What did the Barmen Declaration have to say to the churches of the German Democratic Republic?

Abstract

A detailed presentation of the full extent of the influence of the Barmen Declaration in the churches in the German Democratic Republic would take us far beyond the scope of this essay. That is a task for the historians. I would like instead to try to show how this confession dating from the church struggle of the Nazi era became relevant for our churches as they found their way through the GDR period – whether its relevance was understood and put into practice, or disregarded or repressed. I write this short “history” tracing the relevance of the Barmen Declaration, drawing on my own experience of involvement in the process from 1952 onwards, and on my own theological judgment. I will take the six theses in order. In retrospect, it seems clear that the first Barmen thesis was central and basically set the direction for the path taken by the churches in the GDR, following a line of clear differentiation. In 1934 the Confessing Church declared in this thesis that the church lives by Jesus Christ alone, the one Word of God. This was its way of countering the misleading false doctrine proposed at the time by the “German Christians”, which said that the church should recognize the national renewal effected by Hitler as being also an act of divine revelation, by which they too were bound. By contrast, the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the assumption of power by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) never did become a tempting false doctrine for Christians and the churches. It was strongly atheistic in its understanding and was rejected by the majority of people, not only Christians. The predominant attitude was anti-communist, although – especially after the Berlin Wall was built – this was confined to the inner, private sphere and masked by an outward show of conformity. The world view which lay behind the state ideology, however, did indeed take on the character of an institutional power that controlled all thought and also tried to co-opt Christianity. This was, of course, the confrontation between the opposing world systems: communism – capitalism, totalitarianism – freedom, atheist East and Christian West. The biggest temptation and danger for the churches was to allow themselves be drawn into this dualism and then be written off. Karl Barth, who had been one of the main authors of the Barmen theses in 1934, warned against this in his lecture in Bern in 1949, entitled “The Church between East and West”: “Do not go along with this division! With the gospel in our hearts and on our lips we can only follow a middle course between these two quarrelling giants, praying to God, ‘Deliver us from evil’! The community of Jesus Christ will have to find a third way, a way of its own.”1 1Barth, K. (1949) Die Kirche zwischen Ost und West. Evangelischer Verlag, Zurich, p 9. A year earlier, the third section of the World Council of Churches' assembly in Amsterdam had already stated: “The Christian churches should reject the ideologies of both communism and laissez-faire capitalism and should draw men from the false assumption that these extremes are the only alternatives.”2 2Visser 't Hooft, W. A. (ed.) (1949) The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, vol. 5. SCM Press London, p.80. Caught up in confrontation caused by this dualism, the church in the GDR could only have acted from a negative, opposing position, yet the church of the first Barmen thesis, which takes its direction from Jesus Christ alone, lives by his positive, affirmative action, God's love for humankind revealed in him. This openness and love for the world was already present in the christological focus of the Barmen Declaration itself. For the churches of the GDR, this was further reinforced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christology, which was very influential following the publication of the Letters from Prison at the beginning of the fifties: God in Jesus Christ is the “wholly other” in that he is “there only for others”.3 3Bonhoeffer, D. (1967) Letters and Papers from Prison, 3rd ed. SCM Press, London, p.209. That is why the church can only be the Church of Jesus Christ by being there for others. I think we can say without exaggerating that the first Barmen thesis was received and interpreted in the churches of the GDR in the light of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christology. This made it clear that the church should neither fall into the trap of ideological opposition, nor that of anxiety for itself, but that it had to be there for people, even under Marxist rule. Johannes Hamel, the student chaplain in Halle, urged the churches then to “let the Marxist world be given to them by the gospel”, in other words not to let themselves succumb to the fascination of power and the fixation on “totalitarian rule”, but to “watch out day by day for opportunities where we can cooperate responsibly and with inner conviction under the dictatorship”.4 4Hamel, J. (1959) Christenheit unter marxistischer Herrschaft. Evangelischer Verlag, Zurich, pp.7,79. The Barmen Declaration's focus on Christ specifically does not signify withdrawal from the world, society and culture. On the contrary, it opens up the whole of reality and all its areas in the light of Christ in order to set people free and strengthen them for the Christian life within that reality. The second thesis makes this clear: Jesus Christ … God's vigorous announcement of his claim on our whole life; we belong to Jesus and need justification and sanctification by him in all areas of our lives. “Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.”5 5The Declaration, Resolutions, and Motions adopted by the synod of Barmen, May 29–31, 1934. In: A. C. Cochrane (1957) The church's confession under Hitler, p.240, Appendix VII. The Westminster Press, Philadelphia. The rhythm of the language makes this the most beautiful sentence in the Declaration and at the same time its clear starting point for a theology of liberation! This second thesis was also a central and necessary guideline for the churches in the GDR. The SED wanted to push the church into the private sphere of inner religious feeling and practice divorced from