In the wake of widespread departure from the biblical paradigm of gender and marriage in Western society, those who follow the Bible’s teachings often find themselves in the minority. These lone voices in the wilderness can be tempted to champion any promotion of heterosexual monogamous marriage as a beacon of biblical faithfulness and a positive good for society. However, this inclination carries risks, for there exists a brand of conservatism that superficially aligns with certain aspects of biblical truth but is rooted in principles and priorities fundamentally opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this kind of conservatism is accepted as true Christianity, the overall biblical message becomes grossly distorted and extreme harm can come to society. A case in point is the version of marriage and gender promoted by the National Socialists in Germany during their ascent to power in the 1930s and 1940s. While few today would identify the Nazis with anything remotely biblical, this was not the case when they were rising to power. They courted the German Christian Church, which, in turn, embraced and promoted them.

But there were some who refused to fall in line, including one Karl Barth. Barth saw through the Nazis’ superficial correspondence with the Christian view of gender and marriage to a deeper—and darker—antithesis. My goal is to explore where Barth identified the problem and what he proposed as the solution. I do not endorse all aspects of Barth’s theology and certainly do not commend his own practice of marriage. But the problem that Barth saw with a non-Christologically defined natural theology of marriage could be worth considering for our own day.

1. Gender and Marriage in German Romanticism

The National Socialists’ view of gender and marriage arose from a constellation of social, political, and philosophical realities. Dietrick Bonhoeffer’s pre-conversion lectures to expatriate Germans in Spain offer a good example of the nationalistic eschatology deeply woven into the consciousness of the German people. Bonhoeffer compares peoples (Volker) to a young man struggling to overcome the forces against him and carve out a place for himself in a hostile world. He sees this aspiration to greatness as God’s will for nations and how nations reflect God, who is “eternally young and powerful.” This Nietzschean “will to power” justifies—we could even say sanctifies—aggressive war. Bonhoeffer asks, “Now, should a people experiencing God’s call in its own life, in its own youth, and in its own strength … be allowed to follow that call even if it disregards the lives of other peoples?”1 Bonhoeffer answered “yes.”

This Fascism grew in the soil of German Romanticism. A Romantic movement had swept Europe since around the turn of the century. As Enlightenment confidence in reason waned, people latched onto pre-Enlightenment identities, which, for Germans, meant the folk-farmer/warrior who struggles with a sublime and unruly natural world. This was captured in the important slogan, “Blood and soil.” It was a move to a simpler mode of life, tied to one’s homeland and away from the cities. The Nazis did not invent this aesthetic (it was more of an aesthetic than an ideology),2 but as Bonhoeffer’s lectures show, they succeeded in transferring it to a national identity.

This aesthetic had implications for gender and marriage. The National Socialists opposed the progressive and urban “New Woman” movement of the 1920s, which presented women as “slender, erotic, and amaternal.”3 Women dressed more like men and occupied traditionally male spaces.4 The National Socialists also challenged modern abstract portrayals of the body, which the Nazis labeled “degenerate art.”5 For example, Schultze-Naumburg said, “Woman has probably never been depicted so disrespectfully and in so unappetizing a way as in the paintings we have been obligated to put up with in German exhibits of the last twelve years…. They convey not the slightest trace of the sacredness of the human body…”6 Nazi-supported artists responded by rooting the woman in the land and family, with a perfectly proportioned (Aryan) form.7 Hitler tried to retrieve the Greek idea of beauty because, in contrast to “degenerate art,” he wanted the German people to connect the beauty of German bodies to their noble souls.8

Salvation—it would not be a stretch to use that word—came from both the man and the woman working together. Hitler himself affirmed the importance of marriage: “It is therefore our highest task to enable two companions for life and comrades in work to form a family … [for] the ultimate destruction of the family would mean the end of all higher forms of human life.”9

The man’s role was the heroic warrior who would purify the homeland of all impure (read non-Aryan) elements. The Führer himself embodied this militaristic commitment to the “Fatherland,” modeling the kind of masculinity that men must aspire to. Jünger, a principal source of Nazi masculinity, describes man as being “a compulsive sexual being who proves himself in war.”10 A man showed his masculinity in willingness to fight ruthlessly, kill without mercy, and die without fear. The symbol of a muscular, often nude, young male became emblematic of Nazism, and it served as a kind of religious iconography by which the Nazis worshiped their own strength.11

The woman, while enjoying the land carved out by the male warrior, would provide salvation through the bearing of children.12 This was her opportunity for risk and sacrifice. The maternal work of repopulating the nation after the devastating losses of WWI and declining birth rates during the Weimar Republic would rescue the German people from extinction. But deeper salvation came from the Aryan woman breeding with pure Aryan men to bring about the race of the “new man.” The masculine expansion for Germany’s borders would create space for the feminine task of nurturing the superior Aryan race. Remarking on the progress already accomplished by the 1936 Olympics, Hitler said, “This new type of man who, in all his glistening, glorious human strength, made his spectacular debut at the Olympic Games last year—this, dear sirs … is the model of man for the new age.”13 We should note the connection between the emergence of the “new man” and the “new age.” The salvation that the man and woman would accomplish entailed a specific Aryan eschatology.

