On a sun-drenched Sunday evening in June, a group of twenty pastors, theologians, and lay leaders gathered in a white colonial home in Benicia, 30 miles north of Berkeley, around the overarching question: “How are we to equip the saints (i.e. the Church) for our current moment?” While most of those gathered did not know one another when we arrived, it quickly became clear that at least part of what led us to accept the invitation to join a retreat framed around the Barmen Declaration of 1934 is a shared frustration by our current political-religious moment; a common experience of isolation and sense of helplessness; and a searching desire for ways to respond—faithfully and practically.
Hosted by Dr. Craig Wong, Executive Director of New College Berkeley, we heard several presentations over the course of our three days together: “History and a Close Reading of the Theological Declaration of Barmen,” from John and Marilyn McEntyre; “Barth, Barmen, and the Practice of Theology,” from John Franke of Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis; and “Formation for Fraught Times: The Sermon on the Mount and the Shaping of a Distinctive Community,” from Michael Barram of St. Mary’s College of California. This generous gathering included not only presentations from pastors and scholars, but informal conversations over morning coffee, meals around the dining room table and in the backyard, and late-night chats in the kitchen. The collective experience of this retreat offered substantial nourishment for the mind, body, and soul, which I am still processing.
For those who could not attend, this essay attempts to offer a snapshot of this gathering, in hopes that the generous offerings of this time might be spread even further, offering nourishment to those feeling similarly frustrated, isolated, and in search of a more faithful way forward. While this essay will in no way do justice to the veritable buffet of historical, political, and religious reflections offered by our retreat’s presenters’ and participants’ reflections, perhaps this essay may offer encouragement where discouragement prevails, expand imaginations where so many minds have grown narrow and dim, and potentially spark new paths of faithfulness where the way forward feels opaque and overwhelming.
History and a Close Reading of the Theological Declaration of Barmen
As retired Presbyterian pastor John McEntyre insisted in our retreat’s opening session, theology must meet us where we live. It was for this reason that 139 representatives of Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches—representing ordained ministers, congregants, and university professors—gathered in the German city of Wupperthal, from May 29–31, 1934. Those gathered were responding to the German Evangelical Church’s increasing allegiance to the Nazi leadership of their nation’s government, which was becoming more centralized by the day. Nazi authority at the time of the Barmen Declaration—some five years before the start of WWII—was seeking to implement itself through political elections, which included consolidating church authority under its reign. This increasing threat of centralized political and religious authority under a single leadership birthed the Confessing Church and the Barmen Declaration in response.
As Marilyn McEntyre began her presentation, she invited those gathered to consider the following question: how might a group of Christian leaders create a concise document that unites all believers against the inherently anti-gospel authority of the Nazis? This was no small task. Many within the Evangelical Church in Germany at this time were not themselves opposed to Nazi ideology—including its discrimination against its own Jewish citizens—so long as the Nazi government did not assert itself over church leadership. Indeed, participation in the gathering by those who maintained commitments to Hitler kept the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer away from the Barmen gathering, even as he lent his signature to its final statement.[1] Authority, then, was a primary concern for many gathered at Wupperthal. What would it mean for the Church to defend itself against the increasing centralization of power and authority under Hitler’s Nazi regime, and to emerge as a remnant Church, a resisting Church, a resilient Church, and, even, a repentant Church?
The first step in such work was to name the political and theological crises at play, which remained largely undiagnosed. What became key in this work was to identify the center of the Gospel, and to call Evangelical German Christians back to that center. That center was the exclusive and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ over the Church. While being direct about the political and theological crises of their day, this unifying work required a pastoral and invitational tone. It wasn’t enough merely to point out what was wrong with Nazi leadership; what was needed was to illuminate and model a faithful way forward. If consensus was to be achieved, setting and modeling the terms of the conversation, the way the conversation was handled, was arguably as important as its contents. As Marilyn McEntyre explained in our gathering, a more accurate interpretation of this statement in the original German is “The Barmen Invitation.”
