About the author: Rev. Catherine Tobey is a PhD student in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Drawing on Karl Barth’s theology, her research centers on children as the dynamic, interpretive key to understanding and witnessing to the Kingdom of God. She is a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a resident at Tall Timber Ranch, a camp and retreat center in Leavenworth, WA.
This post is the second in a three-part series engaging Barth’s understanding of children in light of the Kingdom of God. Our primary question: how might Barth’s understanding of kids help us better recognize and enact God’s kingdom in the here-and-now? In the first post, we explored the theme: we are all God’s children. Read the first piece here.
The second way Barth connects children and the Kingdom of God is by insisting that we should be like children. Perhaps virtues like humility, dependence, obedience, and trust come to mind. Like other theologians, Barth speaks of these (and other) qualities that children exemplify.1 However, he breaks away from the pack by emphasizing the importance of imitating actual children rather than merely theorizing child-like behavior.2
Barth infers it is “sentimental” to imitate “childlike simplicity and innocence” to become great in God’s Kingdom. However, notable queer theorist Lee Edelman goes a step further.3 In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he aptly explains how the figurative child is used as a manipulative and political prop.4
For Edelman, the overwhelming cultural narrative of “reproductive futurism” is problematic because it furthers “the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity.”5 Herein, he argues, “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”6
Within this framework, “figural children continue to ‘secure [our] existence’ through the fantasy that we survive in them,” but “the queer refutes that fantasy.”7 Indeed, by refusing to participate in reproduction, one threatens the logic of political futurism and is responsible for “the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.”8 Thus, queer people are “outside the consensus,” as those “not ‘fighting for the children.’”9 Edelman’s conclusion is clear: “The sacralization of the Child…necessitates the sacrifice of the queer.”10
Edelman provides a striking and important critique of efforts that center on children. In short, when one conjures an “image of the Child” in their mind, rather than focus on “the lived experiences of any historical children,” they veer into a politicization inconsistent with the Kingdom of God.11 On this, I am curious if Barth and Edelman would agree.12 While Edelman concludes that we should move our focus away from “the Child,” Barth calls us to pay greater attention to actual kids and how they approach the world.
For example, in Church Dogmatics, Barth often connects children to time. Children are just beginning their lives, but all people of every age should be starting their lives over and over again. For Barth, one learns this by interacting with a child, who “is constantly forced to begin afresh, wrestling with the possibilities which open out to him and the impossibilities which oppose him.”13 Because of this, Barth surmises that, for a child, “life in the world, with all its joys and sorrows and contemplation and activity, will always be for him a really interesting matter, or, to use a bolder expression, it will be an adventure, for which he has ultimately and basically no qualifications of his own.”14
Another way Barth calls us to imitate children is in the practice of wonder. This starts with curiosity and looking forward to what is ahead. He calls the Christian to be “like a child in a forest, or on Christmas Eve; one who is always rightly astonished by events, by the encounters and experiences.”15 He also emphasizes childlike amazement at the materialization of a good future. The Christian imitates the child as one “who will always be the most surprised, the most affected, the most apprehensive and the most joyful in the face of events.”16 For him, this is not a ditzy or disconnected reaction but one rooted in gratitude.
While Barth makes subtle shifts away from the status quo in these examples, I imagine Edelman would most appreciate Barth’s take on obedience. Indeed, Barth considers children as actors in their own right rather than passive characters in someone else’s narrative. Rather than expecting rote obedience from young people (à la John Piper), Barth celebrates the disruption of existing social orders by emphasizing young people’s curiosity, openness, and positivity.17 Appreciating their zeal, Barth describes the youthful “capacity and will to devote oneself to an object,” insisting that this means being “genuinely childlike.”18
The newly released song “The Spark” illustrates Barth’s emphasis that the child “takes his play, his study, his first attempts at accomplishment, his first wrestlings with his environment, in bitter earnest.”19 Kabin Crew, a group of young people participating in an out-of-school program, wrote and performed the song. Kids bring the music to life, but its greatest message lies in living out one’s passion as inevitable.
