Barth did not see Nazism as a reaction to or restriction on the untrammeled freedom of choice celebrated by modern liberals.  On the contrary, it was itself the product of the same “false concept of freedom” that shaped post-Enlightenment Europe.

If freedom means life “in free competition of persons, systems, and ideas, under the motto, ‘Make way for the competent,’” then a “battle of all against everyone . . . which will never be without harshness and suffering” is already underway, and one has already begun a slide down “the slippery slope . . . at the end of which is authoritarianism.”

The solution is not to abandon freedom but “to be more liberal than the liberals” in advocating freedom rightly understood.

He believed that the post-Enlightenment view of human freedom involved a transfer of the old notion of potentia absoluta from God to man, and that human freedom could not be rightly understood so long as God was seen as “an unconditioned God, a God who is free in abstracto ” and a God who is ” abstrac t absoluteness or naked sovereignty.”

God’s freedom has to be understood not in terms of modern autonomy but as the recognition that even in His freedom God remains free: “the accent does not fall on ‘free’ but on ‘God’” when we talk about God’s freedom.  His freedom is expressed in His free self-binding to His people: He uses His freedom “to give Himself to this communion (with the partner who is different from Him) and to practice this faithfulness in it, in this way being really free, free in Himself.

God’s freedom is expressed in His choice, His predestinating grace, the fact that “God has elected fellowship with man for Himself” and “fellowship with Himself for man.”  God’s freedom thus is not a freedom in competition with other freedoms, nor a freedom expressed in protection of His own goods.  His freedom is freedom for fellowship, freedom in communication, freedom in which He “hazards Himself wholly and utterly.”

God’s choice is a choice to bestow freedom: If the Son makes you free, you are free indeed.  God’s freedom is a freedom for communion, and so also He causes others with the same capacity for fellowship, that is, for freedom.  God’s gift of freedom is first and last a freedom for fellowship with Him.

This discussion is based on chapter 3 of Eberhard Busch’s The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology .