BarmenConfession

THE BARMEN DECLARATION

OF THE GERMAN CONFESSING CHURCH (1934)

... 1. Jesus Christ, as he is testified to us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death.

We repudiate the false teaching that the church can and must recognize yet other happenings and powers, images and truths as divine revelation alongside this one Word of God, as a source of her preaching....

2. Just as Jesus Christ is the pledge of the forgiveness of all our sins, just so--and with the same earnestness--is he also God's mighty claim on our whole life; in him we encounter a joyous liberation. from the godless claims of this world to free and thankful service to his creatures.

We repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but another lord, areas in which we do not need justification and sanctification through him....

3. The Christian church is the community of brethren, in which Jesus Christ presently works in the word and sacraments through the Holy Spirit. With her faith as well as her obedience, with her message as well as her ordinances, she has to witness in the midst of the world of sin as the church of forgiven sinners that she is his alone, that she lives and wishes to live only by his comfort and his counsel in expectation of his appearance.

We repudiate the false teaching that the church can turn over the form of her message and ordinances at will or according to some dominant ideological and political convictions....

4. The various offices in the church establish no rule of one over the other but the exercise of the service entrusted and commanded to the whole congregation.

We repudiate the false teaching that the church can and may, apart from this ministry, set up special leaders (Fuhrer) equipped with powers to rule....

5. The Bible tells us that according to divine arrangement the state has the responsibility to provide for justice and peace in the yet unredeemed world, in which the church also stands, according to the measure of human insight and human possibility, by t e threat and use of force.

The church recognizes with thanks and reverence toward God the benevolence of this, his provision. She reminds men of God's Kingdom, God's commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility of rulers and ruled. She trusts and obeys the power of the word, through which God maintains all things.

We repudiate the false teaching that the state can and should expand beyond its special responsibility to become the single and total order of human life, and also thereby fulfill the commission of the church.

We repudiate the false teaching that the church can and should expand beyond its special responsibility to take on the characteristics, functions and dignities of the state, and thereby become itself an organ of the state....

6. The commission of the church, in which her freedom is founded, consists in this: in place of Christ and thus in the service of his own word and work, to extend through word and sacrament the message of the free grace of God to all people.

We repudiate the false teaching that the church, in human self-esteem, can put the word and work of the Lord in the service of some wishes, purposes and plans or other, chosen according to desire....

Transcending Barmen: confessing in word and deed.

by Victoria J. Barnett
in The Christian Century; 5/11/1994

THE SUNNY afternoon of May 31, 1934, was one of those rare moments when human beings become aware of their exact position in history: of the brevity of their lives and the significance of their decisions. According to many accounts, the representatives of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions who met in Barmen, Germany, that afternoon sensed even then the magnitude of what they had done. The Barmen Declaration was approved unanimously. Stefanie von Mackensen, the one woman delegate, later claimed that she had felt the presence of the Holy Spirit sweep the room. Those assembled rose spontaneously and began to sing "Now thank we all our God." The hall resounded; many were moved to tears. The moment, and the document that emerged from Barmen, had transcended the expectations of the delegates.

Given German church history, Barmen was indeed an extraordinary event. Theologically and ecclesiastically the Barmen Declaration was very much a product of its time and of certain strains within German Protestantism, yet it broke decisively with other elements of the volkskirchliche tradition. For many of those gathered at Barmen, it was the bravest thing that they would ever do.

On yet another anniversary of this event, what does Barmen mean for us? Since the end of the Third Reich the commemorations of Barmen that occur every ten years have tried to establish the ongoing significance of the declaration for contemporary Christians. This is a worthwhile exercise, but one that should be undertaken with caution. As William Stringfellow observed 20 years ago on the eve of the 40th anniversary, "History |repeats' itself as parable rather than analogue." In other words, Barmen's lesson for us cannot be revealed entirely by applying the words of the declaration to current situations. Nor is it enough to document what these words actually meant, then and later, to the people who approved them in 1934. We need to remain aware of both levels, the historical and the ethical.

For German Protestants in 1934, Barmen was more a statement of church identity than anything else. In Helmut Gollwitzer's words, the delegates at Barmen decided that "the church is not an auditorium where every religious interpretation has the same rights. There is a line between correct teaching and false teaching, and one has to draw that line." At Barmen, Protestant leaders disavowed the false teachings of the "German Christians," who had altered the Christian faith to conform to Nazi ideology. By drawing the distinction between true and false teaching, Barmen committed the church to a very specific identity and faith.

This distinction set the basis for all subsequent discussion about the church's identity during the Kirchenkampf. In the Confessing Church, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, the confession of faith had to be the foundation of every facet of life. It was the most powerful weapon the church possessed, and it confronted all Christians with a clear choice. For this confession--and Bonhoeffer included here both the Barmen and the 1935 Dahlem synodal confessions--"there can be only a Yes or a No."

