As I have been posting the short series on government, I received the following question:
What are your thoughts on the Bethel Confession and the Barmen Declaration, Father?
First let me comment that if Dietrich Bonhoffer had been Orthodox, he would have probably been Saint Dietrich. There is no doubt that this was a man fully committed to serving the Lord Jesus Christ under terrible circumstances. I know that Karl Barth did much of the writing on the Barmen Declaration, but certainly its heart had to be Dietrich Bonhoffer.
Having said that, after 1945 the Barmen Declaration was critiqued, even within Lutheranism. For me there is an important sentence in the Barmen Declaration:
Precisely because we want to be and to remain faithful to our various Confessions, we may not keep silent, since we believe that we have been given a common message to utter in a time of common need and temptation. We commend to God what this may mean for the interrelations of the Confessional Churches.
The Barmen Declaration was written at a time of special need and special trial. The Declaration itself states that the leaders of various of the confessions involved were in agreement with the “German Christian” movement, so that this ad-hoc group of leaders was forced to issue this declaration in opposition to both Church and State leaders.
In opposition to what was happening, these leaders make a ringing statement about the place of the Church and the State. Speaking 27 years after the death of Abraham Kuyper, they follow various of his points. Kuyper, as I mentioned earlier, foresaw the rise of statism and thought to neutralize its claims by positing the idea of sphere sovereignty. These leaders were writing after the worst had come true. Fascism was winning throughout Europe. Italy, Spain, and Germany had already fallen under its seductive philosophies. Stalinist Communism, the other face of statism, controlled the Soviet Union. Japan was under its own form of statism, built around ancient traditions of emperor worship and the shogunate. Both fascism and communism were making inroads in the United States. It was a bleak time for people of good will. It was 1934, and within five years World War II would begin. Two of its ringing statements were:
8.23 We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.
8.24 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.
When I read the above statements, I find myself in substantial agreement with the first one (8.23). But, I sigh at the second one, because so much depends on how the phrasing is interpreted. Moreover, the words about the “special commission” bear also some definition. A little more definition is found in the Bethel Confession that I will touch on tomorrow, God willing.
But, today I will say that part of the danger of confessions written in extreme times is that they are reacting against a particular set of problems that need to be dealt with. But, the solutions to the problems may actually be only applicable to the emergency. They may not actually be good statements of how things are supposed to function in the long run. To put it in a silly way, one may be able to use duct tape as a temporary fix for a particular problem, but generally only until one can do a permanent fix.
As over against “German Christianity” and the fascist Nazis who controlled both Church and State, the only solution for the Confessing Church was to declare their refusal to cooperate with either the State or with the Nazi-controlled church authorities. A similar situation existed in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the official Church was under the coercive control of the communist State. In both cases, the only possibility was a strict policy of non-cooperation and outright opposition, and a ringing declaration that the Church could not and would not submit to a statist control that would force the Church to violate its own life-giving principles.
But, during more “normal” times, when the climate was either that of a godly State or of a State that was open to input from the Church, the relationship of Church and State can be and was quite different. For instance, look at the books of Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra for a State that would swing from “open to input” to hostile. Look at the relationships between State and Temple in Israel during various times and of Church and State in the Eastern Roman Empire after the Edict of Toleration by Constantine. There is a set of interrelationships and interpenetration that go against the Barmen Declaration.
===MORE TO COME===
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