The Barmen declaration or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 is a statement of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) was a Christian movement in Nazi Germanysupported by the Nazi Party. In 1933 the Gleichschaltung forced protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church and support Nazi ideology. Other opposition movements were forced to go underground to meet, while the Confessional Church would become the...
Confessing Church, re-affirming the focus of the church on The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden (blood and soil). Black, white, and red were in fact the colors of the old North German Confederation flag (invented by Otto von Bismarck, based on...
Nazism rather than on Christ, from the Greek Χριστός, or Khristós, means anointed, and is equivalent to the Hebrew term Messiah. In the Christian religion it is a title given to Jesus of Nazareth. The Anointed in the Old Testament In the Hebrew faith tradition, anointing (with...
Christ.
The Declaration was written by Karl Barth (May 10, 1886 - December 10, 1968) was a Swiss Christian theologian. Born in Basel, he spent his childhood years in Bern. From 1911 to 1921 he served as a Reformed pastor in the village of Safenwil in the canton Aargau. Later he was professor of theology in Bonn...
Karl Barth and is regarded as an expression of the Barthian reform of In an unadorned church, the 17th century congregation stands to hear the sermon. Painting by Emmanuel de Witte Calvinism is a Protestant Christian doctrine named after John Calvin. The term Calvinism has two common uses: As regards the doctrine of grace, Calvinism refers to the soteriological system set out by...
Calvinism.
The Barmen Synod responded that given its current loyalties "the Church ceases to be the Church and the German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible...We may not keep silent"(italics added).
Barmen was crafted as an exegetical response to a crisis of catastrophic isogesis: the church had become "intrinsically impossible" because it no longer sought to build a communal foundation upon revelation.
Barmen's response was, ultimately, an exercise in what Thomas B. Farrell calls "the rhetoric of critical interruption," in which a cultural and national reappraisal could take place on both civic and ecclesiological terms.
The Declaration was written in direct opposition to the national church government—the "Faith Movement of the German Christians"—rather than against the Nazi regime itself.
The BarmenDeclaration expressly asserts that Christ alone is the one Word of God—the source of all authority and truth—whom we must hear, trust and obey.
Barmen confesses the reality that God’s grace for us cannot be reinterpreted or replaced by ideas and programs growing out of human creaturely self-interest and evil designs.
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