The Barmen Declaration
Barth's 1934 Barmen Theological Declaration — the founding charter of the Confessing Church
Tradition: Reformed dialectical theology / Confessing Church / anti-Nazi German Christianity
Barth's 1934 Barmen Declaration — the founding charter of the Confessing Church against Nazi Reichskirche
Drafted principally by Karl Barth (with Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit, after preliminary discussions with the Reformed and Lutheran wings of the Confessing Church) at the Frankfurt Hof hotel on 15-16 May 1934 and adopted at the Barmen Synod of the Confessing Church on 29-31 May 1934, the 'Theologische Erklärung zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche' (Theological Declaration of Barmen Concerning the Present Situation of the German Evangelical Church) is the founding charter of the Confessing Church's opposition to the Nazi-aligned Deutsche Christen ('German Christians') and to the Reichskirche they had captured by 1934. The Declaration consists of an introduction plus six theses, each setting a positive Christian-confessional claim alongside a 'we reject the false doctrine that...' counter-claim. The famous first thesis: 'Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognise as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.' The Declaration's significance is that it positions the Christian church against the totalitarian-political claim of the National Socialist state-Church without ambiguity: Christ alone is the Word of God, no other authority (not Hitler, not the German Volk, not the Aryan-racial principle) can claim the Church's allegiance. The Confessing Church organised around the Declaration; many of its signatories (notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider) were subsequently imprisoned or killed by the regime.
Author
Editions cited
- Theologische Erklärung zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche (Barmen, May 1934)
- Standard English text in Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church's Confession Under Hitler (Westminster, 1962), pp. 237-242
- Modern reissue with annotations: Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now (Eerdmans, 2010)
- Historical context: Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich (Fortress, 1988, 2 vols); Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People (Oxford, 1992)
School Embodiments
Reformed-confessional theological declaration.
"Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death." (Barmen, thesis 1)
Defining anti-Nazi-state theological statement.
"The Christian Church is the congregation of brothers in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord — not Hitler, not the German Volk." (Barmen, theses 2-6)
Christocentric concentration of all six theses.
"Jesus Christ alone — every thesis returns to this." (Barmen, throughout)
Strong scriptural-confessional framework.
"As he is attested for us in Holy Scripture." (Barmen, thesis 1)
Neo-orthodox tradition.
Internal Tensions
Founding charter of the Confessing Church and a defining twentieth-century church-political document. The Confessing Church organised around it; its inheritors in the post-war German evangelical churches treat it as binding confessional standard; it shaped twentieth-century discussions of church-state relations, religious resistance to totalitarianism, and the limits of pastoral accommodation.
I. Time
29-31 May 1934. Hitler had become chancellor on 30 January 1933; the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller (a German-Christian) had been imposed on the Evangelical Church in September 1933; the German-Christian-controlled Prussian church's 'Aryan paragraph' had taken effect in early 1934.
Attributes
II. Space
Barmen-Gemarke, Wuppertal — the Synod venue. The Declaration was drafted in Frankfurt and adopted in Barmen, both in the Rhine-Westphalia region where Confessing-Church strength was greatest.
Attributes
III. Matter
Six-thesis declaration (~1000 words total). Form is confessional-creedal: each thesis consists of a scriptural citation, a positive doctrinal affirmation, and a 'we reject the false doctrine that...' counter-claim.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Confessing-Church synod via Barth's drafting. The Declaration's collective voice represents the Confessing Church as a whole, but Barth's distinctive theological-confessional formulation is recognisable throughout.
Attributes
V. Energy
Church-political-confessional energies of 1934. The Declaration is at once a theological document (a binding statement of Christian doctrine) and a political document (a refusal of the totalitarian-state Church claim).
Attributes
VI. Information
Short formal declaration. The six theses are tightly compressed; their full force depends on the unstated context of the 1933-34 Reichskirche crisis.
Attributes
Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Barmen Declaration resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.