ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Barth's dogmatic theology formed the basis of his political support for Israel in its first tentative steps as an independent nation. While Markus Barth has insisted that the State of Israel has given Judaism a form which is to be affirmed and supported by the church, in reality Christian responses have been uncertain and ambiguous. Barth's comments provoked a storm of controversy in Switzerland and elsewhere, with Barth's old sparring- partner, Emil Brunner, accusing Barth of harbouring pro-Communist sympathies. While Cold War tensions were the public face of Barth's political activism at this time, they were not the only events of global significance to be occupying Barth's mind. In other words Barth, for whom the National Socialist appropriation of Christian doctrine was all too familiar ground, has consciously linked the widespread failure to understand the essential substance of providence, to the horrors of Nazism by which the doctrine seems to have been so clearly discredited.
