1934

The Barmen Declaration and the Confessing Church

The "German Christians" sought to combine Nazism with Christianity and wanted the church to give Nazism a religious justification; in 1933 they won the church elections and introduced the "Aryan paragraph." Against them Pastor Niemöller founded the "Pastors' Emergency League," which became the Confessing Church. Karl Barth was one of the authors of the Barmen Declaration (1934), which proclaimed Jesus Christ the only Lord for all Christians and thereby condemned the elevation of Hitler to the status of a messiah. Barth regarded the German Christians' approval of Nazism as cultural Christianity, a logical consequence of natural theology built not on the Word of God but on another foundation.