The Confession of the Church 8

The Confession of the Church must speak to the political and social issues of its historical time. Arthur Cochrane, in his book The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, writes about the moral focus of the Church’s Confession. His eighth character of a Confession of Faith:

“A Confession of faith not only is relevant for the Church’s own doctrine and life but bears definite implications for concrete social and political issues. This is the ethical character of a Confession. It possesses both ecclesiastical and secular significance. It is a witness to Christ before the Church and the World. It does not shrink from dealing with concrete issues such as racialism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, Fascism and Communism, militarism and economic exploitation. In short, it is relevant for social and political justice, freedom, and peace. A confession which lacked this dimension would not be a true Confession; a Church that neglected to draw the implications of its Confession for the social and political order and that was concerned only about the purity of its own teaching and piety would certainly not be a Confessing Church—not the one, holy, catholic Church of Christ. For then it would have denied that Christ died for the world, and that it has been elected and called to serve the world with its message of God’s grace for all people.”

This is a long statement, but I felt it was very important to draw Cochrane’s whole conclusions out.

The Church does not simply live within its own walls holding onto its tenets as a kind of quietist monastic community, but instead it brings to the world a message of good news. That good news of God’s grace is without question contained in the life, the redeeming death and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That is in fact Cochrane’s first characteristic of a Confession of Faith. “It confesses a Living Person who is the Lord and thus calls for a personal relationship of trust and obedience to him …” Such trust and obedience will shape the Church’s view of the world. And the Church’s view of the world will shape how she serves those in both the Church and the world. And that is both political and social.

Cochrane adds some historical information to show how this was worked out in the Confessing Church. Ten men drew up a memorandum which was sent to the Confessing Synods, to Hitler and to a person who leaked it to the foreign press before it was seen by Nazi government officials. Of the three men who made sure it was read outside of Germany, Dr. Friedrich Weissler was “the first martyr of the Confessing Church”

The Memorandum is an appendix in Cochrane’s book. The authors, among many other complaints, protest young people being sent to work camps where they are not allowed Christian literature. They protest the concentration camps in Germany. They protest the arbitrariness of the law courts and unchristian oaths of allegiance. They protest the attempt to dechristianize the German people.

They write, “When even high authorities in the State and in the Party publicly assail the Christian faith … Church members are more and more enmeshed in their unbelief, the waverers and the doubters are made completely uncertain and are driven to defection. Grave danger, as a matter of fact, exists that the Evangelical youth will be prevented from coming to Him who is the only Savior of German as will as other boys and girls.”