Apostasy, Now!
A Call to Revolt in an Age of Crisis
About the author: Rev. Dr. Jared Stacy (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a theologian and ethicist whose work centers on political extremisms and evangelical theology in America. Alongside serving as a hospice chaplain, his work has been featured on platforms like TIME, BBC, and Seen and Unseen, an outlet for the Centre for Cultural Witness for the Anglican Church. He resides with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.
Barth’s theology of crisis was fit for a time of radical upheaval.
Pressed from without and within, the Church of his time was tempted to ally itself with political saviors or evacuate into affluence and automation. Are not these the very same temptations standing before us now? To trust promises of aspiring authoritarians or evacuate into bourgeois enclaves?
Churches in America can opt for survival strategies, to be sure. We can endeavor to present ourselves as the “right kind” of Christian, or we can sanction and support State-policed “anti-Christian” bias.
We can hide ourselves, too, retreating to institutional security, and denying the fact that the sanctuary of Christian community exists, in the words of Pope Leo XIV, as a “bridge to the world.”
And yet, we must be on guard. Ours is a faith which rides the currents of history, but it is not a faith fueled by crude historical analogy. 2025 is not 1968, is not 1933, is not 1861. But crisis presents in every age.
And in these crises, we must become apostates. In every crisis, a choice—again and always—confronts the churches. The idolatry of political power allures the Church of every age with hard security; the idolatry of mammon numbs the Church of every age. Mammon is the soft persecution of luxury experienced through automation and affluence.
Authoritarianism takes root in the churches through greed just as easily as it does hard power. Both promote fear. Both trade in scarcity. Both demand a vigilance that contains a militancy which betrays faith. And when faith allies itself with these temptations, it cancels itself. Renewal requires apostasy.
For the Church under God’s call, there can only be what Barth calls revolt. We might think of revolt more dynamically and radically. This revolt is apostasy. This is not apostasy from the faith, but the apostasy of the faith. The faith of Jesus Christ is a faith of dynamic disturbance of our settled securities.
In The Christian Life, Barth depicts revolt emerging from the “precedence” of the Word over and beyond all other “factors” which give shape to our lives.1 He locates this revolt in the practice of prayer. It is distinct from activisms and causes in the name of human progress without denying the possibility of common participation in human history.
In essence, in prayer, we participated in a revolt, an apostasy, symbolized by baptism, an initiation into the life shaped by and in anticipation of its preeminent expectation: “Hallowed be thy Name.” It is a revolt of the reverent Life, the Word which esteems the Name of God above all rogue words.2
So it is not enough to simply prescribe “prayer” as rote religious observance (as Hank Spaulding’s recent piece so eloquently reminds us). We practice anticipatory prayer that is more essentially participatory in the Spirit who enacts the divine sabotage of our securities and the divine siege of our totalities, or the realities we construct from the semblance of “the facts.”
The Word assaults the seemingly unassailable “fact” of the State or the market, and the violence practiced in their defense. The Word reveals them to be part and parcel of what Barth calls the “regime of vacillation,” a “twilight” marked by “the confusion and distress of the division which desecrates God’s name and which consists in the fact that the one, true, and living God is both known and [simultaneously] unknown…”3
This “regime of vacillation”—which consists in God’s Name being both known and unknown—was revealed in all its ugly contradiction during a recent worship gathering at the White House. Clergy gathered to pray in Jesus’ name and “influence” the government, but did so only after posting photo shoots in front of Teslas. This regime of vacillation is a regime of paranoia, a split mind, divided between the Name of God and lesser lords.
And so it is not enough to “pray” or to “worship.” The spectacles of religious acts have never once distracted God’s attention away from the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable. These spectacles have the “appearance of godliness but deny its power” (2 Tim. 3:5).
Believing this as we do, with a desire for revolt and apostasy, we must admit this revolt is not without peril for Jesus’ disciples. This peril, this danger, is visible in the distinction between initiation and imitation. Barth warns,
If we want to take the hallowing of God’s name into our own hands, speaking and acting in a divine manner in God’s place, then, quite apart from the fact that this is an impossible enterprise foredoomed to failure, it would in fact result in a further desecration of the name of God.4
And it is here where the path of revolt becomes clear in our time. To make this revolt, to pray “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is to rise up against taking God’s Name in vain.
This is a Christianity that demands apostasy. It occurs to me that, in our time as in times past, a great many efforts to reinforce the regime of vacillation emerge from a Christianity which itself does not participate in revolt, but orients itself to the maintenance of the regime of vacillation.
No better example of this disorientation exists than the recent news that the State in America now aspires to combat “anti-Christian bias” by enlisting State employees to police supposed bias against Christians.
This culture of policing presupposes that the State possesses primal knowledge of what it means to be and makes for “Christian.” So, at base, this initiative dangerously claims that the State knows what makes for a “Christian”—even a “good” Christian. This is transgressive knowledge for the State, as Barmen recognized:
We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfill the vocation of the Church as well.5
The State’s transgressive knowledge is epistemological totalitarianism, the kind that exists to justify authoritarian action. Any State that claims to know a “good” Christian will inevitably define “good” as collaboration with the State itself. In other words, the State can only ever imagine a “good” Christian as a sympathizer to its own agenda and telos.
It is plainly obvious that the Church’s primal confession, “Jesus is Lord,” contradicts the State’s claim. But what happens as the State wields this transgressive knowledge in the face of Christian opposition to its aims and agenda? What happens when those whom the State deems “bad” Christians resist the State?
