the parish: Jesus Loves Private Property

Pretty soon we’ll be hearing from mainstream pundits that America should be a “soft” theocracy and that capitalism is the heart of Christianity (or vice versa). Never was Barth more necessary to a Church’s theological identity than right now in America.

Barmen Declaration, Article I: “We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.”

What Barth is saying is that the source of the Church’s proclamation is the Christ event (Word of God), not political ideology (Justice Sunday, anyone?), not historic figures (i.e., founding fathers), not particular historical events (i.e., the founding of America as a “city on a hill”), and not powers (i.e., the Republican party and their increasing obsequiousness in the face of theocrats who insist that the role of government is to enforce the “law of God”).

This is not to suggest that Bush is another Hitler, but it is to suggest that fascism has a soft side as well as a hard side, that the Church is being co-opted by the government for its own ends, that any nation claiming a divine fiat for the propagation of freedom around the world by means of violence is dangerously usurping a messianic role, that politicians are posing as pastors for the sake of secular power, and that the melding of church and government has NEVER issued forth in good tidings for all.