Confessing Christ
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German Christian demonstration in the Sports Palace in Berlin, August 15, 1935.
THE GERMAN CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE: On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler took power as Germany's new chancellor. The Nazis immediately began to take measures to conform all aspects of German society to the Nazi world-view. Not even the church could be permitted to disturb the lock-step uniformity demanded by Hitler. The Nazi platform claimed to support a "positive Christianity," and a picture of Hitler reverently leaving a church figured prominently in Nazi propaganda. Such images made it easier for church people to believe that support of the Nazi revolution, far from being contrary to Christian convictions, was the only way to restore morality and decency in Germany following the economic and political chaos and perceived moral decay of the Weimar period. Nazi enthusiasts in the Protestant churches, under the banner of the so-called "German Christian" movement, pressed for the formation of a single Protestant church in Germany that would acknowledge the German Volk and its "Führer" as the primary revelation of the will of God for Christians who were Germans. A central characteristic of this allegiance to the Volk was hatred of the Jews, Germany's "misfortune." |
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Hitler leaving the Marine Church in Wilhelmshaven, 1931. It was a picture widely used in Nazi propaganda. The "German Christians" swept into power in the church in the election of July 1933, despite the efforts of Bonhoeffer and his colleagues to stem the tide. As the euphoric illusion that swept over Germany when Hitler came to power began to wane, the German Christians' crude parodies of Christian teaching became less and less tolerable. A speech ridiculing the Bible at a German Christian demonstration at the Sports Palace in Berlin in 1935 permanently discredited the German Christians among the serious Protestants in Germany. Many in the church who had supported the church's coordination with Nazism realized too late that the Nazi support of morality and Christianity was a very thin façade indeed. |
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Karl Barth
Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian then teaching at the University of Bonn, was the leading figure of the Confessing Church that formed in opposition to the official Protestant church. Its great confessing synod at Barmen in May 1934, in a theological declaration authored chiefly by Barth, had declared that Jesus Christ is the one Lord of the church and the only one Christians are to obey in all areas of their lives. |
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Bonhoeffer and his seminary class at Finkenwalde, 1935
The Confessing Church had to organize its own educational institutions. Bonhoeffer was called by the Confessing Church to lead a new seminary in eastern Germany, in a small town called Finkenwalde. Here the students and faculty led a disciplined community life of prayer, meditation, mutual confession, theological study, pastoral ministry and evangelization, and large doses of play and recreation. A small cadre of graduates from the seminary formed a permanent community of pastors who put themselves at the disposal of the church authorities, to be sent where the need was greatest. Bonhoeffer later distilled their experience of Christian community into the book Life Together. |
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Bonhoeffer and students' arrival in Stockholm, March 3, 1936
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Bishop Bell
Bonhoeffer was an active leader in the ecumenical movement and repeatedly tried to get the ecumenical leaders to understand the seriousness of the struggle to confess Christ in Germany and recognize the Confessing Church as the only true Protestant church in Germany. |
Two Altars
In the official churches, loyalty to Christ was subsumed into loyalty to Hitler, as symbolized by combining the cross and the swastika on the altar. No conflict could ever be allowed to develop between them. In practice this meant loyalty to Hitler determined one's actual conduct in the world, while Christ's lordship was relegated to one's private, inner, religious life. The banner hanging in the makeshift chapel at Bonhoeffer's seminary makes a different confession. The Nazi slogan was Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ("One people, one nation, one leader"). The banner counters with Ephesians 4:5, "One Lord, one faith, one baptism." |
