Alec Rittgers is a part-time student in Duke University’s Graduate Liberal Studies program. Outside of class, Alec works full time as a history and Old Testament teacher at Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill. He lives with his wife in Durham, where they enjoy spending time outside year-round.
HUMAN VALUES—INSIGHTS, IMPLICATIONS, APPLICATIONS
Passivity: The Barmen Declaration’s Lack of Help for Those Who Needed It
Alec Rittgers, Duke University
Modern theological sources tend to portray the Protestant church as a source of opposition to National Socialism’s goals of bringing all areas of public and private life under its control.[1] The Confessing Church, the Protestant church group created by the 1934 Barmen Declaration, is often viewed as an example of how churches ought to operate during times of intense political and religious persecution. For those who wish to emulate the inherited ideals of the Confessing Church’s actions, this can lead to the question of how the Barmen Declaration set the groundwork for the church’s mission during the Nazi reign. In other words, how did it protect those in Germany who needed it most? Upon closer examination, however, I believe that the Barmen Declaration fails to answer this question. Although it does outline how the Confessing Church approached ministry to its own members and its relationship to the state, it remains oddly silent about the duty of the Protestant church to the oppressed in Nazi Germany, namely Jews. It is this essay’s contention that by failing to explicitly denounce the treatment of Jews in Germany, the Barmen Declaration was complicit in the racial and religious dualism of German culture under the Nazis that sought to eradicate the Jewish presence from Germany.[2] In particular, the Barmen Declaration failed to address the relationships between Germans and Jews and the Old and New Testaments.
This essay is broken into six sections. The first section lays out the Barmen Declaration’s context. It seeks to demonstrate the rhetoric that led to the removal of Jews from political and religious spheres of German life. In the following two sections, I will look at the document itself and examine what I read to be its goals. In the fourth section, I move to the present and ask the question of why the document retains modern popularity as a foundational church document. The fifth section goes back to the time of Nazi rule in Germany and makes a pivot, examining how an individual who seemingly perceived the document’s insufficiency acted in the face of the totalitarian regime’s violence towards Jews. Lastly, I close by reflecting upon this individual’s motivations.
I
Before I lay out the content and shortcomings of the Barmen Declaration, it is necessary to understand the circumstances of its genesis. To see how church and state viewed Jews, we will look at a series of statements from public figures in Germany who became Nazis themselves or were sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Some familiarity with the historical moment can help us see the problems the Barmen Declaration sought to correct and guard against; this will also aid our understanding of why the Barmen Declaration remains a popular ecumenical statement that is still used by churches today.
Prior to and after the creation of the Barmen Declaration, racial identity took priority in Germans’ understanding of themselves. To define the German, conservative politicians picked up and espoused theological claims and spread messages of racial and spiritual dualism that existed even before official Nazi Party policy. In as early as 1918, Arthur Dinter, a future Nazi Party member, equated the Aryan struggle against the Jew with Christ’s struggle against the Antichrist. Richard Steigmann-Gall summarizes Dinter’s views succinctly in The Holy Reich:
The struggle between Christ and Antichrist was the archetype of the eternal battle between the Aryan and the Semite, between good and evil…. Jesus was the perfect Aryan, who was born among Jews only to emphasize their polar opposition.[3]
Adolf Hitler also unsurprisingly contributed to these rhetorical patterns of a struggle between the Aryan and the Jew in 1921, claiming, “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes, the devil however only with a Jewish grimace.”[4] A more distilled and blunter example of this kind of racial interpretation came from the jurist Walter Buch, who declared that the Jew was “not a human being: he is a manifestation of decay.”[5]
A number of intellectuals and politicians echoed Buch’s claims that Jews possessed less humanity than an Aryan. That did not mean, though, that Jews did not pose a threat to Germans. Rather, as Point 24 of the official Nazi Party Platform argued, the Jews’ materialist spirit[6] worked treacherously amongst the German Volk. Dietrich Eckart, one of the most influential pre-WWII German intellectuals, believed that if Germany wished to deliver itself from the perceived evils of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, it needed to rid the simultaneously Aryan, Christian, and völkisch body of the “Jewish materialist spirit within us and without us.”[7] The Deutsche Christen[8] movement happily picked up on Eckart’s and the Nazi Party’s beliefs in order to reform the Protestant church to fit the Nazi Party’s goals of freeing the infected German Volk from its Jewish spirit of materialism.[9] In her book that examines the thinking present in pro-Nazi theological circles, including the Deutsche Christen, Susannah Heschel points out that in Nazi Germany,
Blood became central to racist discourse, as it is to most religions, because it links spirit and body, human and divine, metaphor and physical reality…. [T]he Institute’s[10] theology might be seen as treating Christianity as the body, National Socialism as the spirit—that is, making the church the bodily carrier of a Nazi soul, thus attempting to make Nazism incarnate in Christianity.[11]
The Deutsche Christen believed that if they were to win the struggle for the body and soul of Germany, its current soul, tainted by Jewish materialism, needed replacing.
