This movement wishes to don the mantle of Karl Barth, appealing to the Barmen Declaration and the Confessing Church organization which opposed Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. The Barmen Declaration, of course, is now part of our Presbyterian Book of Confessions.
In announcing its dissatisfaction, this group has put forward three convictions it wants everyone else in the Presbyterian Church to attest. In addition, a threat to withhold funds has been issued by one or more of the congregations. The first conviction, which is christological in character, is a statement of the Lordship of Christ; a second one, which is methodological in character, asserts the authority of Scripture; and yet a third one, which is pietistical in character, speaks of the need for holiness and lauds the sanctity of marriage.
I consider it an axiom of Christian charity to accept a fellow believer’s statement of conviction when put forward in good faith. Naturally, therefore, I want to give this group of Presbyterian confessors the benefit of the doubt. More than that, the three convictions they have lifted up are ones that I and many of us do not disagree with, at least not in the very general terms in which they have been stated.
So then, it is by no means the substance of this three-fold confession that is the problem for many of us, but rather it is the form. After all, these are three convictions that are already well stated, and in fact better stated, in our existing confessional literature. Moreover, so far as I can see, these three convictions remain the official teaching of the PC(USA). Nor has there been any precipitating event that constitutes either a de facto or de jure denial of the church’s confession on these points, nor have any elected representatives been brought together to speak on these matters in behalf of the church.
Therefore, it seems appropriate for The Outlook — in order to explore some of the richness of the Presbyterian and Reformed confessional tradition, as well as to help people see how this well-intentioned confessional gesture actually strays from the ordinary Reformed understanding of confession — to publish a series of interviews and other reflections in the weeks ahead drawing upon some international experts on our Reformed confessional tradition. The first such interview is with Eberhard Busch, who was Karl Barth’s last assistant in Basel and who now holds the chair Barth himself once occupied at the University of Göttingen in Germany. We are very grateful to Professor Busch for his interest in our American discussions and for the great light he sheds on the Confessing Church of the 1930s and on what it means to be a confessional body today.
The question being put to the church by this recent call to confession is whether the frustrations surrounding events in the life of the Presbyterian Church today are sufficiently analogous to the confessing church movements of the past as to provoke a constitutional crisis. To the contrary, many of us feel that the disagreements in the church today, while difficult, fall far short of what would make for constitutional or confessional division. Hence it is inappropriate to draw analogies between our situation and that of the church’s suffering and sacrifice under the Nazis, and, in fact, the drawing of such analogies too hastily and too superficially does an inadvertent dishonor to the memory of that very suffering and sacrifice.
It is hard for us today to imagine the duress experienced by the Confessing Church in Germany in 1934, the year in which the Barmen Declaration was adopted. The months leading up to Barmen were a time when storm troopers had commandeered the headquarters of the German Evangelical Church; when the Nazis had enacted the so-called “Aryan paragraph” calling for the church to exclude from its ranks every single Christian who possessed a certain degree of Jewish ancestry; and when all manner of coercive intervention by the state was being experienced in church affairs.
These dire circumstances faced by devout Christians — to say nothing of the plight of the Jews, to which the Confessing Church itself for the most part turned a blind eye — bear little resemblance to the comfortable suburbs and ivy-covered hallways in which most of us today — myself included — debate our theological opinions — opinions so easily come by, so easily announced, and so easily promulgated under the postmodern authority of the Web page. Under Hitler, one held one’s opinions under threat of treason. The great theologian, Karl Barth, found himself escorted to the border and expelled; the fearless pastor, Martin Niemoller, languished in a concentration camp for eight long years as Hitler’s own personal prisoner; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a supporter of Barmen though not actually present at the assembly, suffered a martyr’s death at Flossenburg just days before the Second World War ended.
Where the gospel is at stake
A confessing church becomes necessary because a situation arises that presents what theologians call a status confessionis, a situation in which the gospel itself is at stake. It is not simply a situation where one’s opinion needs to be made clear but one in which the failure to confess would mean that there is no more church. To consent to Hitler’s Aryan paragraph and to make race or ethnicity a criterion for salvation would be to exist no longer as a church of Jesus Christ. As Eberhard Busch makes clear in the interview, the Confessing Church was not brought into being just because of differences of theological perspective. Rather, here was an extreme situation where “the issue was to listen to the Word of God as though one had never heard it before.”
Some of the literature defending the need for a confessing church movement has suggested that elements in the PC(USA) are no longer clearly confessing the Christ of Scripture. To buttress this charge, it cites the example of the inadequate christological opinions of Presbyterian minister Dirk Ficca. Yet in his lifetime Karl Barth heard far more rigorous and spirited exponents of liberal christology than Ficca, and these did not for an instant prompt him to call for a confessing church. Barth was there in the audience when the great liberal theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, gave a famous address reducing the significance of Jesus to a matter of social psychology. He left the lecture hall convinced that Troeltsch’s theology would never be able to build up the church; yet one will search in vain for any fiery manifesto or book or even a simple published lecture by Barth on the topic.
Barth’s response to Troeltsch was to ignore him. He ignored him not because Troeltsch was having no impact; quite the opposite. Troeltsch was listened to by much of the Protestant establishment. Barth ignored Troeltsch because the task of the confessing theologian is to put forward a positive witness and not to prosecute a negative one. The task of the confessing theologian is to proclaim the gospel with one’s own lips. It is not to coerce the lips of others. For while the shifting winds of theological opinion will always stir up controversy in the church’s common life, it takes more than just that to threaten the church’s existence.
