by | Oct 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
International Christian engineering nonprofit Water Mission usually responds to clean water crises overseas, like flooding in East Africa this year or the earthquake in Turkey last year.
But when the South Carolina–based organization saw the extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s water infrastructure after the historic storm Helene, it decided to activate a rare disaster response in the US.
“We’re able to take our systems and plug them in here,” said Brock Kreitzburg, the director of disaster response at Water Mission, speaking from Boone, North Carolina. “North Carolina is in our backyard, so let’s use our expertise in providing safe water.”
With permission from the state government, the organization drove up to Western North Carolina and put into operation four of its proprietary mobile water treatment systems that can produce 15,000 liters of clean water a day, or enough for several thousand people. Water Mission has also now distributed and gassed up 400 generators for people who need power to pump their wells, assembling a team of electricians to install the generators as needed.
Swaths of Western North Carolina are without running water for an indeterminant amount of time. Helene’s historic floodwaters took out the pipelines to the main water treatment plant serving the city of Asheville, as well as hit hard Swannanoa and Black Mountain, two smaller communities near Asheville. City officials do not have a timeline for when water will be restored but expect it to take weeks more.
Areas in rural Appalachia are struggling with water supply, too, because they are dependent on wells, which need power to pump. Electricity remains out in many parts of the region nearly two weeks after the storm.
First Baptist Swannanoa, a church that has been a key relief resource and distribution point in the hard-hit community of Swannanoa, set up a health clinic on its property early last week. There were no preexisting clinics in the area. Pastor Jeff Dowdy said the volunteer doctors and nurses have been seeing people with health issues related to lack of clean water. Dehydration has hit people of all ages, he said.
“Once you don’t have access to clean water, all sorts of things can happen healthwise,” Dowdy said. The timeframes he has heard for water to come back are four to eight weeks. “This is a long-term crisis that we’re in.”
Spotty cell service, power outages, and destroyed roads and bridges have compounded the difficulty of restoring infrastructure. One of Water Mission’s trucks got stuck on a mudslide.
“The amount of destruction here in this region—you don’t see this [in the US],” said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg. The death toll from Helene stands at 227, with most of those killed in North Carolina, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the US since Katrina in 2005.
Without running water, residents must gather water to drink, cook, flush toilets, bathe, and wash clothes. Donations of bottled water are abundant, but locals said they are beginning to see more large water tanks positioned around town. Tankers with potable water where community members can fill large containers for their homes are the ideal in-between measure, international clean water engineers told CT.
The residents of Appalachia might not have known, but Taiwanese Christians were watching their plight. After the storm, World Vision US heard from the leaders of World Vision Taiwan. The Taiwanese leaders had seen the water crisis in Appalachia and said they already had a solar-powered water filtration system in transit to the United States, a system they had used in Taiwan after a recent typhoon.
The Taiwanese leaders wondered if North Carolina could use the water system.
Reed Slattery, World Vision’s national director of US programs, had an idea for where it could go. He had been in Swannanoa and the Asheville area and met with the head of Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, a Christian organization which is providing emergency housing to about 120 people, including 6 pregnant women and some babies. The shelter needed water. Slattery thought the mobile filtration system would produce the right amount of water for the shelter—providing 1,900 gallons of water a day.
The system from Taiwan was scheduled to be delivered to the shelter this week, and the Taiwanese staff planned to remotely train the shelter staff on using the system.
The uncertain length of the water outage requires more than bottled water, these relief nonprofit leaders say. World Vision’s “chief water officer” is working with local North Carolina officials on those longer-term solutions, Slattery said.
Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization whose headquarters are in Boone, also typically responds to disasters overseas. But the organization has set up three water filtration systems in the Asheville area.
Each of its systems can produce 50,000 liters a day, or enough for 10,000 people. The organization has also been airlifting water to difficult-to-reach areas. Dowdy, the pastor in Swannanoa, said his community has benefited from large tankers of water from Samaritan’s Purse.
Other international nonprofits like chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen have tankers of water on the ground in the area. WaterStep, which responds to water crises overseas, has established clean-water operations in Augusta, Georgia, one of the places Helene hit hard.
The responding Christian organizations’ leaders told CT their operations are coordinated with emergency management officials, but they are also proactively reaching out to heavily damaged areas and talking to local fire departments or other local officials to learn the needs of the communities. Water Mission is targeting more rural areas where it will take longer to get power and water back.
Local governments have been responding well, said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg, but “it’s just such a wide area of damage. They have to prioritize. So we’re trying to be the supplement between the disaster happening and the restoring of services.”
