“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?
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