Confessing Church

Background

When Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, the "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen) movement, which sought to bring Nazi ideology into the church, gained strength within German Protestantism. At the time, German Protestantism was a federation of regional (state) churches made up of Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches (churches formed by the union of Lutheran and Reformed churches). The German Christians sought to unite these churches into a single "Reich Church." They also sought to introduce the so-called "Aryan paragraph," which would exclude pastors and church members of Jewish descent from the church. They won a majority in the church elections of July 1933, and in September of that year Ludwig Müller was elected Reich Bishop.

Development

• Autumn 1933: Martin Niemöller, a pastor in Berlin, and others opposed the Aryan paragraph and formed the Pastors' Emergency League. Several thousand pastors are reported to have joined.
• May 1934: A synod meeting in Barmen adopted the Barmen Theological Declaration. Drafted principally by Karl Barth, the declaration confesses that Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which the church must hear and obey. It rejected as false the teaching that the state or an ideology could become master of the church. Representatives of the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches took part together.
• October 1934: The Synod of Dahlem refused to recognize the church leadership controlled by the German Christians as the legitimate government of the church and resolved to establish separate church bodies.
• 1935–1937: The Confessing Church trained its own ministers. The most prominent example was the Finkenwalde seminary led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which the government regarded as illegal and closed in 1937. Barth was dismissed from his professorship in 1935 and returned to Switzerland. In 1937 Niemöller was arrested and held in concentration camps until 1945.

In the course of these events, the Confessing Church itself divided between a moderate position and a more uncompromising one (the Dahlem line) over how far to compromise with the state.

Outcome and Influence

As many pastors were imprisoned or conscripted, the movement gradually weakened. Bonhoeffer personally joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed in April 1945. In October 1945, after the war had ended, the leadership of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, acknowledging the church's responsibility during the Nazi era. Niemöller and other figures from the Confessing Church took part in it. The Barmen Theological Declaration was later included among the official confessional documents of several German regional churches and of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

In the Korean church, the Confessing Church is often compared with the issue of Shinto shrine worship. In 1938 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Chosŏn resolved to approve shrine worship, and Ju Gi-cheol and others who refused were imprisoned. These events and the Confessing Church are cited together as examples of the church upholding its confession of faith in the face of state power. During the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Bonhoeffer and the Barmen Declaration are reported to have been frequently cited as grounds for the church's responsibility in relation to the state.

Assessment

The Confessing Church is credited with refusing to let the church be absorbed into state ideology and with preserving the church's identity. Others, however, criticize it on the grounds that its resistance focused mainly on the church's autonomy and doctrine. The Barmen Declaration did not directly mention the persecution of the Jews, and, critics argue, the movement did not do enough to protect Jews outside the church. Niemöller himself reflected critically on this point after the war.

Theological assessments vary according to perspective. At the time, some Lutheran theologians criticized the Barmen Declaration as inconsistent with the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms, which distinguishes the spheres of church and state. Within conservative Reformed circles in Korea, some view Barth's theology critically, so evaluations of the theology on which the declaration was based remain divided.