He added, “It’s a privilege to serve them and serve the Lord.”
The head of the North Carolina Baptist Convention, Todd Unzicker, said the Baptists have semitrucks with water arriving to more than a dozen sites in Western North Carolina every day. Most of that is bottled water, but more tankers of water have been going out. He said the state Baptists are serving 140,000 hot meals a day in the area, and he didn’t know numbers on water distribution but said they were distributing more water than food.
The lack of cell service has made that distribution and communication difficult. Unzicker traveled to the storm-hit area with his daughter recently, and they had to use a map book to navigate.
The presence of so many churches and nonprofits in the region, on top of the government response, meant that the “immediate need is being met,” World Vision’s Slattery said. But residents he talked to were worried about what would happen when bottled water donations dried up or when attention shifted to other crises like Hurricane Milton.
While staffers of these relief organizations are focused on the basics of restoring infrastructure, they are also seeing the hurt and trauma of residents in the aftermath of the storm. People coming into the churches that Water Mission is partnering with have often lost everything, sometimes including family members.
“Wherever we’re responding around the world, we want to partner alongside the church,” said Kreitzburg, adding that his organization would stay as long as it was needed. “The church is going to be in that community a lot longer than we are.”
Dowdy, in speaking to CT from Swannanoa, had to move several times to chase a fleeting cell signal. The area around him is a landscape of cars flipped upside down in trees, destroyed homes, and washed-out roads. But morale is good at his church.
“Everything we’ve gotten in here has been from churches and individuals who have brought it to us,” he said. Outside groups coming in more recently have allowed his church members to rest and attend to their own disaster recovery. “It’s encouraging to see the church in a time of great need.”
Before the storm, his church had been wrestling with the question of whether anyone would miss the church if it ceased to exist. The congregation had begun looking to be more involved in the surrounding community.
“Wow, has God provided that!” he said.
The post In Appalachia, Helene’s Water Crisis Taps a Global Christian Response appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
I recommended the Gospel of Mark to an unbeliever. He read it and found it “creepy.” That’s exactly the response I wanted.
This young man is probably an atheist or an agnostic but has lived in such a secular environment that he doesn’t seem to think of himself in such terms, any more than you would introduce yourself as “non-cannibalistic” or “anti-horse-theft.” He wanted, though, to try to understand—just as an intellectual exercise—why someone would hold to religious views or practices he finds alien.
He asked what he should read in order to do that. There are, of course, many places I would send such a person, but to him I said, “Why don’t you read the Gospel of Mark? Don’t worry about whether you understand it all; just read through it.”
I later ran into the secularist again, and he reported that he had taken my advice. “So, what did you think?” I asked.
He said he was conflicted. Reading the Gospel was, on the one hand, narratively gripping in a way that he hadn’t expected, supposing an ancient religious text would be preachy and propagandistic. On the other hand, he said, “It was kind of creepy.” And that’s when he brought up Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem.
This man knew that I had read the science fiction novel last year—and that I had done so reluctantly. A trusted friend had recommended the book to me with a warning: “Don’t give up. You will feel like you don’t know what’s going on and you’ll want to put it down. Keep reading and, you’ll see, it will all pay off in the end.” My unbelieving conversation partner had not read the book but he had watched some of the Netflix adaptation of it, 3 Body Problem.
Mild spoilers here: in both the book and the series, an alien civilization communicates with human scientists through a virtual reality gaming headset. The scientists are put in scenarios where they must solve the gravity fluctuations that are plunging the distant world into unpredictable periods of chaos and calm.
“At times, it was kind of like playing those games,” the young man said about reading Mark. “It was almost as though someone was on the other side, watching me.”
By that, he meant particularly that the “character” (his word) of Jesus in the text sometimes seemed to be written in a way that felt unexpectedly immediate. “Sometimes I had to remind myself that I wasn’t right there in the middle of everything. That kind of freaked me out a little bit.”
Although virtual reality aliens were not on my mind, this reaction was exactly what I had been hoping for when I’d recommended that he read Mark.
Usually if I’m helping someone “get” what Christianity is, I ask them to read the Gospel of John. With someone like this, though—who I don’t know if I’ll ever get to follow up with—I’ll suggest Mark, partly because it’s concise and relatively easy to read.
I also do this because of a story I heard years ago. If I remember right, a man who had been some sort of New Age Eastern religionist, the kind found often in the hippie countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, became a Christian because a professor in his comparative religion class assigned the Gospel of Mark. Like the young man, he was drawn to the figure of Jesus and started to feel as though he was not only reading the text but that he was being beckoned from the other side of it.