The 1933 Aryan paragraph sought to do just that. The implications of the Aryan paragraph rippled across both political and religious spheres in Germany. With its legislation, non-Aryans who lived in Germany suddenly found employment and educational opportunities severely limited. The mass layoffs included non-Aryan pastors. In the Protestant church structure, pastors belonged to the category of civil servants; because the Aryan paragraph removed non-Aryan civil servants from their positions, the Nazi government effectively terminated employment for pastors who had Jewish ancestry.[12]
Many institutions welcomed the Aryan paragraph, including the influential theological school at Erlangen, whose faculty were known as theologically conservative and combative and included Deutsche Christen members.[13] The school supported the mass terminations by arguing that because Germans saw Jews as a qualitative other, they had to “recommend the exclusion from the ministry for pastors of Jewish origin.”[14] By removing Jewish pastors from positions of ministry, the soul, which the pastors ministered to, would be rid of the grip of the spirit of Jewish materialism. This government action, however, encroached on the Protestant church’s territory. The subsequent Barmen Declaration should be remembered as a response to what the delegates at Barmen perceived as government overreach in the form of the 1933 Aryan paragraph.
II
The beliefs of the Deutsche Christen who applauded the Aryan paragraph deeply frustrated pastors who were committed to the traditional interpretation of two-kingdom theology that forbade the church and government from veering into each other’s realms of jurisdiction.[15] Thus, pastors in Germany committed to this traditional teaching felt the need to gather and state their disapproval of the Deutsche Christen’s relationship with the Nazi state and the state’s encroachment into the church’s sphere in the form of the Aryan paragraph. So, in May of 1934, representatives from Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches met in Barmen, Germany, to address and chart out a response to the issues at hand.[16] Here, it is important to note that members of the Barmen Synod did not set out to publicly denounce Nazi policy. The delegates at the synod never intended to release any statements of resistance. In fact, Nazi Party members attended the synod in uniform and ultimately approved of what the delegates articulated.[17]
The document that resulted from the discussions at the Barmen Synod is known as the Barmen Declaration. It is a document that is perhaps the best practical example of its author’s, Karl Barth, dialectic theology. This form of theological thinking, and by extension acting, stressed “the independence of the gospel from political programs.”[18] Barth’s dialectic theology is perhaps most clearly visible in the Barmen Declaration’s fifth and sixth theses.
In the fifth thesis, Barth seeks to put checks and balances on the two biggest stakeholders who sought influence and control over the soul of Germans. Barth cited 1 Peter 2:17[19] to remind Germans of the boundary lines between church and state. On the one hand, the state did not possess the divine authority to be the “single and totalitarian order of human life.” Rather, the role of the state, as understood by Barth and by the representatives at Barmen, was to maintain justice and peace. These virtues came about through the state’s use of threat, and when necessary, force. To the modern ear, this smacks of an unacceptable allowance of totalitarian rule, but the Barmen representatives viewed this arrangement as in line with divine order: “The church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him…. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.” Rebelling against the state would have amounted to rebelling against divine instruction.
On the other hand, while the state ought not to attempt to supersede the church’s role of ordering human life, thesis six articulated that the church’s domain was not the political realm. The church’s job consisted in delivering “the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead…through sermon and Sacrament.” The church ought to minister to its own people, and it interpreted Scripture to expressly prohibit any attempt on the church’s part to become “an organ of the state.”
Thus, the fifth and sixth theses of the Barmen Declaration sought to correct the Deutsche Christen’s errors, whose attempts at alignment with the state, and not necessarily their antisemitic rhetoric and practice, were what the representatives at the Barmen Synod rejected. The exclusion of ethnically Jewish pastors from church employment was only vaguely addressed as inappropriate government overreach.
