German Church Struggle

The German Church Struggle (German: Kirchenkampf) may refer to three conflicts collectively or to any one of them. The first is the internal conflict within German Protestantism between the "German Christians" and the Confessing Church over control of the church. The second is the tension between the Nazi regime and the institutions of the Protestant churches, and the third is the tension between the Nazi regime and the Roman Catholic Church. This article deals primarily with the conflict within Protestantism.

Background

After its defeat in the First World War, Germany was burdened by heavy reparations demanded by the victorious powers. In this setting, some conservative Protestants turned toward nationalism. In 1932 the "German Christian" (Deutsche Christen) movement was formed under the leadership of the Nazi Party. The movement claimed that God had ordained a mission on behalf of the nation and sought to fuse the Christian faith with Nazi ideology. German Protestantism at the time consisted of a loose federation of twenty-eight regional (state) churches. The German Christians sought to unify them into a single Reich Church according to the "leadership principle" (the Nazi organizational principle of concentrating authority in a single leader).

Course of Events

• 1933: On April 25, Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller, a former military chaplain, as his plenipotentiary for Protestant church affairs. In the church elections of July 23, the German Christians won a sweeping victory. At the national synod held in Wittenberg on September 27, Müller succeeded Friedrich von Bodelschwingh as Reich Bishop (the highest office in German Protestantism). The German Christians sought to introduce into church law an "Aryan paragraph" excluding pastors of Jewish descent. That same September, Pastor Martin Niemöller, together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, founded the Pastors' Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund) in Berlin-Dahlem. Some six thousand people are reported to have joined it by the end of that year. At a rally in the Berlin Sports Palace on November 13, a German Christian speaker put forward three demands: that the church abandon the Old Testament, expel members of Jewish descent, and break with the theology of Paul. The speech provoked a backlash among many church members. At the end of December, Müller handed the church's youth work over to the Hitler Youth.
• 1934: In January, Hitler summoned church leaders from both sides to the Reich Chancellery but reached no decision. Around this time the bishops of the regional churches of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hanover distanced themselves from Niemöller. In May the opposition held a synod at Barmen and adopted the Barmen Theological Declaration, drafted by Karl Barth. The heart of the declaration is that Jesus Christ alone is the Word of God whom the church must hear and obey, and that neither the state nor any ideology can be a source of revelation. The participants declared themselves to be the true German Evangelical Church, and they came to be called the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche).
• Afterward: The Confessing Church trained its own ministers, for example by entrusting Bonhoeffer with the Finkenwalde seminary for the instruction of ministerial candidates.

Outcome and Influence

After the war, leaders of the Confessing Church, meeting in Stuttgart, confessed and repented of their failure to stand up to Hitler more courageously. The postwar German church has treated the Barmen Declaration as a foundational document on the relationship between church and state. Barth's ecclesiology is regarded as having later exerted an indirect influence on political theology and liberation theology. In Korean churches as well, the Barmen Declaration is frequently cited as a landmark in discussions of the church's social ethics and of the relationship between church and state.

Assessment

The Confessing Church is widely regarded as an example of a church refusing to be absorbed into a state ideology. At the same time, it has faced the following criticisms:

• Its resistance remained largely confined to intra-church questions of confession and stopped short of political resistance to the regime.
• The Barmen Declaration did not directly address Nazi racial policy.
• In broader political matters, the Pastors' Emergency League sided with Hitler.

Those who took part in the Confessing Church explain that they deliberately set political criticism aside. It was, they say, a strategy intended to make church members realize that one could not be both a Christian and a Nazi. By contrast, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is regarded separately as a figure who spoke out on behalf of the Jews and opposed the Hitler regime.

Theological interpretations also differ. Jürgen Moltmann explained that two traditions developed within Protestantism—Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms and the Reformed doctrine of the lordship of Christ—determined how the churches of this period viewed the state.