Word: barmene
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...just such an idolatry that Barth saw in Nazism, which sought to impose Hitler's ideology on the Protestant churches of Germany. As a leader of the so-called "Confessing Church," Barth, then a professor at the University of Bonn, was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, which opposed the Nazi infiltration of Christianity as a heathen profanation of God's message. Expelled from Germany in 1935, Barth continued his war of words against Hitlerism from the University of Basel. Later he volunteered for the Swiss home defense force and served as a border guard during World...
...Barmen, however, confronted the National Socialist Party, the Hitler Youth, and a group called "German Christians." The German Christians were extremists who combined theological liberalism with anti-semitism and nationalism. Resistance was organized under the leadership of Pastor Martin Niemoeller in the Pastor's Emergency Federation, and at the Barmen Synod the declaration was adopted according to which Jesus Christ is the only Word of God that men are to hear, trust, and obey. The pastors were harrassed, arrested, deported, called into military service, prevented from conducting services, not allowed to train theological students, and their churches were pacified...
Standing alone, and not in the context of those gathered at Barmen, these statements sound like typical, orthodox, Protestant argumentation. It would be easy to offend a Catholic with such a statement; he might feel that it denied the validity of tradition in the Church. Such statements would be offensive to a Rabbi, or to a Muslim, a Buddhist, or a secularist. Unitarians and Friends could be upset by such a strong declaration...
...United States of 1967 is not the Germany of 1933; nevertheless, one may worry about the U.S. because of the direction in which it is moving. The Confession of 1967 is not the Barmen Declaration; but the similarities between the two are encouraging...
...spite of some of these characteristics of laymen and clergy--because of others--the church came closer to Barmen than Westminster when it overwhelmingly approved the Confession...