Theologizing Beyond State Violence, Pt. 1
We Have to Talk About State Violence
About the author: Christopher Choi is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia. His research engages modern religious thought, the philosophy of religion, and Black Studies. Most recently, his dissertation critically examined the intersection of philosophical and theological doctrines of state power with antiblackness and discourses on slavery. His scholarly interests include political theology, the theology of James Cone and Karl Barth, the thought of W. E. B. De Bois, German idealism and Romanticism, and modern Jewish philosophy.
We have to talk about state violence, and theology might have something unique to say about it. And Karl Barth, I argue, might offer us an interesting place to begin.
My interest in the theopolitics of the state began during my dissertation research, which I began at the height of the 2020 protests and uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder. Just as I felt there to be a radical theological content to the protests, to their dreams and demands, I was convinced that there was also a theological word to be spoken regarding the protests’ brutal and violent suppression by police in cities around the country.
I found an unexpected springboard for my thinking in the early writings of Karl Barth, particularly those from the First World War to the early years of the Weimar Republic. In the face of graphic instances of state violence, Barth pursued similar questions as mine. What does theology have to say about the meaning and function of state violence? What is the theological content of the violence displayed in the abovementioned examples? What grounds can theology offer to critique, which is to say, think both against and beyond state violence?
Barth felt compelled to pursue such questions in the face of catastrophic instances of state violence, not only from the First World War that claimed millions of lives, but the revolutionary unrest and chaos that ensued in the War’s wake. Most vividly displayed in the Bolsheviks’ successful seizure of power in Russia, the technologies and strategies of violence turned inward in revolutionary and reactionary violence across Europe. As Barth was completing the first edition to his Römerbrief, an especially bloody revolutionary and reactionary struggle ended in the brutal suppression of the far left, along with the torture and execution of many of its leaders, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht.
This bloody backdrop to the founding of the liberal and constitutional Weimar Republic precipitated renewed examination and criticism of state violence. Perhaps most famously, Walter Benjamin reflected on the state’s monopolized claim to violence or power [Gewalt] in his 1921 essay “The Critique of Violence” [Zur Kritik der Gewalt]. There, Benjamin argued that underlying the state’s legal claims to power was a mythical political theology of the law, which was prominently demonstrated in the exceptional powers of the police.1
Years prior to the publication of Benjamin’s essay, however, Barth articulated his own theopolitical critique of violence while serving as a pastor at Safenwil, Switzerland, most fully developed in the first edition of his Epistle to the Romans. In this work, we find Barth contending with similar theological questions and concerns as mine, seeking to make sense of spectacular and terrifying displays of state violence. What are we really looking at, Barth asks, when we look at “flamethrowers, mine-dogs, gas masks, aerial bombs, and submarines” [Flammenwerfer, Minenhunde, Gasmasken, Fliegerbomben und Unterseebooten]?2
Anticipating Benjamin, Barth, in his 1918 Römerbrief, draws a critical distinction between the violence [Gewalt] of the state, which he calls the “violence of unrighteousness” [die Gewalt der Ungerechtigkeit], from divine violence, or the “violence of justice/righteousness” [die Gewalt der Gerechtigkeit]. Barth’s approach stands out in his interpretation of this distinction through a reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He discovers in the Epistle a unique ground for criticizing state violence, which is passed over in contemporary social and political critique.
Flamethrowers, aerial bombs, machine guns—Barth identifies such weapons with what Paul calls “weapons of unrighteousness” (Romans 6:13).3 Standing in the background and as the foundation of state violence is not divine justice but the injustice of human justice. These are weapons forged, in other words, from the context of humanity’s attempt to supplant God as sovereign judge, resulting from a stolen right to adjudicate and administer force [Gewalt]. For Barth, the critical power of Paul’s epistle lies in its shift of focus from the relationship between state violence to its innumerable victims to that between state violence and Godself. Or, to put it differently, for Barth, the definitive fact about state violence is its relationship to its one true victim, the crucified and resurrected Christ.4
Tanks, long-rage missiles, drones, and aerial bombs—what are we really looking at? Barth answers that we are beholding a godlike power, a power of violence, however, that has been “detached” [gelöst] and “splintered off” [abgesplitterte] from its divine origin and ground5 and taken on a life and autonomy of its own. We behold humanity’s primordial and ongoing revolt against its Creator, and its vain attempt to establish justice independent of God. These weapons are the form violence and force take when wielded by “the will of humanity alienated from God” [der gottenfremdete Wille des Menschen],6 in its effort to hold power [Gewalt] over and upon the earth in the place of God. What we see in these weapons of state violence, then, is the nothingness and abyss of evil or the destructive efforts of humanity to erect security and stability upon this abyss.
In future posts, I will engage with Barth more critically, particularly his dialectical reaffirmation of the state as a parable of divine justice and the Kingdom of God. But here, I wish to conclude by briefly sketching some dimensions of the theological conversation Barth can help spark regarding state violence. What his specifically theological engagement with the state highlights is the godlike, idolatrous character of state violence, which not only protects and preserves law and order, defends the state from external threats, but also demands and elicits a religious, even worshipful pathos.7 It is a human attempt to stand in for and execute the divine dialectic of wrath and grace, death and new life, destruction, and recreation. Barth brought to the fore the ways in which political reasoning can be captured by a sense of fatalism or naïve affirmation of providence, wherein the torture, over-policing, displacement, and even slaughter of thousands can take on the appearance of unavoidable, even if unfortunate necessity.
Today, as in Barth’s day, we are confronted by catastrophic events and urgent issues that highlight the importance of theologically reexamining state violence, not merely as a given or necessity but as a problem to be reflected upon. Now, as when I began my dissertation, police brutality and mass incarceration continue to be perpetuated and protected by the law, most recently highlighted in the cases regarding the murders of Irvo Otieno, Tyre Nichols, and Breanna Taylor. Issues of sovereignty, territory, and state violence lie at the core of conflicts and crises across the globe, including in Haiti, Congo, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Gaza.
The contention that I propose here and will develop in further posts is that Barth, even if at times negatively, helps us reexamine the critical capacities of theology and pursue the question in the face of state violence—what are we really looking at?
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Belknap Press, 2004), 236–252.
Karl Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, ed. Hermann Schmidt, vol. 16, Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe (Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1985), 519.
Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, 230, 493.
Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, 493.
Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, 503.
Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, 501.
Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, 504–505, 516. See also Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1968), 483.