III
If we step back from the fifth and sixth theses and look at the Barmen Declaration as a whole, nowhere do we see a mention of the persecution of Jews. Instead of political criticism, what came out of Barmen was a passive, retreating statement more concerned with the Protestant church’s commitment to a traditional theological stance on the relationship between church and state and the spiritual care of its own members.
In the document’s introduction, Barth makes very clear that readers should not be led astray by thinking that this document was in any way, shape, or form a document of rebellion or resistance. By drawing on passages from Scripture, it then goes on to remind readers of the authority of the Word of God (thesis one), the need for justification and sanctification (thesis two), the church’s commitment to abstaining from or avoiding cultural and political influences (thesis three), inner-church checks and balances (thesis four), separation and independence of church and state (thesis five), and the church’s mission of administering Word and sacrament (thesis six).
Absent in the theses is any mention of an obligation to protect those facing persecution in Germany. Any gains that were made in terms of defining the church’s relationship to the political sphere were made at the cost of worldly disengagement.[20] In addition to the Protestant church’s retreat, the document contains elements of covert antisemitism besides the already mentioned failure to address the persecution of Jews: each thesis is grounded in a New Testament passage; nowhere is the Old Testament cited. Whether intentional or unintentional, this move comes far too close to the Marcionism that Adolf von Harnack,[21] one of Karl Barth’s professors, espoused, especially given the Deutsche Christen’s active practice of excising the Old Testament from Sunday readings, liturgies, and personal devotion.[22] Neglecting the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, effectively severed a tie that the Church historically shared with Jews. Without acknowledging this commonality, the Church’s ministry turned inward at the expense of Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime. Only later did those present at the Barmen Synod realize the gravity of their error.
Looking back on the period of Nazi reign in 1967, Karl Barth conceded the Barmen Declaration’s shortcomings and failures:
It was new to me above all that Bonhoeffer, first and almost alone, viewed and attached the “Jewish Problem” so centrally and energetically from 1933 on. I have long since felt a sense of guilt that I did not…emphasize its decisive character—e.g., in the…Barmen Declaration of 1934 produced by me.[23]
Barth eventually realized that the church needed to grapple with how it would relate to Jews in Germany, but the issue did not find its way into the seemingly more urgent issues the declaration addressed in 1934. This is especially striking because the authority the government claimed in the Aryan paragraph—excluding ethnic Jews from positions of ministry in the Protestant church—was one of the strongest motivators for the meeting at Barmen in the first place.
IV
These shortcomings, though, do not seem to have hindered the document’s prestige. Today, many churches and theologians in North America and Europe point to the document and see it as a heroic example of the Protestant church’s anti-Nazi stance. The United Church of Christ (UCC) includes the Barmen Declaration in its governing documents and describes it as “a call to resistance against the theological claims of the Nazi state.”[24] In some respects, this is an accurate statement, as the statement did spell out what delegates believed to be the proper relationship between church and state: namely, separation. However, as we have already established, the document was never intended to be a statement of resistance. Nor did it address the problem of the removal of ethnic Jews from the church.
In addition to its inclusion in the UCC, the Barmen Declaration is included in other churches’ governing documents and histories, such as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the Evangelical Church in Germany, and the Worldwide Moravian Church.[25] Further, in popular sources like Dr. Stephen Nichols’s 5 Minutes in Church History, the synod that met at Barmen is held up as an example for how the modern church ought to behave in the midst of political persecution.[26] However, as we have seen, at best the Barmen Declaration sought to maintain the Protestant church’s independence from the state; it failed to speak out on behalf of the persecuted Jews who had recently been barred from full participation in German life.
A Protestant Christian could sympathize with claims of the declaration’s heroism and its current inclusion in churches’ governing documents. After all, the Barmen Declaration laid the groundwork for the subsequent Confessing Church that included Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others, who opposed Nazi antisemitism. Apart from neglecting the Old Testament, something that is not uncommon today, the document does not contain any blatant theological heterodoxy.[27] It maintains that Jesus Christ, not a political party, deserves Christians’ primary allegiance. In other words, the document seeks to uphold the separation of church and state. Seen outside of its original context, the Barmen Declaration withstands many tests that a modern, theologically traditionalist church might administer.