politics. This corresponded to the liberal understanding of religion as a “private matter”, and to the Russian Orthodox tradition. In the Protestant churches of the GDR, East European state socialism encountered for the first time a church which considered itself bound to fulfil its responsibility for the whole of society on the basis of its faith. A church which spoke up critically in matters such as land reform, tolerance in the education system, peace policy and conscientious objection to military service, the Wall, environmental responsibility, and so on. There was considerable controversy within the church about how far the church should go and how clearly it should speak in public. Above all, this was a constant source of conflict with the state, which accused the churches of illegitimately over-stepping the boundaries and trespassing in political life. The last but one State Secretary for Church Affairs, Klaus Gysi, once described dealing with this church as a first and unique “historical experiment” for socialism.6 6Klaus Gysi. GDR State Secretary for Church Affairs: Church and State in the GDR. Lecture given on 13 May 1981 to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London (Chatham House). In epd-Dokumentation, 28/81, pp.4 -10, here p.8. After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Conference of the Evangelical Church Governing Bodies in the GDR formulated ten theses for the church's way ahead. Under the heading, “There is only one Lord, Jesus Christ”, the text linked up with the first Barmen thesis and in the first of its ten statements, the second Barmen thesis can again be found: “Jesus Christ sent his Church into the world to proclaim God's reconciliation and to attest God's will to all men in all spheres of life.”7 7Zehn Artikel über Freiheit und Dienst der Kirche (8 March 1963). Kirchliches Jahrbuch 1963, Gütersloh, Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. English translation: Ten Articles on the Freedom and Service of the Church. In: K. Barth (1971) Fragments Grave and Gay, p.54. Collins: The Fontana Library, London and Glasgow. However, the second Barmen thesis was contested on the basis of a neo-Lutheran “Two-Kingdoms Doctrine”. The political sphere was not set under the “rule of Christ” but was part of the order of creation and subject to political reason. In some churches, and in the use made of it in some church policies, this position amounted to an ideology of conformity. In response the United and Lutheran churches set up a doctrinal commission on “The relation between the Two-Kingdom Doctrine and the Doctrine of the Kingship of Christ”. In its findings the two doctrines are described as “mutually complementary and corrective models of interpretation” for the church's action in the world, and in this framework the position of Barmen II is explicitly affirmed.8 8Rogge, J. & Zeddies, H. (eds) (1980) Kirchengemeinschaft und politische Ethik. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin (East), p.40. The Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR took a significant step beyond this theological consensus document in the 1980s. At that time, the build-up of weapons under the system of mutual deterrence between the two superpowers was causing anxiety among the general public and brought the peace movement onto the streets in the West and into the churches in the GDR. In 1987, after a consultation process lasting several years the Federation resolved to express its “Rejection of the spirit, logic and practice of deterrence”.9 9Synod of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR: Resolution concerning: “Bekennen in der Friedensfrage” (Confessing the faith in relation to peace), Görlitz, 18–22 September 1987. In: epd-Dokumentation, 44/87, pp.33–35. On the meeting of this synod, see also: Silomon, A. (1997) Synode und SED-Staat: Die Synode des Bundes der evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR in Görlitz vom 18. bis 22. September 1987. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen. In doing so, for the first time, it made a committed statement of faith in the field of political ethics rather than the field of doctrine. This built on the theological decision of the second Barmen thesis to confess Jesus Christ as Lord even over the secular and creaturely areas of our life. The churches identified the system of deterrence, with its inbuilt mechanisms for escalation and rigid thinking, as one of the “godless ties of this world” to which the second Barmen thesis refers. If, through Christ, we receive “joyful liberation” from these ties, then we have to reject them in order to be free for “free, grateful service to God's creatures”. The Church Federation did not explicitly base its 1987 “Rejection” of deterrence on Barmen II, but it is abundantly clear that this is in fact a practical implementation of the thesis. I take these two theses together because they both speak about the church and both reject state intervention in the church's life and forms of order. Nazi ideology wanted to establish control over the church, amongst other things by the appointment of a “national bishop” (Reichsbischof) and rigged church elections, and to replace its synodal structures by the principle of one leader (Führerprinzip) corresponding to Nazi structures of domination. There were theological conceptions circulating in the church at that time which opened the door to such interventions. These distinguished the church as a spiritual reality from the church as a legal entity, which was always determined by and adapted to the social and political context and was consequently not theologically founded. In answer to this, the third thesis states that the church “with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order” has to testify that it belongs to Jesus Christ alone “and lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction”.10 10Cochrane (1957) p.240. Only if the link binding it to Christ, and the freedom he brings, take real form in the life of the church will the church also be able to face the world in freedom and with authority. For the churches in the GDR there seemed to be no problem here. The constitution enshrined the separation of church and state and explicitly gave the church the right to manage its own