"A Chosen People": Nationhood in Karl Barth's Christocentric Doctrine of Election

This article explores Karl Barth's conceptualisation of nationhood set forth in Gottes Gnadenwahl (1936), a booklet which marks the beginning of the Christocentric phase of the Swiss theologian's career. The immediate application of his Christocentric ontology to his theology of nationhood in an eight-page appendix to the booklet conveying a strong sense of urgency which addresses the idolatrous immanentisation of eschatological hope, by the secularisation of the Christian doctrines of election and providence, to which Hegel and nineteenth-century idealism gave rise. To appreciate his sense of urgency, it serves well to recall the geo-political background of the authorship of Gottes Gnadenwahl. In Germany, the Nazi Party seized power in 1932, and Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in the ensuing year. Because of his staunch opposition to Nazi ideology, Barth was forced to leave'Germany in 1935. In 1936, for the first time in his career, he offered a thoroughly Christocentric refutation of the nationalism and Volksreligion that bolstered the rise of the Third Reich. But at the same time, he unequivocally affirmed nationhood as God's gracious determination of human nature in his writing, in Christo. Nationhood as such is described as an indispensable dimension of humanhood. This article sets forth the thesis that according to Barth's Christocentric ontology, as set forth in Gottes Gnadenwahl, nationhood is an external basis of the actualisation of election in the form of a community, while the church qua community as the elect is the internal basis of nationhood. This article then concludes with reflections on Barth's rather surprising insinuation of his vision of Christian countries on earth, as referenced from a short treatise from approximately the same period, Rechtfertigung und Recht (1938).