Karl Barth: the Church's Struggle in 1933, Theology for Today's Struggle 3.

Political manipulation, in the Church, is sadly one of the facts of Church history. And it happens in politically free countries as well as totalitarian ones. The surprising fact is that those in a free country would allow themselves to be manipulated. However, Karl Barth took on those Church members who allowed themselves to be manipulated in an increasingly totalitarian country.

His aim was pointed directly at his Christian brothers and sisters in the Evangelical Church in Germany rather than those who were called “German Christians.” Barth would have nothing to do or say to those who pushed a “positive Christianity,” that is, the German Christians. Rather he scolded those Evangelicals who alongside the German Christians espoused natural theology. But he also scolded them for their many compromises with the German Christians.

One of the compromises was to allow the German Christians the right to help form a new Church constitution. Another compromise, especially on the part of those who were reformed, was to call for a Reich Bishop over the united Churches. It was the 'Young Reformation Movement' that Barth chided the most for aligning with the German Christians in a call for a Bishop.

And this is where very serious manipulation happened in the German Church of Hitler’s time. Dr. Hermann Hesse and two other churchmen allowed Ludwig Muller, an advocate for the German Christians and Hitler, to participate in their deliberations on the Church constitution.

The committee for the constitution wanted to meet with Hitler to give him their results and to tell him their choice of a Bishop, which in the end was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. However, Muller announced to the committee that Hitler needed to put off the meeting. Soon afterwards it was announced by the German Christians that Ludwig Muller was their candidate for Bishop.

When von Bodelschwingh was elected, the German Christians started a publicity campaign suggesting that von Bodelschwingh was not the people’s choice. And Muller stated that the election was illegal because “the constitution had not been drawn up.” (Because they had not yet met with Hitler.) At that time the Evangelical Church leaders lost their offices and with the backing of the state the German Christians literally took over the Church.1

In Theological Existence Today, after castigating all parties for their compromises, Barth encouraged the Evangelical Church to carry on their work as the Church ignoring the German Christians and their positive Christianity. Barth’s words on the act of placing a bishop over the Church are illuminating. He spends several pages writing about the church’s failure to ask theologically what they mean by a bishop, and then he writes about the great blunder they have made.

From Theological Existence Today:

“But so long as no one will openly give a statement in one sense or the other of what ‘bishop’ means, can this whole business of creating and electing a Reichs-Bishop be described otherwise than as a colossal blunder? A blunder in which the Church (and the likelihood of it has never been contradicted) has acted in a way that is worldly in principle, because of her quite uncalled-for enthusiasm or fearfulness to ‘assimilate’ herself to the Government of the day.

And can anything else be said but this, that it is high time for the Church to become self-controlled again, sober to the recognition that the German Evangelical Church, so far as she is in the One, Holy, Universal Church, has the ‘Leader’ in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, Who can provide her with human ‘leaders’? So that precisely for this reason—and, to-day, just as thoroughly as Israel of yore had to on mount—Carmel—the German Evangelical Church has to make up her mind whether she is content with His leading, and with His ability to supply us with leaders. …

The German Evangelical Church, through her responsible representatives, has not comported herself as the Church which possesses her leader, during these recent months. And yet He possesses her: as surely as we have to hear His law and His Gospel ever again from Him. When it is recognized that He, and He alone, is the Leader, there is the possibility of theological existence.

And then, in all deference, even if one be but an ever-so-insignificant theologian, or the obscure village pastor, or even not a pastor or theologian at all, but ‘merely’ somebody like a lay-elder, then one is himself the genuine Bishop, if he only knows his Bible and his Catechism: a ‘bishop’ as foreseen in Holy Writ. Where there is no theological life about; where men call out for the Church Leader instead of themselves being leaders in their appointed ministries; then all this crying out for a leader is as vain as the howling of the priests of Baal on Carmel, ‘Baal, hear us!’”

1 For complete details of these actions see, “The Formation of the German Evangelical Church and Its Constitution,” in Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press 1961).