However, camps that praise the Barmen Declaration are primarily theological in nature and do not always pay close enough attention to relevant historical research. This is a situation where history may illuminate the document’s shortcomings that the church has either overlooked or left unaddressed, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Taken out of its historical context, divorced from the 1933 Aryan Paragraph, and flattened to six generalizations that are applicable to many political climates, the declaration and its authors’ intentions can be warped to glorify Barmen as a courageous, daring statement of resistance. Resistance in that time, however, necessitated protection of those whom the National Socialist state sought to eradicate in addition to the care of baptized Christians, a point that Karl Barth, the document’s primary author, conceded years later, as previously mentioned. Ultimately, pastors who saw the document’s limitations, and not its strengths as a statement of the church’s separation from political and cultural influences, were the ones who saw and cared for suffering Jews.
V
Here is where most would point to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and member of the Confessing Church, as an example of someone whose dissatisfaction with the document’s contents led him to advocate for Jews in Germany at a time when many of his colleagues remained silent. Bonhoeffer’s story, though, is one that is well known and has been analyzed by many people. Instead, I would like to examine the story and person of Kurt Scharf, also a member of the Confessing Church, who noticed and reacted to the plight of the Jews in Germany and did not settle for only caring for the souls entrusted to him, as advised by the Barmen Declaration.
Kurt Scharf was a pastor who lived near Berlin during the period of Nazi rule. His parsonage, located in the town of Sachsenhausen, shared a field with the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Sachsenhausen excelled at imposing suffering; there, members of the Nazi party experimented with different modes of execution in order to efficiently eradicate their political and racial opponents. In addition to the cruel forms of treatment inmates faced, prisoners often starved to death or worked so hard that exhaustion overcame their will to live. If death did not greet an inmate through poor treatment, starvation, or exhaustion, then disease in the camp posed yet another obstacle to survival.[28]
Offering help to the Nazi Party’s opponents often came with steep risks; parts of Nazi-controlled Europe mandated death for those who helped Jews. After preaching a series of anti-Nazi sermons, in 1938 the Nazi Party punished Kurt Scharf for the messages that came from his pulpit. He did not suffer torture or any bodily harm, but he was suspended from his position as pastor. Some people in his congregation even applauded this verdict. Scharf, though, refused to acknowledge his suspension and remained at his parishes in Sachsenhausen, continuing to preach sermons denouncing Nazi actions.
His resistance was not only from the pulpit, though. Scharf helped to forge identification and rations cards; he ignored the German laws that disqualified those with Jewish ancestry from working in the church, allowing Jews to serve; he also helped hide Jews from the SS.[29] Additionally, Scharf organized a ministry that aimed to alleviate some of the suffering that inmates at Sachsenhausen experienced. After seeing their emaciated bodies, Scharf and his congregation strategically placed bread along the boundary lines of the camp so that the inmates could consume extra calories. In the evenings, Scharf arranged to have the church’s bells rung for the prisoners. According to historian Victoria Barnett, who conducted hundreds of interviews of people reflecting on the period,
The inmates of Sachsenhausen heard the church bells ring nightly and knew that, in that moment, they were being prayed for. The parishioners in Sachsenhausen…heard the bells and knew that their pastor stood firm, pealing a message to God and humanity, in protest against Nazism, in solidarity with the suffering of the Nazis’ victims.[30]
Unlike the Barmen Declaration, through his sermons and actions, Scharf criticized the time’s racial and religious dualism by refusing to follow the prescribed employment laws and ministering to Jews both within and outside of his church.
VI
When I first read about Kurt Scharf’s actions, my initial reaction was why?. What led him to see, love, and have compassion on his Jewish brothers and sisters? What set him apart from other members of the Confessing Church who followed the passive Barmen Declaration’s example?
Scharf saw a common thread between Christians and Jews, and this thread rejected the racial and religious dualism of the age. The way that Jews lived out their understanding of the Old Testament deeply fascinated Scharf, and he wanted to learn all he could from them; this is a posture distinctly at odds with that of the Barmen Declaration, which did not see fit to draw on the Old Testament. He also demanded respect and an acknowledgement of Christians’ relatedness to Jews:
As Christians, we may never forget that the Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible of the Jews, their entire Bible! We must be aware of this and therefore show respect. Here we are bound by one strand that must never be torn. This strand must be reforged through Jewish-Christian dialogue.[31]
Identifying and investing in a common thread, as evidenced by Scharf’s actions in Nazi Germany, is to begin to stand in solidarity with those cast aside and disenfranchised. Ultimately, Scharf’s commitment to the rebuilding of the binding strand, in this case the Old Testament, motivated the action the Barmen Declaration should have sparked.
