#141. Karl har ordet...

Så här i kyrkovalstider...

"And now we live to-day at a time when, in the realm of the Church, the question of divine justification and, in the realm of the State, the question of human law are being raised with new emphasis, and we seem, now as then, to be pressing onward towards developments that cannot yet be forseen. It is obvious to recall that both justification and justice, or the Kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of this world, or the Church and the State, formerly stood side by side in the Reformation confession, and that by 'worship in spirit and in truth' the Reformers understood a life in both these realms.

But if we are not once more to drift into sterile and dangerous separations, it will not be enough to recollect the Reformation, to repeat the formulae in which it placed the realms side by side, to recite over and again (with more or less historical accuracy and sympathetic feeling) 'the Reformed conception of State' and the like, as though that gap were not evident, as though the Reformation teaching did not, with that gap, bear within itself the temptation to those separations.

If the intesity of our present situation is to be our salvation and not our ruin, then the question which we asked at the outset must be put: is there an actual, and therefore inward and vital, connection between the two realms?"

• Barth Karl, 1960: Community, State and Church. Reprint by Wipf and Stock Publishers: Eugene. Previously published by Anchor Books, 1960. S. 105-106

PS. Ur Karl Barths essä Church and State, 1938 (på tyska: Rechtfertigung und Recht).