Leon Wieseltier argues that we have too much emphasis on “storytelling” right now—that this leads to a loss of arguments, of persuasion. “Storytelling is designed to inculcate certain responses, certain mental stances, in the listener. They are passivity, credulity, wonder,” Wieseltier writes. “All of them are stances of surrender.”
This, of course, denies that there are important truths one can only see from stances of passivity, credulity, wonder, and even surrender.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han agrees that we should be worried about how much we hear about storytelling, but that’s because—however much we talk about it—we’ve lost the ability to tell and to hear an actual story.
“We tell fewer and fewer stories in our everyday lives,” Han argues in his new book The Crisis of Narration, because “communication takes the form of the exchange of information.” In an information age, Han writes, an actual story is a disruption. Information, after all, is direct, controllable, and consumable. A story works a different way. A story requires that, in order to be experienced, some information must be withheld as well as revealed.
“Withheld information—that is, a lack of explanation—heightens narrative tension,” Han writes. “Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot be explained but only narrated. A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges.” That kind of mystery is startlingly rare in an era of algorithms.
Part of our problem is that we find a plot unsettling in an information age, especially if we start to see our lives as part of that plot. That’s what Han finds diminishing about algorithms. We consume bits of disconnected data—curated by our curiosities and our appetites—to the point that we no longer feel surprise. Reality itself starts to feel dead, like so much abstract data. The deadness brings forth more deadness.
“Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain,” he writes. “They lack germinal force. Once they are registered, they immediately sink into oblivion.” The metaphor immediately brought to mind Jesus’ own words: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24, ESV throughout).
Journalist David Samuels laments that we now live in the flatness of a time when story and song are hollowed out by Big Data, replaced by “consuming pornography and propaganda.”
“The goal of their governing algorithms isn’t to create beauty, or anything human; it’s to suck out your brains and then to slice and dice them into bits that can be analyzed and sold off to corporations and governments, which are fast becoming the same thing; it’s a mass mutilation of the human,” Samuels writes. “What that sounds like in practice is like a car alarm that keeps going off, at a higher and higher pitch—a sound that has no meaning in itself, except as a warning that something has been shattered.”
Maybe the three-body problemof it all is not the Bible but the rest of life. On the other side of our digital lives are intelligences seeking to question us—nameless, faceless algorithms designed to test us with just one question, “What do you want?” What if, though, our boredom and malaise are themselves signs that we weren’t meant to live like this?
Jesus said that this is a key reason he taught in parables, “because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matt. 13:13). A story requires a certain kind of participation, a certain lack of control. One must be prepared for, and often through, the story to hear what it is saying. One must be baffled enough to suspend control, to feel the tension, in order to not just share information but to experience something true. Without that sense of bafflement and mystery, a story lacks the ability to astonish and to linger.
Think, for instance, of the Gospel of John’s very familiar account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes—a miraculous sign so important that all the Gospels reference it. We tend to remember that there was a crowd of thousands, that there was not enough to eat, and that Jesus provided a feast from almost nothing. What most people don’t think about when recalling that story, however, is just how Jesus sets up the occurrence.
“Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?’” John records. “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do” (6:5–6).
He himself knew what he would do. The question itself—the kind of momentary perplexity it would create in Philip—was Jesus’ intention. It’s the same pattern God followed with the tribes of Israel in the wilderness after the Exodus. Moses said to them: “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3).
Jesus does not just intend to feed; he intends that we would first “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt. 5:6). He did not simply intend to rescue Peter from drowning, but also that Peter would experience what it was like to go under water, to cry out and to feel a hand pulling him up (Matt. 14:30–31).
Jesus’ encounter with us in Scripture is meant to work the same way. We too are meant to find ourselves exclaiming with the Capernaum synagogue, “What is this? A new teaching with authority!” (Mark 1:27). We are meant to start asking the question, “Why does this man speak like that?” (Mark 2:7). We are meant to hear, as though addressed directly to us, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29).
When one finds authority amid the algorithms, revelation among the consumption, that can feel creepy—just as after a time of starvation, the smell of baking bread can seem nauseating. It’s not those who find all this strange who are not “getting it” but rather those who find it all familiar and boring. That’s what a plot does, but it’s especially what a plot breathed out by the Spirit of Christ does, a plot in which we are meant to hear the voice of a Shepherd (John 10:4).
