In 2017, I was hired to teach Reformed Theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. The class was not supposed to be particularly controversial. It is a required course for adults seeking to become commissioned ruling elders or lay pastors in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A). Most of my students, who were taking the class online, were already serving their church (or a handful of churches). The main textbook was the PC(USA)’s Book of Confessions, the compendium of 11 confessions and catechisms that form the doctrinal core of the Presbyterian constitution.
But I was teaching this course in the context of Donald Trump’s America, and that changed everything.
I put the Barmen Declaration, adopted by the German Confessing Church in 1934, and the Confession of Belhar, adopted by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa in 1986, in the final two weeks of our 12-week term, serving as a fitting climax in the overview of Reformed theology. Those texts demonstrate Reformed church leaders grappling with the political implications of their tradition’s claims about God’s freedom, sovereignty and justice. Many students found themselves frustrated with how remote and foreign the confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries often feel. Barmen and Belhar not only use more familiar language, but they address social and political concerns that reflect the world my students know.
The Barmen Declaration and the Confession of Belhar demonstrate Reformed church leaders grappling with the political implications of their tradition’s claims about God’s freedom, sovereignty and justice.
When I first started teaching the course, during former President Trump’s first year in office, the Barmen Declaration seemed remarkably relevant — a word to the American church that was as powerful today as it was then. As talk of fascism and nationalism became commonplace, studying a confession from a church body that challenged authoritarianism seemed prophetic. Then COVID hit, and pretty soon Barmen became relevant in a very different way.
In the spring of 2020, state governors, most notably California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, issued orders for all residents to stay at home unless they were essential workers. This was followed by more specific directives that frequently restricted in-person worship gatherings to 25% of building capacity or a maximum of 100 people. Megachurches, led by South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, immediately sued the government, initiating a protracted legal battle that led to numerous Supreme Court decisions. After Newsom implemented new policies for worship gatherings in June 2020, John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church made headlines for their refusal to abide by them. Their political battle with Los Angeles County was ultimately successful after the conservatives on the Supreme Court gained a clear majority with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett.
On July 24, 2020, the elders of Grace Church published an essay in response to California’s policies titled, “Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church.” The statement claimed to provide “a biblical case for the church’s duty to remain open.” According to the elders, God has commanded Christians to gather for worship, and the civil government has “divine authority to rule the state” but no “jurisdiction over the church.” For this reason, the church must gather — and the state cannot interfere.
In February 2021, a missionary in South Africa sent by Grace Community Church, Tim Cantrell, wrote a document titled, “When to Disobey: A Theology of Resistance for Reluctant Protestants.” The document begins by discussing how pro-Nazi pastors used Romans 13 to “justify all the Nazi seizures of power” and cites the Barmen Declaration in support of its claim that “Hitler’s Holocaust and racist Apartheid” are similar to the “global pandemic,” because in each case the government tells citizens, “We truly have your best interests at heart.” The manifesto goes on to compare the state-sanctioned violence during France’s 18th-century revolution to the public health committees during COVID-19. Cantrell claims that pandemic lockdowns are “trampling over human rights and replacing rule by constitutional, parliamentary law with rule by martial law.”
In March 2021, Liberty University professor and attorney Johnny B. Davis wrote a paper on “The Barmen Declaration and the American Church: A Warning and Guidance from History.” There he argued that “the Barmen Declaration was a timeless stance against statism [a system in which the state has centralized, authoritarian control over social matters] and idolatry which upheld the truth that Christ comes before all.” Karl Barth, Davis wrote, “saw the need for Christianity to defend individualism” against the statism of the German Reich. (This would come as no small surprise to Barth himself, who was a consistent critic of individualism!) In his conclusion, Davis claimed “the modern American Church is faced with a statist idolatry in the culture and within the Church.” The United States government “increasingly claims lordship over the Church,” and “group rights like that gay marriage are beginning to be used to deny individual rights like freedom of speech and religion.”
Given the rise of conservative appropriation of Barmen, I started asking my students in the summer of 2020: During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, conservative evangelical churches refused to abide by public health mandates regarding lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, and they justified their rebellion against government orders by citing, among other things, the Barmen Declaration. Do you think the Barmen Declaration applies to the government regulations regarding church gatherings during a pandemic? Why or why not?