The State in America has primed itself to code Christian opposition to the State according to the same logic underwriting the State’s apparent and actual unilateral actions against dissenting individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Kalil, Mohsen Madawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk. Such logic also frames the State’s spectacle of El Salvadorian concentration camps.
This logic is fueled by the totalitarian claim to knowledge, a tautology in which what the State claims is true, good, and beautiful is not subject to any accountability beyond the state of exception the State claims for itself.
Constitutional lawyers can debate and advocate by the law of the land. But Christians would do well to recall Ernst Käsemann’s recollections on the authoritarian capture of Germany's democracy:
The deportation of Jews, the persecution of communists, socialists, and [Romanii], and also of radical Christians, were naïvely or resignedly accepted as conditions accompanying the birth of a new epoch, though the inhumanity of the system clearly came to light along with it.6
The revolt of Christian faith in our time must apostatize from Christianities that take the Name in vain. We must become apostates. We must become particular kinds of atheists, in order to preserve the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. As J. Kameron Carter observes, “I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place).”
A faith borne of apostasy, now, is a faith prepared to enter the common life of the world—one that involves Christians and non-Christians. Such a faith revolts against the threats and ragings of an ascendant, vain Christianity where the label “Christian” is sold for political capital and signifies other baptisms: into the party, the market, and the myth of the nation. Apostate faith draws its life from the life to which baptism points and prefigures.
Revolt which emerges from esteem for the Name will invariably make an apostasy from this vain Christianity, as an act of obedient, faithful repentance—the kind which reflects the ongoing Spirit-borne work of “re-cognizing” our mind as how Romans 12:1-2 envisions.
This is not merely a turning away but a turning towards. A re-cognizing of our minds which also binds up the wounds of those who are downtrodden by this vain Christianity.
“As the Word of God is spoken to them, they are also told unmistakably that to this factor which has come into their lives and been inscribed on their consciousness there belongs the precedence over all other possible factors” (Karl Barth, The Christian Life, Cornerstones Series (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), Kindle, Loc. 4829).
“It is to this action of resistance against the desecration of God’s name that we are summoned” (Barth, The Christian Life, Kindle. Loc. 4772).
Barth, The Christian Life, Kindle. Loc. 4542.
Barth, The Christian Life, Kindle Loc. 4514.
“Barmen Declaration,” United Church of Christ (blog), accessed April 17, 2025, https://www.ucc.org/beliefs_barmen-declaration/.
Ernst Käsemann and James Cone, Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance, ed. Ry O. Siggelkow, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Baker Academic, 2021), 217–8.
Superb and timely. So much of the U.S. reception of Barth has fed a shallow biblicism--too readily coopted by the religious Right--or an easy transcendence of worldliness on what passes for a religious Left. This is the best of Barth's legacy brought home.
Are we zealous, or merely jealous? What is one’s own little puny, but graciously commanded by God, honoring of God name in this world of His, at best? “Small steps.” TCL How was God called upon at the White House that day by us as fellow human beings, with the stated petition, and praying in Jesus’ name? Barth paid considerable attention to the vocative address to God as “Father!” as “thanksgiving, praise and petition, “ in “The Children and Their Father” section of TCL, pp. 81-130, as we see from Luke 11:2 NRSV in Jesus training his disciples how to pray, at their request of Him, “When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. “ And, from the Bible, let’s also bother to read Romans 12:1-2. Barth liked that, though he knew it was a challenge to read the tBible, and not everyone agree with the way he read it and what he said about it. Simply put , as Barth puts it in CD 1.1, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ, regarding our God talk and praxis, can measure things by Holy Scripture, by God’s own prophetic and apostolic human witness to Jesus Christ, as the One Word of God, (Barmen), and so we can look there regarding “apostasy.” A Christian sermon should start from our Holy Scriptures, and Christian confession of non-conformity, with it’s timely task, is different, but here with our author we are not without our Holy Scriptures, as the author does conclude by citing Romans 12-2, but how reliably? And so, we may turn first here back to our Holy Scripture, to Romans 12:1-2. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (NRSV primary reading) Transformation and holiness, holy transformation , renewal, discernment of what is good and acceptable and perfect. Note the apostle Paul, unashamed of the Gospel, or Himself as an apostle, rather, it is the world that puts him down that should be ashamed, called by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself here coming , in Roman’s to his hortatory “therefore.” Our prophetic and apostolic Christian church faith rests on the faithfulness of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. The Christian Life is CD Chapter VII The Command of God the Reconciler and the author here overlooks that Barth spells out in CD IV, 4, the second section of TCL, that according to the testimony of Scripture, our Lord Jesus Christ Himself is, in His historical person the One in whom the divine and human “change” has taken place where God’s faithfulness to human beings meets human faithfulness to God, and that by the Holy Spirit as, a second mystery, the beginning of that change comes to each of us as well. The author notes the eschatological but not the Christological context in which Barth spoke of the ethical relevance of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer. (241) Barth does say for the Christian that the Word of God does have precedence over these factors, but as they are not only darkness, but also light, and also that as we ourselves are still in present world, not devils but not angels either, the Word of God will direct us to this or that factor, in “little steps.” Barth was not a stateless person, for example. Barth was adamant about speaking about both the knowledge and ignorance of God in the human world, the church and the individual Christian, and light and darkness in the natural world, but not in our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as True God and True Human Being. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1) Was some of the Christian church happier with other US presidents? The present one is baptized as a Christian, Barth did have something to say about baptism in IV 4, a section of TCL, The Beginning of the Christian Life.