Karl Barth and Liberation Theology

If the 1970s were for theology the decade of liberation, the 1980s may prove in turn to be a decade of reaction. Reaction is perhaps not the exciting new breakthrough which just now happens to be needed, but those who care about human suffering and the concerns of liberation theology had better pay heed that theologically articulate reactionaries are clamoring to take the offensive, being heavily bankrolled along the way by right-wing think tanks and foundations. These reactionary theologians are not really minions of the so-called New Right so much as they are counterparts to those self-styled intellectuals known as neoconservatives. A neoconservative, according to Irving Kristol, who ought to know being one of them, is "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." The theological neoconservatives now gathering their forces would no doubt feel entirely comfortable with this definition. On closer inspection, however, it would seem that Kristol has things backward. Neoconservatism, whether theological or otherwise, is actually what reality looks like after being mugged by a liberal. The lines are being drawn in our culture for a new intellectual cold war, and this cold war will have a theological front. Witness, for example, the recently issued document entitled "Christianity and Democracy: A Statement of the Institute on Religion and Democracy."' This document, in my opinion, betrays nothing so much as what Noam Chomsky has called "the amazing servility of the educated classes in the capitalist countries."2 Written by Richard J. Neuhaus, an erstwhile liberal who (like others in this grouping) once fancied himself a radical, the statement is little more than an attempt to rehabilitate the tired cliches of the Right. Thus we are served up a less than bracing tonic of virtuous capitalism, warmed-over anticommunism, and good