Their answers were illuminating. Because most of my students are lifelong PC(USA) members, many of whom identified as progressive-leaning and claimed Barmen as a confession, they largely opposed the notion that Barmen might lend support to the far-right evangelical culture war. However, a fair number of students over the years saw the confession as supporting the conservatives in their dispute with the government. As uncomfortable as that made me, I now think they were on to something.
Having taught the Barmen Declaration nearly 20 times now, it has become apparent to me how much the statement only makes sense if one places it firmly in its Nazi-era context.
Having taught the Barmen Declaration nearly 20 times now, it has become apparent to me how much the statement only makes sense if one places it firmly in its Nazi-era context. This might seem an obvious point, but the status of Barmen as a confession suggests to many that it is, as Davis’s paper states, a “timeless stance” of the church. While the PC(USA)’s Book of Confessions rightly prints Barmen with an all-important appeal and preface, it is common to see Barmen printed without the introductory statements.
Is a confession that requires an opening essay to read correctly a successful confession? This is an awkward question to ask about a document that has attained near-universal status as a mark of Christian bravery amid oppression. And yet my experience teaching Barmen in a 21st-century American context has illuminated just how inadequate the declaration is.
Each of Barmen’s six points is worded in such an abstract manner that unless you already know the authorial intention, it quickly becomes an empty statement that allows one to reject any authority for whatever reason.
Each of Barmen’s six points is worded in such an abstract manner that unless you already know the authorial intention, it quickly becomes an empty statement that allows one to reject any authority for whatever reason. This problem is not only the result of trying to read a 1930s German document in the context of 2020s America. The more fundamental issue is baked into the declaration itself. A mythology has arisen around Barmen among mainline Christians who read it as a rejection of Nazism and fascism. Barmen is nothing of the sort. As a response to the reorganization of the Reich Church, Barmen only rejects the notion that the state can determine the church’s leadership. To be sure, it articulates this position in eloquent language about Jesus Christ being “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” But as long as the state leaves the church alone, the state can be as fascist and authoritarian as it wants — as far as Barmen is concerned.
MacArthur and Cantrell’s claim that pandemic policies regarding in-person worship amount to a totalitarian overextension of the state’s proper domain into the church’s work may seem to many an outrageous exaggeration. But Barmen offers no guidance to oppose this reading. In fact, the language of Barmen encourages this position with its emphasis on the freedom of the church to continue its “special commission” of ministering through “sermon and Sacrament.”
There are some difficult lessons to be learned from this. For obvious reasons, many progressive Christians see in Barmen a prophetic word for the United States dealing with the rise of White Christian Nationalism in the age of Trump. But those same Trump-supporting Christians see Barmen as a message supporting their resistance against the supposedly fascist administration of President Biden — a metonym for any liberal or left-wing institution. Barmen has become a tool of conservative Christian support for policies regarding religious liberty, which has been leveraged in recent years to allow Christians to refuse service to LGBTQIA+ clients (Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 303 Creative v. Elenis), to deny birth control coverage (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Zubik v. Burwell), and to lead public school students in prayer (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District).
In the Barmen Declaration, the Word of God easily becomes a cipher for any position the church views as divinely mandated, which can range from caring for the sick and marginalized to refusing mask mandates.
Conservative Christians are able to reach this interpretation of Barmen not merely because they discount history but because of a flaw in the Barmen Declaration itself. The Confessing Church’s statement says that the church obeys the Word of God alone but does not clarify what this Word means apart from an abstract idea of freedom. The Word of God thus easily becomes a cipher for any position the church views as divinely mandated, which can range from caring for the sick and marginalized to refusing mask mandates. To be sure, this flaw is what allowed for the approval of Barmen in 1934, and it is unlikely that the Confessing Church could have written a more robust statement at the time. But that only reinforces the point that Barmen is not timeless and arguably should not be viewed as a normative confession in the Reformed tradition.
The Barmen Declaration served its purpose in the context of Hitler’s Germany. Translated into the context of 21st-century America, it speaks a very different message that often reinforces the very authoritarianism it was designed to oppose. It is not enough to support the freedom of the church; today we need a statement that clearly declares what kind of freedom is consistent with the gospel.
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