The Barmen Declaration

The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 is a remarkable document.

Note the year. One year after the Nazis came to power, some Christians in Germany already knew what was up. It is very hard to understand events as they are happening, which suggests to me that Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others were led by the Holy Spirit in this. The document is a creed, perhaps as good as any of the others written in the early centuries of the Church. One might quibble with some of the overall theology of both men, but they got it right in the time they were called, which is rarer and more valuable.

To recreate how difficult it must have been for them to see clearly, consider the following:
1. A nation that was starving was now working, in one of the great positive-thinking scams of all time. If the German people will only stick together, they can become a great people again.

2. The ruling party had come to power by appealing to secular values which were more common in the church than out of it, such as high culture, tradition, and hard work. Their radical competitors, the communists and socialists, were largely antagonistic to Christianity.

3. Their theological opposition was drawn entirely from the people that they knew: their seminary professors and classmates, authorities in their respective denominations, authors of books. They liked many of these people, and knew them as well-meaning, intelligent people who made some valid points.

4. They had families to answer to and jobs to do, creating powerful incentives to shut up, go along, hope to change the system from within, etc. They had begun to suspect that opponents of this regime might not lose not only livelihoods, but lives. Several of the contributors to the declaration were in fact later executed by the Nazis.

Yet through this, the tone of the document is firm, but not angry. There is no flame-throwing as we see in our popular media and on the internet. Each of the six short sections begins with a verse of scripture and expands upon it in measured words. To the Deutsche Christen group which advocated a Positive Christianity consistent with the racial and nationalist philosophies drawn from Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel, the Barmen Declaration replies:

1. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6
I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. John 10:1,9

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.

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.

To answer both the evils of one's own era, yet also ages to come, impresses me greatly.