In addition to Barmen, the other notable time Karl Barth invoked the need to confess was in a 1958 document declaring that the church’s witness requires the unequivocal repudiation of weapons of mass destruction. Confession that is only pietistic in character and that lacks the cutting edge of a prophetic social and political witness cannot claim the mantle of Karl Barth.
Since the time of Barmen, the other great confessing church gesture was the declaration by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches that the policy of racial separation known as apartheid in South Africa provoked a situation of status confessionis. The World Alliance took this action in Ottawa in August of 1982. As a response and appropriation of this action, a group of South African theologians drafted the Confession of Belhar in 1982. With the adoption of Belhar by the South African Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) in 1986, apartheid was declared to be a kind of functional heresy. This in effect marked out a theological division between the DRMC and the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRC) to match the racial division that had been in effect since the 19th century. At that time, the colored and black people had been basically chased out of the DRC and barred from the Lord’s Supper. Only in 1994 were these two churches reunited.
What both Barmen and Belhar make clear is that to invoke the theological protocol of a “confessing church movement” or of status confessionis is to do more than to fire a few verbal shots across the bow; it is the diplomatic equivalent of withdrawing one’s ambassador. Though it may or may not rise to the level of actual schism, or the breaking of fellowship, to declare a status confessionis always comes very close to such a breach in fellowship; for it is to accuse the existing church of no longer knowing where true fellowship is to be found.
The other ‘confessing movements’
The new Presbyterian confessors have made appeal to the “confessing movements” afoot in other denominations. Three in particular come to mind: the Christian Church-Disciples of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ. Looking at these other denominations one might conclude that a “confessing movement” is equivalent to a quasi-political action group in behalf of orthodoxy, or something like a para-church organization for serious adults. To that extent, some may feel the creation of such a thing in the Presbyterian Church is long overdue. Let us examine this reasoning, however, from the standpoint of Presbyterian polity.
The Presbyterian Church, through its Book of Confessions and its connectional polity, is already a confessional church in a way that is simply not true for any of these other three denominations. By contrast, the Disciples of Christ rejected creeds in the 19th century, so that the “confessing” movement in that denomination is specifically seeking to recover something that they regret losing but that we Presbyterians still have. “Confessing movements” of this sort in other denominations, that is to say, are really feeling the need to become more like us. It is not we who need to be more like them.
The same is true in the United Methodist Church. One of the leaders of the “confessing” movement there is William J. Abraham (“Billy,” as his friends know him), who is a native of Belfast and the Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology. Abraham is a passionate advocate for a confessional understanding of United Methodism that would transform Wesley’s movement (and the Wesleyan movement originated as just that, a movement) into something very different from what Methodism has become over the last 100 years. In particular, Abraham wants to do away with what Albert C. Outler, for whom his chair is named, enshrined in Methodism, namely, the so-called Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Abraham is fearful that the Methodist Quadrilateral is a modernist invention that threatens to replace classical doctrine. Instead, he appeals to what he thinks of as the original Methodism captured in the earliest Articles of Religion, in the Confession of Faith, in Wesley’s sermons, and in his Explanatory Notes on the New Testament.
In contrast to the highly creedal understanding of Christianity that already exists in Presbyterianism, Abraham and his allies are trying to define the Methodist Church as a confessional body really for the very first time. And in so doing, they still want to draw well shy of understanding their confessions as many Presbyterians do, i.e. as creeds. It is thus a strange thing for a thoroughly creedal Presbyterianism to be emulating this movement. It is stranger still — and should give us some pause — that the Methodist confessing movement finds it necessary to contest the legacy of so revered a confessionalist as Albert Outler himself. At the very least it suggests that these so-called confessing movements in other denominations are not as simple and unambiguous as is often claimed. This is underscored in the fact that nowhere, to my knowledge, have our would-be Presbyterian confessors appealed to the confessing movement in the United Church of Christ. It is no wonder. Unlike its Presbyterian cousin, the UCC version of the confessing church movement has welcomed adherents who fall down on both sides of the question of gay ordination. Indeed, the UCC movement is an example of confessing Christians who hold a high christology but who have simply agreed to disagree on the question of homosexuality. It is this very openness to disagreement on the nuances of interpreting our confessional standards, however, that causes the new Presbyterian confessors the most consternation.
Let us then be very clear. Within a church that is already a “confessional church,” such as the PC(USA) with its Book of Confessions, the only legitimate reason to declare a “confessing church movement” is if the existing church has somehow ceased to be the church. On an analogy to Barmen, the only thing that can justify a “confessing church movement” is if it is really believed that the Presbyterian Church has effectively denied its confessional nature. To declare the need for a “confessing church” is, in essence, to do two things. It is to offer a new confession, as in the case of Barmen or Belhar, to supplement the ones that already grace our history. And it is to offer such a confession because the testimony of those who constitute the main body of the church is believed no longer to be fully trustworthy.
No one has yet made the case that a confessing church movement, in the historic sense defined herein, is justified in our context; and we are far from the point where our situation can be seen to merit a new confession. To persist in such talk, in an age when people have lost their historical sense of what such talk means, is to risk the unwitting denial of the very history and theology that as confessors we are all seeking to uphold. In short, the term “confessing church” has a historic theological meaning that needs to be respected.
Confession of every sort must begin as did John the Baptist’s (John 1:20) with the avowal of what each one of us is not. Yet more than this, true confession proclaims not just the insufficiency of human beings but the sufficiency of the grace of God. The only true confession, in other words, is the one that lives by and embodies the superabundance of that divine grace, not only in word but in sacrificial deed. Like the seamless robe of Jesus, the mantle of Barmen is cut for a set of broad shoulders and outstretched arms.
William Stacy Johnson is the Arthur M. Adams Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary.
The Interview with Eberhard Busch
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