This session engages both the logic of judgment in Karl Barth’s theology and the
way his theology is used as a resource for current political judgments, including of
Christian nationalism. Against the background of continuing discussion of the
forensic and apocalyptic aspects of Barth’s theology of reconciliation, this session
highlights ‘judgment’ in its relation to nothingness (das Nichtige), as well as the
role of beauty in moral discernment and judgments. Zooming out from these
interpretive questions, the way Barth is used to promote or criticize political
stances also lends itself to critique and judgment inasmuch as His theology serves
to disrupt the legitimating enterprises as “religion.”
In recent years, there has been ongoing debate about the characteristics of Barth’s doctrine of atonement. Some scholars argue that his understanding of atonement is fundamentally forensic, in which Christ bore judgment on sinners for their justification. Others contend that Barth’s atonement is a cosmic battle, centering on the defeat of das Nichtige and the deliverance of enslaved humanity. Despite the excellent work exploring different dimensions of Barth’s soteriology, the relationship between these two dimensions is rarely addressed. In other words, how do justification and deliverance relate to one another? This paper seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of these two interpretations, as shown in Church Dogmatics §§50 and 59, arguing that atonement, for Barth, is a judgment on das Nichtige through das Nichtige, thereby defeating it and bringing both justification and deliverance to humanity. Ultimately, the forensic and cosmological interpretations represent two dimensions of the same atoning event in Christ.
This paper examines judgment in the Reformed tradition through a constructive engagement with the theology of Karl Barth, focusing on the relation between divine judgment, grace, and moral discernment in the Church Dogmatics. While Barth is often read as radically restricting human judgment in light of God’s sovereign judgment, I argue that his mature theology reconstitutes judgment as a grace-shaped practice of analogical discernment. Divine judgment, enacted in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to grace but is itself a mode of grace that summons human response. Drawing on Barth’s doctrine of analogy (analogia fidei) and theology of glory, the paper engages Andrew Dunstan’s interpretation of Barth’s theological aesthetics to show how divine beauty forms human judgment perceptually and ethically. Against readings influenced by Hans Urs von Balthasar, it argues that Barth allows a chastened acknowledgment of creaturely beauty as an aid to moral discernment.
The constructive move of this paper, engaging especially Barth's Church Dogmatics III/3, is to interpret the cross as a judgment upon the potency of God’s original electing decision for covenant and creation as it also resulted in the emergence of that which was rejected by God, nothingness or evil. In this reading the judgment God pronounces through the cross is not primarily a “No” to humanity’s “no” to God, or put differently, not God’s rejection of the rejection of grace, but instead is a final “No” that counters the primordial “No” pronounced before creation as God rejected chaos.
The contemporary mainline Protestant deployment of Barth against Christian nationalism constitutes the latest in a series of American domestications of his theology, following Niebuhr’s Cold War conscription and Hauerwas’s ecclesial recruitment. Each repeats the same formal error: converting Barth into a resource for a prior political commitment rather than receiving his theology as a disruption of the legitimating enterprise as such. Reading this reception history through Barth’s critique of religion in Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, the paper contends that the progressive mainline’s invocation of Barth functions as the very cultural-theological self-assurance Barth identified as religion’s Unglaube. Yet the argument does not terminate in negation. Following Barth’s own logic, religion is judged and justified in the same divine act. The church’s opposition to Christian nationalism is true only insofar as it knows itself under the same judgment it pronounces.