Where Minarets are Mourning

Das Nichtige and Lament for Palestine

Photo by Ahmed Akacha on Pexels

About the author: Jane Barter is a Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg. She has published two books of Christian theology: Lord, Giver of Life (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007) and Thinking Christ (Fortress Press, 2011). She is editor of the forthcoming Christology volume of T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology. She also has published extensively in the area of political theology.

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Where Minarets are Mourning¹

As we bear witness to the mass violence unfolding in Gaza with no end or relief in sight, it is difficult to discern with any finality where God is here and now. It is not difficult to judge, however, where evil, suffering, and death are. At time of writing, almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since the attacks of October 7, including more than 12,000 children. Over 70,000 people have been injured. 1.9 million have been displaced in Gaza, almost 80 percent of its population. 

Barth’s theology of evil and sin is, in my reading, both helpful and problematic in light of this horror which we are witnessing today. On the one hand, his affirmation of das Nichtige—nothingness—offers a realistic assessment of the existence of human malice and of suffering. On other, his positing of the ultimately powerless and insignificant (CD III/3, 367) nature of das Nichtige fails to give adequate voice to the terrible reality and persistence of suffering and evil in history.

For Barth, Das Nichtige is that nothingness which is “opposition to and resistance to God’s world-dominion” (III/3, 289). Das Nichtige exists at the very foundation of the world according to Barth as he argues that the biblical account of creation, which “distinguishes and opposes day and night,” presents a “twofold character and aspect of creaturely existence” (295). Far from trivializing the reality of evil, then, Barth writes at length about its devastating effects: “Nothingness is the danger, assault, and menace under which the creature as such must exist” (CD III/3, 357). Yet, at the same time, Barth speaks of das Nichtige as an illusion or a veil. After Christ, the persistence of das Nichtige connotes a an obfuscation of  the reality of our redemption, which has already been achieved:

Nothingness may still have standing and assume significance to the extent that the final revelation of its destruction has not yet taken place and all creation much still await and expect it. But its dominion, is now objectively defeated, as such in Jesus Christ. What it still is in the world, it is in virtue of the blindness of our eyes and the cover which is still over us, obscuring the prospect of the kingdom of God already established as the only kingdom undisputed by evil (CD III/3, 367).

Barth’s confidence in the redemption of the world in Christ prompts him to relativize the power of evil as mere “shadows and echoes.” Further, and even more problematically, Barth argues that God instrumentalizes das Nichtige as “a strange servant” “for good to them who love Him” (368).

I cannot hope to do justice to these interlocking and large themes in Barth’s theology—themes which span the entirety of his Dogmatics—but I do wish to consider one criticism of the concept of das Nichtige—and that is its lack of lament. In his critical and appreciative examination of Church Dogmatics (III/3 paragraph 50), Matthias Wüthrich urges a reading of Barth that refuses to force a pre-emptive closure on theodical questions. In its stead, he encourages the attenuation of Barth’s doctrine of sin by lament, which acknowledges the reality of suffering in this world while it is also faithful to the story of Christ that is haunted by lament at every turn. Wüthrich writes:

The Crucified One does not silence lament, he evokes it “with a loud voice” (Mt 27:45–50). The realization of how God confronts das Nichtige in Jesus Christ, in his birth, as the Savior, on the cross and in the resurrection, is the very spark that kindles the longing that is evoked in lament, the longing for him as our eschatic Savior.²

Wüthrich draws our attention to Christ’s own life in the form of lament. Reading the gospels through the lens of lament, we see the suffering and longing that haunt Christ’s story from the very beginning to its end, even in the midst of victory: the flight of the innocents, his weeping over his dead friend Lazarus, his lament over Jerusalem, the cry of dereliction upon the cross. Read this way, Christ shares in the knowledge and experience of das Nichtige and his very life reverberates with a lament over and shared with the victims of history.

Lament, in my view, does not merely attenuate theodicy; it refuses it. It refuses to offer any justification or teleology for mass suffering. Lament desists from turning away from the heaps of corpses that history has piled up. Like the angel of history in Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis, lament is that messianic/Christ-like work of return to count wreckage upon wreckage and to awaken the dead, one by one. Lament is therefore a sustained protest against the illusion that evil is an illusion.

It is difficult to see God, but it is not so difficult to witness das Nichtige—sin, death, mass violence—in the here and now. The tradition of lament teaches us something about the capacity to bear witness to human suffering, for lament names evil without attempting to justify or reconcile ourselves to it. Lament names the distance between the blessing for which God has created us and the curse that characterizes much of human existence today. It does not seek to collapse this distance but remains in this aporia, this impasse, as its living witness.

I conclude with this lament by Syrian poet, Nizar Qabbani (1923–1998), titled Al-Quds - Jerusalem. Perhaps it is poetry rather than doctrine that is most needed in times like these. While Qabbani indeed anticipates redemption, he does not bypass human suffering or conceive of it as a mere veil. In this poem, Qabbani mourns for Jerusalem, which has suffered relentless violence, and which he figures as a beautiful child with fingers charred and downcast eyes. The promise of redemption in this lament remains fully attuned to this child—this innocent and ubiquitous casualty of history—whom Qabbani imagines playing once again.  

May it be so.

Al-Quds - Jerusalem³

I wept until my tears were dry
I prayed until the candles flickered
I knelt until the floor creaked
I asked about Mohammed and Christ
Oh Jerusalem, the fragrance of prophets
The shortest path between earth and sky
Oh Jerusalem, the citadel of laws
A beautiful child with fingers charred
and downcast eyes
You are the shady oasis passed by the Prophet
Your streets are melancholy
Your minarets are mourning
….

Oh Jerusalem my town
Oh Jerusalem my love
Tomorrow the lemon trees will blossom
And the olive trees will rejoice
Your eyes will dance
The migrant pigeons will return
To your sacred roofs
And your children will play again
And fathers and sons will meet
On your rosy hills
My town
The town of peace and olives.

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1. The title of this post is an allusion to Nizar Qabbani’s poem, Al-Quds-Jerusalem, cited below. It is also an allusion to the tradition of the Minaret of Isa, the Minaret of Jesus, in the Umayyad Grand Mosque in Damascus. According to a hadith, Isa will descend from heaven to the white minaret prior to defeat the anti-Christ. 

2. Matthias Wüthrich, “‘An Entirely Different Theodicy’: Karl Barth’s Interpretation of Human Suffering in the Context of his Doctrine of das Nichtige,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 23 (2021): 593–616.

3. Nizar Qabbani, “Al-Quds – Jerusalem,” https://allpoetry.com/poem/8526787-Jerusalem-by-Nizar-Qabbani. With permission for re-publication for educational purposes.