"Serve the Time"

Departing from Barth’s Zionism to Pursue Love

IPMN delegation with Father Jamil, pastor of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Nablus, along with church members, and Omar Haramy, Director of Sabeel Jerusalem. https://www.theipmn.org/blog/amazing-sumud

Rev. Dr. Shannon Smythe (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is Director of Field Education and Vocational Placement at Princeton seminary and ordained clergy in the PC(USA). She has spent the past decade engaging in Reformed theological scholarship, teaching in both seminary and undergraduate contexts, and pastoring in congregations in NY, DE, and NJ. She is passionate about social justice, activism, and transformational faith formation. She lives with her husband, son, and dog in Bucks County, PA.

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“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait¹

For years now, I have been taken with a rather small, somewhat singular, but not insignificant, move Barth makes in 1921 in his Romans commentary. In his translation of Romans 12:9-15, Barth adds a sizeable footnote to defend his decision to go with the alternative translation of v.11c—“serve the time,” rather than the more common “serve the Lord,” opting for the textual variant present in a few early manuscripts. With a fervor criticized by New Testament scholars as both rash and arbitrary, Barth startles us by insisting that the “demand” that people “should ‘serve the Lord’” is, given the context, “a quite intolerable generalization” and “insipid” interpretation.²

Barth’s interpretation is a clear departure not only from his former New Testament professor at Marburg, Adolf Jülicher, but also with leading biblical scholars both then and now, who see the variant kairō rather than kyriō as most likely a scribal error and suggest a variety of plausible explanations. In his footnote, Barth argues against Jülicher’s “protest” to his interpretation, even sparring with the linguistic expertise of Hans Leitzmann, offering his own rebuttal to Jülicher’s attempt to justify “serve the Lord” with his reading, “serve the Lord—only.”³ Barth charges that Jülicher’s interpretation requires making an “unintelligible” exception for v. 11c rather than opting for an “authentic” and “intelligible” reading.⁴

Certainly, Barth’s departure from modern and current scholarly interpretations of Romans is one of the hallmarks of his theology that has been both ridiculed and hailed. Barth had his reasons for choosing the textual variant kairō. Throughout his Romans commentary, Barth makes much of “‘the infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity,” insisting throughout that God is God,⁵ noting that the time of the world is indeed always under God’s judgment.⁶ Upon arriving at chapter 12, however, Barth urges that this does not mean Christians are to neglect the world in favor of “some ideal world contrasted with the visible world”⁷ but should instead focus attention on “concrete life”⁸ in all of its “hidden corners” and “kaleidoscopic movements.”⁹ Barth hears in Paul a call to engage with the “KRISIS” of our temporal reality through our “authentic love"¹⁰ (agapē anypokritos in vs. 9), which is our “living sacrifice” to God that can, by God’s grace, “witness” to and serve as “parables” of eternity.¹¹ As Barth moves back and forth with Paul’s thoughts, between what Barth calls both the positive (Romans 12:9-15) and negative (12:16-20) ethical possibilities of the eschatological kairos moments that interrupt our lives to bring forth the possibility of grace within the world of time, he is headed, always, along with Paul, towards love, which he calls the “Great POSITIVE Possibility, because in it there is brought to light the revolutionary aspect of all ethical behaviour, and because it is veritably concerned with the denial and breaking up of the existing order.” Barth proclaims that it is “by love” that “we do the ‘new’ by which the ‘old’ is overthrown.”¹²

This is a powerful reading of Paul’s “now and not yet” eschatology, but we can and must press further. Barth’s insistence that Paul calls us to “serve the time,” through authentic love, rather than simply to “serve the Lord,”¹³ comes from a place of acutely learned practical wisdom. Such wisdom, no doubt, is derived from Barth’s pastoral praxis, which breaks open, importantly, into a concrete and embodied eschatology. It is as a pastor that Barth wrestled with Paul. By the time of his Romans commentary, Barth had a decade of experience serving in the industrial village of Safenwil and, before that, as assistant pastor in Geneva, preaching from the same pulpit John Calvin used. As a pastor, Barth was steeped in the concrete, material reality of his local context. Historically, Safenwil had been governed by “so-called gracious Lords of Bern” who used the local pastors, restricted by sworn oaths, to control the villagers in humiliating and devasting ways until Napoleon removed them from office and redrew the area.¹⁴ During Barth’s time, similar dynamics were still in play but with a new twist: now the village was ruled by two factory owners who expected the village pastor to keep the people quiet and content with their fate of poor working conditions and low wages. Barth did not acquiesce. In protest, one factory owner left the church to establish his own religious club. Meanwhile, Barth earned the title “Comrade Pastor,” even joining the Social Democratic Party and training workers in the work of solidarity, advocacy, and community organizing, himself advocating for the doubly marginalized female factory workers.¹⁵

