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Holy Week resources and reflections

Happy Birthday, Barmen!

In Germany, as well as in many other parts of God´s world, the 75th anniversary of the “Theological Declaration of Barmen” will be celebrated this year on Pentecost Sunday, May 31.

“Barmen” not only marks the birth of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) in Germany, but is also considered to be the first common confession of faith among Protestant Christians in Germany since the Reformation.

It was 75 years ago (May 29-31, 1934), during a crucial period in German history, that the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church met in Barmen and adopted the confession. While the Barmen Declaration is, as far as confessions go, relatively short (an introduction and six “evangelical truths”), its meaning and influence have been profound.

Three theologians, representing the Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches, were commissioned to draft the confession. However, it was Karl Barth, the leading Protestant theologian of the 20th century and then professor in Bonn, who almost single-handedly wrote the Barmen Theologische Erklärung. Barth later recalled he put pencil to paper while in a downtown hotel in Frankfurt, the Basler Hof near the main train station, for a meeting. His other two colleagues enjoyed an afternoon nap. “With a strong cup of coffee and one or two Brazilian cigars in hand,” the Swiss theologian rough-drafted the historical confession, thereby drawing a roadmap to provide a clear witness and direction for the churches in a time of deep crisis.

The Confessional Synod did not intend to found a new church, “but to withstand in faith and unanimity the destruction of the Confession of Faith, and thus of the Evangelical Church in Germany.” In insisting that church unity “can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit,” the Barmen Declaration opposed attempts to establish the unity of the churches “by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices.” Threatened by a harmonization of “throne and altar,” in which the cross was becoming twisted into a swastika and the gospel absorbed into the prevailing culture, the Barmen Declaration called into question attempts to concoct a Christian-Nazi ideology.

Presbyterian scholar Edward A. Dowey Jr. rightly points out, though, that the real struggle was not so much against the government during the Hitler dictatorship, but first and foremost against destructive forces within the church itself. “From this,” says Dowey, “derives both the greatness of the Barmen Declaration and its chief shortcoming.”

The Church’s courage to stand up and be counted during the Nazi reign of terror inspired great numbers of people, including Albert Einstein, who once commented: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

It is particularly meaningful at Pentecost to recall the courageous and prophetic words of the Barmen Declaration, and to remember the ways in which God´s Spirit calls upon the Church of Jesus Christ to be “reformed and always reforming.”

One last note: If one be tempted to think that at “75” all has been said and done, we call to mind the Biblical figure of Abraham. Was it not on the occasion of his 75th birthday that God called Abraham to begin anew and to embark upon what would become the most important journey of his life?

 

Jeffrey Myers is a member of Philadelphia Presbytery. He and his wife Andrea serve the Alte Nikolaikirche am Römerberg in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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