A close reading of the Barmen statement, paying special attention to its language and structure, offers a glimpse into the care involved in this critical ecclesial work. In its final form, the statement from Barmen contains six propositions for the German Church, each quoting from Scripture, rejecting the false doctrine of those German Christians ceding authority to Hitler, and detailing its implications for the present context. In places, the Barmen Declaration uses pointedly strong language. For example, when it states, “We absolutely throw away fake doctrine,” or, “Do not listen to the seducers who pervert our intentions.…” In other places, the authors write, “Do not be deceived….” The threat of Nazi leadership’s political and theological formation required such direct language. These leaders felt the urgency of clarifying the nature of the threat at the Church’s walls, in non-hyperbolic ways. As Luther and other leaders in the Reformation of the sixteenth century attempted to bring the Gospel back to the light, relieved of its illegitimate and compromising accretions, a similarly critical approach was needed in this moment. Orienting Christians anew, giving direction to those faithfully seeking to follow their resurrected Lord, that was the goal, and the statement’s pointed, direct language was key to such work. But that was not all it required, were those who considered themselves members of Germany’s Evangelical Church to be called back to its rightful Lord.
More than merely corrective in its unfolding of the meaning of Jesus’ Lordship, this statement sought to be clarifying as well as unifying, which required an invitational tone. The statement begins with “An Appeal to the Evangelical Congregations and Christians in Germany.” By its nature, an appeal is invitational. “Please come back,” its authors are writing. “The door is open.” Further, throughout this statement there are repeated references to “standing” next to one another, noting their shared interests. “Let us reason together,” the statement goes on, as Christians, united by and in the ongoing work of the Gospel of Jesus in their time and place. Here, too, we see a pastoral voice of care and concern, as well as a desire to work together, rather than merely being corrective, one over the other. As Marilyn McEntyre noted, there is room to admire the restraint shown in this work, especially given the already extreme circumstances in which these Christians were meeting and writing.
In reflecting on this statement, McEntyre asked those gathered in Benicia to reflect on the language we might use in our own moment. Were we to make an appeal to Evangelical sisters and brothers in positions of Church leadership tempted by political pressure appeals with Christian Nationalist interests, what language might we intentionally use? Just as important, what language might we need to avoid? Some words have become so triggering, so divisive that we can no longer use them if our goal is unifying in nature.
Last year Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson visited Seattle for a recording of the On Being podcast with journalist Krista Tippett. Speaking on her latest work, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, their rich, stimulating, and insightful conversation was truly remarkable. Perhaps most impressive of all, Wilkerson never once used the words “race,” “racism,” or “racist” in their conversation—especially striking, given the subject of her work. This represented an intentional omission by a masterful orchestrator of words attempting to create a welcoming, unifying conversation for all.
Similarly, as someone in our retreat noted, if an individual were writing such a statement on their own, they would be able to say a lot more. If a group of individuals are saying something together, across denominational differences, all the particularities any one individual might want would not be able to be included. But saying something together was critical for changing the current of power at work within the Evangelical Church in Germany. In our own moment, we do well to ask, what is our collective appeal? What is it that we all need to remember about the Gospel to find common ground, and how might we need to be strategic about our choice of language to get there, together?
Barth, Barmen, and the Practice of Theology
In his address, theologian John Franke invited those gathered to consider a question at the heart of the Old and New Testaments: what does it mean to be God’s people? Throughout history, and in diverse locations, scripture shows a people wrestling with this question—sometimes coming to violent conclusions.
According to Deuteronomy, God’s people believed Yahweh ordered them to enter the foreign land of Canaan and kill all those already living there, before taking the land for themselves. Scholars, pastors, and lay readers alike have struggled with this text for centuries. However, as Rowan Williams has noted in his book Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer it is possible that ancient Israel misinterpreted God’s call in this moment, and that misinterpretation was perpetuated by subsequent generations. Likewise, Franke offered a firm and pointed response to this story: “As followers of Jesus, we must say that’s wrong, and counter to the moral character of God.”