The consistency of Barth’s interpretation and lived praxis, both bristling at the thought of an insipid interpretation “serve the Lord,” and acting concretely in the face of the injustice and brokenness in his Safenwil village, resonates deeply with me. As Angela Dienhart Hancock highlights, “[t]he bourgeois political conservatism of his liberal teachers was hardly compelling in the midst of the working-class squalor . . . in Safenwil.”¹⁶ Indeed, I would suggest that boldly breaking with his university teachers was an act of solidarity with his congregation of factory workers, even if it meant opting for the less likely textual variant in interpreting Romans 12:11c. This exegetical decision indicates some lived hermeneutical priorities that Barth would later articulate as having “time and space, not merely to see, but actively to share in” the involvement of the living Christ in the current darkness and remaining conflict in the world.¹⁷

Earlier this year, I took on a Lenten practice in which I committed intentionally to witness and not look away from the social media footage provided by Palestinian journalists and the daily news reports of the suffering of the Palestinian people amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. During this time, I found myself taken with another small, somewhat singular, but not insignificant, move Barth made later in retirement while giving a set of lectures in the United States. From April 23–27, 1962, Barth gave a series of seven widely attended lectures at the University of Chicago. As reported by Dr. Gordon H. Clark for Christianity Today, Barth stressed “the history of Israel as no modernist ever can” and in answer to a question posed to him by Rabbi Petuchowski “concerning the state of Israel,” Dr. Clark records Barth saying “that the modern Israel is a new sign of the electing grace and faithfulness of God. Especially after the horrors of Hitler, the reappearance of Zion as a state is a miracle. . . Now today, wedged among the Arab nations and caught in an East-West struggle, God alone will preserve Israel.”¹⁸

I was disturbed to discover such blatant evidence of liberal Christian Zionism manifested in Barth’s noticeably “undifferentiated use of the word Israel.”¹⁹ But those familiar with Barth’s later Church Dogmatics know that he had already written about the establishment of the modern state of Israel in the third part of his doctrine of creation. Mark Lindsay summarizes several instances throughout CD III/3 in which Barth speaks specifically of the land in relationship to the new State of Israel, saying: “the fact that God’s fatherly love is demonstrated on the land and not in diaspora is neither a contingent happenstance nor a product of Zionist lobbying but yet another example of the concrete particularity of God’s mysterious governance that is always actualized in specific times and places.”²⁰

What happened to Barth’s earlier commitment to Paul’s eschatology, expressed through an authentic love that serves the time? Is this an instance of Barth looking to the hidden corners of concrete life? Or might this be a place where Barth’s eschatological vision has been separated from the person and work of Jesus Christ and patched onto a love expressed in nationalist form? Willie Jennings, in a recent lecture, has provided a definition of a Christian Zionism that tries to account for the “profound sadness” Howard Thurman noted from his 1963 visit to Israel-Palestine.²¹ Jennings defines Christian Zionism thusly: “Christian Zionism imagines God’s love channeled through race and nation for Jewish people. It is an orientation of spatial desire that organizes life, land, and love (both divine and human) through a propertied and territorial vision of existence.”²² By suggesting the “reappearance of Zion as a state,” Barth’s vicarious reading of Israel fails to distinguish between biblical history, biblical theology, and contemporary politics. Rather, insofar as Christian Zionism is an eschatological offering, Barth reads God’s grace to Israel through a colonialist vision and imagination that has already provided how God will work in the world and filled in the blanks of what might happen in an eschatological vision of a world beyond suffering.²³

For Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, this filling in-the-blanks occurs in the slippage with the term “Israel,” which must always be contextualized and distinguished. There is Israel, the name given to the Northern Kingdom in the Old Testament. Then, there is the theological concept of Israel referring to the “people of God.” Finally, there is Israel, the name chosen for a modern political entity established through violence and dispossession. Barth’s statement conflates the biblical story and theological concept of “the people of God” with the modern State of Israel as if they are one and the same. But this “leaves the settler colonial nature of the State of Israel unquestioned” and provides divine approval and intention for the conquest of Palestine, finding in the creation of the state of Israel, which resulted in the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), the grace and faithfulness of God.²⁴ While Lindsay positively characterizes Barth as a vocal champion of “Christian solidarity with the Israeli State,”²⁵ Raheb’s concern is that Barth’s statement effectively gives “a political entity a theological qualification” and signals the start, in the 1960s, of “a Zionist political narrative of ‘unity of God, land, and people’ and a ‘theological attribute to the State of Israel’” which become “important features of Protestant liberal theologies.”²⁶

I am sure many would want to come to Barth’s defense, seeing in him an understandable representation of Western Christianity’s search for new ways to relate to Judaism after the Holocaust. The concern of many Western Christians and theologians is that critiques of the state of Israel are (or may be stepping into) antisemitism because Israel is a “Jewish State” for “Jews of the World.” Yet this line of thinking fails to listen to and does not wrestle with Palestinian voices and voices in solidarity with them. And ironically, it further entrenches antisemitism by equating Zionism with the Jewish people.²⁷ As Rebecca Vilkomerson and Alissa Wise argue, the notion that “Jews are uniform in our beliefs and political commitments, and that all Jews, no matter where we live in the world, are fundamentally loyal to a foreign government, and that the ‘real’ home for all Jews is Israel” is antisemitic.²⁸ Even more, Willie Jennings suggests that we also have to see Christian Zionism as more than simply a political or religious ideology, a tool of Western statecraft, and consider more deeply how it teaches people to see. As Jennings notes, “[t]he challenge is to turn the transparency of Christian Zionism against itself, to see through the suffering, not only holy Zion restored in its territorial sovereignty, ready to announce the global reign of Israel’s God, but to see through the suffering into the mind-bending suffering of the Palestinians and the land, and to see Jewish people imprisoned inside a love woven in hate that objectifies a dream of global control born of colonial desire and white supremacy.”²⁹

Of course, we must remember the limits of Barth’s own contextual framework, which is always located inside the Western racial and colonial logic, as well as the hopeful possibility of his theological proposal of “the new human in the Jewish Jesus who becomes a new site for new configurations of life and the striving for the good life.”³⁰ That said, we cannot let Barth off the hook. Given his own commitment to look squarely in the face of “concrete life” and “steadily refuse to treat anything—however trivial or disgusting it may seem to be—as irrelevant,”³¹ we ought still to wonder how he so easily dismissed the facts on the ground during his time. Surely Barth, who always had a newspaper in hand, knew the modern State of Israel was established through a violent project in which Israeli troops and Zionist terrorist organizations occupied seventy-seven percent of historic Palestine, 452 Palestinian villages were destroyed, over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, becoming displaced refugees, and about 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.³² To ignore all of this so as to see signs of God’s grace and faithfulness in the creation of a Jewish State, all while indicating that this is the way for Jews to be safe in the world, belies the very problem at the heart of Christian Zionism which cannot attend to the suffering it allows and propagates or hear life in a wounded land.³³ It also seems to align Barth’s Christian Zionism with the key concept of dispensational millennialism, namely, that God’s restoration of the Jewish people to the land of Israel as a nation marks “the movement of God to bring history to its fulfillment.”³⁴

Barth’s Christian Zionist move is so devastating precisely because his assignment of such uncontested divine approval to the modern State of Israel makes the Palestinian people, their suffering, and the loss and devastation of the land invisible while simultaneously providing a kind of tacit alignment between the miraculous and sustaining grace of God and the State of Israel doing whatever necessary to maintain its existence. Throughout its seventy-seven years of existence, the State of Israel has not acknowledged the human rights violations at the core foundation of its settler-colonial existence from then until now. Today, we know that according to “international law, the International Court of Justice, the Geneva Convention, and the Human Rights Charter, Israel’s settler colonial project is illegal and violates laws and rights,” and was first described by the Jewish human rights organization B’Tselem, “as apartheid.”³⁵