Thus far in our survey of the Nationalist Socialist use of gender and marriage, we see some ostensibly biblical values, especially as they opposed progressive movements that blurred the categories of man and woman. The German Christian church embraced the National Socialist Party because they believed that a group had finally arisen with the strength to make these biblical ideas a reality. But our survey also reveals massive contradictions to biblical values, especially in the Third Reich’s racism and statism. Of course, we also know of the sadistic acts of cruelty the Nazis committed in the concentration camps, including sexual violence used to dehumanize those the Nazis deemed inferior. But there were also more subtle contradictions, revealing that even among their own people the ostensibly biblical values were undermined by the very principles they used to sustain those values.

Arguments can be made that German Fascism was essentially anti-woman.14 George Mosse explains that the only way to reconcile the values of marriage and femininity with militaristic masculinity was for the man to rule despotically in his household.15 Thus the woman—who was not a warrior—could not exist on equal terms with this man and, therefore, related to him only as an inferior. Berthold Hinz explains, “Because of the woman’s high degree of alienation, man could compensate for the loss of his own identity by dominating her. Women were forced in a role that robbed them of solidarity with men…”16

The man, too, found himself isolated. Because the race of the “new man” would be, like Nietzsche’s overman, the source and standard of all ethical reality, he could not really connect with anything else, especially the woman. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he found solidarity with nothing; therefore, he must destroy everything.17 The new man is not really Casper Fredrick’s wanderer, who stares into the void of nature but is also, in some sense, part of that nature. He is, rather, a statue, standing all alone—like the solitary statues that pervaded so many public places in Nazi Germany. The man stands disconnected from nature and, therefore, disconnected from the woman. He relates to woman as something wholly unlike himself and, thus, as something to be used.18 Formally, the Nazis opposed pornography. They aimed to give back the dignity that women had lost during the progressive ’20s. But given the way women existed to serve men, the value of the woman was always seen from the male’s (voyeuristic) point of view. Hinz rightly concludes: “The national Socialist artist was interested in blatant prostitution.”19

Blatant prostitution was not merely an element of their art. The Lebensborn (literally, “fount of life”) program began as a place for unwed mothers to have children away from the public view, but it turned into an initiative to support pure Aryan young women in maternity camps, where they would be impregnated by pure Aryan soldiers when they returned briefly from battle. The program aimed to boost the morale of the soldiers and increase the Aryan population in Germany. The increased importance of the Lebensborn program as the war progressed shows the degree to which the Nazis turned away from marriage and family as the structure of society. It also shows the degree to which women—many of whom were held in the camps against their will—were harmed by the same group of people who sought to return them to their dignity.20

2. Barth’s Theological Assessment

Barth called the breakdown of rightly ordered gender relationships a “disaster,” the root cause of which was “the humanity of man without the fellow man.”21 Conceiving of humanity as fellow humanity meant embracing that it is “not good for man to be alone” and that the suitable helper is someone like him but also other than him. Thus, humanity is constituted as being with and for another who is unlike oneself. This complementary fellowship is paradigmatic for society at large. Barth explains: “The radical sexuality duality of man [and woman] … is the root of all other fellowship,”22 including, Barth says, between the “Semite and the Aryan.”23

In contrast to the biblical paradigm, Barth traces a common theme of man understood in isolation through Nietzsche, Goethe, and the Greeks. Although he does not mention the way these sources contributed to Fascist use of gender, he likely chose them for this reason.24

Barth recognizes Nietzsche’s “almost brutal contempt for woman.”25 Nietzsche speaks of women as weaker, more servile, tending to fear. They are not brave enough to face truth head-on. The overman himself—whether thought of as an individual or a new stage of humanity—must be free from sentimentality and thus separate from the feminine. It is good that the overman be alone.26 Thus, Nietzsche clearly opposes the idea of humanity constituted as fellow-humanity.27