One of the central, defining characteristics of both God and the people of God in scripture involves welcoming the foreigner. “You shall also love the stranger,” Yahweh declares in Deuteronomy 10:19, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Similarly, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” Leviticus 19:34 records. In their hymns, ancient Israel sang: “The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin” (Psalm 146:9). Ancient Israel’s prophets, too, reminded God’s people of this divine concern for the stranger: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (Zechariah 7:9-10). Such texts are paralleled in the New Testament, in Jesus’ own words in the gospels as well as in the epistles. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” the Son of Man says to those who will inherit the Kingdom of God (Matthew 25:35). To the early Church in Rome, Paul writes, “Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers” (Romans 12:13). For, indeed, by offering hospitality to strangers, the author of Hebrews writes, “some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). From start to finish, active concern and care for the stranger are consistently described as characteristics of God and God’s people.
“Why is this a question that deserves our attention now?” Franke asked. “Because we’re seeing a rise in Nationalism, yes, but also in Tribalism, and its religious instantiation.”
Political rhetoric and policies that prioritize one’s own citizens over and against other peoples are put in question by scripture’s consistent concern for the foreigner. Any appeal to Christians today must take seriously this central concern of God and God’s people.
Moving from scripture into early Church history, Franke noted that, in the late fourth century and early fifth century, Rome made Nicene Christianity, a particular representation of the Christian tradition at the time, the official religion of the Empire. In this moment, all other forms of religion were now cut off. Implicit in this social contract was the agreement that the Church (represented by Nicene Christianity) was responsible for the next life, while the Empire would take care of things on earth. This agreement, however—Pax Romana, as it was called—proved disastrous for people on earth. At this point in history, Franke noted, one can see in sermons offered that preaching of the Kingdom of God drops off dramatically. Instead, preaching became concerned with how humanity would get to heaven, where economic and spiritual treasures were promised. Christians, therefore, were formed into a people called to give their allegiance to their earthly rulers (i.e., Rome), and to otherwise concern themselves with preparing for their heavenly future.
In 1930s Germany, in response to the nation’s economic challenges in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles and its painful injunctions, many in 1930s Germany, including its theologians, were in support of their newly appointed Nazi Chancellor and his promises to make Germany a great and powerful nation on the global stage once again. “How could this happen?” Franke asked. “How?” Because of the unchecked assumptions of cultural Christianity and its relationship with power, as seen in Rome and so many other nations similarly striving for economic dominance over and against other nations and people. “Of course we have Christians who are Nationalists,” Franke noted. “This is not just a Christian problem; this is a human problem. It is hard-wired in us. We are tribal by nature.”
How, then, might scholars, pastors and lay leaders to encourage faithful Christian witness in Nazi Germany, and other contexts facing similar threats? In the Barmen Declaration, Barth invites us to think deeply about that question. In so doing, Barth outlines two possible ways forward: the Dogmatic Approach and the Self-Critical Approach. The Dogmatic Approach insists that its members know the right way forward. We have tracked it down, they hold, and we uniquely possess and can wield it. Members of the Self-Critical Approach, in contrast, are careful to avoid the trap of thinking we have the right way, and so are reduced to silence, leaving others to fill the space made by that silence. Regrettably, the Self-Critical Approach has nothing to say to Christian Nationals, Franke noted. One of the primary lessons of Barth’s work, here and elsewhere, is that Christians must avoid assuming we have obtained the right way, which too easily takes the place of God and God’s word. That does not mean, however, that Barth believed Christians ought to be reduced to silence. Instead, as a third way forward, Barth offers the Dialectical Approach, which involves a persistent faithfulness to God’s call, without overstepping our bounds. We must acknowledge both our obligation to faithfulness and our inability to do so fully, and thus give God the glory. That’s the dialectic. This kind of faithful witness involves a certain epistemic humility, one that refuses an over-inflated self-confidence, while also refusing to be reduced to silence.
What does such epistemic humility look like in practice? Taking a personal approach, Franke noted: “I can’t live a single day of my life without benefitting deeply from the perks of Christian Nationalism. Anyone speaking against what I say already has a good point! But,” he continued, “who is not soaked in that reality here? We cannot get stuck in fatalism.” As Franke modeled for our group, Christians seeking faithfulness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ must begin from such a posture of epistemic humility, even as we do our best to live faithful to God’s self-revelation in Christ.