Following my Lenten practice of seeing through the settler colonial vision, I joined an ecumenical group of Christian clergy and leaders on a “solidarity pilgrimage” to East Jerusalem and the West Bank this summer. Our pilgrimage aimed to “express solidarity with all who are suffering in Palestine/Israel during this time of immense violence, to demand an end to Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza and an end to Israel’s systemic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the release of all Palestinian captives held unlawfully by Israel, and to call for an end to Hamas’ acts of horrendous violence against civilians and the return of all captives held by Hamas.”³⁶ Our delegation’s theme was “Come and See, Go and Tell,” as our Palestinian Christian siblings had specifically challenged us to the work of calling attention to Israel’s increased violence and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank and to lifting up the Palestinians and Israelis who engage in nonviolent actions to achieve a future of justice, equality, and peace for all Palestinians and Israelis.

What we witnessed in the daily lived reality of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was not only devastating but also plainly and obviously ethnic cleansing. My own feelings resonate both with Howard Thurman’s, back in 1963, that after what he witnessed, he does “not desire to see it again,”³⁷ and also Ta-Nehisi Coates’ impression that he would never get back to the other side, that his life would never be the same.³⁸ The Palestinians we met, both Muslims and Christians, showed us some of the warmest hospitality I have ever experienced but also shared vulnerably that the State of Israel either kills you right away or very slowly. And we saw it with our own eyes—the heavy weight of suffering under what one delegation member called “the slow-drip genocide of encroachment, enclosure, and asphyxiation.”³⁹ The “concrete life” of the Palestinian people, while beautifully filled⁴⁰ with amazing “sumud” (“steadfastness” and “resistance”),⁴¹ is also deeply tenuous, minute by minute, as they struggle under fifty-seven years of illegal military occupation⁴² dictated by eighteen-year-old armed IDF soldiers who dictate whether they live or die.⁴³

If Barth were alive today, I do not know what he would say if he had been able to travel to Israel-Palestine, if he had relationships with Palestinians, and if he knew their stories and realities. Certainly, one could hope that his pattern of revising his theology based on lived reality, as he did during his time in Safenwil, would reemerge and that we might hear him break the silent complicity that characterizes so many Western Christians and theologians today to “serve the time.”⁴⁴ What I do know for sure is that as an American Christian of European descent, a PC(USA)⁴⁵ clergywoman, and a theologian trained as a Barth scholar, heeding Paul’s eschatological call to “serve the time” means not only following Barth’s example of departing from his theology teachers, and so repenting of Christian Zionism in general, and Barth’s version of liberal Christian Zionism in particular. But it also means committing myself, through the Spirit’s work, to living into the call to love every person, not in conformity with this world, but in a way that overthrows its present order and thus “bears witness to the strangeness of God”⁴⁶ by leaving no space for separation from one another in our collective life.⁴⁷

I will always remember the disturbing and unrelentingly hot day we spent in Hebron at the end of our trip. After multiple checkpoints, several tense interactions with an Israeli settler, and Israeli soldiers threatening our Palestinian guides, our group was equal parts outraged, scared, and obstinate in ways that only privileged Americans can be in foreign places. Before getting on the bus to retreat to air conditioning and our hotel, Omar Haramy, our host and the Director of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center—who is an Arab, Palestinian, Jerusalemite Greek Orthodox Christian whose family traces its history in Jerusalem back almost to the time of Jesus—passionately urged us to remember that as people who are Christians who follow the way of Jesus, we must never abandon the people on the margins. Most importantly, God is under the rubble, and the resurrection is coming. May this eschatological vision, fully attune to the great suffering of the Palestinian people, fill our imaginations with the hope of God’s future for all creation, beyond all forms of territorialism, nationalism, colonialism, war, destruction, violence, and oppression, that we might indeed “serve the time.”

1. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (Beacon Press, 2010), 97–98.

2. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1933), 450.

3. Barth, Romans, 450.

4. Barth, Romans, 450.

5. Barth, Romans, 330, 342, 411.

6. Barth, Romans, 10.

7. Barth, Romans, 424–25.

8. Barth, Romans, 424.

9. Barth, Romans, 425.

10. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Romans: A Commentary (Westminster John Knox Press 2024), 453.

