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.

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

The implication is clear: if Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, then there is no other word — no Führer's word, no nation's word, no racial ideology's word — that 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: the one Word of God, Jesus Christ, attested in scripture, to be trusted and obeyed in life and in death.

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 there is one Word of God, and this is not it?