Goethe may at first appear as the antithesis of Nietzsche. In Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, Werther despairs of life without Charlotte. Goethe’s own life is a series of passionate love affairs with various women. But in all this Barth sees Goethe as having no real covenant partner. Barth sees evidence for this in Goethe’s abrupt departure from his beloved wife Charlotte von Stein to study Greek in Italy and to the distance he placed between himself his next wife Christiana Vulpius. While Goethe does not show Nietzsche’s same disdain he is, Barth says, “a man who is finally emancipated from women.”28 Through Goethe, Barth shows that a desire for a passionate connection with a woman is not, in itself, sufficient to ground human nature as fellow-humanity.29

The Greeks demonstrate the “profoundest symptom of sickness in the world” because “for all the eroticism of theory and practice, it was a man’s world in which there was no real place for woman.”30 Barth gives no evidence for this claim, but he is probably describing the Greek culture as the homoerotic.

I suspect that Barth’s language was carefully chosen to reinterpret the Nazi’s use of these sources. Barth labels as “sick” the very peoples that the Führer instated were the standard of health, namely the Greeks. Hitler also proclaimed a high value of marriage by “emancipating women from all emancipation.” Yet Barth sees in the roots of National Socialism the “emancipated man,” which also undermines the stability of the family. Humanity conceived of as isolated individuals (rather than co-humanity designed for fellowship) leaves a vacuum, which Barth says will be filled with a despotic man, creating a “daemonic and tyrannical world.”31 Barth states that “Humanity that is not fellow-humanity is inhumanity.”32 It is hard to find a better description of the Third Reich.

3. Barth’s Solution

Barth explains: “The only safeguard against these disasters is Christology and a little knowledge of life.”33 A Christological starting point solves the problem because it recognizes humanity’s constitution as fellow-humanity.

We first need to understand how these two things—Christology and a little knowledge of life—relate to each other. Barth does not work out a theology of gender and marriage directly from creation, as though creation itself possessed some independent authority that could be understood and obeyed purely on its own terms. Constructing such a natural theology was the project of liberal theology, which Barth resolutely rejected, in part, because it had no resources to stand against fascism. Rather, Christology—and more specifically Christ and the Church—determines the meaning of being made male and female. Any other starting point leads to disaster.

Yet, we also need “a little knowledge of life.” By this Barth means that we need the existential encounter between men and women in this world. The monastics, Barth says, went astray because they withdrew from this encounter.34 Barth’s point is not that all need to be married,35 but that all need to be conscious of their participation in gendered humanity as a man or a woman and aware of the possibility of encounter with the other. This “knowledge of life” is clearly existential and resonates with the account of marriage we read on the pages of Genesis. But at a deeper level this existential/natural knowledge is structured along Christological lines because the instillation of humanity as fellow-humanity—that is, as male and female—exists only because of the church’s covenant with Christ.

To state this another way, creation is important. It is the “external basis of the covenant”;36 without creation, God could not relate to anything outside of himself.37 Moreover, the knowledge that one has of the creation ordinance of marriage vis-à-vis one’s experience in creation and creation’s ordinances is true knowledge. But the deepest explanation for the fact of creation—including the fullest explanation of the man, the woman, and marriage—can only be found through the covenantal structure for which it was created. If this covenantal structure were taken as foundational for gender and marriage, there would be no vacuum for male despotism to fill.

4. Genesis 2 and Song of Solomon

Genesis 2 and Song of Solomon are key texts for Barth’s understanding of the Christological starting point for gender and marriage. Barth reads Song of Solomon literally, not allegorically, but he sees that a literal meaning ultimately refers to the eschatological hope of Christ’s gracious covenant with the church; this is the only way that the Song makes sense in the canon.38 Barth says, “The most natural exegesis might well prove to be the most profound.”39 Because the Song itself refers to Christ and the church, the encounter between the man and the woman, of which the Song speaks so passionately, must also be christologically defined. Barth points to three aspects of Song of Solomon in relation to the canon that show its eschatological and christological character.

First, Barth points out a link between Genesis 2 and Song of Solomon because of something conspicuously missing in these passages, which is the main issue for marriage in the rest of Scriptures, namely “the problem of posterity, human fatherhood and motherhood, the family, the child, and above all the son.”40 In Genesis 2 the climax of the creation is the man and the woman together naked and without shame. Genesis 2 emphasizes the goodness of the gift of the woman to the man, and, thus the goodness of humanity as man and woman together.41 Barth explains, “No mention is here made of child or family. The relationship of the man and woman has its own reality and dignity.”42 This motif recedes into the background for most of the OT, as marriage becomes dominated by the need to pass on of the family line. But it intrudes again in the Song of Solomon where we find the man and the woman once again naked and not ashamed and marriage celebrated for its own dignity, without children immediately in view. The Song also makes explicit an element only implied in Genesis 2, namely that now the woman happily receives the man as God’s gift to her.43

