The Confessing Church Adopts the Barmen Declaration

Fifty nine years after the Alliance of Reformed Churches formed in London in 1875, already recorded here, and thirty six years before the World Alliance of Reformed Churches formed in Nairobi in 1970, also recorded here, one hundred thirty nine delegates of the German Evangelical Church's first Confessing Synod met at the Gemarke Church in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, and on 31 May 1934 adopted the Theological Declaration of Barmen without amendment. The Reformed theologian Karl Barth wrote the six part text over a single night in a Frankfurt hotel room together with the Lutheran pastors Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit, and it rejected the claim of the pro Nazi German Christian movement that any authority beside Jesus Christ, the German Volk included, could be a source of the church's proclamation. Barmen bound Reformed and Lutheran churches into a single Confessing Church for the length of the struggle against National Socialist control of German Protestantism, and although the alliance did not hold past the Second World War, the declaration itself became the twentieth century's most cited confession of Reformed and Lutheran theology together, studied and adopted as a subordinate standard by Reformed churches worldwide in the decades since. It is remembered as a Reformed document as much as a Lutheran one because its principal author, Barth, wrote it from inside the Reformed tradition even as he shaped a confession meant to speak for both.