11. Barth, Romans, 424–38.

12. Barth, Romans, 493.

13. Gaventa characterizes “serve the Lord” as “a bit out of place, given that the entire chapter might be characterized as service to the Lord” (see Gaventa, Romans, 454).

14. Eberhard Busch, Barth (Abingdon Press, 2008), 2–3.

15. Busch, Barth, 3.

16. Angela Dienhart Hancock, Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic, 1932–1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 7.

17. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3.1, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1961), 333.

18. https://gordonhclark.com/special-report-encountering-barth-in-chicago/

19. Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible (Orbis Books, 2023), 49.

20. Mark Lindsay, “Barth and the Jews,” in Blackwell Wiley Companion to Karl Barth, ed. George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2020), 890

21. Peter Eisenstadt notes that Thurman’s first journal entry during his long-awaited visit to Israel was that it was “an unhappy land.” Partners for Progressive Israel (2021) “Howard Thurman in Israel,” Israel Horizons (April): 10. https://www.progressiveisrael.org/newsletters/Israel-Horizons-April-2021.pdf. Accessed on October 25, 2024.

22. Willie James Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land: Coloniality, Racial Reasoning, and the Imagined Built Environment of Christian Zionism,” Public Lecture, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, April 18, 2024.

23. Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land.”

24. Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 62, 64.

25. Lindsay, “Barth and the Jews,” 890.

26. Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 40. Indeed, two prominent liberal Christian Zionist theologians, Paul van Buren and Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt, were both students of Barth who “speak bluntly and unapologetically of the Christian duty to lobby on behalf of the State of Israel,” Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 44.

27. Rebecca Vilkomerson and Alissa Wise, Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionism Organizing (Haymarket Books, 2024), 126.

28. Vilkomerson and Wise, Solidarity is the Political Version of Love, 126.

29. Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land.”

30. Jennings, “Barth and the Racial Imaginary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, ed. Paul Dafydd Jones and Paul T. Nimmo (Oxford University Press, 2019), 513.

31. Barth, Romans, 425.

32. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948

33. Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land.”

34. Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land.”

35. Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 50. See also https://www.btselem.org/apartheid.

36. https://www.theipmn.org/blog/come-and-see-go-and-tell-may-2024-delegation

37. Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (Mariner Books, 1981), 190.

38. Aljazeera (2024) “My life will never be the same”: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel and Palestine,” UpFront Special (October) Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/upfront/2024/10/25/my-life-will-never-be-the-same-ta-nehisi-coates-on-israel-and-palestine. Accessed on October 25, 2024.

39. Conor Foley, “Liturgies of Occupation,” Israel-Palestine Mission Network Blog, June 2024, https://www.theipmn.org/blog/liturgies-of-occupation.

40. Coleen Moore, “Joy and Hope as Resistance,” Israel-Palestine Mission Network Blog, June 2024, https://www.theipmn.org/blog/joy-and-hope-as-resistance.

41. Carol Garwood, “Amazing Sumud,” Israel-Palestine Mission Network Blog, June 2024, https://www.theipmn.org/blog/amazing-sumud.

42. Conor Foley, “Liturgies of Occupation,” Israel-Palestine Mission Network Blog, June 2024, https://www.theipmn.org/blog/liturgies-of-occupation.

43. Shannon Smythe, “Hebron: Collective Peace or Punishment,” Israel-Palestine Mission Network Blog, June 2024, https://www.theipmn.org/blog/hebron-collective-peace-or-punishment.

44. It should be noted that Barth spoke out in 1933 about the horrors of the concentration camps, posing the question of the guilt of the Christian church because of its silence, opening his home in 1935 to German Jewish refugees, and attempting to halt the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. See Lindsay, “Barth and the Jews,” 886–87.

45. This summer, the General Assembly of the PC(USA) voted to divest from Israel bonds and reject Christian Zionism in all its forms, and confess our history of complicity in Christian Zionism. https://religionnews.com/2024/07/01/presbyterian-church-u-s-a-votes-to-divest-from-israel-bonds/

46. Barth, Romans, 493.

47. Jennings describes a path towards a new kind of “blueprint” for organizing our actions and thinking “towards a love of self and neighbor so deeply intertwined that it leaves no space for separation, whether territorialism and national vision, in our collective life together” (See Jennings, “To Build a Sad Land: Coloniality”).