It’s 1933, and the midsummer haze mixes with rain over Bethel, Germany. A small group of pastors have gathered to discuss the German Nazi Party’s infringement on confessional Christianity and a Scripture-based faith. In their attempt to maintain the ‘Germanness’ of their national Church, the government has revised core Christian doctrines, including the inclusion of Old Testament Scriptures within the canon and implementing laws to remove citizens of non-Aryan descent from civil and government responsibilities and, ultimately, all public life.
Within a year, a similar gathering will take place a few hours southwest of Bethel in the city of Barmen. There, another group of pastors under the guidance of the renowned theologian Karl Barth will compose a declaration of “evangelical truths” addressed to the German Church, drawing ever further under the German Nazi Party’s authority. The ‘Barmen Declaration’ will become the chief confessional document of the soon-to-form Confessing Church – a movement of dissident pastors opposing the infringements of their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, and his “Bishop of the Reich,” Ludwig Müller.
During the year leading to Barmen, only a small fraction of the nearly 19,000 pastors in the Protestant Church in Germany will sign on to officially join this opposition. And while that number will vary in the coming years as threats to the safety and functionality of non-conforming pastors prevail, some will remain faithful throughout. One of those faithful is already here under the rain in Bethel to help produce a different document written months before a pen will meet paper in Barmen. This document will come to be known as the “Bethel Confession,” and that faithful contributor is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was not one for spilling unnecessary words. According to his father’s dinner table rule, Dietrich grew up convinced that only what must be said should be said. So when he accepted the invitation in the summer of 1933 to help address the misguided German Church, he must have known it was time to speak.
In the preceding decade, Bonhoeffer studied at the University of Berlin, where liberal theology was prominent. An influential voice at the Berlin school was Professor Adolf von Harnack, whose liberal leanings are evident in his insistence that conserving the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) within the biblical canon was a sign of “ecclesiological paralysis.” While Bonhoeffer rejected such liberal theology, his time in Berlin exposed him to the underlying trends favored by the German Nazi Party in the 1930s and 40s, namely the anti-Jewish propaganda espoused by Hitler and administered by Ludwig Müller, his Bishop of the Reich.
The government’s influence on the German Church, particularly its anti-Jewish stance, reached a peak in the fall of 1933. A rally in Schöneberg, Berlin, declared a unity of German Protestants under the rule of the Nazi Party.[1] Besides what some saw as an egregious assault on a Scripturally-rooted and Confessionally-oriented faith developed over centuries, the government-led infringements on the Church proved troubling enough to Bonhoeffer and others that, even before the rallying cry at Schöneberg, a decision was made to compose a new Confession at Bethel as a clarifying call to the German Church. This new Confession would draw from those of the historical Church (e.g. the Book of Concord) while sharply addressing the theological and ecclesial tumult at hand.
As a result, In August 1933, Bonhoeffer gathered with a small group of dissident pastors in Bethel, Germany, to begin work on what would be known as the “Bethel Confession.” Their aim was to embolden the German Church with a clear Confession responding to the distortions presented by the Nazi regime. The new confession condemned “the attempt to deprive the German Evangelical Church of its promise by the attempt to change it into a national church of Christians by Aryan descent.”[2] With this and similar language throughout, Bonhoeffer and his co-authors “exemplified Christian orthodoxy’s subversive potential in the face of an idolatrous regime.”[3]
Considering the Bethel Confession’s subversiveness in the face of idolatry, contemporary readers might wonder what “regimes” exist in our own time, whether in the form of governments, organizations, or even within Church structures that, perhaps unintentionally, thin out the universal mission of God. We can ask, “What people, or groups of people, are excluded (explicitly or implicitly) from the structures or philosophies upheld by the influencers in our lives?” I notice a few examples in my contexts – perhaps you will notice some in yours.
