Each of Barmen’s six “evangelical truths” is accompanied by the rejection of a “false doctrine.” Thus, Barmen’s affirmation that, “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,” is accompanied by a renunciation: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”
Similarly, when Barmen declares that, “ … As the church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance,” it also rejects the false doctrine, “ … as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure, or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.”
The influence of Barmen’s affirmation/rejection pattern can be seen in the Confession of 1967. The Confession of Belhar also bears traces of Barmen’s yes/no contrast. Not coincidentally, both C67 and Belhar were strongly influenced by the theology of Karl Barth, principal author of the Theological Declaration of Barmen. For Barth, genuine confession of faith is always both affirmation of truth and denial of untruth. “If the Yes does not in some way contain the No,” says Barth, “it will not be the Yes of a confession. … If we have not the confidence to say damnamus [what we refuse], then we might as well omit the credimus [what we believe].”1
The believe/refuse dynamic is not “Barthian,” however; it is thoroughly Reformed. The Reformation confessions boldly join clear declarations of evangelical faith with clear denials of error. An intriguing variation on this dynamic is found a century later in the Westminster Larger Catechism. Its section on the Ten Commandments asks what each commandment requires before it asks what the commandment forbids. For Westminster, the No must in some way contain the Yes in order to express the fullness of Christian living.
The Theological Declaration of Barmen reminds the church that the identity of a community as Christian always entails renunciation of what is not from God as well as affirmation of God and God’s new Way. Barmen says Yes to something that the church too often takes for granted: “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 may hear those words and nod casually, “Of course,” until we are confronted with Barmen’s accompanying No: “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.”
Is it possible that an institutionalized church — an institutionalized denomination and its institutionalized congregations — could place the gospel in the service of its own desires, purposes, and plans? Is it possible that rhetoric about the primacy of the church’s mission might push the Word and work of Christ aside in a rush to promote our own purposes and achieve our own plans? Is it conceivable that our “seeker friendly” worship submerges Word and Sacrament in a desire to become attractive once again? Those are not questions with simple answers, but our attention to the wisdom of Barmen may awaken us to the reality that we cannot say Yes to everything, and that if we say Yes to our Lord it will mean saying No to the dream wishes of our chosen desires, purposes, and plans.
Sometimes the confessional No is explicit, while at other times it is implicit. But always, as the Christian community struggles to define itself in fidelity to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, it must say Yes to God’s Way in the world, and No to the ways of the world apart from God. Saying Yes to the Nicene Creed’s affirmations of Christian faith involves far more than the comfortable recitation of liturgical orthodoxy. Saying Yes to the Creed’s defining affirmations of God’s being and action means saying No to an understanding of God as one who is aloof from the world, or who is “creator, redeemer, sustainer” in sequential or alternating modes. It means refusing a picture of Jesus as the tragic hero or moral exemplar of pop historicism. It rules out a generalized Spirit who bypasses the embarrassment of christological particularity. Saying Yes to the Creed’s proclamation of Holy Trinity entails saying No to the monistic deity of bourgeois Protestantism.
The task of confessing the appropriate center of Christian faith and faithfulness, and setting their appropriate boundaries, is not unique to some generations while absent from others. Seventy-five years after its composition and adoption, it is tempting to receive the Barmen Declaration as a dramatic response to an extraordinary historical threat rather than as wisdom for the church in every time and place. However, if our Yes becomes indiscriminate and every No is considered intolerant, then our Yes is no longer a confession of faith. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is called to declare with Barmen that it sees “in the acknowledgement of these truths and in the rejection of these errors the indispensable theological basis” of the church, and the source of its “unity in faith, love and hope.”
Joseph D. Small is director of theology, worship, and education ministries for the General Assembly Council, PC(USA) and a core member of Re-Forming Ministry.
1Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) pp. 631, 630.