Second, Barth reads Song of Solomon christologically because of the connection made throughout Scripture between sexuality and the people’s covenant with God. Normally Scripture connects people’s unfaithfulness and their sexual sin, such as in Ezekiel 16. Barth explains, “[The] Old Testament prophecy everywhere presupposes the sin of man, Israel’s apostasy and therefore the law and judgment of God.” 44 This coincides with the fact that normally in Scripture

the “erotic” notes are few. Everything is controlled by the Law, and especially the danger and prohibition of adultery. In this respect, too, we are in the world of sin and infamy and shame, in which the love-song must always have a rather dubious sound, and the original of the covenant between man and woman, the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, is continually broken on the part of Israel and has still to be properly constituted.45

But in Song of Solomon the encounter between the man and woman is spoken positively. While this alone would point to a positive relationship between God and his people, Barth also points out that the Song itself hits at this positive connection in 8:6 where “‘the flame of the Lord’ and the very different flame of love are necessarily mentioned together and openly and distinctly compared and related.”46 This positive connection between the covenant and eros begs the question, What solution was found for human sin that everywhere else breaks the covenant and robs the joy of the encounter between the man and the woman?

Third, Barth recognizes that the christological reading is eschatological. This is the case for two reasons. Frist, because it is Solomon’s Song, Barth says that we are dealing with a representation of the Last-Days King in his glory, as Solomon was a pointer to the eschatological reign of Christ. Thus, Barth understands that the Song has an eschatological character, even as we must “take seriously their very concrete content.”47 Second, regarding that concrete content, it is the consummation of the covenant love between the man and the woman. Thus, Genesis 2 “sets at the beginning that which in the Song of Songs is the goal.”48 Barth describes the Song as “one long description of the rapture, the unquenchable yearning and the restless willingness and readiness, with which both partners in the covenant hasten toward an encounter.”49 The Song is eschatological in the sense that it speaks of the telos of humanity created as male and female.

Crucial to this point is that this telos is unaffected by human sin. Between Genesis 2 and Song of Solomon, sin has entered the picture. However, the Song realizes the goal that was sent for the man and woman in their supralapsarian state. This is a shockingly different concern from the rest of Scripture, which constantly presents the risk, pain, and sometimes violence of the encounter between man and woman. Again, we are led to ask, What is the reason for this optimism about marriage?

Barth believes the ultimate reason for the Song’s joyful exaltation in the encounter between the man and the woman can only be the eschatological covenant of grace between Christ and the church, in which God alone solves the problem of human sin and takes the people into covenant fellowship with himself. The covenant of grace realizes that which the encounter between the man and woman points to, and thus the covenant of grace infuses the meaning of the encounter between the man and the woman with hope and joy, even though the actual experience of marriage in the fallen world is often far less glorious. The Song’s exuberant exaltation of the goodness of marriage is not naive, sentimental, or a denial of the harsh realities of life East of Eden, but a witness to God’s covenant and the fact that God’s grace is stronger than man’s sin. Barth explains,

The authors of Gen 2 and the Song of Songs speak of man and woman as they do because they know that the broken covenant is still for God the unbroken covenant, intact and fulfilled on both sides; that as such it was already the inner basis of creation, and that as such it will again be revealed at the end.50

This could be called Barth’s “eschatological realism.”51 That which comes at the end is real and should be used as the interpretative grid by which we understand life now. While it would be an over-realized eschatology to expect the sustained joyful encounter of the Song to be normative now (at the very least children will interrupt the sustained focus on the husband and wife’s communion), it would be an under-realized eschatology to expect no impact on real marriage. It’s worth lamenting that Barth did not conform his own marriage and sexual life to this partially realized eschatological reality, which resulted in pain and anguish for his wife Nelly.52 In view of Barth’s personal failure, we do well to remember that the indicative implied in the partially realized eschatology must give way to the imperative, that is, the need to actually live in light of this new reality. This is an imperative that anyone could at any time fail to obey.

In sum, the progress of the covenant of grace—which Barth sees implied in the literal reading of the Song—reconciles humanity to God and, in so doing, rehabilitates humanity’s constitution as fellow-humanity, enabling them to participate in the joyful encounter as man and woman.

5. Concluding Contrast between Barth and the Third Reich

Neither Karl Barth nor the Third Reich would have agreed with the blurring of gender and downgrade of marriage that occurred in the progressive movement of the 1920s. But that’s about where their agreement ended. Barth’s christological starting point made it possible to realize humanity’s constitution as fellow-humanity, whereas the Third Reich, notwithstanding all their talk about the importance of marriage, presented the man and the woman as ultimately alone.

