"Forgiveness of sin is something different from justice. And eternal life is not the same as peace and freedom. The church requires scope to deliver her own message about forgiveness of sins and eternal life in the name of her Lord. The significance of the political order as the service of God is obscured where the State refuses the church this scope or sets limits to it. It is obscured where the State demands of the church that she subject and adapt herself to the aims of the State. It is obscured when the State furthers the false church in opposition to the true. It is obscured where the State, perhaps by making its own aims absolute, as in Germany to-day, becomes itself a church, a church which will without doubt be a false one and the most intolerant of all churches. The question then which the State cannot evade it: does it make clear or obscure the significance of the political order as service of God? Is it on the way to becoming in its sphere what Romans 13 calls God's representative and priest or is it on the way to becoming the beast rising up out of the sea of Revelation 13? It is either one or the other."
— Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560 (The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1937 and 1938) (UK: Scribners, 1939) tr. Haire and Henderson, p. 226.
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