoder suggests, biblical teaching about the powers – viewed as an ontological scheme bound to an outdated cosmology or metaphysics – did not make the cut. Supposed ‘freedom from the form of Paul’s thought’ thus allowed insufficiently biblical philosophies of history, the state and culture to dominate the intellectual scene, and when their inability to provide a sophisticated theological analysis became clear, theologians seemed to stand again on this side of Lessing’s ditch. Yoder suggests that Hendrik Berkhof ’s short work on the powers  – because it began from the opposite assumptions that (1) the relevance of scripture (qua scripture) to a given topic of inquiry or moral

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problematic can only be judged after attending to what the texts say, and (2) that the apostle (qua apostle) ‘might know whereof he speaks’ – reintroduced into twentieth-century theology a sense of the doctrinal and exegetical resourcefulness of Paul’s powers-talk.34 While by no means unprecedented, Berkhof ’s work bears a great deal of responsibility for the renewal of this theme in modern biblical theology.35 The remainder of this part depicts how Yoder’s appropriation (and to some extent popularization)36 of Berkhof follows the insights enumerated above: the opening paragraphs emphasize Yoder’s methodological sympathy with Berkhof ’s theological exegesis, while the latter attend to Yoder’s development of Berkhof ’s view that the biblical powers should be conceived as structures of creaturely life.

Berkhof and theological exegesis Yoder’s account of the powers nowhere seeks to establish the etymological or intellectual origins of the Pauline view in an exhaustive or definitive manner. His most extended treatment of the topic is typical of his usual approach: it is concerned not with ‘explicating the Pauline doctrine’ in itself, but with ‘illuminating the way in which this doctrine meshes with modern understandings and questions’, particularly with theological questions about the meaning of sociopolitical ‘structures’ and ‘power’.37 Theological exegesis must, of course, bear some organic relation to the texts that norm its reflection, or else it faces the charge of arbitrary speculation; yet different kinds of reading (i.e. different disciplinary pursuits) require methods appropriate to their particular aims, and Yoder shared Berkhof ’s interpretive judgement that theological exegesis begins to discover ‘meaning’ by materially attending to scriptural texts as witnesses to and resonances of the gospel of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ.38 Commenting on the various biblical terms associated with the powers, Yoder states: Berkhof .  .  . suggests that probably for Paul each of these several terms had its own very precise and technical meaning; that they are not simply synonyms standing parallel. Still the best we can do today is to come to some understanding about the general trend of meaning which the total body of thought has for us. We may quite agree with Berkhof that Paul probably had such a very precise understanding in mind; but it could be well pointed out that it would hardly matter if he had not.39

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Such a claim is exegetically defensible only on the basis of the theological conviction that the primary significance of Paul’s thought for the church is bound to the unity of scripture itself, as a normative means by which God’s one Word sustains the life of God’s people.40 This conviction is embodied in the expectation that scripture, read in the light of the church’s confession of faith in Christ, contains its own ‘inner logic and coherence’, not separate from but manifest precisely in and through the human and so historically particular texts Christians read as God’s word. Faced with the inadequacy of modern subjectivist accounts of evil on the one hand, and the assumed irrelevance of biblical cosmology and its powers on the other,41 Yoder found in Berkhof ’s exousiology (and then practiced in his own) a mode of exegesis that, while certainly not disavowing the significance of historical criticism for conceptual refinement, does not reduce the salient features of the biblical text to authorial intention. Rather, Berkhof and Yoder seek theological clarity (and thus contemporary moral ‘relevance’) vis-à-vis their subject-matter by returning to scripture as the fount and test of Christian doctrine, with scripture itself here understood as a living testimony to Christ’s lordship over and throughout human history.42 That such exegesis is bound to the text of scripture exemplifies a kind of epistemological realism  – the recognition that the internal logic of scripture is manifested in and through rather than in spite of the contingent and diverse texts that compose the canon. This is one reason why Yoder’s approach to biblical interpretation, which he often referred to as a kind of ‘biblical realism’, considers modern exegetical techniques an aid rather than a hindrance to the hearing of God’s Word, even as it (theologically) distances itself from the discursive normativity and conceptual autonomy modern hermeneutics grants these text- and historical-critical practices.43 Yoder’s ‘biblical realism’ presupposes that the need for historical continuity (between author, text and reader) sets limits to faithful or even intelligible interpretations, and is thus not reducible to a wholly constructivist method; yet that it is bound to the text as scripture or apostolic testimony to a particular divine work means that the coherence between ‘Paul’ and ‘us’  – between how the biblical writers did and how we should conceive of the powers – need not be restricted to either their or our subjective experience, but is located rather in the fact that in and through his own historic particularity, the apostle gave witness to the one power of God in

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Christ, such that, by faith’s recognition of that same power as a communicative presence today, the biblical witness proves binding upon and illuminative for our own time and place.44 Translation and/or interpretation is intrinsic to the divine Word’s speaking from the world of the bible to the present, but the fundamental grammar of a faithful reading or hearing of the Word resides not in any one interpretive technique, but in faith’s trust that it is the (narratively specific) Jew from Nazareth in and through whom God speaks. This goes some way towards explaining why Yoder  – who was neither deficient as a ‘critical’ exegete (as the largely exegetical tracts of The Politics of Jesus suffice to show),45 nor unfamiliar with the wide range of scholarly opinion on the biblical powers  – was usually content to reference a host of biblical scholars whose work lent support to his basic approach to the subject.46 That approach was, in short, a theological appropriation and elaboration of this specific biblical vocabulary, for the sake of specifying the morally salient or problematic features of the forces and institutions through which human social relations are ordered and unified. It is an instance of theological exegesis that depends for its critical coherence only on the minimal affirmation that the powers may  – not exhaustively, but at least in certain respects  – be considered as themselves, or as analogous to, such structures (e.g. ‘the law’). A simple reference to ‘the governing authorities’ of Romans 13.1 is not enough to prove that the powers must be equated with forces of this kind or the sociopolitical institutions through which they work; yet when seen alongside Jesus’ recognition of Pilate’s authority (the exousia of Jn. 19), and the description of the powers as that which ‘crucified’ Jesus (1 Cor. 2.8) and was ‘exposed’ by his death (Col. 2.15), such reference suffices to claim that there can be no serious ‘biblical view’ of the powers which makes little or no theological sense of their relation to the rulers and authorities tangibly present in human history.47 Berkhof was, admittedly, more concerned than Yoder to establish the contextual origins of the Pauline view.48 For example, Berkhof ’s confident derivation of the salient biblical terms from the ‘comparative religious background’ of Jewish apocalyptic led to what is perhaps an over-exaggeration of the ‘non-angelic’ (because impersonal) character of the Pauline powers.49 Rather than simply denying ‘the equation “Powers = Angels”’ as a narrow reduction of Paul’s view, Berkhof thought it ‘obvious’ – in lieu of the difference

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in emphasis between Pauline and Jewish apocalyptic conceptuality  – to disregard altogether the identification of the Pauline powers with ‘angels’, insisting that the powers ‘form a category of their own’.50 The problem with this stance is that it appears to be only by way of comparative ‘religious history’ (Religionsgeschichte) that one could determine how to understand not just the powers, but their relation to ‘angels in the ordinary sense of the word’.51 Berkhof rightly decries the ‘startling agreement’ on this point between ‘traditional theology’ and ‘research in comparative religion’52  – namely, the assumption that the powers are self-evidently a species of ‘angelic being’ – yet the biblical-theological particularity of his reading then fails, as he goes on to stress the originality of Paul’s doctrine of the powers without asking whether theology might also find in the biblical depiction of the angelic ministry a unique conception and concern. Berkhof ’s recognition of a congruence (in Rom. 8.38) between the ‘function’ of angels (as ‘messengers’) and that of the powers’ ‘mediation’ of God’s work does, however, push him in the direction of Barth, whose renewal of exegetical angelology led to a quite pronounced departure from metaphysical speculation regarding angelic existence in se. Barth is named as the ‘only theologian who . . . has noticed the problems that arise here’,53 yet Berkhof remains unconvinced by Barth’s account precisely because it maps the opposition of created and fallen powers onto the traditional angelic-demonic duality.54 It seems there is less material discrepancy than Berkhof thinks between Barth’s angelology and his own account of those cosmic-historical powers that fulfil a certain role in God’s creative work, from which they may historically ‘rebel’. Yet Berkhof states: ‘The fact that Barth, with all other theologians before him, understands the Powers as angels drove him to the artifice of two classes of powers’.55 One can only assume that Berkhof – who treats the powers as simultaneously ‘created’ and ‘fallen’, and thus admits a dialectical element intrinsic to their activity  – found Barth’s construction ‘very forced’ because it locates this opposition in ‘two opposing kinds of being’, whereas Berkhof does not so identify the powers’ work with their being as to locate the distinction between created and fallen powers on an ontological level.56 The point here is not to chastise Berkhof for making substantive judgements based upon standard exegetical practice (i.e. deriving textual ‘meaning’ vis-à-vis comparative Religionsgeschichte), but simply to note that because he does not

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look for the same ‘originality’ in Paul’s angelology as he does with respect to Paul’s exousiology, the conceptual range of Berkhof ’s account of the powers – which must then be opposed to the particular angelology Paul adopts  – is unduly limited. Yoder’s exousiology, by contrast, simply relies on the plausibility of the thesis that there are textual grounds for identifying the historical role of sociopolitical (not to mention cosmological, moral and religious) structures with the work of the biblical powers. With Berkhof and Barth, Yoder saw his theological critique of power-structures as one facet of the biblical depiction of the world (kosmos) in its rebellion against God, and yet – unlike Berkhof – did not see the need to exclude from or oppose to this cosmic-structural account the biblical description of spiritual powers whose service of or opposition to God’s work is rightly judged ‘angelic’ or ‘demonic’. Berkhof ’s account did not oppose ‘structural’ and ‘spiritual’ powers per se, and the prejudice we have identified here is only in respect of his basic refusal of the categories of ‘angelic’ and ‘demonic’ power. His difference from Yoder (and Barth) on this point is simply that he identified Paul’s (definitely ‘spiritual’) powers with modern structures in a manner that a priori excluded angelic ministry and demonic rebellion as appropriate descriptions of their activity. Indeed, Yoder’s basic sympathy with apocalyptic interpreters of Paul concerning the cosmic scope of his gospel is one reason why he questioned any interpretation of the powers that entailed a strong division between the ‘realms’, and thus historical influence, of spiritual and material forces.57 This understanding of Yoder’s position is supported by the fact that he made much not only of Berkhof ’s thesis but also that of Oscar Cullmann,58 whose view of the powers (in contrast to Berkhof ’s) insisted upon the necessary conceptual distinction of the (angelic) spiritual powers themselves from the material institutions or human agents in or through which they worked.59 Despite his practical indifference to reconstructing the historical origins of Paul’s thought on this topic  – which may understandably be regarded as exegetically minimalist (or worse, naïve) from a modern text-critical perspective – Yoder’s deep sympathy with and argument for the hermeneutical aptitude of Berkhof ’s account consists in the theological use he makes of it. Before charting the dogmatic role of the powers with regard to his doctrine of creation, the remainder of this part lays out the basic contours of Yoder’s

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emphasis on the powers as historical ‘structures’. Achieving a basic grasp of this structural dimension – to be materially filled out in Part II of this chapter and in Chapter 3  – is important for understanding Yoder’s exousiology as indebted to and theologically developing Berkhof ’s reading of Paul.

Berkhof ’s cosmic-structural exegesis As noted above, Berkhof accounted for scripture’s historical focus by speaking of the ‘world powers’ as structures of creaturely life. In light of 1 Corinthians 2.8’s declaration that the ‘rulers of this age .  .  . crucified the Lord of glory’, Berkhof conceded a ‘personal aspect’ to the powers, yet noted that the Pauline emphasis here (as also with regard to the stoicheia of Col. 2 and Gal. 4.1–11) fell not on the powers’ ‘personal-spiritual nature’, but rather ‘on the fact that these Powers condition earthly life’.60 Berkhof alludes to Cullmann’s interpretation in claiming that ‘in and behind the visible authorities’ of Jewish piety and Roman law, ‘Paul sees higher powers working’.61 He thus interprets as one complex but interrelated field of agents the spiritual ‘rulers (archontes) of this age’, visible human ‘authorities’ (exousiai), and the basic ‘elements’ (stoicheia) of the cosmos. In the first instance, Berkhof ’s association of the Pauline powers with historical structures is exegetically derived from the relation of the stoicheia of Colossians 2 (vv. 8, 20) – themselves aligned with enslaving human ‘precepts’ or customs – to the ‘rulers and authorities’ (tas arxas kai tas exousías) Christ’s death overcame and exposed (2.15). The religio-ethical ‘structures within which the pagan and Jewish societies of the day lived and moved’, from which the Colossian community had been liberated by Jesus’ death, yet to which they risked becoming subject again, are described as ‘the way in which the principalities and powers rule’ over human life outside of Christ; ‘or rather the powers are the structures’.62 Berkhof ’s understanding of the powers as historical structures includes a definite spiritual (or immaterial) component. In part due to his interpretation of the stoicheia in Colossians and Galatians  – which could include both astrological forces as well as a broader Hellenistic sense of the basic ‘principles’ or foundations of human life63 – he views the powers as functioning for Paul in a manner analogous to what modern Protestant theology has traditionally called creation’s ‘orders’;64 the powers comprise the ‘invisible background’ to which visible creaturely life is bound and upon which it is dependent.65 Such

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an account is broad enough to include numerous forms of power, from the cosmological to the political. To cite one example, Berkhof speaks of time and space, of ‘[d]ivers human traditions, the course of earthly life as conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state’. 66 Any such power may come to function in a particular context as a divinely given, morally authoritative or practically necessary structure of social life, and thus be (consciously or subconsciously) counted among ‘the invisible weight-bearing substratum of the world’ which constitute the true ‘underpinnings’ of creaturely existence. Berkhof ’s equivocation in saying that the structures that mediate order and unity to human life are for Paul ‘the way the powers work’, or that the powers are themselves such structures, seems to be grounded in his view that the existence of structural forces in the cosmos is itself part of God’s creative intent  – the formal legitimacy such powers bear, the ordering function they fulfil for human societies is itself a manifestation of God’s positive will; thus their material correspondence to a theology of ‘the Orders’.67 Yet Berkhof also introduces a christological norm for understanding any particular social structure as fulfilling or deviating from its own creaturely ‘destiny’. Without providing a positive account or typology of specific ‘created’ structures, Berkhof sees the structural function itself bespeaking God’s creative intent for and gracious provision of a shared human life before God, while designating the potential for all structures to become ‘tyrants over our lives’ as an issue of whether and how a given pattern ‘preserve[s] us in Christ’s love’.68 Any means of creaturely order and social unity, in ‘every realm of life’, may become one of the demonic ‘powers which unify men, yet separate them’ from God’s love for creation through idolatrous detraction from the revelatory Word of Jesus Christ.69 This observation is important in order to pick up on Berkhof ’s working distinction between (creaturely) ‘structures’ and (fallen) ‘powers’ – a conceptual distinction that, as will be shown in the next part, Yoder himself adopts. This distinction stems from the formal identification of God’s creative will and providential activity with the historical ordering of earthly life. In Berkhof ’s case, despite a concern to distinguish the Pauline powers from the angelic ministry, he nevertheless identifies their proper ‘service’ of God with the creaturely order earthly life receives in its dependence upon the ‘heavenly

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part’ of the cosmos. Yet the particular form human life receives through its various structural powers – the kind of social order the powers embody and perpetuate – can be theologically evaluated only from the standpoint of God’s self-revelation in Christ. The crucified and risen Jesus is himself ‘the ground and goal of the universe’. He is thus also the ‘ground and goal’ of the invisible cosmic powers that, even bound up with the ubiquitous and ‘enigmatic fact of sin’, still function in human history as ‘the framework of creation’, exercising an ordering function and ‘preserving’ creaturely life ‘from its disintegration’.70 Berkhof interprets the stoicheia of Galatians 4 – which functionally parallel the Law as ‘tutor’ and (more severely) as ‘master’ – as indicating how the powers that encompass human life ‘before’ or outside of Christ’s reconciling work may still be included within the grace of God’s providential maintenance of creaturely being, precisely for the sake of its redemption. According to Berkhof, persons ‘instinctively entrust themselves’ to these world-ordering powers not because the specific structural forms they represent or embody are actually good for them, but because they stand – as surrogate tutors, rulers, ‘guardians and trustees’  – in contrast to the ‘chaos’ of utter godlessness or nihilistic self-determination.71 Understanding the Pauline powers as forces that structure human life in this way demands a christologically grounded awareness of the specific forms of order and unity human life receives in different contexts. To so distinguish beneficent creaturely ‘structures’ and fallen ‘powers’ is then a way of naming the concrete forms of human enslavement ‘apart from Christ’. The powers are the false gods and promises to which persons and societies entrust their lives and so become enslaved, the world-ordering and unifying authorities which, detached from the work of Christ’s Spirit, become a spiritual malaise that may and does emerge from and attack all fronts. Against the backdrop of ancient Jewish and Greek conceptualities,72 Berkhof saw in Paul’s gospel a ‘new burden of meaning’, one that discovered the world’s ‘myriad forms of bondage’ anew in the light of Christ’s liberation.73 What is pertinent to our analysis here are the theological judgements made in Berkhof ’s exegesis that Yoder’s own exousiology adopts and elaborates. The crucial point is to recognize that Berkhof ’s structural interpretation precludes an emphasis on the angelic nature of the powers, favouring instead a theological account that materially follows scripture’s own interest in the way in which a vast array of historical forces condition

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human life, either in accordance with or in detraction from the purposes of God revealed in Christ. When Romans 8.38 is read alongside the aforementioned texts, the powers’ influence is seen to be ‘as broad and deep as life itself, and as especially connected with human affairs’.74 Thus to speak of the powers as structures is not to exclude, in principle, more traditionally conceived (‘spiritual’) powers from one’s purview; it is rather to emphasize, with Barth, the recognition that as the whole person is the object of the powers’ work, so the cosmic-historical context of shared human life  – particularly the institutional and legal matrixes that order social relations – must be theologically accounted for as an essential frame of reference. It is precisely this latter emphasis that Yoder’s exousiology hones in upon and theologically develops.

Yoder’s development of Berkhof: Exousiology as a theology of ‘power-structures’ In this part, I attempt to show how and why Yoder is using the term ‘structure’ as a description of the biblical powers’ agency. Doing so helps clarify, in light of Niebuhr and Berkhof, the sense in which Yoder’s exousiology is an instance of ‘political’ theology, in a broad and a narrow sense. The goal here is to clarify that even though Yoder understands the Christian narrative of redemption as itself a political drama  – thus situating the entire range of biblical powers within an account of Christ’s lordship  – Yoder’s exousiology nevertheless focuses upon social and political forms of power, re-narrating modern language about power-structures as mediations of specific forms of social order and ideological unity within this larger theological narrative. We are now in a position to understand Yoder’s own account of the powers in its indebtedness to Berkhof ’s exegesis. To grasp how Yoder develops (rather than simply appropriates) Berkhof ’s structural account one must recognize the sincerity with which he takes the biblical language of the powers’ ‘governance’ or ‘dominion’. Like his theology in general, Yoder’s exousiology is rightly described as ‘political’ insofar as it intends to express the meaning of human social life in fidelity or opposition to God’s reign  – the divine ordering of creaturely life by and for the particular way of being-human revealed in Jesus. In Yoder’s work, the powers plays an essential part of such expression, for to so speak of the powers takes up again the apostolic witness to the resurrected and

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ascended Christ’s lordship over human history, by theologically referring to the creaturely forces that bind human persons together, directing and determining their lives in specific ways. For Yoder, to conceive the powers-as-structures is an entailment of the character of God’s salvific work: the ‘structural’ dimension signals the totalizing scope of the fallen powers’ intended mastery over human life – its character as a world-ordering affair. The death-dealing ‘structure’ such powers provide thus negatively reflects the sociopolitical character of the divine reign ushered in, by and as the life of God’s Messiah. The new order established by the Servant is not limited to the life of inward faith. . . . His sway is not limited to the civil/corporate life of the believing people. When the apostle Paul speaks of ‘principalities and powers, thrones, . . . dominions . . .,’ it is to claim that even the cosmos is shaken by the cross. There is a patiently growing scholarly consensus to the effect that in Paul’s ‘exousiology’ we have to do with an alternative political cosmology or philosophy of history, neither sacral imperial order nor ‘national liberation,’ but a universe being reordered by the Word of the resurrection.75

To treat the powers in this way is a theological reminder that one’s conception of creaturely rebellion, because necessarily derived from the positive revelation of the gospel, must bear some (even if wholly negative) resemblance to the character of human faith in Christ and life within God’s reign. In other words, Yoder’s account of power-structures, or of spiritual powers whose historical influence includes a ‘structural’ dimension, stems from a recognition that faith in Christ – as well as that which hinders or obscures it – encompasses the totality of human being and activity, and that the event of fidelity to God’s kingdom – and, again, of infidelity – does not occur solely within the realm of subjective interiority or individual will, but is a living phenomenon among persons who are constitutively (rather than ‘accidentally’) related to and dependent upon one another and the material cosmos. In short, Yoder’s exousiology is ‘structural’ because it is concerned with the forces that condition human society by providing meaning and order to our common life; at the same time, it is ‘political’ because the ordering of human society is never a morally neutral affair – structural powers either serve or hinder common goods and human freedom; they may encourage or discourage the just works for which we are set free. Theologically speaking, this sociopolitical dimension is simply an issue

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of whether the works of the historical forces that structure social life are, in any given instance, to be construed as a service to God’s bringing about a new humanity in Christ, or as moments of the great creaturely rebellion against that divine-human reality, and so as claimants to the feigned dominion and authority of an idol. The structural dimension of creaturely rebellion is then a necessary complement – not a replacement or exclusion – of traditional biblical language of ‘the heart’, and of traditional (Western) theological emphasis upon the human will. Yoder makes this point in Politics and elsewhere: ‘the fallenness of the world is not just the fallenness of individual sinners; the world as structures is awry’.76 To be faithful to Yoder’s intent, one must recognize his refusal to see the individual/personal and the sociopolitical/structural as two (polarized) ends of a spectrum, such that the theologian proper may focus upon the former (under the guise of an extractable ‘spirituality’) while the moral theologian or social ethicist need be concerned only with the latter. Rather, there is for Yoder a certain prioritizing and (re)contextualizing of these two dimensions of creaturely being when exousiology is seen as one aspect of a historicized christological realism. In particular, Paul’s apocalyptic cosmology ‘is not interested in dealing with realities that are “out there” but do not transform our situation, nor can it conceive of our situations as being transformed by the mere force of our own believing’.77 Rather, just as God’s purposes for human life have an intrinsically social shape and political dimension,78 the human agent is in scripture always one agent (even if a, or at times even the central agent) in the context of a larger cosmic drama, a drama in which the human appears not only as the subject of history, but as a creature subject to its own acts as well as the acts of a host of other agents – most decisively, but not exclusively, God.79 It is thus clear that, for Yoder, the term ‘structures’ signals one dimension of an account of created reality in which the agency of the individual is intrinsically related to – shaped by and shaping – the existence and acts of other human beings, as well as a plethora of suprapersonal powers, including visible human ‘authorities’, the social institutions these rulers embody and represent, and the ideological principles and practical foundations that function as sociocultural norms and undergird any people’s way of life. As Douglas Harink points out, despite continued debate over the nature of the biblical ‘powers “in themselves”, most exegetes agree that [they] have some relationship to and influence on the

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structured character of the cosmos and human society’.80 Even exegetes who do not identify the powers with historical structures regard this biblical idiom as a way of describing ‘how human life is ordered by and subject to social and political realities not wholly under human control’.81 Harink rightfully stresses the apocalyptic-cosmological framework of Yoder’s exousiology: the conceptual link between ‘powers’ and ‘structures’ in Yoder’s work is entailed by his view that modern insight into the formative or ordering capacities of sociopolitical systems and institutions gives expression to a major concern of biblical cosmology. This is the truth that the life of human beings is structured – given order, coherence and meaning – by diverse institutions and systems of power, which are themselves dependent upon and subject to a vast array of cosmic-historical forces (e.g. the resources and laws of ‘nature’); and that as such, these structures of creaturely life are theologically significant sites of either human fidelity to God and love of neighbour, or of human rebellion and injustice. That the powers are part and parcel of a theological cosmology pushes us into the doctrine of creation, and the next part explores Yoder’s account of the powers’ role within this doctrinal locus. Yet first it is important to consider whether the term ‘structure’ in Yoder’s usage functions as a strict analogy to what the biblical powers in fact are, or whether the powers are to be theologically conceived as structures of creaturely life themselves. On the surface, Yoder’s description of the biblical powers in structural terms is ambiguous. This ambiguity may be traced back to Berkhof ’s own formulation of Paul’s logic, as noted above: the social structures within which the Colossians ‘lived and moved’ are described as ‘the way in which the principalities and powers rule over men; or rather the powers are the structures’.82 How is this crucial ‘or’ to be understood? Berkhof ’s exegesis clearly favours the latter interpretation  – for Paul, the powers are creaturely structures  – though he nowhere denies the appropriation of the term as a modern concept.83 This articulation betrays the conceptual tension inherent in any ‘translation’ or ‘expression’ of biblical categories into a different philosophical idiom. Hence the questions remains: should theology conceive the biblical powers as realities analogous to sociopolitical structures – as the latter term has been conceived and defined by certain strands of modern social and political science – or are the powers to be theologically conceived as themselves being structures of human social life? Yoder’s usage reflects both convictions: there is a range of

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proper conceptual overlap between a biblical-theological focus on the nexuses of sociopolitical power and modern ‘social-scientific’ interest – governed by its own disciplinary norms  – in the formative power and ordering capacity of the same or similar institutional phenomena.84 Yet, with Berkhof, Yoder understands Paul’s discussion of the principalities and powers as exousiology – that is, as itself a theological envisioning of human history’s structural agents and capacities, one inherently demanding reflection upon the (revealed) nature of social and political relations as sites of creaturely power inseparable from the gospel’s claim. The most decisive characteristic of these powers is thus the manner of their involvement in God’s own lordship over and in human history. Before moving on to the next part, in which the latter claim will be developed, a brief discussion of Nathan Kerr’s recent account of Yoder’s exousiology will serve to clarify the former point of ‘analogy’. At several points Yoder refers to the powers as ‘roughly the equivalent’ of ‘structures’ in modern parlance.85 For him this concept expresses awareness of ‘the dimensions of cohesiveness and purposefulness which hold together human affairs beyond the strictly personal level, especially in realms such as that of the state and certain other areas of culture’.86 Thus he accounts for his chapter on ‘Christ and Power’ in Politics not as a strict ‘exposition’ of the Pauline view, but rather as an attempt at ‘illuminating the way in which [Paul’s] doctrine meshes with’ modern insight into the ‘patternedness’ of concrete sociopolitical and sociocultural phenomena; and this because the latter illustrates the ‘complexity’ of the apostle’s own categorization of modes of power.87 It should, however, be noted as methodologically significant that Yoder saw his aims here as showing how Paul’s doctrine illuminates or sheds light on ‘modern understandings and questions’, rather than simply ‘parallels’ or ‘confirms’ them, and that the task of addressing such questions itself presupposes a coherent exposition of Paul. Hence Yoder’s claim, when commenting on the ‘Christ and Power’ chapter of Politics: ‘The effort of this chapter must therefore be devoted not to explicating the Pauline doctrine – for this exposition is by now widely understood and accepted by scholars in the field – but to illuminating the way in which this doctrine meshes with modern understandings and questions’.88 Yoder’s language here is, of course, misleading just to the extent that ‘Christ and Power’ does constitute an argument for the hermeneutical adequacy of his interpretation of the Pauline powers (that is why one of the aims of this

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chapter is to sketch the basic features of Yoder’s own exegesis as a theological deployment of Christian doctrine). The point made here is that there is for Yoder a discursive analogy between the biblical powers and the modern concept of ‘structures’, yet the overlap is found by moving from a biblical-theological matrix to a contemporary intellectual register. Nathan Kerr’s account of Yoder’s ‘apocalyptic historicism’, central to which is a reading of Yoder’s theology of the powers, insightfully brings out this discursive analogy. Drawing on a reading of Yoder offered by Daniel Barber,89 Kerr discerns in Yoder’s exousiology the admission of a ‘functional’ similarity between the biblical powers and a modern conception of sociopolitical structures: what the powers do for Paul – the role they play, the pattern they execute in his theological cosmology  – is not unlike ‘the way in which certain customs, institutions, and ideologies function for modern social and political science’.90 In Kerr’s terms, the analogy consists in that both the powers and modern sociopolitical structures ‘presuppose their own universal coherence and self-maintenance’. Both are conceived as enacting ‘certain pre-individual and “universal” modes of social organization and operation, which are de facto sovereign with respect to the particular and the contingent’.91 Here Kerr is picking up on and elaborating Yoder’s claim that the concept of a structure serves to indicate ‘the patterns or networks or regularities that transcend or precede or condition the individual phenomena we can immediately perceive’.92 This leads Kerr to state that, following Yoder, one can describe the ‘concrete socio-political function of “the Powers”’ as ‘ideological’: [T]hat is, the powers function to provide the given structural ‘handle’ by which one can ‘get a hold on’ the course of history and move it in the ‘right direction’. . . . In short, what the powers presume is that the particulars of history are themselves to be related to some more universal reality or goal, which relation involves its own immanently determined nexus of causality, the proper negotiation of which is determinative of the powers’ political ‘dominion or sovereignty’.93

Kerr’s description of the sociopolitical function of the powers as ideological is helpful, insofar as it signals that for both theology and the relevant strands of social-science, what is at issue in the work of the powers and in power-structures is the enactment, at particular historical sites, of a false transcendence. In both conceptual registers there is an agency at work irreducible to particular agents,

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though it stands in a definite relation to them; and this relation is ‘ideological’ not just in the benign sense of contingent perspectives that just so happen to have gained prominence in a given time and place. Rather, the concept of ideology here functions more negatively as a determination of human history through the imposition of the will of the transcendent  – however the latter is conceived.94 Thus, for Kerr, that the powers ‘function according to’ a kind of universalized ‘priority’ over the particular and contingent means that the institutional sites and contingent sources of sociopolitical life come to order human agency by means of its negation – they are ‘sovereign over’ human life and history, conditioning the possible laws of action in any particular context. There is much in Yoder’s work, even beyond the seminal chapter on ‘Christ and Power’ on which Kerr’s reading heavily depends, that confirms the basic contours of this account.95 In The Christian Witness to the State, for example, Yoder’s reference to E. Gordon Rupp’s list of ‘ ’Anities and ’Alities, and ’Oligies and ’Isms . . .’ suggests that he understood a doctrine of the powers as constituting a kind of discursive parallel to philosophical ideology critique.96 Both discourses attempt to name, albeit in different ways, the ruling spirits of the age. Also in line with the above structural account, Yoder states that the powers do not refer directly to ‘specific people, things, or events’ but rather to ‘suprapersonal’ realities (not mere ‘ideas’) that ‘lend coherence’ to human life and so exercise ‘a real power over human decision’.97 Kerr is thus right to read Yoder as positing a link between the powers and sociopolitical structures insofar as both concepts describe modes or sites of creaturely power, phenomena that transcend personal agency yet condition human behaviour in fundamental ways, by providing meaning and order to social life. This account certainly aids an understanding of Yoder’s exousiology, by clarifying the phenomenological grounds on which Yoder was wont to speak of as at least a ‘formal’ overlap between biblical powers discourse and this (admittedly generic) account of ‘social structures’. Yet it does not settle the question of why this analogy – if the powers do indeed function in such a way for Paul – bears theological import. Indeed, Kerr’s own description of the aims of Yoder’s exousiology begs for clarification: he admits that Yoder is not practicing ‘strict exegesis’, but rather attempting to show how ‘the idiom of apostolic apocalyptic’, or the theological cosmology in which the powers reside, calls into question the ‘universal-historical logic of “power and causation”’ that animates modern conceptions of politics and historical

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agency.98 Yet without doing exousiology as exegesis, without a clear statement of how the Pauline powers themselves ‘function’, the risk is that the discursive analogy  – the structural ‘parallel’ between the powers and sociopolitical structures  – itself becomes the most determinative feature of the powers’ work, muting the wider biblical-theological context in which they appear. The careful reader will, however, discern a basic theological truth in Kerr’s reading: namely, that Yoder’s insight into the structural function of the biblical powers revolves around the human exoneration of certain nexuses of creaturely power, their becoming ‘sovereign’ with respect to the limits and possibilities of human agency, through their self-referential determination of the human good. The theological claim is then that this (self-)exaltation consists in their being poised as ‘universally’ relevant – the most basic ‘threads of meaning’ for human life, the foundations of human life’s coherence and unity, the systemic keys to all ‘causal effectiveness’ in the world. Kerr rightly recognizes that this truth is theological, rather than simply a discursive analogy to modern thought, because in identifying this moment of creaturely (self-)exaltation as an instance of injustice, and thus as rebellion against God, Yoder invokes the gospel’s declaration of Jesus’s own particular transcendence of totalizing systems of power. We see, then, that Yoder is interested in the structural analogy insofar as it displays how the venerated ‘foundations’ of sociopolitical power and effective causation for modern thought are not at all unrelated to the gospel, but are in fact addressed by it and, from within Paul’s christological (re-)envisioning of reality, set within a different account of creaturely dis/order. As Kerr states, for Yoder Jesus’ life and death are neither positively nor negatively determined by the powers; he ‘challenges’ and proves victorious over them because he is in history as one whose own life ‘is irreducible to the powers at both an operative and constitutive level’.99 This means that neither Christ’s work (‘operation’) nor his person (‘constitution’) are determined by humanity’s being-in-sin; that his life-history is not trapped within the systemic rebellion and structural injustice that stem from and perpetuate Adamic humanity, for he is himself the presence and enactment in world-history of an altogether different order of act and being: he is in human history as one ‘independent of the universalist pretensions of the principalities and powers inasmuch as [his history] is at once . . . conditioned by and constitutive of that transcendent

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reality which is beyond the powers as prior to them  – the reign of God’s agape’.100 What is missing in Kerr’s account of Yoder at this point is the admission that this negative state of affairs, the particular mode of transcendence the powers enact – their totalizing self-exaltation or idolization – is derivative and not ontologically basic to the powers’ creaturely existence. Kerr recognizes that the rebellion of the powers consists in their negation of ‘contingency’ – of the well-being and concrete needs of particular persons – yet without an affirmative description of the positive function thereby negated, he risks short-changing Yoder’s exousiology by rendering the powers’ God-given existence in creation a mere negative image of their historical rebellion. If we take Barth and/or Yoder as exemplary, any account of the powers as essentially fallen or rebellious, lacking any positive account of the powers’ primal commission or function within God’s good creation, will prove christologically unacceptable. Such an account may allow space for ideological critique, but it does not find its basis in nor does it lead to praise of the good works of God that sustain creaturely life, holding it open to and for new life. Kerr neither has himself nor does he portray Yoder as having such an ‘essentialist’ account of the fallen powers, but I now turn to take up where his account leaves off, by arguing that, for Yoder, the historical rebellion of the powers is a perversion of God’s own ordering of creaturely life, which ordering the powers not only negate, but in whose service they find their raison d´être.

II. Created and fallen powers So far it has been shown that Yoder’s focus on power-structures casts in a decidedly political tone the breadth of Berkhof ’s exousiology, within which we find cosmic-historical forces (of ‘nature’), visible human ‘authorities’ or rulers, as well as the ideological principles or practical foundations of social life. Like Berkhof, Yoder focuses on historical structures as spiritual powers, clearly resonating with Barth’s exegesis of the powers’ ‘angelic’ ministry and its ‘demonic’ opposition. At this point, we may provisionally offer a dialogical thesis: for Barth and Yoder, exousiology contributes to a Christian ethic by describing how social and political structures – which are never simply material

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or empirically individuated (their phenomenological complexity is part of the reason for adopting the term ‘structure’ to begin with) – themselves operate as spiritual powers by virtue of their relation to Christ’s work. A solid basis for this claim in Barth’s work has been laid in Chapter 1, and Chapters 3 and 4 further prove the overlap in this respect between our thinkers. The remainder of this chapter provides a basis for this dialogue by reading Yoder through the same doctrinal or thematic framework followed in Chapter 1: having covered Yoder’s basic account of the powers as fulfilling a christologically determined function, at once spiritual and political (compare with Part 1.I), we now turn to consider the powers’ positive determination by God’s own ordering of creaturely life (Part 1.II), and the demonic refusal which marks creation as fallen (Part 1.III).

A. The givenness of power-structures In Yoder’s writing the powers’ indelible association with God’s creative activity is what conceptually binds the cosmic scope of Paul’s gospel to the powers’ structural dimension. To speak of the powers as creaturely structures, or as ‘the structures of creaturely existence’,101 is to admit a reason for their existence in God’s eternal purposes for creatures; it is to recognize that the corrupt forces that oppress and enslave humankind do not subsist in and of themselves, but may only be perversions or obfuscations of a preceding and positive creaturely function that serves God’s own good fashioning of and provision for human-historical life. As the Augustinian tradition has declared in its own way, the powers, like all manifestations of evil by and within creation, are parasitic on the good. In Yoder’s language, creaturely life ‘is not sustained arbitrarily, immediately, and erratically by an unbroken succession of new divine interventions’.102 Rather, God himself orders the world in Christ, and the powers-as-structures are, in that first and primal moment, the ‘mediate instances’,103 the ‘network of norms and regularities’,104 by which God unifies and preserves creaturely life in him. This original, positive role the powers have within God’s own creative work is, however, perpetually obscured and negated by their share in creaturely rebellion.105 Thus to speak of the powers as fallen structures, as structures of dominion, is to recognize the utter corruption of the powers’ primal creaturely

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vocation; it is to conceive of them in their fatal connection with rebellious humankind, to locate them squarely in a world-history moved by and towards its own disintegration. One of the key insights of Yoder’s exousiology is that it seeks to retain at all points this dialectic of creation and fall: properly speaking, the powers are the concrete ways in which the structures of God’s good creation confront and appear to fallen and rebellious humankind. ‘In themselves’ – that is, in their original and intended place within God’s own creative work – the powers are not gods or lords of anything, they exercise no ‘rule’ over human history in any direct sense, no sovereignty with respect to human being and activity, but exist only as traces, signs and messengers of the rule of God, ministers of ‘the reign of order’ which is in Christ ‘a divine gift’ and service to human life.106 In uncharacteristically abstract language, Yoder states: ‘All these [religious, intellectual, moral, political] structures can be conceived of in their general essence as parts of a good creation’.107 My view of Yoder’s intent here is that this ‘general essence’ is not primal in the sense of a pre- or a-historical metaphysical substance, but as the vocation all historical power finds within the originary and final claim of God, executed in and as the humanity of Christ, on every existent power-structure. This claim, at once primal and eschatological, determines their ‘nature’. Though my primary aim here remains descriptive and analytical, the remainder of this chapter substantiates this view.

Naming the powers Yoder’s exousiology is similar to Barth’s angelology in the sense that it tends to resist clear typological specification of what the entities in question are, at an ‘essential’ level, choosing instead to generate theological ‘definitions’ as descriptions of the God-given vocations or tasks they bear, and the manner in which these constitutive functions are practically negated. Because of this, and also due to the seemingly limitless forms of embodied evil, it is impossible to find in Yoder’s work any definitive ‘naming’ of the powers.108 Yet, as the work of a theologian committed to Christian unity and deeply concerned with the fundamental characteristics of human society,109 Yoder’s writings often refer to certain powers he viewed as especially binding the contemporary church’s theological imagination and distorting its witness. If our thesis is correct that Yoder views the powers at work in human history as, at an ontological level, deviations from the creaturely structures by and through which God

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himself preserves and sustains the sociopolitical fabric of human life, then the specific powers Yoder mentions at various points should serve as an aid to understanding his conception of God’s gracious ordering of creaturely life, and the way in which the ‘structures of creaturely life’ are involved in the divine rule. Thus before sketching Yoder’s description of the christologically specified function of all creaturely powers, it would be helpful to mention those with which Yoder’s work was chiefly concerned  – again, not for the sake of an exhaustive typology or categorization, but to clarify that Yoder’s treatment of the powers as ‘created’, and thus as standing within the economy of God’s reign, presumes a critical (rather than ontologically univocal or historically idealist) relation between the specific powers theology names as unjustly operative in human history, and the positive structural forms which function as ‘servants of the divine purpose’ for creaturely life.110 A word should be said about the potential objection that Yoder seems to neglect traditionally conceived ‘spiritual’ forces – for example, ‘literal’ angels and demons – with this focus on structural power. Yoder resists an account of the powers that would locate them on either side of a two-tiered cosmos, in which there are spiritual powers (angels, demons or other immaterial forces) operating on one level, with embodied agents, visible institutions and human agency located in a separate cosmic ‘realm’.111 Instead he argues, like Walter Wink and the modern biblical scholars mentioned above, for a biblical-theological cosmology that locates all the powers of heaven and earth within the single cosmos created by God.112 Yet unlike Wink, Yoder does not conceive the spiritual dimension of the powers’ activity according to the monolithic grid of an ‘inner’ core or essence, operative ‘within’ but still distinguished from the embodied agency of some distinct material power.113 Yoder’s exousiology is rather a theological specification of the purpose and value of sociopolitical structures, which scripture counts among the spiritual forces at work in human history. Like Barth, Yoder wastes little time entertaining what he takes to be a specifically modern concern with ‘strictly personal’ intelligences or ‘other-worldly’ forces, even though there is little reason to think his exousiology entails any necessary denial of such agential powers. Yoder sees biblical exousiology as an integral element of Paul’s enunciation of ‘the political meaning of Jesus’;114 the powers are matter of exegetical and ethical concern, because their appearance within the canon bespeaks the spiritual

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significance of human social life, and its structures of power and authority, within the gospel’s declaration that Jesus lives and reigns as Lord. As noted above, Yoder was quick to admit that when considering the manifold variety of the world’s power-structures, ‘[t]he totality is overwhelmingly broad’.115 Yet he also spoke confidently of how human history and society are at their very foundations ‘ordered’ by a complex and contingent host of intellectual, religious, moral and sociopolitical structures, without whose presence in one form or another human life would be unrecognizable qua human.116 This is not an exclusive typology, but an inclusive vision of the sorts of structures through which social and political bonds emerge and are sustained. It is not pressing too far to read Yoder as claiming that Paul’s exousiology offers, both to moral-theological discourse and from a gospel perspective, precisely such a critical vision of fundamental social structures. The point is that insofar as such structures exist in human history as ‘more than the sum of [their] parts’ – as vital social functions irreducible to the concrete, phenomenologically recognizable forms they take in this or that instance  – then theology may recognize this ‘more’ as the presence of ‘an invisible Power’, which must be explicated as in its ‘essence’ part of the good creation of God.117 Beyond a generic description of intellectual, moral, religious, social and political structures, what kinds of power(s) specifically command Yoder’s attention? First, mention may be made of the specific personal and institutional forces that ‘acted in collusion’ to bring Jesus to death – ‘in this case the most worthy representatives of Jewish religion and Roman politics’.118 The human rulers and institutions involved in the gospel narrative stand in the drama as representatives of the political and religious authorities of Jesus’ day. Berkhof ’s account of the passion, which Yoder cites at length, spoke of Christ being crucified ‘in the name of piety’, ‘in the name of the temple’ and by those deemed to represent ‘Roman justice and law’.119 Moreover, Yoder’s description of why these powers so colluded suggests an intimate association between ideology and these institutions of government and religion, and the operative presence of ‘law’ in both. It was not simply the human agents or visible institutions of Jewish piety and Roman justice collaborating to bring about Christ’s death; rather, Christ constituted a threat to the ‘dominion’ of these institutions, to that which bound them together as interdependent structures of sociopolitical and religious authority. His ‘independence’ from these powers consisted of

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his refusal ‘to support them in their self-glorification’,120 in their reification of the divine law as itself bound to their own authoritative power  – to the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, or to the ‘order of social human relations’ secured by and securing the Pax Romana. Thus in this first exegetical instance, Yoder describes particular instantiations of the powers of ‘religion’ and ‘the state’ and, operative in both cases, the power of ‘the law’ – the divine sanction for or binding authority of the threatened power-structures. The interdependence of legal and religious structures is here tied to a kind of ideological or mythological self-absolutism.121 Branching out from here, it is easy to identify ‘the state’ as a particular power that occupies a prominent place in Yoder’s thought. In light of our reading of Berkhof, it is important to emphasize Yoder’s theologically nuanced distinction between the power of ‘the state’ and the structural function of politics itself. In this respect one must bear in mind two elements of Yoder’s political thought. First, Yoder does not have an ‘essentialist’ view of the state, which would make its authorization by means of the maintenance of civil law and the threat of coercive force a historical inevitability. He does identify the state with the sustenance of civil order through ‘judicial and police functions’, yet the historical admission that ‘every state in fact wields the sword’, and recognition of the ubiquitous ‘fundamental phenomenon’ of social organization ‘by the appeal to force as [an] ultimate authority’,122 is different than providing an essentialist justification of such functions that would seek a theoretical grounding for the necessity of these practices and so inscribe them into the nature of things. ‘The state does not need to be theoretically justified to exist; it does exist.’123 Yoder appeals to Jacques Ellul’s ‘persuasive’ advocacy of the view that ‘the only “metaphysical” ground for the complex of ideas and institutions which we call justice [i.e. the state] is the fact of their presence’.124 This historicist view of the state, refusing to justify it by appeal to divine institution while recognizing it as an enduring form of governance in sinful human history, is formally similar to Barth’s refusal to ontologize the existence of evil despite its manifest reality. Part of Yoder’s theological concern here is obviously the refusal to concede this sword-bearing function, and the ‘complex of ideas and institutions’ for whom the achievement of ‘justice’ is relative to this function, as metaphysically grounded in either a doctrine of creation or redemption. The state and its function of maintaining a modicum of social order through the coercive

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restraint of violence is, rather, relegated to an ‘order of providence’ in which God works through fallen powers to limit and over-rule the ongoing rebellion of humankind. Although there remains some conceptual ambiguity in Yoder’s account, particularly around what the sword-bearing function identified with state-power practically entails, it is clear – from his early essay The Christian Witness to the State to his nuanced exegesis of Romans 13125  – that Yoder achieves a genuinely theological distancing of this ‘power’ from the direct and positive will of God for creaturely life. He recognizes the sword-bearing power of the state as contributing to the maintenance of a kind of sociopolitical ‘order’ within God’s preservation of the fallen creation, yet refuses to reduce ‘politics’ either to that power or to the kind of order it produces. While the nature of the Christian relation to this circumscribed realm of civil power and order is debatable,126 Yoder’s theology of political life, which is inextricable from his avowal of God’s providential lordship over the rebellious powers, issues a clear and, within the tradition of modern theology, a largely unparalleled call for theology to resolutely conceive the state as a fallen power, whose own dominion over and against creaturely life must be resisted wherever it occurs.127 The second, related point is that Yoder does not follow the modern Weberian tradition of political thought, which identifies the business of politics with a particular theory of statecraft. Yoder’s recognition of the state as a ‘fallen power’ is part of a more basic conviction that the political realm is not coextensive with the activities in which state-power is constituted and exercised. On this point Yoder can be seen as representing both a philosophical and a theological sensibility resisting that modern reduction. Philosophically, his common references to the church as a ‘structured social body’ or a polis betray a (neo-) Aristotelian tendency to conceive of politics, in the most generic sense, as the ordering of the social whole;128 the crucial element is not the maintenance of a philosophical alternative to an ideal (Platonic) state, but rather that, from the ‘city-state’ (polis) to the household (oikos), politics be conceived as the way in which a people ‘structure their common life’.129 For Yoder, this conception flows out of a theological sensibility that refuses to equate politics with statecraft, because of the positive conviction that the gospel itself announces a new sociopolitical order, for which ‘[t]he Rule of God is the basic category’,130 and the negative correlation that national identity and the boundaries drawn by its arbiters do not encompass the breadth of human community and

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political belonging. Yoder’s view of politics will be further addressed in the next chapter; here our goal has been simply to note what Yoder’s naming of the state as a power does: namely, it signals an historically ubiquitous mode of social organization, one recognized as a ‘fundamental’ structure of social life even as it is distinguished from the new order of human being-together constituted by God’s acts of creation and redemption in Christ. The key here is to grasp Yoder’s working distinction between the socially constitutive function of political power – the legitimate ‘ordering’ of human social relations – and state-power’s history of governmental ‘violence’, its legal-political suppression of free and just forms of social life. God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignly to tell them where they belong, what is their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin existed.131

The power of the state is contingent both historically and ontologically, its concrete form developing (and not always for the better) from one society to the next, yet none of which – not even an ‘ideal’ form – is to be identified with the reign of God’s own grace and power, or with the political form of a human society that accepts and seeks to live within that rule. Specific references to other powers appear less frequently, but nonetheless serve as an indication of Yoder’s view of the ways God structures social life and the variety of human distortions of this structuring. Alongside the power of state, Yoder could also speak of the gospel’s proclamation of freedom from ‘the dominion of Mammon’, of money itself as ‘one of the powers which have risen above the neutrality or servanthood of simple instruments, and have become . . . a law unto themselves’.132 What he calls ‘the temptation of the Sadducees’, a ‘form of servitude to the Powers’ as deadly as the pharisaic idolization of the law, is the assumption that history marches on under the supreme direction of ‘the leaders of the armies and the markets’, such that any genuine social impact or change comes about only by manipulating ‘the state and the economy’ towards one’s own ends.133 The conviction that it is God’s own gracious rule over the cosmos in Christ – the coming of that political order – which subverts

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and limits and reveals the injustices of human governmental systems is tied to Yoder’s suggestion that Jesus makes possible a ‘new economic solidarity’, a kind of economic ‘realism’ wherein the evaluation of socio-economic goods and (re)distributive possibilities arise within ‘a framework of faith and hope’ in God’s coming kingdom.134 The new order Jesus’ life-history brings about sets an end to economic as well as political dominion, and so issues a fundamental challenge to systems that presuppose and perpetuate disparities in wealth, justifying selfishness and the usurpation of common goods in the name of ‘economic security’ for some.135 Although one cannot find in Yoder any systematic treatment of the economy that rivals the attention he gives to the state, his argument for interpreting Jesus’ call for jubilee in practical economic terms,136 his deep appreciation of liberation theologies’ concern with systemic oppression of the poor,137 and numerous scattered remarks about the idolization of wealth and the collusion of political and economic power involved in such oppression138 display his clear recognition of the basic social need for well-ordered economic exchange; it signals his awareness that theological analysis of (un)just economic structures is part and parcel of the New Testament’s refiguring of ‘the problem of power’.139 Yoder also noted that a major problem with traditional accounts of the ‘orders of creation’ is their typical exclusion of any critical analysis of religion and ideology as unifying social structures.140 The presence of these two powers was noted above with reference to Christ’s passion, and one can in fact detect a subtle recognition of their significance behind all of Yoder’s discussion of how specific power-structures claim human loyalty. As mentioned above, Daniel Barber and Nathan Kerr link the ideological component of the powers’ work with a kind of feigned universality or false transcendence. The powers exercise an ‘ideological function’ insofar as the structures of sociopolitical life are seen as embodying some basic ‘thread of meaning which is more important than individual persons, their lives and well-being, because it in itself determines wherein their well-being consists’.141 That is to say, ideology is for Yoder the power concretely at work everywhere that one’s moral vision becomes bound to a given historical ‘system’ or sociopolitical programme, such that the human good is identified with something other than the revelation of God which is the humanity of Jesus Christ. Thus Yoder, in a sermon on the crucifixion, can claim that behind the visible ‘rulers of the age’ dramatically poised as anti-Christ

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in the passion, ‘we can see at work an ideology, [or] a consciousness’  – the Romans and the Sanhedrin unwittingly enacting the ‘spirit of Empire’, or ‘the mentality of morally threatened authorities’.142 Ideology is, in this sense, the power that parodies and supplants the power of Christian faith and hope, rendering a liveable trust in Jesus as the one Word of God – here replaced by or, as is typical in Western Christendom, identified with some particular codified dogma or moral code – practically non-existent. Recalling the generic typology mentioned above, we can affirm that such a power is operative in ‘intellectual structures’ the world over, not simply in official academic institutions (though certainly there, too), but everywhere a specific vision of the human good is elevated above the concrete needs of real human beings. That human well-being is finally and decisively illumined by the liberative work of God in Christ is part and parcel of this view as a conception of ideology internal to Christian theology, and some such claim cannot be set aside, despite the hermeneutical problems involved.143 A Yoderian critique of ideology might nonetheless share deep similarities with non- or implicitly-theological ideology critique, insofar as they, too, describe ideological power as a (self-)deceptive turning of attention away from the concrete needs of existent human life. Surely any view of ‘concrete human need’ that bypasses or ignores the this-worldly character of human well-being – for example, the way in which the bodily need for food is intrinsically tied to the goodness of the earth’s bounty – would stand condemned by Christian and secular accounts of ideology for having a fundamentally ahistorical frame of reference. On Yoder’s reading, gospel-based ideology critique locates the shared human goods and needs from which ideological systems abstract in precisely the same ‘realm’ as that to which ‘secular’ phenomenology attends – namely, human history and its place within embodied creaturely life. The distinction between Christian and non-Christian forms of ideology-critique arises rather in the interpretive framework or heuristic grammar within which the constitutive elements of human social and political life are articulated. Such an account of the power of ideology also clarifies why one may attribute a distinctly ‘religious’ dimension to all sociopolitical structures that become themselves the definers and arbiters of the human good. In his under-appreciated and still-timely critique of H. Richard Niebuhr’s view of culture and its ‘transformation’,144 Yoder spoke of the idolatry of the world’s

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powers as the ways in which they claim autonomy and unity. The powers claim to transcend human history not only by exercising the ‘independence of any higher will such as that of the Creator God’ but also (as constitutive of such ‘independence’) through ‘the claim to exercise dominion over men and women, who thereby become slaves of the law, of idols, or of other powers’.145 It is this claim to sovereignly govern human history, the claim to a transcendent rule, that marks the ‘unity’ the powers provide to human life and the ‘universalities’ constituted by their spheres of dominion as false promises, and marks the powers themselves as claimants not just to sociopolitical, cultural or moral, but religious authority. Across the spectrum, the unity of the powers themselves ‘lies precisely in their pretension that independent of the will of the Creator God they are able to provide to a person and to society a full, integrated, genuine existence’.146 One need not delve too far into much modern rhetoric about the ‘role’ of religion in modern social life – whether on the lips of religious leaders and practitioners, or of those practically detached yet existentially or theoretically committed defenders of (a) faith – to recognize precisely such a claim about what structures of religious authority have to offer.147 And, as will be discussed below, even when sociopolitical structures are endorsed with an appeal to ‘the will of the Creator’, the functional absence of christology in such appeals typically results in apologetic justifications of a particular institution or practice (usually one ‘under attack’) as normative for all humankind, such that God’s will is identified with the given order of things in a way that underplays both the fallenness of the present order and the correlative newness creaturely life receives within the eschatological rule of God.148 The point here is simply to note the intertwining of religious authority and ideological power, an intertwining whose presence is by no means restricted to especially pious segments of society, but may be detected wherever sociopolitical structures – from the most self-consciously ‘religious’ to the most avowedly ‘secular’  – make idolatrous claims upon human life. This happens wherever a given power-structure, or the ‘cultural values’ its institutionalization purportedly represents, demands a posture of loyalty or manner of action that contradicts the claim of God’s Word upon all facets of human life.149 The confession of Jesus as the one Lord is simultaneously a denunciation of the powers’ dominion; the gospel proclaims that ‘in him’ creaturely life finds its God-given meaning and a liveable order, that it is he who reveals

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the self-glorification of human institutions, authorities and systems of power.150 Hence Yoder’s claim, when speaking of those ‘definable skills and goals [through] which the social organism is constituted’, that it is those who prophetically link God’s will for social life to God’s redemptive work in Jesus who find themselves capable of asking which specific visions of, for example, ‘the vocation of motherhood’ or of ‘national dignity or world liberation’ are genuinely humane and which tyrannical.151 This sort of theology of the powers locates the perduring structures of sociopolitical life within God’s rule of our world, encouraging us to consider how God’s self-revelation in Christ upends the enslavement of human beings to various gods, ‘whether the idol be Mammon, the State, or the family’.152 With Yoder, exousiology may be seen as the enactment of a fundamental theological task: that the Christian theologian (in whatever occupation) give full ear to the biblical proclamation of Christ’s lordship – a proclamation with immense (indeed, cosmic) scope yet precise historical focus, demanding attention to the coming of God’s reign of love for us and our world in its subversion of history’s contrived sources of political order and social peace, and so ‘demythologizing’, relativizing and theologically re-envisioning the most basic and cherished structures of human society.

