Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church

Today's Scripture

Three short passages set the stage for one of the hardest chapters in church history.

Acts 5:29 — "But Peter and the apostles answered, 'We must obey God rather than men.'"

Matthew 10:32-33 — "So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven."

Revelation 13:10 — "Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints."

The Big Idea

There are rare hours in history when a church stops following Jesus and starts following something else — while keeping the Christian label. In 1930s Germany, believers had to confess Christ against their own church, and it cost some of them everything. Today we learn what that hour actually looks like, and why we must not pretend every church disagreement is that hour.

Reflection

A church that hung a flag above the cross

In the spring of 1933, something happened in Germany that most Christians thought was impossible. A large part of the national church — pastors, professors, whole congregations — decided that Adolf Hitler was good news.

They called themselves the Deutsche Christen, the "German Christians." They flew the Nazi flag inside church sanctuaries. They pushed for a rule called the Aryan paragraph, which said no one of Jewish descent could serve as a pastor — in the church of a Jewish Messiah. Some wanted the Old Testament cut from the Bible for being "too Jewish." Their preachers announced that God had sent Hitler to renew Germany.

Notice what they did not say. They did not say, "We are leaving Jesus." They said, "We love Jesus — and Germany, and the Führer, and our race." Jesus stayed on the sign out front. He just had to share the throne.

C.S. Lewis saw this move clearly. In The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon coaches a junior one on how to ruin a believer without ever mentioning unbelief:

"What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call 'Christianity And.'" — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Christianity And the nation. Christianity And the race. Christianity And our side. The "And" always boards as a passenger, and it always ends up driving.

The Bible has an older name for this. Exodus 20:3 — "You shall have no other gods before me." It is the first commandment because it is the first temptation. And Colossians 1:18 says of Christ: "And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent." Preeminent is a big word with a simple meaning: first. In everything. No co-rulers.

When a church formally gives Christ a co-ruler, the old word for it is heresy — a teaching so false that it breaks the faith itself. Not a mistake. Not a style difference. A different god wearing a familiar name.

The sentence that drew a line

A small group of Christians saw it almost immediately. The theologian Karl Barth. Pastors like Martin Niemöller. And a young teacher named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, still in his twenties.

In May 1934, representatives from Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches met in the town of Barmen and adopted a confession. A confession is a public, written statement of what the church believes — written down precisely so that no one can quietly change it later. Barth drafted most of it. Its first article is one sentence, and it cuts like a sword:

"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." — Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (1934)

The one Word. Not the loudest voice among several. Then the declaration names the lie out loud:

"We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords." — Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (1934)

Other lords. That was the whole fight, compressed into two words. The churches that held to Barmen became known as the Confessing Church — believers who would not let the swastika stand beside the cross, whatever it cost them.

This was not a new fight. It is the oldest one in Scripture. 1 Kings 18:21 — "And Elijah came near to all the people and said, 'How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.'" Limping between opinions: trying to keep two gods happy at once. And when Israel's own religious authorities ordered the apostles to stop preaching Jesus, Acts 5:29 records their answer: "We must obey God rather than men."

Christians had stood here before. In the second century, an elderly bishop named Polycarp was ordered to honor Caesar as lord or be burned alive. His answer became one of the most famous sentences of the early church:

"Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" — Polycarp, The Martyrdom of Polycarp

One King. The Confessing Church was not inventing something new at Barmen. It was remembering something old.

The hour you cannot manufacture

Here is where we have to be careful — because this story is misused all the time.

The Barmen hour is real, and it does come. But it is not most hours. The German Christians did not merely hold bad politics. They wrote race into church law. They cut Scripture. They taught, officially, that another lord stood beside Christ. That is what the hour looks like.

Most church conflicts do not look like that. Yet the Barmen comparison gets reached for constantly — over worship styles, pandemic policies, sermon tones, elections. When we do that, we flatter our own cause and cheapen the graves of people who paid the real price.

Jesus himself made room for ordinary loyalties. Matthew 22:21 — "Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Loving your country is like loving your family: good, even commanded. A flag on the porch is not an idol. The test is what happens when the loyalty collides with Christ. Tim Keller gives the working definition:

"What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give." — Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods

Here is a homely picture. A flag in a sanctuary is like a guest at a wedding: welcome in the seats, a scandal at the altar. The German Christians did not merely invite the nation to the wedding; they married it. The question for any church is never whether it has earthly loyalties — every church does. The question is where those loyalties are seated.

So here is an honest test for any church you fear is compromised. Can you point to the place where Christ has actually been dethroned — in its teaching, its rules, its public practice? Where it says, in word or deed, that some other lord gets a vote, or some part of life does not belong to Jesus? If you can, you may be in a Barmen hour, and Acts 5:29 is your verse. If you cannot — if what you find instead is a list of irritations and preferences — then you are in an ordinary hour, and the call is patience, not departure.

Romans 12:2 describes the discipline this takes: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God." Discernment is tested, renewed thinking — not a mood, and not a hashtag.

The cost — and the Christ who paid first

What did Barmen cost? Almost everything.

Bonhoeffer left a safe pastorate in London to run an illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, training pastors for the Confessing Church. The Gestapo closed it in 1937. His books were banned. He joined the resistance against Hitler, was arrested, and was hanged in April 1945, just weeks before the war ended. He had written, years earlier, the sentence that summarized his whole life:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

In that same book he named the disease that had made the German church so easy to capture — a Christianity of comfortable words and zero demands. He called it cheap grace:

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

A church running on cheap grace will trade Jesus for safety every time, because it never really intended to follow him anywhere hard. The German Christians did not fall because their theology books were too thin. They fell because, long before 1933, grace had become a slogan instead of a summons — and a church that demands nothing will surrender everything.

Now read Matthew 10:32-33 again: "everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny." That verse should sober us. Be honest: would you have stood with the Confessing few, or drifted with the comfortable many? None of us knows for sure. Peter swore he would never deny Jesus, and denied him three times before sunrise.

This is where the gospel meets us. Our hope is not that we would have been brave enough. Our hope is a Person. Revelation 1:5 calls Jesus "the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth." He is the one confessor who never flinched — faithful before Pilate, faithful to the cross — and he was faithful for us. He restored the Peter who folded under pressure and made him a rock. The endurance Revelation 13:10 calls for — "Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints" — is not self-generated courage. It is courage on loan from the King who already won.

The Confessing Church's witness is not a trophy for our side, whatever our side is. It is a costly gift, and a quiet question: is Jesus Lord of everything in your life — or Lord of everything except the "And"?

Going Deeper

Do a loyalty audit today. Look at your last twenty posts, texts, or conversations — the things that made you angriest or proudest this week. Ask one question of each: was Jesus driving, or was an "And" driving? Then pray a single sentence, slowly, three times: "Jesus Christ is Lord — of this too." You are not manufacturing a Barmen hour. You are practicing, in a small way, the confession you would need in one.