Certainly the Nazi regime and the Faith Movement of German Christians must be condemned. The Barmen Declaration does stand as a bold confession to the truth of the Word of God in the face of heresy and attempted cooptation of Christ’s church by the state. The members of the Confessing Church deserve honor for their courage to identify publicly with the Declaration at considerable risk to themselves and their livelihoods. Yet, as many survivors of the German Church Struggle would readily admit, they failed to see and do what was required. In the words of Karl Barth, “It was only a partial resistance” [quoted in Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Pickwick Press, 1976)].
The catalyst for the convening of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church at Barmen in May 1934 was the popularity among German Protestants of the Faith Movement of German Christians and its growing control of the German National Church. The ideology of the German Christians tightly melded Christianity with the German nation and the German race. It emerged as a public force in the economic and political chaos of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The movement quickly aligned itself with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state. Accordingly, one of their objectives was to apply the Aryan Paragraph to the offices of the German Church.
The Aryan Paragraph was a recent addition to the civil code removing all non-Aryans from government service. When German Christians gained control of the national Church, the Paragraph’s extension to the Church was a real possibility. This prospect, along with the government’s meddling in Church appointments, provoked the formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League (PEL). The protest of the PEL, however, was limited to the policy’s application to pastors who had either converted to Christianity or whose forbearers had converted. It did not extend to the policy’s application to the civil service or to the racist foundations upon which it stood. Most in the PEL saw the Aryan restrictions as legitimately within the state’s purview to address the “Jewish Question.” Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps the most outspoken, limited his outrage to its impact on Christianized Jews. For his part, Martin Niemöller, a leader of the PEL, advised Jewish Christians not to seek Church office so as to avoid causing offense. The actual impact the Aryan Paragraph would have had on the operations of the Church was quite limited as there were only 37 Jewish pastors at the time, eight of whom had retired. The greater threat was the application of state policies to the Church and the implication that Christ’s power was ineffective against racial heritage.
Both of these issues were addressed by the Declaration of Barmen, though the issue of Church and state gets more explicit attention. Here also we can see the restrained intentions of the Confessing Church. It is often noted that the Declaration never mentions the “Jewish Question” or the institutionalized persecution of the Jews that had already begun. On the other hand, the fact that a particular race is never mentioned, and instead language inclusive of all humanity employed, is itself a tacit rejection of race-based anti-Semitism. The idea that God’s grace is powerless to overcome bloodlines is further refuted by the rejection of natural theology in Article 1 and by the statement of Article 2 that in Christ we are delivered “from the fetters of this world,” recognizing that one of those fetters is heritage. But this affirmation is limited to the converted. Jews who stayed within their faith, were beyond the pastoral responsibilities of the Church.
Relations of Church and state are explicitly addressed in Article 5 in a manner that reaffirms a two-kingdoms theology confining Church and the state within strictly defined, separate spheres of responsibility. The Declaration firmly denied state interference in Church affairs and Hitler’s agenda to bring all of society under the discipline of the Nazi Party. At the same time, however, the legitimacy of any Church-based protest of the Nazi regime or its policies was significantly inhibited. The separation of the roles of the Church and civil government was a prominent aspect of prevailing German Protestant ecclesiology. The Church was to stay out of politics and pastors had a personal duty to remain apolitical.
But many in the Confessing Church, even those at Barmen, were still uncomfortable even with the Declaration’s modest and mostly implied intervention into politics. This reluctance, however, went beyond conflicting loyalties. All had experienced the humiliation, traumas, and disillusionments of defeat in World War I, the threat of class warfare, financial collapse, and political instability. Many saw Hitler as the last hope to save Germany from communism, preserve order, and restore national pride. Martin Niemöller voted for Hitler. His brother Wilhelm had joined the Nazi Party in 1925. Otto Dibelius, a leader of the PEL, delivered the opening sermon for the Reichstag, in which he called upon the new government to restore Germany’s honor. They soon became uneasy in the support, but it was difficult to put their hopes and ecclesiology aside to critique the regime.
It should be recognized, as did a few like Barth and Bonhoeffer, that despite its limitations the Barmen Declaration did open a way for protest and even action. The Declaration asserted Christ’s claim on all of life and refused to admit any aspect of life “in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ” (Art. 2). The claims of Christ were higher than those of the state. When civil authority refused to pursue peace and administer justice the Church had a responsibility to speak out.
In the years following the Synod of Barmen, however, the Confessing Church seldom did so. The few occasions it did, it was again to protect its own and preserve the Church. Most, in fact, were anxious to demonstrate that they were loyal citizens and good Germans. Thus, in 1937-38, nearly 85% of Confessing Church pastors took an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler. The few who refused to do so, thereby openly distancing themselves from the regime, were seen as dangerous radicals. When Bonhoeffer finally was convinced that the demands of the gospel required active opposition to the Nazi state, he did not find support and assistance from the Confessing Church. Instead, his co-conspirators were members of the German military elite, the aristocracy, and others tied sentimentally to the old Germany of the Kaisers.
While we should be careful not to over-glorify the men and women of Barmen and the Confessing Church, so too should we respect them for what they accomplished, and sympathize with them in their failures. Their inability to recognize or act against evil was a consequence of being the products of their times. Racial and religious anti-Semitism was so much a part of German culture that most of the time they were not aware of its presence, and consequently found it difficult to elicit much empathy with Jewish suffering. They were imbued with a sense of duty to obey authority and not to interfere in politics so that even when wrong was suspected they were reluctant to act. Their failures were less of intention than uncritical assimilation. Though they had boldly asserted the transcendent claims of Christ in a dangerous and troubled time, they also showed themselves human. In the end, they could not transcend their cultural conditioning. Their story is not one of hagiography or condemnation. It is a cautionary tale the past is telling to us all.
James Deming is associate professor of modern European church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.