B. The powers as ‘created’ and ‘fallen’ structures This brief examination of the kinds of sociopolitical structures Yoder identifies with the work of the powers has prepared the way for a proper examination of Yoder’s claim that such powers are ‘created’ by God. I have sketched how, for Yoder, the powers appear in human history as the necessary and basic structures of sociopolitical life. These structures are idolatrous to the extent that their claimed autonomy within and authority over human-historical life contradicts God’s own governance of and provision for human society in Christ. Yoder indicates that the powers so oppose God’s rule by exercising an ideological function – insofar as they appear and act in history as themselves the structures that define and guarantee the human good, and with it sociopolitical order and peace. Perhaps most importantly, in the above discussion of specific powers a certain doctrinal tension has come to light, between Yoder’s affirmation of the powers as ‘created’ – the admission that God graciously structures creaturely life and human history, and that the powers are in some sense the ‘means’ through which this gracious divine ordering occurs153 – and as simultaneously

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‘fallen’ structures, whose historical presence no longer represents and cannot be identified with God’s will for creaturely life. This is seen most clearly in Yoder’s unwillingness to ground ‘the state’ in a doctrine of creation or divine institution, or to identify its constitutive practices with God’s own governing of human-historical affairs. The question that remains is, therefore, the nature of the relation between the powers’ creation and fall, between the task they are commissioned to fulfil within creaturely life and their present opposition to God’s rule. What is the relationship between the world’s basic power-structures – as seen, for example, in the social order secured by states, markets and familial bonds – and God’s own ordering of human history? This part takes up that question first by examining Yoder’s statements about the powers as created and fallen structures, and then by unpacking his suggestion that theologically serious attention to the New Testament powers improves upon one traditional way for Christian theology to locate social structures within a doctrine of creation. It is perhaps best to begin by quoting at length a passage that touches on much of what still remains to be considered: It follows from the ‘already, but not yet’ nature of Christ’s lordship over the powers that there is no one tangible, definable quantity that we can call ‘world.’ The aion houtous is at the same time chaos and a kingdom. The ‘world’ of politics, the ‘world’ of economics, the ‘world’ of the theater, the ‘world’ of sports, the under-‘world’, and a host of others – each is a demonic blend of order and revolt. The world ‘as such’ has no intrinsic ontological dignity. It is creaturely order in the state of rebellion; rebellion is, however, for the creature estrangement from what it ‘really is’; therefore, we cannot ask what the world ‘really is,’ somehow ‘in itself.’ . . . All that the Powers have in common is their revolt, and revolt is not a principle of unity. . . . Only the lordship of Christ holds this chaos of idolatrous ‘worlds’ together.154

For the moment, we will set aside direct discussion of the ‘already, not yet’ character of Christ’s victory over the powers. This theme is addressed in the next chapter in dialogue with Barth’s eschatology. Yet precisely because of the eschatological nature of Christ’s lordship over the powers – the fact that it is this ‘rule’, this particular law and order, in which creation finds fulfilment, not negation – this theme loops back into a necessary consideration of the powers as fallen creaturely agents. As the above passage indicates, Yoder’s evocation of

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God’s ordering limitation of the powers’ historical disorder is itself grounded in the (biblical) judgement that the ‘world’ of the powers’ dominion is ‘not creation or nature or the universe but rather the fallen form of the same, no longer conformed to the creative intent’.155 How can such a judgement stand alongside Yoder’s equally clear declaration that the powers ‘are not devils, but creatures’,156 and so find their origin in the creative purposes of God?157 What is the relation of the fallen ‘present age’ – and the sociopolitical structures that order life within it – to God’s primal creative work? The brief section in Politics on the powers’ origin in God’s creative purpose takes as its point of departure the christological claims of Colossians 1.15– 17: that ‘all things’ – ‘visible and invisible; whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers’  – were created and subsist ‘in him’.158 Noting the linguistic connection between subsistence and systematization,159 Yoder reads this passage as denoting Jesus’s share in creation: he is the one in whom all created reality ‘holds together’; God brings about creation’s rightful order in and through him. The powers appear here simply as the creaturely ‘means’ through which Christ himself is present to creation as the ‘divine gift’ of order in ‘society and history, even nature’. Speculative tendencies about what the powers might have been are however, quickly blunted by Yoder’s subsequent reminder ‘that we have no access to the good creation of God’. This latter claim must be understood epistemologically, rather than ontologically, yet precisely as such it is integral to Yoder’s entire theology of the powers. The term ‘access’ implies human knowledge of God’s creative work. This statement must accordingly be read as denying persons any self-authenticating knowledge of themselves, the cosmos or the powers, since the truth of the entire creaturely world and its powers is bound to Jesus Christ as the one self-revelation of God. This is more than a claim that Jesus ‘incarnates’ a principle of grace that can be detached from his person and work, through which theology might then reconstruct what the ‘original form’ of various fallen powers was in God’s primal will and should have been in world-history. Yoder’s exousiology does not allow even a ‘christocentric’ (re)construction of primal forms that historical structures of government, economy, religion, family or any ideology pervert and negate. This is, I suggest, precisely because he interprets Jesus’ lordship over the cosmos and its creatures as the positive content of God’s will from all eternity. As noted above, the powers find their only

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‘unity’ in their common subjection to Christ, in the accomplishment of God’s redemptive purposes in the history of his life, death, resurrection, ascension and coming-again. The powers’ created goodness is therefore located not in the a-, trans- or pre-historical establishment of distinct creaturely mediations of God’s governance of or provision for creatures, but rather in the ongoing presence of these life-giving works of God. Precisely because God is faithful to creaturely history as its good Creator and Provider – as the One who has made it and holds it open to the Word that comes and dwells in Jesus – human structures of social and political cohesion may become, in their own particular histories, creaturely servants of a new humanity. The fallenness of the powers is thus not, for Yoder, conceived against the backdrop of an initial state of being, some original status quo from which certain aspects of creation or historical life, the ‘rebellious powers’, have contingently deviated. This is because there is no legitimate norm, authority or standard for creaturely agency other than the grace by which God sustains and claims creaturely life in Christ. This makes the question of the powers’ creatureliness and fallenness not primarily metaphysical, but doxological; the question is whether the creaturely goods and social structures that do exist in a given time and place serve human life by becoming transparent to God’s own self-attestation in the lowliness of Jesus Christ, or function as idols in and through which persons may and should seek self-establishment, self-possession and false security – some moral justification or legal guarantee of our own intrinsic worth and righteousness. Thus in Yoder’s exousiology, every social structure, institution or system that rises and falls in human history stands under the sign and judgment of God’s primal will for and eschatological realization of a truly humane society in Jesus Christ. Yoder’s account, particularly in respect to the state but logically throughout, identifies the ‘demonism’ of the powers not by looking back to a primal moment of angelic perfection or pristine creaturely mediation, but by interpreting the authorities and forces which move human history in light of Jesus’ gospel. It thereby evaluates the relative modesty or idolatry of the powers according to the standard of God’s own free condescension to stand with and for each human in her vulnerability and need, according to each power’s functional openness to the promised transformation of all things by and in that work of grace.

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The condition of the creature and the world itself ‘outside’ of Christ  – that is, in rebellion against the God who creates, sustains and makes new in him  – is therefore one of fallenness, lostness and disorder, and ‘in this the powers have their own share’. The creaturely structures which are in Christ ‘active only as mediators of the saving creative purpose of God’, are through human sin and rebellion now aligned against this singular purpose, such that the ‘structures which were supposed to be our servants have become our masters and guardians’.160 The language used here suggests a fundamental shift in the work of the powers – one that obtains in the differentiation between God’s creative act, the divine ‘intent’ or purpose given christological form and content there, and the condition that befalls the historical world, its creatures and their developing patterns of social relations under the regime of pride and self-exaltation. Yet this shift, expressed above simply as the tension inherent in describing the powers as both ‘created’ and ‘fallen’ structures, must in some sense also reflect the powers’ creaturely status, the form of their present existence. The ontological question of the powers’ created ‘nature’ is admittedly given less conceptual weight in Yoder, but he does address the matter in terms of the ‘subsistence’ of all reality in Christ. It is shown to be at root a question of the character of the world powers, as their histories are seen through the lens of the history of Jesus Christ. The following paragraphs trace this indirect identification of the ‘nature’ or given purpose of the created powers, and shows how Yoder’s exousiology requires a christological doctrine of creation that does not sunder God’s primal act of establishing a liveable sociopolitical order from the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Yoder does not explicitly address the ontological status of the fallen or rebellious powers in the same manner as, for example, Augustine’s nihil or Barth’s das Nichtige; yet it is clear that he similarly understands them to be, in their fallenness or rebellion, enemies of both God and God’s good creation, as antithetical to the constitution and fulfilment of a creaturely life ordered by the divine Word. He often appeals to biblical articulations of ‘this present age’ (ho aion houtous)161 in Paul or the Johannine kosmos162 as overarching descriptions of the present order of creaturely rebellion. Yet the passage quoted above complicates a simple polarity of ‘worlds’ – one created (past), another fallen (present)  – by suggesting that creaturely rebellion is ‘not a principle of unity’ but estrangement from what creaturely being ‘really is’.

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Yoder’s work consistently displays such an understanding of the creaturely disorder wrought by human sin and creation’s own fallenness. For example, his oft-misunderstood emphasis upon the basic distinction of church and world is not the positing of a geo-spatial dualism, such that the ‘world’ of faith is to be located elsewhere than the ‘world’ of unbelief, but the difference between two diametrically opposed ways of being-in-response to the Word and work in whom God is present to creation. Yoder finds in Barth a unique approach to the church-world distinction along these lines; Barth’s christological ecclesiology offers a post-Christendom gloss on this distinction as a difference residing in the confession of Christ as Lord, one enacted ‘on the level of real history and personal choices; not a difference of realms or levels or even dimensions’.163 Similarly, Yoder’s exousiology conceives the world-powers as simultaneously created and fallen,164 such that their fallenness does not locate them in any other ‘universe’ than the one world created by God, but characterizes their being as a particular kind of relation to Jesus Christ, who stands before the foundations of the world as God’s one and only claim upon all creaturely power(s). This is the meaning of Yoder’s claim that the rebellious ‘world’ (kosmos) of the New Testament – the world of idolatrous power and its enslavement of human history – is ‘the fallen form’ of God’s one creation (ktisis), the world in which humanity is created, preserved and made new by Jesus Christ.165 In this respect, the logic of Yoder’s exousiology is best spelled out by those who have read his work as enacting and calling for an apocalyptic theological cosmology, a world-view in which God’s self-revelation as Jesus is the basic hermeneutic by means of which the conceptual relations (or antagonisms) between God’s primal creative work, the fallen cosmos and the new creation are understood.166 Douglas Harink understands Yoder’s work on the powers – alongside his exegesis of biblical apocalyptic167 and consistent emphasis on the soteriological significance of culture and politics  – as developing ‘a christocentric, ecclesiocentric, apocalyptic theology of creation and history’.168 It would take the present inquiry too far afield to fully investigate the points at which Yoder’s exousiology does or does not converge with apocalyptic readings of Paul; here we simply note how Harink’s reading of Yoder rightly casts his understanding of the powers as part and parcel of a doctrine of creation, in which Christ’s lordship constitutes a primal and irrevocable divine claim on

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creaturely agents who rebel against God’s particular way of ordering human history, who become trapped in and by their own rebellion. This way of putting it signals how Yoder’s attempt to view God’s creative work christologically ends up construing the conceptual tension inherent to ‘fallen creatures’ not first and foremost as the ontological departure from an intrinsic nature, but as an historic posture of revolt and consequent estrangement from the ordering creaturely existence has been and is given through Jesus Christ. The upshot of Yoder’s view that the structures of creaturely life receive coherence and unity only from their relation to Christ’s lordship is the dogmatic refusal to identify their creaturely ‘nature’ with any reality other than Christ’s ongoing manifestation of God’s world-ordering and -sustaining grace; conversely, it is a refusal to locate the powers’ creaturely vocation or ‘purpose’ elsewhere than in their structural openness to the new humanity God is raising up in him. The apocalyptic character of Yoder’s exousiology shows through precisely in this christological navigation of the powers as created and fallen structures. Christian faith confesses ‘the lordship of YHWH . . . from all eternity’ as God’s gracious ordering of creaturely life in Christ,169 such that the spatio-temporal unity of the world that is God’s creation, but has become estranged from its Lord through its deformation by human sin, is affirmed. In this sense, to recognize the world’s regnant powers as God’s creatures is an affirmation of the divine claim on their existence executed in the history of Jesus Christ; it is an entailment of Yoder’s view that the universe, the material and historical context in which the human being occurs, is and has always been ‘the ontological locus of God’s sovereign intentions’.170 Yet the powers appear in history as the ‘guardians of the created order in its fallenness’,171 such that the fundamental polarity at work in Yoder’s exousiology is that between ‘this present evil age’ – the epoch of the fall, in which God’s creatures and creation itself are enslaved to idolatrous power(s) – and the age to come, in which the triumph of God’s eternal purposes for creaturely life is fully and finally manifest on earth. Thus to affirm the powers as ‘fallen’ is to confess the distance of the present world order from the creative Word of God; it is to refuse to map the structures of social life in any of their given forms onto God’s primal creative act and will for creaturely life. A full-blown theology of the powers, including not only ‘sociopolitical’ structures but structures of the cosmos itself  – chthonic or ‘natural’ forces  – would obviously have to wrestle with a whole host of

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cosmological, ecological and environmental questions traditionally posed within the remit of ‘natural evil’. Such analysis might require a cautious but more direct affirmation of presently recognized structures as forms of God’s good order, yet the character and extent of such affirmation would depend entirely upon the methodological relations and distinctions enacted between theology and whatever sciences inform our understanding of the reality under consideration. As noted above, my inquiry takes its cue from Barth and Yoder’s focus on the powers informing human sociality and politics, which by their own accounts reflect scripture’s primary (but certainly not exclusive) interest in human-historical affairs. To sum up Part II.B: God’s self-revelation in the gospel of Jesus is the source of any conceptual relationship – positive or negative – between the world’s structures or systems of power and God’s creative and redemptive purposes for human life, purposes which are one in the life-history of Jesus Christ. As the revelation of the ‘saving creative purpose’ of God come among us, this history also declares the opposition to the divine ordering that the powers are as the world’s own sources of political ‘order’ and social ‘peace’. Yoder’s exousiology displays these convictions by establishing a dialectical opposition between the ‘creatureliness’ of the structures by which God graciously provides for human life in Christ and the self-serving ‘fallenness’ of those same structures, and by refusing to resolve this opposition from within creation itself. Only such a resolution of the powers’ fallenness would entail the ultimately hopeless assertion of a benevolent ‘nature’ or primal ‘essence’ lurking beneath patently unjust forms of power; to such status quo conservatism, Yoder’s exousiology offers a clear alternative.

C. Creaturely powers or ‘orders of creation’ Thus far I have noted Yoder’s critical adoption, in the wake of Berkhof, of the modern concept of a power-structure as that which patterns or gives definite form to particular social phenomena. I have further suggested that Yoder’s relocation of this conceptuality within a theological cosmology – a biblically grounded, doctrinally explicated thinking of ‘reality’  – moves towards an account of sociopolitical structures as creaturely powers that hold human social relations and political possibilities captive, precisely to the extent that

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any given power is (self-)exalted as that which in itself defines and secures human well-being. In this final part, the insights won by our reading of Yoder are recast in relation to his provocative suggestion that exousiology provides a working alternative to the mainstream Protestant tendency to identify God’s work of shaping human society with certain ‘orders of creation’. This juxtaposition nuances the above view of the powers as the particular authorities organizing sociopolitical life, contingent yet deeply embedded structures which must be at once related to and distinguished from God’s own gracious ordering of our common human life by the Word of Jesus Christ. Yoder’s distinction of the powers from divinely instituted creaturely ‘orders’ shows his attempt at a christological doctrine of creation, one that materially refuses to divide God’s creative Word from the embodied presence of Jesus Christ, and which critically relates to any view of particular sociopolitical structures or institutions as providing secure foundations for faith and life. Douglas Harink and Daniel Barber are uncommonly insightful in their recognition of Yoder’s distinction of exousiology from a theology of creation’s ‘orders’.172 Harink’s essay, more than any other interpretive development of Yoder’s work, picks up on Yoder’s explicit claims about exousiology as an exegetically grounded and materially nuanced manner of ‘systematically’ relating Christ and creation, one surpassing certain (‘Thomist’) accounts of ‘natural law’ as well as traditional Protestant reflection on ‘orders of creation’.173 The contexts of Yoder’s statements clarify that what is at issue are those institutions and contexts through which God’s will for ‘secular’ human life is realized or made known. For present purposes, Yoder’s (admittedly generic) claim about natural law is less significant than the much more far-reaching and refined critique of ‘created orders’, which can in fact be detected in much of his work. Yoder’s insight in this regard is not explicitly traced through citation of traditional sources, but the logical distinction he affirms in several places brings together the themes discussed in this chapter, providing further insight into the substantive aims and doctrinal contours of his theology of the powers. Yoder’s exousiology entails a critique of ‘social order’ as something wrought through divinely ordained or eternally given institutions, but is nonetheless sympathetic with traditional concerns to attend to social life and political order as related to the will of the Creator, or as somehow grounded in

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God’s creative work. Although Yoder eschews ‘essentialist’ accounts of given power-structures, he sees as integral to God’s creative purpose the ordering of human history by means of ‘a network of norms and regularities [which] stretch out the canvas upon which the tableau of life can be painted’.174 Despite the powers’ fallenness, the structural function itself, a function the powers continue to exercise for the rebellious cosmos, cannot be grounded anywhere other than God’s own ‘saving creative purpose’. The question, for Yoder, is not whether or not God wills the ordering of human society through ‘the existence above us of religious, intellectual, moral and social structures’, but what kind of relation extant power-structures have to God’s own ordering of human life in Christ. Our reading of Yoder has proven that at precisely this point he dialectically opposes the creatureliness and fallenness of the powers. The key to understanding the critical relation of exousiology and ‘created orders’ is in recognizing and grappling with the doctrinal implications of Yoder’s refusal to locate ‘the reign of order’ that sustains creaturely life – a ‘divine gift’ willed and provided from the beginning – anywhere other than in God’s own active presence to creation in and as Jesus. To ground all assessment of the powers’ being and work in the claim of Christ’s lordship requires one to give up an ontologically static account, and instead to see them, alongside human beings, as entities whose creaturely identity or status inheres in their ongoing relation to the God who claims them for and calls them to share in Jesus’ service of all persons. The historicity of this relation between divine claim and creaturely ‘status’ is the root of a (Yoderian) distinction of exousiology from a traditional conception of created orders. In an inversion of the traditional approach, one might read Yoder as insisting that if any enduring ‘nature’ is to be attributed to the powers in se, as a permanently applicable description of their character, it must be a fallen nature – the abundant proclivity to ontological ‘establishment’, to self-justification through the reassurance of an identity ‘possessed’ because ‘given’ by God. Though Yoder does not express it in these terms, such a logic of ontological self-possession or self-establishment is at the heart of his view of the powers as fallen creaturely structures, and of his insistence upon a christologically grounded critique of the ‘values and structures which are necessary to life and society’, yet have idolatrously ‘succeeded in making us serve them as if they were of absolute value’.175 Given this latter claim, the implicit charge is that an ‘analysis of the problems of society and history’

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in terms of God-given orders fails to properly reckon with the fallenness of creaturely orders, not because such conceptions are simply not serious about the ubiquity of evil, but because they dissociate the very emergence and sustenance of sociopolitical order from the active presence of God’s grace towards all in Christ.

God-given orders or the ordering of Jesus Yoder makes only a few explicit accusations against the orders of creation tradition. After outlining the powers as structures that are simultaneously created, fallen and within God’s providential rule, Yoder notes that ‘traditional theologies’ which defined these structures as created orders have typically lacked the ‘clarity and precision’ with which exousiology recognizes both ‘humankind’s fallen condition and the continuing providential control’ of social order.176 This claim is followed by charges that treating sociopolitical order under this heading tend to exclude analysis of religion and ideology, and especially that the ‘meaning and coherence’ of the moral and political ‘values’ thereby affirmed is found not in Christ but in creation itself. The final sentence of this section in Politics emphasizes this christological deficiency as the chief distinction from a theology of the powers: the problem is a view of ‘the state, family, economy, etc.’ as orders that, because they are ‘created by the Father’, necessarily ‘have an autonomous value unrelated to redemption and the church’. That is, ‘Jesus Christ has little directly to do with them’, because their meaning and coherence are seen as an ontological property or capacity inherent to creation itself. This brings us to another passage in Yoder’s corpus in which the orders are invoked, alongside a doctrine of ‘social vocation’, as insufficient to answer concrete questions about which social structures and kinds of political vision are truly humane and which tyrannical, insofar as these conceptualities are grounded in an understanding of created reality that abstracts from the ‘prophetic vision of Jesus’.177 Jesus’ acceptance of the cross, not simply at the point of death but as the form of obedience and fidelity to God marking his entire canonical life, was ‘an ontological decision’ precisely as an eschatological decision. That is, the biblical identification of the ‘social goal’ of human history with Jesus’ own way of being human is faithful precisely in its inversion of the question ‘How do we get from here to there?’ Yoder affirms Jesus’ continuity

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with the Old Testament prophets in his reaffirmation of ‘shalom’ as the ‘social historical purpose of YHWH’ from the beginning, such that the prophetic insight without which all construals of creaturely order and social vocation become self-serving is faith’s willingness to allow ‘the present world to be rendered transparent to the reality already there’ within the gracious lordship of Israel’s God. To affirm God’s justifying grace as the only ground of ‘morality as well as “salvation”’ – indeed, to understand the latter precisely as the ‘social historical purpose’ of creaturely life – requires discontentment with both ‘the existing order’ in its fallenness and with the self-confidence of all strategies that assume the human ability to identify or bring about God’s will for sociopolitical life within the present, apart from God’s revelatory judgement upon our own inhumane complicity with and blind captivity to the powers. Several of Yoder’s remarks concerning standard Lutheran and Reformed approaches to a theology of the state provide further insight into what he is concerned to resist in traditional accounts of sociopolitical order, and how exousiology avoids the named pitfalls.178 The root of Yoder’s criticism is that in various ways, mainstream Protestantism has grounded its theological judgements regarding political agency in the methodological inoculation of a certain creaturely realm (i.e. that demarcated by state activity) from the revelatory claim of Jesus Christ. Such inoculation is based in a view that this particular realm is ‘divinely instituted by a special act of God in creation and/or providence’. He identifies as a particularly Lutheran tendency the ‘positivistic’ equation of the empirical state – ‘whatever state now exists’ – with this divine institution and thus with God’s concrete will for political life. Yoder does not describe this equation as representative of Luther himself or the entire tradition, but does suggest that ‘in the most extreme form’ of Lutheran tradition the doctrine of divine institution has functioned simply to endorse with divine approval ‘the moral judgments and practical purposes’ of the reigning political body. Yoder contrasts the notion of a divinely ordained empirical state with the Reformed tradition’s theoretical insistence upon an ideal political institution. This ‘legitimistic’ view derives from Romans 13, or ‘a combination of biblical and rational considerations’, God-given prescriptions for the political realm, such that any governing body may be assessed (and consequently dis/obeyed) in terms of its practical conformity to the divinely instituted ideal. What is significant for present purposes is Yoder’s critique of the assumption of both

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approaches that scripture provides a ‘metaphysic or ontology of the state’, in which a ‘special act’ of divine institution sets up within human history a ‘realm’ of creaturely activity whose ontological and moral basis is ‘distinct from Jesus Christ’. Yoder here prefers to speak of divine ‘acceptance’ rather than a particular act of ‘institution’ or establishment distinguished from the co-inherence of all things in Christ. As will be addressed in the next chapter, this ‘acceptance’ rests on a conceptual distinction between the ‘orders’ of God’s providential and redemptive rule, which are nonetheless united as different aspects or manifestations of the present lordship of Christ over the rebellious powers. For Yoder, Paul’s declaration (in Rom. 13) of the subordination of the governing powers to God is not the affirmation of a uniquely creative act on par with the miraculous coming-to-be of the cosmos, humanity itself or God’s calling out of Israel from the nations; it is a claim that even the fallen powers (exousia) of the cosmos stand within ‘the divine ordering’, that no creaturely ruler or authority, however modest or rebellious, either replaces  – in the sense of bearing an intrinsic and thus distinct moral authority – or can finally thwart the purposes of God which are constituted by God’s own gracious presence to creation in Jesus Christ. Yoder’s critique of mainstream accounts is that the need to develop a theological ‘theory about what the state is and should be in itself ’, on the basis of which practical standards of judgement or action can then be articulated, presumes that God ordains a specific human institution or creates a discrete sphere of ‘government’ separate from the human reception of and response to God’s own rule of the cosmos in the cross of Christ. The alternative to a doctrine of primal divine institution – which in effect sets up a ‘competitive revelational claim’ whose moral legitimacy is based in (fallen) ‘human nature’ – is the conceptual adherence to a christological doctrine of creation, in which the entirety of creaturely life has always found its ontological and moral ‘order’ in the purposes of God executed and revealed in him. That creation is fallen, with persons subject to and perpetuating personal and sociopolitical disorder, and that God himself graciously limits and preserves the cosmos even in its rebellion, does not entail the divine establishment of what Yoder calls ‘that “other realm”’ – a realm of fallen creaturely activity in which persons know and live out the good independent of God’s creation, preservation and renewal of the world in Jesus Christ. As will be emphasized more fully in the next chapter,

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this christological restriction does not mean such ‘knowledge’ of our own and the powers’ creatureliness is bound to the explicit confessional boundaries of the Christian religion; it simply means that Christian faith has a particular name for the divine power which underlies, sustains and fulfils creaturely life, and thus a particular standard (intellectual and practical) for discerning the forms of power human life actually confesses in a given time and place. Recalling the quote with which we began this part, we may state that the basic problem with locating conceptual or practical standards for sociopolitical life within creation itself – the conceptual refuge of ontologically established orders of creation  – is the de facto assumption that some segment of the world has ‘its own ontological dignity’. This ‘dignity’ of creation in its divinely ordained self-possession ensures, for human sociality, the autonomous and universally binding authority of a social or political space either cordoned off from God’s redemptive purposes (a God-given ‘nature’ transcended, displaced or destroyed by ‘grace’), or divinely arranged in such a way that the Word of Christ’s cross and resurrection need not take anything from or add anything to it. It is not enough, in Yoder’s view, to posit a doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence as a qualification to the exousiological critique of certain powers’ claimed autonomy.179 The fundamental question still remains as to whether sociopolitical order should be conceived as something located in creation itself, as something persons, societies or rulers ‘possess’ despite their fallenness, instead of a form of relation between God and God’s creatures that is always and only real ‘in Christ’. To opt for the former requires a doctrine of creation and account of human sociality that sunders the purposes of God’s creative word from God’s redemptive act,180 and inoculates the eternally given ‘foundations’ of moral and sociopolitical order from the critical or ‘prophetic’ presence with which the crucified and risen Word of God announces the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. In this reading, Yoder’s exousiology provides an alternative to a conception of divinely instituted orders of creation by refusing to ontologize and immanentize God’s will for human persons and their various social and political relations. Yoder locates the divine ordering of human societies not in creation itself, but in the particular form that God’s good lordship over creation and present claim upon human life takes in Christ. As seen in Yoder’s critique of traditional approaches to the state, not only does this approach entail an account of social

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or political power ‘instituted’ – finding its creaturely raison d'être – in Christ alone, but it consequently refuses to ground its practical criticisms of and concrete involvement in the specific social and political institutions with which it is historically confronted in a ‘theory’ about what ideal political, economic, familial (and so on) structures must look like. For Yoder, the signal contrast is not between nature and grace, God’s creative and redemptive purposes, or the eternal Word and the human Jesus, but between God’s governance of the cosmos and human history in Christ, and the concrete and manifold ways in which persons, nations and rulers ignore and resist this Word of God’s rule as a word of grace. It is, therefore, only from within the lordship of Christ – not simply a doctrine of creation – that the world’s power-structures are constituted and may be judged as creaturely words bespeaking God’s own governance of and provision for humankind. From this perspective, all sociopolitical structures that exist – every state or regime or market, every received social role or pattern of relation – stand under the judgement of the divine ordering human life receives in Christ. The question cannot therefore be what ‘the state’ or ‘the market’ or ‘the family’ – or any other conceptual shorthand for the actual structures that bind together human life – was in the beginning, such that theology might, under the bright light of that pristine form, finally capture a vision of how to implement an ideal social life. Rather, exousiology sees creaturely life as at all points grounded in and governed by the salvific purposes of the Creator, and yet hopelessly tangled in webs of sin and rebellion; within these webs, the world’s own structures of order and provision idolatrously claim to be and are hailed as themselves the revelation and embodiment of divine beneficence to and authority over creaturely life. But as Douglas Harink notes, Yoder accounts for ‘the “orders of creation” . . . not as an unchanging set of relationships (an ontology), but as “the powers” – plural in number, rebellious and therefore threatening to the ekklesia, nonautonomous in relation to Christ’s lordship, and therefore within the scope of reconciliation and redemption’.181 Human life is not, therefore, hopelessly trapped within a web of inevitably inhumane powers. The fallen powers can themselves be transformed  – which is to say, they can begin to move once again towards the vocation they intrinsically bear in relation to the power of God in Christ, as structural servants of God’s grace towards creatures. They can be and are so transformed as they are confronted by his new humanity –

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an ‘independent’ social body, whose very newness is the freedom to stand with and for those lives inexorably crushed by the powers that be.182 In Yoder’s exousiology, the fundamental polarity is not between paradise lost and hell on earth, or God’s primal act of cosmic ordering and the myriad forms of historical disorder, but that between the present actuality of creaturely rebellion against the one Word of God and the newness of a cosmos transformed by the Word made flesh. The interpretive work above has shown that this is not the lack of a working distinction between the divine acts (or ‘moments’) of creation and redemption, but rather the positive affirmation that, as with human being itself, the structures underpinning human co-existence are at their very foundations ‘defined’ by their relationship to the grace in which God’s Word is present and active in human history. The only foundation of legitimate worldly power is the power of God in Jesus Christ. Just so, the analysis offered in this chapter calls for further attention to the ways in which God’s primal and final claim upon the world’s power-structures in Jesus Christ might be theologically recognized as present and active in human history – that is, to the ways in which God himself has overcome and continues to thwart both the attempts of creaturely powers intent on establishing their own kingdoms, and the consequent subjection of human existence to anti-creaturely forms of power and authority. To this end, Yoder’s eschatological distinction between the present age and the age to come  – or the ‘orders’ of providence and redemption – and the related question of the ‘church-world’ distinction, will be taken up in dialogue with Barth in the next chapter.

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Barth and Yoder: Eschatology as the End of ‘Worldly’ Power(s)

Chapters 1 and 2 have provided a working sketch of Barth’s and Yoder’s respective exousiologies, laying out their basic conceptual contours and emphases. In seeking to demonstrate what the powers are for our thinkers – the kind of reality with which we and human history itself are confronted here – our focus has initially been on the powers’ place within a doctrine of (the fallen) creation. This chapter furthers the above analysis by shifting focus explicitly to the doctrinal register of eschatology. This is not a shift from what the powers are in ‘history’ to what they will be in ‘eternity’, nor simply from what they are ‘for us’ sinners as opposed to what they are ‘in Christ’, for we have seen that both Barth and Yoder attempt to conceive even the fallen creatureliness of the powers in christological terms. The shift is rather to a closer look at what is entailed in speaking of the powers as historic agents whose creaturely raison d'être has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and as powers which have been and are continually set free to serve the grace God extends to humankind in him, even though they remain often and in many ways set against this freedom. Yoder’s work clearly contends that it is the reality of Christ’s lordship over the powers – enacted in his earthly history, climactically revealed in his passion and resurrection, eschatologically vindicated and completed  – which constitutes the euangelion whose proclamation renders the church a unique witness to God’s reign. In Barthian parlance, Christ’s lordship is the comprehensive reality in response to which creatures receive their own distinctive calling and tasks, coming to play their part in the drama of salvation-history. Yoder is more explicit and clear than Barth that Christ’s lordship by its very nature determines

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its human witness or attestation as intrinsically sociopolitical, in form and content. One of the distinctive aims of this chapter is to clarify that it is precisely this insight and its emphasis which makes Yoder’s contribution to a theology of the powers so essential. Barth himself never said clearly or emphatically enough: ‘That Christ is Lord, a proclamation to which only individuals can respond, is nonetheless a social, political, structural fact which constitutes a challenge to the Powers’.1 Nonetheless, part of the aim of my treatment of eschatological exousiology is to clarify that Yoder’s own achievement in this regard is in fact substantively related to several of Barth’s own key christological commitments. Both thinkers aver the facticity of Christ’s lordship over the powers, while recognizing that human life remains captive on many levels, not least socially and politically, to false gods and promises. The next two parts (Parts 3.I and 3.II) demonstrate two primary continuities in Barth and Yoder: (1) that both conceive of this ‘facticity’ eschatologically, and (2) that while their affirmation of the eschatological nature of God’s liberative work does open up conceptual space for recognizing the lived distance between redeemed human life and the various forms of unjust sociopolitical relations in the present, it by no means functions to relativize Christ’s claim upon any of the powers operative in human history. Given the less systematic nature of Yoder’s work, this portion of the dialogue will perhaps best proceed by showing how Yoder’s conception of the regnum Christi  – through which God’s final challenge to unjust creaturely power is made present  – coheres with several basic impulses within Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. I will thus begin with a focussed exposition of several main themes in CD IV/3, in which Barth takes up the question of the theological rationale for the presently overlapping aeons. In relation to Barth’s conception of the (divine) revelation of and (creaturely) witness to Christ’s eschatological victory emerging from this initial exposition, I will then pose the question of the anthropocentric character of Barth’s description of what forms of power God finally overcomes and abolishes, which is at once the question of what kinds of power Christ’s prophetic presence in history continues to oppose and set aside in the drawing-forth of his new humanity. As will be made clear below, the question here is not a worry of ‘anthropocentrism’ in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation – one could hardly fault him for failing to articulate the ‘objective’ basis of reconciliation in terms that give the necessary priority

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to divine agency. Rather, the quite specific conceptual challenge I will pose is whether Barth’s rightful emphasis on the human covenant-partner might not still be described as enacting a metaphysical account that inadequately captures the social (and thus political) form of the new humanity God constitutes in Jesus. If this is the case, there is a demonstrable need to move beyond Barth for a fuller view of the character of the rebellious creaturely powers to which Christ’s new humanity is opposed. Barth’s account of ‘the resisting element’ in sinful humanity is helpful here, especially when aligned with attention to the alien and alienating character of the ‘lordless powers’ discussed in the ethics of reconciliation fragments.2 In light of this pivotal question, Yoder’s voice is finally shown to be crucial, and Part I.B thus moves into dialogue with his own, more sociopolitically conscious account of the ongoing opposition between the present regnum Christi and the powers God has eschatologically overcome in Jesus’ own life, death and resurrection.

I. Barth on eschatological fulfilment, Christ’s prophecy, and the ‘lordless powers’ A. The grace of the ‘time between the times’ [God] wills to preserve the world, to cause it to persist, in its present and provisional form, in order that it should be the place where He can be perceived and accepted and known and confessed by the creature as the living Word of God. He wills to be invoked and proclaimed in His community in the world as the assembly where this knowledge and confession take place. He wills that each man should exist and also be sustained in his limits, in order that he may be a witness to the reconciliation accomplished in Him, to the future of salvation already present in Him.3

Barth’s emphasis upon the ‘objectivity’ of the reconciliation of God and humanity in Christ has been the root of much misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the real ‘subjective’ or human-historical implications of his christocentric soteriology.4 In his answer to the question of why God allows the continuing ‘overlap’ of the two ages – of the order of reconciliation right alongside of, for all its diametrical opposition to, the order of rebellion – one finds both a concrete example of and poignant response to what worries many

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interpreters. The short answer Barth gives is that it is simply ‘the good will of Jesus Christ himself to be not yet at the goal but still on the way’ from the ‘first form’ of his revelation as the new creation (in his resurrection) to its final form in the consummation of God’s redemptive work in Christ’s parousia, and thus towards the definitive ‘manifestation’ of God’s reconciliation of all things in him.5 According to Barth, the chief dogmatic reason to understand the history of the present age as a time in which Christ is present to creaturely history ‘still [as] Pilgrim and Warrior’ amid the powers of sin, death and evil, is not because these powers themselves have not really been set aside by God; nor is it due to any intrinsic capacities for positive endurance on their part.6 Rather, they persist as the (still, as always) unfounded contradiction and negation of the grace of God, of God’s will for human life to have its own responsive and thus active share in the revelation of creation’s reconciliation to God. What could this possibly mean? A nuanced answer detects here Barth’s penetrating insight – one stated in various ways in the preceding chapters  – that ‘creation’ names not simply a preparatory or provisional stage on the way towards a trans- or post-historical liberation, but the singular and irreplaceable context of God’s covenant with creatures as a history of grace; the distinct time and space within which the creature is afforded a relative ‘independence’, and thus the time to live with God as responsive recipients of and witnesses to God’s promise of a new humanity in the coming of God’s Son. In this way, Barth’s rationale for the present overlap of reconciliation and rebellion is ultimately grounded in the distinction of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ (or de jure and de facto) creaturely participation in Christ’s unique work. The objective basis of the covenant is characterized by the fact that both primally and finally, as it were, creaturely reality simply has no role to play in the divine economy; creaturely existence, life and history only ever is on the basis of the free outpouring of God’s grace, its turn ‘outward’ in Jesus Christ. There is therefore only divine activity with regard to creation’s original determination, the gracious ex nihilo of its coming-to-be, and with regard to the final status of creaturely life before God. God alone brings-to-be and brings-to-pass. Barth therefore claims that God could have ‘collapsed’ the presently overlapping orders of creation and new creation – he could have made ‘Easter Day at once the last day, the day of the Lord’, in which all things are set to rights

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by God’s irrevocable judgement, and in which Christ’s presence to creation would therefore no longer take the form of a ‘Pilgrim and Warrior’ amid and against the ‘still persisting forces’ of sin, evil and death.7 Crucially, however, the persistence of the creaturely world itself characterizes this ‘good will’ of God in Jesus Christ to not yet be at his goal as a good will, as a relation of grace. The material and historical ‘outcome’ of God’s ‘first’ economic work (creatio ex nihilo) is the given context within which God’s eternal and electing love reaches its goal, the sphere in which God’s covenant with the creature is enacted and fulfilled. Creation, as this ontologically distinct reality derived from and sustained by the love of God, is preserved even ‘after’ the (objective) triumph over evil in the earthly history of Christ precisely for the realization therein of a new form of creaturely life, one that is marked by recognition and anticipation of the reality of its eschatological fulfilment. Such a view of the gracious continuation of the present world order helps explain the high status Barth’s domatics gives to ‘witness’ as the basic moral concept, felicitously describing what it means to live ‘the Christian life’ or to have a creaturely existence reconciled by and corresponding to God’s salvific work.8 Here it appears through the claim that God graciously preserves the creaturely realm itself – despite its corruption by the destructive powers of sin, evil and death – precisely so that humanity’s given earthly life can receive a new orientation of ‘joy and gratitude and praise’.9 A reconciled creaturely life in the present is possible because it is a reality in Christ, because the ‘once for all’ of God’s grace towards and judgement of all things in him is prophetically present as a ‘living Word’, declaring that ‘this sphere or time of ours’ is in fact ‘included’ within ‘the reconciliation effected in Him’.10 One must see in all this a quite specific (even narrow, as if on a razor’s edge) sense in which Barth views the (negative) possibility of creaturely powers still-in-opposition to the ‘reconciliation and lordship of God’ as an effect of – or perhaps happier, as conditioned by – God’s positive will. God wills for human history itself to be given a share in Christ’s own transition from death to life; he desires, with the grace of longsuffering patience (rather than the final dualism an impotent will), for the creature freely  – that is, ‘subjectively’, in positive response to God’s determinative grace and claim – to follow the movement of Christ’s own earthly history as a life lived from and towards God’s liberating grace. This movement of creaturely reception of and witness to God’s grace

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occurs in the covenant-partner’s living recognition that their own time and place – their given creaturely context, as the time for and place of their own freedom to respond to God’s decision and act – is a history occurring within Christ’s history, ‘the history of the covenant fulfilled in Him’.11 Conversely, then, the ‘counter-history’ or great contradiction of human existence ‘after’ the self-revelation of God in Christ, and thus ‘after’ humanity’s own (objective) reconciliation, is that human life and history can be and is still characterized by what Barth calls a ‘great confusion’.12 This hominum confusio consists in the fact that human life actively corresponds not to its own fulfilment in Christ and the kingdom his drawing-near announces, but to that which God’s good lordship judges and opposes – that is, to das Nichtige and its powers.13 What God has already achieved in Christ’s history, and wills to accomplish in ‘the wider sphere’ of human history as such, ‘is the unravelling of this historical confusion’ in which humanity is actively engaged.14 Barth notes that when and where this confusion takes place, there is of necessity the intertwining and entangling of that which, originally and ultimately, can only be strictly opposed  – the good creation of God, along with all its powers and possibilities (both human and within ‘the surrounding cosmos’) which are themselves good by virtue of their basis in and service of the rule of God, and on the other side the absurd reality of das Nichtige, that sheer ‘negation of the good creation of God’ which exists by no ground or right but ‘only per nefas’.15 The ‘metaphysic and logic’ Barth expounds here is that of the human being ‘who has fallen from God and therefore fallen out with his neighbor and himself ’.16 To understand its appearance here in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, and its relevance to our inquiry into why and how the powers arrayed against God’s creature continue to wreak havoc within human history despite their eschatological abolition, we must understand this hominum confusio as an extension of Barth’s earlier definition of das Nichtige as, quite strictly, the negation of the good creature – the reality of God’s good creation, represented by humanity’s own freedom ‘for a life in fellowship with [God]’.17 Das Nichtige’s strictly negative ‘reality and operation’ arises in the creature’s own unfounded turn away from the grace of God. This latter emphasis is necessary to grasp that Barth’s logic with respect to das Nichtige and its powers is without reserve the logic of idolatry, and to see this is to begin to grasp how ‘the great confusion’ that renders human

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life still-subject to the powers of ‘that which is not’,18 and thus practically still-captive to an alien and inhumane rule, persists in the concrete attempt by God’s covenant-partner  – whose unreservedly good creaturely life has been established and bestowed in the humanity of Jesus Christ – to ‘seek life where it cannot be found’. It persists in the attempt to discover or, perhaps more accurately, to establish the divine ‘Yes’ (i.e. the goodness, justification, affirmation, grace) of one’s own life and history where only God’s ‘No’ may resound. Barth is emphatically clear that the non-divinity of the creature, the Creator-creature distinction as such, and the Schattenseite (‘shadow-side’) of creaturely life entailed in that insurmountable distinction, is not to be confused with this alien and opposing power.19 The immovable distinction and ‘frontier’ of creatureliness, creation’s own intrinsic limitations and possibilities, is not itself das Nichtige, that which God rejects and excludes from all eternity. Rather, nothingness make its inconceivable invasion of and attack upon God’s good creation in the creature’s (self-defeating, because futile) attempt to cross that divide.20 The creature ‘succumb[s] to the insinuations of nothingness’ as it acts in correspondence with the serpent’s lie, when Adam ‘desired to be like God’ – himself ‘effecting the separation’ between the divine Yes and No, no longer willing ‘to live by the grace of God and on the basis of the judgment already accomplished by Him, or to persist in the covenant with God which is its only safeguard against nothingness’.21 For Barth, the reign of the powers God has set aside in Christ, their lingering dominion over and imprisonment of the creature God has liberated in him, persists in the active perpetuation of this confused modus operandi in human thought, speech and action.22 As made clear in Chapter 1, Barth does not claim or wish to imply that the divine will for creaturely life grounds or (more strongly) justifies the active confusion in which human life idolatrously comes to perceive its own powers and those of the cosmos as themselves the direct and unmediated Word and work of God; to see such a legitimation, even in God’s ‘No’, is for Barth to risk confusing what God separates, to seek a reason for what is strictly irrational, and a freedom in what is in fact captivity.23 But keeping all this in mind, it must nevertheless be admitted that the logic of Barth’s rationale for the persistence of the present order, as a ‘provisional’ order in which the aeons overlap, is that the time and space given for human life’s correspondence to its own fulfilment in Christ – itself a work of grace, a liberation only but really for the (subjective)

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freedom to discover its life in Christ  – is also the time in which inhumane and rebellious creaturely powers may exist, strictly because creatures actually persist in using this time of God’s grace as a time for self-establishment and self-justification. Thus even while maintaining a strict opposition between the good and gracious rule of God and the per nefas dominion of all other lords, Barth sees the powers of das Nichtige as continuing to live by and in the creature’s idolatrous service of some other power or possibility as itself the divine presence and future, as the justifying centre of creaturely life and thus as creation’s lawful, world-ordering claim.24 In this ontologically inconceivable act the ‘frontier’ of creation’s Schattenseite becomes a divide, and what is good ‘in itself ’ – that is, within the claim of God’s promise behind, in and through all things – becomes strictly opposed to the reconciliation of human existence constituted in and by God’s Word. All of this is salient to our present inquiry, not only in contributing to a refined understanding of Barth’s view of das Nichtige’s powers as depicted in Chapter 1, but chiefly as a way of explicating Barth’s rationale for understanding as a work of grace the divine determination to distinguish the ‘first revelation’ of Christ’s new humanity from the last, and thus to allow the present world-order to persist, despite the ‘provisionality’ and ‘relativity’ it necessarily has in the overlapping of its order with the opposing order of das Nichtige’s forces. There will be reason below to further consider Barth’s placement of this hominum confusio, even in his doctrine of reconciliation, alongside the providential lordship of God’s grace. Yet first the task is to round off our reflections on CD IV/3 by attending to Barth’s description of the kinds of powers God eschatologically overcomes, and thus what Christ’s prophetic work in the present concretely opposes.

B. Christ’s prophetic presence and the power(s) of ‘falsehood’ The force of Barth’s treatment of Christ’s prophetic office stems from the repetition that the one (once-for-all) history in which God enacts and effects reconciliation, putting to death the powers opposed to God’s creature and therefore establishing this creature’s life as a new form of being in the world, is for all its ‘objective’ singularity not closed to or at a remove from the history of humanity and world-occurrence as such, but is in fact ‘eloquent’ grace, present as the living Word of God addressed to and for persons in their own time and

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place.25 This does not imply Barth’s ignorance or silence regarding the biblical portrayal of ‘the eschaton’ or ‘the day of the Lord’ as an impending judgement and total transformation of all things, a final setting aside of all that has fallen with(in) the old regime and the establishment of a ‘new heavens and earth’ (Rev. 21). He simply thinks such cosmic transformation has been accomplished by God ‘in Christ’, and (not least in his treatment of ‘The Promise of the Spirit’)26 he re-orients the logic of eschatological transformation from the need to ultimately resolve the corruption of the present order by relegating hope to a trans- or post-historical future, to focus instead upon the graciousness with which God continues to uphold the order of creation precisely so that it can be made new by the apocalypsis of Jesus Christ – by the revelation that in him God has fulfilled covenantal history and so brought the dominion of the rebellious powers to an end. What this account importantly denies, as I have already implied above, is any temptation to think that the problem of the present age, the ‘evil’ God condemns and sets aside in Christ, is creatureliness itself – that the genuine basis of human-historical disorder lurks within some instrinsic metaphysical divorce between ‘creation’ and ‘new creation’ (or time/ eternity, soul/body, etc.). Thus Barth, while avowing that the future hope of creation is hope for an ‘eternal’ reception of and share in the life that is proper to God alone,27 can claim that the actualization of this future hope in the person of Christ means for the creature not liberation from its non-divinity – that is, from a distinct form of earthly life within God’s rule – but rather from ‘the antithesis of a temporal and eternal, this-worldly and other-worldly, corruptible and incorruptible, human and divine life’.28 My reading of Barth thus far has suggested that such antithesis historically emerges as human thought, speech and action become ordered according to a falsely divinized law, instead of faith’s sensitivity to its reception of and dependence upon the verbum externum of God’s grace. As a brief aside, it should be noted that – at least from the standpoint of a certain ‘Platonizing’ influence in the mainstream theological tradition, in the wake of Augustine – there is here a radical and largely ignored or misunderstood aspect of Barth’s doctrine of creation, in which to be a creature simply is to have a limited and appointed time which is necessarily distinct from God’s own ‘time’.29 In this quite specific yet basic sense, ‘death’ names not an alien and threatening enemy of the creature, but the good and appointed end of

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creaturely life, ‘the frontier’ beyond which nothing stands but God himself.30 This also helps make sense of Barth’s seemingly abstruse discussion of the relation of das Nichtige  – whose powers are, again, in no way ontologically ‘grounded’ or morally justifiable  – and the Schattenseite (‘shadow-side’) of creatureliness.31 In obvious dialogue with (yet without slavish repetition of) the privative evil tradition, Barth’s das Nichtige appears as the wholly oppositional force this Schattenseite  – itself a non-oppositional, primal determination of creaturely existence  – becomes in a postlapsarian state of existence. That is, with these terms Barth signals a fundamental difference between creation’s good and appointed end, and the strictly negative ‘last enemy’ that darkens creaturely reality through and in the creature’s abstention from and resistance to God’s sustaining grace.32 Barth’s account of the objective end of covenantal history in Christ is not, then, a denial of the newness of the Easter event, the fact that an end is really made in Christ, one which draws near to creatures even now through the Spirit but is present to them as the promise of their own, and indeed all creation’s future.33 This newness is signalled early on in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, through the notion that creaturely life occurs only through ongoing sustenance by and anticipation of divine grace. ‘Created being as such needs salvation, but does not have it: it can only look forward to it. To that extent salvation is its eschaton’.34 This allows Barth to affirm, with Augustine and the theological tradition in his wake, that God makes and sustains creaturely life for eternal or ‘perfected’ life with God, while retaining a christologically specified conception of this future perfection, not as intrinsic opposition to or absorption of creaturely life, but as the quality of the life and time unique to God in its gracious inclusion of creaturely life.35 None of this is meant to deny the possibility of a certain kind of ‘divine monism’ in Barth’s eschatology. The charge may well stand that the given cosmic-historical ‘context’ of the covenant, and the relatively but really free existence and activity of God’s creature within it, occurs only as a blip on the way from original to final divine self-knowledge. Whether or not the charge sticks, it is certainly true that Barth affirms both that ‘death’ means the end of the creature’s ‘temporal existence and therefore function as a witness to Jesus Christ’, and at the same time that the Christian hope is set upon an ‘end’ in which humanity meets not merely death but Christ himself, and hence ‘a new beginning bordered by no further end’.36 To adequately resolve this question,

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one would have to make a full-blown analysis of time and eternity in Barth, which is beyond the bounds of the present inquiry.37 What is clear, and must suffice for the present analysis, is that even where it most appears that Barth is following the traditional line, in ultimately orienting ‘history’ upon ‘eternity’ (e.g. CD §73), his stress still falls upon the subject of eschatological hope (i.e. Jesus Christ) in such a way that the reorientation and re-ordering of one’s given creaturely life upon and by his presence remains the basic theme.38 The salient point is, again, the emphatic clarity with which Barth is concerned to bring this future of redeemed life with God – which has been accomplished ‘once-for-all’ in Christ’s own unique history, and thus needs no further establishment or metaphysical actualization– to bear upon the present hope of reconciliation. While there is in Barth, in relation to his affirmation of the Schattenseite as delimiting the appointed and thus good end of the creature, a strand of thought that risks construing the eschatological future as an eternity of merely passive being in relation to God,39 I agree with Adam Neder that the driving impulse and central categories of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation places emphasis on the way in which the objective fulfilment of the covenant – itself constituted by an intrinsically ordered divine and creaturely movement – is an act of grace precisely for the correspondence of creaturely life in the present to God’s own decision and act.40 This reading stresses that, despite the possible eschatological monism mentioned above, Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation repeatedly emphasizes how the ‘end’ (telos) of the covenant in Christ is achieved not for God’s sake and glory alone, but is a divine work of grace for creation’s reconciliation, and so ‘awakens and allows and commands it to know and experience and take itself seriously as such, and therefore to exist as the reconciled and not the unreconciled world’.41 Whatever the final, as-yet-unrevealed form of creaturely life before God, there is a definite sense in Barth that the telos of Christ’s prophetic work in history is the reorientation of humanity’s given creaturely life upon him, and thus the freedom to find one’s particular life-history situated within and illumined by his revelation of the divine Yes and No. Christian theology sees the great confusion characterizing human history in light of a ‘new thing’, an event that is new by virtue of its occurrence not only ‘beyond the antithesis, yet also new within it’.42 In this light it is clear that Barth understands what is put to death in Christ’s eschatological fulfilment or final ‘perfection’ of creaturely being creation

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not as creatureliness per se, but strictly the ‘old Adam’, the creature in its self-reliance and thus its proud, slothful and ultimately ‘false’ resistance to the grace by which alone it lives and may live. In what sense does Barth see the death of the old Adam, and his representation of the ‘resisting element’ within the present order as such, as the overcoming of the demonic principalities and powers, against whom, as Paul so clearly attests, God’s messiah has waged and won not merely a personal but, decisively, a cosmic war? Before turning to Barth’s most explicit answer in discussion of ‘The Lordless Powers’, it is worth contextualizing our critical entry into that text through a brief description of das Nichtige’s powers in relation to Christ’s prophetic office and present historical work.43 Jesus is true God and true humanity also as ‘The True Witness’44 to the covenant of grace  – that is, as the self-revelation of God in God’s grace towards and for creatures, as well as the revelation of the creature in reception of and response to God’s grace. He is the truth of God in the grace of God’s ever-turning again to wayward creatures, and the truth of human life in living recognition of the creature’s intrinsic dependence upon and openness to the present help of its Lord. Christ is in this sense a double kenosis, a ‘two-fold determination’ of divine and creaturely being,45 although Barth is clear (along with the deepest insights of his own Reformed theological tradition) that there is here a certain conceptual ordering or delimitation – namely, that it is the priority of divine grace, the unconditioned (or ‘eternal’) self-giving of God, that grounds the existence of creation and so conditions the form and content of a free creaturely offering of praise.46 What is especially significant at this point is Barth’s claim that human existence ‘outside’ of Christ – that is, in actual contradiction to God’s self-revelation in his history  – also bespeaks ‘a real relation between God and man’, but it is a relation which is determined by the revelatory encounter of divine and human existence in Christ, rather than the other way around. ‘What is proclaimed in their existence is another God, another man and another relation between them. And the untrue declaration of their existence is unmasked as such when they are confronted by this man, the true Witness, and by the true declaration of His existence.’47 As the revelation of God’s eschatological promise to and claim upon creaturely life, Christ is prophetically present, confronting human-historical existence

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not simply as a proud and slothful resistance to God’s grace, but decisively as the false reality – a ‘counter-revelation’ to the one Word of God – that is attested ‘in the deeds and misdeeds of man’.48 The covenant God has established and fulfilled in Jesus Christ is opposed not simply by the over-reaching tendencies of human pride or the moral slothfulness of the improperly moved will – these being ‘the material, intrinsically timeless and constant opposition in principle of man’49 – but also (and decisively) in the concrete non-conformity of earthly human life to the reconciliation God’s Word declares. ‘Falsehood’ names for Barth the actual distance between the present (old) and coming (new) order of creaturely life; it is the form creaturely rebellion takes ‘in [its] historical encounter with the Word of divine grace’ addressed to it. This concept describes God’s judgement of human thought, speech and action when and where it mounts its defences against the gospel’s declaration of what is the case ‘in Christ’, which is (conversely) God’s disclosure of the concrete ways in which ‘the being and form’ of present creaturely life achieves a relative but real continuation of what has been set aside in him. So how is this ‘falsehood’ portrayed in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation? What does its persistence have to do with the ongoing captivity of human life and history to a dominion God has abolished in the history of Jesus Christ, to the alien rule and hostile powers Christ’s prophetic work and witness is even now actively (and, Barth says, effectively) battling against? The best way to answer these questions will be to turn now to Barth’s treatment of the ‘lordless powers’, and then to close off analysis of that text, and move into dialogue with Yoder’s eschatological exousiology, by re-introducing a few final themes from CD IV/3. This will display Barth’s description of the kind of power(s) God has overcome and is at work overruling in Christ, as he prophetically draws human life from Adamic captivity to its own creaturely freedom in him.50 In addition to addressing the precise ‘anthropocentric character’ of reconciliation, in the sense mentioned above,51 these themes  – when set in the context of the discussion of lordless powers – will also provide necessary fodder for the question of the agency of creaturely power, now set in relation to humanity’s historic liberation from and empowerment to resist the hostile powers of das Nichtige. This question of ‘power and agency’,52 especially as it informs the relation between exousiology and ecclesiology, will then be further addressed at the end of this chapter in dialogue with Yoder.