As Bonhoeffer's words suggest, Barmen was not an inclusive statement. For those who took it most seriously, it was a very exclusive one. In May 1934 there was one issue that had personally affected all those present at Barmen: Nazism's ideologization of public life and private belief. The Barmen Declaration declared the church free from the demands of any ideology. In the midst of an ideological state that had turned conventional ideas of good and evil upside down, Barmen announced that not all theological views were welcome within the church. It stated further that there would always be a limit to Christian allegiance to any worldly authority. Christians could serve only one Lord, and that could not be a Nazi Fuhrer.

Therein lies Barmen's strength and radicalism. Many observers contend that therein is also its weakness: that the signers of Barmen were so intent on keeping their church free from political pressure that they failed to see the necessity of a more explicit political response to what was happening around them.

For there is much that Barmen failed to say. Sixty years later we measure Barmen's legacy as much by what it did not say as by what it said, and we judge the Confessing Church as much for what it did not do as for what it did. When we read the Barmen Declaration we hear not only the church's voice in 1934, but its silence at Barmen and throughout the Third Reich--about the Jews and others who in May 1934 were already the victims of Nazi persecution. The Barmen Declaration did not prevent Confessing pastors from fighting in Hitler's army from 1939 to 1945. It did not lead the church to condemn the persecution of the Jews. It did not take the church to the forefront of the resistance to Nazism.

Some--including many who were in the Confessing Church--believe that had the church really lived up to its words at Barmen, the murderous course of the Third Reich could have been thwarted. They contend that the seeds of resistance--even resistance on behalf of the Jews--were present in the Barmen Declaration for those Christians who truly understood what this confession of faith demanded of the believer.

This contention is true only in part. The words of Barmen could indeed imply solidarity with the victims of Nazism. But for most members of the Confessing Church, that solidarity did not exist. The Confessing Church avoided opposing the persecution of the Jews,. not because the church was still unaware of the seriousness of the matter, nor because the church believed that its theological statements implicitly included concern for the Jews. In general, the Jews were never mentioned because church leaders, even in the Confessing Church, didn't want to touch the matter. Their reluctance to respond to the persecution of the Jews remained even after the Holocaust, and in some church circles it continues today.

The history of Christianity is marked by contradictions between grand statements and broken creeds. The Confessing Church is part of that history. It produced few martyrs and a great many compromisers. Only four years after Barmen, in August 1938, Gustav Heinemann resigned his synodal mandate in protest of the Confessing Church's passivity. "How much have we declared unbearable," he said in an impassioned speech, "and yet we bear it." His words could be the epitaph for the Christian churches under Nazism.

This tension--between the promising words of Barmen and the reality of what followed--is what we still wrestle with today, and it greatly affects any verdict we render about the real legacy of the Kirchenkampf. Did German Protestants fail to resist Nazism more forcefully because they did not live up to the principles of Barmen? Does the Confessing Church, as Arthur Cochrane said in 1970, stand "condemned by the message of its own Barmen confession"? Or were the failures of the churches already evident at Barmen in the reluctance of Protestant leaders in 1934 to oppose Nazism explicitly, forcefully and publicly?

IN A SENSE, this debate began in Barmen. To quote one conservative Lutheran delegate, differences, among the delegates at the Barmen Synod were "artificially bridged, but not overcome." Those differences were primarily theological and confessional, but they were also political. United for one euphoric moment, German Protestants began arguing about the significance of the declaration as soon as they returned home. The dispute continues 60 years later.

This conflict is partly due to a paradox within the declaration itself. The words of Barmen outline some very basic tenets of Christian faith--words with which most Christians of whatever political persuasion could agree. The dispute was, and is, over the practical consequences of those words. This dispute is bitter precisely because the words of the Barmen Synod and the context in which it occurred showed how high the stakes on this issue really are.

Because of its context, Barmen was always more than a confession of faith. Yet its radicalism is based precisely upon a claim that would seem to be the least radical in a political sense: the claim that all truth is revealed in the word of God in the scriptures, and that each Christian is ultimately accountable to his or her God.

In the years since 1945, the definition of "radical," particularly in religious circles, entails a clear political and ideological alignment. In part, this is a legacy of the Holocaust. But the radicalism of the church at Barmen was that it refused to align itself with any leader, government or ideology, instead committing Christians to a fundamental, confessionally based opposition to any demand that deviated from the principles of Christian belief.

The paradox was that, in declaring the church independent of ideology at that historical moment, Barmen committed the German churches to a clear position with respect to the Nazi state. This is what gave the Barmen Declaration its radical potential. The faith of Confessing Christians was inextricably tied to the church's identity in the world--to its identity in a National Socialist society in 1934. The words of Barmen are not explicit politically, but they are very clear theologically, and therefore the church's position with respect to Nazism, at least in the moment of Barmen, was clear.

