Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church

Today's Reading

Read Acts 5:27-32, where the apostles, ordered by the religious authorities to stop preaching in Jesus's name, reply: "We must obey God rather than men." Then Revelation 13:5-10, where the saints are called to endurance under a power that demands the worship Christ alone deserves. Add Matthew 10:32-33 ("everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father") and Romans 12:1-2 ("Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind").

Reflection

In the spring of 1933, the German Evangelical Church faced a question that would not let it answer slowly. The newly empowered Nazi regime had, through a movement of pastors and theologians who called themselves the Deutsche Christen — the "German Christians" — begun to remake the church in the image of the state. They sought to introduce an "Aryan paragraph" forbidding pastors of Jewish descent from holding office. They flew swastikas in sanctuaries. They subordinated Christ to the Volk, the nation, the racial community. Their slogan, repeated from pulpits, was that Adolf Hitler had been sent by God to renew the German church.

Many German pastors went along quietly. Some believed it. Some did not, but reasoned that staying inside, however compromised, was better than the alternatives. Some simply did not see, at first, what was happening.

A small group saw immediately. By the summer of 1933, theologians including Karl Barth, Hans Asmussen, and the young pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer were warning that the church was not facing an ordinary controversy. It was facing apostasy — a redefinition of Christ himself in the service of an idol. In May of 1934, representatives from Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches met at Barmen and adopted a confession largely drafted by Barth. Its first article 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. And the second: 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.

That sentence is the heart of the matter. The German Christians were not denying that Jesus was a lord. They were denying that he was the Lord — placing the Führer, the nation, the race alongside him as additional sources of authority over the Christian's life. Barmen called that what it was. Not a tolerable variation. Not a permissible accent. False doctrine. Heresy.

Bonhoeffer's role through these years is sobering to read. He was, by 1934, no longer in Germany; he had taken a pastorate among German-speaking congregations in London, partly to gain distance from a church he could no longer in conscience serve under its current leaders. He returned to lead a clandestine seminary at Finkenwalde — training pastors for the Confessing Church, the body that had separated from the official German church to maintain Barmen's confession. The seminary was illegal. It was raided and closed by the Gestapo in 1937. Bonhoeffer's books were banned. His writing was watched. He went on, eventually, into the conspiracy against Hitler that cost him his life in April 1945, weeks before the camps were liberated.

What Bonhoeffer never did was treat the Confessing Church's separation as a triumphant act. He treated it as the necessary, grievous response to an hour the church had not chosen. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. He saw the choice as the choice of a martyr, not of a faction. The Confessing Church was not better than the German Christians because it was on the right side of a culture war. It was the church because it confessed Christ as Lord; the German Christians had ceased to be the church because they had subordinated him.

Two warnings flow from this story for ordinary Christians in ordinary times.

First, the Barmen hour is real, and it does come. Christians in Germany who imagined that the political mood of 1933 was just a phase, that the church could absorb a little nationalism and recover later, were terribly wrong. There are moments when a church has been so compromised by an outside loyalty — a political party, a national identity, an ethnic loyalty, a celebrity figure, a culture-war coalition — that to remain in it is to participate in idolatry. When that hour comes, Acts 5 is the only verse that fits: we must obey God rather than men. The Confessing Church was right to confess. Bonhoeffer was right to leave the chair he had been offered in Berlin and the comfort of the official church and to write what he wrote.

Second — and this is where many modern Christians get into trouble — that hour is not most hours. The Barmen analogy gets reached for far too quickly in our own day. Every culture-war disagreement, every disagreement about pandemic policy or political endorsements or pastoral style, gets compared to the German church under the swastika. This is not careful theology. The German Christians did not just have bad politics. They denied, in their formal teaching, that Christ alone was Lord. They wrote race into the church's polity. They removed the Old Testament from preaching because it was "Jewish." They taught a Jesus stripped of his Jewishness and reattached to the Aryan ideal. That is what apostasy looks like. That is the Barmen condition.

Most disagreements in most churches are not at that level. To pretend they are is to flatter our cause and to insult the memory of those who actually paid the Confessing Church's price. The discipline of the Confessing Church, including Bonhoeffer's discipline, was not just the willingness to confess Christ when others would not. It was also the careful, slow, painful refusal to call something heresy that was not heresy. They did not pick fights. The fight came to them. And when it did, they could not, as Christians, walk away from it.

The honest test is something like this: when you imagine your church's compromise, can you identify a clear moment at which Christ has been replaced or dethroned in its public confession or practice? Not a moment at which the church has annoyed you, disappointed you, taken a position you find embarrassing, or failed to be as countercultural as you wish. A moment at which it teaches, in word or in deed, that there is some lord beside Christ, or some part of life that does not belong to him, or some gospel besides the gospel. If you cannot identify that moment, you are not in a Barmen hour. You may be in a real one — discomfort, frustration, conviction — but it is not that one.

If you can identify that moment, then the Confessing Church's example is sobering rather than glamorous. It cost everything. Most of those who signed Barmen suffered. Many lost their pulpits. Some lost their lives. The Confessing Church was not a more comfortable place to belong than the German Christian church. It was much harder. The line was clear, but the path was bloody.

Going Deeper

Bonhoeffer is reported to have said to his students at Finkenwalde, in the years before he was killed, that "only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chant." The line, recorded in different forms by different students, is striking because it locates the church's right to its own worship in its willingness to suffer for those the world hates. The German Christians could sing the chants. They could not cry out for the Jews. Bonhoeffer would not separate the two.

That is, in the end, the Barmen test. Not whether your church has the music you like, or the politics you prefer, or even the doctrinal precision you can defend on paper. Whether, when the world is hating someone Christ loves, your church can cry out. If it cannot — and will not be corrected — then perhaps the Confessing Church's example is yours to live. If it can, the Confessing Church's example will only deepen your loyalty.

Either way, the example is not a slogan to be borrowed. It is a costly gift, paid for in lives, that the church should remember with reverence and not weaponize.