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C. The lordless powers Barth’s section on ‘The Lordless Powers’ is set within the final paragraph of the doctrine of reconciliation, entitled ‘The Struggle for Human Righteousness’.53 This heading reflects the extension of several particular themes brought to light above, in connection with Christ’s prophetic office, to bear upon the second petition of the Lord’s prayer. Can and should we not recall the particular ordering and interrelation of the covenant’s (objective) fulfilment in Christ and his (subjective) liberation of human existence to that end, in Barth’s summation of this final paragraph – namely, that as Christians pray that God ‘will cause his righteousness to appear and dwell on a new earth under a new heaven’, they simultaneously ‘act in accordance with their prayer as people who are responsible for the rule of human righteousness . . . on earth’?54 The form of action required by this ‘element of the one command of God’ is that of a ‘militant revolt’ against the vast historical disorder arising from the great confusion of God’s good creation with das Nichtige. What is at issue for Barth is not simply a human ‘no!’ that follows the judgement of God, but the Christian’s revolt against a given state of affairs precisely because, in light of ‘the act which God has commenced and will complete’55 in Christ, another reality and thus possibility has been set before them.56 To follow the command to seek the righteousness of God’s kingdom (the act of invocation) entails a corresponding ‘attitude and mode of conduct in the sphere of the freedom which .  .  . is already given to them here and now on this side of the fulfilment of the prayer’.57 Here, circling in upon the powers with which Christ’s prophetic Word sets human-historical life in conflict, we encounter again the cautious dialectic of the eschatological (divine) achievement of and provisional-historical (human) correspondence to reconciliation. The crucial aspect is, again, the orientation of the latter by the former. The ‘vertically’ oriented command to place one’s living hope in God’s own act is not obeyed without a corresponding ‘horizontal’ movement: ‘they cannot pray the prayer aright without in so doing being projected into this corresponding action of their own which is provisional but nonetheless serious in this particular sphere’.58 As his account of the Christian life moves from ‘the revolt against disorder’ that Christians make in prayer for the divine kingdom, to ‘the lordless powers’ with which they are set in living conflict by this prayer, Barth comes perhaps closer than anywhere else to affirming that the historical freedom creaturely

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life finds in looking to God’s kingdom is itself a manifestation of the kingdom’s presence: Where free praying of the second petition is a living and powerful event in the great hope of God’s future, there the vitality and force of little hopes for the present of a person and of people will not be lacking: the free and responsible advocacy, actualized in little steps, of that which in the light of the act which God has commenced and will complete can be called human right, human freedom, and human peace, of that which very provisionally and incompletely can already be these things.59

The first thing to note about Barth’s discussion of the powers at this point is its extension of the logic of idolatry noted above. Barth intends this treatment to be a closer look at ‘the manner and nature of the evil’ whose end Christians pray for as they invoke the coming of God’s kingdom, a practically oriented account of the evil powers they are compelled to resist as they seek God’s righteousness.60 He begins this analysis by discussing how the ‘great disorder that .  .  . characterizes the human state and course of things’  – as a form of historical life or creaturely existence that contradicts the ‘salutary order and righteousness of God’ – is rooted in and to a large extent simply is humanity’s ‘fall and alienation’ from the good government of God, which is simultaneously self-alienation and alienation from other persons. This ‘original disorder’ is idolatrous because it is always and everywhere the ‘attempt to escape from the sphere of God’s lordship’, the human attempt to be ‘without a Lord’ or, more precisely, to embark upon a path that follows the serpent’s false promise that ‘You will be like God’, that you may become ‘your own lords and masters’.61 The dominion of the powers begins in human thought, speech and action that are ordered by this unrealizable promise and enacted in its service. Once the latter point is grasped, the other determinative feature of Barth’s exousiology (re)appears: all that the idolatry of a human life attempting self-mastery or freedom from God’s rule can and does accomplish is ‘a dreadful “as if ”’, a paradoxical inversion of what human existence is as the good creation of God. Das Nichtige sets itself upon the throne, and human persons lose the relative but real ‘dominion’ they are to have over their own powers and capacities, and over the powers and capacities of the surrounding non-human cosmos, within the sphere of God’s lordship. ‘Parallel to the history of his emancipation from God there runs that of the emancipation of his own possibilities of life

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from himself: the history of the overpowering of his desires, aspirations, and will by the power, the superpower, of his ability’.62 In The Christian Life, these powers are shown to be nothing more than the abilities, capacities and possibilities of the good but idolatrous human creatures, ‘exalting themselves as lordless forces, against man himself ’.63 To grasp the full significance of this latter ‘against’, however, one must note that the ‘law of rebellion’ enacted in all human idolatry extends outward, as it were, comprehending every arena of human-historical life.64 Barth’s treatment of Leviathan (the powers of the state) and Mammon (within the economic realm), at the head of this discussion of the person’s ‘own abilities’ emancipated from and now set against him, would be incoherent if Barth did not envision this ‘unleashing’ of hostile power as in some sense moving beyond the sphere of the human being, at least insofar as that sphere has been traditionally conceived in terms of intrapersonal intellect, affect and will. The lordless powers are the extension of this law of rebellion, of the perverse and anti-creaturely forces arising in human idolatry, into every corner of human existence and history. The power of the powers, though in truth ‘only a usurped and creaturely one’, nevertheless ‘is a highly effective [power] in its outward penetration and expansion’.65 Although the baseline of Barth’s rhetoric here is the refrain of the ‘human abilities’ God gives to and sustains for the life of creaturely freedom, to make sense of his account it is essential to see these ‘abilities’ as more than intrapersonal faculties and individual effects. The powers that have sought and still seek lordlessness are also the capacities and possibilities of human existence in toto – all that Adamic humanity can and does do as it (collectively) turns from the rule of God’s grace as it meets us in Jesus Christ. Thus even though the emancipation of these ‘powers, abilities, and possibilities of [human] life’ from their God-ordained service of creaturely freedom cannot be ‘finally valid, effective, and irreversible’, it is in nonetheless ‘real and efficacious’ in, and indeed in the strict sense as, the history of fallen and rebellious humankind.66 World history, being the history of man and humanity, of Adamic humanity which has fallen from God, is also the history of innumerable absolutisms of different kinds, of forces that are truly and properly man’s own but that have won a certain autonomy, independence, and even superiority in relation to him.67

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How should one understand the connection, in Barth’s exousiology, between these specifically human powers and possibilities; the practical roots of their emancipation from and inverted dominion over human life in humanity’s own idolatrous attempts at lordlessness and self-mastery; and the fact that their relative but real ‘independence’ and ‘superiority’ in relation to humanity is described, by Barth, as most clearly displayed in the social context of human life? First of all, it must be admitted that there is clear rhetorical tension at several key points between Barth’s account of the powers here, in his ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, and Chapter 1’s account, grounded primarily in Barth’s doctrine of creation, of the demonic powers as the concrete forms of das Nichtige. This tension is obvious, for example, when one juxtaposes the following claims. Chapter 1 argued that in CD III/3, the demonic powers simply are nothingness ‘in its [historical] dynamic’, form and activity; that, as such, they cannot be equated with or reduced to creaturely powers; and that Barth’s account of nothingness as itself the power of the powers does not, nor could it, seek ‘firm conceptual resolution’ regarding its origin or ‘final cause’. As shown above, however, the lordless powers are said to be ‘nothing but’ the abilities and possibilities of humankind, and Barth clearly contends, if not for ‘firm conceptual resolution’ of these powers’ origin, at least for the clear admission that humanity’s ‘fall and alienation from God is the root of all evil and therefore of this evil too’.68 A proper understanding of Barth’s exousiology does, however, relieve the obvious pressure of this rhetorical tension in his doctrines of creation and reconciliation, by attending to the material unity of these two loci within the key concepts already sketched in this chapter – namely, creaturely history as itself the context given for the enactment of the covenant of grace; the way in which creation’s God-given Schattenseite – the creature’s own salutary limitation(s) and dependence(s)  – becomes the site of the wholly negative, antagonistic powers of das Nichtige in connection with human idolatry; and, especially, the ‘great confusion’ between the reality of God’s wholly good creation and the anti-creaturely power(s) of nothingness, a corrupted and further-corrupting state of existence which characterizes world history and marks it decisively and comprehensively as the life-history of Adam. This chapter’s opening account of God’s (objective) eschatological fulfilment of creation’s history brought these

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themes together, so that we may note their confluence in the subjectivity of the lordless powers. The following paragraphs accomplish this by further detailing the powers’ peculiar historical existence and activity. Chapter 1 showed how Barth distinguishes the angelic ministry, issuing from God’s own self-attestation to and among creatures, from the earthly ‘correspondents’ or agents that positively attest and follow this work of revelatory grace. Yet it was also clear that this necessary conceptual distinction between heavenly and earthly powers does not prohibit Barth’s practical identification of the angelic accompaniment of God’s self-revelation with the task of witness determinative of human authorities (the ‘political angelic power’ of the state) as well as non-human cosmological structures (the raq’ia). When the powers carry out this positive determination, their work can be said to be ‘sanctified’ by the Word and work of God, in the precise sense noted by Gerald McKenny: for Barth, Sanctification . . . is the determination of human [or creaturely] conduct by grace. Determination (Bestimmung) does not, of course, imply causal force or fate. We are determined by God’s Word, not by some cosmic or metaphysical force; what is involved is a divine decision and judgment on our free acts designating us to respond with faith and obedience.69

The essential point is that all the powers of heaven and earth bear this vocation; the powers’ determination for the Word and work of God, no less than (and, indeed, as ingredient to) the covenant-partner herself, is fundamentally constitutive of who and what the powers are as God’s good creatures. Just so, however, Barth’s treatment of the lordless powers should be interpreted as the converse of that practical identification – it has to think and say together what, from the standpoint of God’s gracious determination and creation’s innermost truth, must needs be totally distinguished – the ontologically impossible power of das Nichtige, which is the power of ‘the devil and the demons’, together with the powers and possibilities of the human covenant-partner. The lordless powers are the powers and possibilities of the covenant-partner in breached and broken fellowship, in practical alienation from the lordship of God’s Word and so self-alienated, set firmly at odds with what they are given as and for: namely, living witness to God’s grace. Just as, from the standpoint of creation, the devil and demons name the ‘mythological’ agents of the ontologically negative (or, in traditional terms,

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privative) spiritual power and tendency of ‘that which God has denied’,70 in the ethics of reconciliation it is shown to be the powers and possibilities of the fallen and rebellious creation – the creature at odds with itself, with its life by and in the divine speaking – whose work and effects can only be described ‘mythologically’. Barth’s sense for a necessary ‘mythologization’ at this point has nothing to do with a denial of the perverse reality of the powers’ work, and everything to do with its character as perversion in relation to the ‘confusion’ of God’s good creation with das Nichtige. As Gorringe notes, nothingness is neither directly the work of God or creature – yet as that ontologically privative tertium quid, it bears a distinct relation to both: it is that which is ‘rejected’ from eternity by the Word and work of God, and that which is paradoxically elected by the creature as it turns from that Word, from its own true life. Whereas in Barth’s doctrine of creation, the focus is on its relation to the divine No – to that which God does not will, or create, or sustain, or reconcile – in The Christian Life, the focus falls on the unpromising turn of the human covenant-partner away from a living trust in the sustenance of the divine Word. It is only the God-given powers and possibilities of creation which could and have become the ‘earthly-historical’ forms of the power of hell, the darkened stage upon which ‘that which God rejects’ from eternity could gain an audience and make its case. This is so precisely because what is at stake in the relation of divine and creaturely power is not a zero-sum relation of a power-balance or exchange, but the creature’s acceptance of its own life as constituted and fulfilled in the divine Word; the issue is whether and how the life-history of creation manifests – how it receives and responds to – God’s self-revelation in and as the humanity of Jesus Christ. For human beings, this is specifically a question of recognition that even as we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’ (Eph. 2.10), our powers – those personal capacities often seen as our ‘possession’, as well as the social and cosmic powers that sustain us – are also and inextricably bound up with the history of the first Adam. It is in this sense that the key distinction between the ‘confessing’ and ‘non-confessing’ world can be said to be, for Barth, a distinction between knowledge or ignorance of God’s active presence to and for creation. The primal fall through which the powers of Adahm open the floodgates of lordlessness is, as Bonhoeffer put it, not the abstract ignorance of ‘unbelief ’, but ‘the deed’ which transgresses the creature’s limit in the other; it is the partaking of a forbidden self-knowledge,

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in which wisdom, good and evil become relative to our own will, decision and act in place of the ‘given Word of God’.71 As will be shown below, Yoder also employs ‘confession’ as a practical indication of the church-world distinction, yet he does not flesh out this demarcation in primarily epistemic categories. The exousiological significance of the difference between Barth and Yoder on this point is further discussed below. Here the emphasis falls on the clear necessity with which Barth states that there could be no ‘great confusion’ darkening world history, no disorder opposed to the salutary order of divine rule, if God’s unreservedly good creation and creature did not continue to exist, to be sustained by and preserved for the Word of grace. Human life would not carry on in active confusion, or (in the terms of The Christian Life) it would not suffer the ‘plight of disorder’, if God’s ‘first’ creative work was at any point no longer part of the exousiological equation. In the confusion and disordering of the creature’s powers and possibilities, then, what is effected is a conjoining, in and through humanity’s disastrous response to the present Word of grace, of what from the doctrinal vantage-points of creation and reconciliation is strictly opposed: freedom for the other and ‘the deed’ of self-rule; the ability to hear and respond to the embodied promise of the Word and the deafening decision for one’s own will and might as the law of action. If the typology of the powers explored in Chapter 1 – now further nuanced in light of the relation of Christ’s eschatological victory accomplished for the history of reconciliation – has shown that, for Barth, the question of angelic or demonic power(s) is only ever about how creaturely life receives and responds to the one Word and power of God Jesus Christ; if exousiology, too, is finally about the power(s) of God’s creature as it is confronted and claimed by the power(s) of Jesus Christ  – then the heuristic function of Barth’s ‘lordless powers’ discussion is to clarify and concretize how that relation of divine and creaturely power illumines the ethical dimension of human history in light of the eschatological triumph of Jesus Christ. The ethical shape given to Barth’s exousiology in the specific powers he names will be further explored in Part 3.B and Chapter 4. This brings us to a second question in relation to Barth’s lordless powers, one that addresses both the nature of the powers’ dominion over human-historical life, as well as the primary field of the powers’ operation in the context of human

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society and politics. This is the question of the rationale behind Barth’s division of what we might call the ‘primary’ powers into absolutizable (or, in Haddorff ’s words, ‘potentially hegenomic’72) ‘spiritual’ forces, and the lesser, more-earthly or materially embedded ‘chthonic’ powers. Whence this division? What is its theological significance, in terms of how Barth conceives the practical means by which the powers enslave or hold human life captive to false promises and goals, thus determining sociopolitical history as a history of lived inhumanity? This question can be tied back into the themes raised in Chapter 1 – especially the impossibility of reducing the demonic powers to human activity. The possibility of connecting the spiritual (i.e. supra-material) forces that demonize and enslave human existence with das Nichtige’s own exceeding of personal agency is already there. Yet the sinful ‘activism’ grounding Barth’s treatment of the earthly powers’ lordlessness – the fact that it is shown to be the creature’s own turn away from God’s grace and claim which ‘unleashes’ das Nichtige’s dominion  – still orders the relation between human idolatry and structural injustice as, in principle, a move from the former to the latter. Theologically, the structural problem  – the ‘horizontal’ question of sociopolitical relations and institutions – remains for Barth secondary to or derivative of intrapersonal idolatry. A fuller analysis of this question is taken up below, but it is worth framing the problem here as we move back into Yoder’s structurally oriented exousiology. The question is directly raised by Barth’s distinct categorization of his primary powers (Leviathan, Mammon and Ideology) as ‘spiritual forces’, over and against the more-earthly ‘chthonic’ powers (e.g. technology, fashion, sport).73 It is clear that Barth is working towards an account of the practical interrelation of all these human-historical powers, or else it would not be the social dimension of human existence given such primacy as the realm within which occurs that ‘great confusion’ of creaturely life paradoxically ordered by both the kingdoms of God and das Nichtige. ‘Christians are summoned to revolt . . . against the disorder which controls and poisons and disrupts all human relations and interconnections’.74 Moreover, the interrelation of these two types of powers is clear in the transition from the spiritual to the chthonic: ‘Even as man forms pictures and concepts, thinks in ideas, and coordinates these relatively or absolutely, he does not exist in an empty or separate sphere of the spirit’. The ‘real man’ created and loved by God exists ‘also’ in the

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‘physical sphere of the created cosmos’; he is ‘the soul of his body’, who as such ‘never looks and strives only upward . . . but always downward as well’.75 It is in ‘the sudden or gradual movement’ in which the human being ‘slips out’ of his (ontologically constitutive) service of God that he ‘forfeits the lordship’ over the earth and ‘natural’ powers that is rightfully his.76 Yet what sense can be made of the claim that the injustices of Leviathan (political absolutism) and Mammon (economic idolatry)  – and the functioning of ideology in cooperation with both  – are patently more spiritual, intrapersonal or ideational, than are the lower, more-earthly, ‘much more directly’ felt forms of bondage wrought through the power of technology, or through captivity to social customs such as fashion, sport and culture?77 It seems obvious that the claim about ‘man himself ’ being the soul in his body; the sense that political, economic and ideological power grasps ‘upward’ after divinization, whereas the ‘forces of nature’ and the ‘spirits of the earth’ pull the human being downward; the connection of the divine blessing and command to be fruitful and have dominion among the creatures of earth (Gen. 1.28) with Goethe’s image of the human spirit that wilfully disposes and triumphs over his own and other earthly natures – this all quite dutifully follow the classical metaphysical image of the real human being situated between heaven and earth, one who remains free and in control of his own internal and external life as long as his soul is duly ordered, not transgressing its God-given boundaries (in either direction). My aim here is not to challenge this image directly; yet exousiology must at least raise the question whether it – at this point, in connection with Barth’s account of the ‘final and true basis’ of the powers’ lordlessness in Adam’s personal sin – proves adequate for conceiving if and how the ‘sudden or gradual movement’ in which the covenant-partner breaks free from fidelity to the divine Word actually becomes external to the realm of intrapersonal being. The difficulty is that Barth so clearly perceives the sociopolitical consequences of human attempts at idolatry, and he no doubt recognizes that all are lost, together, within the slaughter-bench of human history; but the ontological-moral basis of this pathology remains the creature’s decision for disobedience and unfreedom, in a way that does not do justice to how collective idolatry historically informs personal being and action. In light of the exposition provided here, which builds upon Chapter 1’s outline of Barth’s theology of the powers, two critical questions might be raised

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that are worth bearing in mind as we move back into Yoder’s exousiology and seek to further develop his emphases laid out in Chapter 2. First, there is the question of the sinful activism intrinsic to Barth’s account of the way in which das Nichtige gains power over creaturely life. While Barth certainly describes this hominum confusio or ‘plight of disorder’ in starkly comprehensive terms, as a ‘counter-history’ to the history of God’s good creature and the reconciled human life that corresponds to God’s gracious act, the ontological (or, more precisely, anti-ontological) foundations of das Nichtige’s vacuous presence among creatures finally falls back on the active rebellion in which the human creature paradoxically decides for what is strictly irrational, achieving what is ‘impossible’ from the perspective of her being-in-relation to the divine Word and its life-giving power. This rhetorical emphasis on human sin as the active seat of the powers’ rule in human history, especially when linked with Barth’s view of sinful agency itself as a patently ‘absurd’ and ontologically privative act, seems to imply that every instance of the subjection of human life to hostile powers is a self-conscious matter – that it is always grounded in the individual’s wilful decision for active conformity to ‘the patterns of this age’, or in his personal blindness to the grace and judgement with which God sustains creaturely life. It implies that one suffers the hostility of the powers’ rule only by actively refusing the concrete paths in whose direction freedom lies; that everything boils down to the individual placing their living hope where true life cannot be found. Barth clearly does not intend any of that, but whether he adequately avoids it is another matter. The risk is that this conceptual emphasis, which grounds the ontological basis of exousiology in the (lone) covenant-partner’s obedience to or detraction from the divine Word, ends up muting what might be considered the ‘other side’ of a biblically dialectical exousiology. This other side is nicely captured in Jacques Ellul’s paradoxical claim regarding the powers’ dominion: ‘we can affirm that certainly all is of man; but finally we know well that no man ever decides’.78 Secondly, all of these potential problems are crystallized by posing the wide-reaching question of the character or form of (the ‘old’) Adamic humanity eschatologically displaced by Christ’s (‘new’) humanity. Is the good creature of God whose powers and abilities the reign of evil corrupts and negates adequately conceived in intra-personal metaphysical terms, as much of the Christian theological tradition has presupposed? Or, alternatively,

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should theology in general and exousiology in particular speak instead of the covenant-partner’s existence as a form of life that is constitutively ordered by the gracious presence and claim of an/other – not only God’s otherness, but that of the creature in whom God’s otherness becomes for us a concrete promise and claim? This final question, then, to which we shall return below in dialogue with Yoder, is whether the dominion of the powers should be conceived as a form of captivity that is not simply personally willed or consciously chosen, but suffered, and this precisely because the good creaturely life this hostile rule opposes – that of the reconciled humanity God has established in Christ ‘before the foundations of the world’ – is an intrinsically sociopolitical form of existence, a being-with and -for, co-humanity, life together within the divine reign. The next two parts affirm the latter claim, thereby demonstrating that Barth’s exousiology needs Yoder’s not simply to grasp the nature of the powers’ ongoing dominion as exceeding intrapersonal idolatry and sin (the problem of ‘sinful activism’), but also to name the human situation of captivity as the result of more-than-epistemic disordering (the problem of faith as ‘knowledge’). If exousiology – indeed, Christian theology as such – need not begin with an intrapersonal state of being that the creature herself has fallen from; if its dialectic gets at the ‘self ’ by means of a certain way of being- with and -for the other; if ‘responsiveness’ rather than ‘possession’ is the more fitting ontological grammar, then the primal problem of evil power(s) can be said to persist in particular forms of life or modes of relation by which the histories of humankind are related to the ongoing history of the divine Word. Theology might then be concerned less with recovering a lost or underlying essence that fallen and rebellious powers have covered over, and more with discerning the various contours (political, economic, sexual, ‘environmental’) of the covenant-partner’s received form of life in relation to the promise and claim of God, in which all that creaturely life is finds freedom and fulfilment. Such analysis of the spiritual forces ordering human history would not, indeed could not be a shifting of all exousiological concepts from the locus of ‘creation’ to that of ‘eschatology’; rather, it would be a particular way of accounting for the givenness and transformative promise of a human life that is contextualized both by God’s own grace and command, and the coming of that Word to, in and through the relational structures constitutive of human history.

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Barth’s focus throughout the doctrine of reconciliation is, again not without good reason, on human being. But exousiology requires, as our first two chapters have shown, that a doctrine of salvation necessarily accounts not just for God’s eschatologically decisive overcoming and reconciliation of the fallen human creature and its powers of self-exaltation, but also (1) these powers as they become alien and alienating forces in relation to human subjectivity – powers with a perverse yet painfully real existence working against the creaturely flourishing which stands at the centre of God’s ‘Yes’ to humanity as Jesus – and (2) the institutional or structural forms these creaturely powers intrinsically have and depend upon when the human existence so affirmed is recognized not as a single figure in unmediated relation to God, but fundamentally as fellowor co-humanity. The question is not the impropriety of Barth’s focus upon the humanity of Christ, but with the theological sufficiency of not foregrounding the ‘newness’ of this humanity, and the ‘old’ that is thereby displaced, as an intrinsically social and political form of existence. Recalling that for Barth the lordless powers are the capacities and life-possibilities of the wayward covenant partner, but also that the creature’s rebellion inaugurates and entails a fall that extends outward, as it were, one can and indeed must then recognize this same ‘law of rebellion’ against the divine promise and claim at work in the relational structures and institutions through which human life receives its social and political form. The interpretive work in the preceding chapters has made clear that in Yoder these structural forms are given theological priority, whereas in Barth’s more ontologically oriented exousiology, and humanity’s structural relations tend to appear as material background (the cosmos as ‘context’)79 or as the purposive sociality entailed in the universality of God’s covenant with Adahm (humanity as ‘fellow humanity’).80 After a final detour into the eschatological character of Yoder’s exousiology, the rest of this chapter will be devoted to bringing the critical questions put here to Barth into dialogue with Yoder around the question of what constitutes ‘the church’ as a particular declaration of the gospel in the world of (the) power(s).

II. Yoder’s exousiology and the regnum Christi In the section in Politics discussing ‘The Work of Christ and the Powers’, Yoder quotes at length from Berkhof ’s account of ‘what Christ and his death did

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to the Powers’.81 The opening paragraph leading up to that lengthy quotation is especially relevant to Yoder’s theological development of Berkhof ’s thesis. Therein Yoder reaffirms that even though the present alienation of humanity from God’s redemptive purposes ‘consists in our subjection to the rebellious powers’, the powers’ rebelliousness is itself an idolatrous detraction from ‘the creaturely condition’.82 As shown in the last chapter, Yoder understands the ‘creatureliness’ of the powers to be their God-given existence as the ‘norms and regularities’ through which human society receives structural coherence and social unity. Given this positive account of the powers’ ordering function  – their rightful place within the cosmos as creaturely structures bearing witness to God’s own ‘saving creative purpose’ and work – Yoder cannot then articulate God’s liberation of humankind from these fallen and enslaving powers as sheer eschatological annihilation. It would constitute a denial that God’s work in Christ is meant to save persons ‘in their humanity’ if the fallen powers are ‘simply [to] be destroyed or set aside or ignored’. Rather: ‘Their sovereignty must be broken’.83 Thus for Yoder the Christian confession – ‘That Jesus is conqueror is eternally settled: the universe is his!’ – is much more than an affirmation of ‘the benevolent disposition of certain individuals to listen or of certain Powers to be submissive’ to the reality thereby proclaimed. Rather, ‘[i]t is a declaration about the nature of the cosmos and the significance of history’, and it is from within such a claim – that here, decisively and determinately in this life and death, the shape and purpose of human history itself has been revealed – that both the conscientious participation and objection of persons to the various powers governing their lives ‘find their authority and their promise’.84 This understanding of the powers’ fallen creatureliness allows Yoder to provide an account of structural or systemic evil that is at once ‘privative’ and historically realistic: the powers’ rebellion is the pretence – whether attributed or self-proclaimed, whether explicit or simply entailed in the powers’ modus operandi  – that the particular historical ‘networks, norms and regularities’ constitutive of human existence in a given time and place are themselves the definitive content or direct embodiment of the divine will. The powers’ mediatorial or representative function is rather purposive, receiving its meaning, its proper form and content, in the ongoing history of Jesus Christ. His history is the revelation of the divine-human encounter that every social institution or structural power exists to serve. Yoder can therefore claim that

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Jesus was willingly ‘subject to’ the political and religious powers of his day – a ‘submission’ which, as Yoder’s exegesis of Romans 13 makes clear, means neither moral acceptance nor indifference, but an allegiance to a different order whose radical scope determines even the means of ‘resistance’85 – and that he annulled their sovereignty precisely through this lived transcendence of their power, through his ‘moral independence’ from their idolatrous ‘self-glorification’ and ‘rebellious pretensions’.86 Christ’s historic confrontation of the ruling powers and its climactic end in his crucifixion is thus a divine ‘victory’ precisely as the fulfilment and revelation of Jesus’ own humanity, the distinction of a human existence comprehensively ordered by the utterly unique (i.e. non-transferrable) power and grace of God.87 Differing from Adam, Lucifer, and all the Powers, Jesus “did not consider being equal with God as a thing to be seized” (Phil. 2.6). His very obedience unto death is in itself not only the sign but also the first fruits of an authentic restored humanity. Here we have for the first time to do with a man who is not the slave of any power, of any law or custom, community or institution, value or theory.88

Here we note two considerations of primary importance. First, Yoder identifies as the demonic pretension common to ‘all the Powers’ the working presumption that ‘equality with God [is] a thing to be seized’. Secondly, the enslavement of human life to the powers, whose presumed autonomy renders them functionally ‘sovereign’ over human-historical affairs, is sundered by the fact that in the midst of such powers Jesus lived ‘a genuinely free and human existence’. These insights are crucial for grasping how Yoder understands the idolatry of the powers, their de facto sovereignty, and God’s liberation of humanity’s common life from this sovereignty to be conceptually intertwined. The nature of the fallen powers’ sovereignty in history, and of Jesus’ lived independence from such rule, has everything to do with the kind of faith persons live, with what form human trust and hope in the divine victory over evil takes. We will see that understanding the confession of faith as ‘doxology’ makes all the difference for understanding Yoder’s exousiology in its own right, as well as its deep coherence with yet distinction from Barth’s account. My aim in this part is to clarify this set of interrelations in Yoder’s exousiology, and to demonstrate how it illumines the powers’ ongoing dominion after Jesus’ resurrection. I will begin with mention of the exegetical work of Oscar Cullmann, with whom

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Yoder also studied and whose interpretation of the lordship of Christ explicitly informs Yoder’s exousiology.89 It is helpful to draw attention to Cullmann here not only because of his influence upon Yoder, but because of the overlap between Cullmann and Barth on this topic. Many scholars consider their understanding of the powers as of a piece, especially when discussing Barth’s ‘Justification and Justice’ (1938) or, more generally, how the political exousiai in Romans 13 are best interpreted.90 Cullmann’s work on the powers was not, of course, restricted to an exposition of Romans 13; a number of significant texts appearing in English in the 1950s set forth a developing exousiology that centred on the connection drawn in the Pauline corpus between spiritual (angelic and/or demonic) powers and earthly authorities, in the wake of Martin Dibelius, Günther Dehn and Barth.91 A brief engagement with Cullmann at this point will therefore serve the particular aims of this part as well this work’s larger aims, bringing Barth and Yoder’s exousiologies into a more nuanced dialogue.

A. Cullmann and the regnum Christi It is undoubtedly significant that many of Yoder’s earliest essays, several of them presented during his time as a graduate student at Basel, depend at crucial junctures on claims regarding the powers and Christ’s lordship over them that are quite similar to arguments developed in Cullmann’s work. For example, in a 1957 essay on the New Testament’s view of the state, Yoder refers to the citation of Psalm 110, a verse which was ‘of central importance for the early church’, as the necessary point of departure for a biblical understanding of governmental power and authority.92 Yoder’s identification of the New Testament principalities and powers with ‘the enemies’ of God’s Messiah referenced in this psalm, and the claim that such an identification was of critical import for the early church’s posture towards government, mirrors the opening argument of Cullmann’s signal essay ‘The Kingship of Christ and the Church in the New Testament’.93 The significance of Christ’s present lordship over the fallen and still-rebellious powers – the ‘regnum Christi’ – indicated in this early essay, is the principal theme by which Cullmann’s influence on Yoder can be identified, although this concept engenders several other distinctions which are also operative in Yoder’s thought. The key distinctions related to Cullmann’s view of the regnum Christi that inform Yoder’s exousiology are:

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a distinction between Christ’s reign in the present and the ‘future’ or awaited kingdom of God; the difference between powers which already submit to the redemptive (i.e. eschatologically accomplished) reality of God’s victory, and the ‘spiritual’ subjection of still-rebellious powers; and, following from the latter, the distinction between Christ’s ‘cosmic lordship’ over all powers and his more narrowly circumscribed ‘ecclesial headship’, which determines a particular conception of the church-world distinction itself. The following paragraphs outline these areas of thematic overlap between Cullmann’s and Yoder’s exousiologies, first by providing a brief overview of Cullmann’s account, and then by identifying key references in Yoder as a basis for analyzing which elements of Cullmann’s account he draws upon, and to what end. The heart of Cullmann’s thesis is that even where Paul is clearly referring to the work of human or institutional authorities (e.g. Rom. 13.1; 1 Cor. 2.8), there is always also reference to ‘invisible angelic powers’ which stand behind these human-historical agents. In the key texts noted above, Cullmann develops this view of a ‘double meaning’ of the powers pertaining throughout the Pauline corpus. Anthony Thiselton nicely summarizes how Christ and Time’s interpretation of the archontes in 1 Corinthians 2.6–8 (the ‘rulers of the present world order’) encapsulates Cullmann’s basic integration of the various New Testament powers within this double reference of spiritual powers and authorities, which are distinct from yet historically associated with or working through earthly powers and authorities.94 It is clear how the heavenly-earthly ‘correspondence’ of Barth’s exousiology exposited in Chapter 1 – the logic of which is already present in ‘Justification and Justice’ (1938), becoming most explicit in Barth’s doctrine of creation (beginning in 1945) – shares this basic rationale. In light of Dibelius’s contention that Hebrew apocalyptic texts reveal a widespread Jewish belief ‘that there is a particular angel for every people’,95 as well as the host of exegetical trends set in motion after Dibelius, Cullmann situates patently human-historical powers, such as the political authorities of Romans 13 and the rulers who ‘crucified the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor. 2.6–8), within the wider Pauline claim that Christ’s lordship encompasses all ‘thrones and dominions’, visible and invisible (Phil. 2.10; Col. 1.16).96 Thus Cullmann can be seen as setting forth an exousiology which encompasses both spiritual (angelic/demonic) and earthly (sociopolitical) powers, yet as will be shown below, the interdependence of Cullmann’s doubly referential exegesis with an

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emphatically linear heilsgeschichte leads to a historical prioritization of the powers’ dethronement in the spiritual-angelic realm. This emphasis orients Cullmann’s understanding of Christ’s triumph in a manner that differs in important ways from Yoder’s structural focus. Cullmann argued that the early Christian confession Kyrios Jesus Christos (‘Jesus Christ is Lord’) summarizes a basic conviction of the ancient church – namely, that all the powers of and in the cosmos were, in consequence of his death and resurrection, already subject to Christ in the present historical period.97 Parallel to his mediatory role in God’s first creative work (see Col. 1.15–17; Heb. 1.2; Jn. 1), Christ is also confessed as the executor of God’s redemption of the fallen creation (Col. 1.14–22; Phil. 2.6–10), and as the one through whom God preserves the still-rebellious cosmos for that final work by which God will vanquish the powers of sin, death and evil and establish His peace on earth. For Cullmann the regnum Christi names the subjection of fallen and rebellious powers to God’s salvific work in the time between Jesus’ earthly ministry and his parousia. This is clearly expressed in the ‘creed-like early Christian psalm’ of Phil. 2.6–11,98 in which God has exalted the resurrected Christ to the end that everything ‘in heaven, on earth and under the earth’ should bow before and confess him as Lord, and in 1 Corinthians 15.25’s christological interpretation of Psalms 110.1: ‘For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet’.99 The church’s very authorization to baptize and make disciples among all the nations, is in Matthew’s gospel (28.18–19) grounded in Christ’s confirmation that all authority (exousía) in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and in the promise of his presence until the end of the age with those proclaiming this gospel of God’s imminent reign. The powers’ subjection to Christ in the present age thus has a double-manifestation, in that Christ rules both as head of his body (the ekklesia) and lord of all human history. God’s eschatological ordering of all things in Christ is already recognized and confessed by the believing community, but its definitive manifestation in a new heaven and earth is still to come. For Cullmann a biblical chronology, grounded in the distinction between the present rule of Christ over all cosmic powers and the final consummate kingdom of God, is essential to understanding the powers themselves. On the basis of the New Testament depiction of Christ’s present lordship and its awaited consummation, the ‘double reference’ of the Pauline exousia becomes

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for Cullmann a kind of theological litmus test. For example, Irenaeus is criticized for being led to reject the Gnostic view of spiritual powers standing behind earthly authorities such as ‘the state’ (which Cullmann affirms),100 precisely because Irenaeus takes for granted the Gnostics’ ‘dualistic’ presupposition that the exousia are ‘simply .  .  . evil powers and nothing more’.101 Irenaeus can only refer ‘to the eschatological future’ that early Christian confessions declared ‘concerning the present Lordship of Christ, namely, his lordship over the invisible powers’.102 Cullmann explicitly rejects two forms of exousiological dualism: the Gnostic conception of the powers as merely evil, which (as in Irenaeus’s case) entails the exclusion of exousiology from any account of God’s positive relation to earthly authorities and institutions; and equally, any view which posits a strict division between the two categories of biblical powers (spiritual/angelic and earthly/sociopolitical), treating them as functionally unrelated.103 According to Cullmann, neither of these views can account for the eschatological tension introduced into the present by the achieved subjection to Christ of both spiritual powers and earthly authorities, which nevertheless continue to do evil and resist full conformity to God’s will and work. It is essential to note how the basic significance Cullmann draws from the distinction of the regnum Christi and the kingdom of God itself is not primarily material, but chronological. The aforementioned essay on ‘The Kingship of Christ’ is driven by the attempt to explicate the ‘chronological differentiation between them [that] is unequivocally implicit in the New Testament’.104 This differentiation matters as a way of grasping the tension between the already and the not-yet of redemption, which as noted above grounds the related distinctions between the ‘subjection’ and ‘destruction’ of the rebellious powers,105 as well as that between ‘church’ and ‘world’. Yet for present purposes, especially for understanding Yoder’s eschatological exousiology as informed by Cullmann, stress must fall on the fact that the chronological differentiation – which is a way of naming how the promised future of an entirely redeemed and fulfilled cosmos (‘new creation’) makes its way, really yet provisionally, into human history – does not deny the substantive unity of Christ’s present rule with the coming rule of God. ‘In substance the Regnum Christi is no more separate from the Kingdom of God the Father than the Son is from the Father, but from the point of view of time it represents a power of its own’.106 Cullmann thus argues that believers in every age rightfully see and look for ‘signs of the

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end’ in their own time and place,107 because the final act of judgement which ushers in God’s kingdom is in fact the definitive recapitulation of the triumph over the evil powers God has accomplished in Christ’s death, and which Christ’s Spirit is working in the present age by drawing out of the old a new humanity.108 This implies two points of consequence for Yoder’s exousiology. First, the material coherence of the temporally distinct regnum Christi and future kingdom of God is finally due to the unity (or, better, singularity) of God’s eschatological and creative purpose and work. Second, their distinction is therefore most properly characterized not as one emerging from two separate creaturely realms, times or states positively willed and worked by God (i.e. creation-redemption, time-eternity); it is rather a distinction between the present-provisionality and promised-fullness of creation’s own reconciliation to God. The distance between this provisionality and fullness is certainly bound up with a state of affairs (i.e. ‘fallenness’) which transcends the individual’s own disposition and action, yet there nevertheless remains a decisive dogmatic difference between tracing the origins of this ubiquitous state to a positive will (and thus ‘legitimating’) work of God, or locating it in the history of infidelity to which God remains graciously (and thus, for the fallen creature, hopefully) present. As we will see more fully with Yoder, this crucial difference has finally to do with the uniqueness of faith’s relation to God’s work as one of christologically sensitized responsiveness within the given historical context of creaturely life. Yoder’s indebtedness to Cullmann is most on display in two important essays, ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’ and The Christian Witness to the State. In both Yoder’s primary aim is critical evaluation of the power of the state, but to get at this concern each also introduces concepts and distinctions with wider relevance to exousiology and to the particular aims of this part. Yoder discusses the present historical period as a time in which there are ‘two overlapping aeons’, two rules or orders which exist simultaneously but ‘differ rather in nature or in direction’.109 The present aeon ‘points backwards to human history outside of (before) Christ’, whereas the new aeon ‘points forward to the kingdom of God, of which it is a foretaste’.110 It is important to note that even though Yoder readily admits that the new age is a coming order, ‘it is not only a future quantity. The old has already begun to be superseded by the new, and the focus of that victory is the body of Christ, first the man Christ

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Jesus, and then derivatively the fellowship of obedient believers’.111 Both texts explicate the tension introduced by the claim that the old order has only begun to be superseded by the new, even though God has triumphed over the powers of evil in Christ, by employing Cullmann’s illustrative distinction between ‘D-Day’ (the decisive battle) and ‘V-Day’ (the official end of the war). Finally, both make use of the key distinction, mentioned above, between ecclesial headship and cosmic-historical lordship. The distinction between headship and lordship is in a sense the most decisive, as it implies the differentiation of church and world that lies at the heart of why Cullmann and Yoder associate the regnum Christi most directly with the wider field of human history: ‘Christ is not only Head of the church, He is at the same time Lord of history, reigning at the right hand of God over the principalities and powers’.112 The question to be addressed, then, is if – and if so, in what precise sense  – Christ’s lordship over the powers is operative within the field of ‘history’, as opposed to or in a different manner than within the remit of ‘the church’. Addressing this question will also provide insight into the interconnections of the other noted distinctions, namely, the already/ not-yet of God’s kingdom and submissive/still-rebellious powers.

B. Cosmic-historical lordship and ecclesial headship Yoder’s entire body of work is marked by the deep impression that theological ignorance of or insensitivity to Christ’s active presence ‘beyond the confines of faith’ is bound to entail grave consequences in the Christian community’s self-understanding and mode of presence in the world.113 This insensitivity and the consequent risk of blindness to what is required by the community’s vocation of witness and reconciliation is pre-eminently an exousiological problem, for (as I argue in Chapter 4) what lies behind Yoder’s sustained critique of ‘Constantinian’ forms of power is the notion of a practical inversion of the church-world distinction, as that distinction is bound to and, in a sense, derived from the ancient church’s confession of Christ’s lordship over the powers unjustly governing human history. Here the aim is to get at the distinction (inherited from Cullmann) of Christ’s cosmic-historical lordship and ecclesial headship, by focussing on Yoder’s ‘doxological’ specificity of the Christian life before and within the power structures ordering social existence.

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Yoder’s signal essay ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’ allows us to offer several important qualifications regarding his use of the term ‘cosmic’ in relation to Christ’s lordship over the powers. The essay begins with the observation that the discipline of ethics, in the technical sense of analyzing ‘the conditions of validation of [human] dispositions, decisions, and actions’, is not a free-standing evaluative enterprise, but rather ‘always is and always properly should be in the service of some cosmic commitment or other’.114 The thing to note here is that moral reflection and evaluation, indeed ‘all of the intellectual disciplines of critical articulation and reconstruction[,] are embedded in a larger life process. The choir in the heavenly vision sings that this “larger process” is praise, and that it rules the world’.115 The oddity of that last phrase should ring out – how can it be that creaturely praise ‘rules the world’? Is it not a fundamental error to apply such a lordly function to the ‘larger life-process’ of which ethics is a part? But, on his own terms, Yoder has not misspoken. This essay goes on to show that ‘doxology’ is in fact constitutive of what it means to be part of the ‘priestly royal lineage’ the slain Lamb draws out from the nations, ‘to serve our God and to rule the world’. From an apocalyptic-eschatological perspective,116 doxology is the community’s share in Christ’s own service and rule, his own enactment of the priestly and royal offices. That the prophetic office is, for Yoder, also integral to doxology’s relation of eschatology and history will become increasingly clear in the remainder of this chapter. The biblical call for doxology in a foreign land – for trust in and celebration of God’s rule, even while living under patently hostile rulers (and is this not the witness of Job?) – has typically been understood as one of two kinds of future-oriented hopes: hope for an ‘organic and therefore distant’ future, in which the faithful are rewarded for their perseverance by eventually being given their share of history’s spoils, their turn in the seat of worldly power; or, as a hope set on ‘a new nonhistorical state of things’, an imminent catastrophe ushering in a trans-temporal order in which the faithful end up ‘on top’.117 Yet Yoder thinks both readings miss the mark. Whereas the hymn of Rev. 4.11 refers to the worthiness of the Creator by virtue of creation, and ‘the strophe of 5.12ff. is about the future universal consummation’, ‘the “new song” elicited by the work of the Lamb describes the seer’s present, the same age in which people of every tribe and tongue are being called into a new community’.118 The key is to recognize that doxology, as the way the human community is learning

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to perceive and experience history in light of the contemporaneity of Christ’s own past and future, is not primarily a matter of either interior disposition or personal purity (as pietism says), nor a private doctrine or ‘sectarian system of belief ’ (the scholastic error), although it may include aspects of both. Doxology is human being and action becoming attuned to Christ’s own way in the world. It is the community’s being endlessly gathered and sent, precisely so that the provisionally separate, ‘cultic’ celebration of the Lord’s song in a strange land can itself give way to the hope and expectation that God has already been opening up liveable paths outside the Temple walls.119 The existence of liveable paths ‘external’ to the established community is in fact ingredient to doxological faith, since it trusts not in its own might, but in the power of God made perfect in weakness and the freedom of Jesus’ Spirit to blow where it wills. One cannot understand Yoder’s work without recognition that even the ‘sacramental’ orientation of the confessing community is always ordered to the purposes of (self-)critical participation in and reconciliation with the world beyond the community so set apart.120 This sense of the God-given purpose of the community’s specificity – in which its gathering is for sending, its specific confession for critical discernment and doxological celebration in the world – is decisive for Yoder’s exousiology. As Harink recognizes (and as those tempted to charge Yoder with ‘sectarianism’ do not), Yoder is both historically aware of and theologically expectant that a community whose own inner life is being re-oriented by the worldliness of God’s grace in Jesus Christ will be (precisely through its ‘unhandling’ of history)121 a witness to God’s own protest against and reclamation of power structures that have been thoroughly ‘paganized’ through their embeddedness in habits of idolatrous self-exalation and works of injustice.122 In connection with this point it is worth mentioning a claim whose significance is more fully explored below in dialogue with Barth  – namely, that the new age of Christ’s rule does not introduce into the world a new form of government, but rather reveals, in its irresolvable christological concretion, the form and content of God’s own directive presence to the world and human-historical affairs: The new aeon came into history in a decisive way with the incarnation and entire work of Christ .  .  . The new aeon involves a radical break with the old. . . . The gospel He brought, even though expressed in terms borrowed

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from politics (kingdom) and involving definite consequences for the social order, proclaimed the institution of a new kind of life, not of a new government.123

Yoder clarifies in a footnote, added in 1970, that the use of ‘political’ in this passage (originally written in 1954) is meant only to signify that Christ’s work does not have anything to do with a modification or benign reformation of ‘the structures of the human community “under the sign of the old aeon”’. A hallmark of Yoder’s work is his emphasis that ‘the will and work of Christ should be spoken of as “political” in the most proper sense of the term, i.e., as having to do with the polis, with the common life of [humanity]’.124 My point here is the additional one that Yoder’s original formulation also stands on his own terms, if read as the claim that the properly political dimension of the regnum Christi is only ‘new’ by contrast with what the powers ordering social life have become through their own connection with and share in the (‘old’) history of creation’s infidelity and injustice. Christ’s incarnate life, death and resurrection does not materially ‘add to’ God’s own governance of human and world history; it reveals, definitively and irrevocably, the agent and/or agency  – and thereby the meaning, shape and purpose  – of God’s own works of creation and preservation.125 Both of these points are relevant to our present inquiry into doxological sensitivity to Christ’s lordship over the powers: Christ’s rule is truly political in that it reorients human history by calling forth ‘a new kind of life’ in and for the welfare of the polis, in the midst of the world’s power structures; and yet Christ’s rule, his particular way of reorienting the common life of humanity, does not stand at any remove from God’s own providential lordship over and sustenance of creaturely life towards that particular end. ‘I did not come to abolish, but fulfil’ (Mt. 5.17) – which is to say that, the world’s power structures are perpetually caught up, in spite of themselves, in the divine work of ‘holding all things together’ by the divine Word, for Christ’s new humanity. ‘The church’s task is’, therefore, ‘to call the powers to modesty’. When it understands its own vocation in the common life of the world as oriented by and to doxology, it ‘can thereby be freed from the temptation to sanctify the power structures, which should be objects of patience but not honor’.126 The community thus becomes a witness to God’s own relativization and humanization of the cosmic-historical powers, as it is made aware that each finds its fulfilment (whether positive or

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negative; of grace or judgement) in its own concrete orientation to human well-being. There is, then, a necessary distinction between Christ’s lordship over the life of the Christian community and his reign over the still-rebellious powers; it is a difference best recognized as grounded in the community’s confession of the agent (and thus the particular form of agency) presently at work in and, in the fullest sense, for the ‘wider social setting’. The difference is thus dynamic, in that the confession itself persists in the community’s ongoing readiness to meet the ‘newness’ of the Word as it comes to them in the claim and promise of the neighbour (the poor, the outcast, even the enemy). Moreover, it hopes for its own fulfilment in the end of the church-world distinction, as Jew and Gentile alike learn to trust and celebrate that they have been made into one body through the rule of One who loves indiscriminately (Eph. 2.13–15; Mt. 5.43–45). In other words, Christ constitutes the church by reconciling his own people to other peoples, by breaking down the basic polarities and intrinsic sociocultural, religious and national divisions (Jew-Greek, slave-free, male-female) that constitute and order the fallen cosmos, not as the abolition of ‘difference’ but precisely by remaking the previously hostile relation of differences in the form of his new humanity. The promise that orients Christian hope is thus at once the command to be present to and for the neighbour in the midst of the world-powers working hostility and injustice, in trust that the God who rules the world through cross and resurrection can and will meet them there and provide a liveable way forward. That this liveable way is the way of Christ’s cross, the freedom to give up one’s life in solidarity with those being crushed by idolatrous power(s), is itself the confirmation of the universality or cosmic scope of the promise. In a sense, this is simply the insight so well-established by Barth in CD IV/3.2, that the church, like Israel herself, is gathered and called out from among the nations not for her own religio-ethical purity or righteousness, but for the sake of the world.127 The present, more directly exousiological point is that the church’s own doxological confession – its particular mode of being-sensitized to the way Christ’s rule is presently active within creaturely history as such, of which awareness or sensitivity are ingredient in learning ‘to see history doxologically’ – is in turn manifest in a new orientation within the wider sphere of sociopolitical history. Doxology names the ‘life-process’ of the community becoming aware that God’s creative

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and preserving work has been fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ, such that the divine Spirit is even now at work transforming the world into the image of the Messiah. That ‘the end’ has been reached and draws near to us in Christ is therefore foundational to exousiology, not as the relocation of hope to an otherworldly future, but as the condition of ‘own[ing] the Lamb’s victory in one’s own time’.128 While it is precisely the cosmic scope of the future consummation that is ever-necessary to avoid triumphalism and maintain humility with respect to the finality of one’s own struggle against the powers, liveable trust in God’s present and future help is also informed by historical sensitivity to the ways in which the reconciling power of God has previously been at work, taming and transforming the powers whose claimed or attributed sovereignty have determined a particular context. The community’s memory is one of the ways she is made ready to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Yahweh calls Israel to remember who brought her out of Egypt, just as surely as she receives the ever-new command to ‘stand firm and witness the deliverance of the Lord’ (2 Chron. 20.17). The significance of Yoder’s claim that the ‘beyond’ (the coming kingdom of God) came first should also not be overlooked. Kerr elaborates the point by stating that Jesus’ ‘singular historicity . . . is independent of the universalist pretensions of the principalities and powers inasmuch as it is at once (and paradoxically) conditioned by and constitutive of that transcendent reality which is beyond the powers as prior to them  – the reign of God’s agape’.129 Although much could be said about the Barth-inspired logic of Kerr’s reading here (as indicated by the revelation-centric claims about Jesus’ history being both ‘conditioned by’ and ‘constitutive of ’ the particularity of divine love’s ‘transcendence’), for present purposes my emphasis falls upon the fact that his account of Yoder rightly picks up on the fact that God’s kingdom stands over against the powers in, as it were, both directions. The rule of God’s own grace turned outward to and for creation stands ‘beyond the powers as prior to them’. Here Kerr hints that Yoder’s exousiology can be read along the lines of my account in the last chapter; the divine power that transcends the idolatrous power of the powers comes to creatures in the form of Jesus Christ, yet the challenge it issues in his coming is efficacious not because it represents or prefigures a final trans-historical negation of what God willed or providentially

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needed the powers to be in creaturely history. Rather, the powers are challenged and their captives set free because the grace that historically confronts them as the final Word of God is the same love that brought all things to being, as well as that which sustains them for their own (‘new’) history of witness to the Lamb that was ‘slain before the foundations of the world’. It is the particularity of the newness God brings to the personal and institutional powers and capacities upon which human life depends, through submission to Christ’s rule, that demands of all power the relinquishing of self-aggrandizement and illusions of divinization. It risks repetition to say that no such powers finally will or can withstand the universal judgement executed in the resurrection of God’s Crucified, just as none of them properly are at all on any basis other than his primal grace and claim. But a new way and an altogether different power is glimpsed where persons have learned or are learning to freely accept their non-divinity, their creaturely interdependence and vulnerability and to willingly bear one another’s burdens and give up one’s life for the neighbour in need. As an example of God’s taming of the powers, Yoder appeals to the progressive significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement for civil justice of which he was a part: ‘It took the principled non-cooperation of America’s black minority to enable elite powerbearers . . . to make small steps toward being honest with the American dream . . . [and] to move the churches and the synagogues of the comfortable – and then only some of them – to support the most modest steps toward the most elementary public morality in matters of race.’130 It would be a grave misreading to read this as a direct exaltation of the ‘power of nonviolence’ or non-conformism with respect to the powers; the point is precisely the opposite – this past instance should be claimed (as it was by King) as a work of the Lord, who calls his people to a way of life before the powers whose rightness is not dependent upon their own powers and capacities, even though the divine Word is spoken and may be heard in and through them. The potentially deadening logic of cause and effect, of a ‘closed moral nexus’, is broken only by the recognition that the moral stance taken there would have been no less right, no less a sign of God’s own sovereign fidelity, had it not bent the ears of the powerful.131 In light of the above, it is clear that the gospel community’s freedom ‘to see history doxologically’ impinges on the moral implications of exousiology

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as a particular manner of ‘discerning the signs of the times’. Its hope that a liveable and humane path may be found even amid the powers’ reign entails neither uncritical optimism or fatalism (because ‘not all historical movement is forward’), nor triumphalism (welcoming our political victories as ‘providential signs’), nor patriarchalism (‘defending the biological or anthropological givenness of a society as it stands’).132 Rather, faith’s discernment of the various spirits at work in a given context is accountable to its own foundational confession that the crucified Jesus now sits at the right hand of the Lord. In other words, the particular ‘cosmic commitment’ and ‘life-process’ that situates Christian ethical sensitivity is nothing more nor less than the community’s lived trust in the seer’s declaration that the slain yet living Lamb is alone worthy to unlock the scrolls of history – that the world itself is being moved by the One whose own inner movement is manifest in ‘the simple narrative substance of the work and the words’ of Jesus of Nazareth.133 In transition to more explicit conversation with Barth, a final word needs to be said regarding Yoder’s refusal to ‘ontologize’ the church-world distinction, as this refusal touches on the ongoing rebelliousness of the powers ordering human-historical life. As mentioned above, Yoder picks up on Cullmann’s recognition of the substantive unity of, yet chronological distinction between, the regnum Christi and the consummate kingdom of God.134 Yoder develops this line of thought by emphasizing that, because Christ himself is now revealed to be the agent of God’s own providential rule,135 the distinction between Christ’s cosmic-historical ‘lordship’ over the still-rebellious powers and his ‘headship’ over the community of disciples issues in ‘two separate anticipations of the [coming] kingdom, both of them valid foretastes of the final triumph but in different ways’.136 The lordship of Christ is here articulated as the providential ordering by which God preserves the fallen and still-rebellious world by means of the powers, a gracious work that exists ‘side by side’ with Christ’s rule as it redirects human societies towards the eschatological order of God’s full redemption.137 Yet everything hangs on recognizing that the ‘duality’ admitted here stems, according to Yoder, not from God’s own positive ‘will and work’, but from two ways of being-in-response to the one Word and work of God in Jesus Christ. As a graduate student representing the ‘historic peace churches’ at an ecumenical conference on ‘The Lordship of Christ Over Church and State’,138

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Yoder adopted as the starting-point of his paper Jean Lassere’s suggestion that the proper ‘Christian influence is to be exercised upon the World’ not by coercive ‘Christianization’, but by the recognition of ‘two sets or levels of ethics’ which nonetheless derive from a common point of origin: What is . . . the difference between the two kinds of ethics we are referring to? We have heard from Lasserre that they must be articulated, i.e., that they must be related to each other. Further, I do not think we can say that the difference is that God has an affirmative relation to the Christians and a negative relation to the World, that God says ‘yes’ to the Christians and ‘no’ to the World. It is rather that God has a positive word of salvation and call to salvation which He addresses to both the Church and the World – He says ‘yes’ to both . . . – but that the World says ‘no’ to God, while the Church says ‘yes’ to Him.139

Yoder goes on to spell out in nuce themes which he expands in The Christian Witness to the State, central to which is an ethical proposal for ‘middle-axioms’ (or ‘intermediate norms’), the basic premise of which is that, both in terms of how God is at work preserving the creaturely world that remains ‘a demonic blend of order and revolt’,140 and in what the community of faith should expect and ask of the world’s power structures, God’s work and the church’s witness both take into account, or rather are contextualized by, the absence of doxological awareness or trust in Christ’s rule within the still-rebellious world. The goal here is not to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of Yoder’s ‘middle-axiom’ proposal in itself,141 but simply to note that the duality traditionally grounded in God’s own ‘creative’ (or providential) and ‘redemptive’ purposes is for Yoder a matter of how God’s one work of ordering human existence by the (creative, providential and eschatological) Word of Jesus Christ is ‘differentiated’ by its positive relation to both faith’s obedience and the faithlessness of disobedience. For exousiology, this means that all of the creaturely powers operative in the yet-unredeemed cosmos fall somewhere ‘between’ the fullness or universality of Christ’s victory and unmitigated or absolute demonization. We shall do well to avoid thinking of the order of nature as a source of any kind of revelation. Yet at the same time we must recognize that there exists also in the unredeemed world an order, a relation to Him who ordains, and who is none other than the Redeemer. This is the concept of order (taxis) and duty (opheilein) which runs through Romans 13.1–7 and which we

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have referred to as the reign of Christ. On the basis of revelation we can thus speak of a structure of society whose main lines we may ascertain  – from revelation, not from nature – and which will be the framework of our judgments about ethics for [the powers]. This structure is, however, not a stable ideal order, but an ordering, a historical mediation between continued rebellion and the orderliness of the kingdom to come.142

The final point that needs to be made with respect to Yoder’s eschatological exousiology, then, is that the powers’ location ‘between’ creaturely givenness or providential sustenance and final liberation, or, with respect to the powers’ injustice, final abolition  – this location applies equally to every personal, communal or institutional power, whether it fall within the doxologically differentiated sphere of ‘church’ or ‘world’. It will be recalled from Chapter 2 that Yoder treats the presence of structural power(s) in human history as itself a positive attestation of the ‘saving creative purpose’ of God in Christ; the additional point made here is that the community’s doxological specificity – her life in its becoming as a new anticipation of the kingdom – neither renders her own (personal or ecclesiastical) powers free from temptation or the possibility of becoming subservient again to the power(s) Christ overcame,143 nor does it set her own life under Christ’s rule at any further distance from the world still-subject to idolatrous and inhumane powers. The point is exquisitely captured in Harink’s reading of Yoder’s ‘apocalyptic theology of creation and history’ as a commentary on Romans 8: The community’s deliverance is not yet complete – it cannot be insofar as it continues to dwell in a fallen creation. For what is promised in Christ and the Spirit is not the community’s escape from its enmeshment in the created order, but rather the redemption of the whole created order with the children of God. As Yoder notes, the structures/powers of creation, though fallen and therefore often oppressive, are nonetheless necessary for human life to be fully human. For the time being the people of God must continue to share in Christ’s sufferings (8.17) and in creation’s groaning (stenazō in 8.22–23). While they have already received the spirit of adoption in their obedience and worship, God’s people still wait for adoption as the redemption of the body. . . . In the interim, the suffering-servant community, as it lives in the power and prayer of the Holy Spirit, does indeed bear the meaning of creation.144

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What those learning to sing the song of the crucified and risen Lord in a strange land await and move expectantly towards, as their own life is opened by and to the ‘spiritual historicity’ of Christ’s own freedom (for the poor, the stranger, the enemy and from the works of sin and death), is the redemption of their body. Yet this is so because, as members of a human world created for, sustained by and fulfilled as the body of Jesus Christ, their very identity and existence is bound to the newness of that world transformed by the movement of divine love. The community suffers and groans from the birth-pangs of the new creation, precisely because their liberation cannot be (complete) without the liberation of the sociopolitical body of humanity itself.145 Paradoxically, as suggested in my reading of Barth above, it is the goodness of human-creaturely limitation and interdependence which itself has become and persists as the (negative) possibility for idolized and so finally anti-creaturely power(s), the time and space in which persons use their creaturely freedom to seek self-establishment, or some guarantee that ‘we’ (in a narrow, non-christological sense) can and should make our own stand against the Last Enemy. But the community that is (being) open(ed) to a living renewal by the mind – the logos or rationality – of God’s Word incarnate, crucified and risen, may yet become a visible hope that the threat of death and its powers146 has been overcome through a love, a sacrifice, grounded not in the self – not in one’s own metaphysical, biological or material ‘possessions’ – but in the concrete integrity and claim of the other.

