This is a summary of Oliver O’Donovan’s essay of similar title, found in Bonds of Imperfection. What’s important is not so much the conclusions reached, but how they are reached.
Ramsey: The crux of the difference between pacifists and justifiable-war Christians turns on the person and work of Christ (Ramsey, Speak up for Just War or Pacifism 111, quoted in O’Donovan 247).
- While this sounds pious and truistic, it has a very precise meaning for both thinkers.
- For Barth it concerns the proper location of the political order within the covenant of Reconciliation between God and man (OO 251).
- For Ramsey it means that Christ assumed one common humanity: there is no ontological disjunction between homo politicus and any other kind of man/order.
O’Donovan summarizes Barth’s ethics in several stages:
- Despite some of Barth’s shifts on election, there is a stable stream of ethical reflection–grudgingly acknowledging the state’s right of force but noting the abnormality of it.
- Romerbrief may be discounted as “anarchist” and “backwater” (O’Donovan 249).
- Barth’s wartime writings veered closer towards a realist use of the State’s force. His later writings veered towards a more anabaptist view.
- This is because of a dialectic within Barth’s thought that is never fully settled.
- This is partly the case because Barth doesn’t (will not?) imagine the possibility of both a peace-state and war-state within the same framework.
Here is where possible confusion arises: Ramsey will critique “liberals” on pacifism and note they follow Barth. What does he mean by “liberals?” I don’t think it is simply “those who reject the Bible.” I think he has in mind Niebuhrian liberalism.
Paul Ramsey
Key Point: The Legitimate Use of Power
- The use of power, including the use of force, is of the esse of politics
- The use of power is inseparable from the bene esse of politics.
As a foil, Ramsey will have Barth say:
B3: War should not be seen as a normal, fixed, or necessary part of a just state (CD III/4, p. 456).
Back to Ramsey’s theses. We may add another
R4: The use of power implies the possible use of force.
Ramsey’s argument presupposes a proper ordo of politics, the connections of iustitia, lex, and ordo.
- Ordo = the disposition of power.
R5: The cross casts a shadow over politics, not pure light (OO 259).
Politics, community, and the cross should meet in that area where light and shadow meet.
R6: “The task of politics is to be a sign of the rule of Christ, disclosing right, preserving community and determining the basis of community in right” (259).
Political reflection based on the gospels should not begin with the Advent, as important as it is, but with the fact that Christ has come in history. O’Donovan: “He [Messiah] has reached for the crown which will allow no rival crowns beside it. Because he has come, history has divided into two, its back broken on this outcrop of rock which it cannot negotiate” (260).
Corollary: There is a disjunction within the community of election (visible/invisible church), not in the works of God as such.
Problems with Barth’s Political Ethics
For Ramsey, God accepts Christ’s regnant new humanity. For Barth, God rejects the old humanity. This seems to mean that God also rejects extra-ecclesial orders as such. When Barth comes to war as such, he does not interact with Just War reasoning but simply lists the evils of the Second World War.
Ramsey can point to “monuments of grace” in such a horror, even to legitimate uses of State force. Barth can only suggest a delaying action (CD III/4, p. 456). As a result, notes O’Donovan, Barth “ends up precisely in the place he intended to bypass, in a politics that can only be viewed soberly and not with evangelical faith or hope” (O’Donovan 264).
A Way Forward With Ramsey
Ramsey has what Barth needs: a way to bridge the gap between homo politicus which is redeemed in Christ and homo politicus that is in need of redemption. We are back with the distinction between esse and bene esse. The latter terms also suggests something along the lines of goal or end. Ramsey is speaking of true political activity.
Is Barth an Apollinarian?
Ramsey offers a model in which political power is both used appropriately and judged: the Incarnation, homo assumptus. This means that Christ takes on the fallen order, including homo politicus. There is no radical “Other” realm to which Christ has no access. As O’Donovan notes, “Only so can the homo politicus that is redeemed be the same homo politicus that was in need of redemption” (266).
Barth will not grant this. But in not granting it, he is partitioning off a section of man’s redemption. To be fair, Barth resists this temptation in Christology but not in politics.
Who is Ramsey’s “Liberal?”
A liberal for Ramsey is one who splits politics and military doctrine.
Liberalism for O’Donovan: the inadequacy of every human attempt to render justice. A magistrate’s power should be limited. Therefore, power is suspect but necessary (270).
What does Ramsey mean by Just War and International Politics? So, O’Donovan: “The international sphere was a constitutional vacuum, but by no means a moral or political vacuum” 271). Ramsey suspects there is a continuum that links violent with nonviolent resistance. Indeed, is not democracy justum bellum (Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, 126)? Jesus never said to resist evil by ballot boxes.
Outlaw Huguenot 