Karl Barth

History has shown that church-run states don’t work. Neither do state-run churches. Nazi leadership took control of the German Evangelical Church in 1933. Clergy were pressured to preach the superiority of the Aryan race and espouse Nazi ideology. A group of pastors came together in 1934 to oppose the Nazi church takeover, adopted the name Confessing Church and formulated a written rebuttal. The primary architect of the resolution was Karl Barth (1886-1968), a theology professor at the University of Bonn. He composed the draft on a Sunday evening, fortified by strong coffee and Brazilian cigars. While there is much to commend in this statement, I’ll limit myself to a single sentence, “We reject the false doctrine, as though there are areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords.” Translated, it means Jesus is Lord and Hitler is not. Barth (pronounced Bart) sent a personal copy of the finished product, the Barmen Declaration, to Hitler himself. Barth was forced to resign his professorship for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Hitler. He returned to his native Switzerland to teach theology at the University of Basel and continued his support of the Confessing Church. Barth was trained under liberal theology but was dismayed at its moral weakness and became decidedly more orthodox in his later years. Barth came to America on a lecture tour in 1962. He spoke at the University of Chicago and was asked in a Q&A session if he could summarize his theological work in a sentence. “Yes, I can,” he said, “In the words of the song I learned at my mother’s knee, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'” Barth composed prayers as well as major theological works. This prayer from his book, Fifty Prayers: