Quote of the Day (Karl Barth, on WWI and the Question of God’s Will)

“None of this is God’s will, neither the selfishness and arrogance in human beings, nor the mutual hatred of the nations, nor their anxieties about one another and their threatening armaments, nor finally that they mutually attack life with both precise and heavy firing power at sea, on land, or in the air. All these things are completely alien to the innermost being of God . . . God is as distant from them as from their enemies in the wrath with which their actions fill God. But God is also as distant from them in the love that God wants to bestow to draw both sides out of their confusion. And this indeed remains the same in victory or in defeat.”—Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968), sermon of September 6, 1914, in A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons, translated by William Klempa (2016)

Commemorating Armistice Day, and how the guns fell silent—only to sound again a generation later, due to the “selfishness and arrogance in human beings.” Who can say, in our own time of nationalism, awakened like a beast, that the guns will not sound again, even louder this time?