Franke went on to note an often-omitted theme in Barth’s Dogmatics: love. This omission is not exclusive to Barth’s systematic theology, of course. Such oversight is found elsewhere in Protestant theology, including the Westminster Confession. But love is the center of God’s nature and mission. “What does it mean to bear witness today?” Franke asked our group. “It must look like love, love even for our enemies.” When humanity was still far off, Jesus suffered and died for us. That reality is a core tenant of the Christian faith. And so, Christian community must take a cruciform posture in our own time, speech, and actions, or we will have nothing to say. Offering a series of examples of books and films to help reshape Christian imaginations toward a posture of enemy love, Franke recommended Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; “The Scarlet and the Black,” a film based on the book, The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican; and Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, by Eli Saslow. Concluding this series of recommendations, Franke offered the story of Keith Johnson, who worked in the White House under President Obama, in the area of domestic White terrorism. In a discussion about what can be done following the storming of the Capitol on January 6, Johnson noted that the only thing that has proven helpful in instances of people changing their ways after turning toward the promises of White Nationalism is when someone loved them. While it can sound overly simplistic, profound care, even for those who have made themselves our enemies, is transformative. This kind of love will be a requirement in any appeal to Christians across the political and ideological divide. As Yale theologian Miroslav Volf writes in Exclusion and Embrace, “Talking about the way of Jesus without talking about enemy love is not talking about the gospel.”
Formation for Fraught Times: The Sermon on the Mount and the Shaping of a Distinctive Community
In our closing presentation, Michael Barram began with the question: So what do we do now? Unfolding his own experience of growing up deeply engrained in Christianity, as the son of a parachurch ministry leader, Barram shared how educational trips to Latin America offered a disruption to the Christianity in which he’d been raised. He spoke of encounters with “rank injustice,” “violence,” and what it felt like to learn that his own government had, in large part, paid for it all. It was here, in college, that he described himself as reading everything Marxist he could get his hands on. Barram was interested in whether there was anything left in this tradition that might somehow put language to his experience. Looking to Liberation Theology, what he found was a tradition that was much more geared toward justice than he ever realized before. All of this has led Barram to a reconsidered reading of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5–7, which he offered to those gathered, starting with a consideration of our location.
“Start on the ground,” Barram began. “What’s going on in the world has to shape our understanding of the Gospel.” Considering Jesus’ words in these chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, “a located reading is absolutely critical, especially here.”
Our own setting, as Barram describes it, is a manufactured Neo-Liberal context, bathed in colonialism, currently facing a cataclysmic global climate crisis caused by the transactional abuse of creation, all lived out “in the shadow of the burgeoning popularity of a militant, vengeful, authoritarian,
proto-fascist Christian Nationalism that appeals to a mythologized, whitewashed Christian past—a movement that trucks in half-truths, Orwellian doublespeak, and outright lies in service of controlling and denigrating women, people of color, the weak, and vulnerable of all kinds.”
In this, our lived context, Jesus’ blessing of the peacemakers is, at best, out of touch. But, given our context, a focus on the blessedness of peacemakers is also revolutionary. Taking context seriously, it becomes clear why Dietrich Bonhoeffer would find his own location in the Sermon on the Mount. This text offers an alternative to the models of powers at work then—both under Roman rule in the first century and in 1930s Germany—as now.
Moving from location to genre, Barram invited our group to consider the masterful literary work at play in Matthew’s Gospel. What we see in Matthew’s telling of the Sermon on the Mount is something of Jesus’s “greatest hits,” with various teachings constructed into a single sermon. What genre allows us to best encounter the weight of Jesu’s words here? Is this text, for example, intended as a series of literal commands, ethical ideals, or, instead, as hyperbole? Historically, readers and interpreters alike have gone to great lengths to show that this text doesn’t apply to them. A traditional Protestant reading suggests Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as a reminder of how far short we fall of God’s righteousness, and our resulting need for God’s grace. The medieval Catholic “counsel of perfection” reading insisted that Jesus doesn’t intend these teachings for “normal” people, but are, instead, meant to be lived out in practice by monastics.[2] Both approaches (and most others) defang the Sermon, rooted as they are in individualistic readings. There are, of course, many other interpretations of this sermon, including those that are read communally rather than individually.