III. Exousiology and ecclesiology: or, power(s) and confession Parts I and II of this chapter have exposed two primary and interrelated points of reference for both of our thinkers’ exousiologies: first, the need to conceive the idolatry and injustice through which the powers’ dominion is constituted as a ‘privative’ reality, as an instance of the (attempted) negation of creation’s own being in Christ. And secondly, Christ’s eschatological victory over the powers’ dominion as an accomplished reality, yet one whose ‘accomplishment’ judges and renews creaturely life by re-orienting humanity’s living hope upon the presence of the Word, whose specific form and content – the life-history of Jesus of Nazareth, his cross and resurrection – discloses the promise and

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claim God’s grace bestows on all creation. As this ‘disclosure’ of a new creation realized in and by the Word, the victory of the crucified is simultaneously ‘exposure’, setting persons free for the life that is already hidden with God in Christ precisely by illuming the idolatries and injustices that mark their past and present as fallen, corrupt and inhumane. We have also seen that there is in Barth and Yoder a tendency to construe the primary domain of the powers’ ongoing attack as the sphere of our common humanity, in social and political no less than religious or ‘spiritual’ realms of life. The primary task from here on is to tease out more precisely the relation between these primary points of reference (the powers’ dominion as anti-creation, and the newness offered to creaturely life by the Word’s prophetic presence), through their material connection with the latter question of the sociopolitical character of both Christ’s new humanity and the powers its dawning in human history contests and subverts. In this way, the remainder of this book will foster a dialogue in which it becomes clear precisely how Yoder’s ‘structural’ exousiology both complements and challenges Barth’s stress upon the priority of God’s de jure victory over anti-creaturely powers. The eschatological character of exousiology provokes the question of how the Christian community is to carry out its own vocation of witness to the divine judgement upon all creaturely power(s) declared in Christ’s history. What do Barth and Yoder think is entailed in proclaiming the lordship of God’s crucified and risen Word to the world’s ruling authorities? What does the Christian confession and hope look like in their midst? The final part of this chapter offers a pre-emptory answer to these questions, by re-raising the critical questions put to Barth’s exousiology above (Part 3.I) in light of Yoder’s discussion on eschatological exousiology. I will first discuss an important aspect of Barth’s account – namely, the use of primarily epistemic categories (‘knowledge’ or ‘ignorance’) to describe the difference between human life being-opened to the rule of God’s grace or, alternatively, remaining captive to hostile or anti-creaturely powers. The problems emerging in this initial discussion are then set alongside Yoder’s different casting of the church/ world distinction. Yoder’s eschatological exousiology, by tying Christian faith’s ‘knowledge’ of Christ lordship much more closely to a certain way of being in and for the world, is shown to offer a more adequate rationale for conceiving shared human captivity in a manner that bridges the structural/personal

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divide. This part thus gestures towards the interrelationship between the two critical questions raised above – the problem of a kind of ‘sinful activism’, or metaphysic of intrapersonal idolatry, funding das Nichtige’s ongoing dominion, and the question of the sociopolitical form of both the old (Adamic) and new (Christic) humanity. The dialogue here is pre-emptory in the sense that it lays out the general contours of a discussion that can properly be had only in relation to concrete questions about specific (forms of) power(s). This part thus invokes the central question of this work, in preparation for the next chapter in which the fundamental themes and insights of Barth’s and Yoder’s exousiologies are brought into fuller dialogue, by analyzing their understanding of two specific and interrelated powers – namely, Leviathan and Mammon, or the demonic forms of political and economic power.

A. Knowledge/ignorance as (subjective) freedom/captivity As a way into a critical examination of the ‘sinful activism’ that seems to undergird Barth’s account of personal idolatry as the seat of das Nichtige’s invasion of and threat to creaturely life – traced in our analysis of CD III/3, IV/3 and ‘The Lordless Powers’ – it is important to foreground the increasing emphasis Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation places on epistemic metaphors to describe both the captivity and renewal of human-historical life. What Barth means by human faith’s ‘knowledge’ of God’s Word – how he depicts humanity’s recognition or confession of that Word’s active contestation of the rebellious powers on its behalf – is intrinsically related to his view of the ways in which the dominion of such powers persists. Commenting on Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, David Demson describes how, for Barth, the differentiation of Christian and non-Christian is finally a distinction between knowledge or ignorance of Christ, whose coming as the divine Word ‘gives [new] direction’ to creaturely history. This Word ‘comes to them [non-Christians] too. They are ignorant of all this. . . . The Christian is different. . . . In sum, the Christian is the person who knows Jesus Christ’.147 Demson rightly intuits that Barth’s casting the church-world polarity here as one of knowledge and ignorance does not reify or stabilize that distinction, because ‘Christians are also often non-Christian’, and ‘more importantly, [because] the Christian never renounces solidarity with the non-Christian’.

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That is, the Christian community’s awareness of Christ’s rule is partial and relative, both because of that community’s own lingering fallenness, and because what Christ is already for them  – the new direction his presence brings – he is also, objectively and in principle (i.e. eschatologically), for those who remain ignorant of and resistant to it. Yet Demson’s description of how the knowledge that differentiates the Christian from the non-Christian issues in human solidarity implies that the decisive movement is from the consolation that knowledge of Christ gives to the believer or the church, outward to a kind of mindfulness of or pity upon the world still suffering from their lack of the knowledge Christians possess. Can Christians follow Christ’s direction and forget those who don’t? Are we unaffected by their misery? or by their bondage? Can we who know the comfort of the knowledge of Jesus Christ enjoy that comfort and be unconcerned about the comfortless? No. The Christian enacts the apprehension that Jesus Christ is also (and perhaps primarily) the hope of the ungodly. In so enacting this apprehension, the Christian is also enacting their own hope, since the Christian so often regresses into the situation of the non-Christian.148

There is much to be praised here, but an exousiology concerned with the sociopolitical form of Christ’s new humanity, and thus a structural reorientation and renewal of creaturely life, will ultimately sit uneasily with any image of ‘the Christian difference’ as a consolation internal to the church in its separation from the world, as an apprehension only leading to and issuing in, but in no way emerging from or fulfilled in trans-religious human solidarity. The Christian hope is indeed enacted as persons apprehend and attest the way of Jesus as the hope of all, but the basis of this universalizing solidarity is not just (or, as I contend below, even primarily) because those who self-identify as Christian regress into different, more ‘worldly’ forms of identity. Might it not be rather, as intimated above in Yoder’s eschatological exousiology, that awareness of Christ’s rule redirects Christians towards the world precisely because it is there – in the secularity of Jesus’ unconditional being for and with the poor, the stranger and the enemy – that the promise and claim of the eschatological community lies? The critical concern raised here is not directed at Demson, for his essay offers a sound elaboration of Barth’s own position as spelled out in his doctrine and ethics of reconciliation. The Christian Life affirms the knowledge/

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ignorance polarity as basic to the creature’s mode of subjective correspondence to the divine economy of salvation. Reconciliation and captivity both remain, insofar as they are a matter of the human covenant-partner’s fidelity, partial or provisional determinations of his life and work.149 No Christian, that is, is ever fully reconciled to God’s redemptive act, just as no one ‘outside’ the confessing community stands fully condemned or without hope. The problem is that God is both ‘known and unknown’ to the world, to religious traditions and to each person.150 The problem is that all have need to confess the ‘simul’ in Luther’s simul iustus et peccator. Barth does not have a simplistic account of faith’s ‘knowledge’ as any kind of ‘theory’ to be set over against praxis; his use of epistemic categories does not square easily (if at all) with George Lindbeck’s ‘cognitive-propositionalist’.151 Moreover, Barth’s deep recognition of the unity-in-distinction of gospel and law already implies a constitutive interrelation of the ‘knowledge’ of faith with ‘obedience’ to the Word.152 Thus in CD IV/3, the ‘specific knowledge’ mediated and established by Christ’s prophetic disruption of the world of infidelity is decisively distinguished from a kind of mental or psychic ‘acquisition of neutral information’. It is ‘the whole man’ – intellect, will and act; mind and heart – who is by grace becom[ing] aware of another history which in the first instance encounters him as an alien history from without . . . in such a way that he cannot remain neutral towards it, but finds himself summoned to disclose and give himself to it in return, to direct himself according to the law which he encounters in it, to be taken up into its movement, in short, to demonstrate the acquaintance which he has been given with this other history in a corresponding alteration of his own being, action and conduct.153

This passage is an indispensable guide for understanding the roundedness of Barth’s portrayal of the ‘vacillation’ between knowledge and ignorance of God as the central problem of the Christian life. The resonances of Barth’s last sentence  – the creature becoming aware in order ‘to demonstrate the acquaintance’ with which he himself has been grace  – fits with our own reading of Barth in Part 3.I above, as well as with Demson’s description: the Christian ‘enacts the[ir] apprehension’ of Christ, assured that Christ is the (non-Christian) other’s hope too. Yet the subtle but, for exousiology, deadly serious question I am raising is how closely the Christian’s

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‘objective’ participation in the divine knowledge imparted here – her own transformative ‘acquaintance which [s]he has been given with this other history’ – needs to be held together with the (public) witness she is called to proclaim in the ‘corresponding alteration of [her] own being, action and conduct’. How co-inherent or mutually determinative are ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ ignorance and infidelity, if the externality of the prophetic Word – Christ’s own history in its coming to and commanding redirection of the covenant-partner – reaches the covenant-partner in and through the word of the creaturely other? Is it sufficient that human ‘ignorance of God culminates and manifests itself in his ignorance of his fellow man’?154 Does the exousiological problem not also find its theological foundation and critical direction in the fact that the primal question came to Adam through Eve, and at the provocation of the serpent? Or in that – as Yoder notes, quite apart from any textual explanation of the ‘transmission’ of Adam’s sin – Cain saw God’s blessing of Abel and responded not with joy and gratitude, but murderous anger?155 From the standpoint of the biblical narrative, the horizontal problematic of Cain’s violence towards Abel is just as unwarranted  – in Barth’s terms, without ontological foundation  – as is the fact that Eve ‘saw that it was good . . . and ate’ (Gen. 3.6), and it is the former that prompts Cain’s fear of vengeance mediated by the human community, setting in motion the spiral of self-destruction culminating in Lamech’s boast: ‘For I have killed a man for wounding me, and a boy for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-seven fold’ (Gen. 4.23–24). Barth clearly sees the primal act of idolatry as historically manifest in sociopolitical relations, but the question is whether his account provides sufficient grounds for speaking of collective idolatries or social injustices that themselves ‘in-form’ and condition personal thought, speech and action. How would Barth characterize what is passed down from Cain to Lamech? The mode of discernment and resistance into which God invites the human community in Jesus will be understood differently if the powers’ dominion is recognized as constituted in and through an historical-structural and not simply an ontological-personal register. The ‘verticality’ of a structural exousiology is maintained in the fact that what is actually betrayed in the injustices of interpersonal relations is the warning and promise God continually speaks on our behalf.

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With Barth, Yoder recognizes that ignorance of God is the act of idolatry, that it is undeniably personal infidelity to the divine command and promise revealed in Jesus Christ. Yet the command is not given to Adam apart from Eve, and he bears neither the curse nor the blessing and promise alone (Gen. 1.28); moreover, Cain’s violence towards Abel is the point of transgression at which the ‘sin crouching at your door’ rises up and strikes (3.6–8). Hence the problem of structural infidelity and injustice, the problem of intrapersonal idolatry’s ‘pre-individual’ conditioning or in-formation I am pressing (with Yoder), has to do with the dialectical necessity to think even of the ‘vertical’ problem of idolatry as not only ‘leading to’ or ‘inspiring’ but also in a real sense constituted by – perpetuated in and through – the horizontal register of interpersonal infidelity and systemic injustice. The next part summarizes how this insight into the co-inherence of idolatry and injustice, or of personal and social captivity to the powers, finds surer footing in Yoder’s framing of doxological sensitivity to the divine ordering as part and parcel of a living faith confessed in and for the world.

B. Confession in the world It is clear that the character of the church’s knowledge of Christ – of him as the one in and by whom God’s good rule is exercised – has everything to do with the nature of its witness in and to the world, with what the Christian must do and say before and against the specific idolatries and injustices of the present age. We noted in our discussion of eschatological exousiology that both Barth and Yoder understand confession to be a fundamental marker of the church-world distinction. While Barth’s doctrine and ethics of reconciliation conceives the Christian confession as a form of ‘knowledge’ that subjectively conforms the church’s life-history to that of Jesus Christ, Yoder conceives the community’s doxological specificity as a ‘life-process’ in which persons are learning to follow Christ’s own way in the world. The main point here is to further specify the metaphorical tension between confession as apprehended ‘knowledge’ and dynamic ‘process’, as it maps onto the primary descriptive registers of our thinkers’ exousiologies (ontological-personal or historical-structural), and further illumines the practical overlap and distinction of their views (ch. 4).

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One of Yoder’s most enthusiastic treatments of Barth finds in his thought a groundbreaking manner of distinguishing church and world.156 The innovation, found in ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’157 and CD IV/2’s discussion of ‘The Order of the Community’, hinges for Yoder precisely on the socio-ethical import of faith’s confession of Christ as Lord. One can see Yoder’s indebtedness to Barth on this point, in its resonance with themes developed in this chapter, in the following: The definition of the gathering of Christians is their confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. The definition of the whole of human society is the absence of that confession, whether through conscious negation or simple ignorance, despite the fact that Christ is (‘objectively’, ‘cosmically’) Lord for them as well. The duality of church and world is not a slice separating the religious from the profane, nor the ecclesiastical from the civil, nor the spiritual from the material. It is the divide on this side of which there are those who confess Jesus as Lord, who in so doing are both secular and profane, both spiritual and physical, both ecclesiastical and civil, both individual and organized, in their relationship to one another and to others. The difference as to whether Christ is confessed as Lord is a difference on the level of real history and personal choices; not a difference of realm of levels or even dimensions.158

Such confessional distinction follows from Barth’s demarcation of church and society as ‘two different kinds of political and social identification’, both ‘outward, institutional, “worldly” ’.159 The genius Yoder sees in Barth here lies in the ‘de-territorialization’ of the church-world distinction: the mark of confession is not its geo-spatial or institutional location (for it is ‘both . . .’), but what is attested ‘on the level of real history and personal choices’, in each ‘level or realm or dimension’ of life. Yoder’s primary concern in this essay is to close the gap between the specific confession of Christian faith and the sociopolitical or moral duality of church and world. The liturgical or cultic specificity of the gathered Christian community is certainly seen by Yoder as a means by which the church’s confession of Christ is sensitized. The church’s self-understanding gains narrative coherence ‘through time in a celebratory recounting that ties the particularity of [Jesus’] history to the particularity of ours’; yet the liturgical shape of the church’s life is not for Yoder (or, he thinks, for Barth) primarily a ritual mediation.160 All rite and custom gains its coherence in its worldly

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telos  – the community perpetually ‘loops back’ to scripture in order to see where it presently stands, so that it can move outward again as salt and light;161 its recounting is ‘celebratory’ because of the light the specific history of Jesus shines on the promises and possibilities of our specific time and place. Yet the crucial insight is that the celebratory impulse of doxological confession, in response to the specific revelation to which it looks and from which it moves, is bound to the secular form and content of that Word’s promise and claim: the good news that we can and must set out even now towards ‘the new order in which [persons] may live together in love’,162 because that order has come and is being offered (to ‘us’ no more or less than all others) in the history of Jesus Christ. The exousiological relevance of Yoder’s ecclesiology is thus that the reality of the church, its ‘identity’ as set over against the non-confessing world, is specifiable as ‘a cause being implemented and not an ontology being realized. Kingdom rather than gnosis is the key mystery’.163 In other words, as suggested above (Part 3.II.B), the ecclesiastical or liturgical distinction of church and world (the community’s gathering, ritual memory, etc.) is ordered to and by faith’s confession, ‘before the watching world’, of Christ’s active presence beyond the confines of the institutional church. This intrinsically links the doxological cultivation of a ‘distinctive consciousness’,164 the specific liturgical and theological lineaments of renewal in the ‘mind of Christ’ (Phil. 2; Rom. 12), to the sociopolitical form of Christ’s body. And that is precisely why neither Christian ‘knowledge’ nor ‘confession’ can be located on either side of a spiritual/bodily, or ecclesiastical/civil, or religious/secular divide. As the response of faith, the confession that Christ is lord over every power and authority is necessarily enacted in the one realm that bears the promise of the Spirit: the realm of the powers’ invasion and attack, creation itself as bound up in and together with the embodied life of God’s covenant-partner. The church’s confessional distinction from the world thus finds its concretion not in any particular dogma, or institution or practice, but in the ‘socio-logic of the believing community’,165 in the quality and shape of its commitment in and to the surrounding world. What the church confesses, and therefore attests to all the world (including itself) as its hope, is that in Jesus God has opened up and continues to provide a liveable way forward beyond the idolatries and injustices of the present age. It will not ‘know’ how to proclaim and serve that Word, and thus what it has to say

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and do before the powers Christ’s rule contests, if it becomes desensitized to either the doxological specificity (the history of Jesus Christ) or the sphere (the one creaturely world) and object (each person’s specific life-history)166 of God’s self-revelation. The church is separate from and ‘prior to’ the rebellious world primarily and, in the strictest terms, only in ‘the sense of orientation’.167 The confession that marks its life as distinct from the still-rebellious creation is a particular form of response to Christ’s present cosmic-historical rule, and thus a particular way of being-with God and -neighbour in the midst of the fallen creaturely powers that both constitute and corrupt our life-together. Yoder thus reads the new community’s internal coherence – its confessional trust in the lordship of the crucified Jesus – in terms that by no means signify that community’s isolation from or (at least in principle) non-participation in power structures that are, whether explicitly or simply de facto, ignorant of God’s ways. The various forms of legitimate involvement in any power structure (including religious or ecclesiastical institutions) simply presuppose (1) the assumption that God’s rule over human history in Christ is non-identical with any specific community’s (or person’s, or institution’s) own power and capacities, and (2) faith’s expectation that, because it is the same agential power now ‘seated at the right hand of God’ which came to dwell among and for humankind in Jesus of Nazareth, God’s rule is still effected in and by that Word and power, and not another. Both positions taken together entail a commitment to discerning and following, in whatever context the community finds itself, the particular way God rules the world and is ordering human history by the specific grace and power manifest on Christ’s cross. Such ‘cosmic commitment’ does not imply, however, a univocal view of what such human trust in and lived witness to Christ’s rule over the world-powers will look like at all times and in all places: [It] will sometimes mean humbly building a grassroots culture, with Jeremiah. Sometimes (as with Joseph and Daniel) it will mean helping the pagan king solve one problem at a time. Sometimes (again as with Daniel and his friends) it will mean disobeying the King’s imperative of idolatry, refusing to be bamboozled by the claims made for the Emperor’s new robe or his fiery furnace.168

Thus Yoder’s emphasis on the de facto ‘minority status’ of the community learning to live in the world without controlling it, must not be understood as

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an a priori refusal to share in received power structures or given sociopolitical offices and roles. The form of such participation is what cannot be specified in advance of a given context, precisely because what it would mean to take part in a given set of structural arrangements in fidelity to Christ’s rule depends on the extent to which the particular ‘networks, norms and regularities’ in place are actually serving human welfare, the extent to which they are modestly ‘transparent’ to the sustaining works of God or idolatrously self-referential and so courting disaster. The following remark about whether Christian truth-claims will necessarily be ‘distinctive’ from other perspectives can thus also be read in terms of practical or sociopolitical confession: To make ‘distinctiveness’ a value criterion is to measure the truth value of meaning system A in terms of the other systems (whether B or C or N or X) that happen to be around, from which [A] is supposed to differ. That is a method mistake. Some of the neighboring systems may be very much like it. Some of them may be historically derived from it, which is true of most of the post-Christian value systems in the West. To ask that Christian thought [and practice] be unique is nonsense. What we should ask of Christian statements [and practices] is that they be specifically or specifiably Christian, i.e., true to kind, authentically representing their species. Whether a specifiably Christian statement [or practice] is ‘distinctive’ depends on the other guy.169

The salient point is that for Yoder, the ‘knowledge’ of faith, while certainly shaped by the community’s own doxological history and its particular means of self-understanding, is utterly incomplete in its separation from the ‘non-confessing’ world. Indeed, the fact that the specificity of faith’s confession cannot be mapped onto any distinct religious site or spiritual realm, or indeed any specific personal or institutional property or capacity, matters greatly for understanding the historical contingency and practical porousness of the church-world distinction. As the next chapter argues more fully, both the cosmic scope that the lordship faith confesses, and the ordering direction of that lordship to and for a specific form of life-together, means that the human world that does not share the historic church’s specific doxological form, nevertheless lives by relation and response to the grace of God’s Word. The church’s specific ability and task to ‘discern the spirits’ arises at precisely this juncture, for the secularity of the ‘good news’ it proclaims to the wider world

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resides in the fact that God sustains creaturely life for the practical recognition of Christ’s promise and claim, which  – precisely in its sociopolitical form – is spoken through the embodied presence of one’s neighbours.170 That is the rationale behind taking the above quotation seriously in relation to the ethical dimension of Christian confession: the sociopolitical ‘distinctiveness’ of the church’s specific faith and hope ‘depends on the other guy’, that is, it is always a matter of following Christ’s own way in and for the world, and thus the critical impetus of its social witness depends entirely on its attention to the ways in which the specific structures and institutions ordering human relations are resistant or being-opened to his rule. All of this implies that the particular ‘knowledge’ of Christian faith  – its specific awareness of God’s rule – is much closer to being a form of practical recognition or lived responsiveness to Christ’s worldly presence, than it is to being an ideational apprehension or intellectual in-formation through some material ‘deposit’ of faith residing in the church’s ecclesiastical, liturgical or (even) biblical resources. All of the latter may be and are integral to how the church’s self-understanding is shaped,171 but the ‘how’ is conditioned by the ‘what’ (or, as Bonhoeffer would stress, the ‘who’).172 What the church knows and proclaims  – the grace of God’s Word in Jesus Christ  – is neither idea nor some codifiable moral, legal or dogmatic principle, but a living person and work, God’s own incarnate being and movement in and for the life of the world. Faith is thus a positive relation (trust) and response (confession) to this Word’s present rule over and through the structures and institutions, the inter- and intrapersonal relations that bind human-historical life together. The difference with respect to Barth’s and Yoder’s exousiologies here is, again, tied to the central question of whether this ‘person and work’, his own execution and manifestation of the life-giving and sustaining power of God, bears an intrinsically sociopolitical form. Yoder’s structural exousiology clearly assumes that it does, and the reading of Barth throughout this work – the ‘political’ or world-ordering dimension of all the powers work; bearing witness to God’s grace towards all as the vocation of every creaturely power; reconciliation as a matter of ‘the whole man’; idolatry as the root of personal alienation from God, self and neighbour – clearly suggests that both Christ’s new humanity and the ‘old’ humanity displaced by his lordship entail an ethical form of life.

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This leads us back, then, to why Yoder’s account of the confession of Christ’s lordship – which is, as with Barth, what distinguishes the (obedient) church from the (still-rebellious) world – is expressed in primarily ethical or sociopolitical, rather than epistemic categories. The key difference between Barth’s more-ontological and Yoder’s more-historical/structural exousiology might now be reasonably described as where rhetorical emphasis is placed. For Barth, it falls on the Christian revolt as waged against the power of the powers directly – it is a fight against the devil himself, or against das Nichtige, the ‘whole complex’ of sin, evil and death that invades and attacks God’s good creation. For Yoder, the revolt occurs as a struggle against evil in its concrete activity, in critical resistance to the particular demons – the particular forms of demonic power – with which the rebel, alongside his or her compatriots, is confronted. As we have shown in Chapter 1, Barth has just as much reason to affirm that das Nichtige’s power acquires ‘form and shape and activity’ through the demonization of creaturely power(s) as he does to affirm that God’s own Word is that which speaks and claims humanity through the manifold works of his good creation.173 But the concern being raised here is (obviously) not a need or desire to jettison Barth’s ontological approach in favour of a purely historico-structural exousiology  – that would be its own form of reductionism, also unable to finally cohere with the biblical narrative. It is rather that a theological account of captivity to the powers will not be able (or likely even willing) to move beyond the creature’s own (intra)personal idolatry and inhumanity if its foundations lie solely in the ontological register of the covenantal relation between God and (the) creature. Emphasis will then fall by necessity on the problem of the evil power behind the powers, in its sheer univocality. And the latter is, again, finally a problem on Barth’s own terms, since he, too, wants to uphold both the concreteness of the divine command and an ethically attuned recognition of the powers’ ubiquity in humanity’s sociohistorical life. In sum, a structural exousiology such as Yoder’s, which emphasizes how human solidarity is in-formed or practically determined by the historical powers structuring social relations, seems necessary to bridge the gap between Barth’s reading of the powers’ ‘unleashing’ through Adamic pride and self-absolutization, and his equally clear recognition that the good life of the covenant-partner, ‘hidden with God’ in the eschatological history of

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Jesus Christ, is now (i.e. historically) also threatened and attacked from every corner. If ‘human nature’ itself is divinely constituted and fulfilled not as an unmediated spiritual relation between God and the creature, but as a form of embodied co-existence or responsiveness, an extrinsically ordered posture of inter- rather than intra-personal fidelity, then the divine-creaturely relation itself contextualizes or conditions, but is nevertheless refracted in and through, the creature-creature relation  – the Word’s active presence in and through the words. Then exousiology can and must rightfully speak about collective idolatry and inhumanity as works which also in-form Adam’s history, as a history that is both conditioned by and itself perpetuating sin and injustice. Then exousiology can clearly deny that the idolatrous powers of any given social arrangement or institution are simply ‘derived’ from or ‘entailed’ as the consequence of individual spiritual and moral failure. Demson’s reading of Barth, which is again commendable as an accurate representation of Barth’s own conceptual ordering of (personal) idolatry to (social) injustice, just so confirms the one-sidedness of an account of exousiological captivity moving only in this direction: When the human desires to be lordless, it falls prey to the absolutization of a power which comes to control it. Since these ‘absolutes’ are multitudinous, each serving a different absolute or absolutes, humans live against one another. They cannot live rightly with one another or at peace with one another.174

David Haddorff ’s account of Barth’s ethics also shows the risk of overreading his ontological emphases on the spiritual negativity and unreality of das Nichtige’s powers, by so identifying the notion of ‘hegemonic’ power with an effectively totalized negation of creatureliness that he ends up all but denying that the powers do, in fact, perpetuate hegemony: ‘Since they are not hegemonic, but act as if they are by asserting their influence over individual and social life, they inevitably become a kind of “absolutism” that seeks to control human life.’175 The ‘as if ’ clause here is fair to the one side of Barth’s dialectic  – the human attempt at lordlessness and the powers’ own inversion of humane service can only achieve ‘a pseudo-reality and efficacy’  – and Haddorff is obviously aware of the other side, as well – namely, that even this [‘as if ’] has ‘catastrophic consequences’ for lived history.176 But it is the fact that Barth’s ontological impossibility (the ‘as if ’ of lordlessness) can be read as a denial of

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the powers’ actual hegemony that betrays the descriptive problem inherent to Barth’s account. A biblically dialectical exousiology must include both a kind of privative ontological account (their dominion is fallen, that is, parasitic on the good that persists by grace) and a historical-structural recognition that the fall is enacted and perpetuated in concrete contexts and historically in-formed relations which are in their own, a provisional and eschatologically limited but nonetheless real and significant way, determinative of the shape and meaning of creaturely life. This is, finally, a matter of the creature’s own commanded posture and task before idolatrous and inhumane powers, of the character of the community’s necessary witness to and revolt against their rule. If both the (human) exousiological problem and its (divine) resolution are fundamentally sociopolitical, then the Christian confession of Jesus’ lordship over history and the hope of its consummation cannot rest content in an internally focussed project of conforming the world to the church’s existing institutions, laws or customs. The admission that the church calls the world-powers to find fulfilment and creaturely purpose not by becoming absorbed into her own mission or projects, but by moving concretely towards the power of God in Jesus Christ where they are  – by taking up, through this or that (however painful) renunciation of this or that idolatry, the way of the cross – in fact frees the community to direct its own attention to how God is blazing the trail of his righteousness and justice, in excess of its own powers and capacities. In this reading, the community confessing Christ’s lordship over the world-powers finds freedom in the trust that because God has met them in the midst of their captivity before (Exod. 20.2), she has nothing to fear or to lose  – and, indeed, everything to gain  – by moving out once again for the selfless service of those with whom she lives. Thus it is not, as reading the entire exousiological equation through epistemic categories would at least imply, that the community’s freedom from the powers rests in the knowledge of faith (precisely because this knowledge is not a ‘property’ which persons or communities can ‘posses’). Rather, to confess faith in Christ before idolatrous and inhumane powers is to act in the trust that by his cross and resurrection God has freed and still frees the community to love without regard. Such confession becomes a witness to the powers in the community’s recognition that this Word binds God’s own freedom to the embodied word of the

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neighbour, whose given life bears the judgement and promise in relation to which the community may and must bear its cross. It should by now be clear why we suggest that exousiology needs the insights provided by both of our thinkers. As the metaphysic and logic of Barth’s account makes clear, there is no ‘non-spiritual’ creaturely power  – no personal, social or institutional capacity whose operation is unordered by some law or another – just as Yoder has shown that there is no ‘spiritual’ power whose ordering directionality for human life is exercised in isolation from embodied relations and formative social structures. But exousiology as a theology of structural power(s) seems, in light of the analysis undertaken thus far, to facilitate recognition of God’s reign constituting ‘the new Jerusalem’ – Adamic humanity itself, reconstituted in Christ – as a social and political body (Rev. 21). Beginning with the recognition that the exousiological problem is always an inversion of a common creaturely vocation and shared promise, and thus a willingness to locate theology’s inescapable concern with personal idolatry and infidelity within the question of our received form of life, we can better account for divine and creaturely freedom, and thus that which is fulfilled in the new humanity of Christ, as being a freedom for and with the other – without thereby needing (or, in terms of biblical warrant, being able) to marginalize personal responsibility to the Word or the significance of a spiritual (‘inner’) orientation conditioning creaturely power(s). Barth clearly intends the latter, although as I have now briefly argued, his conceptual ordering of the primal and basic exousiological problem – as an ontological reading that makes historical-structural relations derivative and consequential, rather than constitutive – orients the rhetorical weight of his account of the powers’ own ‘ignorance’ of God and the salient dogmatic features of their rebellion in ways that sit uneasily with his own intuition concerning their ubiquity and destructiveness in sociopolitical life. The final chapter further substantiates these claims by opening the dialogue begun here into a more concrete analysis of how Barth and Yoder understand the (‘angelic’) creaturely vocation and (‘demonic’) negation of political and economic powers. This chapter’s treatment of eschatological exousiology is shown to be especially important for grasping the theological rationale behind the interrelations and the ethical centrality of these two powers for both our thinkers.

4

The Pre-Eminence of Leviathan and Mammon

This chapter concretizes many of the exousiological themes thus far uncovered with the help of Barth and Yoder. The primary aim is to show how they conceive the ‘fallen creatureliness’ of two specific forms of creaturely power – namely, political and economic power  – the demonization of which Barth names Leviathan and Mammon. Here Barth and Yoder are read as theologians seeking the contemporary meaning of Jesus’ eschatological victory over and prophetic challenge to these powers. Pursuing this course will nuance the critical questions put to Barth in Chapter 3, throwing into greater relief the christological differences that surface in our thinkers’ exousiologies. Finally, a more modest but nonetheless important goal of this chapter is to lay bare the practical contours and ethical implications of exousiology so conceived. My aim is not to offer anything like a full-blown account of Barth’s and Yoder’s views concerning the state or the economy, nor of their political and economic ethics. The point is rather to show the rationale behind their own way of connecting political and economic life to Christian discourse about divine and creaturely power(s). In seeking the rationality of this discursive connection, it becomes clear that the work done above  – the reasons for and insights gained by charting the powers’ doctrinal location in the registers of creation and eschatology – is in fact intrinsically ordered to reflection on the powers discussed here. In other words, this chapter contends that, given all that has been said thus far, it is by no means accidental that when Barth begins to ‘name’ specific powers with which faith must contend, Leviathan and Mammon stand at the fore.1 The fact that the same can be said for Yoder, despite the conceptual differences previously and here explored, signals the substantive overlap in their accounts.

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Given the relative paucity of our thinkers’ commentary on the power of Mammon  – relative, that is, to what they have to say about politics  – the bulk of this analysis will be devoted to Barth’s treatment of Leviathan, and to the political form of what Yoder is wont to call ‘Constantinian’ power. In line with the ordering followed in the rest of the chapters, I will begin with Barth, allowing his more systematic approach to set the tone, and then turn to Yoder to nuance and problematize Barth’s conceptual framework. The focus of Part I is on how Barth’s description of Leviathan both nuances the major themes of his exousiology found in Chapters 1 and 3, and further betrays the need to question and supplement his exousiological narrative with a historical-structural perspective. One specific theme around which this part of our dialogue revolves is the identification of political power itself, whose positive or ‘angelic’ creaturely function Leviathan (and/or Constantinian power) inverts and corrupts, with the institution of ‘the state’. Again, without attempting to treat exhaustively Barth and Yoder’s concept of the state, this interpretive line involves us in reconsidering the most important aspects of each thinker’s exousiology, and crystallizes the critical discussion begun at the end of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 as a whole spells out, as an explicitly sociopolitical and thus ethical relation, the integral link between political and economic life that is implied when Barth’s and Yoder’s exousiologies are taken together. The overarching argument is that the two go hand in hand, because political exousiology (what forms of power order human social life) is always implicated in and ordered to the powers and possibilities of economic life (the material-social relations so ordered). Part 4.II.A begins with a cursory glance at several of the main lines discerned in Barth’s description of Mammon. Yoder’s critical sympathy with liberation theology is then discussed (Part 4.II.B), as it both nuances his critique of Constantinian power in relation to revolutionary violence, and establishes why political power is most properly mobilized in relation to material well-being or, broadly speaking, socio-economic in/justice. All of this prepares a base for the next and final chapter, which elaborates the interrelation of Leviathan and Mammon described here into the complexity of naming Mammon’s presence in and among us today. As well as bringing our exousiological ‘dialogue’ into a contemporary frame of reference, with the help

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of two other modern theologians engaging Mammon’s power, Chapter 5 will suggest a partial answer to the problems I have found in Barth’s exousiology, especially the account of Christian resistance to Mammon discussed below.

I. Leviathan and Constantine? Political power and the power of the state A. Barth on the spirit of Leviathan Barth considers Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan to be a ‘clear illustration’ of the ‘whole problem of political absolutism’, and indeed of demonic power itself.2 Leviathan’s place at the head of Barth’s ‘closer look’ at specific lordless powers is not arbitrary. Chapter 1 noted CD III/3’s admission of a ‘broad sense’ in which all the powers are political,3 and at the beginning of ‘The Lordless Powers’ subsection it is again made clear that what these earthly powers seeking lordlessness contradict is a pre-eminently political order and rule – the just ordering of human co-existence in and by God’s kingdom. The universality or fundamental character of the good creaturely power(s) that Leviathan inverts, corrupts and attempts to negate is integral to the analysis undertaken in the remainder of this text. For Hobbes, Leviathan epitomizes ‘the rise and existence, . . . the essence and reality’ of the all-powerful ‘commonwealth or state as the only earthly potentate and sovereign with one or more heads (and preferably only one)’. This sovereign state-power does not actually require but in fact presupposes the consent of human subjects, and so is immune to or freed from their protest; ‘he therefore rules in their place and over them . . . They are not his meaning and purpose; he is theirs’. Leviathan does not exist for them, but ‘their life can be no more than a functioning in his honor and service’. Barth thinks Hobbes could have easily called this sovereign earthly power ‘the true God-man’, the opponent of which is ‘Behemoth’ – ‘the Christian church of all confessions to the extent that in its teaching and its life it should not just be one of the organs of the state but should champion the very different omnipotence of a very different God-man’.4 Thus Barth claims Leviathan to be certainly mythical, yet also thinks Hobbes has here intuitively captured – ‘with the sharp glance

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of a visionary’ – something of the ‘underlying reality’ of all human political history. The idea of absolute and lordless power concentrated at one point in one hand . . ., the idea of a polity which leaves only the options of intoxication with its mad principle, or actual assimilation to its structure and program, or law-breaking opposition  – this idea was the force that fascinated and demonized those leaders and through them countless multitudes, a lordless force because they were not in any sense its lord but were instead possessed by it.5

This part seeks to get at the question of how political power becomes Leviathan by pressing two points in Barth’s account: (1) the notion of Leviathan (i.e. demonized state-power) as ‘myth’, and (2) the related question of whether Leviathan names a spiritual drive or ideological tendency towards hegemonic power, and not a practical form of hegemonic power. Answering these questions will allow us to set Barth’s claim in The Christian Life that it is the ‘idea of empire’ which demonically possesses political life in helpful contrast with Yoder’s critique of ‘Constantinianism’ as an unjust form of power-relations. Along the way, we will also gain insight into Barth and Yoder’s different ways of relating positive political power – that is, power accepting or transparent to its eschatological subjection to Christ’s lordship – to the institution of the state.

Leviathan as ‘myth’ and exception It is the Beast of Revelation 13 that Barth calls a ‘myth’. Does this then imply that the exousia of Romans 13 is non-mythological, somehow more real and actual for human life in history? David Haddorff ’s reading of Barth brings the problem to the surface. The danger is that framing one’s ‘naming’ of the demonic powers in ontological terms can tilt historical description towards the assumption that the powers one ‘normally’ encounters – in this case, the historical-political norm from which ‘some’ authorities ‘attempt’ to escape – reflect the definitive divine ordering in a fairly straightforward and thus more benign way. Thus Haddorff states: ‘As an “empire,” leviathan seeks to change the “normal” or “just” state into the “marginal” or “unjust” state. . . . [W]hen persons reject God’s authority and say No to God’s established “objective” order of redemption and place themselves as masters of the political realm,

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the “demonic” in politics emerges in human society,’6 Again, this is all well and good, as far it goes. But if one were to look seriously – that is, critically, in the light of the reality constituted and proclaimed by God’s Word – at past and presently established political systems, certainly with a hope (but certainly not with any naive expectation) of discerning therein traces of human history’s openness to the ruling sway of divine justice, could one honestly hold that the spirit of Leviathan has only attempted to change the ‘normal’ (i.e. the divinely ordered) state into an ‘unjust’ authority? Is the converse then untrue  – that such attempts themselves may and have come to constitute the practical norm for state-power? At this point it will be helpful to comment on what, for Barth, characterizes the ‘normal’ or ‘just state’ away from which Leviathan moves or redirects political power. This state is characteristically described in Barth’s important 1946 essay, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, which description may now serve as a focal point for our account of Barth’s exousiology as a whole, and a critical point of departure vis-à-vis Yoder. Knowing that, [the Christian community] recognizes in the existence of the civil community . . . no less than in its own existence the operation of a divine ordinance (ordinatio, i.e. institution or foundation), an exousia which is and acts in accordance with the will of God (Rom. 13.1b). However much human error and human tyranny may be involved in it, the State is not a product of sin but one of the constants of the divine Providence and government of the world in its action against human sin: it is therefore an instrument of divine grace.7

The task of this exousia is to relatively but really establish a lawful social order that ‘humanizes’ our life together by delimiting and protecting freedom and peace, thereby also serving God’s own ‘Providence and plan of salvation’. As Barmen Thesis No. 5 states, such service is enacted ‘according to the measure of human insight and capacity’ as well as the threat and use of force.8 Barth’s description of the role of state-power in this essay brings together several key themes uncovered in our reading thus far, especially the notion that this good (i.e. ‘angelic’, ‘sanctified’) work – the active presence of this graced creaturely power  – persists objectively, ‘quite apart from the judgment and individual desires of its members’. It does so because ‘its [own] foundations and its influence’ – the hidden foundation of this human-historical foundation – is

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that it is ‘not autonomous’, but ‘an exponent’ of Christ’s kingdom. There is much material overlap here with the themes developed in Chapter 1, but our present concern is the conceptual upshot of describing this exousia as both an enduring divine institution (ordinatio) and a historically dynamic, conditionally ‘good’ creaturely power. Chapter 1 showed that in several key texts Barth sees all creaturely powers as ontologically constituted and thus practically claimed by God’s grace in Christ, such that each stands within a contingent dialectical (angelic-demonic) relation to the reconciliation effected in him. Here the ‘political angelic power’9 is seen to accomplish its God-given task ‘according to the measure of human insight and capacity’, even though its ‘definite service’ of God’s own work is rendered ‘quite apart from’ persons’ judgements or intentions. How do these apparently disparate claims cohere? That this power works through human capacity and insight can now (in light of Part 3.A) be situated in proximity to Barth’s account of the earthly ‘lordless powers’.10 The following paragraphs take up the related question of how directly Barth’s objective-subjective dialectic identifies the creaturely goodness or divine foundation of this exousia with the human-historical institution of ‘the state’. In so doing, they not only open a critical line to be further discussed with Yoder – namely, whether theology is justified in identifying this political exousia with state-power  – but also offer fuller specification of the agential issue of ‘demonization and providence’ broached in Chapter 1. A close reading of this text, alongside the insights into Barth’s exousiology gained in our analysis thus far, suggests that the ‘dynamism’ or dialectical nature of the relation between divine and creaturely powers is bound to Barth’s refusal to locate the ‘true existence’ or ‘final basis’ of worldly and humane power anywhere other than in the history (the person and work) of Christ. Accordingly, in the 1946 essay the exousia of the state – its positive existence as a divine ordinatio, institution or foundation – is seen as God’s own ‘operation’ of preservation and judgement in and through the civil community. ‘The state’ names the particular form of power instituted by God for this creaturely work, in this realm. In human history, then, state-power truly is what it is only in utterly transparent correspondence with, or as ‘angelic’ witness to, God’s own free exercise of power, the establishment and sustenance and restoration of creaturely order in Christ. For Barth the existence of the state, of this divinely willed exousia, resides in his life and work, in his ‘hidden rule’.11 It is ‘one of the

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powers . . . which subsist in Him (Col. 1.16f.), which cannot separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8.37f.) because they are all given to Him and are at his disposal (Matt. 28.18)’.12 The state’s human-historical activity, however, reflects this christologically executed work of life-sustaining protection and overruling delimitation only in a broken, relative and obscuring manner. Creaturely political power is constituted as and for ‘a form of divine service’ (Rom. 13.4, 6),13 and it is as such – as a secondary, responsive, but in its own time and place nonetheless real and determinative work – that ‘it can be perverted[,] just as the divine service of the Church itself is not exempt’ from this possibility.14 Along these lines, Robert Hood’s reading of Barth’s doctrine of the state suggests that we must distinguish between the ‘outer shell’ or ‘ontological origins of the phenomenon called the state’, and ‘the internal character of the state as a civil community (how it looks and functions)’.15 The ‘outer basis’ bespeaks the divine Whence? and Whither? of historical-political power, what Hood calls the ‘theological foundation’ on the basis of which Christians are to discern the moral contours of any particular state’s existence and act. But is there an intrinsic or necessary relation between the ‘outer basis’ of political phenomena  – that is, the extrinsically constituted ordinatio or mandate for the power states exercise – and the human ‘capacity and insight’ according to which this power is historically manifest? Barth clearly thinks human-historical political systems, their personal or systemic capacities and goals, are ‘good’ insofar as they exist and work in correspondence to or service of the gracious power of divine providence. The question remains, however: if the ‘authority’ or institutional legitimacy of the governing powers truly resides in the hidden rule of Christ, does that entail that such correspondence to and service of that rule constitutes the ‘internal’ or practical norm for the visible historical institutionalization of state-power? It is clear  – from his initial break with the theological liberalism he was schooled in, in large part due to his teachers’ ‘compromise with the ideology of war’ during World War I, to his sharp criticisms of modern capitalism as the ‘Red Pastor’ in Safenwil, to his involvement in the Confessing Church and Barmen’s clear-eyed declaration of non-conformity with Hitler as a status confessionis16  – that Barth had no illusions regarding the utterly destructive capacities of idolatrous and ideologically blind political power. Yet even having seen first-hand the horrors of National Socialism, Barth’s politically

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charged writings of the 1930s and 1940s betray no lack of resolve regarding the positive and necessary operation of state-power. It might well be described as an argument from (exegetical-theological) definition – because it is certainly not an argument from experience! – that allowed him still to maintain, as he did in a 1948 lecture, that Christians are unable to ‘regard and treat even the worst state as wholly diabolical’.17 But he can do so for two reasons: (1) because human history is everywhere marked by two elements, Dei providentia hominum confusione; because human life together is never left to its own devices, such that even where persons sow only death, God’s being-beyond our situation holds open the possibility that our future may yet become new, that God can ‘make good come out of evil’;18 and (2) because political institutions, as systems of law and power, are by definition externally ordered. Political systems are the attempts undertaken and carried out by men in order to secure the common political life of man by certain co-ordinations of individual freedom and the claims of the community, by the establishing of laws with power to apply and preserve them. Political organisation means a system of law based on power, a system of power in honour of law.19

State-power depends on or is derived from the active presence of both God’s life-giving and sustaining grace for and in creation, and the resultant personal freedom and communal need whose embodied dignity and claim is worth ‘securing’. The key is that, as seen especially in ‘Justification and Justice’ and the essays collected in Against the Stream (1946–52), Barth identifies the concept – in Hood’s words, the ‘outer basis’ of the phenomenon – of the state with creaturely political power so constituted, with that divinely willed exousia which resides properly in the work of Jesus Christ, but is always finding ever-new expression in human-historical agency. Even where it looks as if a given system of law and power is unreservedly anti-Christ because decidedly anti-human, and the situation is in fact dire, Barth simply has too much confidence in the more-determinative presence and power of God to think that the situation is utterly without hope or possibilities for transformation. Thus in terms of human-historical political agency and its various institutionalizations, it is possible for any state to become possessed by the spirit of Leviathan, to greater and lesser degrees; but existent political power becomes ‘anti-state’ just to that extent, since this amounts to the human attempt to negate in the creaturely realm what is in fact a divine work, promise and claim. Barth seems sceptical

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of the possibility of any society achieving total anarchy – by which is meant, of course, not strictly a lawless or unordered society (although that, too, is an impossibility), but the impossibility of any given system of law and order to fully contradict its positive social role, to become practically unlawful or disordered without remainder. As mentioned above, given his experience and perspective, one might conclude that Barth can hold such a view only as a matter of faith or theological conviction. Surely that is right at least in part, but our analysis in the remainder of this part questions the presumption that, even when confronted with horrors such as the Holocaust, Barth would have it that he and others could hear no witness to the present mercy and judgement of God. It must be kept in mind that Barth ties the goodness of state-power to the de jure lawfulness of ‘political’ systems and institutions, and equally that he does not deny to any existing regime the wide-ranging possibility of functional detraction from what political power in fact is according to God’s eschatological judgement. ‘We need to realize that that no state of any kind has or is or will be immune to the tendency to become at least a little Leviathan. The threat of a change from the might of right to the right of might crouches at the door of every polity’.20 It therefore serves us well to note the irony of the claim – made in passing as he reminds us that the particular ‘authorities’ Paul had in mind in the Epistle to the Romans was ‘the “State” [note the scare quotes!] of the Emperor Nero’ – that ‘something of God’s wisdom and patience (though it may only be a reasonable traffic regulation!) will be revealed by even the worst political system’.21 The parenthetical ‘although’ in the latter sentence leads directly into the question of the tangible need for discernment of spirits, of prophetic sensitivity to exactly where and how particular systems and institutions of legal power are opening to or closing themselves off from the specific ‘wisdom and patience’ upon whose present operation their legitimacy depends. If ‘even in the best State Christians may well’ have to express their gratitude for God’s provision and judgement ‘in the form of serious opposition’ to the powers that be,22 then only dire consequences can arise for the church’s vocation of confession and witness when such prophetic sensitivity is divorced from the meaning of ‘subordination’ to the regnant authorities – especially when Christians live and work within systems where God’s wisdom and patience finds expression only in well-ordered traffic laws! God’s Word does not rule over political systems

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only as the primal origin or sustaining source of the powers and capacities of which they make use; it is even such an origin and source as a wisdom and patience that has come and still comes into human history, with regard for and service of the well-being of those who stand concretely and irreplaceably before it. As this Word of power it upholds ‘all political things’, and has been raised above and beyond them as their irrevocable judge.23 A final word needs to be said about the interrelation of the two points highlighted above: namely, Barth’s apparent presumption that trust in the providential fidelity of God’s grace for and within creaturely order coincides with a view of the state as the present institutional representative (or ‘analogue’) of the properly political dimension of God’s own justification of human social order  – the kingdom which is ‘God himself in the act of normalizing human existence’.24 The appeal in Barth’s political writings to Pilate’s unlawful accusation of Jesus, as an example of how human-historical agency ‘deflecting the course of justice’ might yet give way to the miraculous occasion for reconciliation,25 is important here. In ‘Justification and Justice’, Barth states that Pilate’s injustice in crucifying Jesus does not prevent his unjust work from becoming ‘the involuntary agent and herald of divine justification’.26 Here the angelic-demonic exousiological dialectic means that state-power (as exercised in Pilate’s judgement) really is demonic, in terms of what is accomplished by human will and its effect, but such demonism is theologically decisive only as a creaturely failure to be what the true state is.27 In short, Pilate – the human representative and agent of state-power – failed to act as a statesman, but this is a practical failure to ‘take himself seriously as a representative’ of the institution which stands behind and above his concrete act. Pilate’s act is the state ‘in “demonic” form’, but even so the New Testament is less interested in the form his power takes than in the fact that, by God’s incomparably greater power, ‘the very State which is “demonic” may will [and actually do!] evil, and yet, in an outstanding way, be constrained to do good. The State, even in this “demonic” form, cannot help rendering the service it is meant to render’.28 Similarly, in the 1946 essay Barth claims that even when the state ‘assume[s] the face and character of Pilate . . . it still acts in the power which God has given it’ (Jn. 19.11).29 We recall that it can only assume this character as a creaturely work, as a ‘form of divine service’ conditioned by the world it is given to serve.

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The critical question to be put here is whether this providential ‘mystery’ – in which, by the grace of God, the ‘effect’ or outcome of the historical exercise of political power need not correspond to the human character or intention of the work – justifies the claim that ‘even through the doing of injustice, the state might render service to the furthering of justice’.30 This is directly tied to the question of whether human (and thus Christian) honour, respect and support for the governing authorities is due to the ‘earthly institution’ of the state and those wielding its power, or to these insofar as their work fulfils its true function, serving human life and attesting its divine reconciliation. R. E. Hood’s reading of Barth’s interpretation of Pilate in ‘Justification and Justice’ goes from the above claim (that even by doing injustice, the state might serve ‘the further of justice’), to the following conclusion: ‘Hence, remarks Barth, the honor due the state as an earthly institution with a mandate from God himself cannot be dismissed or ignored by Christians’.31 Yet might there not be an essential exousiological difference – essential because a matter of living faith, of love’s confession32 – between accrediting honour to the ‘earthly institution’ itself, and honouring each political institution as one form of human-historical power created for and claimed by Christ’s own lordly service of God’s reconciling work? The meaning derived from the story of Pilate should be seen alongside Barth’s claim in the ethics of reconciliation fragments that since human history itself ‘cannot escape the sphere of God’s lordship, neither can the alienated forces of [humankind]’.33 God’s power exceeds the power of the powers, not just as ‘their frontier’ but as one ‘at liberty to make use of them in the fulfilment of his will’. For exousiology, much hangs on the significance of Barth’s claim that ‘No matter how bad their effects may be, they cannot be ontologically godless forces’.34 It is worth restating that this conception of the relative power of the powers is of a piece with Barth’s account of das Nichtige, which signals his own share in the post-Augustinian tradition of viewing the reality of evil in terms of ‘privative’ rather than any ‘actual’ or positive determination. Just so, it is not only in relation to God (their Creator) that the powers’ lordlessness is ontologically limited, but also in relation to humanity and its cosmos as the good creation of God.35 As humanity’s relation to the only true life-giving and – sustaining power ‘disintegrates’, its good powers and life-possibilities are turned in on themselves, and these powers draw out of this spiritual disintegration ‘power and lordship over’ persons. Moreover, humanity in itself ‘cannot deny

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their power or shake it off ’. But as the demonized powers remain limited by the Creator and dependent on the existence of the good creature and creation – graciously upheld and thus in itself a witness to Christ’s rule – then in relation to both God and humanity their idolatrous attempts at human mastery and its unjust ‘effects’ cannot be ‘finally valid, effective, and irreversible’.36 Barth’s depiction of the relativity and provisionality of all specific ‘incarnations’ of historical-political power could, therefore, be appreciatively read through the lens of the ongoing dependence of all legal or regulatory systems on divine and creaturely powers  – in themselves unreservedly good37  – which precede and exceed any existing state’s institutional limitations. That the unjust state ‘still acts in the power given it’ means that ‘[e]ven in its perversion it cannot escape from God; and His law remains the standard by which it is judged’.38 The additional point may be made that political institutions cannot escape God and the present claim of his grace not only because God remains their Creator and Lord, but because he does so as one whose own Word of power ‘upholds all things’ (Heb. 1.3),39 as one who is thus free to speak his own lordly claim in and through the creaturely life upon whose powers and capacities political systems depend, and whose free integrity they exist to serve. If the latter point holds, however, and the gracefulness of all human political power is refracted, in better or worse forms, in and through the creaturely attestation of God’s ordering of social history, then what are we to make (conceptually, theologically, morally) of Barth’s tendency to construe God’s victory over demonic or unjust power in metaphysical terms? Does it suffice to say that the historical injustices of political power, because most properly a matter of God’s sovereign determination of human ‘being’, will be finally ineffective? This is the question of the sufficiency of Barth’s view of Leviathan as ‘mythological’ or exceptional state-power, since it is in relation to the demonic powers’ ‘pseudo-objective reality’ and ontological ineffectiveness that ‘we can speak of them only in consciously mythological terms’.40 We have here posed the question, but it will be best answered in dialogue with Yoder, after a brief look at Barth’s description of Leviathan as the spiritual-political power of pride and the idea of empire.