Notes
[1] These sources will be addressed in the fourth section.
[2] For an overview on the strands of dualism in Nazi Germany, see Goetz A. Briefs’s work “The Dualism of German Culture.”
[3] Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31.
[4] Ibid., 37.
[5] Ibid., 32.
[6] There are multiple interpretations of what Nazi leaders meant by using the term “Jewish spirit of materialism” or “Jewish-materialist spirit.” Some, like Alfred Rosenberg, believed that the spirit was embodied and viewed it primarily as a biological difference between races. Dietrich Eckart, though, was concerned more with beliefs about an afterlife. He saw the Jewish spirit of materialism leading Aryans to only focus on the temporal and not believing that a life after death existed. Thus, both racial and religious/spiritual interpretations of this spirit existed within German life. Though heavily influenced by Eckart, Hitler viewed the Jewish spirit of materialism biologically, calling for the removal of Jews from Germany to purify the Volk.
[7] Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 17.
[8] Wilhelm Kube, a politician and intense antisemite helped create the Protestant church group in 1931. Although never an official branch of the Nazi government, the church aligned itself as closely as possible with the Nazi’s racial beliefs.
[9] Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing ‘The Holy Reich’: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 3 (2013): 437, 439.
10 Refers to the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” an academic venture established by the Deutsche Christen.
[11] Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2010), 23.
[12] Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1998), 128–129.
[13] Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (OUP Oxford, 2006), 319.
[14] Wolfgang Gerlach, “The Attitude of the Confessing Church toward German Jews in the Third Reich, and the Way after: Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly,” in The Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly (Lewiston, NY, 1986), 93.
[15] Heinrich Bornkamm’s work Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms in the Context of His Theology addresses how Martin Luther saw the distinct roles of secular and Christian authority. The two spheres could serve one another (for example, Luther saw one of the state’s roles to be that of peacemaker. In turn, peace would help extend the kingdom of God.), but they could not overlap.
[16] United refers to a Prussian denomination that combined the Lutheran and Reformed denominations into a united church body.
[17] George Harinck, “The Barmen Declaration: Opposed to Hitler and the Nazis?,” filmed July 2015 at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YciKsq6HMh8.
[18] John E. Wilson, Introduction to Modern Theology: Trajectories in the German Tradition (Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 2007), 172.
[19] “Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.”
[20] Tobias Cremer, “The Resistance of the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany and Its Relevance for Contemporary Politics,” Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, no. 4 (December 2019): 45.
[21] In his work Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, Adolf von Harnack concludes with an excision of the Old Testament from the Christian Scriptures: “any sort of equation of the Old Testament with the New Testament and any authority for the Old Testament in Christianity cannot be maintained.” For him, the God of the New Testament, a being only capable of merciful love, could not possibly have been the same God found in and testified about in the Old Testament.
[22] For more on the removal of the Old Testament from Deutsche Christen church services, see Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.
[23] Wolfgang Gerlach, “The Attitude of the Confessing Church toward German Jews in the Third Reich, and the Way after: Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly,” in The Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly (Lewiston, NY, 1986), 98-99.
[24] “Barmen Declaration,” United Church of Christ (blog), accessed November 27, 2023, https://www.ucc.org/beliefs_barmen-declaration/.
[25] The Evangelical Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland) is a communion of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant churches. See the following link for the Barmen Declaration’s inclusion in the Evangelical Church in Germany’s heritage: https://www.ekd.de/en/The-Barmen-Declaration-133.htm. See the Book of Confessions for its inclusion in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A and the Book of Order for its inclusion in the Worldwide Moravian Church.
[26] Stephen Nichols, “The Barmen Declaration | Ligonier Ministries,” accessed November 27, 2023, https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts/5-minutes-in-church-history-with-stephen-nichols/barmen-declaration.
[27] See chapter two of Brent A. Strawn’s book The Old Testament is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment for statistics on the lack of sermons preached on the Old Testament.
[28] Elie Wiesel et al., “Sachsenhausen Main Camp,” in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I, ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee, Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Indiana University Press, 2009), 1255–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt16gzb17.42.
[29] Kurt Scharf, Widerstehen und Versöhnen (Stuttgart, Germany: Radius-Verlag, 1987), 21-22.
[30] Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1998), 102.
[31] Scharf, Widerstehen und Versöhnen, 25. Author’s translation.