Barth’s political thought has been debated heavily, however.9 Hauerwas’ complaint, for example, of ‘a peculiar “abstractness” to Barth’s ethics that gives his account of the moral life an aura of unreality’ is both well known and well contended.10 Earlier, Reinhold Niebuhr had found in Barth’s refusal to jump on the West’s anti-communist bandwagon a confirmation of the ineffectiveness of Barthian ethics when applied to the complexities of actual ethical situations.11 In their own ways, both complaints