Children rewrite the laws of possibility, imagining a different world and living in it as if it were real. It turns out this is how change happens.20 But let us admit: though we serve a God of new life, we favor old ways. Rather than taking the rising generations seriously—truly seeing and hearing them—we drift further apart.
Perhaps the problem that Edelman recognizes in society and that Barth describes in churches is not all that different. Both seek to dismantle the idol of theoretical children, calling it a farce. For Edelman, this is to recognize queer community members who are otherwise excluded; for Barth, this is to recognize young community members who are otherwise silenced. Both groups signify a revolution—a disruption of the status quo, of the “oh-so-holy way things have been done.” Though unlikely conversation partners, I wonder if it might be possible for Edelman and Barth to consider the ethical imperative of centering queer children.
Recently, I got to know two trans kids whose divine “spark” is radically clear. One child's family and wider community celebrate them unconditionally, resulting in strengthened relationships and a cascade of flourishing. However, doubt and condemnation met the other child. In this case, the community around the child expects them to conform to the status quo. This expectation challenges them, as they sparkle in many ways. Relationships have been ruptured, confusion and frustration abound, and it is a struggle for this person to carry on. Which of these seems more consistent with the Kingdom of God? How might things be different in the latter example if the queer child had been seen and heard?
These are just a few questions I am exploring as a part of my PhD research at the University of Aberdeen. Stay tuned for the third essay in this series, Karl, Kids, and the Kingdom of God, to hear more about how we might change the world if we center kids.
In Matthew 18, the disciples ask, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” In response, Jesus “called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 18:1-3, NRSV). Unfortunately, as scholars and pastors grapple with this text, they often create passive constructs of a theoretical child who must have merited Christ’s attention. John Wall points out that this goes back to “Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Gregory of Nyssa, who consistently hold up children as models of adult imitation through their innocence, simplicity, freedom from desire, sexual purity, and indifference toward worldly status and wealth” (see John Wall, Ethics of in Light of Childhood [Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010], 21). However, one must note that these are all passive functions! Herein, young people are reduced to symbols rather than agents of God’s Kingdom.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it is quite revolutionary. By contrast, take the modern Child Theology Movement. Defending the decision not to include any actual children in their work, Keith White writes, “we are not seeking a deeper or more rounded understanding of child and children, or ground for making the church and world more child-friendly.” He emphasizes that they do not see children as “subjects” or seek to join those “devoted to facilitating their well-being and agency.” After all, “In the text of Matthew, the little child is ‘silent,’ and Jesus makes no attempt to encourage the child to speak, or adults to listen” (see Keith J. White, “Child Theology as Theology” in ANVIL: Journal of Theology and Mission 35, no. 1 [2019]: 15).
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961),187.
Shoutout to Morgan Bell, who introduced me to Edelman’s work at the recent Barth Graduate Student Colloquium at Princeton Theological Seminary!
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 21.
Edelman, No Future, 11.
Edelman, No Future, 66.
Edelman, No Future, 13.
Edelman, No Future, 3.
Edelman, No Future, 28.
Edelman, No Future, 11.
That said, I doubt Barth would go as far as Edelman, who says, “[F**k] the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (Edelman, No Future, 29).
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 245.
Barth, CD III.3, 245.
Barth, CD III.3, 245, emphasis added.
Barth, CD III.3, 244–245.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 609. I do not want to reference John Piper’s Desiring God, but if you truly want a reminder of his approach to obedience, you can find it here.
Barth, CD III.4, 612.
Barth, CD III.4, 609.
The willingness to start (and move forward!) without knowing what’s ahead is crucial. Take Barth’s discussion in Evangelical Theology, for example: “Theological work is distinguished from other kinds of work by the fact that anyone who desires to do this work cannot proceed by building with complete confidence on the foundation of questions that are already settled, results that are already achieved, or conclusions that are already arrived at. He cannot continue to build today in any way on foundations that were laid yesterday by himself…His only possible procedure every day, in fact every hour, is to begin anew at the beginning” (Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1963], 165–166).