Central to an alternative reading is to see the parallels between this story from Matthew’s Gospel and the account in Deuteronomy and Exodus of Moses receiving the divine commandments. In the Old Testament telling, Moses travels up the mountain to meet with God, receives the divine imperatives, and then returns to share that message with God’s people. In Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, it is Jesus who goes up the mountain, and he shares God’s message with the people gathered there. In both instances, this moment represents a communal covenantal renewal.
One example of an alternative, communal reading of this Sermon is found in the Anabaptist tradition. Mennonites tend toward a reading that assumes if Jesus said “love your enemies,” it’s most likely he meant it. Such a reading need not be reduced merely to individuals loving their enemies, in one-to-one ways. Read as a Christ-shaped counter-narrative, this Sermon has the capacity to form contrasting community, one that eschews traditional forms of power and authoritarianism, under a different Lord, whose reign is lived in abundant, lifegiving, and sacrificial service of others. What may seem impossible for an individual becomes, to borrow Barth’s phrase, “impossibly possible” with God for a cruciform-shaped community.
Barram concluded his presentation with an invitation to consider Jesus’s Sermon as intended for communal formation for located participation in the mission of God: not in the abstract nor in the future, but right here, temporally and geographically local. Peacemaking, Barram insists, is central to God’s mission. And the Shalom of scripture is not merely the absence of conflict; it is the presence of relational justice and wholeness. Such Shalom, experienced as divine rule in contemporary community, is the beginning and end, the foundation and the goal of Jesus’s Sermon. To live as community in the sphere of heavenly rule—here, now—involves becoming uncommonly creative and wise participants in a divine mission with tremendous this-worldly implications. Such a mission is not impractical nor beyond our capacity; it is largely left untried.
In reading Jesus’ Sermon in this way, Christian community is invited to be provocatively creative in its response to injustice. When someone robs you of your outer jacket, as Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:40, give your shirt as well—leaving you unclothed in a way that publicly reveals the violence for what it is: a gross injustice, but with creative generosity, rather than exchange violence with more violence. To turn the left cheek toward those who have already inflicted violence against you, as Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:39, is not to merely allow oneself to be beaten more. Rather than inviting a back-handed slap on the right cheek, as was the custom at this time, turning the other cheek requires those committing this act of violence to deliver a punch—again, revealing the gross injustice at play, and, also, to non-violently insist on being treated as an equal. Lastly, to go with someone who asks you to go with them one mile may be acceptable, socially, but to go with the same person two miles (Matthew 5:40–41)—while carrying the load of their armor, as was asked under Roman rule and the so-called Pax Romana—would have been understood as an injustice even by a Roman soldier. Jesus’ invitation to his followers is not resist evil, but to respond in a creative, counter-cultural, and ultimately peacemaking way that reveals evil and injustice for what it is, while practically inviting all to see that another way is possible. Indeed, such a life reveals that the Kingdom of God is already at-hand.
What Now? An Invitation to Faithful Witness Together
In the face of growing political, social, and religious temptations toward White Christian Nationalism, what, then, is the invitation for those who name Jesus as Lord—here, today? How might we live together in an invitational, creative, loving, and peacemaking way toward even those we have been taught are our enemies? What might creative resistance look like for us, not as individuals, but as a counter-cultural community shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of the One who is truly and finally Lord? What choices are required of us? What conduct? That, it appears, is the question before us.
At the conclusion of our gathering, Marilyn McEntyre offered our group an invitation to pen a personal letter to an individual or a group who they feel has been tempted by the trappings of White Christian Nationalism in this moment. Using the form of the New Testament epistles as our model, such letters should begin with a note of sincere love, gratitude, and well wishes. “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” these letters of early Christian witness begin, before offering a gentle invitation to faithfully return to the center of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If this invitation is undertaken now, and if it is to be received in the way we would hope, such an appeal must be bathed in love and humility, it must be sincere in nature, and it ought to be communal in character. To all those who would take up this task, may we do so with a persistent hope rooted in the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit—whose in-breaking Kingdom knows no end.
Ryan Pemberton is a writer and editor living in Seattle. The author of two books, he works for Image Journal as Director of Community Cultivation. Learn more at ryanjpemberton.com.
[1] Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York, NY: Knopf), 223.
[2] For more on this topic see, Frank J. Matera, The Sermon on the Mount (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press), introduction.