World Wars and the Confessing Church

God on both sides

When war broke out in August 1914, the churches of Europe almost all blessed their nations' armies. British bishops preached a holy war against German barbarism. German soldiers wore belt buckles stamped Gott mit uns, "God with us." In October 1914, ninety-three leading German intellectuals, including the great liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack, signed a manifesto supporting the Kaiser's war policy.

The war lasted four years and killed about ten million soldiers, mostly young Christian men killed by other Christians. The horror of the trenches shattered the 19th century's faith in "progress" and in a Christianity that seemed to have blended seamlessly with European civilization (see Faith, Science and Liberal Theology). Many soldiers came home unable to believe in the God of their childhood. Others found new depth of faith in suffering.

The Armenian genocide

During the war, the Ottoman government carried out the systematic destruction of its Armenian Christian population (1915–1923). Up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed through massacres and death marches into the Syrian desert. Assyrian and Greek Christians also suffered mass killings. The ancient Christian presence in Anatolia, dating back to the apostle Paul, was almost entirely destroyed (see Countries of the Sunrise). The genocide remains a defining wound for the Armenian church.

Karl Barth's "No"

A young Swiss Reformed pastor, Karl Barth (1886–1968), was horrified to see his liberal theology teachers sign the war manifesto. If their theology could lead there, he decided, it must be wrong. Struggling to preach to his village parish in Safenwil, he turned back to the Bible, especially Paul's letter to the Romans. His commentary on Romans (1919, revised 1922) fell, as one Catholic theologian put it, "like a bomb on the playground of the theologians."

Barth insisted that God is "wholly other." We cannot reach God through human religion, feeling, culture or reason, as Schleiermacher and the liberals had tried to do. God can be known only because God speaks his own Word, revealed in Jesus Christ and witnessed in Scripture. Human religion, including Christian religion, stands under God's judgment. His theology was called "dialectical theology" or Neo-orthodoxy, because it reclaimed Reformation themes in modern form. His massive Church Dogmatics (over 9,000 pages, unfinished) made him the most important Protestant theologian of the 20th century. Asked to sum it up, he reportedly quoted a children's song: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

In America, Reinhold Niebuhr developed "Christian realism." Human sin, especially collective sin by nations and classes, means that justice must often be pursued through power and compromise, not idealism. His "Serenity Prayer" became world-famous.

Nazism and the German churches

When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, many German Protestants welcomed him. He promised national renewal after the humiliation of 1918 and the chaos of the Weimar Republic, and he spoke of "positive Christianity." A movement called the "German Christians" sought to merge Christianity with Nazi ideology. They wanted to remove the "Jewish" Old Testament, present Jesus as an Aryan hero, exclude Christians of Jewish descent from the ministry (the "Aryan paragraph"), and unite all Protestants in a single Reich Church under a "Reich Bishop," the Nazi sympathizer Ludwig Müller. In church elections in July 1933, with Nazi backing, they won about two-thirds of the vote.

The Catholic Church, through its Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (later Pius XII), signed a Concordat with the Nazi government in July 1933 to protect Catholic schools and organizations, in exchange for clergy staying out of politics. The Nazis repeatedly violated it. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning concern"), smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits, condemning Nazi racial ideology and the "idolatry" of race and state.

Barmen and the Confessing Church

A minority of Protestants resisted the German Christians. Pastor Martin Niemöller, a former U-boat commander, organized the Pastors' Emergency League to support ministers of Jewish descent. In May 1934, representatives met at Barmen and adopted the Barmen Declaration, largely written by Karl Barth. Its first article declared:

"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."

It rejected the idea that the church could recognize any other source of revelation, such as "other events and powers, figures and truths," meaning the Nazi state, race or Führer. Those who accepted Barmen became the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche). Barth, refusing to swear unconditional loyalty to Hitler, lost his professorship in Bonn and returned to Switzerland. Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and spent eight years in concentration camps. His later confession has become famous: "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist..."

Barmen had a major limitation. It defended the church's freedom but said nothing explicit about the persecution of Jews.

Christianity in the age of world wars

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The most famous Christian resister was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), a brilliant young Lutheran theologian from a distinguished Berlin family. Already in April 1933 he wrote that the church must not only "bandage the victims under the wheel, but put a spoke in the wheel itself." He ran an underground seminary for the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde until the Gestapo closed it. His book The Cost of Discipleship (1937) attacked "cheap grace," meaning grace without discipleship, forgiveness without repentance, "grace without the cross." He wrote that when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. In Life Together he described Christian community.

In 1939 Bonhoeffer was in New York, safe, at the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr. He decided he had to return. He would have no right to help rebuild Germany after the war, he wrote, if he did not share its trials. Back home, he joined the resistance through his brother-in-law in military intelligence, and he was involved at the edges of plots to assassinate Hitler, a painful decision for a man who had been drawn to pacifism. Arrested in April 1943, he wrote letters from prison, later published as Letters and Papers from Prison, exploring "religionless Christianity" in a "world come of age." On 9 April 1945, weeks before the war ended, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. The camp doctor later recalled him kneeling in prayer before his death. His last recorded words: "This is the end, for me the beginning of life."

The Holocaust

About six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, as well as Roma, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners and others. The Holocaust happened in the heart of Christian Europe, carried out largely by baptized Christians. It forced a reckoning with centuries of Christian anti-Judaism (see The Fall of Jerusalem).

The record of the churches is mixed and painful:

• Silence and complicity: Most church leaders, Protestant and Catholic, did not publicly protest the persecution of Jews. Some actively supported it. The wartime silence of Pius XII, who never explicitly condemned the Holocaust by name, remains intensely debated. Defenders point to his fear of making things worse and to the Vatican's quiet efforts that saved many Jews. Critics see a failure of moral leadership. Vatican archives for his pontificate opened in 2020, and historians are still studying them.
• Courage: Many individual Christians risked their lives. In the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Protestant pastor André Trocmé and his congregation hid around 3,000–5,000 Jews. The Dutch watchmaker Corrie ten Boom and her family hid Jews in their home. Her father and sister died in prison. Catholic convents and monasteries in Italy, Poland and elsewhere sheltered Jewish children. Bishop Clemens von Clemens August von Galen of Münster publicly denounced the Nazi murder of disabled people (1941), helping to halt the official program.
• Martyrs: Edith Stein, a Jewish-born philosopher who became a Carmelite nun, was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. The Polish Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of a condemned prisoner, a father of a family, in the Auschwitz starvation bunker (1941).

After the war, in the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (October 1945), Protestant leaders including Niemöller confessed that they had not witnessed more courageously, prayed more faithfully, believed more joyfully, or loved more ardently. It said nothing specifically about the Jews. Deeper reckoning came later, especially through the Catholic Church's Nostra Aetate (1965) and many Protestant statements (see The Second Vatican Council).

Faith in wartime Britain

In Britain, the Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis gave wartime radio talks on the BBC explaining Christian belief in plain language. Published as Mere Christianity (1952), they made him perhaps the most influential Christian writer of the century in the English-speaking world. His Chronicles of Narnia brought Christian themes to millions of children.