In their own context, the writers of Bethel Confession recognized the ‘thinning’ of the universal Gospel that excluded whole segments of people (primarily those with Jewish heritage) who did not match the image presented by the Nazi regime. They did this by defending the ‘Jewishness’ of the Christian faith while underscoring God’s election of Israel in salvation history, evidenced by the Jewish descent of the Church’s true ruler, Jesus Christ:
“We reject the false doctrine that tears apart the unity of the Holy Scriptures, rejecting the Old Testament or even replacing it with non-Christian documents from the ancient pagan history of another people.”[4]
“God elected Israel, from among all the earth’s peoples, to be the people of God. Israel was chosen solely by the power of God’s word and in God’s mercy, not because of any natural merit of its own (Exod. 19:5; Deut. 7:7–11).”[5]
“Christ is the reflection of God’s glory (Hebrews 12) in the midst of the world and the Son of David who was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel … We reject the false doctrine that would make the crucifixion of Christ the fault of the Jewish people alone, as though other peoples and races had not crucified him. All races and peoples, even the mightiest, share in the guilt for his death and become guilty of it every day anew, when they commit outrage against the Spirit of grace. (Heb. 10:29).”[6]
Further, in sharp contrast to the pro-Aryanism of the Nazi Party, the Bethel Confession laid out terms for a non-national identity among the Church:
“We reject the false doctrine of the Christian state in any form. The authorities, whether in a land of heathen or of Christians, only carry out their office rightly when they exercise the power of the sword rightly and remain within their boundaries. “The Word can have no emperor or judge, or protector, other than God alone.”[7]
As Marsh argues, the Bethel Confession’s real issue went beyond mere doctrinal differences and cut to the very heart of the Church’s identification with either “Germanism or Christianity.”[8] Once more, we might consider where our deepest identification lies and how those allegiances influence our message and mission as God’s people.
By the end of August 1933, the new Confession was circulated to a few dozen theologians for review and approval. Surprisingly for Bonhoeffer, those who read the original draft disapproved of its explicit call to resist the national government, and revisions were made to lessen its criticism of the state. Even theologian Karl Barth, one of Bonhoeffer’s greatest influences and the primary contributor to the Barmen Declaration the following year, wrote critically to Bonhoeffer that the time had not come to pursue political combativeness. This would be a decision Barth came to regret.
For Bonhoeffer, the unwanted corrections resulted from “too many cooks spoiling the soup,” and the resulting draft missed the mark so much that, in the end, he refused to sign the final document. With or without his mark of approval, the final draft of the Bethel Confession was largely rejected by those in the Confessing Church, whose efforts soon turned to a succeeding document: the Barmen Declaration.
Whether or not the politically pointed language of Bethel would have proven more impactful than the more generalized (albeit theologically crafted) work at Barmen is a question for all of us to consider. Perhaps, in contrast to Barth’s and others’ opinions, the time was right for the Church to speak boldly to social powers. And perhaps other moments in history, even ours, afford a similar opportunity to offer a bold, unsoftened defense of the Christian faith.
What are your thoughts? Were the boldness and anti-Nazi stance of Bonhoeffer’s original document more appropriate than the Church realized? Further, what currents in our own context might require a bold and unsoftened defense of a Scriptural faith? And what words and actions would such a defense consist of? Though I resist some of the contemporary language calling us to a “Bonhoeffer moment,” I readily welcome the example he gave during the rainy month at Bethel when, I believe, the time was right for the Church to be reminded of their call.
Corey Parish lives in Fergus, Ontario where he works as a local church pastor and social service worker. He completed his doctoral research at Tyndale University in Toronto where he trained as a practical theologian and Certified Spiritual Director. As an adult with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Corey’s research and writing focus on intersections of theology, neurodiversity, and community structures in the Church and society.
[1] Besides the removal of Hebrew Scriptures from the canon, the anti-Jewish propagation of the Nazi Party at Schöneberg on November 13, 1933 included the removal of “non-German” elements from religious services, the expulsion of Jewish people from leadership (ref. the Aryan Paragraph), the reinterpretation of Jesus Christ in light of the Fuher’s “power” and “heroism,” and the removal of all pastors who were unsympathetic with the Nazi’s rule.
[2] Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, eds., A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1990), 143.
[3] Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 184.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, ed. Carsten Nicolaisen, Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth, and Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best, David Higgins, and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 12, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 379.
[5] Ibid, 416-417.
[6] Ibid, 397, 399.
[7] Ibid, 415-416.
[8] Marsh, 184.