The Global Church Era · 1933-1945 · Germany
The Confessing Church
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About This Movement
When the Nazi state and the pro-Nazi 'German Christians' moved to reorganize the German Protestant churches in 1933, a minority refused. Pastors organized an emergency league; a synod at Barmen in May 1934 adopted a declaration, drafted by Karl Barth, that the church has one Word to hear and obey, Jesus Christ, and no other; and the Dahlem synod that October declared itself the lawful church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary at Finkenwalde from 1935 until it was shut down in 1937, and wrote Discipleship and Life Together out of that community. In 1936 the movement sent a memorandum to Hitler. Its own record refuses to flatter it: the church struggle was largely about the church's own freedom, and the near-silence about what was being done to Jews is named by the movement's own historians as part of the story. In October 1945 the survivors issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt.
Sources
- The Barmen Theological Declaration (May 1934); the Bethel Confession draft (1933); the Dahlem resolutions (Oct 1934) (primary) — The movement's confessional core in its own words.
- Bonhoeffer: Discipleship (1937), Life Together (1939), Letters and Papers from Prison (1951, ed. Bethge; critical DBW editions) (primary) — Bethge's own editorial hand shaped the earlier published text; the critical edition resolves that.
- The working record: circular letters (Rundbriefe), Finkenwalde records (1935-37), Pfarrernotbund records, Niemoller's Dahlem sermons (primary)
- The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (Oct 1945); the 1936 memorandum to Hitler; the record of the movement's own limits and silences (primary)
- Gestapo and church-ministry files; Deutsche Christen publications (primary) — These are the state's own hostile files, alongside the church's records — each clearly a different kind of source, from opposite sides of the conflict.
- Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People (OUP, 1992); Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich (ET 2 vols, 1987-88); Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ET rev. 2000); CHC vol. 9 (secondary) — Standard secondary histories of the Confessing Church and Bonhoeffer's life.