The Barmen Theses Then and Now

The 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary

Eberhard Busch, Darrell L. Guder, Judith J. Guder, Darrell L. Guder, Judith J. Guder, Darrell Guder, Judith Guder

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780802866172
• eBook ISBN: 9781467434713
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In 1934 Christian churches in Germany faced strong pressure to conform their belief and practice to the pillars of Nazi thinking -- respect for the authority of the Fuhrer and fervent devotion to the history and culture of the German race. Defying this ideological agenda, leaders in the German Evangelical Church responded by adopting the Barmen Declaration. This bold statement of dissent, grounded in the authority of Scripture, has since become a powerful model for the contemporary confession of the Christian faith against modern forms of skepticism and unbelief.
In  The Barmen Theses Then and Now Eberhard Busch demonstrates to a new generation how that key German confession during a specific time of crisis can guide Christians everywhere today. He interprets each of the six theses in its original context -- Nazi Germany -- and then applies it to crucial cultural and political challenges facing Christianity in our time.

Thesis Six

The Mission of the Church in the World of Religion

“Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:20). “The word of God is not fettered” (2 Timothy 2:9).

The church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and Sacrament.

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

“Methinks I scent the morning air,” says the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 When Christians scent the morning air, they will get up and break camp. They will go out to others in the hope that they too will awaken and scent the morning air. The Dutch theologian Hendrikus Berkhof said, “The great danger of the church all over the world is indeed the danger of introversion. As soon as that is her attitude, she shirks her calling to participate in the great movement from the One to the universe; she becomes static and, as such, disobedient.” Berkhof then cited 1 Peter 2:9, “You are . . . God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”2 This is what the sixth thesis of the Barmen Declaration is speaking about.

If the fifth Barmen thesis deals with the relationship of the church to the state, then the sixth Barmen thesis deals with the relationship of the Christian movement to non-­Christians. If Thesis Five speaks of the political service of God, then Thesis Six speaks of the missionary service of God. This is a notable fact. In our church world these are two themes that, if they are dealt with at all, are often played off against each other, or approached as though one had the option to choose between the one or the other. Over there the more progressive ones are engaged with the political service of God, and over here the more conservative ones devote their efforts to the mission of the church. Both tasks are indeed falsely understood if they are separated and played off against each other. In this regard as well the Barmen Declaration is a significant church document because in it both actions are connected to each other. The fundamental point it makes for us is that the one task can only be done properly when the other is done as well. This is the twofold form of the church’s sending into the world around it as well as to the fellow humans of its age.

As far as mission is especially concerned, there were two dominant conceptions in the period before the Barmen Synod, both of them reaching back to the nineteenth century.3 The one was that the “heathens” were to become Christians through the call to personal conversion. According to the other view of mission, the “heathens” should be persuaded of the superiority of Christianity through cultural and civilizing endeavors. Both conceptions could prove meaningful, and both could be connected to each other in such things as medical services. But both became dangers when, in the course of mission, the haves dominated the have-­nots, and tended to think that it is not we but rather the others who should get converted and improve their lot. Then the Christians did not do the one thing commanded of them, which is to stand in the service of Christ. This problem appeared to have been dealt with by the doctrine of mission that emerged in the 1920s.4 It emphasized that the disciples are sent to “all nations” according to Matthew 28:19. Included in this emphasis, according to this doctrine of mission, was the task of adapting the proclamation totally to the distinctive situations of the diverse nations. But there is a difference — a serious difference like the one between truth and error — whether one says that the God normatively testified to in the Bible loves in a wonderful way all people in their various ethnicities, or one says that rootedness in a distinctive people is the inviolable presupposition for one’s being loved by God and for the proclamation of that love. And there is also a difference whether, because of this love, people break out of the life they have been leading, as Abraham left his people and moved out to the land that God would show him, or whether, based on their interpretation of this love they are simply encouraged to continue living their customary lives but in a somewhat improved way. In the first instance, we are speaking of God’s unconditional and free grace, and in the second, of a naturally given human precondition for his grace. In 1933 this problem was profoundly exacerbated.

1. The Concept of “National Mission” in the Year 1933

In the twentieth century this concept was in the air in the decade of the thirties. The German concept “Volksmission,” or “national mission,” had been coined a short time before and could be defined in a variety of ways. It could mean that the time of mission among the “faraway heathen” was now past because the churches that had been established in the various parts of the world could take over the task independently. These were churches with whom we now live in ecumenical fellowship. Perhaps they now have even a missionary task in our no longer so very Christian countries because mission to and among our people has become an urgent matter. But “national mission” can also mean something very different. This becomes plain when we ask what this slogan of national mission meant in Germany in 1933, when many Christians were claiming that it had become necessary. The term emerges in an emphatic way in the rhetoric of the German Christian movement. The administration of their imperial church, the Reichskirche, made an appeal for national mission and published the following guideline for it in November 1933: “All those working in national mission must be both clearly grounded in the gospel and persuaded members of the Third Reich.” It was in this sense that the notorious Berlin Sport Palace Rally, which took place shortly thereafter, was conceived of as a “national mission event.”5 And it was entirely consistent when they appealed there for “liberation from the Old Testament” and for its replacement with stories of a “Germanic kind.”6 The rootedness of the earliest Christians in the people of Israel was to be repealed today by one’s rootedness in the German people. In 1932 the German Christians had already declared that, although they did not want to “tamper with the confessional foundation of the Evangelical Church,” they wanted nevertheless to supplement this foundation with this “living confession.” “We want an evangelical church that is rooted in nationhood [!]” and protects the nation from the “degeneration of our people.”7 The root of that kind of national mission is not the gospel but openly and avowedly Germanic nationhood, and the gospel here apparently does not have the power to hinder the expulsion of the racially impure from the Germanic people.

The same slogan, “national mission,” was also important to the internal church opposition to the German Christians. After they lost the church elections to the German Christians in July 1933, they applied themselves seriously to what they called “comprehensive national mission efforts.”8 What they meant by this was similar to the German Christians: this work should take place in the framework of their church programmatic strategy, whose thrust was that they devote themselves to “the inner strengthening of the people” in the “uncompromising service of the German nation.”9 Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in a preparatory document for the Bethel Confession, stated that the church “enters with its proclamation and in its external forms into the various peoples.” To be sure, its “adaptation to the people . . . reaches its boundary at the content of the gospel.” But how clear can that boundary be if one then goes on to say that the church must become “German to the Germans”? Why must it? Because, he says, “the church . . . never [hovers] over the peoples. It lives within the peoples.”10 This is said more clearly by the Bethel Confession, published soon thereafter by that internal church opposition to the German Christians: “The people of a certain nation, who are at the same time members of the church that lives in this nation, are inseparably bound to both.” It is virtually rejected as heresy, then, to state that the church “in its structure and proclamation does...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foreword
• Translators’ Notes
• The Barmen Theological Declaration in May 1934 — Its Formulation and Significance
• Thesis One: Jesus Christ as the One Word of God and the Jews as the Elect People of God
• Thesis Two: The Rigorous Gospel and the Gracious Law
• Thesis Three: The One Lord in the Fellowship of Brothers and Sisters
• Thesis Four: Responsible Church Membership
• Thesis Five: The Public Worship of God in the Political World
• Thesis Six: The Mission of the Church in the World of Religion