The Third Reich recognized a fundamental distinction between man and woman and the goodness of marriage because of the way they saw marriage and gender rooted in creation. In line with German theological liberalism, Nazi-sponsored theologians emphasized natural theology, from which they understood certain laws of nature, including those laws that regulated gender. However, because creation was subject to the higher authority of the inevitable expansion and triumph of the Aryan people, whatever they discerned from creation served that higher political authority. Thus, gender and marriage served the State. Hitler was explicit about this.53 The highest value of marriage was to bring into the world pure Aryan children, which would expand Germany’s borders and eventually result in the race of the new man. For both the man and the woman, gender manifested human strength. It was for the strong (only pure Aryans were encouraged to marry), and it made them stronger. Also, because gender served the state, the roles for men and women were clearly defined. But, in the end, their own philosophy undermined the emphasis on marriage. The need to provide salvation through marriage burdened marriage beyond what it could bear.54 Their philosophy has no real opportunity for fellowship between the man and the woman. The man was ultimately alone, and so was the woman. Barth connects this solitude to all the many horrors of the Nazi regime.

Conversely, Barth’s christological starting point revealed an entirely different perspective on marriage and gender. There was a givenness to gender and marriage in creation. To live in the created world is to encounter being made male or female and thus to be confronted with the need to find a meaning to this experience. This is Barth’s “little knowledge of life” discussed above. But this meaning can only be found in the covenant between Christ and the church, which is the ultimate meaning of history. Thus, in Barth’s system, we cannot look at the goal of gender and marriage apart from this christological definition, and consequently, it becomes difficult to deploy marriage and gender for a purely secular agenda. Also, because the man and the woman serve as an analogy for Christ and the church, marriage also falls under the umbrella of “mystery,” and thus resists rigid definition. To be a man is to live in a way that points to the eschaton differently than the eschatological trajectory of the woman (and vice versa). The roles are not reversible, but neither are they entirely transparent.

Moreover, the only responsible way to act within the covenant of marriage is to come to that covenant through the covenant of grace. This means that we do not come to gender and marriage to manifest human strength, but as a witness to our weakness and our need of grace. Salvation comes not through marriage, but through Christ. Having received salvation in Christ, we then approach marriage with a kind of playfulness, not requiring it to bear more than it can. We also approach it with a lack of confidence in ourselves. Barth acknowledges, “Sooner or later each man must discover that in regard to the command of God [regulating his sexuality] he is a failure, that measured by it we all belong to the category of fools, bunglers and impious who can only cling to the promise hidden in the command, but who certainly cannot congratulate themselves upon nor live in the strength of its fulfilment.”55 We experience the encounter between man and woman as a double gift. It is gift in creation—God brought the woman to the man in Genesis 2—and gift in the new creation, because it is God who solves the problem of human sin that had prevented fellowship in marriage. Barth’s christological starting point maintains stable gender categories, as witnessed in creation, and it ensures that these categories remain in the service of the gospel.

While our approach in this paper has been historical, this project naturally suggests a few questions for the theological ethics. Is a purely natural theology of gender susceptible to coming under another authority? And might it be possible for theologians to come under another authority without realizing it, such that they think they are proclaiming a biblical reality, but are really serving another agenda? Is it possible to develop a cogent theology of gender and marriage that has a christological starting point (or to put it another way, some version of christological supralapsarianism), while also recognizing that there are certain given realities in creation that we confront as creatures in God’s world? In other words, is Barth’s project tenable, and even if we disagree with some of his assumptions, is it possible to sustain his basic theological construct on different grounds? Might it be that Barth’s concept of coming to know the covenant of marriage through the covenant of grace provides a pastorally sensitive approach to sexual and marital problems that invariably arise in our fallen world? Might it provide a conceptual framework to deal with difficulties—same-sex attraction, an unfaithful or uncaring spouse, prolonged singleness, etc.—in such a way that one can authentically rejoice in one’s gendered condition and the reality of marriage as a gift, without placing one’s hope in substantial change in one’s own situation in this life? While these questions are obviously leading in a certain direction, their answers are not obvious in what we have explored. More work must be done.

As the Christian position becomes increasingly the minority, we can be tempted to look for hope in any presentation of heterosexual monogamous marriage. This is how many German Christians in the 1930s responded to the degradation of gender and marriage of the 1920s. They sought help from a purely natural theology and found common cause with the National Socialists. This resulted in great harm to the Christian witness and to society at large. To avoid a similar disaster today, the church needs the insight to look beyond mere superficial correspondence to the deeper reality of the gospel.