The Western ‘Leader-concept’ in Contrast with a Genuinely Christian Christ Concentrated Doctrine of Election

The dear “Leader” concept has riled the modern mind; it has been the warp and woof of lived reality in the 18th into the 21st centuries, and is still going strong. Barth, with his characteristic predilection, contrasts the election of Jesus Christ with the election of the individualistic understanding of the Leader. He identifies how the latter functions as a ‘usurper,’ while the former as the One among and for the many. It is rather striking given the display of the Leader, particularly in our current cultural moments. We see Leaders rising and falling, ostensibly for the people, but in point of fact only ultimately for their own fame and glory. In the process, under the Leader’s “watchful eye,” the many are destroyed, and being destroyed with the carnage produced by the Leader’s vanity and self-importance.  

For Barth, Hitler, no doubt, would have been his primary referent for the Leader type, in his day and age. But clearly, this observation transverses periods, and is applicable to all periods, precisely because the Leader notion finds its rootage in and from the corrupted and polluted human heart. This is what differentiates the Leader, from the actual King; the former is ultimately fallen humanity, while the latter is resurrected humanity. Barth writes with clairvoyance: 

There is a modern concept which during the last two centuries has shown itself with increasing clarity to be a kind of secular imitation of the concept of the election of Jesus Christ—the concept of the leader. At first in a limited, but then necessarily in a limitlessly expanding sphere, in an area which must finally be nothing less than world-wide, the leader is the individual who in some fashion unites in himself the fulness of the election of grace, so that he is the elect, not on behalf of, but in place of others; he is the other, besides whom there are finally no individuals, or at least no elect individuals. The whole mystery of human power in this sphere, belong to him. He is the other, by whom is taken from the many beside him both their election and everything else with it—they mystery of their individuality and solitude, freedom and responsibility, all authority and power—and from whom they hold everything only in fee, to carry out his decisions. Emerging from the ranks of the many and elevated over them as the other who alone may be an individual, the leader is an absolute usurper in relation to other individuals. Election in the sense of the modern leader-concept has nothing whatever to do with the election of Jesus Christ except that it is its utter reversal and caricature. The individualism of the West obviously cannot evade responsibility for the formulation of this concept. All the brutality, all the murderous insolence of the usurper have been involved in it from the very outset. Mastered, as it were, by its own logic and reduced ad absurdum, it has brought down upon itself an inevitable and most terrible reaction. But this has simply disclosed the antithesis to the Christian concept of election in which it found itself even at its inception. The Christian concept of election does not involve this despoiling of the many for the sake of the one. On the contrary, when Jesus Christ is the elected One, the election and the accompanying mystery of individuality and solitude, and with it the freedom and responsibility and the authority and the power of the many, are not abrogated, but definitively confirmed in this Other. He is not the object of the divine election of grace instead of them, but on their behalf. He does not retain for Himself or withhold what He is and possesses as the Elect of God. He does not deal with it as with spoil. But He is what He is, and has what He has, in His revelation and imparting of it to the many. His kingdom is neither a barracks nor a prison, but the home of those who in, with and by Him are free. He is the Master of all as the Servant of all. Secular individualism may have reached its goal and end in the contemporary leader-concept, but in the Christian concept of election its own barely understood desire has always been defended against it, and even in face of the catastrophe which has overtaken it, it will continue to be preserved.1 

On the flipside of this, Barth goes on and develops how the Leader-concept has corollary with its other expression in Communist-collectivism, and/or Fascist-nationalism as a sub-species. No matter how this bastardization of Christian election is expressed, it is the satanic parody of the real and the ineffable, indestructible election of God in Jesus Christ.  

So many Christian leaders, particularly in evangelicalism (of whatever tradition), have attempted to copy the secular Leader-concept as the model for what it means to be a Christian leader. Sadly, they have imbibed the Angel of light’s model of election, and the concept of the “individual” in the process; and they have made disciples of the many in this image. It is a homo incurvatus in se (‘a person incurved on oneself’) image that finds its resource for life from its own satanic sense of self-possession; which of course is why there is so much carnage, not just in the world, but in the church. This is one reason why we see Christian leaders telling their people to simply get in line with the cultural mandates, particularly as those are given shape by the Leader; precisely because they have imbibed the same spirit that breathes life into the Leader[s] they follow. This is the delusion of the Antichrist, and it is seductive even to those who outwardly are supposed to be the most inoculated against such schemata. Kyrie eleison