Barmen's radicalism, then, is not in the church's explicit alliance with a specific cause or ideology, but rather in its freedom, in all areas of human life, to proclaim another standard for behavior and belief. In the context of Nazi Germany, the logical consequences of this should indeed have included a sense of solidarity, of responsibility for others and for some Confessing Christians they did, as Bonhoeffer made clear: "In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others ... Being free means |being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free."

From this standpoint, despite the subsequently ambivalent record of the churches under Nazism, the Barmen Declaration continues to be an inspiration for Christians in dictatorships and in situations governed by injustice and violence. Unlike most church statements, which usually find their historical niche in a file cabinet, Barmen remains relevant, despite the fact that many of the modern

Catholic and Protestant statements are far more politically explicit and radical than the Barmen Declaration appears to be.

The words of Barmen make clear what the sides are; what Christians have argued about ever since is what these clear sides imply with respect to other issues. In other words, Barmen established the criterion for the debate. This is why it has been possible for Christians in such diverse circumstances as South Korea, the former East Germany, South Africa and Brazil to find significance in the words of the Barmen confession.

THE SIGNIFICANCE of Barmen--then and now--emerges not only from the words of the declaration itself but from the contexts in which people find it meaningful. For a small group of Confessing Christians, Barmen was not just a statement, but a confession that they wrestled with, that their own lives enlarged upon. They transcended the words of Barmen by making them concrete with respect to the victims of Nazism. Usually when we Christians speak of transcendence, we mean the move from the worldly realm to the spiritual realm. But transcending Barmen meant, in essence, the reverse: moving beyond words to deeds. The solus Christus of the declaration's Thesis I became a declaration of independence from the German Fuhrer. In setting theological limits on the sovereignty of the state, Thesis 5 broadened the scope of Christian ethics. In other words, Barmen was, for those who took it seriously, a starting point.

This brings us directly to the ambiguous legacy of Barmen: on the one hand, its silence on such crucial issues as the persecution of the Jews; on the other, the radical application of its words by some Christians during the Third Reich and afterward. It is a mistake to conclude that Barmen's symbolic impact outweighs all shortcomings, or that we can determine its historical and moral significance entirely through our interpretations of it. We are left--as the Confessing Christians were--with both the strengths and weaknesses of this document and its church. An uncritical view of Barmen only fosters illusions about the Christian tradition and the role that tradition played in the Holocaust.

Last year someone asked me how it was still possible to be a Christian after the Holocaust. For a long time, my reply would have been a fatalistic one: I was born and raised a Christian. It is not possible to deny one's roots, nor are many of us able to stray that far afield from the traditions that have shaped us. For better or worse, we carry these influences and identities within us. I simply play the hand I have been dealt.

I am no longer satisfied with this answer. The years in which I began to wrestle with this were the same ones in which I interviewed numerous Germans who had been members of the Confessing Church. These encounters convinced me that human life, to have meaning, should go beyond merely playing out one's hand. I learned that the challenge for moral people remains the same in any age: to discover the means by which we can live up to our principles. We have to do more than play our hand.

FOR CHRISTIANS, this means transcending what we have been given--which means gaining a critical distance on our tradition in order to understand it. With respect to Barmen and the history of the Confessing Church, this means viewing it through the broader historical lens that includes the Holocaust.

This is not merely because the history of the Holocaust corrects any illusions Christians may have about the role our tradition played, and reminds us of both the theological and ethical failures of Christianity under Nazism. It has to do more with the possibilities which history itself gives us--with, if you will, the "grace of history." The grace of history is not, to paraphrase German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that we are born conveniently late and therefore are not accountable for the misdeeds of earlier generations. It is exactly the opposite: that we are linked to the past in more ways than we can comprehend.

The grace of history comes only to those who are willing to assume the burden of remembering Barmen in the context of Auschwitz. We can feel both the euphoria of that May afternoon and the despair of the years that followed. By facing history honestly we cannot undo it, but we can give new meaning to the lives of those who went before us. In turn, their lives and actions can help us to understand our lives, beliefs and values. Only in grasping the link between the luminous witness of Barmen and the darkness of the Holocaust can we discover the ever-evolving shape and form of what we believe. Only in that way can we transcend that which is merely comfortable to believe and face up to the difficulty of belief after the Holocaust, and so begin to the state, and thereby become itself an organ of the state....

Victoria J. Barnett has written For the Soul of the People, a history of the Confessing Church. This article is adapted from a paper she delivered at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, as part of a meeting sponsored by the Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the German Church Struggle and by the college's Julius and Dorothy Koppelman Holocaust/Genocide Resource Center.