Leviathan as spiritual pride and the ‘idea’ of empire We have noted Barth’s definition of politics as the human attempt to secure an ordered co-existence (‘the common political life of man’) by means of a lawful

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coordination of personal freedom and communal or shared needs. The proper organization of social life therefore entails ‘a system of law based on power, a system of power in honour of law’.41 For Barth, Leviathan is the human-historical attempt at demonically inverting this good legal coordination and social organization, as the creaturely powers involved in this work seek ‘lordlessness’ (that is, absolutization) and mastery over the persons and communities whose freedom and needs they exist to serve. It names the demonic or unjust power that arises in history where ‘power breaks loose from law’, and those agents (i.e. creaturely powers and capacities) who ‘should be active in the service of the divine order’ of government choose to ‘value and love’ their ‘power and force over others’, to exercise these abilities for their own sake, rather than using them in service of others’ freedom and need.42 Barth claims that insofar as this inversion occurs, human law and order is ‘no longer the order which helps man, which safeguards his life’ by enabling social freedom and peace. Insofar as power is unlimited and undetermined by ‘the right’, the state ceases to be an institution that serves humankind, and becomes an arena in which human life is forced to serve the power of the state. Yet as we have also seen, this inversion is limited a priori not only by the reality of God and his faithful ordering of human history, but by the latter’s determination of the reality or true being of the state. ‘It is the myth of the state which can only be described in mythological language, as it is in Revelation 13.1–8’.43 The ‘demonism of politics’ thus consists in the ‘idea of “empire,” which is always inhuman as such’, but the ‘beast rising out of the sea’, real and efficacious enough, is relativized  – shown to be in truth only myth and idea – by the reality of God’s providential preservation and eschatological fulfilment of genuine creaturely order. We have explored some of the chief reasons why Barth insists on the ontological relativity of unjust state-power, but nuance is added to our question here by reflecting on how Barth associates the reality of Leviathan – the imperial ‘tendency’ from which no state is immune – with the spiritual problem of ‘political absolutism’ and the ideational possession of existing states with unrealizable goals. David Haddorff ’s recent treatment of Barth’s ‘lordless powers’ is an excellent resource at this point, as his account of Leviathan betrays the rhetorical problem I am honing in on (it also helpfully moves Barth’s exousiology in the direction of our reading of Yoder, as mentioned below in Part I.C). Haddorff ’s text is a

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comprehensive ethical treatment, which appropriately aligns the chief Barthian sins of pride, sloth and falsehood with the demonic powers of Leviathan, Mammon and Ideology. These latter powers are then shown to be ‘unmasked’ in the Christian witness of faith, love and hope (respectively), each of which ‘correspond’ to the subjective presence and act of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.44 The structure of his account allows him to pair political ethics (specifically, the ‘risks of global violence’) with pride-Leviathan-faith. Haddorff admits that each of the ethical risks and problems he treats (political, economic and environmental or ecological) is affected by each of the corresponding sins and powers, but his pairing is apt as an illustration of Barth’s own logic, since Barth’s description of Leviathan as the temptation of and tendency towards ‘political absolutism’ indeed corresponds to the sin of pride, which our analysis has already shown to be foundational to Barth’s understanding of demonic power as rooted in idolatry. Even so, Haddorff ’s pairing the problem of Leviathan primarily with the (personal) sin of ‘pride’ and finding its (creaturely) solution in faith – which is, again, a fitting re-description of Barth’s own view – further illumines the trouble with an ontological framing of the problem of idolatrous political power, as it makes intentional spiritual transgression central, and renders the historical ‘consequences’ or effect of political self-regard secondary. It seems to cast the ‘horizontal’ or historical failure of political agency to be attentive to the human life within its God-given care (i.e. ‘sloth’, contrasted with love) as derivative of or secondary concern to the ontological dissolution of political power, rather than seeing such failure as itself perpetuating and enacting such dissolution. One should note how the later treatment of Leviathan (as the historical ‘myth’ or practical exception, and as consisting in the ‘idea of empire’) is conceptually grounded in Barth’s earlier and typical image of the state as the embodiment of the divine power that sustains the extra-ecclesial or ‘secular’ order, and the fact that Barth claims it fulfils this preserving work ‘in its action against human sin’. The latter claim crucially qualifies the former, since even if we are to see in Barth here (and in general) the presumption that ‘the state’ names a human-historical institution bearing divine authorization, the fact that the institution of state-power is tied to the biblical exousia ordained for a specific purpose means that the ‘functional’ question – the question of what political institutions do in any given context – cannot be finally set aside. It

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gets at the heart of this work to ask here whether this good exousia either (1) signifies a perduring institution (‘the state’), to whom persons should thereby grant de jure legitimacy and thus de facto authority to use the sword at its own discretion and according to its own law(s) or (2) whether this exousia names an ongoing task, a form of power itself ordered by a particular law, in whose execution a given institution becomes (or remains) ‘political’. Below we will see that from a Yoderian perspective, the former presumption – that God orders human co-existence not simply by means of the sword (a relation of force), but by the sword as ‘the state’ (an ontological, yet historically identifiable institution) – has disastrous theological consequences, if and when it is seen as holding true in isolation from the functional question of what specific states do. It is only when the political exousia of Romans 13.1 and 1 Peter 2.14 are identified, not with the contingent task of humanely (re)ordering social life, but with an already-given institution of power  – with a state of rule in fact represented by past and present kings, emperors and presidents – that theology is tempted to scan the course of human political history and cry ‘peace! peace!’ where there is none to be found. The key point made in this part is simply that Barth’s rhetoric about state-power often veers towards ordained-institution language, despite the fact that he introduces exousiological concepts that suggest that the il/legitimacy of such institutions is adjudged by their enactment of distinct kinds of power (angelic/demonic; serving/mastering). With claims to the effect that ‘however much . . . human tyranny may be involved in it, the State is not the product of human sin’, Barth risks inverting his own insight that the forms of power enacted in a given time and place determine (i.e. manifest; reveal) the spiritual legitimacy of creaturely institutions, thereby moving his account much closer to ordained-institutional or ‘spherical’ territory. That is, he risks conceiving ‘the state’ as an ideal or normative institution, whose good presence and work is specifiable in distinction from its historical manifestation of and actual correspondence to God’s own good work of holding creaturely life together by the power of the cross. If, on the other hand, exousiology must maintain that it is the enacted form of human-historical response to God’s own Word of power (the crucified and risen body of Jesus) that signals what spirit possesses a given institution, or whether an existent power stands in the service of heaven or hell, then the state – indeed any political institution or authority –

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becomes Leviathan precisely to the extent that it enacts unjust forms of order and perpetuates idolatry. Political authority, power and rule is possessed by this spirit  – practically resistant to and ignorant of the Spirit of the Lord  – insofar as the work of authority-figures, power-structures and territorial rulers perpetuate and engender an ethos of idolatrous self-regard and unjust inattention to the concrete freedom and embodied claim of the human life within its care.

B. Yoder on Constantinian power(s) Although the immediate aim of this part is to contrast Yoder’s view of political power(s) with Barth’s, it also serves as a necessary supplement to our account of Yoder’s critique of ‘Niebuhrian realism’ discussed in Chapter 2. There I argued that Yoder’s account of the fallen creaturely powers works against the grain of such realism, by opening sociopolitical life and its ordering powers to the historical claim and promise of redemption. Here the aim is to show how Yoder’s well-known critique of ‘Constantinianism’ serves as a diagnosis of the theological error involved in political realism’s legitimation of given power-structures, in their present and, it is assumed, intrinsic distance from God’s eschatological fulfilment of sociopolitical life. The crux of the argument is that Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism informs exousiology because of the twofold character of the theological error it betrays: the logic of Constantinianism involves both an ethical rationality and a form of power, and it is the conjunction of the two in human social history that makes what otherwise might be casually accepted as simply a ‘different’ confessional or ideological perspective worthy of prophetic ire. First a brief comment should be made regarding the nature and interpretation of Yoder’s critique. The term ‘Constantinian’ itself invites the assumption that what is being criticized is primarily a historical period or shift. In Yoder’s work, the latter (a historical shift) is certainly true, but only in a qualified way. Many readers have correctly noted that Yoder’s critique is more focussed on the figure and period of the emperor Constantine the Great serving as ‘the symbol of a sweeping shift in the nature of the empirical [i.e. historical] church and its relation to the [surrounding] world’,45 than on the ‘historical career of the man . . . and his personal influence in history’.46 My

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argument below further substantiates this reading in terms of the theological problematic involved in this symbolic shift: Yoder’s ‘concern is not with Constantine the man’, but with the fact that ‘he stands for a new era in the history of Christianity’.47 Even this is not quite right, for Yoder’s baseline critique touches not on the fact that he has often been seen as representing a new shift in world history definitive of the church’s confessional identity, but the theological (and practical) judgements involved in the shift he ideologically represents: he is the ‘symbol of a change in styles of moral discourse’,48 which has had and has ‘far reaching changes in Christian social ethics’.49 Peter Leithart’s recent Defending Constantine is a noteworthy attempt at disassembling the historical foundations of Yoder’s critique. Leithart admits that Yoder’s critique primarily targets a ‘theological shift’ in Christian (indeed, Western religious) self-understanding: ‘Yoder does not identify “Constantinianism” with the achievements or policies of Constantine or any of his successors. Constantinianism is a set of mental, spiritual, and institutional habits’ that the church in any age is capable of adopting, even though it is ‘symbolized’ by and is in some ways bound up with the legacy of Christendom. The ambiguous relation of historical and theological judgement must be admitted, and in my view Yoder’s position here, exactly parallel to the noticeable refinement of his views on the ‘paganism’ of the state, becomes over the course of his career increasingly more nuanced, and less adapted to rhetoric that might imply an ecclesiastical ‘fall narrative’.50 Whereas Leithart’s reading is based on the assumption that Yoder’s mistaken historiography (an ‘Anabaptist fall narrative’, itself grounded in an a priori defence of pacifism) leads him to misconstrue the real ‘theological significance of Constantine’, my reading works the other way around. The charge is best understood as referring to a historical shift ‘symbolized’ by the institutional church’s increasing alignment with secular power-structures as they stand, its (ideological and practical) acceptance of forms of power at odds with its gospel. The debate is thus precisely about the ‘theological significance of Constantine’, but this significance refers not only or, for Yoder, even primarily to the meaning ‘intrinsic’ to a historiographically correct evaluation of the man or the era.51 The question is the theological adequacy of the ideological function deployed by this symbolic shift; with the rightness of what it means for the church’s self-understanding and moral posture in the world.

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If, as discussed in Chapter 2, the hallmark of (Niebuhrian) political realism is the conceptual distancing of sociopolitical life  – its own powers and possibilities – from the eschatological promise and directive of Christ’s new humanity, then Constantinianism names the theological rationale by which Western Christendom has practically wedded itself to this reality. The two definitive characteristics of this ideology mentioned above – its deployment as an ethical rationality, and as a form of power – show that this problematic maps directly onto the doxological character of ‘confession’. We have seen that for Yoder, living the Christian confession entails both a particular form of ‘consciousness’ or (self-)awareness – one that is honed by but not restricted to the historic institutions and practices of Christianity  – and a particular way of being in the world, a definite sociopolitical posture.52 The following paragraphs sketch Yoder’s suggestion that the logic of Constantinianism betrays a theological inversion of God’s particular rule over human history by the Word of Jesus Christ, a ‘false rationality’ that is bound to and manifest in the unjust exercise of political power(s). As an ethical rationality, Constantinianism embodies a form of historical consciousness and self-understanding that contradicts the ratio or internal logic of the gospel. Yoder’s critique here is, in different places, aimed at several moving targets – rationalism, consequentialism, the reductive determinism of (natural or social) science, political realism53 – but the underlying unity of all the positions he associates with ‘Constantinianism’ is that each makes an agential identification between a particular human power-bearer and sociohistorical possibility itself. It effectively elevates the agent who is assumed to be ‘in control’ to a ‘providential’ plane, and in so doing it defines present and future possibilities in relation to that power-bearer’s own aims and capacities. The ruler in whom a given society places its trust becomes the transcendent bearer of the meaning of history. They become for us the systemic key to history itself – the ideational or practical door by which we may develop ‘system-immanent causal explanations for the past, and even more, . . . system-immanent causal descriptions of how the future is sure to unfold’.54 In its explicitly political guise, Constantinianism assumes that ‘God’s governance of history had [or has] become empirically evident in the person of the Christian ruler of the world’.55 In following the interpretive lines developed in Chapter 3, our focus should fall here not chiefly on the qualification of the

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providential ruler’s ‘Christianness’, but on the assumption that God’s own rule has become immanent to a particular and identifiable person or office. It is, of course, clear from even the most cursory glance at the actual history of Constantine and the beginnings of imperial Christianity, of Western Christendom all the way down to the blatant ideologies of present day Anglo-American evangelicalism, that the ruler’s own explicitly ‘Christian’ identity has never been the main concern. But Yoder is not (nor are we) concerned with the ‘secularity’ of the specific ruler with which Constantinianism identifies the divine rule – an issue which would only concern exousiology in a theocratic guise. Nevertheless, the fact that this is not the ethical rationale of Constantinianism is significant, for it shifts attention from the personal identity of the ruler, to the providential blessedness of the particular office or institution in which they stand. Once one assumes ‘the providential place of the power-bearer’, then the frame of ethical deliberation is that of the person with power; the king deciding whether to wage an unjust war, the merchant deciding whether to set a fair price, the head of household deciding whether to beat his wife or child, the wealthy person deciding whether to lend at interest. The action is to be evaluated not by whether it keeps the rules, or by whether it resonates with the grace of God, or by whether it exemplifies virtue, or whether it coheres with the salvation story, but by whether, when carried out, when generalized [i.e. imposed] through the ruler’s power, it will produce the best possible outcomes.56

Yoder’s fundamental insight here is that as an ethical rationale, Constantinianism denies that the locus of God’s rule of creaturely life is ‘hidden in Christ’ – it is not manifest first and decisively in the shape of his life-history, or the revelatory specificity of his cross and resurrection. It is state-power. And thus the realm of political possibility is determined by ‘system-immanent’ reference to the past and presently established institutional aims and capacities of the state. This clarifies how the exousiological relevance of Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism lines up with what we described in Chapter 2, with the help of Daniel Barber and Nathan Kerr, as the ideological functioning of the powers. The powers determine human relations by providing an ideological refuge beyond the realm of lived human history, which allows us to identify our sociopolitical agenda and moral righteousness with the truth of things, in such a way that our awareness of this truth need not pass through ‘individual

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persons, their lives and well-being’. Human trust in the powers takes the form of personal or social confidence that one or another creaturely ‘site’ of power – some past or presently established ‘network or norm or regularity’ – constitutes the ideal form in knowledge and application of which we can rightly move ourselves and history itself along. Therefore it is justified to sacrifice to this one ‘cause’ other subordinate values, including the life and welfare of one’s self, one’s neighbour, and (of course!) the enemy. We pull this one strategic thread to save the whole fabric.57

The import of this for the exousiological perspective being developed here is that the idolatrous and ideological function of the powers co-inhere at this juncture of human trust (faith) in and practical commitment (confession) to the powers. The powers allow ‘us’ to rest secure in ‘our’ knowledge of the truth they embody, because their embodiment of the truth is in principle divorced from the specific bodies and claims of those ‘outside’. Just so, the ideological operation of the powers means that human knowledge of the truth is unconditioned by the concrete ‘lives and well-being’ of our neighbours, because it is not their lives or well-being, but ‘our favored [structural] handle’ on history which ‘in itself defines and determines wherein their well-being consists’.58 This insight is what drives Kerr’s championing of Yoder as providing a theological way forward by means of an ‘apocalyptic historicsm’. What Kerr so helpfully articulates is the christological specificity of what Yoder believes to ‘transcend’ the powers’ ideological functioning. An eschatological (or, in Kerr’s terms, apocalyptic) ‘historicism’ only functions as a different kind of ‘transcendence’ of human-historical relations, because what it sees as lying ‘beyond’ the realm of past and present powers and possibilities is not another ‘idea’, nor any specific creaturely practice or principle or institution, but a certain way of being in the world  – God’s own movement of grace in and for the other, as the cross and resurrection of Christ. The argument of this chapter, with respect to both Leviathan and Mammon (and, specifically, to their interrelation), hinges on the further claim that precisely because of this christological specificity, the power of God in relation to which all persons find their creaturely vocation and freedom, comes to God’s covenant-partner not simply in an ontological or metaphsyical register, but in and through the

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embodied word(s) of those other human persons to which one’s own life is materially bound. In light of this, we need only add as a reflective gloss the claim that the other side of Yoder’s Constantantinian dialectic is its practical enactment as a certain form of power. Human idolization of the powers is manifest in its ideological deployment, and, conversely, the specific ideological shape of a person’s sociohistorical life  – the powers actually ordering their way of being in the world – conditions their understanding of that in which security and hope lies. Both Niebuhrian political realism and a Constantinian rationale entail not just mistaken ‘ideas’, but certain sociopolitical forms of life and ethical postures. Or, perhaps better, it is not that such ‘realism’ or ideological ‘consequentialism’ are necessarily bound to a specific set of practical forms – indeed, they have been tied to and may yet inform many social visions and political agendas. Thus it is not simply on ‘practical’ grounds that they are to be resisted. Rather, Yoderian exousiology challenges these articulations of the foundations of sociopolitical life, because their intrinsic denial that Christ’s cross and resurrection is the way God rules the world and directs conceptual attention and lived hope away from the promise and claim of that rule in the concrete life of the neighbour. The particular way Yoder conceives the confessional distinction of church and world is again paramount. The embodiment or enacted form of Constantinian power, which not only assumes a specific ‘structural handle’ by which human agency might move history along, but practically imposes this assumption through the subordination of human-historical life to its cause, is itself a ‘confessional’ stance. And this because it attests the ethical rationale embedded in it, which proclaims a ruler other than Jesus Christ – another specific form of (‘divine’, ‘providential’) law and order – to be the ‘mover of history’ in whose direction social life finds its own limitations and possibilities. Both the positive and critical dimensions of Christian social witness emerge at this point. Because the lordship Christians confess bears an intrinsic sociopolitical form; because the rule to which they bear witness is enacted, first and finally, in and for the common life of the world and, finally, because their own share in Christ’s rule comes not primarily in an ontological or epistemic register, but as a certain way of being-with and – for God and neighbour – the confessing community finds its specific political ‘orientation’ in God’s own being-for the creature in Jesus Christ, the content of that power and love positively orders

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the community’s proclamation, in word and deed. Positively, therefore, the sociopolitical form of the community’s confession is its willingness to give its own resources and capacities – be they intellectual, institutional, personal, spiritual or financial – over to the advocacy and defence of those creaturely lives victimized and threatened by the powers that be: the ‘least of these’; the poor, orphan, and widow; the foreigner and the enemy. Negatively, therefore, the confessing community is distinguished from the non-confessing world by its critical discernment, resistance to and public denunciation of not any and every ‘other’ confession, but the specific (Constantinian) forms of idolatry and injustice which exalt their own capacities and aims, and their correlative systems of meaning and value, above the embodied life of God’s covenant-partner.

C. Barth and Yoder on political power(s) These insights directly inform the dialogue begun above (Part 3.III), and what a Yoderian exousiology has to say (positively and negatively) to Barth’s account of the power of Leviathan and the exousia of the state. Additionally, a key part of the logic of Part 4.B below can now be explicitly stated: just because the constructive political function of creaturely power  – the divine work it serves and attests, its angelic-ministerial vocation – has to do with the ordering of humanity’s embodied life-together, so humanity’s political powers and capacities become most dangerous, and thus most in need of critique and resistance, precisely where they collude and overlap with the law of Mammon. God also – and, in the sense explored below, primarily – claims human history for its own freedom in Christ precisely where Mammon stakes its claim: in and through the material interrelations upon which human life depends, which are always being-ordered and directed by one lord or another, by some authority and power. This final portion of Part 4.I summarizes the most pertinent areas of overlap and distinction between Barth’s and Yoder’s political exousiologies. Our account of Yoder’s exousiology has by now clearly drawn out the logic of what Richard Bourne aptly describes as the functional legitimacy of structures of governmental authority.59 The heart of Yoder’s claim is that the ‘authority’ of every power-structure or sociopolitical institution resides only in Christ, and therefore all worldly structures are judged il/legitimate only on the basis of their practical conformity with God’s own mode of governance in his person and

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work. This confirms the claim developed in Chapter 2 regarding the lordship of Christ as the operative unity of the world-powers: that power which lasts, which bears eschatological weight and authority, is no particular governmental structure or institution in and of itself (as a Constantinian rationale presumes), but every existent (personal or institutionalized) human-historical power in and through its determination by and correspondence to Christ’s own way in the world. In this light, we can understand Yoder’s exousiology as working against the grain of traditional doctrines of providence, insofar as such doctrines are determined by a Constantinian inflection of Christ’s heavenly session  – that is, insofar as one’s account of providence aligns the divine work of creation’s preservation or sustenance with an identifiable sphere (or institution, or ‘realm’, or form of power), whose ‘secularity’ or principled separation from the gospel renders silent the church’s living confession of Christ’s cross. In modern Protestantism providence has often functioned to name the sectors of ‘secular’ or (better) irreligious activity where God’s rule over sociopolitical life is mysteriously active, while robbing these sectors of any critical theological insight by materially disconnecting this providential rule from God’s eschatological reconstitution of humanity. Moreover, this gets at the root problem with many mainstream theological conceptions of the division between (Adamic) creation and redemption, insofar as they end up conceding the material space within which social unity itself is contested and organized, under the rubric of an insulated ‘created order’, while confining any eschatological pressure Christ’s work puts upon the constitution of sociopolitical life to some other, trans-historical plane. Yoder, by contrast, refuses to allow ‘providence’ to name the political and economic rulers of the day as themselves the primary or direct mediators of God’s (positive or negative!) will for human social life. Our reading of Barth’s political exousiology treads far along this path, precisely because it shares with Yoder a christocentric grammar that refuses, in principle, to separate the existence and witness of creation from the eschatological determination of human history by Christ’s humanity.60 Yet the critical line opened in the previous chapter and continued in Part 4.I finally leads us back to the question of whether the ontological register of Bath’s account ends up falling back into a ‘spherical’ casting of the church-world distinction, through its tendency to locate the positive (i.e. eschatologically

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receptive) existence of creaturely power – in this case, the exousia of ‘the state’ – on a metaphysical plane. Above we discussed this tension in terms of Barth’s identification of ‘state-power’ with the negative political form of Christ’s own kingdom, in its ‘action against sin’. Here, then, we might ask about the ‘positive’ form of Christ’s kingdom – where, if anywhere, can one see in Barth the good ordering of creaturely life by powers that are subjectively being-conformed to Christ’s rule? The answer clearly given in ‘Justification and Justice’ and ‘The Christian and the Civil Community’ is that, first and foremost, we discern the pattern of divine-human ordering by looking to the church – not of course ‘directly’, for it, too, is only a ‘provisional’, relative being-in-correspondence to the reality of God in God’s gracious work. ‘The Word and Spirit of God are no more automatically available in the Church than they are in the State’, for Christians no less than the rest of humankind exist in and as the fallen and rebellious world.61 Moreover, the church and state both have a political structure and order; the question here is how the ‘analogy’ between them maps onto the distinction of the ecclesiastical from the civil realm. The sphere of the church’s political witness  – its explicit pointing to the kingdom of God  – does not, for Barth or Yoder, sit ‘alongside’ the civil or sociopolitical realm, as it does so often in the mainstream theological conceptuality described above. The institutions of church and state are not territorially located, side by side, or over and against. Rather, the church resides, for Barth, within the civil realm, ‘internal’ to the sociopoltical context in which all human life occurs. Yet here we must recall that Barth opens the 1946 essay by stating the non-identity of the divine and human-historical establishment of political order as a distinction of eternity and time. The church knows that all persons stand in need of ‘kings’, ‘that is, need to be subject to an external, relative and provisional order of law, defended by superior authority and force’,62 because it knows its own humanity as a sinful history standing on the brink of das Nichtige. Yet it also knows and proclaims ‘the eternal kingdom of God’ as the ‘original and final pattern of this order’ that is relatively established in history by human law and force.63 This logic is the basis of Barth’s development of an ‘analogical’-practical relation between the concentric circles of church and civil society, in which the community that knows and proclaims the inner (eternal) foundation of all creaturely power(s) makes its own unique witness in and to the external (historical) order of power encompassing life in one’s own ‘place, region or country’.64

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The political exousia whose law governs the common realm of social life is therefore not simply the one rule of Christ, making use of whatever contingent worldly structures of power and authority happen to be in place. It is the (ontologically defined) institution of the state, the ‘external’ form of the kingdom of God, in its ‘provisional embodiment’ in the common realm of fallen human history. We have noted above how Barth casts his definition of the state, its being-in the reign of Christ, in metaphysical terms. The upshot of this was shown to be that there is no necessary connection between the being and function of state-power. Yet now we can add the further qualification that while the institutions of church and state are unified in several respects, their distinction arises in the fact that they give two necessarily distinct forms of witness to the presence of God’s eternal kingdom. Each institution is, at an ontological level – and, also practically and historically, insofar as what persons do out within and through these institutions functionally corresponds to its metaphysical basis – a distinct form of witness to God’s reign. The state names the form of political power that defines the kingdom’s relation to present human history, in its ‘external’, ‘visible’ and historical-political form. The church’s sociopolitical witness – the exemplary structure of its own internal-institutional form of law and order, as well as what, on an analogical basis from that structure, it might say to the state – points away from present human history, to its fulfilment in the eternal kingdom of God. The remainder of this part is devoted to teasing out the logic of this way of distinguishing church and state, or the ‘ecclesial’ and ‘sociopolitical’ realms, in a way that connects this question with the key themes emerging in Chapters 3 and 4.

Concluding remarks Todd Cioffi, commenting on the similar relation of justification and justice in CD II/1 and the 1946 essay, notes that both church and state bear the political ministry of reconciliation. This ministry, in either ‘form’ of its expression, entails just treatment of the ‘weak’ in society. In no uncertain terms, Barth asserts, ‘By any other political attitude [one] rejects the divine justification.’65. . . . That is, as God reconciles humanity by way of divine justification, so too the church and the state are ‘called’ to engage in a ministry of reconciliation (justice) to the oppressed. To the degree, then, that the

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state, particularly at the encouragement of the church, shows mercy to the disadvantaged, and indeed all persons, it is indirectly participating in the ministry of reconciliation to which God calls the church and all persons.66

Cioffi is rightly pointing out that it is not simply personal or cognitive awareness or trust in the fact (i.e. the objective-eschatological accomplishment) of divine justification that informs a theological account of historical-political justice; the character  – or, in our terms, the specific historical form or structural orientation  – of Christ’s salvific work determines also the shape of human justice. Yet there may still be reason, on Yoderian grounds, to quibble with Barth’s view, also endorsed by Haddorff and Cioffi, that civil society  – or, which is the same for them, the common realm of fallen humanity, ordered by state-power  – participates indirectly in the ‘political angelic’ ministry of reconciliation. My reservation here has to do with Yoder’s differentiation of church and world (including, therefore, authentic social witness and rebellious political power) not in terms of ‘two distinct callings’ or ‘two distinct tasks’ – both equally valid and positively willed by the one Word of God – but rather as two ways of being-in-response to the one political order (and thus singular creaturely vocation) God has constituted and is bringing about through the lowliness of Jesus Christ. In other words, to conceive the ‘secular’ or civil task as ‘indirect’ political witness – indirect because of its specific relation to the realm of fallen human history – is tied to the Barthian tendency to read the ecclesial-civil distinction through a polarization of interiority and exteriority, or eternity and time, or the religious and the political – all of which finally falls back on the epistemic casting of the church’s confessional distinction from and within the civil realm.67 Yet Yoder’s account of confession, as read above, problematizes the claim that the visible (or institutional) church is necessarily grounded in a more-sure knowledge and awareness of the gospel than the state (or any ‘secular’ political power), irrespective of those institutions’ historically enacted posture towards the good creaturely life being threatened by idolatrous and unjust power. Yoder’s confessional church-world distinction, and his (related) critique of Constantinian power thus richly informs the direction in which Cioffi is rightly reading Barth’s emphasis on the common ‘political ministry of reconciliation’ given to the church and state.68 Practical judgements about the forms of political power that correspond to God’s ordering must

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be made in relation to the reality of reconciliation, in which all the powers and possibilities of creaturely life are what they are, and are called to do what they are called to do, through their subsistence in and for the rule of Christ. The self-divinization of the powers is intrinsically tied to and manifest in works of injustice, because in denying the concrete need and dignity of the neighbour (the citizen, the employee, the enemy), political powers forsake their own creatureliness – they are, to invoke Luther’s image, curved in upon themselves. In contrast to the separation of state-power’s being and function, Richard Bourne’s reading of Yoder’s theology of the state rightly picks up on the need for a contextualized Christian discernment of the functional legitimacy of governmental authority and power.69 Here it is fitting to recall the claim developed in Chapter 2 regarding the lordship of Christ as the operative unity of the world-powers: that power which lasts, which bears eschatological weight and authority, is no particular governmental structure or institution in and of itself, but every existent (personal or institutionalized) human-historical power in and through its determination by and correspondence to Christ’s own way in the world. This is tantamount to a theological rejection of the state as an ideal institution. The latter ends up focussing on authoritative structures (i.e. structures that bear authority; what Yoder, in Chapter 2 defined as a ‘legitimist’ approach), whereas Yoder’s interest is in a critical approach to structural power that prioritizes contingent modes of practice (i.e. actual power-relations). For Yoder, thinking christologically about state-power requires historicizing what any given state should be and do, on the basis of theological discernment about the extent to which actually existing forms of power are oriented by and to Christ’s own rule, as they claim (as all benefactors do!) to go about the practical tasks of preserving peace by restraining evil and encouraging the good. This chapter has shown why and how Barth accounts for the institutional exousia of state-power as an ‘element of the kingdom of Christ’. The location of all political power within the rule of Christ confirms the need, stated in the previous chapters, for exousiology to have an account of ontological ‘privation’ running  – to speak about the state’s practical contradiction of Christ’s own rule as the negation of genuine political power, and as the social enactment of unfreedom. In Part 4.I we tied Barth’s confidence about the being of the state to his salutary recognition that it is the good and active presence of both God

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and creation that limits and conditions political power. The co-inherence of idolatrous and ideological forms of authority is based in the fact that what the powers claiming the right and legitimacy to rule transgress is not simply God in and for himself, but the goodness of creation being-upheld by and for Christ’s world-affirming presence. This ties back into Chapter 1’s claim that the ‘political angelic power’ of the state bears the historical mandate to attest God’s own providential preservation of creaturely life against das Nichtige’s work of destruction. Thus Barth intrinsically links this specific ‘angelic power’  – political power(s) – to God’s restraining No to the powers of das Nichtige in fallen human history, a No spoken for the hearing and embrace of God’s Yes therein. Yet as we are now able to see, from a Yoderian perspective, this dogmatic ordering of the ‘political angelic power’ of the state to the end of humanity’s eschatological fulfilment does not go far enough. And this because – as Barth intuits in his ascription of that ‘broad sense’ of the political to all the angelic powers, but does not expound – the dogmatic foundation of political justice and social order is given, in the first instance, not with God’s No to sin, nor in a merely future kingdom, but in the positive, historic claim of the Word made flesh. The power of ‘the sword’ therefore finds its limited, negative function relative to the positive fulfilment of all sociopolitical power in the history of Jesus Christ, in his death and resurrection in and for the life of the world. That specific power, which has significance only in connection with the still-fallen and -rebellious creation, is thus not to be identified with ‘political’ power in its fundamental and positive theological sense. There is still a serious question that a Barthian (or, more generally, Reformed) reading of the civil community– the sociopolitical whole – as, in principle, the realm of state-power, within which the confessing church proclaims a different order and power, might justifiably put to Yoder. That is, if ‘knowledge’ of God, and thus what the powers and institutions in any realm of life proclaim, is contingent and particular – then what becomes of the view, clearly adopted in Yoder’s earlier work and resonating throughout, that state-power or the sword-bearing function is somehow itself fallen? If stress falls on the ‘externality’ of Christ’s rule to all institutional and structural forms of power, could one maintain that state-power is, in principle, positively related to God’s own will through some kind of providential ‘transmutation’ of evil into good?

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This is a legitimate charge, but I agree with Richard Bourne that it sticks most firmly only to one (typically quite early) strand of Yoder’s commentary on the state. The overall tone is indeed negative, but a close reading of Yoder’s body of work leads to a much more nuanced picture of how Christians may witness to and be involved in ‘secular’ political power. Moreover, Yoder’s own refusal to ‘ontologize’ the state has to be kept in mind. A Yoderian might well respond here that, yes, on this exousiological reading, state-power can no more be ‘in principle’ a positive response to God’s will and rule in Christ than the ecclesial realm – however, Yoder’s negative description of state-power focuses not on ontology (what an ‘ideal’ sword-bearing function would look like), but on the kind of sword-bearing that has been and is being enacted. This certainly does not let Yoder off the hook, but it does nuance what kind of discussion needs to be had about what sword-bearing is. In my view, the specificity of the vocation of creaturely political power, just because of the specificity of the Word whose rule it is called to attest, means that any principled distinction between what the political witness of ‘church’ and ‘state’ must look like in a given time and place must be finally set aside. Christians can and must support state-power where it is opening to Christ’s sustaining rule, just because ‘confession’ of this rule is not lip-service but a way of being-with and -for God and neighbour, the enactment of which is by no means necessarily ‘mediated’ through the church’s own (missional) influence or power; just because the range of historically specific forms political witness may take never definitively ‘settles’ in any given realm or institutional form. None of this provides any reason to deny Yoder’s fundamental claim, with which Barth’s exousiology agrees and which so clearly marks Stanley Hauerwas’s work, that the church’s distinctive willingness to ‘unhandle’ history – the freedom to not have to be in charge, precisely because Christ has triumphed over the powers – means that the primary way the church ‘influences’ the world is simply by being the church.70 Yet my reading of Yoder’s exousiology picks up on and developing another side of this ‘unhandling’, which is that the confessing community cannot write off any present or future sociopolitical possibility simply in the name of ideological or confessional ‘difference’, because it is in principle open to the rule of Christ over and in all human history, and is thus ever ready and willing to hear a new word regarding where and in what way living confession of Christ’s rule may and must occur. The confessing community’s ‘no’ and ‘yes’

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to the world is bound, through discernment and attention, to the specificity of what is being confessed – to the forms of response to God and neighbour actually being enacted. This also helps us see a point of clear difference from Barth, namely, why it is that Yoder assumes that ‘even the most democratized form of the state can never escape a moment of self-deification’.71 Precisely because Yoder identifies the ontological constitution of historical-political power as residing in God’s gracious ordering of human life in Christ – that is, in the grace of the gospel, the ‘good news’ of Christ’s presence to human history in and for the life of the world – then he can only identify the ‘negative’ form of this rule, its judgement of sin and providential ‘use’ of coercive creaturely powers and capacities to preserve a modicum of social order, as bearing in itself the negative possibility of humanity’s idolatrous and ideological use of such power for their own ends. Yet my reading of Yoder suggests that the logic of his exousiology does not warrant, and in fact firmly resists, any principled polarization of the duties of church and state, just as firmly as it resists restricting the confession of Christ and the witness to his rule that all persons are called to enact to any religious institution or separate realm. There may be a de facto ‘separation’ of the confessing community from the dominant political institutions and its self-identified tasks, but that is determined by the contextual interaction between the good ends of God’s own gracious rule in Christ and the structural make-up of those institutions and roles. What is always required of the church, precisely so that its explicit confession of Christ’s lordship may become living political witness, is both sensitivity to the internal shape and content of God’s own way with creatures in Jesus Christ, and discernment of which sword-bearing or constructive political tasks hold social life open to that way. In sum, if the link between divine-human fidelity with respect to ‘political’ power is as broken by ubiquitous idolatry and injustice as the link between divine-human action in the ‘religious’ or ecclesial realm, then the form of political power ‘ordained’ by God will be no more restricted to or co-extenstive with the state than spiritual power is restricted to or co-extensive with the church. Moreover, if the task of political power is not essentially negative, then exousiology can and must say not only that ‘political’ powers and institutions exist for the reconciliation proclaimed by the church but also that the church’s proclamation and hope is that reconciliation has occurred, and may and

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will occur in all corners of human existence. Hence the negative response of judgement, the preserving power of restraint and coercion that wards off the destruction of creaturely life for the sake of its reconciliation, does not delimit the ‘boundaries’ of political power or institutions. Political power is not simply reactive, but constructive; it does not simply mitigate against sin, but bears positive witness to the kingdom of God constituted and being made manifest in Jesus Christ. It is constituted and exercised as the ordering of social life according to laws, customs and institutional boundaries that follow the movement of God’s own grace in Christ. This means that the decisive boundary lies not between spiritual and political powers or realms, nor originally or finally in any visible distinction of church and world, but between ‘positive’ (i.e. knowing, accepting) and ‘negative’ (ignorant, unwilling) spiritual-political witness and response to God’s one rule of all creation by his crucified and resurrected Word. The ‘ecclesial realm’ only exists because the world as a whole does not yet knowingly accept or practically entrust its life to the order it has been, is being, and will be given in the divine work named ‘Jesus’. But the community gathers to listen again to that Word whose eschatological rule is even now being enacted in and for the ‘external’ realm of shared human life. At its best state-power serves and attests God’s creative, sustaining and overruling power  – that is, it protects and nurtures embodied human life, which is the historical and God-given condition of possibility for genuine ‘spiritual’ (i.e. free, willing, responsive) reconciliation of actual human beings, in their lived interdependence and material relations. But if the injustices of Pilate and his ilk are limited by both the externality of Christ’s rule and the graced sustenance of creaturely life, with all its human-historical powers and possibilities, then authentic political power – that is, divine and human energy directed towards the christic form of social relations – is not and, in principle, cannot be restricted to the particular historical institution called ‘the state’. It cannot reside or depend upon the legacy of national, international and other territorial rulers, since these themselves depend – as do all ‘political systems’, in Barth’s view – upon practical transparency to the divine rule. To be in and for human history what it is in Christ, the political power of states and other institutions – which Barth considers to lack, in their secularity, at least explicit knowledge of God’s justification – require constant reminders that the human lives within their care are not ‘merely’ creaturely (such that their given life

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could be relativized by some greater good), but bear in themselves the sign and promise of reconciliation. When political systems forget their raison d'être, and seek to solidify their existence as a ‘thing in itself ’ rather than a ‘means of getting specific things done’,72 the preservation of their creatureliness depends once again on a word from outside. It requires persons, communities and institutions that discern, vocalize and resist the real threats crouching at the social door in light of Jesus’ humanity. In their witness, attention is drawn to God’s own way of sustaining creation and providing liberating direction as a human life for and among the most vulnerable; the Word speaks in the words, and therein lies the ever-new possibility of hearing what is actually threatened when our forces of law might become self-serving and inattentive to shared human need. That Christ’s presence is mediate and ordered, that God’s way is one with Jesus’ self-identification with the poor and imprisoned, means a definite orientation for political power, and thus a direct challenge to all powers that resist this directive, when the divine promise is heard and proclaimed.

II. Towards a theology of Mammon: Barth and Yoder in dialogue Part 4.I has teased out the theological rationale for affirming Barth’s placement of Leviathan at the head of his treatment of the lordless powers. This has to do with his incipient recognition, one much more explicit in Yoder, that Christ’s new humanity comes to and reconciles human beings as a transformative political order constituted on earth by God. This part gestures towards the significance of the power of Mammon for our thinkers’ exousiologies. The overarching goal is to spell out, as a social and ethical relation, the interrelation of political and economic life implied when our thinkers’ exousiologies are taken together. In the first part (II.A), I draw out the most relevant aspects of Barth’s discussion of Mammon as a ‘lordless power’, and Yoder’s sympathy with liberation theology. While it remains for the concluding chapter to focus exclusively on Mammon, this part contributes to the overarching goal of this work, which is to establish the exousiological rationale for refusing to treat the humanity or demonization of either political or economic power apart from the other. Politics and economics are theologically intertwined, because

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Leviathan and Mammon constitute a Janus-like deity, and possession by either spirit implies the nearness of the other.

A. Barth on Mammon Whereas Hobbes’s Leviathan philosophically grasps the demonization of political authorities described in the New Testament, scripture itself names Barth’s second ‘lordless power’  – the power of Mammon (Mt. 6.24). This power refers especially, in Barth’s view, to the idolization of material resources, possessions or property. Barth’s description here comes strikingly and instructively close to claiming that Mammon describes the corruption of human power itself. Barth says that ‘at the beginning’ this power refers to ‘resources which are part of [human] nature . . . which are good in themselves, which may be used by him in freedom’. Mammon intrinsically harkens back to the God-given material means or capacities (‘resources’) by and through which persons are able to exercise ‘control of certain material goods and valuables, to guarantee and secure a livelihood’.73 How could one not hear, as the backdrop to this account of ‘the power of [human] resources’ – the embodied human ability ‘to guarantee and secure a livelihood’ – the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, in all of its material connection with the blessing of the earth made subject to human subjectivity, with the garden which may and must be tended? When a person exercises this power apart from God, however – when human labour or production or acquisition is undertaken as if it is ‘emancipated from’ the Giver of all good things – this power ‘confronts him with imperious claims in its tendency to become an end, the thing which has accrued to him or been created and won by him, but which now has its own weight, majesty, and worth, the great or little barns, with the great or little that is stored up in them for the future (Lk. 12.16ff.)’. ‘When he perceives this and acts accordingly’, Barth says, these material goods ‘acquire power of him’ and Mammon ‘is born. It mounts its throne. The worship of it begins, whether wittingly or unwittingly, openly or discreetly, cheerfully or sighingly’.74 Here again the ‘law of service’ that delimits the good creatureliness of the powers is demonically inverted, and we gain some further clarity about the nature of these powers’ demonic rule itself – the intertwining of perception and action in a certain form of life, or way of being in the world, gets at the fact that collective captivity to false gods and promises is both learned

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or inherited (in-formed) and also a matter of personal volition. Here there is conceptual space for theology to account for both the ‘objectivity’ of these demonic powers over and against human agency – their perverse appearance and activity as idols claiming human life in multiple registers (intellectually, affectively, practically) – as well as the ‘subjective’ submission to and service of these idols that persons willingly enact. The power of Mammon is ‘born’ when humans perceive their own embodied powers, as well as the material resources at hand, not as good gifts of God for the flourishing of creaturely life, but as ‘property’ that can and must be possessed – as goods that individual persons ‘own’ or may and must acquire. This perception is for Barth integrally related to a corresponding form of action, wherein persons practically come to serve these material resources, seeking ‘possession’ and in the process being possessed by this alien spirit. In sum, Barth considers the creaturely good whose idolatrous perversion Mammon names to be humanity’s own powers and abilities  – here cast economically, that is, as the conditions enabling humanity’s collective sustenance and provision – as well as the material ‘goods and valuables’ (the ‘fruits of the earth’) these powers and abilities are given to cultivate or procure for such ends. Mammon is the demonic spirit that arises and captivates human life when humanity’s own abilities and material economic context are treated not as goods which in themselves positively structure what economic life together is and may be before God, but as ‘our resources or possessions attempting self-absolutization’. The basic logic is Barth’s sense that humanity’s own capacity for labour and provision, as well as the earthly goods humanity is given to tend and receive as daily bread, are gifts given to and for all persons under God, as opposed to faculties and property that individuals do or can possess in and for themselves. Barth notes that in our own time, this demonic spirit is much more directly bound up with the concept of money than in scripture, even though that connection is certainly not lacking in the biblical witness.75 Though its phenomenal reality has become ever-more abstract, what Barth considers ‘incontestable is that money as such is not a good which directly serves the support of human life’, as economic powers and resources should. Even as a material good, money has and can have ‘only symbolic value’, and is thus ‘the classic representation of real values on the basis of certain conventions’.76

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Its possession by a person indicates the scope of his participation ‘in the possessions or products of the society around him’. Money is thus ‘the symbol of [human] ability’, indicating by a ‘conventional fiction’ a person’s or group’s ‘measurable economic capacity’. It renders human existence economically significant solely in terms of ‘credit-worth’  – even the real human abilities and material goods at one’s disposal are valuable only as an index of monetary capacity and worth.77 Eberhard Busch has intuitively picked up on the fact that ‘“Mammon” is for Barth the epitome of these other lords’ precisely because of the generalizability of its definition in The Christian Life  – it is ‘the spirit of our resources or possessions attempting self-absolutization’. Working with this definition, at a definite remove from the narrowly economic realms of production, trade and consumption, Busch reads Barth’s conception of the either/or of serving God or Mammon as a variation on the impossibility of law divorced from gospel – law divorced from gospel is the attempt to serve ‘two lords’. Busch notes that in precisely this way, Matthew 6.24 was the pre-eminent guide during the German Church struggle, understood as ultimately grounded in the first commandment.78 This is an enlightening dogmatic connection between Mammon, as the idolization or ideological exploitation of any and every human resource, capacity or possession, and the basic political problem of serving two lords. In just that sense it touches on the deepest claim of this part, and confirms the basic argument of this work that the eschatological-political function of the powers, as world-ordering forces, is necessarily bound to the socio-economic realm of embodied human life. In the following paragraphs, however, I briefly suggest why the generality of this conception is problematic, in a way that connects this power, too, with the problem of the ontological register of Barth’s exousiology. Kathryn Tanner has recently posed an insightful challenge to the abstraction or ‘formalism’ of Barth’s account of the powers’ lordlessness, especially that of Mammon. She raises serious critical questions with respect to the ethical formality of Barth’s ‘third way’ rationale – that is, with Barth’s attempt to move ‘beyond’ a principled stance either for or against capitalism (or, indeed, any social system), through the eschatological relativization of all human-historical commitments to any specific politico-economic movement or agenda. According to Tanner, Barth’s critique of Mammon’s lordlessness

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‘remains purely formal in that it has nothing specifically to do with capitalism’. It applies the problem common to all the powers in a generic way to the economic realm, but ‘we are given very little hint of what . . . features specific to capitalism’ are problematic.79 The second element of Tanner’s critique is, then, that by describing Mammon’s lordlessness in terms that do not go beyond the powers’ general inhumanity, The Christian Life discussion provides no christological advance beyond the ‘creaturely’ grounds for economic critique offered in CD III/4. Moreover, even the criticisms of CD III/4 are the same as those advanced in Barth’s early essay ‘Jesus and the Movement for Social Justice’,80 the only serious difference between them being that the former lacks any ‘easy equation’ of socialism with God’s kingdom.81 The material problem with capitalism, then, is that it is not for humanity in proper correspondence to the way Christ was. . . . But if mere inhumanity is the charge, the ‘proper correspondence to Christ’ violated here seems indistinguishable from what capitalism was said to violate in CD III/4.82

Tanner’s critique goes too far in claiming that ‘there is nothing specifically christological’ about Barth’s claim that the rule of Mammon ‘denaturalizes’ what human life in Christ is meant to be.83 She is, it seems to me, looking for more of a distinction between humanity’s genuine creatureliness and its christological fulfilment than Barth, in his best moments, is willing to give. Yet she is certainly right that it does not make the christological contours of that which Mammon denies clear. My reading of Barth in Chapter 3 suggested that the objective ordering given in Christ (eschatology) is oriented to and for the creaturely life being-preserved for its free, subjective witness to this ordering (human history). If this is right, Barth’s identification of the inhumanity of capitalism, or indeed, any economic system, with the practical denial of the ‘basic form’ humans have as God’s covenant-partners is, contra Tanner, potentially a dogmatic strength, and not a weakness. But the force of Tanner’s critique is well-targeted, for that is only the case if that theological judgement is aligned with a more concrete diagnosis of the specific structural forms of such inhumanity than Barth’s account alone can give. This is the case especially as his work seems, over time, to move away from describing the poverty of Christ  – and thus the general ‘shape’ of the divine promise and command to human economy – in contrast to dominant rationales of wealth and poverty.84

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In the same volume as Tanner’s essay, Christopher Holmes and David Haddorff both pick up on and defend Barth’s shift from his early clear condemnation of ‘private property’ and explicit avowal of socialist principles, to increasing emphasis on the ‘non-identity’ of God’s kingdom with any economic ideology. Holmes’s essay, which is developed as a response to Tanner, is of particular relevance to our reading of Barth’s exousiology.85 Holmes emphasizes that Barth understood God’s rule as ‘possessing inherent practical significance that does not need to be further specified by a series of principles or programs . . . concreteness is ingredient in it’.86 God’s rule stands ‘over and above [all particular] human arrangements . . . in the sense that God, as the active agent and Lord over them, continually summons them through his Word to become ever more permeable to his reign’.87 Therefore it cannot be argued that he is not concerned with the very practical character and significance of God’s governance of the world in Christ. But what Barth does not do, as a function of his basic conviction that God’s world governance in Christ is a ‘formative economy and disposition’, is prescribe in the form of principles of programs the implications of what God’s economy might mean for our economic life. To make such a move would, for Barth, be to suggest an inertness on the part of the active agent of that economy . . . For Barth, God’s action possesses a concreteness in itself . . .88

In line with the exousiological reading of Barth I have developed, Holmes has both captured Barth’s intent and rightly seen a certain theological (and practical) strength in Barth’s refusal to ‘pin down’ the objectivity and freedom of the divine economy to any given state of affairs. Yet this response to Tanner’s critique is problematic just to the extent that it implies that theology may or must resolve all ethical questions by way of dogmatic description. The problem is only compounded when such description, as we have worryingly detected in Barth’s general exousiological style, remains distanced from any account of the historical contexts in which specific forms of power(s) come to dominate human life. Holmes’s defence of Barth revolves around the claim that moral-theological insight into the problems of human economy is gleaned not by extracting specifically applicable or contextualized principles from God’s rule, but better description or greater cognitive awareness of that rule as itself the determinative

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context within the which creaturely response of witness occurs. He therefore understands Tanner’s critique to imply that if there is for Barth no ‘ontological correspondence between human (economic) activity and God’s activity’, that necessarily entails formalism or abstraction when it comes to specific moral contexts and questions. In reply to the notion that clear-sighted ethical reflection depends on there being such an ontological ‘correspondence’ between divine (eschatological) and human (historical) economic agency, Holmes contends that ‘The economy of redemption is definitive per se because it is reality. It is not only the basis of reality but that which continually establishes reality, thereby calling all our actualities to correspondence with itself. There is in fact only one economy’.89 The reading of Barth and Yoder I have offered would not contest Holmes’s reply at the specific point that, eschatologically – in terms of what the human situation has been, is and will be ‘in Christ’  – there is ‘only one economy’, and that is the economy determined by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. I have taken precisely that line of interpretation throughout, first in terms of the good ‘creatureliness’ of the powers’ vocation, and the related need to conceive their actual contradiction of this vocation in ontologically privative terms; and secondly, in this chapter in terms of the christological determination of legitimately political power. However, there is a foreshortening of the intrinsic relation of eschatology to history, or of the singular power of God to the contingency of the powers’ work, if that ‘one economy’ is seen as metaphysically dissolving all human economy into the stasis of a trans-historical order of things. Lest we defer God’s eschatological judgement and grace to some other plane of existence, the ‘one economy’ of creaturely life constituted and being-transformed by Christ is nothing but every economy that has been, is and will be in relation to Jesus’ eschatological presence. Holmes’s response thus bears all the risks associated with the more general exousiological problematic outlined above. Is God’s economy, then, the only economic power now at work? There is also creaturely power, precisely because creaturely life is included within, expressive of and not excluded by the divine economy; all creaturely economies have their own responsive share in and witness to Jesus’ new humanity, and God’s singular relationship to each in Christ constitutes the ‘one economy’, simultaneously eschatological and historical. The human economic problem is therefore not only personal ignorance of God’s economy – which dogmatic

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description, or some form of ‘knowledge’ internal to the church’s institutional life or religious traditions may and can resolve.90 The root problem is the spiritual one of lived human worship of and captivity to idolatrous and inhumane lords; it is the specific forms of ideology and power that threaten and destroy humanity’s God-given life together, precisely by idolizing and deforming to the point of extinction the material and social fabric into which the freedoms and limitations of personal life are woven. Holmes has, therefore, helpfully provided a reading of Barth on the economy and its perversion by Mammon, which seems exactly right in terms of Barth’s dogmatic concern; yet, just so, it betrays the descriptive problem inherent to the ontological register of Barth’s exousiology. At this juncture we can clearly designate the ethical inadequacy of any exousiology that understands the divine Word’s existence and act – detached from specific sociopolitical contexts, institutions and structures  – to be ‘the concrete reality’ in relation to which Christian forms of knowledge may access and dole out moral truths. It is important to see how the practical directives Holmes draws out of Barth’s ethics revolve around a prayerful disposition and an intra-personal trust that attempts to resist ideological commitment by becoming ever-new. His reading suggests that any personal or communal ‘settling’ on behalf of a particular social cause, any alignment of the actual ‘witness Christians bear and the economic goals for which they work’ with an existing social movement or political cause risks separating itself from ‘the hearing and the hoping that is new every day and to which the Holy Spirit gives rise’.91 Again, there is here much to be praised: the hope of fallen human history, of human life grid-locked in and by personal and collective idolatry and injustice, indeed depends on the newness with which Christ’s own being-with and for God and neighbour exceeds and thus remains ever free to confront and call forth again our own creaturely in/decisions and in/actions. Yet this is where a structurally oriented exousiology, which can account for both the ministerial vocation and the fallen demonism of sociopolitical institutions, widens the scope of analysis and provides a different ethical horizon. Surely God’s mercies are new every morning. But does such ‘newness’ imply the separation of grace and judgement from the structural fabric holding life together, or tearing it apart, in specific creaturely histories?

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The question posed here has to do with what it means for persons in definite sociopolitical relations to trust that God’s beneficent provision for and ordering of economic life is presently active and sufficient for them to receive and follow. What would it have meant for the Confessing Church to think and speak of the government of God apart from its coming to their specific context, from its impinging on and claiming the political and religious institutions of German Christians? Trust in God’s own active presence and ‘concrete’ lordship did not, indeed could not, have meant in that moment a refusal to finally ‘take sides’ because of the danger of ideologizing faith in God’s Word; it could not have meant a disposition or invocation that expected a totally new (i.e. decontextualized) work of divine ‘normalization’ of human history, and thus a different practical orientation to be received every morning. No – the newness of the divine Word and work there was that some people heard the promise and claim of the gospel in the body of the Jew, and thus could do no other than risk giving themselves over to fragile, human, but nonetheless definite works of resistance and hope. The newness of the divine Word simply was the promise and claim spoken in that concrete body, and thus one’s response to the spirits of idolatry and inhumanity present in its victimization was necessarily one and the same as one’s response to the Spirit that ever breaks the chains of spiritual captivity. Should it be any less clear for the contemporary church that it can and must resist, with the same conviction and clarity of vision, the spirit of Mammon that hovers over the increasingly ‘globalized’ world in the specific aims and institutions of corporate capitalism? Is it that much more difficult to name its works of death as anti-Christ, to hear the command and promise of God in the embodied claims of its victims, than it was for the Confessing Church there and then?

