The Confessing Church stands up

The German church is fracturing.

The Deutsche Christen — the German Christians — are a movement within the Protestant church that has enthusiastically aligned itself with National Socialism. They want to incorporate Nazi racial ideology into Christian theology, remove the Old Testament from the Bible as a Jewish document, and create a Reich Church that will serve the national renewal.

They have considerable support. They control many church bodies. Their opponents are a minority.

The minority gathers in Barmen in May 1934 and produces a document.

The Barmen Declaration is primarily the work of Karl Barth, with significant contributions from Hans Asmussen. It is not primarily a political document — it is a theological one. It does not begin by condemning Nazism. It begins by affirming Christ.

The church has one Lord, Jesus Christ as the Scriptures reveal Him, to be heard and obeyed in living and in dying, owing no allegiance to any earthly ruler or ideology.

The implication is clear: if Christ is the single utterance of God that the church is bound to receive, then no rival voice — no Führer's word, no nation's word, no racial ideology's word — can claim the same authority. The church that adds another word alongside Christ's has already abandoned Christ.

The Confessing Church that forms around Barmen will be persecuted, its pastors imprisoned, its seminaries closed. It will also produce, in Bonhoeffer and others, the most courageous theological witness of the twentieth century.

The Barmen Declaration begins not with what it is against but with what it is for: Christ as the single decisive utterance of God, witnessed in scripture, to be trusted and obeyed whether one is living or dying.

This is the cleanest possible theological refusal of every ideology that tries to recruit the church: not a political argument but a theological one. Christ is Lord. Therefore nothing else is.

The German Christians who aligned with Nazism did not begin by worshipping Hitler. They began by adding his word alongside Christ's — by allowing a second authority to share the space that belongs to one.

Every generation faces its version of the German Christians' temptation: the offer to add something alongside Christ, to let a national narrative or a political identity or a cultural preference share the throne.

What is being added alongside Christ in your context? And are you willing to say — clearly, publicly, at cost — that God has spoken one decisive word, and this rival voice is not it?