The Barmen Declaration: Confessing Christ Against the Nazi State
Ordained Minister, M.Div.
May 16, 2026
2 min read
In May 1934, a small group of German pastors and theologians gathered in Barmen-Wuppertal under enormous pressure. Adolf Hitler had come to power the previous year, and the Nazi regime was working to bring the German Protestant churches under state control. A group called the "German Christians" was promoting a version of Christianity aligned with National Socialism, complete with the "Aryan paragraph" excluding Jewish Christians from church ministry. The Confessing Church responded with the Barmen Declaration.
The Document and Its Author
The Barmen Declaration was drafted primarily by Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian who had fled Germany and whose theology of the Word of God provided the intellectual backbone of the Confessing Church's resistance. The declaration has six theses, each stating a positive Christian affirmation and then rejecting a corresponding false doctrine. The most famous is the first: "Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death." Against this, it rejects "the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation."
Why It Still Matters
The Barmen Declaration matters because it shows what a confession of faith is for — not merely to state doctrines in peacetime, but to draw a line in the sand when the gospel itself is threatened. The Confessing Church pastors who signed Barmen faced real risk: many were arrested, many lost their positions, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most visible figures of the movement, was eventually executed. They confessed Christ at cost to themselves.
The document is also a warning about the temptation to allow political ideologies — of any stripe — to shape the church's message. Every generation faces its own version of the German Christian temptation: the pressure to align the gospel with the spirit of the age, to let cultural or political loyalties become sources of theological authority alongside Scripture. Barmen says no. Christ alone is Lord, and the church's obedience belongs to him.