B. Yoder and liberation (theology) The form of liberation in the biblical witness is not the guerrilla campaign against an oppressor culminating in his assassination and military defeat, but the creation of a confessing community which is viable without or against the force of the state, and does not glorify that power even by the effort to topple it. . . . The means of liberation . . . is not prudentially justified violence but ‘mighty Acts’ which may come through destruction at the Red Sea – but may also come when the King is moved to be gracious to Esther, or to Daniel,

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or to Nehemiah. . . . So let us abandon the spiritual/secular polarity and ask what kind of spiritual historicity reflects the shape of liberating grace.92

The limited aim of this part is not to focus directly on Yoder’s view of economic power, but to show how Yoder’s critical sympathy with liberation theology further illumines the relationship between political and economic forms of power. An inquiry into Yoder’s baseline economic posture would have to devote more space than is possible here to analyzing Yoder’s understanding of ‘the jubilee’.93 For present purposes it suffices to note which two aspects of the Old Testament proclamation of the year of jubilee Yoder sees as central to Jesus’ teaching and ‘theology’ – the remission of debts and the liberation of slaves. A brief comment can be made about why Yoder thinks these concepts are central to the gospel.94 Yoder’s point of departure is the claim that the primary sense of the ‘debts’ (opheilema) for whose remission Jesus teaches us to pray is economic. This primarily economic  – indeed, explicitly monetary  – sense derives not from any theoretical ‘economization’ of the personal debts God forgives, but from Jesus’ favoured verb aphiemi, ‘which means “remit, send away, liberate, forgive a debt” and which is regularly used in connection with the jubilee’.95 This means not only that the debts humans are to forgive (‘as we forgive those. . . .’) are monetary ‘in the most material sense of the term’, but that the connection, in the prayer, between what God is asked to forgive and the pattern of behaviour towards which we are simultaneously directed is specified by the jubilee-form of grace. God’s grace comes to Israel in the command to keep the sabbath holy, and thus Israel ‘transgresses’ and becomes ‘indebted’ to God precisely through her recurring involvement in the economic practices the sabbath year limits and overturns. The parable of the unjust steward further confirms the co-inherence of the grace that is freely given (‘the king’) and commanded by God. The forgiven steward stands finally condemned by his own failure to extend, in his relation to his debtors, the liberating shape of God’s gracious rule. Thus Yoder’s stark summary of this parable: ‘There is no divine jubilee for those who refuse to apply it on earth.’96 While the concept of the ‘application’ of earthly grace by human agency is one Barth’s emphasis on creaturely ‘witness’ to divine agency helpfully resists, its theological untidiness is also corrected by its connection to the inner logic of Yoder’s own exousiological grammar. As my account of Yoder on confession and Constantinianism has shown, Yoder’s

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basic concern is not with the question of grace’s ‘mediation’ through the church’s own human-historical power, but with uncovering the sociopolitical form of the grace that comes to and claims human history in the rule of Christ. Commenting on his own understanding of the ‘political meaning’ of Jesus, Yoder states that it ‘both is and is not what most of us are used to understanding under the heading of liberation theology’.97 Any theology is one of liberation if it considers ‘unfreedom to be a necessary way to describe perdition and freedom to be a necessary way to describe salvation’;98 yet the political meaning of Yoder’s Jesus lines up much more closely with the specific concerns of (particularly Latin American) liberation theology than this wide-ranging definition.99 For present purposes, I want only to note how Yoder’s critical empathy with liberation theologies informs our account of the exousiological interrelation of political and economic life. Yoder is most at odds with those theologies of liberation that conceptually bind that normative concept to ‘the political strategy of violent revolution’.100 He admits that revolutionary aims certainly promise a certain kind of sociopolitical liberty, but the question is whether ‘the violent replacement of one regime by another is the most apt, the most fundamental, way to describe the freedom God promises’.101 Yoder is most in agreement with the methodological orientation and conceptual focus of liberation theologies upon the plight of the materially poor. Thus when it comes to the substantive overlap (which much Latin American liberation theology has assumed) between the Christian gospel and Marxist ideology critique, Yoder agrees with former World Council of Churches president José Miguel Bonino that it is a pragmatic coalition, whose ‘commonality of perspectives’ is due to the fact that both care about the problem of ‘how to understand and then to transform the oppressive structures under which [persons] suffer’.102 Precisely because Jesus’ commitment to the poor ‘was not marginal, nor derivative, but constitutive of his ministry’, the alignment of Christian social analysis with Marxist ideology critique is no more a betrayal of Christian theism than it was when Augustine borrowed from Plato or Aquinas from Aristotle. It is less a betrayal than it is when our contemporaries borrow their visions of economic justice from Milton Friedman or their vision of personal flourishing from Freud. . . . If by ‘Marxism’ we mean that an elite will impose a new order by the violence

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of the state, that is wrong, just as it is wrong when Christian patriarchalism, Christian imperialism, and Christian nationalism have done it. If by ‘Marxism’ we mean an atheistic materialistic determinism, that too is wrong, in the same way as is the commitment of Reagonomics to the sovereignty of the laws of the marketplace. If, however, by ‘Marxism’ we mean sobriety about the reality of class interest, if we mean the recognition that where one’s treasure is there one’s heart will also be, and if we mean a moral bias in favor of the underdog, then that cannot be what is wrong with liberation theology.103

What is most relevant here to our development of Yoder’s structural exousiology is the recognition that his worry is not with Christian support of or involvement in the revolutionary transformation of unjust sociopolitical structures; it is with an understanding of violent revolution which would functionally reinscribe and normalize the agential ‘triumphalism’ that we have diagnosed above as endemic to Constantinian forms of power. Two central points from Yoder’s essay ‘The Wider Setting of Liberation Theology’ further clarify how this attitude helps clarify this part’s inquiry into the connection of political power to economic justice. First, Yoder notes that using the image of Exodus as a ‘master metaphor’ – a biblical warrant for sociopolitical liberation through our own revolutionary agenda – will not resonate with the faith of ‘suffering peoples in nontriumphal settings, where freedom is not just around the corner’.104 Yoder’s real insight here lies not principally in the practical discrepancy between this image and its pragmatic relevance in all contexts, but in a deeper theological dissonance. A key christological motif subtly developed here is that God identifies with victims of unjust power(s) ‘in their capacity as victims’. Divine presence with and for the needy is not contingent on their politico-economic capacities ‘as bearers of the promise of a new order’.105 This resonates with one aspect of our reading of Yoder’s exousiology, which is that the shape of Christian sociopolitical witness is informed first and foremost by God’s own ‘condescension’ to be present to and for his covenant-partern – indeed, to ‘rule’ over creation itself – in and as the humility of Jesus Christ. The divine-human ‘other’ in relation to which humanity discovers its own freedom does not will to be ‘God’ – to be sovereign, to be glorified – without or against the embodied presence of human being. As suggested at the beginning of Part 3.II above, Jesus’ ‘moral independence’ from

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the ruling powers was a freedom constituted and enacted in the midst of their rule. In the present context, this affirms that the freedom of God and creature from the powers, constituted in and as the way of Jesus Christ, is a freedom that finally transcends the logic of law and might – of what one can do for and be the other through the utilization of one’s own powers and possibilities alone. The discerning reader might see that this is, in a quite different context, an application of Barth’s own deep insight regarding the final unity-in-distinction of gospel and law, with the latter conditioned by the former rather than the other way around. Legal and judicial powers  – the state-powers enforced by ‘the sword’  – gain their relative justification and authority in connection with the prior and free commitment to be with and for the neighbour in their creaturely mortality, vulnerability and (inter)dependence. This ties in with a second important aspect of Yoder’s nuanced critique of the potential triumphalism of revolutionary political or economic movements, which is his recognition that mainstream theological dismissals of liberation theology’s material concerns because of its appeal to the prospect of ‘justified revolution’ is, when coming from anyone but the political pacifist, ‘in serious danger of being an argument in bad faith’.106 It is such both because typically the grounds upon which liberation theologies justify revolutionary violence are in fact just war criteria,107 and because in actual fact liberation movements have been less violent, and more prone towards encouraging non-violent movements for transformation, than mainstream Christianity’s de facto legitimation of imperial power. Although Yoder does not explicitly put it this way, his real insight here is that the dehumanization and sociopolitical disordering accomplished through unjust economic structures is no less (and may well be more) of an actual threat to humane social order than those goods which are normally protected or procured by military power. Because of its orientation upon the humanity of those over whose lives the powers that be claim dominion, an exousiological perspective may well overlap with pseudo- or even anti-theological critical perspectives, which seek to expose and critique the ideological blindness fostered by dominant power-structures. It seems clear that Yoder’s notion of ‘gospel realism’ requires a critical social posture quite similar to the ‘micro-resistance’ proposed by Michel Foucault, despite the irresolvable qualification that the hope of Christian faith, and thus its (doxologically attuned) sense of what our shared

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human vocation is to discern and follow and resist, is bound to a quite specific history, name and power. In a 1971 conversation with Noam Chomsky about human nature, justice and power, Foucault responded to Chomsky’s rather modest suggestion about what a free governmental structure might look like, by saying: It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. If we want right away to define the profile and the formula of our future society, without criticizing all the forms of political power that are exercised in our society, there is a risk that they reconstitute themselves even through such an apparently noble form as anarchist-syndicalism.108

This debate was lightly revised in 1976, and in the book Foucault reformulates that last sentence, replacing the warning about the ‘apparently noble form’ of Chomsky’s proposed anarcho-syndicalism with the broader warning that failure to recognize the particular points in which class domination is exercised ‘risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power to reconstitute itself even after an apparently revolutionary process’.109 Both versions of the claim, taken together, point up the connections between Foucault’s account and the twin problems of ideology-critique and revolutionary triumphalism identified by Yoder. The parallels here with the exousiological-ethical orientation this book works towards are only deepened when one recalls Yoder’s insight, so clearly stated in his lifelong response to the Niebuhrian charge that non-violent resistance to injustice was ‘apolitical’, that even an act of refusal, non-participation, or self-sacrifice is a form of social presence and political response. Yoder’s critique of the danger of political ‘triumphalism’, even when tied to strategies of economic revolution, calls upon all traditions of faith and society to bind whatever relative and ad hoc legitimation of state-power(s) they think must be given to the question of the material needs and capacities of the social whole, much more closely than is typically done in mainstream theology. All who hold that state-powers – the power of ‘the sword’ – can be morally justified, as a means of local protection or social defence that Christians can or should

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support, are bound by the divine transgression of all authorities in the cross of Christ; the capacities of law and might, too, find their spiritual and moral legitimacy in ongoing relation to ‘the least of these’, with whose social presence the gospel identifies the bodily presence of the Lord. State-power thus becomes legitimately political just to the extent that it works for the embodied freedoms and rightful claims of all within its reach. Yet political power can only exercise its authority to (re)direct law and might for the good of all by perpetually working against self-centred forms of power  – institutions and authorities which deny the spiritual dignity of each life as addressed and claimed by Jesus’ divine humanity. Political power thus works against the exaltation of the material well-being of some over others, against social logics and economic rationales which presuppose a hierarchical valuation of embodied lives. Such evaluative schemes distance the voice of God from the social presence of the marginalized, and in so doing they distort our collective human freedom to recognize and respond to the real promise and threat of creaturely life together. This does not mean, of course, that political powers come into their authority and right, or demonically forsake their vocation of social service, only in relation to the narrowly ‘economic’ matters of labour for money, production, trade, exchange and consumption so emphasized by modern power. These realities matter, like Mammon as the god of money or material wealth matters, because they are grounded in and affect the ‘real economy’ of persons whose lives are constituted by their embodied relations to creation and its Lord. This conjunction of a capacity for self-criticism and the theological interruption of triumphalism, whether Constantinian or revolutionary, has brought us back to the fundamental insight sought in this work and explicitly developed in this chapter: namely, why defence against Leviathan requires liberation from Mammon, why our human relation to political power must be spiritually discerned and critically amended in light of political power’s economic orientation. I have not attempted an exhaustive definition of ‘economy’ such that one should feel threatened by any latent economic absorption of humanity; I am rather making the more modest but necessary claim that the material life of creation, and especially our lived relation to specific human others, is the context in which the ‘otherness’ of the divine ordering reaches and claims us, in our humanity. Thus to welcome Jesus’ challenge to the ruling powers, to seek the directive promise of his power, is to allow the divine justice of his humanity

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to expose the economies in which we live and work for what they are. But the exposure of the oikonomia in the fullest sense, the common ‘household’ of embodied life with God, also means judgement upon the forces that sustain and secure it; it means the exposure of social order itself as something in and through which we seek security and fulfilment, as a way of holding human life together through institutions of power and deeply embedded techniques of control. The point is not to demonize this connection between political power and socio-economic order – our seeking is not misplaced – but to open it to the one human life, the singular expression of power, in which the Christian gospel finds hope. This means, then, that the inhumane spirits of Leviathan and Mammon together emerge and grasp for our lives, the terrible possibility of each harboured in the false promise of the other. Political power is always authorized in the name of one or another form of social wealth, health and security; it is always enacted towards a particular ordering of embodied human relations. Likewise, the goods and capacities that sustain our lives are not products of individual power or will; they are never just there for the taking, but come to us mediately – through land, through bodies, through the effort and care of others whose sustaining presence to and for us implies boundaries which cannot graciously be transgressed. So long as the light is not overcome by the darkness, the heavenliness or hellishness of our political and economic powers cannot but show themselves in the material interconnections of our lives. The eschatological promise borne in Jesus’ humanity crosses and redirects every state power, it contradicts and relativizes the ordering capacities of law and might, because it is the promise of a just and free life together in this world. As such, it remains ever hidden in the body of the neighbour; it refuses to present itself, it cannot become fully present to any one of us, apart from our (self-)critical attention to those others with whom our lives are in fact bound by work and love, by that great economy of grace and judgement which includes everything and to which there is no end.110

5

Naming and Resistance

Now that we have uncovered with Barth and Yoder the exousiological rationale for connecting political and economic power, what remains is twofold: to clarify an alternative to the problems found in Barth’s account, and to bring our working towards a salutary christological exousiology, at once positive and critical, in relation to the question of Mammon’s contemporary presence and work. Having already juxtaposed Yoder’s historical-structural emphasis to the basic dilemma of a decontextualized confrontation between divine and creaturely power(s), the first task is to articulate how following Yoder’s lead entails a constructive alternative to non-ideological or otherworldly forms of Christian faith. Given the clarity we have already achieved regarding Yoder’s difference from Barth on this score, it will help to contrast the superficial depoliticization of the mature Barth’s view of resistance with the confidence with which he named a specific enemy of God’s reign in his initial pastoral and theological work. To that end we will employ Friedrich Marquardt’s reading of Barth’s early ‘Socialist Speeches’, in which it becomes clear that discerning and resisting the demonism of Mammon at work in a specific form of economy (namely, capitalism) crystallizes the ethical directive of the gospel, without implying the exaltation of a particular human alternative as itself the divine solution. As the broader purpose of this final chapter is, however, to move from our reading of Barth and Yoder-style exousiology to a focus on the powers of Mammon at work in our midst, this final foray into Barth is sandwiched between two other examples of naming and resisting the inhumane power of the powers. We begin with a glimpse at Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow,

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two modern theologians influenced by Barth, each of whom arguably wrestled with the presence of Mammon’s power, intellectually and practically, more pointedly than Barth or Yoder. Their comprehension of Mammon as an idolatrous and unjust power concretely at work in modern social life shows how much of the hard-won theological insight mentioned above may be acutely deployed by way of critical and socially responsible awareness of the present order’s injustices. After considering Ellul’s and Stringfellow’s namings of Mammon, we will be better positioned to grasp what was at stake in Barth’s early diagnosis of capitalism as a dehumanizing form of economy that must be resisted and overturned. This book then concludes with a brief postscript, more meditative than scholastic, on a specific moment of the disaster that is contemporary capitalism. Keeping with the insights of previous chapters, I suggest that the ubiquitous multiplicity of Mammon’s power shows itself in the social and material vulnerability of the poorest residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Refracting the connection between political and economic order through the social displacement of the most vulnerable New Orleanians reveals how Mammon subtly grips our lives – through, for example, the constrictions of racialized identity – and how the impoverishing effects of this possession are at once personal and social, spiritual and material. Learning to resist the lure of such powers will require better, more critical attention – theological and otherwise – to the way in which the goodness of our own lives is bound to the freedom and limitation of the most vulnerable among us.

I. Ellul and Stringfellow on money as Mammon To understand the scope of Mammon for Ellul and Stringfellow, one could just apply the christological standards we have traced in the exousiologies of Barth and Yoder to every recognizably economic exchange and institution in human history. However, for reasons that should now be patently clear, a generic ‘application’ of even this doctrinal system would fall drastically short of a thoroughgoing exousiological posture. The historical-structural framework of Yoder’s exousiology has helped us see that, in ethical terms, no serious intellectual struggle with the powers occurs if it remains ever-aloof from the risk of naming specific instances of idolatry and resisting given forms of injustice. No actual ‘discernment of spirits’ – including whatever role self-critical

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reflection plays in that phenomenon – will ever occur in a decontextualized exousiology, because it is only in and through specific moments of (self-)exaltation that the singular power of evil touches us, drawing us down pathways to self-enclosure and spiritual death. The power of evil darkens the human heart – the spiritual ‘centre’ of every created self, in Jewish scripture – precisely as the world of power, as a way of being-before God and neighbour that absolves us from relation to the actual neighbour before us, through whose embodied life the Spirit claims and redirects our lukewarm selves. Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow agree with Barth and Yoder that divine self-revelation, rather than merely our own experience and wider common sense, must inform our awareness of what human economy is and is for, and thus also one’s critical approach to present forms of economic corruption. I do not here seek to delve into a broad sketch of that definitional question – all the necessary doctrinal and philosophical contours of ‘the economy’ – but rather, in light of its dependence upon political power (Chapter 4), this chapter helps us achieve a sense for some of the primary ways Mammon’s presence in modern social life precludes our welcoming of a humane economy. Ellul is more explicit in naming idolatrous economic power as ‘Mammon’ than is Stringfellow, who typically discusses simply the idolatry of money, finance or commerce. Yet Ellul himself often speaks of the power of money synonymously with the idolatry of Mammon, just as Stringfellow’s critique of regnant financial, commercial and monetary powers is clearly informed by a deep exegetical-theological sensitivity to both personal and institutional captivity to Mammon. I will first offer an overview of Ellul on the monetary law of Mammon, before turning to Stringfellow’s emphasis on the social form of captivity to this idol.

A. Jacques Ellul: Mammon as money Jacques Ellul’s 1954 text L’ Homme et L’Argent is an extended meditation on the false god that appears and operates as ‘wealth’ or, more precisely, money.1 One of its pivotal claims is that biblically money is considered to be a ‘monetary reality’; this means for Ellul that, theologically, the reality of money exceeds the monetary forms of gold and silver, metals and paper. It is rather ‘a means of exchange and capitalization’, and its institutional reality has everything to do with its mediation of a definite spiritual orientation and direction for human

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society. As Marva Dawn states, for Ellul the powers signify ‘those forces that inspire human work and are incarnated in it’.2 The material forms and symbols of money are only the ‘outward manifestation of [its] power’, only specific ‘mode[s] of being and form[s] to be used in relating to [human persons]’.3 As one of the powers Mammon ‘is not only of the material world, although this is where it acts’. It is also ‘something that claims divinity’, a spiritual force ‘which makes itself our master and has specific goals’ according to which it seeks to order human relationships.4 It is thus that the claims of Mammon are absolutely opposed to the one Word and claim of God – just as recognition of the divine reign is manifest in the character and form of our relations with our neighbours, so Mammon becomes ‘a personal master’ precisely through its determination of economic relations. Ellul’s Ethics of Freedom explicitly discusses the state and money as two ‘institutions, structures, or social forces’ that scripture names among the powers.5 His emphasis here is that the authoritative status these powers have in human societies cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their concrete reality or sociological functions. For present purposes, we need only note in passing Ellul’s dismissal of the idea that personal greed sufficiently explains money’s power. ‘To talk of avarice is to explain nothing’ in this respect, ‘for it is simply not true that the individual thirst for gold causes whole societies to be structured in terms of money and its function.’6 He goes on to say that Marx was right in stripping ‘this question of its moral[istic] character’ and simply bringing to light ‘the mechanism[s] of naked power’ and human alienation at work. However, Ellul thinks Marx’s analysis ultimately fails to get at the depth of money’s power: ‘We are not in the presence of a mere economic phenomenon . . . [but] of an economic phenomenon which is quickened by a power that destroys man, that man himself does not create, and that does not issue from the heart of man.’7 There are two obvious parallels here with our reading of Barth and Yoder. First, it is hard not to hear Barth’s claim that the wholly oppositional, anti-creaturely power of das Nichtige works in and through the powers in Ellul’s latter claim  – the perverse ‘objectivity’ of Mammon as an active force apart from and against humanity. Secondly, however, Ellul does not ground the objectivity of Mammon’s negation in an intrapersonal act or individual disposition, as does Barth’s reading of the primal fall. Rather the power of Mammon, the force of its operative destruction of humane economy,

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stems not ‘from the heart of man’ but from Mammon’s structural determination and institutional contextualization of economic activity. If, then, Mammon dominates human economy by ordering social relations according to money’s inner law, what is it that makes this law idolatrous? What specific goals does Mammon wish to achieve that so blatantly oppose the claim of God? A few comprehensive points can be drawn from Money and Power, chief among which is the notion that the law of Mammon is revealed in the incorporation of every created thing, including human life itself, into the exchange relationship of buying and selling.8 The normative biblical example here is Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. The betrayal enacted there is the same betrayal risked in every monetary transaction, for ‘This sale defines all selling’. Ellul states that even ordinary monetary transactions ‘inevitably set up a destructive, competitive relationship .  .  . [M]oney pushes us to put its interests (which we assimilate as our own interests) before those of the person with whom we are doing business’.9 In the 1979 ‘Afterword’, Ellul nuances this view by speaking of a growing critical awareness of how the form of money (as capital) entails the ‘law of merchandise’, in which not only is everything bought and sold, but ‘everything is done with the intention of buying and selling’.10 Ellul specifies money not simply as a monetary ‘means of exchange’, but as a form of exchange driven by ‘the profit motive’. Personal and social possession by this spirit leads to an economizing rationale for every human endeavour and relationship – nothing is worthwhile if the expected return upon my time, my money, my attention, my labour, my love, does not promise to match or exceed the investment I have made. The logic of that which can be bought and sold, measured, weighed, judged and exchanged with calculating precision contradicts the logic of grace, which is utterly free and given without measure; the material-social world constituted by this spirit is ordered and functions in a radically different manner than does the world of interdependence and relation sustained and renewed by the spirit of God’s crucified and risen Word. One could understand why, from this perspective, Ellul himself was wont to criticize the monetization of exchange in terms of its depersonalization of the human agents involved. Compared to the eschatological reservations detected in Barth’s metaphysical exousiology, for Ellul it is the personal nature of sociopolitical and economic relationships that signals the nearness of God’s reign. Similar to Barth and Yoder’s emphasis on the moral priority of embodied

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need and care, it is the abstraction from personal life that drives Ellul’s critique of totalizing ‘systems’ and his refusal to identify the divine order with any specific form of human politics or economy. Economic ‘depersonalization’ in Ellul’s sense clearly does subordinate real human needs and interests to the goal of wealth-accumulation, ordering exchange to buying-power rather than the claim of mutual dependence or the ability to meet human need. Yet to reinterpret his concern in terms of our argument, Mammon’s rule consists in the dehumanization and injustice that occurs when the structures ordering economic relations are bent towards the narrow interest of some members of the human community and not the good of all; its law takes hold in the various religious, moral and intellectual traditions that inform a society’s and person’s economic rationality and evaluative standards, such that the wealth or health of the few – usually ‘our own’ – is detached from the right and freedom of the most vulnerable.

B. Stringfellow on the social corruption of Mammon Stringfellow’s thoughts on the idolatry of money exhibit deep continuity with Ellul’s understanding of Mammon. Stringfellow reaffirms what can now be seen as an (implicitly developed) truism for this book, that the problem with ‘possessing’ monetary wealth is not ‘inordinate covetousness’, but the more basic phenomena of spiritual idolatry and unjust relations. Stringfellow sees idolatry as the human embrace of a non-divine power or reality ‘as the source and rationalization of the moral significance of [human] life in the world’. The idol takes the place of God in its becoming the agent or entity in which the idolater locates the value and purpose of their own existence. Idolatry is social, both because individuals unfailingly hold others to their own standards of purpose and value, and because lived human trust has a social rather than individual form.11 The heart of money’s idolization, then, is the working presumption that its acquisition, accumulation or effects signify moral worth or virtue. ‘The corollary of this doctrine’, Stringfellow notes, is of course that ‘those without money are morally inferior – weak, or indolent, or otherwise less worthy as [human beings]. Where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin’.12 To many modern ears, this warning may sound rather quaint and redundant. Who has not learned the most basic lessons about the material benefits of social location and conditioning, the contextual luck of the draw? Yet Stringfellow’s

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point is that the logic of justification by money works itself out in human blindness to ‘the interdependence of rich and poor’; money’s idolatry is tied to practiced ignorance of the actual form and character of material wealth and destitution. Like Ellul, Stingfellow thinks that monetary exchange intrinsically fosters competitive social relationships, and thus a form of social life bound to the desire and need to maintain some person’s or group’s power over the other. For Stringfellow, genuine insight into the nature of material interdependence and exchange is most properly understood as an outworking of the doctrine of the fall, rather than ‘an economic doctrine or a precise empirical statement’.13 It is not that there is in every transaction a direct one-for-one cause and effect relationship, either individually or institutionally, between the lot of the poor and the circumstances of those who are not poor. It is not that the wealthy are wicked or that the fact of malice is implicit in affluence. It is rather [the theological insight] that all human and institutional relationships are profoundly distorted and so entangled that no man or principality in this world is innocent of involvement in the existence of all men and institutions.14

This does not mean that human interdependence itself is the result of a fallen state, but that the specific forms of money’s idolization are manifest in and perpetuated by our personal investment in economic institutions, practices and policies that bless with one hand and curse with the other. It is competitive interdependence which marks the fallenness of human economy, and economies of competition inform our spiritual disposition towards self, God and others. Idolatrous valuation, in turn, is the effective means by which competitive activity and the lived divisions of injustice are sustained. This cyclical spiritual-social destruction helps make sense of Ellul’s suggestion, offered by way of reflection on the parable of the unjust steward, that a primary task for modern Christians is not to ‘flee’ from the domain of Mammon  – which would effectively abandon those lives most utilized and threatened by its power – but to subvert its dominative relation, to counteract its reign of idolatry and injustice through the welcoming of a different spirit and mode of relation. Already in 1911, Barth’s attitude towards material goods was that ‘the mammon of unrighteousness’ (Lk. 16.1–12) should not be ‘possessed’, but used faithfully.15 As the next part shows, faithfulness before Mammon clearly meant for the young Barth that the operational logic of Mammon’s divisive spirit had to be

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overturned, by subverting the oppressive structure of contemporary economic relations (‘making others into [the] common owners’ of privatized wealth).16 Similarly, Ellul reads this parable as freeing persons to use the ‘Mammon of iniquity’ in ways that counteract money’s own law and aspiriations. Mammon is ‘profaned’ when the human subjects related to it do not attempt to overcome it on its own terms, but are able to newly perceive the good of their neighbour as constitutive of their own wealth, and thus to live within Mammon’s domain in ways that counteract its own economically competitive and socially destructive gravitas. This insight touches on a basic feature of christological exousiology, to which we shall return in our concluding remarks. For now, it suffices to reaffirm the paradoxical element of a historical-structural exousiology, as it showed itself in Barth and Yoder and reappears in Ellul and Stringfellow. All our thinkers agree that no complete or final liberation from the structural malformation of sociopolitical life will come through uncritical loyalty to any given past or present human alternative. No human tradition or institution escapes the temptations and claims of that last enemy, Death; none can be uncritically endorsed and supported as free from the lure of pride or the possibility of corruption. To so place our hopes would be to make some work of our own the full presence and unsurpassable mediator of God’s reign, the definitive triumph over unjust power. Yet precisely because the power of the powers, as well as that divine reality which has and continues to overcome power’s inhumanity, does not confront us in or exalt us to some ‘other plane’ of existence but claims us in and through our material and social being-with another, the promise of a new world is ever at hand. All creaturely power, every form of personal or institutional ability and possibility, finds its freedom and purpose in this presence of Jesus’ resurrection; his victory does not cease to come again, as the grace and judgement of a transformed human life, a new way of being-with and -for the neighbour to whose dignity and need the power and the glory of God’s reign has been freely bound. What remains is to suggest that if our welcoming of divine grace and judgement frees us for the humanity of specific others, we are thereby enlisted in a definite struggle for a new order of being. If the freedom of God binds us to God’s self as it binds us to the body of the poor, then faith in the divine Word cannot become the false humility of a knowledge, hope or love that has risen above the present wounds of power, impervious to the risk and vulnerability of Gethsemane.

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II. Faith beyond ideology? Barth, socialism and the vulnerability of resistance A. The problem, restated In Chapter 4 we drew on Katherine Tanner’s and Christopher Holmes’s readings of Barth on Mammon, which respectively problematize and defend the sort of dogmatic ‘concreteness’ ingredient to the ontological register of Barth’s exousiology. They helped us name how Barth’s refusal to identify the nearness of God’s reign with any particular historical movements leaves the dilemma of naming the intersection of the ordering direction of Jesus’ humanity (in this respect, ‘the divine economy’) with various human economies. Tanner’s way of resolving the conceptual distance Barth’s exousiology entails is to draw out of a more focussed christological discussion specific economic features and principles applicable to human society.17 Holmes’s response is nuanced, and is in agreement with our reading of both Barth and Yoder on one key point – namely, in its suggestion that Christian faith can only ‘witness to and demonstrate a more humane set of economic arrangements in society .  .  . inasmuch as it recognizes and commits itself ’ to the notion that the world God’s reign humanizes, the one world in and for which the church has a witness to give, ‘is not a world without God’.18 Moreoever, we are in agreement with Holmes that scepticism about spiritual-theological ‘abstraction’, such as Holmes finds in Tanner’s need for social ‘prescriptions’, can become a seeking after some set of universal principles or a priori guidelines for the moral life, such that one no longer needs to attend to the order of things as ‘that to which God is redemptively [and thus critically] present’.19 As Yoder said of modern social ethics, and as Bonhoeffer said of ethics itself, the quest for inviolable social laws and principles of action by which we may confidently settle issues of justice inevitably exalts one or another set of human techniques as the divine answer.20 Such seeking effectively idolizes our given powers and possibilities and removes the need and promise of ongoing divine agency from our life’s purview, with all manner of inhumanity following in the wake. This is the exousiological basis of Barth’s eschatological ‘relativization’ of all human programmes, principles and causes, which Holmes rightfully picks up on. Yet while we agree that all human causes (as involving creaturely power) are relativized by the eschatological promise and claim of God, the christological

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exousiology outlined in this work equally problematizes the suggestion that the relation of all earthly things to this promise and claim means for any human society a flattening out of various paths leading forward. Holmes is indeed quite clear that God enlists the Christian community in the divine constitution of humane economic orders, ‘which enjoy a kind of transitory reality’ just because ‘they acknowledge God as their limit and frontier, and God’s Son as the royal man who penetrates the very foundations of economic life’.21 Thus, Holmes contends, Barth’s exousiology not only relativizes various socio-economic orders: ‘God’s motion is positive’ in that it also ‘seeks to recast them and build them up.’22 The crucial theological question is, of course, how? And every answer to this question – for Christians, always some way of articulating that God frees humankind ‘in Jesus Christ’  – also implies a when and a where. How, then, do various social, political and economic arrangements begin to ‘acknowledge’ their divine foundations? What is constitutive of their divine exposure and transformation, their becoming humane and liveable? The crucial thing to note is how here, as at all the critical points that suggest any positive relation between the concreteness of God’s Word and the concreteness of worldly decision and action, Holmes’s Barthian answer relies on epistemic, ‘vertical’ categories. The divine movement ‘seeks to recast and rebuild’ the structures presently ordering common life ‘by resisting our tendency to identify the kingdom of God as it pertains to certain economic reform movements and economic revolutions’.23 We might ask: why does God only seek to recast and rebuild in this elusive manner? Because, it seems, the world does not become a participant in its divine reclaiming until we recognize that it has already been transformed. The ‘we’ is vitally important here as a qualifier of the appropriate forms of ‘recognition’. Human societies, including their economic powers and possibilities, are ‘normalized’ – they ‘become what they are’ already in Christ – through their practiced ‘recognition’ of God as their ‘limit and frontier’ and of Jesus, crucified and risen, as their sustaining ‘centre’. In and of itself, our account is in full agreement with the latter claim. But does the world receive this witness, is it caught up in the Spirit’s work of ‘making it possible for us to become participant’ in the divine economy, only inasmuch as the church ‘recognizes and commits itself ’ to the notion that the world is already God’s?24 Holmes rightly recognizes that Barth’s refusal to specify universal features of a divinely humanized economy does not intend to draw the church out of

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the world. On the contrary: ‘There is a kind of economic direction contained in Christ’s enactment’ of God’s reign in and for the present, and this direction, ‘which in itself contains imperatival force’, ‘ought to be recognized’.25 In this reading, therefore, Barth need not be blamed for any perceived failure to connect the dots between Mammon’s opposition to God and that opposition’s occurrence in specific forms of economic idolatry and injustice, because ‘socioeconomic implications are already ingredient to’ dogmatic description of the real human situation.26 Even where epistemic categories give way to the church’s constitutive dependence upon the Word’s coming again into her own institutional and intellectual life, enlivening it from outside, the uni-directionality of the gospel’s proclamation and hearing as a vertical affair is thoroughly maintained.27 The clear implication is that humanizing awareness of the ordering direction of God’s reign – humanity’s becoming alert to the powers’ present dominion, and how to resist – comes to the world through the powers and possibilities of the Christian church. My suspicion is that this way of resolving Barth’s exousiological dilemma is not specific to Holmes, or even to readers and inheritors of Barth, but reflects a rationale endemic to modern Western forms of faith and religion. Despite the stated assumption that Christians can only give witness to God’s reign by attending to God’s saving presence in the world, this account of faith’s subjective role in the world’s remaking sanctions self-referential methods of ‘attending to divine presence’ by means of ever-present reminders to look inward and upward – that is, to look to the Christian community itself and to become aware of divine nearness by becoming self-aware, and to become self-aware by reconceiving oneself and one’s world according to our forms of piety and institutions of knowledge. The universal human freedom to ‘call upon God’ – the ‘concrete action’ of revolt for Barth, which ‘includes all others’28 – now means for the world that it is opened to its divine reconciliation, and may (consequently) manifest this reconciliation in its common life, to the extent that it becomes one of our flock, allowing our thought-forms and liturgy, our prayer, to absorb and redefine its very being. This self-understanding of Christianity nurtures both Christians’ and others’ incapacity to discern the communicative presence of God outside of themselves, in the very world Jesus has reconciled and which his Spirit is even now sustaining and making new. According to our exousiology, the problem

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is most acute in the sociopolitical paralysis that follows any creature’s inability to point away from itself. We recall that, for Barth and Yoder, such inability is itself a telltale sign of the nearness of Mammon, which we have most broadly defined as the idolization of those powers humans see themselves as ‘possessing’. In terms of our emphasis on the lived interrelation of idolatry and injustice, the self-referentiality of Christian witness is especially deadening in its inability to point, with the force and clarity of the gospel, to Jesus’ self-identification with the materially and socially poor, whom we ‘always have with us’. The church’s ‘sober assessment’ of the world may and does occasionally reach those most vulnerable to the dominant powers, whenever its rerouting of personal self-awareness through the intricate circuitry of the right dogmatic concepts and enlightening sermons manages not to go haywire. The church indeed manages, from time to time, not to get in the way of the liberating Word God speaks in and for the life of the world. Our suggestion is, however, that integral to our common freedom not to get in the way of the Spirit’s movement, which the church today may be required to relearn from movements outside its walls, is the capacity to discern the one truly destructive power – blasphemy against this free and Holy Spirit – in the powers that captivate our common life. If this is right, human spiritual freedom to ‘call upon God’ need not mean for exousiology – nor for any of us, with our limited and wayward powers and possibilities  – an ever new naivety about the powers determining our sociopolitical and economic relations. Humanity’s freedom in Christ does not have to mean sundering the prayer through which persons invoke and welcome the divine promise from the embodied claim of those most vulnerable to power. According to the above Barthian rationale, the christological direction of exousiology is God’s educative encouragement to achieve greater self-awareness of the eschatological ‘already’. As is witnessed in today’s dominant forms of Christian faith the world over, such direction effectively retards the revolutionary struggle for the ‘not yet’, drawing the world out of its self-imparted delusions by drawing the church out of the world’s struggle, into a trans-ideological plane of clarity and tranquillity amid the raging storms. Yet throughout our analysis, the co-determination of idolatry and injustice has driven the claim that becoming aware of the positive direction one must take in the present is inseparable from the critical exposure of one’s embodied life with others as captive to inhumane powers. By turning finally and briefly to the early

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Barth’s thoroughgoing critique of capitalism, which Friedrich W. Mardquardt contends is never left behind  – rather ‘internalized’ and ‘obscured’ by the maturing Barth29 – we glimpse a strand of critical continuity between Barth’s initial insight into economic injustice and our overarching exousiological claims. While not eliminating the need for a more dynamic interplay between personal-spiritual idolatry and historical-structural injustice (as found in Yoder), pointing to this critical continuity suffices to show that Barth need not be read as sanctioning any faith or hope that rests above and beyond those various human-historical movements which look towards a new form of social existence in their struggle against the present order of things.

B. The theo-logic of Barth’s ‘socialist speeches’ In respect of our account, Marquardt has rightly seen that status quo conservatism (Christian or otherwise) is incompatible with the spirit of Barth’s work, and yet has also correctly diagnosed Barth’s identification of the theological and the political as enabling an apparent retreat into dogma whose abstraction belies his message’s ongoing social-political foundation and intent.30 As noted in the introduction, this work affirms Marquardt’s reading not by any narrow ‘contextualization’ designed to arrive at the essence of Barth’s thought – though contextualizing work certainly has its contribution to make31  – but by attempting to allow the spirit (i.e. the theological-social meaning) of our thinkers’ exousiological texts to speak. Our charge against the predominant Anglicized-evangelical Barth, who has served as one more support for Western Christianity’s general social conservatism, is thus not that those who read Barth this way have not adequately accounted for the significance of his social-political origins. It is that they have inadequately resolved the internal theological-political contradiction between Barth and Yoder’s God  – who opposes and overcomes creation’s idolatrous powers in and through Jesus’ revolutionary self-abandon to God and neighbour – and a Christian faith that seeks to absolve itself of worldly power by retreating to some ‘other realm’ above and beyond the ideological battleground. The muting of Barth’s overtly anti-capitalist origins is only a piece of this misreading, and (again, as Marquardt recognizes) Barth is not without some blame for deafness to that conviction’s persistence. The limited goal of this part, is, however, to

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highlight the rationale behind Barth’s initial confidence in naming capitalism as unmistakably possessed by Mammon. This gesture indeed bespeaks the consistency between Barth’s theological beginnings and the exousiology we have traced from the mid-1930s forward. Our point is not that there is consistency here, but why. Here we see that Barth first discerned the spirit of capitalism in its structural injustice, bridging the distance between (personal-spiritual) idolatry and (material-social) injustice in a way that parallels our account of Yoder. On this basis the young Barth affirmed that Christian faith in the midst of the present socio-economic order would be hopeless without a common struggle against its ruling powers. One of the first and most well-known speeches Barth gave during his decade-long stint as a Swiss pastor was presented to the Safenwil labour union in late 1911.32 It is important to note the overall positive tone and emphasis of this lecture. Stress is placed on the overlap of the ‘socialist cause’ and the cause of God’s coming kingdom; both seek a new social order on earth, one governed by ‘the law and the gospel’ of solidarity through which the unjust divisions of the present order are overcome.33 That this law and gospel is no different from Jesus’ call to ‘repent and believe’ in God’s kingdom is spelled out here according to the ‘rule of corresponding action’: we become ‘human beings again’ as God’s love flows into us from outside and we turn to live with others in love.34 Here humanizing ‘correspondence’ to the divine economy – seen as integral to Barth’s eschatologizing of history in Chapter 3 – is directly expressed in social form. A hopeful and loving life with others is not merely ‘added onto’ faith in God after the fact; ‘rather, it is inextricably bound to it’.35 To be sure, our reading of Barth’s developing exousiology uncovered the same sentiment. How, then, does this early text square with the problematic features of Barth’s account we identified: with the conceptual distancing of personal idolatry and social injustice? And with the apparent implication that the task of Christian faith, life and thought is to indirectly ameliorate the latter by keeping one’s eyes firmly fixed on the former? In answering this question, it is worth affirming Tanner’s passing remark that the critical comments on capitalism in the Church Dogmatics36 are the ‘very same criticisms’ found in the 1911 lecture.37 For present purposes, this connection merely serves to reinforce our point that there is not an altogether different spirit informing Barth’s initial intertwining of the gospel’s

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eschatological direction and the present-day goals of a specific political movement. Again, it is important to bear in mind the fundamentally positive note this strikes: Barth is more interested in clarifying the unity of purpose in ‘true socialism’ and ‘real Christianity’ than in identifying enemies and arousing animosity. And, of course, already here Barth was careful to distinguish Jesus’ own relation to the coming order from that of the socialists. Significantly, however, this distinction was not grounded in the human need for greater cognitive awareness of God or any explicit avowal of Christian faith. Rather, the distinction was grounded in the fact that Jesus’ cause and life  – his ‘program and performance’  – were one, whereas the present-day socialist movement was still distanced from the just social order they rightly sought by the persistence of the divisive ‘spirit of mammon and the self-seeking’ in their ranks.38 The substantive overlap between the socialist cause of Barth’s day and the demand of the gospel was a shared sociopolitical orientation: both called persons towards a new way of being together beyond the injustices at the heart of their given life situation. It is, however, misguided to think that Barth’s finding common cause with socialism was detached from or even prior to a negative judgement about the spiritual condition of their socio-economic context. Here arises the crucial point: solidarity with specific sociopolitical movements, not as tangential or secondary to, but as concretely expressive of Christian faith and hope in God’s reign, rests entirely on the distinction-in-relation between the Spirit of Jesus’ humanity and the spirits manifest in the structuring powers of one’s social life. The ‘great Either/Or’ before which the gospel places each of us – to serve God or Mammon (Matt. 6.24) – is a decision that encloses all human life, a decision that confronts us as the call to follow after Jesus and there find freedom.39 Yet at precisely this point we find the missing link in Barth’s exousiology, as outlined above: the present capitalist order has also faced this decision, and has been found wanting, not merely in the less benign personal decisions of certain owners or bosses, but at the structural heart of the system, as it stands. The uni-directionality of the mature Barth’s exousiology – always a metaphysical movement from the internal disobedience of the one (Adam as every ‘I’) to the consequent disintegration of the many  – is problematized by the early Barth’s explicit recognition of the collective idolatry constituted in and through socio-economic injustice. Whereas the gospel Jesus proclaims frees us ‘from

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everything that begins with “I” and “mine”, absolutely free, in order to be free for social help’, the relative freedom capitalism allows is founded upon the principled material-social dependence of some upon others, and the determination of ‘independence’ by way of acquisitive possession.40 To live in a capitalist economy does not mean, however, that the great ‘Either/Or’ has already been decided for oneself – each is always free to abandon oneself to Jesus’ particular freedom for all others – but it does mean, in this as in every other conceivable context, a definite path of social hope and resistance. For the early Barth, one could only decide for the freedom of God’s reign by opposing the very real forms of bondage at the heart of the current social order. In 1911, this appears in the rather clumsy formulation that Jesus ‘rejected the concept of private property’, instructing us to invest our hope in the total freedom and perfect justice of God’s reign by way of a common struggle against Mammon’s grip on our lives. In an economic context where market processes are intrinsically exploitative, the ‘faithful’ use of material goods is to use what has been unlawfully privatized as common.41 A significant development of these theological-political intuitions is found in Marquardt’s ‘First Report on Karl Barth’s Socialist Speeches’, which traces the development of Barth’s developing understanding of socialism from 43 manuscripts Barth penned between 1911–19.42 These texts nuance the ‘spirit of Mammon’ manifest in capitalist relations as the ‘tyranny of possession’, a suppression of freedom endemic to capitalism’s way of organizing economic relationships.43 Most important to our reading, however, is the keen insight Barth displays here into how a certain social perception internal to Christian doctrine and practice effectively deafens persons to God’s directive judgement upon the present order. Barth finds that the organizing logic of capitalism involves a faulty application ‘of the Christian concept of subordination’, by which ‘one regards the superiority of the employer that is based on capital possession to be of the divine order’ of things – they represent the ordained ‘natural’ economy  – whereas strikes, unions and other forms of principled, organized rebellion against this order are perceived as the misguided ‘disturbance of economic life’.44 The social and material consequences of this privatizing logic of ownership are twofold: first, all capitalist relations involve a structural inequality and selfishness, as the fruits of shared labour are, in principle, ‘owned’ by one party: ‘the net profits of the common work of the

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entrepreneur and the worker now become the private property of the former, because he is the private owner of the means of production’.45 Secondly, this structural inequality creates a hierarchy of social relations, in which the worker’s livelihood depends upon the fairness and reliability of the owner’s wage, just as any and all outside the capitalist system of production and profit – the homeless, the disabled, the elderly, women, etc. – depend upon the ‘charity’ of those who possess material wealth. Here, the Christian authorization of capitalism is jumbled up with a mishearing of scripture’s message (the textual basis for ‘the Christian concept of subordination’),46 a distorted view of God’s relation to creation, and a set of inhumane social assumptions, all spelled out in one’s attitude towards the given capitalist order. The inscribing of this economic system into the ‘divine order’ of things implies the religious and moral sanctioning of a certain scale of value, which goes hand in hand with the political normalization and legalization of a certain economic praxis. The church becomes a key player in capitalism’s social dominance, endorsing and inculcating others into a moral rationality in which human society’s economic welfare is ‘one-sidedly identified with the profit of the employer’, and the monetary risk of the employer is valued above the very different investment and risk of the worker. When one is an ‘owner’, both parties are not personally invested in the social contract that structures the economic enterprise. In terms of the effects of its success or failure, the capitalist relation obviously entails an unequal burden of risk; yet the disparity in risk is grounded in two very different modes of investment. Each is bound to the other by the labour contract, depending to some extent on the other’s fidelity, but this belonging is not mutual. The owner and worker are not economically interdependent, and the justification for this in-built inequality – the threat to profit for the one, the threat to personal livelihood and all that entails (dignity, freedom) for the other  – is the reification of private ownership as part and parcel of the ‘divine order’ of things. Although here or in his later writings Barth does not and perhaps cannot go as far as he should towards dogmatically renouncing and excising all subordination, all hierarchic forms of ‘order’,47 here we at least glimpse a concrete judgement of exousiological dis/order: that God’s power, the power that sustains and humanizes creaturely life in and through Jesus’ humanity, stands totally opposed to this power-structure and the mode of social relations

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it entails; that God’s Spirit dethrones the spirit of Mammon working in and through the in-built inequality and inevitable injustices of the capitalist order. Here we have not simply a contemporary ‘naming’ of the power of Mammon, but – tied to that critical judgement – positive insight about the meaning and shape of hopeful resistance. Barth endorses revolt against this order of things, not as a mere transfer of power, but as a call for all to move in the direction of a new society in which the in-built antagonism of the old order is overcome. An exousiology following this lead would affirm that attending to the transformative presence of God’s Word involves both an unflinching realism about the injustices of the present age, and a welcoming of one’s own future hope and salvation in the midst of the divisions thereby produced. For the pastor Barth, this meant that where the power of Mammon reigned, producing ‘class division’, one could not remain aloof from the ‘class struggle’ that ensued, the call to affirm and re-empower that segment of human society ‘made dependent as a matter of principle and exploited practically’.48 Three summary remarks will tie these reflections back into our overall aims, and move us into our concluding reflections on one contemporary sign of Mammon’s power. First, these remarks do not betray any ‘easy equation’ of the kingdom of God with socialism, such as Holmes fears and Tanner also suspects.49 We might take as our motto here the following statement, which summarily displays why Barth discerned ‘the great Either/Or’ in socialism’s challenge to capitalism’s right and necessity: ‘Socialism – despite its imperfections, which people should discuss calmly and openly – is for me one of the most gratifying signs of the fact that God’s kingdom does not stand still, that God is at work, and hence I may not and cannot stand against it indifferently’.50 It is important to note that here, in 1915, the more flexible language of ‘sign’ (soon to be followed by ‘parable’) does not obviate the concrete decision (already articulated in 1911) to follow or flee God’s directive movement in and for the life of the world. In Helmut Gollwitzer’s words, Barth knew at all points that the fullness of God’s reign ‘infinitely surpasses whatever we .  .  . can create as socialism’, but also that ‘this does not exclude, but includes, our struggling for a revolutionary transformation of the present ungodly social order into one which better corresponds to God’s socialism’.51 According to Holmes’s reading, such a claim could be nothing other than a statement of ‘identity’ between God’s reign and a particular human cause (‘socialism’). Whereas Tanner affirms that ‘Just as

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God is love does not mean love is God, God’s kingdom may be the basis for a Christian identification of socialism with it without implying that socialism on its own merits is to be identified with the kingdom’,52 Holmes responds that no ‘economic program . . . can be identified with the kingdom’, because it ‘resists domestication of any kind whereby a particular prescription for economic life, drawn up independent of the gospel and its claim, is thought to be continuous with the gospel itself ’.53 But, leaving aside the nuance of Tanner’s claim,54 has anything we have encountered in Barth’s early attitude suggested that his public call to side with socialism’s anti-capitalism was conjured up independently of ‘the gospel and its claim’? As noted above, already in the 1911 speech we detected elements of Barth’s mature logic of ‘correspondence’, with all the critical distinction between human and divine agency thereby implied. And here we can state even more clearly the critique laid out above: to reject out of hand the Christian endorsement of and alliance with extra-ecclesial causes is to presume an epistemology and ethics in which dependence upon ‘the gospel and its claim’ has become bound to the mediating powers and possibilities of the Christian community. There is indeed an intimate connection between the refusal to externalize evil and the inherent revisability of our own ‘solutions’ to past and present injustices. Yet this link is found in the difference between the humility to hear another’s critique – rooted in awareness of one’s tendency towards self-exaltation (semper reformanda!) – and the ethical paralysis that comes from so divorcing what God has accomplished from what God is doing that we constantly end up in self-protective retreat from the decision placed before us. What we find in Barth’s early critique of capitalism is no ‘easy equation’ of God’s reign with any given form of socialism, but rather a contemporary discernment of power’s socially destructive idolization, and thus an ability to recognize those ‘outside’ the fold who are caught up in hopeful resistance. What Barth discerned was a relation between the humanizing direction of God’s reign and the socialist struggle that differed in kind from the antithetical relation of God’s and capitalism’s way of ordering human social existence. As an expression of human power and possibility socialism, too, was not (and is not) at any point immune from the lure of self-exaltation, from the tendency to lose sight of the end-goal, to divinize its past and future work and to demonize all who stand in its way. Yet a central lesson of exousiology is that the semper

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reformanda Christian faith must speak to all critical movements  – to those human lives outside of and victimized by power, and all who stand with and for them  – has a different tone and posture than attesting God’s revolution to the ruling powers. The same Word is spoken to all, but, again, it is spoken into the divisive context of power, and thus is necessarily heard and attested as an exaltation here and a humiliation there (Lk. 1.49–53).55 In our reading, it is therefore a profound mistake to suggest that the ‘otherness’ of God’s reign vis-à-vis capitalism (the dominant mode of socio-economic relations) is of the same order as God’s otherness to socialism (a form of struggle against the present order). As a means of creaturely resistance and hope, any resistance movement – any form of ‘socialism’ – harbours the same potential for idolatry and injustice as does capitalism or ‘any other economic program’. Yet insofar as ‘socialism’ names a form of resistance to the idolatry and injustice at the heart of the present order (as Barth saw in the logic and practice of capitalism), Christians, too, have reason to rejoice that the Spirit moves freely ahead of us and that ‘God’s kingdom does not stand still’. Secondly, it helps our case to see that Barth did not understand his alignment of Christian hope and socialism’s cause as ‘ideological’, but as a ‘practical and political commitment’ that, in certain contexts and at certain points, was required by faith in the gospel. In a fascinating later to Paul Tillich, explaining why he remained in the Socialist Democratic Party during the early 1930s despite its imminent defeat by National Socialism, Barth reveals that he associates the word ‘ideology’ strictly with its ideational content, as one or another competing set of ‘ideas or worldviews’.56 The ‘exclusivity of the Christian confession of faith’ meant, for Barth, that he could ‘“confess” [him] self to neither an idea nor to a world view in any serious sense’.57 This shows that Barth understood his perception and (self-)consciousness as bound to the singular hope of the gospel in Jesus Christ. Yet this makes all the more clear just what is problematized by an understanding of faith’s knowledge as intrinsically opposed to alliance with secular causes, for the converse of this confessional binding of Christian awareness is that one is absolutely free to align oneself with whatever sociopolitical movements best conform to hope in and movement towards God’s coming reign. Thus, in 1933, Barth is found explicating his ‘freedom to adopt purely political decisions, positions, and possibly actions’ as ‘the point on which .  .  . everything depends’.58 The freedom to be for the

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neighbour and the new world on its way in concrete alliance with movements we would today recognize as ‘ideological’ was, for Barth, not a matter of identifying Christian faith with a non-Christian theory, but a matter of praxis which just so belongs to his existence. Barth here evinces a concept of ideology which, because restricted to the ‘ideational’ (which itself presumes the theory-praxis divide), needs augmentation and transformation, and which may thus entail a reassessment of his basic position; but that is a task for another day.59 Here our point is that Barth shows a concept of the faith called forth by the gospel – the confessional commitment to a particular hope – not as a theoretical form of ‘knowledge’, but as the binding together of one’s (personal) awareness and (social) existence by a particular promise and claim spoken into one’s present. A theological explication of reality could not but mean a very definite yes and no to the concrete situation of one’s given life with God and others. Thus, for Barth, there simply was no alternative to discerning the at-handedness of Jesus’ new humanity in and through the powers ordering one’s social existence; otherwise one would be captive to that ‘useless Christianity which intends to come only “in heaven”’ – a spiritual no-man’s land – faith in which is not just ‘hypocritical’, but, most presciently, slothful.60 The social-political direction of the gospel is here, as it always was for Barth, intrinsic to the theological perception of faith. Yet no matter how helpful or even essential, the dogmatic or intra-ecclesial articulation of what faith perceives is only one mode of its public expression, as the sermon (and the congregation’s liturgical work as a whole) is another. The point is not to denigrate or relativize those forms of witness, but to keep them in their proper place as witness, as forms of creaturely power and possibility which meet their limit, purpose and end outside themselves, in the free coming of God’s reign to and for all. For exousiological ethics, then, the crux of the matter is that finding common cause with whatever social movements are concretely caught up in the direction of the kingdom’s coming – its ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ to the present order; its clear ‘No!’ here because of the clear ‘Yes!’ faith hears there – is an equally valid and always necessary expression of Christian hope, no less integral to the life of faith than whatever other forms of knowledge sustain it. In fact, this lived awareness of the direction in which true freedom lies is perhaps even more significant when other, more explicitly ‘Christian’ forms of knowledge have become incurvatus in se, revelling in their own world-ordering powers and possibilities instead of the promise and claim Jesus’ way holds forth.

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Thirdly and finally, Barth’s alliance with socialism was driven by an understanding of gospel liberation as binding persons to a collective struggle for the peace of total justice. Confirming a central insight of our christological exousiology, these ‘socialist speeches’ declare spiritual freedom as freedom for lived fidelity to God in and through one’s material and social relations. This is confirmed in Marquardt’s insight that Barth never critiqued the ruling powers on strictly political grounds, as if formal political freedom necessarily entailed social and economic freedom.61 The young Barth ‘dealt critically with [the] solely democratic liberties’ obtained through political might and protected by law, when such rights were not combined with ‘economic and social democracy’.62 While Barth stops short, in his early and later work, of describing democracy itself as a necessary expression (or ‘parable’) of the kingdom, he does identify the revolutionary goal with a democratizing process – a legal means of restraining the reach of power’s self-exaltation – essential to the protection of all social life, political or economic. We may note here the reappearance of the principle discerned in Chapters 3 and 4: that political power find its legitimating rationale or relative ‘authority’ in its service of common human needs, and thus first and foremost in its orientation upon those most deprived of the material and social goods intrinsic to a humane co-existence. In societies where capitalism’s founding inequality orders all relations, formal political freedom translates into the economic ‘freedom of the possessor to earn still more’.63 All have equal rights under the law, yet the socio-economic context in which ‘equal rights’ are applied is already determined by an unjust power-relation and thus an inevitable antagonism. For Barth, this means that even democratic states provide an illusory freedom insofar as they ideologically presuppose or are practically adapted to a state of economic and hence social war.64 ‘The principle of the freedom to make money is the enemy because it means that countless people have to live in bondage, discrimination, misery, it means continual war against people’.65 Barth’s early attitude towards capitalism clarifies the theological insight that, in our reading of his mature exousiology, remained obscure: the liberation the gospel heralds is not an otherworldly freedom from one’s given creaturely life; neither is it personal-spiritual independence from material and social relatedness to specific others, through whom God confronts and claims us

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for love’s purifying fidelity. Barth spiritually discerned capitalism as Mammon because it usurps what God has given as common – fruits of the earth and of shared work, the material and social means of humane sustenance – through the self-exalting spirit and logic of freedom by private acquisition or ‘ownership’.66 This interplay of spiritual idolatry and lived injustice creates unjust forms of independence (for the few) and dependence (for the many), which the freedom and justice for all of God’s humanity cannot abide. In this situation, Barth declares freedom from Mammon’s rule as necessarily involving the overturning of this dominative structural relation. In the context of unjustly ordered economic relations, at once spiritual and sociopolitical, awareness of the ordering direction of God’s reign cannot but mean a corresponding decision for and against. ‘Recognition’ of Jesus as ‘the concrete Word of God’ invests oneself in the struggle for the common dignity of all, by saying ‘No!’ to the one and ‘Yes!’ to the other whose interests and causes are presently opposed. The critical direction of the gospel compels society towards an all-encompassing freedom, whose coming in fullness is antithetical to and thus deferred by every injustice. Just so, we unwittingly distance ourselves from the divine promise when, individually or collectively, we exalt our perceived powers and most cherished freedoms as rights earned by or given to us (not them), shielding ourselves from those most vulnerable to power.

