We Christians do not accept this war as a necessary evil. We approve it as a righteous war, which God commands us to wage ardently.
So last week declared the world's most influential Protestant theologian, Swiss Calvinist Karl Barth. So saying, he reversed his pre-war stand that Christianity need not concern itself with such mundane struggles, that war never solves anything.
Dr. Barth is a theologian's theologian. Known to few men in the pew, he nevertheless profoundly affects them at third hand—for the theologians whom he influences influence the preachers of the Christian world. Nazis ousted him from his chair at Bonn in 1935 for his resistance to Hitler, and now he teaches in his native Basle. Last week the first copy of his latest book, A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, was Clippered to TIME. Its influence will be enormous—and more immediate than usual. Wrote Dr. Barth:
"The Christians who do not realize that they must take part unreservedly in this war must have slept over their Bibles as well as over their newspapers. . . .
"Adolf Hitler attempts to force his 'New Order' on Central Europe today, on the whole of Europe tomorrow, and on the whole world the day after tomorrow. Its establishment is to be achieved by the whole might of Germany's military power, which is impelled by the force of a heathenish religion of blood, despotism and war. . . . We Christians cannot say 'No' nor 'Yes and No' to this war; we can only say 'Yes.' . . . We must not evade our responsibility for seeing that this war is waged, and waged ardently.
"You may have been struck by the fact that the ultimate reason which I put forward for the necessity of resisting Hitler was simply the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I have been struck, on my side, by the fact that in your pronouncements various other conceptions have been put forward as primary and ultimate reasons —such as 'Western civilization,' 'the liberty of the individual,' 'freedom of knowledge,' 'the infinite value of the human personality,' 'the brotherhood of man,' 'social justice,' etc. . . .
"There is no need for me to assure you that the terms you use have a very positive meaning for me also . . . but do those conceptions sufficiently indicate the distance between us and Hitler? Must we not make the gulf much wider? Ought not our opposition to him to be genuinely Christian? . . . Our resistance to Hitler will be built on a really sure foundation only when we resist him unequivocally in the name of peculiarly Christian truth, unequivocally in the name of Jesus Christ. . . .
"I cannot venture to prophesy when, where and how Great Britain will conquer. But that she will conquer I am sure, because I have more confidence in British toughness than in German energy, and because ultimately I ascribe greater historical weight to the better cause . . . than to the evil and fundamentally fantastic cause of Adolf Hitler."