The Church's One Foundation
This year--appropriately on Pentecost--marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, a document drafted by theologian Karl Barth and adopted by the Confessing Churches of Germany in 1934 as a confrontation of accommodationist religion and totalitarian government in fledgling Nazi Germany. The document is short and inextricably linked to the details of the day, but it's nonetheless been embraced worldwide as a historic confessional statement, rightly establishing where the church's source of strength solely lies and the boundaries that God has ordained for human government. Here's an excerpt of this brief statement:
The Church of pardoned sinners . . . 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.
To a government and cultural movement that desired to be as totalizing in its worldview as it was in its claims to power, the confessing churches of Germany appropriately shouted "Nein!" We are not the property of governments even of our own making; we are children of the God who made us, and we're to live and move and have our being as such. It begs the question, Who needs to hear this from me today? Where do I need to testify this today?
Posted by Dave Zimmerman
at May 29, 2009 7:16 AM
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