III. Final remarks: Katrina and disaster/capitalism We live in a world that is still but differently ordered by the socially and spiritually destructive powers Barth once named as intrinsic to capitalism. Prefigured in important respects by Marx,67 Karl Polanyi’s thesis about the totalizing aims of the modern economic principle of commodification for short-term profit has been validated by the globalizing reach of contemporary capitalism, which is driven not by anything like ‘free’ market forces but by the sociopolitical organization of life through the collusion of legal-political coercion and concentrated money’s buying-power.68 In recent years, Naomi Klein’s important work on ‘disaster capitalism’ has clarified how twentieth century capitalism’s slow shift of wealth upwards depended upon the combination free market ideology’s longstanding political centrepiece (deregulation) with what she

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calls ‘the shock doctrine’ – the notion that the best time to dismantle a society’s existing public defences against capitalist privatization and commodification is during or after a crisis.69 We cannot explore here the many parallels between the powers at play in disaster capitalism and the spirit of Mammon’s economic self-seeking, but one clear implication of Klein’s account rings out: the open recognition by free market ideology’s leading spokespersons and wealthiest profiteers that the orientation of political power upon the most vulnerable has to be redirected in service of narrowly defined economic interests, through ever increasing privatization of public funds, goods and services. For Klein, this means that the ideological aims of disaster capitalism are incompatible with democracy. In light of what we have to say here, that incompatibility may well suggest the need to advance exousiological ethics by attending to the link between the specific form of human freedom affirmed and enabled by Jesus’ humanity and the public accountability of power for which democracy strives. But the lesson to be derived here is the more directly theological one, namely, that self-serving economic power (Mammon) reaches its highest inhumanities through the manipulation of the world-ordering powers of law and might (Leviathan). The rhetoric coming from those who testify to the ‘freedom’ wrought by the shock doctrine and the disasters exploited everywhere by corporate capitalism is, of course, that the political-economic goal is to bring about a ‘freer market’. As we have seen with Barth, however, the concept of freedom employed here is based on a notion of independence through personal acquisition and upward mobility through social competition. The human condition presumed by capitalist freedom is socio-economic war. Our insight into political power’s intrinsic socio-economic orientation is confirmed here: the powers we exercise as law and might, whether personal or institutional, find their eschatological limit and legitimacy in their service of the whole social body, whose earthly life God has affirmed in and as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Conversely, we can affirm for a final time that our sociopolitical powers and possibilities are ‘demonized’ – becoming idolatrous in spirit and unjust in practice – when they so order socio-economic life as to benefit some at the expense of others. This is why the divine ordinatio of political power that works ‘for the good’ and ‘hinders evil’ in Romans 13 cannot be rightly understood apart from Romans 12 and the judgement of kings and judges in Psalm 82: creaturely power and

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possibility attests its eschatological ordering by God in a particular form of service to all others, namely, through using what power and capacity it has as freed for those materially and socially victimized by power. By way of conclusion, I would like to refract these insights, and to summarize the major themes uncovered in our reading of Barth and Yoder, through the lens of the ‘unnatural disaster’ that hit New Orleans in August 2005 in tandem with Hurricane Katrina. The facts about what casts New Orleans as a ‘manmade’ disaster, in a more pointed way than Katrina’s impact on other coastal regions in Louisiana and Mississippi, are readily available, so we may proceed by taking up in a theological vein the insight into the connection between the faulty levees and the wider social and political conditions represented by Klein and Michael Eric Dyson.70 It should be patently clear how our account of the twin powers of Leviathan and Mammon show through the (all too common) vulture capitalist mentality Klein exposes at work in the wake of New Orleans and many other global disasters, which seeks to profit off others’ tragedy, privatize at every turn and thereby redirect political power and socio-economic resources for the material wealth of the few.71 For our purposes it is worth focusing on the social and political abandonment of those tens of thousands of New Orleanians who survived the storm, and how the justifications mounted for this abandonment may themselves conjure up Mammon’s self-protective defences against a God who would and does condescend to speak to us, critically and thus transformatively, in and through the material life of the poor. If one were to focus on the immediately visible causes of New Orleans flooding, or the fatally slow response by many local, state and especially federal government agencies to those who survived, there is surely more than enough blame to go around. Especially if one agrees that political power is only legitimate when attentive to those most affected by and vulnerable to destructive forces, the fact that it took six days to organize and deploy the evacuation of over 40,000 persons crammed into the New Orleans Superdome and Civic Center, in suffocating heat and without adequate access to food, water or sanitation, signals a state of political negligence and inefficiency many understandably perceive as criminal.72 Of course, the response of many others, from individual citizens to the Coast Guard, who rescued more than half of those officially stranded (about 60,000), was heroic – or, in our terms, exemplified just the sort of freedom for the other that is willing and able to

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invest one’s self (including one’s ‘resources’: time, energy, money, attention) for those neighbours who are in need. But as Michael Eric Dyson rightly argues, to view Katrina survivors as either abandoned merely through the failure of some agent ‘external’ to us, or as not really abandoned at all, are both deceptive viewpoints. It is easy, Dyson writes, to decry the circumstances of the poor while assuring ourselves that we had nothing do with it. We can even take special delight in lambasting the source of their suffering – a source that is safely external to us. We are fine as long as place time limits on the origins of the poor’s plight – the moments we all spied on television after the storm, but not the numbering years during which we all looked the other way. By being outraged, we appear compassionate. This permits us to continue to ignore the true roots of their condition, roots that branch into our worlds and are nourished on our political and religious beliefs.73

We will turn momentarily to the self-protective logics that allow us to excuse all social and political agencies in the face of Katrina’s disaster, but in order to do so, it is worth reinforcing Dyson’s specific point about the relation between ‘externalizing’ the evils of social abandonment and a myopic understanding of what material poverty actually is. Many American citizens were rightly outraged and distraught when confronted with news of Katrina victims, predominantly poor, black and brown; but ‘it is the exposure of the extremes, not their existence, that stumps our national sense of decency’.74 In language reminiscent of Barth’s condemnation of Christianity for inscribing the capitalist ‘superiority’ of the owner into the ‘divine order of things’, Dyson reminds us that ‘We can abide the ugly presence of poverty so long as it doesn’t interrupt the natural flow of things, doesn’t rudely impinge on our daily lives or awareness. As long as poverty is a latent reality, a solemn social fact suppressed from prominence on our moral compass, we can find our bearings without fretting too much about its awkward persistence’.75 Yet our account of the inherent connection between Leviathan and Mammon, between the world-powering powers of law and might and the powers and possibilities of socio-economic life, has forbidden just this ‘suppression’ of poverty’s existence as stemming from an external source. Our own safety and security, our political freedom and economic ‘health’ and ‘wealth’, which allows us to flee all manner of powerful storms, is bound to larger social structures

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and political institutions which also produce and depend upon concentrated material and social poverty. At this juncture, we can further qualify Dyson’s comment that the ‘roots’ of poverty’s social and political conditions ‘branch into our worlds and are nourished on our political and religious beliefs’. Such qualification comes about in a Christian theological key when we are able to discern and name the subtleties of Mammon’s power at work in the power-construct of racialized social identities. Flowing outward from that contemporary centre of global power called the United States, race remains the primary matrix through which Mammon flexes its muscles of social division and depoliticization today.76 This is clear in the all too common explanations that Katrina victims are to blame for their own abandonment, not larger social forces (which involve ‘us’) or the governing agencies that purportedly represent us. The commonsense rationale of many, who simply cannot understand why people would be so stupid as to not ‘just leave’, reflects the experiential segregation intrinsic to the power of capitalist wealth. It simply does not occur to those whose life presupposes the social and geographical mobility of privately owned wealth that concentrated material and social poverty might affect one’s ability to flee an impending storm.77 So when thousands of predominantly black and brown faces appear on our TV screens, stranded on rooftops, waist-deep in toxic sludge or (in a favoured media loop) raiding local stores, the segregation of power is naturally re-expressed through the divisions of race and its signifiers – an inherent lack of intelligence, personal character or moral and cultural enlightenment. If the material and social effects of disasters such as Katrina are not our responsibility, nor a consequence of the system through which our own freedom and power has been secured – and how could it be, when to recognize an injustice in the system might entail a critique of ourselves? – they must be to blame for their own captivity and destruction. What kind of people would be so foolish? What kind, indeed. This deflection of rage against the injustices and inequalities of today’s economic powers is perhaps the clearest sign of Mammon’s grip on those who feel the need to defend them. In order to maintain a veneer of credibility as respecting liberty and justice ‘for all’, established systems of power depend upon the dehumanization of those whose embodied freedoms, dignities and rights are suppressed through their socio-economic agenda. To discern Mammon’s spirit of self-exaltation and economic self-seeking in the

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midst of today’s socio-economic divisions, then, will require a new humility about the ways in which our ‘political and religious beliefs’ have generated, absorbed and sustained certain social assumptions, not just about ‘the poor’, but about ourselves – our histories, and what powers have secured and do sustain our ‘possessions’  – which, like the category of race, effectively externalize the roots of material and social poverty. According to Willie James Jennings, this will require sensitivity to the ways in which the racialized binaries of yesteryear are reproduced today ‘at the intersection of moral discourse, the market, and the prison’.78 Just as the slave ship created a social world and theological rationality in which obedience and disobedience were evaluated in terms of black submission ‘to market calculation’, so today the looming slave ship of the prison-industrial complex harbours the social and political consequences for those (predominantly black and brown) persons who seek to escape their material and social deprivation by transgressing power’s law. The point is not to valourize or sanitize ‘criminality’, nor to condone the host of social violences it often entails, but to recognize that the narratives of self and other, rich and poor, owner and labourer, deserving and dependent and right and wrong which keep at bay the socio-economic reality of those stowed beneath the decks of today’s slave ships foster the spirit of Mammon.79 Just so, these narratives obscure and thus underwrite the real forces that sustain the material and social abandonment of our most vulnerable neighbours. Yet if we have ears to hear, disasters like Katrina, at once spiritual and sociopolitical, bespeak the prisons hidden in plain sight. What Katrina reveals are the myths we live by  – not just ‘those New Orleanians’, but us, Americans; not just ‘those Americans’, but us, capitalists; not just ‘those capitalists’, but all of us  – fallen human beings, self-invested, content to some extent with the present order of things. Each and every one of us, capable of and prone to shielding ourselves from the truth of our common situation, prone to seek after and build up for ourselves a little kingdom of our own, sturdily protected from those others whose embodied calls for a liveable dignity, freedom and justice disturb our worldview and our way of life. I have heard in Barth and Yoder, and have tried to convey in this work, a kind of theologically articulated hope that something real lies ‘beyond’ the need, attempt and desire to seek and build such a kingdom for ourselves. If that trust is not misguided, that ‘something real’ that lies beyond our grasp

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will, as it comes to and addresses us, illuminate a different present, a new mode of possible presence. The christology undergirding this view of the powers names that ‘something beyond’ not in otherworldly terms, but as the nearness of someone’s humanity – one who gave up all, all pretension to ‘divinity’; all power; all the riches hell has to offer, because he identified his self with the humanity of each and every other. His freedom for God thus cannot brook any faith that rests content beyond ideology, beyond the need to stand for all by saying a clear ‘No!’ here in order to affirm the clear ‘Yes!’ that has already been spoken there, awaiting only for us to hear, receive and affirm it.80 The key, which exousiology may help us unlock, is to realize that this freedom for humanity as a whole elicits a very definite form of faith, hope and resistance, the many names for which – if the Christian gospel rings true – may finally be one.

Notes Introduction 1 Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 15–17. 2 See Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2nd edn, 2001) which is important to the argument I am making in Christian doctrinal terms not so much for its description of modern market societies as inherently commodifying (again, we turn to ‘naming’ this particular economic power only at the tail end), but more so for its intuitive grasp of the intrinsic connection between social regulation and market forms, or between political and economic power. 3 A good place to start is Walter Wink’s cumulative case for breaking with the ‘spiritualizing’ tendencies of the Christian tradition regarding the powers and related concepts (such as angels and demons). See his trilogy: Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers and Engaging the Powers, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, The Powers, vols 1–3, 1984–92). Beyond the host of traditional and modern texts Wink helpfully draws upon, see the exegetical and theological works referenced in chapters one and two of this book. 4 Ray Gingerich has nicely summarized how Yoder’s contextually oriented theology and ethics did not entail any arbitrary expression of what he had to say in his time and place: ‘Throughout his life Yoder engaged in what he called “occasional theology” rather than systematics. That is, he was always keenly aware of the times in which he lived, and his theology addressed the particular issues that emerged out of those contexts. But Yoder’s “occasional theology”, though wide-ranging, was not random.’ Gingerich, ‘Theological Foundations for an Ethics of Non-Violence’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 76.3 (July 2003), 417–35. 5 Sabine Plonz, Die herrenlosen Gewalten: Eine Relektüre Karl Barths in befreiungstheologischer Perspektive (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1995). This text is also available at www.sabine-plonz.de/fileadmin/media/downloads/buecher/ HerrenloseGewalten.pdf 6 Martin Hailer, Gott Und Die Gotzen: Uber Gottes Macht Angesichts Der Lebensbestimmenden Machte, Forschungen Zur Systematischen Und Okumenischen Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 7 Barth’s ‘Lordless Powers’ section appears in The Christian Life (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981).

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8 Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford: OUP, 1999). 9 Yoder’s own commentary on Barth goes some way towards signalling the common ground. See especially the essays collected in Yoder, Karl Barth and the Problem of War, and Other Essays (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2003). The repetitive appeal to both our thinkers in the work of Stanley Hauerwas is another signifier; see, for example, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001). See Alain Epp Weaver, ‘Parables of the Kingdom and Religious Plurality: With Barth and Yoder towards a Nonresistant Public Theology’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review 72 (July 1998), pp. 411–40. 10 Craig Carter, The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), especially pp. 61–90. 11 Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003). 12 See Daniel Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011); Daniel Barber, ‘Epistemological Violence, Christianity, and the Secular’, in Peter Dula and Chris K. Huebner (eds), The New Yoder, pp. 271–93 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books); and Daniel Barber, ‘The Particularity of Jesus and the Time of the Kingdom: Philosophy and Theology in Yoder’, Modern Theology 23.1 (2007), pp. 63–89. 13 Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (London: SCM, 2008). 14 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2nd edn, 1994), p. 160. 15 Throughout this work I use the label ‘exousiology’ as short hand for a Christian ‘theology of the powers’. Yoder uses this term to refer to the Pauline understanding of the powers (see, for example, Yoder, Politics, p. 143). It follows the semantic convention of many English doctrinal labels, such as ‘ecclesiology’ (from the Greek ekklesia, which describes the ‘discourse about’ a topic(-ology) based on a biblical noun; in this case, the referent is the exousia from a favoured biblical phrase for the powers, the ‘rulers and authorities’ (archai kai exousia). 16 The Römerbriefe refers to the two editions of Barth’s commentary on Romans, written in 1919 and 1922. Only the second edition, which gained Barth widespread attention in his day and afterward, has been translated into English. See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn Hoskyns; London: OUP, 1968). See the references below for more on the significance of Barth’s socialism and (alleged) ‘break’ with liberalism. 17 See, for example, the common usage of ‘Mammon’ language in Karl Barth and William Willimon, The Early Preaching of Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William Willimon (trans. John E. Wilson; Lousiville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009).

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18 The text being referred to is Karl Barth’s Rechtfertigung und Recht, originally published in Theologischen Studien, Vol. 1, 1938. 19 That the explicitly socialist commitments of ‘the early Barth’ do, in fact, endure throughout Barth’s work is the basic thesis of Marquardt’s Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Bespiel Karl Barths (München: Kaiser, 1972) which, to the severe detriment of Barth studies and modern theology as a whole, remains untranslated. My account of the significance of Marquardt’s thesis, which figures largely in the concluding chapter, is informed by his selected essays on Barth’s early ‘Socialist Speeches’, his two Römerbriefe and his ‘theological-political motivations’ in the German Church Struggle in Marquardt, Theological Audacities, ed. Andreas Pangritz and Paul S. Chung (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010). 20 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960). The essays in this English translation appeared a few years earlier as Die Menschlichkeit Gottes, Theologische Studien 48 (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1956). 21 The critique that Barth relies on a positivist understanding of divine revelation and human faith became a commonplace response from the quarters of modern liberal theology. For a helpful survey of this theme, see Gary Dorrien, ‘Otherworldly Positivism? Modern Theology against Barth’, in DorrienTheology Without Weapons: The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, pp. 131–67 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000). 22 See Marquardt’s discussion of the ‘self-contradiction represented in the theology Barth and his friends represented’, in ‘Theological and Political Motivations of Karl Barth in the Church Struggle’, in Theological Audacities, pp. 190–222. 23 Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) and Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden; London/Philadelphia: SCM/Fortress, 1976); Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt; Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth; Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Kenneth Oakes, Reading Karl Barth: A Companion to Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’ (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), pp. 3–12 and, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2012), especially chapter 2. 24 Marquardt uses the stronger language of ‘concealment’: ‘. . .the socialist radicalism of the Römerbriefe, which had become internalized into Barth’s theology, was kept at every subsequent phase of his work. . . . That radicalism can be lifted out, without great difficulty and without doing violence to the text, from its concealment in the language of dogmatics. That is a task that, in my view, future studies of Karl Barth have to accomplish. For without this, the tottering idols of academic, bourgeois theology will not be brought down. But in Barth’s theology they have already been brought down’ (‘The Idol Totters’, in Theological Audacities, p. 189). This warning

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Notes should be heeded as the converse to Marquardt’s clear admission in ‘Theological and Political Motivations’ that, without methodological attention to the gospel’s this-worldliness, Barth’s own ‘radicalism’ can just as easily be excised from his theology.

Chapter 1 1 Originally published as Rechtfertigung und Recht, in Theologischen Studien, Vol. 1, 1938. As ‘Justification and Justice’ is the best rendering of the title into English, I will refer to the text by that name; page references throughout are taken from the ‘Church Classics Series’ edition entitled Church and State (Greenville, SC: Smyth and Helwys, 1991). 2 See Karl Barth, The Christian Life, 213–32. 3 Barth presents his treatment as a ‘New Testament study’, noting that the ‘dubious character of the Reformation solution’ is owed not simply to the christological insufficiency of the Reformers’ views of powers such as the state, but also to the ‘questionable character’ of the scriptural arguments then made concerning government and civil order (Church and State, pp. 9–10). 4 As George Hunsinger said in 1983: ‘The unity (not identity) which [Barth] saw between theology and ethics implied, among other things, that it was illegitimate to place theological and political criteria in fundamental opposition. . . . It was precisely because the Word of God as the central criterion was concrete that political criteria – in a relative and strictly subordinate, but still operative sense – were necessary. . . . The reason, as he noted in 1939, was that “wherever there is theological talk, it is always implicitly or explicitly political talk as well”’. Hunsinger, ‘Karl Barth and Liberation Theology’, in George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, n. 9, pp. 44–45 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). The Barth quote is from E. Busch, Karl Barth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 292. 5 Church and State, p. 9. 6 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 7 Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation (trans. J. L. M. Haire and Ian Henderson; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 221. 8 Church and State, pp. 6–7. 9 Ibid., pp. 2–7. Barth’s judgement on this matter was confirmed a decade later by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, W. A. Visser’t Hooft. See his The Kingship of Christ: An Interpretation of Recent European Theology (London: SCM, 1948), especially pp. 13–26. 10 Church and State, pp. 7–8. 11 See, for example, Church and State, pp. 10, 23–4 and 27.

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12 Church and State, p. 23. 13 Ibid., 27. Barth cites here Colossians 1.15 and 2.10, which clarify that the powers were ‘created in the Son of God . . . by Him and unto Him’ (1.15) and ‘that in Him they have their Head’ (2.10). 14 Church and State, p. 27. 15 Robert E. Hood, ‘Karl Barth’s Christological Basis for the State and Political Praxis’, Scottish Journal of Theology 33 (1980), pp. 223–38. 16 Ibid., p. 228. 17 In addition to the texts cited above, Barth references here also Romans 8.38ff., 1 Corinthians 2.8, Ephesians 1.10, 1.20–21, 3.10 and 6.12, Philippians 2.9ff., Colossians 1.20, 1 Peter 1.12 and 3.22. See Church and State, pp. 23–28. 18 Church and State, pp. 32–34. 19 Ibid., p. 29. 20 Ibid., p. 10. 21 Barth’s list is remarkably complete, considering that the renewed attention to ‘the powers’ which began with Berkhof focussed largely on the Pauline corpus. Walter Wink’s initial exegetical analysis in his Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), which sought to amend this narrowness by tracing references to ‘power’ and the ‘powers’ throughout the New Testament, only includes one significant term that Barth does not mention – onoma (‘the name’). 22 Church and State, pp. 24–25. 23 One of the primary exceptions to this rule is Wesley Carr, whose Angels and Principalities: The Background, Meaning and Development of the Pauline Phrase Hai Archai kai Exousiai (Cambridge: CUP, 1981) has been roundly criticized for its judgement that with this terminology Paul intends to denote not simply just ‘spiritual’ forces, but solely good (i.e. ‘angelic’) ones. Other helpful surveys of the history of interpretation can be found in A. T. Lincoln, ‘Liberation from the Powers: Supernatural Spirits or Societal Structures?’ in ed. M. Daniel Carroll et al., The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), pp. 335–54, and Willard Swartley, The Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), ch. 8. 24 Citing 1 Corinthians 2.6.ff., Barth exclaims: ‘“Archontes” is the title given in Rom. xiii.3 to the officials of the State!’ Church and State, p. 14; n. 10, p. 88. 25 Church and State, n. 17, p. 89. Literally this phrase refers to a ‘human creation’ or ‘creature’, though in context this need not exclude the more specific meaning of a particular ‘institution’ or ‘authority’ typically found in English translations. 26 Church and State, p. 34. Barth’s ambiguity on this point is reflected in the generic claim, following upon the host of scriptural citations mentioned above, that the ‘function of Christ concerning the angelic powers . . . seems to have some connection with human justice’ (Ibid., p. 28). 27 Church and State, p. 29.

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28 Ibid., p. 14. Barth is clearly referring to the use of archontes tou aiwnos toutou (‘rulers of this age’) in 1 Corinthians 2.6–8, Galatians 4 and Colossians 1. 29 Church and State, pp. 14–15. 30 This is the title of an important essay from 1946, given fuller treatment below in Part 3.III. See Karl Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946–52 (ed. R. G. Smith; London: SCM, 1954), pp. 13–50. 31 Church and State, pp. 14–15; see also Knowledge and Service, pp. 218–19. 32 See especially Part 3.III. 33 Church and State, p. 16. 34 ‘Such “recognition” cannot be and is not Pilate’s business. To the question of truth, the State is neutral. “What is truth?” But the release of Jesus, and with it the recognition by the “rulers of this world” of the wisdom of God, might have meant the possibility of proclaiming openly the claim of Jesus to be such a king; or, in other words, it would have meant the legal granting of the right to preach justification’ (Church and State, p. 15). 35 Church and State, pp. 16–17. 36 The import of this issue – namely, how Christ’s ontological-providential determination of the powers is wedded to a certain confidence with respect to the intractable justice of ‘the state’ – is more fully discussed in Section 4.I. 37 These last two paragraphs raise the complex question of the relation of God’s providential work to fallen human work and the reality of creaturely evil. How one handles this central problem, tied to the question of what sense one makes of Romans 8.28, has major implications for one’s understanding of the nature of the powers, and what form liberation from captivity to them takes. This issue is taken up again in dialogue with Yoder, in Chapters 2 and 3. The concluding chapter demonstrates my own view of what sorts of practical judgements might be entailed by a discernment of God’s providential sustenance today. 38 See Church and State, pp. 17–19. 39 Ibid., p. 16. 40 Ibid., p. 27. 41 See Church and State, pp. 26–27. Barth cites Ephesians 1.20–21 and 1 Peter 3.11, but the connection with Hebrews 1.13–14 and 2.5–8 is evident – namely, all of these texts exemplify a christological recitation of Psalm 110 (see also Ps. 8.6), which opens with the Psalmist’s declaration that ‘The LORD said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”’ 42 See especially Church and State, pp. 40–46. 43 To generalize again from what Barth says of the state: the NT does not suggest ‘that by [their] very nature . . . the [powers] will be compelled, sooner or later, to play the part of the Beast “out of the abyss.” Why should this be inevitable, since [they] too [have] been created in Christ, through Him and for Him, and

Notes

44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58

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since even to [them] the manifold wisdom of God is proclaimed by the Church?’ (Church and State, p. 30). Church and State, p. 31. Ibid., pp. 28–29. ‘We should note that here there is no question of any justification of the “demons” and the “demonic” forces. . . .’ (Church and State, p. 28). This distancing of eschatological judgement from sociopolitical history is a central problematic in the following two chapters, and is related to the explicit critique of Barth I develop in Parts 3.III and 4.I. Barth, CD III/3, pp. 457–59. This resistance to restricting discussion of the ‘nature’ of heavenly beings to an ‘ontological register’ is all that is meant by characterizing Barth’s treatment as ‘highly functional’: as is shown below, Barth sees the ‘function’ these spiritual creatures fulfil within God’s own work in and for human history as determinative of theological reflection about their existence. CD III/3, p. 458. See E. Käsemann, Paulinische Perspektiven (Tübingen: JCB Mohr, 1969). Käsemann’s insights have been carried forward by the work of J. Louis Martyn and his students. See, for instance, Martyn’s claims about the christologically determined cosmos of which Paul writes, in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), especially pp. 135–40. A more recent example of the kind of theological exegesis underpinning Barth’s angelology, also sensitive to the strand of ‘apocalyptic’ exegesis spurred on by Käsemann, is Christopher Morse’s important The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2010). I further discuss the relevance of an apocalyptic-theological understanding of the powers in dialogue with Yoder. CD III/1, p. 51. ‘He is not an “intermediate being.” He is the divine person who acts, suffers and triumphs as a man. . . . And in this way, just because He is not a “hypostasis,” He is the Mediator between God and man. . . . And again, [the writers of the New Testament] could not have been more critical of the views of their contemporaries than when with undoubted reference to them they said of this person – that God had created all things by Him. In so doing they summoned man to faith in God. And in this way they did not add another to the plethora of supposed “intermediate beings.”’ (CD III/1, p. 53). CD III/1, pp. 34–35. CD III/3, p. 421. Ibid., p. 429. CD III/1, p. 28. Ibid., p. 19.

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59 ‘Eloquence’ here signals the definition or clarity unique to Christ as Revealer. See John Webster, ‘Eloquent and Radiant’, in Barth’s Moral Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1998). This theme reappears in the discussion of Christ’s prophetic work in Chapter 3. 60 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 6 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2005), p. 70. 61 See ‘The Concrete Command and the Divine Mandates’, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 6, pp. 388–408 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2005). 62 The contemporary theologian who has most clearly articulated such a reading of Bonhoeffer is the German Lutheran ethicist Hans Ulrich, whose seminal Wie Geschöpfe Leben displays the range and critical force of re-reading the Lutheran doctrine of ‘the estates’ (die Stände) through the christocentric intuitions of Barth and Bonhoeffer. For a clear display of the logic of Ulrich’s reading in English, see Brian Brock, ‘Why the Estates? Hans Ulrich’s Recovery of an Unpopular Notion’, Studies in Christian Ethics 20.2 (August 2007), pp. 179–202. 63 See CD III/1, p. 20, and the discussion of this theme in Part III below. 64 From The Book of Common Prayer. 65 This ‘superiority’ is discussed below in the form of the uniqueness of angelic witness. 66 CD III/1, pp. 18–19. 67 Barth refers to them, in fact, as ‘the practical principle’ of the differentiation of the lower from the upper cosmos (CD III/1, p. 156). 68 Ibid., p. 157. 69 See Ibid., p. 160. 70 Ibid., p. 158. 71 Ibid., pp. 160–63. 72 Ibid., p. 162. 73 ‘For light is the revelation of the will of God, and the heavenly bodies . . . are His servants in the sense that they indicate to man the seasons given Him for the recognition of this revelation – his day as a day of revelation, his time as a time of revelation, and his history as a history of revelation’ (Ibid., p. 165). 74 Ibid., pp. 167–68. 75 Ibid., pp. 165–66. 76 For Barth’s discussion of the raqia‘, see Ibid., pp. 135–41. 77 See Section II.B below. 78 For a sophisticated critique of Barth’s reading of Genesis 1 in terms of ‘cosmic order’ and the correlative ‘nothingness’ which constitutes a metaphysical threat to all that ‘is’, see Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), ch. 5.

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79 CD III/3, p. 461. 80 CD III/1, pp. 94–99. 81 The angels’ ‘freedom consists in their obedience’ ( Ibid., p. 498), as does that of human beings. On the latter theme in Barth, see the helpful overview of human autonomy in John McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 137–42, as well as the substantive discussion of freedom and political life in T. Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford: OUP, 1999), especially the final two chapters. 82 CD III/3, p. 493. 83 Ibid., p. 478. 84 Ibid., p. 495. 85 Ibid., pp. 494–97. 86 ‘Where the angel is, God Himself is present’ (CD III/3, p. 513). 87 CD III/3, p. 497. By emphasizing the word ‘executed’ Barth means to stress that the angels, as creatures, were not present in God’s eternal counsel, but rather form the ‘heavenly entourage’ that accompanies God in the economy of God’s work for and on earth. 88 See Barth’s lengthy excursus on this passage in CD III/3, pp. 463–76. 89 CD III/3, p. 500. 90 Ibid., p. 498. 91 Ibid., p. 500. 92 See also Part I.C above. 93 CD III/3, p. 550. 94 Ibid., pp. 502–03. 95 Ibid., p. 503. 96 ‘But what does it mean to praise God’s mercy? . . . It consists in the fact that men look and move willingly and readily to the One who comes, as earthly creatures who have appropriated what is said to them even though they know that they are in no position for what is said to come to them and actually to happen’ (CD III/3, p. 504). 97 CD III/3, p. 458. 98 Ibid., p. 496. 99 Ibid., pp. 458–59. 100 See Barth’s warnings against systematic preoccupation with the devil and demons in CD III/3, pp. 519–22. 101 CD III/1, p. 20. 102 CD III/3, p. 523. 103 Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. Philip G. Ziegler and Christina-Maria Bammel, Studies in Reformed Theology and History, New Series 10; Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005), p. 29.

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104 This is Timothy Gorringe’s phrase. See Gorringe, Karl Barth, p. 179. 105 This is in my view the main problem with G. C. Berkouwer’s well-known opposition to Barth on this point, in his The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction and Critical Appraisal(2nd edn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956). See Barth’s reply to Berkouwer’s criticisms in CD IV.3.1, pp. 173–80. 106 Gorringe, Karl Barth, p. 182. 107 Two noteworthy treatments of Barth’s angelology that note this inevitability are: Amy Plantigua Pauw, ‘Where Theologians Fear to Tread’, Modern Theology 16.1 (January 2000), pp. 39–59, and Robert Jenson’s sympathetic departure from Barth on this point, in his Systematic Theology: Volume 2, The Works of God (Oxford: OUP, 1999), pp. 131–32. 108 CD III/3, p. 523. 109 Thus my own judgement on Barth’s angelology itself is closest to Jenson’s, who seeks to retain many of Barth’s insights while recognizing that Barth does not adequately address the strong parallel between the surdity of demonic existence and the sinful human being. Jenson’s insight here merely poses a question, however fruitful, to the consistency of Barth’s rejection of fallen angels on the grounds of inexplicability alone; it does not reckon with the larger problem of how demonic ‘being’ can be affirmed as ‘created’ if its essence or most basic characteristic is that of nothingness. 110 See CD III/3, pp. 521–23; for commentary, see McDowell, Hope, p. 142. 111 CD III/3, pp. 458–59. 112 This theme is taken up in greater detail in the analysis of Barth’s ‘lordless powers’ in Chapter 3. 113 ‘The demons are the opponents of the heavenly ambassadors of God, as the latter are the champions of the kingdom of heaven and therefore of the kingdom of God on earth’ (CD III/3, p. 520). 114 CD III/3, p. 520. 115 Ibid., p. 458, emphasis added. 116 Ibid., pp. 524–25. 117 Ibid., p. 460 118 Ibid., p. 523. 119 This theme is more fully explored in Section 3.I.B. 120 CD III/3, p. 527. 121 See again the description of this third type in CD III/3, p. 458, as well as in CD III/3, pp. 527–29. 122 CD III/3, pp. 525–28. 123 Ibid., p. 310. 124 Ibid., pp. 305, 310–11. 125 I am indebted to Darren Kennedy’s discussion of Barth’s treatment of das Nichtige, in which he aptly summarizes: ‘Only the covenant partner can break the covenant’.

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127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

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Darren M. Kennedy, A Personalist Doctrine of Providence: Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics III.3 in Conversation with Philosophical Theology (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007). On sin as that which ‘opens the door for the invasion of [God’s] creation by nothingness’ (CD IV.2, p. 225), see Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, pp. 12–21. Echoing Heidegger, Barth speaks of the ‘play’ and ‘performance’ of nothingness as its (false) actuality. CD III/3, pp. 527–28. On the connection between humanity and the cosmos, see CD III/1, esp. pp. 18–19, 141–44, 152–55. CD III/3, p. 310. Ibid., pp. 527–28. Ibid., p. 530. The importance of noting this event as matter of ‘becoming’ for creaturely being comes into full view in Chapter 3. Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, pp. 19–20. CD III/3, p. 530. See ibid., pp. 458, 528. Barth, The Christian Life, p. 205, trans. note 1. The headings of the sub-sections are: (1) Revolt Against Disorder, (2) The Lordless Powers, (3) Thy Kingdom Come and (4) Fiat Iustitia. Barth, The Christian Life, p. 213. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 214–15. ‘In reality . . . they escape from him, they have already escaped from him. They are entities with their own right and dignity. They are long since alienated from him’ (Barth, The Christian Life, p. 214). Barth, The Christian Life, p. 215, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., pp. 214–15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 216. CD III/3, p. 458. Barth, The Christian Life, p. 216. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 216–17. Ibid., p. 217; see here Barth’s numerous references to the titles used in the NT epistles. Barth, The Christian Life, pp. 217–18. Barth cites Eph. 6.12 and Rom. 8.38f f. to the same effect in the typology outlined above. CD III/3, p. 458. Barth, The Christian Life, p. 218. Ibid., pp. 218–19.

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Chapter 2 1 See John H. Yoder, Karl Barth and the Problem of War, and Other Essays (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2003); and John H. Yoder, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 29 (April 1955), pp. 101–17. 2 I mention the influence of the Niebuhrs because H. Richard’s work, specifically but not exclusively Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951), can be read as an articulation of the major theological presuppositions within the realm of social ethics – a ‘realism’ about human culture, the capacities of ‘religion’ therein and a related concept of moral ‘responsibility’ – that Reinhold articulated in predominantly political terms. This is by no means to reduce the work of the one to the other, but simply to note the material overlap of their work as equally important to the modern discipline of Christian ethics. See John H. Yoder, ‘The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic’, in The Politics of Jesus, pp. 1–20 (2nd edn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), and ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, in John H. Yoder, Glenn Stassen and Diane Yeager, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture, pp. 31–91 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996). 3 For more on Yoder’s relation to Barth, historically and intellectually, see Mark Thiessen Nation, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), and Craig Carter, The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 61–90. 4 For an informed and sympathetic exposition of this position, see Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). 5 This account is set forth in John H. Yoder, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Realist” Critique’, in Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution, ch. 18 (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009). 6 See R. Niebuhr’s classic treatment of these issues in Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (rep. edn; Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2001). 7 It is important to note that Yoder did not equate ‘war’ with the sword-bearing function he thought states rightly bore (see Politics, ch. 10). In my view, Yoder’s position is closest to that which conceives of the sword-bearing function as exercising a police-like restraint of violence through politically accountable forms of coercion, rather than the militarist capacity for group preservation through war. It must be admitted, however, that from early on in his career (see John H. Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility (2nd edn; Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2003)) he conceived of even the former as a ‘pagan’ function which God in God’s providence used to maintain a relative form of social stability. The issue of state-power is further addressed below, and more fully in dialogue with Barth in Chapter 3.

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8 In R. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: Nisbet and Co., 1938), pp. 271–86. 9 R. Niebuhr, ‘The Kingdom is Not of This World’, in R. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History, pp. 285–86 (London: Nisbet and Co., 1938). 10 Niebuhr’s opposition of ‘moral’ and ‘political’ weapons here (in ‘The Kingdom is Not of This World’) maps onto his strong bifurcation of ‘love’ and ‘power’. 11 Each of the essays from Beyond Tragedy mentioned in this section exemplify Niebuhr’s view of Christ’s cross as defeat rather than victory. 12 R. Niebuhr, ‘The Suffering Servant and the Son of Man’, in R. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History, p. 180 (London: Nisbet and Co., 1938). 13 R. Niebuhr, ‘The Kingdom is Not of This World’, p. 282. 14 Gerald Schlabach discusses overlap between Augustine and Yoder in this respect in his ‘The Christian Witness in the Earthly City: John Howard Yoder as Augustinian Interlocutor’, in Peter Dula and Chris K. Huebner (eds), The New Yoder, ch. 2 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010). 15 This is seen clearly in Niebuhr’s ‘The Kingdom is Not of This World’. 16 This logic is at work in Niebuhr’s idealistic account of love’s ‘relevance’ to political justice, straightforwardly set forth in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper, 1935). Yoder refers to Niebuhr’s account of ‘the relevance of an impossible ideal’, noting that ‘all of this relevance’ – of the ideal of love’s double-critique (i.e. its formal-universal condemnation of ‘all human achievements’, and its aid in casuistical-particular judgements), and of the ‘prophetic relevance of the minority’ who represent this critique by political withdrawal – ‘can only be had at the cost of admitting first that Jesus’ way is not really for here and now’ (Politics, p. 107, n. 15). 17 Yoder, Politics, p. 107. 18 Yoder’s early essay attributes Niebuhr’s inability to attend to the full ethical import of ‘God’s redemption’ to his ‘anthropological slant’ – the fact that his ‘theology is first of all an anthropology, his doctrine of God first a doctrine of man’. In Yoder, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism’, p. 102. The resonances here with Barth’s critique of liberal theology as a form of anthropocentrism should not be missed. 19 R. Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist’, in Christianity and Power Politics, p. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1940). 20 Yoder had described this ‘dogmatic’ divorce as the last in his original list of six ways mainstream ethics sets aside Jesus’ normativity. The 1994 epilogue refers to the Niebuhr quote as ‘a refinement’ of that position (Politics, p. 18, n. 37). 21 That Yoder understands Niebuhr this way is evidenced by his claim, immediately following the reference to Niebuhr, that the ‘classical Lutheran tradition designates

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27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34 35

Notes as usus elenchticus the claim that the function of the law is less to tell us what we can do than to bring us to our knees because we cannot do it’ (Politics, p. 18). R. Niebuhr, ‘As Decievers, Yet True’, in R. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History, p. 19 (London: Nisbet and Co., 1938). Ibid., p. 23. Yoder, Politics, p. 105. Ibid., p. 107. The classic account of ‘politics as statecraft’ derives from Max Weber. See, for example, John Howard Yoder, ‘Biblical Realism and the Politics of Jesus’, in Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (eds), Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution, pp. 309–20 (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009). See Yoder, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism’; Yoder, Politics; Yoder, Christian Attitudes. Yoder, Christian Attitudes, p. 289. Ibid., p. 290. The formulation of the latter half of this sentence mirrors Yoder’s concerns in the final chapter of Politics, in which he takes the book of Revelation as his point of departure for a theological alternative to the assumptions concerning ‘the meaning and direction of history’ prevalent in ‘the social ethics of our time’ (p. 228). As discussed further below, Yoder viewed an account of the powers as integral to a properly theological conception of history. Published by G. F. Callenbach N.V. of Nijkerk, The Netherlands. I am referring to Barth’s discussion of ‘The Lordless Powers’ in The Christian Life. Though he does not mention Berkhof by name, Barth was obviously familiar with Christus en de Machten. In stark contrast to Barth’s apparent caution regarding ‘(de)mythologization’ in the early 1950s, his lectures on the ethics of reconciliation aver the need to speak of the powers in ‘consciously mythological terms’. Berkhof ’s recounting of Barth’s initial reactions to his work (in which Charlotte von Kirschbaum seems to have played a significant role) is described in the preface to the second English edition of Christ and the Powers (trans. John H. Yoder; Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977). Berkhof notes that Barth’s published lectures on the powers came ‘as a great surprise’, commenting that although the treatment ‘goes immeasurably deeper’ than his own, ‘it goes in the same direction’ (pp. 8–9). See also H. Berkhof, Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith (rev. edn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 214. Berkhof reports that Yoder discovered his work ‘just a few years’ after his meeting with Barth in 1955. Glen Stassen of Fuller Theological Seminary once suggested in personal conversation that Yoder learned Dutch in order to translate Christus en de Machten into English. Yoder, ‘Translator’s Preface’, Christ and the Powers, p. 6. Notable studies published before or around the same time as Berkhof ’s include: W. A. Visser’t Hooft, The Kingship of Christ (New York: Harper, 1948); E. Gordon

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37 38

39 40

41

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Rupp, Principalities and Powers: Studies in the Christian Conflict of History (London: Epworth, 1952); and G.B. Caird, Principalities and Powers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). With the publication of The Politics of Jesus in 1972, it seems clear that Yoder’s treatment of the powers (see ch. 8, ‘Christ and Power’), which borrows at length from Berkhof ’s work, was largely responsible for increased attention to Christ and the Powers, leading to a second edition of the English translation in 1977. In an uncharacteristically self-referential moment, Yoder admits: ‘Since I reviewed the work of MacGregor, Caird, Berkhof, and Rupp in my The Politics of Jesus . . . the theme of the “powers” has enjoyed considerable and growing scholarly support; there are interpreters who consider it odd but none who have offered serious grounds for ignoring these texts nor for understanding them otherwise’ (‘Is Not His Word Like a Fire? The Bible and Civil Turmoil’, in John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical, p. 87, n. 13 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997)). Yoder, ‘Christ and Power’, in Politics, p. 136. As suggested above, Yoder confessed admiration for the ‘audacity – or the simple faith’ of Berkhof ’s attempt to grasp ‘the inner logic and coherence’ of Paul’s thought, by assuming – contra the modern decree of irrelevance – that scripture could itself generate new understandings of how the powers were and are ‘involved in Christ’s work’ (Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 5–6). Yoder, Politics, p. 137, n. 2. Yoder takes scripture to be the practical norm by which the church in various times finds its moral compass and thus its historical continuity. It is that by and through which the community must continually ‘loop back’ to receive its original commission. John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UND Press, 1994), pp. 69–72; see also John Howard Yoder, Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method (ed. J. Alexander Sider and Stanley Hauerwas; Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002), pp. 369–76. Marva Dawn, whose doctoral work on Jacques Ellul’s concept of the powers was supervised by Yoder, helpfully summarizes the deterioration of ‘“Powers” language’ in post-Reformation theology, and the way in which renewed interest in the theme in early twentieth-century German theology was bound up with the need to move beyond reductively subjectivist (and/or ‘psychological’) accounts of evil, in the wake of the two World Wars. See Dawn, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 3–6. Dawn’s historical narration draws on W. A. Visser’t Hooft’s masterful survey, The Kingship of Christ (New York: Harper, 1948). Angus Paddison – whose essay, ‘Theological Exegesis and John Howard Yoder’, The Princeton Theological Review XIV.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 27–40, is the best account to date of Yoder’s exegesis – sufficiently demonstrates that for Yoder reading ‘by faith’ is (both practically and theoretically) a matter of the confession of Christ’s lordship.

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43 See Yoder, Politics, pp. viii–xi, 3–4, 12, 15–16, 54–55, 136; ‘The Use of the Bible in Theology’, in Robert K. Johnston (ed.), The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options, pp. 103–20 (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985); and To Hear the Word (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000). 44 Craig Carter rightly differentiates Yoder from proponents of contextually determined exegesis, precisely because of his proximity to Barth in granting that ‘there is a sense of stability at the base of the interpretive process that is rooted in the historical character of divine revelation’ (Carter, Politics of the Cross, pp. 73–74). I would, however, quibble with Carter’s formulation of Yoder’s position, insofar as he is thereby concerned to set limits to Yoder’s ‘historicism’. As Nathan Kerr has recently argued, Yoder’s account of the incarnation issues not in an anti-historicist ‘realism’, but rather in a theological ‘historicism’ in which Christ’s history stands in a ‘singular’ relation to all other histories. See Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Veritas Series. London: SCM, 2008), pp. 127–60. 45 For critical appreciation of Yoder’s exegesis in addition to A. Paddison, idem., see the comments by Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 239–53, and Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 42–51. 46 Among Berkhof and others, Yoder regularly cited the exegetical work of G. B. Caird, G. H. C. MacGregor, E. Gordon Rupp, Oscar Cullmann, Markus Barth and Walter Wink, as well as the theological developments of Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow. 47 The same can be said with respect to cosmological and religious structures (the stoicheia tou kosmou) in Galatians 3.23–4.10, and the multifaceted stoicheia of Colossians 2.14–23. 48 This is as good a place as any to note Yoder’s practice, which I follow, of denominating as ‘Pauline’ both the undisputed and disputed letters. See Yoder, Politics, p. 138, n. 3, p. 159, n. 26. 49 Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 16–17, 23–26. Although his argument parallels Berkhof ’s at several points – chiefly in finding an ‘overwhelming’ predominance of ‘abstract, impersonal’ terms in Paul’s descriptions of ‘the spiritual world’ – Chris Forbes makes a thorough case (against the dominant view) that the most abundant analogies to the Pauline conceptuality of ‘the powers’ reside in contemporary Hellenistic philosophy rather than pre-Christian apocalyptic. C. Forbes, ‘Paul’s Principalities and Powers: Demythologizing Apocalyptic?’, JSNT 82 (2001), pp. 61–88, and ‘Pauline Demonology and/or Cosmology? Principalities, Powers and the Elements of the World in Their Hellenistic Context’, JSNT 85 (2002), pp. 51–73. 50 See Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, p. 26. 51 Ibid. (emphasis added). 52 Ibid., p. 25.

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53 Berkhof is referring to the excursus from CD III/3 discussed at length above (ch. 1.B). Christ and the Powers, pp. 75–6, n. 8. 54 Ibid., p. 26. 55 Ibid., pp. 75–76, n. 8. 56 See Ibid., pp. 30–32. 57 To wit: ‘The positive emphasis of this present discussion on the relevance of the apostle’s powers language to the institutions and ideologies of our times need not imply the rejection of all the more literal meanings which the language of the demonic and of bondage can also have (occultism, astrology, possession, exorcism). That these two areas or two kinds of definitions of “the demonic” are quite distinct from one another would probably have been much less evident to Paul than it seems to be to some moderns’ (Politics, pp. 139–40, n. 4); See Politics, pp. 156–60, especially p. 156, n. 19 and p. 160, n. 28. 58 See Part 3.II. 59 Cullmann’s thesis has long had its critics, though the basic position – which posits a basic intertwining of the agency of ‘spiritual’ and ‘earthly’ rulers, immaterial and material agents – has enjoyed a certain predominance in the field at least since Walter Wink’s Naming the Powers. It is a stretch to posit that a spiritual-material unity-in-distinction is assumed throughout the Pauline corpus – see, for instance, the case of 1 Corinthians 2.6–8’s archonton (see Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians. Interpretation Commentaries (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997); G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997], pp. 103–04) – but such examples do not constitute an argument against the theological specification of the ways in which cosmic-historical powers are accorded spiritual significance through inclusion where it in fact exists. 60 Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, 19–22. 61 Ibid., 20. 62 Ibid., 20–21. 63 On the latter meaning of the powers, see G. H. van Kooten’s Cosmic Christology in Paul and the Pauline Schoo (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2003) which consistently translates the archai as ‘principles’. 64 See Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, p. 29. 65 Berkhof elaborates on his more Hellenistic, ‘non-apocalyptic’ view of the Pauline stoicheia in Christ, p. 74, n. 6. To reiterate a point made earlier, I take such judgements regarding contextual origin or literary genre to be informative but not theologically foundational. As will become clear throughout this chapter and the next, my own view is that the powers are best located within an ‘apocalyptic’-eschatological perspective, when the former term is defined principally as a mode of theological reflection upon God’s historic self-revelation. 66 Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 28–29. 67 See Part II.C below.

258 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76

77 78

79

80 81 82 83

Notes Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 28–29. Ibid., p. 32 Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, p. 33. Ibid., 22: ‘The demands of the present, fear for the future, state and society, life and death, tradition and morality – they are all our “guardians and trustees,” the forces which hold together the world and the life of men and preserve them from chaos.’ As noted above, Berkhof does not view these powers as ‘angelic’ (nor, thus, ‘demonic’ in the strictest sense), yet that is a judgement made not because his view confines the powers to either the physical cosmic ‘elements’ or to historical institutions or rulers, but because he finds major characteristics of the Jewish apocalyptic conception of ‘angelic powers’ absent in Paul: ‘The influence of the angelic powers on earth, which for the apocalypticists is but one aspect of their nature, is all that Paul is interested in’ (Christ and the Powers, 23). Ibid., 23–24. Ibid., 23. John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 87. John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 175. See Politics, p. 215, n. 2. Yoder, Politics, p. 157, n. 19. A clear and brief formulation of what such a claim means for Yoder can be found in his discussion of ‘Christ’s Lordship According to the New Testament Witness’, in John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (2nd edn; Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2002), pp. 8–11. This formulation, of course, betrays my sympathy with readers of Yoder – most notably Douglas Harink, but also recently Nathan Kerr – who understand his work as that of a fundamentally ‘Pauline theologian’, and who take Yoder’s various concerted efforts to bring the apostle’s ‘apocalyptic’ cosmology to bear upon a theological approach to sociopolitical and ethical questions seriously. J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), published the year of Yoder’s death, remains one of the most penetrating readings of Paul as an apocalyptic theologian. Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003), p. 118. Ibid. See Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 20–21, emphasis added. That Yoder not only read Berkhof this way, but sympathized with him in doing so, can be seen from the Translator’s Preface to Christ and the Powers: Berkhof provides an ‘up-to-date, yet Christian world view’ of political power and culture’s

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85 86 87 88 89

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‘structuredness’; his exegesis illuminates ‘the inner logic and coherence’ of Paul’s own thought world as ‘habitable and weather-tight . . . for modern man’ (6). Yoder had theological reasons for supporting a method in which theology, which has its own particular conceptual norms and authoritative sources, would in principle neither affirm nor deny the use of concepts and insights from other disciplines. For a good overview of Yoder’s position, see the essay ‘On Not Being Ashamed of the Gospel: Particularity, Pluralism and Validation’, Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992), pp. 285–300. Douglas Harink insightfully picks up on the wider implications of the following claim for Yoder’s more basic view of the church-world distinction: ‘To make “distinctiveness” a value criterion is to measure the truth value of meaning system A in terms of the other systems (whether B or C or N or X) that happen to be around, from which [A] is supposed to differ. That is a method mistake. Some of the neighboring systems may be very much like it. Some of them may be historically derived from it, which is true of most of the post-Christian value systems in the West. To ask that Christian thought be unique is nonsense. What we should ask of Christian statements is that they be specifically or specifiably Christian, i.e., true to kind, authentically representing their species. Whether a specifiably Christian statement is “distinctive” depends on the other guy’ (‘On Not Being Ashamed’, p. 294). See Harink, ‘Apocalpysis and Polis: Pauline Reflections on the Theological Politics of Yoder, Hauerwas and Milbank’, [www2. luthersem.edu/ctrf/Papers/1999_Harink.htm]. This phrase comes from Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 8; See Politics, pp. 136–9. Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 8. Yoder, Politics, pp. 136–38. Ibid., p. 136. Daniel Barber, ‘The Particularity of Jesus’. A comparison between Barber’s essay and Kerr’s chapter on Yoder in Christ shows that a good deal of the language of Kerr’s reading derives from Barber’s, although they are certainly reading Yoder in different directions. Both find in Yoder a certain ‘apocalyptic historicism’, but Barber is more interested in the critical theoretical avenues this method opens up, in distinction from Kerr’s more explicitly confessional theological aims. For more on the differences of their reading, see Barber’s review-essay on Kerr’s text: ‘Ideology and Apocalyptic’, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 10.3 (Summer 2010), pp. 167–72. Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic, p. 137. Ibid. Yoder, Politics, p. 138. Kerr, Christ History and Apocalyptic, p. 138. The quotes within Kerr’s passage are references to Yoder’s own language in Politics, particularly the final chapter’s treatment of christological apocalyptic.