internal affairs within the framework of existing laws. Nonetheless, at the end of the fifties, there was an attempt by the SED to make the churches compliant and dependent, using the financial lever. In 1957, the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony found itself in financial crisis, to the extent that pastors' stipends could only be paid in instalments. In a covert operation, the state arranged for clergy households to be asked what they thought about the state taking over responsibility for payment of their salaries. In doing this it would have introduced the system already in place in the People's Republics of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. A group of young pastors, to which I belonged, saw this as a violation of Barmen II and declared themselves ready if need be to earn their living through outside employment. This strengthened the leaders of the church in their decision to reject this arrangement and the state took back the kite it had floated. There was a constant struggle over the church's independence whenever a church gathering of any kind touched on a political theme, whether worship, youth events or church congresses. Then we had to insist, often in heated discussions, that the church alone was responsible for defining what was worship, and that political themes are part of the church's identity and witness to the gospel. The church had to assert itself as a state-free space, and it became increasingly apparent what political and social importance this had in the SED-ruled state. The latter asserted its control over the economic, social and political life of the society and allowed no independent forces of civil society to develop. In this context, the meetings of the synods of the Protestant church, which were public, were the only democratic forum in which public affairs could be critically discussed. In the eighties, groups critical of society were able to meet in the state-free space offered by the church, and this was to become the marshalling ground from which the revolutionary movement moved out in the autumn of 1989. So, in the situation in the GDR, these two theses of the Barmen Declaration acquired a political relevance which was no doubt far from the minds of those present in Barmen in 1934. This thesis deals with church-state relations and was the subject of heated controversy, especially in the fifties. It does not set out any theory of the state, and it certainly does not theologically legitimize any particular state system – not even democracy, although the author was a convinced Swiss democrat. Even democracy is not held up as a confession of faith or – as sometimes happens today – a doctrine of salvation. Instead, what emerges clearly here is the tendency to demythologize the state, notably in contrast to the tradition of German state metaphysics and the mystique of the state cultivated by the “German Christians”. The state is described not as God's order, but as God's “appointment”. The word suggests an “appointed” order, a particular way of acting, a measure to be applied; in other words, it has a limited, focussed and purely functional meaning. The function of the state is to provide for “justice and peace”. Therefore – even before the politological concept of “totalitarianism” was born – this thesis resisted the idea that the state could become the “single and totalitarian order of human life”.11 11Cochrane (1957) p.241. After the Second World War this also had to be affirmed in opposition to an ideologically-based socialist state. Together with the monopoly of power, this claimed to hold the ideological monopoly of truth, thus laying claim to the whole person. The church consistently resisted this claim. In education and in other areas of life it fought for tolerance, freedom of conscience and opinion, admittedly with only limited success. This was an ongoing, structural conflict. Did the church not therefore also have to challenge the SED-governed state about the state's duty to maintain justice? Heated controversy was sparked off towards the end of the fifties by a paper written by the Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, Otto Dibelius, denying not only the constitutional legitimacy of the GDR state but also its nature as a state governed by the rule of law, and questioning the citizens' duty of loyalty towards it. Here the concept of “appointment” in the Barmen Declaration was helpful in drawing distinctions: God can use even a state that is illegitimate in terms of modern constitutional notions in order to establish a limited measure of justice and peace in a “yet unredeemed world” and so preserve human life in community from descending into chaos. In 1956, clearly picking up the fifth Barmen thesis, the synod of the then still united Evangelical Church in Germany had stated: The gospel places the state under God's gracious appointment which, as we know, stands regardless of how state power and its political form came about. The gospel sets us free in faith to say no to any claim to totality by a human power, to defend those who are disempowered or tempted by it and to choose to suffer rather than to obey laws and ordinances that are contrary to the will of God.12 12Theologische Erklärung der Synode der EKD in Berlin, 27–29 June 1956. In: Kirchliches Jahrbuch 1956, Gütersloh, Carl Bertelsmann Verlag, pp.17–18. Furthermore, in the proclamation and pastoral work of the churches in the GDR, the concept of appointment underwent a shift of meaning which moved into the sphere of history. It also meant God's action in history which appointed this state as the place where we Christians in Germany were to live our lives, after the war brought about by our fault. Trusting in God's forgiveness and guidance we had to accept this state as the place where we were called to serve in the world and so to be “the church for others”. This understanding of faith became all the more important when, after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, it became apparent that the GDR state would continue to exist for the foreseeable future, with a divided Germany and the world political scenario of the East-West conflict. The church's existence was now often described as “the church within socialism”.13 13See the reports of the Conference of the Evangelical Church Governing Bodies to the Synods of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR in Schwerin in May 1973 and Görlitz in May 1977. In: Sekretariat des Bundes der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR (ed.) (1981) Kirche als Lerngemeinschaft, pp.184–186; 205–211. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin (East). The “within” was usually explained as placing it “between conformity and refusal”, but the danger of conformity through habit was actually very great. The state used the phrase “church within socialism” as though it meant the sanctioning of the status quo under “actually existing socialism”. In the widespread mood of depression following the crushing of the Prague spring and its “socialism with a human face”, the danger of resigned conformity was even greater. At the synod of the Federation in Dresden in 1972, I on the other hand defended the idea that we could only be the church within socialism if we worked to humanize and liberalize, in other words to change, actually existing socialism. I urged Christians to “remind our society of our committed hope for a socialism that can be changed for the better”.14 14Falcke, H. (2004) Christ Liberates – Therefore, the Church for Others. The Ecumenical Review, vol. 56, no. 2, p.178. This hope was grounded in the resurrection of the crucified Christ, not in an optimistic misconception of socialism, and it was a hope that led to action for change, not an attitude of wait and see. Given the situation I think this was an appropriate interpretation of Barmen V in the light of Barmen II and on the basis of the sentence in the fifth Barmen thesis: “The Church … trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.”15 15Cochrane (1957) p.241. We could also show how this critical action for change based on hope took shape in practice in local congregations, in peace groups, environmental groups and one-world groups. The work to change socialism, however, came to nothing in the mid-1980s, when a GDR regime incapable of changing refused the fresh political start offered by Michael Gorbachev. To show how the Protestant church's strong involvement in the political events of the revolution and transformation that took place in 1989/90 can be traced back to the Barmen Declaration must be the subject of a separate paper. One thing is abundantly clear, however: through its intensive work for peace over many decades the church helped in the revolutionary process to maintain “justice and peace”, so that the outcome was a non-violent revolution with candles and prayers. What this last thesis had to say to the churches in the GDR can be quickly stated. It speaks of the commission and freedom of the church to deliver “the message of the free grace of God to all people”. The core of the church's freedom is stated here with admirable brevity: “The Church's commission, upon which its freedom is founded …” The theological truth of this statement can be verified by the experience of forty years of history in the GDR. The church was free at any given time to the extent that it let itself be guided only by this commission. Whenever it tried to purchase space for its existence by cutting back this commission, it became less free. The freedom of the church in the GDR was precarious, not least because the legal place of the church was not set out in a codified law. When the church acted in public it often had to fight for its freedom of action, or take the risk of simply arrogating that freedom for itself. So it had more or less constantly to protect its freedom to be faithful to its commission. But even a church that is given freedom of action by state conventions and civil rights and liberties can lose its freedom. The church's freedom is not granted by the state and it is not taken away from it by the state. The church's freedom is determined by its faithfulness to its commission. The church's commission is to deliver the message of the free grace of God to all people. The churches in the GDR had to keep this commission constantly in mind, even as they became a minority church. They were not expanding independent churches, but dwindling national churches! For them the missionary outreach “to all people” meant constant, self-critical questioning and challenge which they could not escape by shrinking into their shell as a complacent, self-righteous conventicle church. In the sixties, the WCC assembly in New Delhi told us that Christ's church does not engage in mission, it is mission, the form of God's missionary movement in the world. This approach unsettled us by asking about the “heretical structures” of churches and local congregations that are an obstacle to this commission.16 16WCC (1967) The Church for Others and The Church for the World: A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations. World Council of Churches, Geneva, p.19. There were many experiments and models that tried to translate this in the context of the GDR, and even a congress on “Mission Today”. In the light of the sixth thesis of the Barmen Declaration, care certainly had to be taken to make sure that, as the church addressed the outside world, its “message of the free grace of God” did not turn into a programme for the reform of society or a social programme. But no more should the kind of “Barmen orthodoxy”, which certainly did exist, be allowed to block the new ideas that came to us in the sixties from the theologies of liberation. At any rate, with the commission to proclaim the gospel to “all people” the sixth Barmen thesis sets the church in the universal context of the Risen Christ's sending of his disciples “to all nations” (Matt. 28:19). So the Barmen Declaration ultimately points beyond itself and its own particular historical context and challenges us in a changing world to keep asking ourselves afresh about the likewise changing relevance of its confession of faith. Translated from the German by the Language Service of the World Council of Churches and edited for this issue of The Ecumenical Review. The Revd Heino Falcke, formerly dean of Erfurt, was moderator of the Committee on Church and Society of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR, and a member of the Working Group on Church and Society of the World Council of Churches.