Karl Barth was, by any standards, one of the most deeply principled intellectuals of the age, someone who was quite ready to pay the price of conscience in an insane and tyrannical state. It was probably only his Swiss citizenship that saved his life. So it’s all the more surprising to read some of his words in a Christmas sermon preached in 1931, where he says that the real good news of Christmas is that we are given permission to be free from our principles. We need, he says, “to be able to live with principles, but we must also be able to live without them”.
Why is this good news ”“ and what has it got to do with Christmas, with this Christmas in particular and our current anxieties and hopes?
What Barth saw beginning to take its grip on Germany in 1931 was a system of “principle” that worked quite consistently once you accepted that quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t. As the nightmare decade unfolded, the implications of this became clearer and clearer. And what he was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a “cause” which was essentially about “me and people like me”. It’s about the danger of my agenda, our needs, the programme of this particular group, its safety and prosperity.
Certainly an postmodern take on the lack of principles given the Decalogue and the Incarnancy’s adherence to the Torah and its observance: particularly that Summary of the Torah bit Jesus is so famous for!