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94 This is not to deny that for many strands of (post)modern thought, particularly those committed to some kind of materialist historicism, there can be no proper mode of transcendence, no legitimate appearance of any ‘transcendent’ agent or power at all. The description here is only meant to point up the fact that, common to both exousiology and the continental philosophical tradition (uniquely indebted to Nietzsche) of ‘ideology critique’ is the recognition that there are in history forces that ‘condition’ human being(s) and ‘order’ human action(s) in improper ways. However humanity and its history is conceived, ‘ideology’ in this sense names a kind of blindness to human-historical reality inseparable from the practice of violence. 95 Kerr also refers at key points to Yoder’s essay ‘Ethics and Eschatology’, Ex Auditu 6 (1990), pp. 119–28, which contrasts deterministic accounts of ‘Power and Causation’ with biblical apocalyptic. 96 Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 8, n. 1. Yoder is referencing Rupp’s Principalities and Powers (London: Epworth, 1952). 97 Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 8, n. 1. 98 Kerr, Christ History and Apocalyptic, pp. 138–39. 99 Ibid., p. 139. 100 Ibid., p. 142. 101 Yoder, Politics, pp. 140–42. 102 Ibid., 141. 103 John Howard Yoder, ‘Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State’, in ed. Donald Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, pp. 140–41 (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978). 104 Yoder, Politics, p. 142. 105 Ibid., p. 141. 106 Ibid. 107 Politics, p. 143, emphasis added. 108 There is an interesting contrast here with Walter Wink’s ambitious project, begun in Naming the Powers, which seeks to specify the powers as groups or types corresponding to the headings of the various biblical terms used. 109 Mark Thiessen Nation’s excellent biographical introduction to Yoder’s life and thought, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions, convincingly displays how a certain ecumenical commitment pervaded Yoder’s self-understanding and work. 110 Yoder speaks of structures that are ‘servants of the “divine purpose”’ in a somewhat convoluted passage in ‘Are You the One Who Is to Come?’, in John Howard Yoder, For the Nations, pp. 214–15. As will be stressed below, it is theologically significant that Yoder is here at least attempting to connect (albeit critically) social structures with doctrines of ‘the vocation’ or orders of creation. 111 That Yoder does not want either a spiritualist or materialist reductionism, but is rather interested in the nature of sociopolitical structures in a biblical-theological

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114 115 116

117 118 119 120

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cosmology, is clear from a close reading of ‘Christ and Power’; see especially pp. 139, n. 4; 153–55; 156, n. 19; 160–61. Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (The Powers, vol. 2; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), pp. 1–8. See Yoder’s review of Wink’s Unmasking the Powers, in TSF Bulletin (May–June 1987), 34–35; See also Marva Dawn’s criticisms of Wink on this point, which she also attributes to Yoder (Powers, pp. 15–19). Yoder suggests that the ‘major thesis’ of Wink’s work is the ‘greater adequacy of a neo-classical cosmology . . . to make sense of reality’, which contrasts with modern cosmology at certain points (e.g. Jung’s ‘non-rationalistic’ psychological structures) and commends it at others. The theological difference of Yoder’s exousiology is revealed by his suggestion that for the ‘world-view’ Wink enunciates, the ‘confession of Jesus’s normativeness is clear but not central’; Yoder is not interested in developing a ‘globally satisfying new cosmology’ which translates biblical myth into modern terms, but is rather asking how scripture’s testimony concerning the powers generates theological claims about the structures at the heart of modern society. Yoder, Politics, p. 160. Ibid., p. 143. Yoder enumerates these specific kinds of structures as an ‘inclusive vision’ of the various modern phenomena Berkhof defined as ‘structurally analagous’ to the biblical powers. Yoder, Politics, pp. 142–43; See Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 22, 25, 27. Yoder, Politics, p. 143. Ibid., pp. 145. Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, pp. 30–31; See Yoder, Politics, pp. 146–47. Yoder, Politics, p. 145. Daniel Barber’s essay ‘The Particularity of Jesus’ insightfully explicates this tension in Yoder between Jesus and the historical powers he faced. These themes are certainly operative in Yoder himself, although this is one point at which Kerr’s account of Christ’s ‘independence’ from totalizing systems of power clearly overlaps with Barber’s formulation. Yoder speaks of Christ ‘refuting the moral pretensions’ of the Jews and exposing the hypocrisy of the Romans’ ‘vaunted respect for law’, relativizing the authority of each as he proclaimed ‘a greater righteousness’ than the Pharisees and a ‘more universal’ vision of the social than the Pax Romana (Politics, 145). Yoder, Christian Witness, pp. 12, 74–77. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 82. The latter is set forth most explicitly in ch. 10 of Politics, pp. 193–211. By this I simply mean that while the logic of Yoder’s treatment of ‘the state’ as a fallen power is, in my view, consistent with the biblical narrative, it remains unclear precisely how the ‘sword-bearing function’ by which it exercises its

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Notes claimed authority should be understood. In Christian Witness, Yoder calls for an ‘analogical’ approach to the Christian articulation of moral standards for the state; ‘analogical’ here means that Christians never cease to understand true justice and power theologically, on the basis of God’s justification of the world in Christ – that he himself remains ‘our only standard of right and good’ (p. 59) – and thus that, from this particular norm, the form of Christian witness to the state (or to ‘non-Christian society’) will always be a matter of contextual critique and discernment, criticizing the particular violences in place, and discerning what less violent and more just alternatives might look like in practice. This set of claims is more fully argued in the discussion of the power of the state in Chapter 4. See especially the Introduction to Body Politics, pp. vi–ix. Yoder, Body Politics, p. 81 n. 5. Stanley Hauerwas’s work issues the constant refrain that the church is a political community in just this sense – namely, that it has a social structure integral to its existence, informed by the two convictions spelled out below. Another clear parallel in recent theology is found in Bernd Wannenwetsch’s Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (trans. Margaret Kohl; Oxford: OUP, 2004). Wannenwetsch nicely displays how this theology of political life shares much in common with Hannah Arendt’s political conceptuality. See especially pp. 5–13, 25–34. This latter phrase comes from Yoder’s essay ‘But We Do See Jesus’ (in The Priestly Kingdom, p. 54), where Yoder is discussing Christ’s lordship as the conceptual norm for apostolic proclamation in a specific missionary encounter. The conviction enunciated here regarding the sociopolitical shape of the gospel is to be found throughout Yoder’s work, but see especially, ‘The Original Revolution’, in The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971), pp. 13–33; Christian Witness, pp. 8–12, 16–25; and ‘Justification by Grace through Faith’, in Politics, pp. 212–27. Yoder, Politics, p. 201. John Howard Yoder, ‘The Anabaptist Shape of Liberation’, in Harry Loewen (ed.), Why I am a Mennonite: Essays on Mennonite Identity (Ontario: Herald Press, 1988), pp. 340–41. Yoder, Politics, p. 153. John Howard Yoder, ‘Jesus’ Life-Style Sermon and Prayer’, in Dieter T. Hessel (ed.), Social Themes of the Christian Year: A Commentary on the Lectionary, pp. 94–96 (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1983). Ibid., pp. 94–95. Here Yoder is discussing the implications of the parallel ‘between the renunciation of selfish economic security in Matthew 6 and the renunciation of violence toward the enemy in Matthew 5’. He notes that ‘the most entrenched defences of inequitable social systems’ are tied to visions of ‘legitimate

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self-concern’ and the concomitant need, expressed on behalf of those in power, to preserve the regnant social order, which benefits some at others’ expense. See ‘The Implications of the Jubilee’, in Politics, pp. 60–75. See especially Yoder’s essays: ‘Exodus and Exile: The Two Faces of Liberation’; ‘Politics: Liberating Images of Christ’ and ‘The Wider Setting of Liberation Theology’, The Review of Politics 52.2 (Spring 1990), pp. 285–96. The rationale for Yoder’s engagement with liberation theologies is discussed in Chapter 4. Yoder mentions the powers in connection with economic practices in the following essays: ‘The Conditions of Countercultural Credibility’; ‘Is There Such a Thing as Being Ready for the New Millenium?’; ‘Jesus’ Life-Style Sermon and Prayer’. Yoder, Politics, p. 161. Ibid., 144. Ibid., p. 229. See Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic, p. 138. Yoder, ‘God’s Weakness’, a sermon delivered to the First Baptist Church of Berkley, CA, 29 June 1986. For one assessment of the problems involved in any claim that Christ – or, more precisely, that God’s self-revelation in the ‘Christ’ made present through Christian scripture and tradition – somehow allows Christian faith to claim a stance ‘beyond ideology’, see Barber, ‘Ideology and Apocalyptic’. Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture’, pp. 31–89. Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. See, in this respect, Bernd Wannenwetsch’s critique of the modern ‘functional’ approach to Christian worship, in Political Worship, pp. 21–31. Thus one of Yoder’s deepest criticisms of Niebuhr’s articulation of cultural transformation is the insufficient Trinitarianism undergirding his position, which so distinguishes the persons and their respective roles in the economy that the ‘will’ of the Father functions to correct or balance out the judgment of the Son. See Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, pp. 61–65. Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, p. 70. When discussing ‘the social shape of moral judgment in the church’, Yoder has a paragraph on the powers under the heading ‘the lordship of Christ must be proclaimed as judgment on idolatry’ (Ibid., p. 76). Yoder, ‘Are You the One Who is to Come?’, pp. 214–15. Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, p. 70. Yoder, Politics, p. 141. Yoder, ‘The Otherness of the Church’, in The Royal Priesthood, pp. 56–57 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

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155 Ibid., p. 55. 156 John Howard Yoder, ‘Jesus – A Model of Radical Political Action’, Faith and Freedom 1.4 (December 1992), pp. 4–8. 157 The latter clause is taken from the heading in Politics, p. 140. 158 All quotations in this paragraph come from Politics, pp. 140–41. 159 ‘The word translated “subsist” in verse 17 has the same root as the modern world “system”’ (Politics, p. 140). 160 ‘Now we find them seeking to separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8.38); we find them ruling over the lives of those who live far from the love of God (Eph. 2.2); we find them holding us in servitude to their rules (Col. 2.20) . . . [and] under their tutelage (Gal. 4.3)’ (Politics, 141). 161 See Romans 12.2; 1 Corinthians 1.20; 2.6, 8; 3.18; 2 Corinthians 4.4, and parallel usages in Galatians 1.4; Ephesians 2.2; 1 Corinthians 3.19; 5.10; 7.31. 162 In a footnote in ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, Yoder notes: ‘The simply negative sense of kosmos which we are considering here is only fully at home in the Johannine letters. Wink calls it “the domination system”’ (Authentic Transformation, p. 280, n. 100). 163 See ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, in John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, pp. 108–09. The integral relation of critical exousiology and such an understanding of the church’s ‘confessional’ distinction from the still-rebellious world is further developed at the end of Chapter 3. 164 Yoder, ‘How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned’, p. 85; See For the Nations, p. 137; The Royal Priesthood, pp. 55–56. 165 Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, p. 55. 166 I am thinking primarily of Douglas Harink’s pioneering essay on ‘Yoder’s Pauline Theology’ in his Paul Among the Postliberals, pp. 105–49. The aforementioned chapter in Kerr’s Christ similarly treats Yoder as an ‘apocalyptic’ theologian. In line with both authors, it is fair to characterize ‘apocalyptic’ as a theological signification of a cluster of interwoven biblical concepts and thematic precedents – all hovering around the motif of God’s revelatory act in its historical becoming – rather than being primarily a genre description or literary ‘style’. For a helpful description of several of the ‘thematics’ to which theological apocalyptic gives precedence, see Philip G. Ziegler, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer – An Ethic of God’s Apocalypse?’, in Modern Theology 23.4 (October 2007), pp. 579–94, and Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic, pp. 12–16. For a more constructive doctrinal deployment of apocalyptic, see D. Harink, ‘Paul and Israel: An Apocalyptic Reading’, Pro Ecclesia XVI.4 (Fall 2007), pp. 359–80. 167 See Yoder, ‘The War of the Lamb’, in The Politics of Jesus, pp. 228–47; ‘Ethics and Eschatology’, Ex Auditu 6 (1990), pp. 119–28; ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the

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World’, in The Royal Priesthood, pp. 128–40; ‘Armaments and Eschatology’, Studies in Christian Ethics 1.1 (1988), pp. 43–61. Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals, pp. 120–21. Yoder, ‘Are You the One Who Is to Come?’, p. 210. Ibid., p. 215. Yoder, Body Politics, p. 39, emphasis mine. See Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals, pp. 119–20, 124, 138–39. Daniel Barber’s entire essay (‘The Particularity of Jesus’) problematizes the notion of given sociopolitical ‘orders’ through a philosophical alignment of such givens with Yoder’s fallen ‘powers’. An explicit contrast is mentioned on p. 66. The claim about ‘natural law’ is found in the 1994 Epilogue to ‘Christ and Power’: ‘It would not be too much to claim that the Pauline cosmology of the powers represents an alternative to the dominant (“Thomist”) vision of “natural law” as a more biblical way systematically to relate Christ and creation’ (Politics, p. 159). That chapter distinguishes the powers from created ‘orders’ on p. 144; other references and allusions are highlighted below. All quotations in this paragraph come from Politics, pp. 141–43. Yoder, Politics, p. 142. Barber helpfully interprets Yoder’s account of human ‘enslavement’ to the powers in terms of addiction (‘The Particularity of Jesus’, pp. 65–66). All quotations in this paragraph come from Yoder, Politics, p. 144. All quotations in this paragraph come from Yoder, ‘Are You the One Who Is to Come?’ pp. 209–15. This section is, significantly, entitled ‘Not Engineering, but Doxology’. All quotations in this paragraph come from Yoder, Christian Witness, pp. 74–83. Here I have in mind Yoder’s response to the potential objection that ‘it is also Christ who is the foundation of the knowability and bindingness of other [creational] standards’, whether as the ‘eternal Logos operative in creation and history’ distinct from the God-man, or in terms of a Jesus-derived ‘love ethic’ which, in differing historical contexts, calls for standards of justice and moral responsibilities substantively divorced from the New Testament’s portrayal of Christ’s own claim upon his disciples. See Yoder, Christian Witness, pp. 81–82. Carl Braaten’s essay, ‘God in Public Life: Rehabilitating the “Orders of Creations”’, First Things (December 1990), pp. 32–8, nicely illustrates the theological division Yoder’s exousiology resists, by arguing against Barth in favour of a theology of the ‘two Words’ or ‘divided Word’ of God in creation and redemption. Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals, p. 124. The logic of this prophetic ‘confrontation’, as it relates the Word’s self-expression to eschatology, history and ecclesiology, is spelled out in the next chapter.

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Chapter 3 1 John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1992), pp. 156–57, emphasis added. 2 CD §78.2, in Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), pp. 213–2. 3 CD IV/3, p. 332. 4 A classic and in many ways still exemplary worry that Barth’s dogmatics denigrates the creature’s ‘subjective’ or participatory role in the economy of salvation is found in Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), especially ch. 9. See also Colin Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (London: SCM Press, 1978). 5 CD IV/3, pp. 330–31. David Demson provides a helpful summary of this question and Barth’s answer in his ‘The Advantages and Limits of Regular and Irregular Dogmatics’, in Philip G. Zielger and Michelle J. Bartel (eds), Explorations in Christian Theology and Ethics: Essays in Conversation with Paul L. Lehmann (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 85–86. 6 CD IV/3, p. 329. 7 Ibid., p. 331. 8 See especially CD §71.4. For an overview, see Joseph Magina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). On the theme of divine-creaturely ‘correspondence’, see John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), especially ch. 6. 9 CD IV/3, p. 333. So Demson: ‘He wills to have the time and space . . . in which to enact his combat among us and so to reveal in this combat who he is and who we are. And he wills this time for us, a time during which he wills to enlist us in his struggle as his witnesses in our words, attitudes and actions. He wills us not merely to observe (in faith) his work, but to be active and free agents in its declaration’ (‘Advantages and Limits’, p. 87). 10 CD IV/3, p. 333. 11 Ibid., p. 181. 12 Ibid., pp. 694–700. 13 See Ibid, pp. 693–700. 14 Ibid., p. 695. 15 Ibid., pp. 695–96. 16 Ibid., p. 697. 17 CD III/3, p. 290. 18 Ibid., p. 289, n1. 19 Ibid., pp. 349–50.

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20 ‘When the creature crosses the frontier from the one side, and it is invaded from the other, nothingness achieves actuality in the world’ (Ibid., p. 350). 21 Ibid., p. 356, emphasis added. 22 ‘The creature sinned by thinking, speaking and acting in a way alien and adverse to grace and therefore without it’ (Ibid., 356). 23 ‘There is no capacity for nothingness in human nature and therefore in God’s creation, nor is there any freedom in this direction as willed, ordained and instituted by God. When man sinned he performed the impossible, not acting as a free agent but as a prisoner’ (Ibid.). 24 It should be noted that the logic of this entire exposition of the dominion of das Nichtige over God’s good creation hinges on a particular insight into the final unity of the liberating grace of God’s Word and its form as divine law (or Torah), which is for Barth conceptually grounded in the oneness of the verbum divini itself. In relation to my analysis here, see especially CD IV/3, pp. 369–71. This also undergirds the unity of dogmatics and ethics in Barth (see CD I/2, §22.3). 25 On the ‘eloquence’ of the Word, see John Webster, ‘Eloquent and Radiant’, in Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (London: T&T Clark, 1998), 125–50. 26 CD IV/3, §69.4. 27 Ibid., pp. 310–11. 28 Ibid., p. 315, emphasis added. 29 A significant elaboration of this insight in modern theology, which explicitly opposes Plato and St Paul, is found in Oscar Cullmann’s essay Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?: The Witness of the New Testament (NY: Macmillan, 1958); rep. edn (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000). 30 CD IV/3, p. 310; see also CD IV/3, pp. 924–26. 31 See CD III/3, pp. 296–302, 349–50. 32 Katherine Sonderegger has uniquely grasped and eloquently articulated this more-positive conception of ‘death’ as the creature’s divinely appointed end in connection with the doctrine of providence. Her account is certainly informed by yet lacking explicit reference to Barth. See her ‘The Doctrine of Providence’, in Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Zielger (eds), The Providence of God: Deus Habit Consilium (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2009), especially pp. 152–53. 33 CD IV/3, pp. 315–17. 34 Ibid., p. 8. 35 See Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), pp. 55–56. 36 CD IV/3, pp. 924–26. 37 On this topic, see Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth, (rev. edn; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

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38 On this latter point, see Ingolf Dalferth, ‘Karl Barth’s Eschatological Realism’, in Stephen W. Sykes, Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 14–45, especially pp. 21–22. 39 For example, Barth describes in a counterfactual register what would have occurred if God had decided to make Easter day immediately the ‘last day’, thus ‘collapsing’ the present and coming aeons: ‘This might have been very wonderful if He had so willed it. But there is no doubt that He would not then have willed a world sharing in His work. . . . Or He would have willed the world, the community and ourselves only as objects and spectators of His activity, majestically ignoring the freedom of the creature for any activity of its own’ (CD IV/3.1, pp. 332–32, emphasis added). See Neder, Participation, pp. 44–46, 54–57. 40 Neder, Participation, pp. 44–47, 55. 41 CD IV/3.1, p. 280, emphasis added. 42 CD IV/3, pp. 707–09. 43 It should be kept in mind that my analytical procedure here follows the movement of Barth’s own account – ‘The Lordless Powers’ section (§78.2, published in The Christian Life) is a part of the concluding fragments of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, the former parts of which have guided my treatment so far. 44 CD IV/3, §70.1, emphasis added. 45 Ibid., pp. 380–81. 46 Barth discusses the internal coherence of the freedom of these two acts in CD IV/3, 381–83. 47 CD IV/3, p. 380. 48 Ibid., p. 372. 49 Ibid., p. 373, emphasis added. 50 Barth describes Christ’s prophetic work as ‘reconciliation in its transition to consummation in redemption’ (CD IV/3.1, p. 263). 51 See the introduction to this chapter. 52 This is David Haddorff ’s apt way of putting the question. See his Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for a World at Risk (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), pp. 294–99. 53 CD IV/3, §78. 54 Barth, Christian Life, p. 205. 55 Ibid., p. 213. 56 ‘In the thought, speech, and action demanded of Christians . . . a revolt [occurs] that has positive meaning and inner necessity because another possibility stands with such splendour before the eyes of the rebels that they cannot refrain from affirming and grasping it and entering into battle for its actualization. . . . In word and deed they say No here because they may and will say Yes there’ (Ibid., p. 207). 57 Barth, Christian Life, p. 212.

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Ibid., p. 213, emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid. ‘The “You will be like God” (Gen. 3.5), “you will be your own lords and masters,” was from the very first the promise he thought he should grasp when he started on this path’ (Barth, Christian Life, p. 214). Ibid., p. 214. ‘To be sure, these are nothing but man’s own abilities loaned to his creaturely nature and peculiar to it’ ( Ibid., p. 215). ‘If we are to see the disorder and unrighteousness which corrupt human life and fellowship, we must not only not deny, but consider very seriously, not merely man’s rebellion against God, but also the rebellion unleashed by it, that of human abilities, exalting themselves as lordless forces, against man himself ’ (Ibid., emphasis added). Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., pp. 215–16. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., p. 213. Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2010), p. 56. McKenny is describing Barth’s use of the concept of sanctification in his 1928–29 lectures on Ethics, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury, 1981), although it is still clearly operative in Barth’s doctrine and ethics of reconciliation, as shown by my account of Barth’s understanding of the tasks of ‘witness’ and subjective ‘correspondence’ as determinative of creaturely life in Christ. CD III/3, p. 72. On the mythologization of the ‘devil and demons’, see Part 1.II.B. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004), pp. 115–18. Haddorff, Christian Ethics, pp. 274–75. Barth, Christian Life, pp. 227–29; see Haddorff, Christian Ethics, p. 280. Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. 265. Barth, Christian Life, pp. 227–28, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 228. Gorringe incisively picks up on the connection Barth implicitly makes between several of the chthonic forces and the workings of ‘capital’, which goes to show how intuitively Barth saw the practical interrelation of spiritual and chthonic powers, even if he did (or could) not explicate the material interconnection. See Gorringe, Karl Barth, pp. 265–66. Jacques Ellul, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation (trans. George W. Schreiner; New York: Seabury Press, 1977), p. 152. See CD III/1, §41.2. See CD III/4, §54, ‘Freedom in Fellowship’.

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Notes Yoder, Body Politics, p. 146. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 157. See Ibid., ch. 10. Ibid., pp. 144–45. What I am calling the ‘distinction’ of Jesus’ humanity is expressed by Daniel Barber and subsequently (but, finally, for different reasons) by Nate Kerr in terms of his historical ‘singularity’. Barber, ‘The Time of the Kingdom’; Kerr, Christ. Yoder, Politics, p. 145. Mark Nation provides details of Yoder’s graduate coursework at the University of Basel, part of which was undertaken with Cullmann, in his John Howard Yoder, p. 18, n. 69. For example, Douglas Moo refers to the ‘Barth-Cullmann approach’ to the ‘authorities’ of Romans 13 (Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 796, n. 22). See also G. C. Berkouwer’s discussion of the ‘Barth-Cullmann theory’ of the state, in his The Providence of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), pp. 111–17. The most significant Cullmann texts are Christ and Time (London: SCM, 1951), especially pp. 191–210; ‘The Kingship of Christ and the Church in the New Testament’, in The Early Church, ed. A. J. B. Higgins (London: SCM, 1956), pp. 103–37; and The State in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1957). Cullmann refers to M. Dibelius’s Die Geisterwelt im Glauben des Paulus (1909) and the development of its thesis in the 1930s by H. Schlier, K. L. Schmidt and especially G. Dehn (Christ and Time, pp. 205–06; see The State in the New Testament, p. 1, n. 1). As noted above, Barth’s argument in Church and State refers principally to Schlier, Schmidt and Dehn. I am referring to the first of two essays later published as Discipleship as Political Responsibility (2nd edn; Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2003), pp. 19–20. Both essays were originally lectures delivered in Germany in 1957, first appearing in book form as Nachfolge Christi als Gestalt politischer Verantwortung (Basel: Agape Verlag, 1964). In Cullmann, The Early Church, pp. 105–09. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 237–38. For Thiselton’s interpetation of the archonton tou ainos toutou in 1 Corinthians 2.6, 8 as ‘the rulers of this world order’, see his The First Epistle to the Corinthians, pp. 165, 231–32. Cullmann, Christ and Time, p. 192; see also Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, p. 237. Thiselton draws most of these strands together in explanation of how Cullmann understands the archontes of 1 Corinthians 2 to be ‘both supernatural and political’. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, pp. 237–38.

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97 Cullmann, Christ and Time, pp. 152–54. 98 Cullmann, ‘The Kingship of Christ in the Church and the NT’, p. 105. 99 Other New Testament references to this psalm occur in: Romans 8.34; Colossians 3.1; Ephesians 1.20; Hebrews 1.3, 8.1, 10.13; 1 Peter 3.22; Acts 2.34, 5.31, 7.55; Revelation 3.21; Matthew 22.44, 26.64; Mark 12.36, 14.62, 16.19; Luke 20.42, 22.69. 100 See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org/ ccel/schaff/anf01.toc.html, V, 24, 1. 101 Cullmann, Christ and Time, p. 196. 102 Ibid., p. 197. 103 On this latter ‘dualistic’ error, see Cullmann’s critique of G. Kittel’s interpretation from Christus und Imperator, Das Urteil der ersten Christen über den Staat (1931). Christ and Time, pp. 194–95, 197–200, 206; see also ‘The Kingship of Christ in the Church and the NT’. 104 Cullmann, ‘The Kingship of Christ in the Church and the NT’, p. 116. 105 Ibid., p. 114. 106 Ibid., p. 116. 107 See Ibid., p. 113, n. 18. 108 Ibid., pp. 113–16. 109 Yoder, ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’, in The Original Revolution, p. 55; see Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 9. 110 Ibid. 111 Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 9. 112 Yoder, ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’, p. 58. 113 John Howard Yoder, ‘Are You the One Who Is to Come?’, in The Royal Priesthood, p. 216. 114 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, in The Royal Priesthood, p. 129. 115 Ibid. 116 See Yoder’s comments about his use of ‘the Apocalypse’ as a ‘mode of discourse’, in ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, pp. 129–30. See also ‘Armaments and Eschatology’, Studies in Christian Ethics 1 (1988), pp. 43–61, and ‘Ethics and Ecshatology’, Ex Auditu 6 (1990), pp. 119–28. 117 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 131. 118 Ibid. 119 On the notion of a Christian political ethic oriented by the eschatological promise of the end of the ekklesia’s separation from the ‘non-confessing’ world, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Representing the Absent in the City: Prolegomena to a Negative Political Theology According to Revelation 21’, in L. G. Jones, Reinhard Hütter and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell (eds), God, Truth, and Witness. Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, pp. 167–92 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press 2005). Another helpful reading of Yoder along these lines is Daniel Barber’s ‘Epistemological Violence’, which emphasizes the need to conceive Yoder’s church as a particular

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123 124 125

126 127 128 129

Notes form of ‘secularity’. Barber rightly links the secularity of Yoder’s church to his insight, increasing in emphasis throughout his career, that the normative form of ecclesial existence is not ‘counter-cultural’ but diasporic. See John Howard Yoder ‘See How They Go With Their Face to the Sun’, in John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, pp. 51–78. See Yoder, Body Politics, and ‘Sacrament as Social Process’, in John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, pp. 359–73. This way of putting it is Chris Huebner’s (see his ‘Unhandling History: Anti-Theory, Ethics, and the Practice of Witness’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 2002). It refers to Yoder’s own claims about the managerial rationality of modern social ethics, in which ‘part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right “handle” by which one can “get a hold on” the course of history and move it in the right direction’ (Yoder, Body Politics, p. 228). See Kerr, Christ, p. 138, and J. Alexander Sider, ‘Memory in the Politics of Forgiveness’, in Peter Dula and Chris K. Huebner (eds), The New Yoder, pp. 168–70 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010). For several of Yoder’s claims about the historical ties between the development of Western democracies and Christian witness, see his ‘Response of an Amateur Historian and a Religious Citizen’, Journal of Law and Religion, 416 (1989), p. 415; Priestly Kingdom, pp. 166–68; Royal Priesthood, pp. 135–36, 205–06, 368. For Yoder’s more general argument about the community’s own sociopolitical fidelity as a way of ‘modelling’ creative possibilities for the betterment of its host society, see Royal Priesthood, chs. 1–2, and Body Politics. Yoder, ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’, p. 55. Ibid., p. 179, n. 3. ‘It is not going too far to affirm that the new thing revealed in Christ was this attitude to the old aeon . . . The cross was not in itself a new revelation; Isaiah 53 foresaw already the path which the Servant of Jahweh would have to tread. Nor was the resurrection essentially new; God’s victory over evil had been affirmed, by definition one might say, from the beginning. Nor was the selection of a faithful remnant a new idea. What was centrally new about Christ was that these ideas became incarnate’. Yoder, ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’, pp. 57–58. Yoder’s terminology here – ‘ideas’ becoming incarnate – is also too dogmatically unrefined; the point, however, clearly revolves around Jesus’ embodiment and revelation of God’s own ‘will and work’ on behalf of humankind. John Howard Yoder, ‘Christ the Hope of the World’, in The Royal Priesthood, pp. 194–95. See CD IV/3.2, especially §72. Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 137. Kerr, Christ, pp. 141–42.

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130 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 137. 131 I will say more about Yoder’s linking Constantinian power(s) with a certain form of moral ‘calculation’ of cause in Chapter 4. 132 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 132. 133 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 133. 134 See Yoder, Christian Witness, pp. 9–10. 135 ‘The mastery of God over history is not a new idea in the New Testament. . . . the Old Testament knew that the Lord is the master of history; the New Testament adds that Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 10). See also Christian Witness, p. 11; and ‘If Christ is Truly Lord’, pp. 57–60. 136 Yoder, Christian Witness, p. 10. 137 Ibid., p. 12. 138 The conference was held in Puidox, Switzerland, 15–19 August 1955. Yoder was involved in organizing the conference, which stemmed out of discussion from the World Council of Churches; his presentation was preceded by papers from thinkers Ernst Wolf and Jean Lasserre. The papers are collected in Donald Durnbaugh (ed.), On Earth Peace: Discussions on War/Peace Issues Between Friends, Mennonites, Brethren, and European Churches, 1935–75 (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press). 139 John Howard Yoder, ‘The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State’, in Donald Durnbaugh (ed.), On Earth Peace, pp. 136–37. 140 John Howard Yoder, ‘The Otherness of the Church’, in The Royal Priesthood, p. 56. 141 Almost three decades after The Christian Witness to the State, Yoder articulated the same kind of posture, grounded in the same basic convictions but in a more nuanced way, under the heading of ‘Gospel Realism’. See ‘The Christian Case for Democracy’, in John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom, pp. 155–66. 142 Yoder, Christian Witness, pp. 33–34, emphasis added. 143 ‘Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain’ (Gal. 4.6–11). 144 Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals, p. 121. 145 The phrase ‘spiritual historicity’ is from Yoder’s essay ‘Exodus and Exile’: ‘So let us abandon the spiritual/secular polarity and ask what kind of spiritual historicity reflects the shape of liberating grace’ (John Howard Yoder, ‘Exodus and Exile: The Two Faces of Liberation’, Crosscurrents (Fall 1973), p. 308).

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146 It is important to distinguish here, precisely along the lines of Barth’s distinction of creation’s intrinsic and good Schattenseite from the power of das Nichtige, between that which actually threatens creation’s good and proper existence – that is, death as the ‘Last Enemy’ that arises and condemns in conjunction with human sin and the correlative corruption of creation – and death simply as a feature of our shared human mortality. 147 Demson, ‘The Advantages and Limits of Regular and Irregular Dogmatics’, in Philip G. Ziegler and Michelle J. Bartel (eds), Explorations in Christian Theology and Ethics: Essays in Conversation with Paul L. Lehmann, p. 87 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). 148 Ibid. 149 This polarity comes to the fore most explicitly in §77.2, ‘The Known and Unknown God’. 150 Barth, Christian Life, pp. 115–16. 151 See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984), pp. 16–17. On Barth’s relation to Lindbeck and ‘postliberalism’ more generally, see Paul J. DeHart’s The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 152 See Eberhard Busch’s excellent survey of this theme, in The Great Passion, ch. 5. 153 CD IV/3.1, pp. 183–84. 154 Barth, Christian Life, p. 131, emphasis added. 155 John Howard Yoder, ‘A Theological Critique of Violence’, in Glen Stassen, Mark Thiessen Nation and Matt Hamsher (eds.), The War of the Lamb, p. 27 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 156 John Howard Yoder, ‘Why Eccleisology is Social Ethics’, in The Royal Priesthood, pp. 102–26. 157 Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in R. G. Smith (ed.) Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946–52, pp. 15–50 (London: SCM, 1954). 158 Yoder, ‘Why Eccleisology is Social Ethics’, pp. 108–09, emphasis added. 159 Ibid., p. 108. 160 Ibid., p. 110. 161 See Yoder’s linking of the ‘radical reformation’ stance of the church (semper reformanda) to its continual ‘looping back’ to the call of Christ through scripture, in The Priestly Kingdom, p. 17. 162 John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution, p. 18. 163 Yoder, ‘Why Eccleisology is Social Ethics’, p. 110. 164 Ibid., p. 123. 165 Ibid., p. 121. 166 On the inherent ‘contextualization’ of the church’s confession, see ibid., pp. 121–22.

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167 Ibid., p. 119. 168 Yoder, ‘To Serve Our God and Rule the World’, p. 135. 169 John Howard Yoder, ‘On Not Being Ashamed of the Gospel: Particularity, Pluralism and Validation’, Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992), p. 294; see Douglas Harink, ‘Apocalypsis and Polis: Pauline Reflections on the Theological Politics of Yoder, Hauerwas and Milbank’, www2.luthersem.edu/ctrf/Papers/1999_ Harink.htm 170 While he does not develop his reading in this theological direction, Daniel Barber provides an instructive discussion of the ‘secularity’ of Yoder’s gospel, in his essay ‘Epistemological Violence’. 171 Again, this is not to deny the significance of any such ‘means’ of confessional awareness. 172 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (trans. John Bowden; Fontana Library edn; London: Collins, 1971). 173 On this latter point, see Barth’s exquisite excursus on Job, in CD IV/2, pp. 113–16. 174 Demson, ‘Advantages and Limits’, p. 95. 175 Haddorff, Christian Ethics, p. 280. 176 Barth, Christian Life, pp. 214–15.

Chapter 4 1 See Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), pp. 219–24. 2 Ibid., p. 220. All quotations in the following paragraphs are from Barth’s account of ‘Leviathan’ in Christian Life, pp. 219–22. 3 Barth, CD III/3, p. 458. 4 Barth, Christian Life, p. 221. 5 Ibid., p. 221. 6 David Haddorff, Christian Ethics as Witness, p. 281. 7 Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906–68 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 21. All quotes in the following paragraph are from this page. 8 Ibid., p. 22. 9 This is Barth’s description of the state in Church and State. ‘Church Classics Series’ edition. (Greenville, SC: Smyth and Helwys, 1991); see Part 1.I. 10 The exousiological vision of this 1946 essay might therefore be seen as standing somewhere ‘between’ the strong angelic-demonic emphasis on the ‘spiritual’ dynamics of creaturely power in ‘Justification and Justice’ (Church and State, 1938), and Barth’s casting this relation explicitly in terms of divine-human correspondence in the ethics of reconciliation fragments (circa 1960).

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11 Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, pp. 31–2. 12 Ibid., p. 21. 13 One may recall, at this point, our opening Chapter 1 with the theme of ecclesial and political ‘service’ of God in Barth’s Gifford lectures of 1937–38. On this text and theme, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, especially pp. 28–31. 14 Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 22, emphasis added. 15 Robert E. Hood, ‘Karl Barth’s Christological Basis for the State and Political Praxis’, pp. 226, 228. 16 For biographical context on these matters, see Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906–68 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); and Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). 17 Barth, ‘The Christian Community in the Midst of Political Change’, in Against the Stream, p. 81, emphasis added. 18 Barth ‘Christian/Civil Community’, pp. 28–9. 19 Barth, ‘Christian Community in the Midst’, p. 80. 20 Barth, Christian Life, p. 221. 21 Barth, ‘Christian Community in the Midst’, p. 81. 22 Ibid. 23 Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 26. 24 Barth, Christian Life, p. 212. 25 Barth, Church and State, p. 21. 26 Ibid., emphasis added. 27 ‘For it is in this sentence of acquittal (which [Pilate] did not pronounce), that his duty lies. If he had done so the State would have shown its true face. . . . the “demonic” State . . . is a State which at the decisive moment fails to be true to itself ’ (Church and State, pp. 19–21). 28 Ibid., p. 17. 29 Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 22. 30 Hood, ‘Barth’s Basis for the State’, pp. 227–28, emphasis added. 31 Hood, ‘Barth’s Basis for the State’, p. 228, emphasis added. 32 See Part 3.III above. 33 Barth, Christian Life, p. 215. 34 Ibid., emphasis added. 35 See Part 3.I.A above. 36 Barth, Christian Life, p. 215, emphasis added. 37 To be clear, this notion that either divine or creaturely powers are ‘good in themselves’ is not meant in a generic metaphysical sense; we are not speaking of dehistoricized ‘essences’ that are at any stage unconditioned by their modes of relation, but of particular historical realities that are, in their concrete historicity, most appropriately conceived as ‘exponents of Christ’s kingdom’.

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38 Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 22. 39 ‘It [the church] trusts and obeys no political system or reality but the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things (Heb. I.3; Barmen Thesis No. 5), including all political things’. Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 26. 40 Barth, Christian Life, p. 216. 41 Barth, ‘Christian Community in the Midst’, p. 80. 42 Barth, Christian Life, pp. 219–20. 43 Ibid., p. 220. 44 For an overview, see Haddorff, Christian Ethics, pp. 370–73. 45 John Howard Yoder, ‘The Disavowal of Constantine’, in The Royal Priesthood, p. 245. 46 Craig Carter, The Politics of the Cross, p. 155. See Michael Cartwright, ‘Radical Reform, Radical Catholicity’, in John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, p. 10–14; Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), pp. 11, 177–78, 310–17. 47 John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom. 48 John Howard Yoder, For the Nations, p. 9, n. 21. 49 John Howard Yoder, ‘The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics’, in The Priestly Kingdom, p. 135. 50 As to the maturation of Yoder’s theology of state power, discussed further below, it suffices to note the significant differences in understanding and tone between early essays such as Discipleship as Political Responsibility – whose title is indeed an accurate reflection of the continuity in Yoder’s work, but which all but maps the church/state binary onto the church/world distinction – and the infinitely more nuanced position developed in later works such as The Priestly Kingdom and For the Nations. Richard Bourne’s treatment of Yoder’s theology of state power, precisely because it so incisively picks up on the exousiological rationale being traced in this thesis, provides the best discussion to date. See Richard Bourne, Seek the Peace of the City: Christian Political Criticism as Public, Realist, and Transformative (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), ch. 6, especially pp. 224–31. 51 A thorough and, in my view, devastating critique of Leithart’s take on Yoder is found in John Nugent, ‘“Trial and Error”: A Yoderian Rejoinder to Leithart’s Defending Constantine’, The Englewood Review of Books, 3.46 http://erb.kingdomnow. org/featured-a-yoderian-rejoinder-to-leitharts-defending-constantine-vol-3–46/. 52 See Parts 3.II and 3.III. 53 These various ‘isms’ are most clearly woven together in Yoder’s essay ‘Ethics and Eschatology’. See also ‘The War of the Lamb’, in Politics, and ‘Armaments and Eschatology’. 54 John Howard Yoder, ‘Ethics and Eschatology’, Ex Auditu, 6 (1990), p. 122. 55 Yoder, ‘Constantinian Sources’, p. 136. 56 Yoder, ‘Ethics and Eschatology’, p. 121.

278 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68 69 70

71 72

73 74 75 76 77

Notes John Howard Yoder, ‘The War of the Lamb’, in The Politics of Jesus, p. 229. Ibid. Bourne, Seek the Peace of the City, pp. 216–25. For a (typical) mainstream criticism of Barth’s theology of state-power, which faults it specifically for adopting precisely the kind of christological specification of divine ‘providential’ power as I am developing here with Yoder, see G. C. Berkouwer’s discussion in his The Providence of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952). Barth, ‘Christian/Civil Community’, p. 18. Ibid., p. 19, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 16. This quote is from CD II/1, pp. 386–87. Todd Cioffi, ‘Karl Barth and the Varieties of Democracy’, in Daniel Migliore (ed.), Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, p. 129 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Barth says clearly, ‘Awareness of God is one thing. Being in God quite another’. The point he is making here is, of course, that the church needs the state precisely because . . . Christian and civil communities are both in God. But the claim is that much clearer that, even despite the fact that faith can be ‘cold’ and the church ‘dead’ . . . ‘awareness’ of God’s rule in Christ is still conceived as ‘internal’ to the church in a way that is in principle closed off from the world. Todd Cioffi, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 133. Bourne, Seek the Peace of the City, pp. 216–25. See, for instance, Yoder’s claims about the church’s being the ‘firstfruits’ of the Spirit’s eschatological promise, in relation to its enactment of a ‘paradigmatic’ form of sociopolitcal belonging, in ‘The New Humanity as Pulpit and Paradigm’, ch. 2 in For the Nations; Politics, p. 145. Hauerwas’s signal claim along these lines is that ‘The primary social task of the church is to be itself ’. Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader, John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (eds) (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), pp. 113; 553. Bourne, Seek the Peace of the City, p. 223. I am here paraphrasing Rowan Williams. See the conclusion to his ‘Barth, War and the State’, in Nigel Biggar (ed.), Reckoning with Barth (London & Oxford: Mowbray, 1988), pp. 170–90. Barth, Christian Life, p. 222. Ibid. Ibid., 223. Ibid. ‘The thing that makes him this when he has resources under his control is no longer measured in terms of barns and their contents, or these only insofar as they have a monetary sale value’ (ibid.).

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78 Busch, Great Passion, pp. 33, 156–9; see also Busch, ‘Indissoluble Unity: Barth’s position on the Jews during the Hitler Era’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), For the Sake of the World, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 57. 79 Kathryn Tanner, ‘Barth and the Economy of Grace’, in Daniel Migliore (ed.), Commanding Grace, p. 183. 80 Published in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). 81 Tanner, ‘Barth and the Economy’, pp. 185–86. 82 Ibid., p. 183. 83 Ibid., p. 184. 84 Whether or not there is a noteworthy shift from the ‘Red Pastor’ of Safenwil and the Romans era, to the self-confident Reformed dogmatician of the CD, is, of course, a matter of debate. For a host of questions on the political and economic dimensions of this debate, see Hunsinger, Karl Barth and Radical Politics. 85 Christopher R. J., Holmes, ‘Karl Barth on the Economy: In Dialogue with Kathryn Tanner’, in Daniel Migliore (ed.), Commanding Grace, pp. 198–215. 86 Holmes, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 199. 87 Ibid., p. 200. 88 Ibid., p. 202. 89 Ibid., p. 204; See CD II/1, p. 46. 90 This is the problem treated above in Chapter 3’s critique of Barth’s ‘subjective knowledge’; I return to it in direct relation to the problem of naming and resisting Mammon in Chapter 5. 91 Holmes, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 214, emphasis added. 92 John Howard Yoder, ‘Exodus and Exile: The Two Faces of Liberation’, Crosscurrents (Fall 1973), p. 308. 93 John Howard Yoder, ‘The Implications of the Jubliee’, in The Politics of Jesus, pp. 60–75. Yoder notes that his reading is ‘adapted freely, with the author’s permission’, from Andre Trocme’s Jésu-Christ et la revolution non-violente (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1961). 94 Yoder says they are not just ‘part’ of Jesus’ teaching, but stand ‘even at the center of his theology’, Politics, p. 61. 95 Yoder, Politics, p. 62. Yoder notes that the noun form aphesis is the Septuagint’s term for the jubilee (p. 62, n. 5). 96 Yoder, Politics, p. 64. 97 Yoder, ‘Politics: Liberating Images of Christ’, in The War of the Lamb, p. 169. 98 Yoder, ‘Politics: Liberating Images’, p. 170. 99 Apart from the ‘Politics’ essay just cited, Yoder’s most explicit treatments of liberation theologies are found in: ‘Exodus and Exile: The Two Faces of Liberation’, ‘The Wider Setting of Liberation Theology’ and especially ‘Ecumenical Theologies of Revolution and Liberation’, in Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (eds),

280

100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110

Notes Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), pp. 369–92. Yoder, ‘Politics: Liberating Images’, p. 170. Ibid. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., pp. 171–72. Yoder, ‘Wider Setting’, pp. 286–87. See Yoder, ‘Wider Setting’, p. 294, n. 10. Yoder comments here on the theological ‘sobreity’ regarding political liberation gained in Minjung theology, ‘the Asian counterpart of liberation theology’: ‘Minjung thought counts less on the achievement of liberation within a manageable future. Thus it affirms more simply than does Latin [American] liberation theology God’s identification with the victims, in their capacity as victims, less than as bearers of the promise of a new order’. Yoder, ‘Wider Setting’, p. 287. On this point see Yoder, Christian Attitudes, pp. 378–81. See Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, Chomsky vs. Foucault: A Debate on Human Nature (New York: The New Press, 2006), pp. 38–41. Ibid., p. 41. Video of this conversation may be found on the internet. This line is inspired by Wendell Berry’s writing of God’s kingdom as ‘The Great Economy’ in his essay ‘Two Economies’, in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010), pp. 115–38. Berry’s description of the divine kingdom as a ‘Great Economy’ overlaps in important respects with my account, especially in his linking the ‘transcendence’ of eschatological reality to its inclusive mode of ordering specific relations: ‘. . . everything in the Kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else in it; that is to say, the Kingdom of God is orderly. . . . [T]hough we cannot produce a complete or even adequate description of this order, several penalties are in store for us if we presume upon it or violate it’ (p. 115).

Chapter 5 1 The English title (Money and Power) is not exact but nevertheless apropos. Jacques Ellul, Money and Power, Jacques Ellul Reprint Series (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009). 2 Marva Dawn, The Concept of ‘the Principalities and Powers’ in the Works of Jacques Ellul, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 1992), p. 104. 3 Ellul, Money, p. 76. One may note the clear parallel of this language with Walter Wink’s account of the powers as the ‘inner’ spiritual power expressed in material and social phenomena. See, for example, Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (The Powers, vol. 2; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).

Notes 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26

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Ellul, Money, pp. 75–76. Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 154. Ibid. Ibid. Ellul, Money, p. 78. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 166. William Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society: A Christian View of American in Crisis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), p. 40. Ibid. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid. Karl Barth, ‘Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics, p. 31. Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, p. 31. Beyond the essay treated above (‘Barth and the Economy of Grace’), see in this respect Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). Holmes, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 206. Ibid. It should be said that Holmes’s response to Tanner somewhat rather straightforwardly misses the mark to the extent that it assumes the theological principles and correlative social prescriptions Tanner seeks to draw out of dogmatic reflection are not context-dependent. On the first page of Economy of Grace, Tanner reinforces the point (made earlier in her Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997]), that ‘theological ideas are always internally constituted by a contestatory relationship with the beliefs and practices of the wider world in which they live’. In Politics Yoder claims that, in our human fallenness, ethics is often the search for ‘the right “handle” by which one can “get a hold on” the course of history and move it in the right direction’ (p. 228). This is the insight Kerr recasts as the ‘ideological function’ of the powers, as discussed in Chapter 2. See Bonhoeffer, ‘The “Ethical” and the “Christian” as a Topic’, in Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 6. Barth approvingly quotes Bonhoeffer’s position here in his ethics of creation (CD III/4). In a similar vein, Ellul provided an even more stringent attack on ethics as a way of assuaging the Christian conscience, in The Presence of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951), pp. 14–15. Holmes, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 212. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 206, 208. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., pp. 206–07.

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27 ‘Barth is arguing that God himself has taken the decisive action, and having done so wills that we, his children, take decisive action too. Our most decisive action is, once again, to call upon God’ (ibid. p. 211). Again, Holmes is right here, both in his reading of Barth, and, according to our account, in this general posture. What we are opposing here is, to paraphrase Tanner, the assumed competitiveness between this pious act (our own ‘calling upon God’) and our freedom for specific judgements about the orders in which one lives: ‘I am afraid that were we to receive from this impinging reign propositions whereby we could correspond to – or, more problematic, enact – this reign, we would no longer focus upon calling upon this impinging reign itself ’ (ibid. p. 213). 28 Karl Barth, The Christian Life, p. 212. 29 This is the basic thesis of Marquardt’s well-known Theologie und Sozialismus. My reading here is informed by the selected essays on Barth’s early ‘Socialist Speeches’, his two Römerbriefe, and his ‘theological-political motivations’ in the German Church Struggle in Theological Audacities. 30 In Marquardt’s words, ‘The option of an abstractly dogmatic, purely intra-theological exploration of the relation between theology and politics in Barth surely becomes an insoluble problem when the relatedness of the theological act of knowledge to the “difference between the times and situations” is not acknowledged and systematically attended to’ (‘Theological and Political Motivations’, p. 213). Marquardt is utilizing Barth’s comment that ‘The difference between the times and situations in which the theological act of knowledge is carried out opposes any thoroughgoing and consistent systematization’, in Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (trans. Grover Foley; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), p. 89. 31 One could read my claim here also through the lens of my account of Yoder’s theological exegesis in Chapter 2. Or again as refracted through Barth’s (alleged) claim that the Christian proclamation occurs ‘with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other’. The point is that the normative ‘texts’ of various religious-theological traditions bear an ordered relationship to how those who speak from ‘within’ specific traditions engage and perceive the world, and thus to identify the meaning-determinative ‘context’ of a specific (body of) text(s) outwith these normative traditions may be to impose, a priori, a fundamentally different frame of reference than the particular sociolinguistic world which gives a text its sense. The role of historical criticism is, however, precisely to augment and clarify intra-traditional accounts of textual meaning, by exposing the meaning-laden contexts unwittingly informing an author’s or tradition’s account of their own meaning. 32 Barth, ‘Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics.

Notes 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46

47

48 49

50

283

Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, p. 33. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Tanner is referring to CD III/4 (pp. 531–45) and the powers discussion in Barth, The Christian Life. Tanner, ‘Barth and the Economy’, pp. 185–6. As we noted above, for Tanner the grounds on which Barth critiques capitalism (at all points) is a dogmatic weakness, because it leaves the problem at the generic level of ‘inhumanity’, rather than specifying its systemic injustices christologically. I agree with Tanner that more clarity about economic idolatry and injustice would have surfaced had Barth more directly contrasted Christ and capitalism, our focus throughout has been on the eschatological determination of ‘true humanity’, which is, of course, ineluctably christological. Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, p. 37. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. ‘Our attitude toward material goods should that of the famous steward in the parable (Lk. 16.1–12): “Make friends for yourselves by means of the mammon of unrighteousness.” We should not possess it, but we should be “faithful” with it. And “being faithful” in this context means quite clearly: We should make others into its common owners. As private property it is and remains precisely the mammon of unrighteousness’ (Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, pp. 31–32). Marquardt, ‘First Report’, in Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Theological Audacities (ed. Andreas Pangritz and Paul S. Chung; Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), pp. 103–22. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 111. Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, p. 44. See Yoder’s discussion of the Haustafeln (‘household codes’), whose call for mutual ‘subordination’ within binary social relations so perplexes Christian ethics, in Politics, pp. 162–92. See, for example, Catherine Keller’s ethically pointed critique of Barth as a champion of creation’s intrinsically hierarchical order, in Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 84–99. Marquardt, ‘First Report’, p. 110. Tanner makes a passing remark that Barth’s later remarks on capitalism come ‘without the easy equation of socialism with the kingdom to be found in that [1911] article’. In ‘Barth on the Economy’, p. 186. Marquardt, ‘First Report’, p. 106. This is from an address Barth gave called ‘Religion and Socialism’ on 7 December 1915.

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51 H. Gollwitzer, ‘Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics, pp. 79–80. 52 Tanner, ‘Barth on the Economy’, p. 181. 53 Holmes, ‘Karl Barth’, p. 200. 54 Holmes might have done more justice to her use of the words ‘basis’ and ‘Christian identification’. 55 See Yoder’s translation of euangelion as ‘revolution’, with specific reference to Mary’s song, in The Original Revolution, pp. 13–18. 56 See H. Gollwitzer, ‘Kingdom of God’, pp. 115–16, n. 10. 57 Ibid., p. 116, n. 10, emphasis added. 58 Ibid., p. 116, n. 10. 59 Adam Kotsko has recently put the basic problem with Barth’s view here in helpful summary, commenting on Slavoj Žižek’s Marxist thesis from The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989): ‘“Ideology” is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as “deconstruction” means little more than “detailed analysis” in popular usage, so “ideology” tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as Žižek argued . . ., ideology is not to be found in our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value’. Kotsko, ‘How to Read Žižek’, Los Angeles Review of Books (2 September 2012). 60 Barth, ‘Jesus Christ’, p. 29. 61 In today’s global capitalist context, of course, the converse applies all the more forcefully – no economic freedom without social and political justice! If there is a ‘point’ to the next and final section, that is it. 62 Marquardt, ‘First Report’, p. 113. 63 Ibid. 64 This did not mean Barth wavered in a basic commitment to democracy as the most promising form of political order, which continues through Barth’s well-known 1946 ‘Christian/Civil Community’ essay. Marquardt refers to a 1919 speech, ‘Democracy or Dictatorship’, in which Barth indirectly affirmed the ‘rule of the proletariat’ in democratic terms. Speaking of ‘Minority rule’, he asks ‘Who protects us from the errors of the workers’ leaders . . .? . . . The minority should rule through its intellect, i.e., become a majority . . . through political work, more of a co-operative system, more social formation!’ (Marquardt, ‘First Report’, p. 118). On a related topic, this point about the ability to overcome the state of war only through a total (i.e. eschatological) social freedom would be one way to productively reassess the ironies in Barth’s ‘practical pacifism’ Yoder treats in Karl Barth and the Problem of War. 65 Marquardt, ‘First Report’, p. 113.

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66 This work could be expanded with an entirely different yet directly related emphasis, through the simple association of the pride of ‘ownership’ to the logic of justification by ‘acquisition’ and its twin concept ‘conquering’. It should suffice, at present, to point once again to the underlying rationale of our explicit connection of political power and socio-economic order. The injustices of (economic) deprivation are ever tuned to the drumbeats of war. 67 See Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), especially Chapters 1 and 4. 68 Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is a standard reference for the historical argument that ‘free market capitalism’ presupposes state intervention. For a contemporary restatement with a more constructive theoretical-political alternative, see the joint efforts of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 37–62 and 176–79. 69 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). 70 The Shock Doctrine portrays Katrina as the definitive example of disaster capitalism’s ‘coming home’ to US soil. See also Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006). The sorts of judgements I am making in a theological key are poignantly captured through the historical retellings of Katrina’s descent upon New Orleans in Spike Lee’s two documentaries on the subject – When the Levees Broke (New York: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2006) and If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (New York: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2010) – as well as David Simon’s and Eric Meyer’s TV series, Treme. 71 Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has done an excellent job showing how this ‘vulture capitalist’ spirit led to the 2008 financial crisis, in Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con that is Breaking America (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010). 72 For details of the effects of Katrina on New Orleans’ most poor and vulnerable residents, see the report by the Center for American Progress, ‘Who are Katrina’s Victims?’ www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2005/09/02/1641/ who-are-katrinas-victims/ 73 Dyson, Come Hell or High Water, p. 4, emphasis added. 74 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 75 Ibid., p. 3. 76 Recently, two notable accounts of Christianity’s role in the production and maintenance of modern racial logics have come out of Duke University’s Divinity School: James Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: OUP, 2008), and Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Jennings’ account especially

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78 79

80

Notes deftly elaborates, in a historical-theological vein, my intuitions about the lingering connections between race and Mammon. Dyson reports that about one in four citizens in New Orleans had no access to a car. See his account on concentrated poverty in the region, in Come Hell or High Water, pp. 5–12. Jennings, Christian Imagination, pp. 326–27, n. 33. As Jennings’ account of the historical intertwining of imperial conquest, the expansion of a slave-market economy and Christian mission shows, human worship of the god of wealth and its socially destructive capacities do not occur at the narrowly ‘economic’ moment of human conquest, trade and exchange. Mammon grips our lives more deftly, through the deformation of desire and will, thought and speech which is sustained by various social practices. For more on how my account of freedom for God and neighbour entails, in the context of political and economic oppression, a posture of ‘revolt’ that also refuses to demonize and denigrate the humanity of those whose life and work is bound intimately to oppressive power, see the excellent work of Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics: Jesus Christ and the Question of Revolution (London: SCM, 1974). Daniel Barber has also recently provided a helpful discussion of the necessary ‘antagonism’ of resistance to the powers, in On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), pp. 35–38.

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Index of Names and Subjects angelic powers  15–19, 28, 33–7, 63, 64, 65, 133–5 apocalyptic  4, 26, 65, 75, 93–4, 146, 182 Aristotle  83 Augustine  38, 56, 78, 92, 113–14, 173 Barber, Daniel  4, 74, 85, 96, 181 Berkhof, Hendrikus  54, 59–69, 72–3, 77, 81–2, 95, 129–30 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  30, 123, 158, 219 Bourne, Richard  184, 189, 191 Busch, Eberhard  5, 197 capitalism  1, 11, 197–8, 211, 223–34, 238 Chomsky, Noam  207 church  14, 20, 37, 93, 134, 137–42, 149–50, 154–6, 161, 188, 220–2, 227 Cioffi, Todd  187–8 confession  16, 137–8, 144, 153–7, 161, 180, 183–4 Constantinianism  178–84, 208 creation,  divine ordering of  30–3, 46, 69–70, 84, 95–8 doctrine of  7–8, 27–30, 37–40, 72, 88, 108–9 fallen  71, 78–9, 89–95, 97, 100 orders of  85, 95–102 shadow-side of  114–15, 121 cross of Christ  9–10, 130–1, 141, 148, 161, 208 Cullmann, Oscar  65, 132–7, 144 Dawn, Marva  214 death  113–14, 218 Dehn, Günther  132 demonic powers  19–25, 39–43, 65, 91, 131, 159, 234 Demson, David  149–51, 160 devil, the  39, 122–3, 131, 159 Dibelius, Martin  132–3 Dorrien, Gary  6 Dyson, Michael Eric  235–7

economy  1, 9, 85, 194, 196, 198–200, 208–9, 212–21, 224, 226, 233 Ellul, Jacques  10, 11, 82, 127, 211–16 eschatology  8, 14, 46, 89, 98, 99, 105–8, 128–9, 141–6, 182, 200, 234 ethics  14, 53, 58–9, 138, 145–6, 178, 180–1, 201, 219, 229, 231 evil  37–9, 173, 213, 229 exousiology  4, 7, 11, 71–2, 75–8, 88, 128–9, 143–4, 162, 222 faith  5, 42, 131, 144, 158, 161, 221, 224, 230–1, 239 Foucault, Michel  206–7 Gollwitzer, Helmut  228 Gorringe, Timothy  3, 6, 39, 123 Haddorff, David  125, 160, 166, 175–6, 188, 199 Hailer, Martin  3 Harink, Douglas  3–4, 71–2, 93, 96, 102, 139, 146 Hauerwas, Stanley  3, 191 Hobbes, Thomas  165 Holmes, Christopher  199–200, 219–21, 228–9 Hood, Robert E.  16, 21, 169–70, 173 hope  10–11, 44, 49, 102, 226, 231, 239 humanity,  Adamic  50, 76, 116–17, 121, 123, 127, 129, 131, 160, 225 new  29, 57, 71, 91, 94, 102, 127, 129, 136, 231 Hurricane Katrina  212, 235–8 ideology  10, 74–5, 77, 85–7, 98, 126, 176, 181–2, 201–2, 223, 230–1, 239 idolatry  8, 67, 71, 77, 86–8, 97, 110–11, 119–20, 126, 131, 213, 216–17, 225 Irenaeus  135

298 Jennings, Willie James  238 Jenson, Robert  39 justice  14–15, 56, 59, 82, 143 justification  14 Käsemann, Ernst  26 Kerr, Nathan  4, 73–7, 85, 142, 181–2 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  143 Klein, Naomi  233, 235 Krötke, Wolf  38, 44 law  57, 63, 66, 68, 81–2, 170–1, 175, 208, 219, 232, 234 Leithart, Peter  179 Leviathan  10, 120, 125–6, 163–78, 184, 208, 235–6 liberalism  4 Lindbeck, George  151 lordship  54, 59, 69–70, 88, 90, 91, 94, 97, 101–2, 105–6, 132–41 love  224, 233 McCormack, Bruce  6 McKenny, Gerald  122 Mammon  1, 4, 7, 10–11, 84, 120, 125–6, 163–4, 176, 184, 195–8, 202, 208, 211–18, 221–2, 224–6, 228, 233–8 Marquardt, Friedrich W.  4–6, 211, 223, 226, 232 Marx, Karl  1, 204–5, 214, 233 modernity  1, 72–6 money  84, 196–7, 213–18, 232 myth  49–51, 60, 88, 122–3, 165–7, 175–6, 238 Neder, Adam  115 Niebuhr, H. Richard  58, 86 Niebuhr, Reinhold  53–60, 180, 183 nothingness  37–42, 49, 51, 110–12, 115, 121–3, 173 Oakes, Kenneth  4, 6 Pilate  20–2, 172–3 Plonz, Sabine  3 Polanyi, Karl  1, 233 politics  9, 14, 26, 53, 55–60, 82–3, 139–40, 171, 174–5, 177, 185–7, 208, 232, 235

Index providence  19–24, 48, 83, 91, 98, 103, 144–5, 167, 170, 172–3, 180–1, 185 race  236–8 religion  66, 81, 87, 98 resistance  10–11, 44, 46–7, 206–7, 217–18, 226, 228, 239 resurrection  44, 218 revelation  35, 40, 68, 70, 85, 90, 93, 95, 113, 130 Rupp, E. Gordon  75 Saint Paul  60–6, 71–3, 75–6, 92, 100, 132 salvation  45, 84, 99, 146–7, 204 sanctification  122 scripture  1–2, 60–3, 227 sin  39, 40–2, 44, 47, 51, 56, 59 socialism  4, 199, 224–32 state, the  13–16, 19–21, 24–5, 55–6, 58, 73, 82–4, 99–100, 165–73, 177–8, 181, 187, 191–3, 208 Stringfellow, William  10, 11, 211–13 structures  6, 44, 59–60, 66–74, 76–80, 81, 88, 101–3, 220 the sword  9–10, 55, 82–3, 177, 190–1, 206–8 Tanner, Kathryn  10, 197–9, 219, 224, 228–9 theology,  Anglo-American  4–5, 181, 223 confessional  3 doctrinal  2–3, 199, 221 liberation  10, 85, 203–6 Lutheran  30, 99 and politics  5–7, 10 Protestant  60, 66, 96 Reformed  15, 99 Thiselton, Anthony  133 Tillich, Paul  230 Troeltsch, Ernst  57–8 violence  58, 83, 84, 152–3, 204–6 war  53, 55, 56, 234 Weber, Max  59–60, 83 Wink, Walter  80 Wolin, Sheldon  1

Index of Scripture References Genesis,  1.6–8  31–2 1.28  126, 153 3.6–8  152–3 4.23–4  152

15.24  16, 35 15.25  134 Galatians,  4.1–11  66, 68

2 Chronicles,  20.17  142

Ephesians,  1.22  35 2.10  123 2.13–15  141 3.10  35

Psalm,  82  234 110.1  132, 134

Philippians,  2.6–11  134 2.10  133

Matthew, Gospel of,  5.17  140 5.43–5  141 6.24  195, 197, 225 28.18–19  134, 169

Colossians,  1.14–22  134 1.15–17  90, 134 1.16  133, 169 2  16, 66 2.10  35

Exodus,  20.2  161

Luke, Gospel of,  1.49–53  230 12.16  195 16.1–12  217 John, Gospel of,  1  134 Romans,  8  146, 169 12  234 13  132, 169, 171, 175 13.1  133, 167 1 Corinthians,  2.6–8  133 2.8  66, 133 4.9  35

1 Timothy,  3.16  35 Hebrews,  1.2  134 1.6  35 1 Peter,  1.12  35 Revelation,  4–5  35 4.11  138 5.12  138 13  166 21  113, 162