Open your mouth
Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church
In 1934 the official German church was bending to the Nazi state, remaking the gospel to fit a regime. To many it looked like loyalty. To a group of Christians who could not stomach it, it looked like a church selling its soul. They broke away to form what was called the Confessing Church, and at Barmen they set their refusal down in writing: the church has one Lord, Jesus Christ, and owes no rival allegiance to any earthly ruler or ideology. It was a line drawn through the heart of a captured institution. Among those who stood on the far side of it was a young pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would give his short life to the resistance and pay for the break with his death. Mark what the disconnect was and was not. It was not a break over a fine point of doctrine. It was a break from a church that had fused itself to worldly power and called the fusion devotion, a refusal to be silent while the desolate were crushed. The mother of King Lemuel had charged her son to open his mouth for the mute, in the cause of all left desolate. At Barmen a remnant remembered that charge when the rest forgot it.
“Open your mouth for the mute, in the cause of all who are left desolate.”
— The mother of King Lemuel — Proverbs 31:8 (WEB)
“To him who knows to do good, and doesn't do it, to him it is sin.”
Disconnect, at its most costly. This is the break of conscience from a church co-opted by worldly power, the separation that may cost everything. The phase asks whether you will name complicity as complicity rather than loyalty, and whether you will open your mouth for the desolate even when silence is safer and the cost of speaking is real.
There are breaks that conscience demands when the institution you belong to begins going along with evil. They are the costliest of all, because the pressure to stay is dressed as loyalty, and the people leaning on you to keep quiet are often the ones you most want to please. To open your mouth for those who cannot speak, to separate yourself from a comfortable complicity, can cost you your standing, your security, and, as it cost some at Barmen, your life. This is not a break to romanticize from a safe distance. It is meant to sober you. The temptation in such a moment is to tell yourself that silence is prudence, that staying inside lets you do more good, that the time to speak has not quite come.
James cuts through all of it: to the one who knows to do good and does not do it, that failure is itself sin. Silence is not the neutral safe ground it pretends to be. Sometimes the only faithful move is the costly break, and the refusal to make it is not neutrality. It is the sin of knowing the good and declining to do it.
The Church is perpetually tempted to fuse with worldly power and call the fusion devotion. In 1934, as the official German church bent itself to the Nazi state and remade the gospel to fit a regime, a remnant could not stomach it and broke away as the Confessing Church, declaring at Barmen that the Church has one Lord, Jesus Christ, and owes no rival allegiance to any earthly ruler or ideology. Some paid for that line with their lives. Sometimes faithfulness requires exactly that costly break, a refusal to be silent while the desolate are crushed. The Body that will not, when the moment comes, separate itself from complicity with evil has already lost the only Lord it claims to serve.
What cannot be shaken is the church's one true Lord. Institutions bend to power and are exposed; allegiances that called themselves loyalty are torn away. But the lordship of Jesus Christ over His church does not yield to any earthly ruler or ideology, and it stands unmoved when every counterfeit devotion is shaken to the ground.
- Where is an institution I belong to going along with something I know to be wrong?
- Am I calling my silence prudence when conscience knows it is complicity?
- Whom is God asking me to open my mouth for, even if speaking costs me dearly?
Lord, when those around me fuse faith to power and call it loyalty, give me eyes to see it and courage to refuse it. Help me open my mouth for those who cannot speak, whatever it costs. Keep me from the sin of knowing the good and staying silent. You alone are Lord. Amen.