What if someone on the other side of those ancient words knows that you’re there? What if, in those words, you can almost hear the Galilean-accented voice that once disrupted the plotlines of some fishermen by saying, “Follow me”? What if it’s speaking to you? If so, finding that disturbingly strange isn’t the end of the story, but it’s a good place to start.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
The post The Bible Doesn’t Fit an Information Age appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
The ad begins with a clip of Billy Graham, wearing glasses, a gray suit and tie, leaning in toward a pulpit.
“But you must realize that in the last days, the times will be full of danger,” Graham declares. “Men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money.”
Suddenly, a clip of former president Donald Trump is spliced in. Standing before a row of American flags at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Trump says: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.”
For the next few seconds, the ad, which has racked up over 30 million views, flips between Graham’s 1988 sermon, contrasting his points with shots of Trump using violent language, claiming to be “the chosen one” and talking about kissing women without their consent.
That ad, the result of a $1 million ad campaign by Evangelicals for Harris, is now the subject of a potential lawsuit from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based nonprofit that supports the ministries of Billy Graham’s son and grandson.
In late September and early October, Evangelicals for Harris, a grassroots campaign of the political action committee Evangelicals for America, said it received multiple letters from lawyers representing the association, including a “cease and desist” letter. An October 2 letter, sent from outside counsel and obtained by Religion News Service, threatened to sue Evangelicals for Harris on the basis of copyright infringement.
In a statement to RNS, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said it does not generally comment on potential disputes, but it acknowledged having communicated with Evangelicals for Harris regarding its concerns about the “unauthorized, political use of BGEA’s copyrighted video,” and said it would continue to address the matter.
“It may be worth noting that, in all of his years of ministry and across relationships with 11 US presidents, Billy Graham sought only to encourage them and to offer them the counsel of Christ, as revealed through God’s Word. He never criticized presidents publicly and would undoubtedly refuse to let his sermons be used to do so, regardless of who is involved,” said the statement.
In August, the association’s president and CEO, Franklin Graham, turned to the social platform X to voice his displeasure at Evangelicals for Harris’s use of his father’s sermons.
“The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris. They even developed a political ad trying to use my father @BillyGraham’s image. They are trying to mislead people,” he wrote. “Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President @realDonaldTrump in 2016, and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.”
In response to the threatened lawsuit, Evangelicals for Harris released a statement saying Franklin Graham is taking a page from Trump’s playbook by trying to silence the group through legal action.
“Franklin is scared of our ads because we do not tell people what to do or think. We merely hold Trump’s own words up to the light of Scripture, the necessity of repentance, and Biblical warnings against leaders exactly like Trump,” it wrote in a post on X.
The lawyers representing Evangelicals for Harris also released their formal legal response to the threatened lawsuit. Originally sent on September 28, the letter asserts that the ad does not constitute copyright infringement or violate the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s right.
They write that the public discussion of Trump’s moral failings is “essential First Amendment expression” and that the use of Billy Graham’s sermon is protected under the Copyright Act.
“EFH will not be removing the ‘Keep Clear’ advertisement in response to your demand. The advertisement is a transformative, noncommercial use of less than two percent of a widely disseminated video, aimed at a market that BGEA (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) was prohibited from targeting,” the letter says.
Evangelicals for Harris was founded by Jim Ball, an evangelical minister and former head of both the Evangelical Environmental Network and Evangelicals for Biden. Since its launch in August, the group has had over 300,000 people sign up for information about the campaign, according to Ball. Jerushah Duford, Billy Graham’s granddaughter; Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina; and Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic are among the group’s ranks. (Alexander is also a CT board member.)
Ball said the “Keep Clear” ad, named after Graham’s admonishment to “keep clear of people like that,” was inspired by a desire to rely on the biblical wisdom of Billy Graham, whom Ball considers a personal hero, and to reintroduce young people to the evangelist.
“We’ve never had a situation where a single individual has threatened democracy and the rule of law like Mr. Trump has,” said Ball. “We’re also hoping to provide a witness to others that love should be at the heart of how we look at politics. … How are we called to love our neighbors in the public square? We think hands down that Kamala Harris is the candidate that everyone should be voting for on that regard.”
The post Evangelicals for Harris Asked to ‘Cease and Desist’ Billy Graham Ad appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
When we moved to the small town of Canton, North Carolina, last fall, we heard stories about flooding. Living in the mountains spells unpredictability. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred flooded the river that runs through our city, destroying significant portions of the downtown area. Some homes and businesses were lost.
So when we heard that Hurricane Helene had headed our way, people took it seriously. It seemed our little city was on guard and prepared for the storm. But on Friday morning, we still watched with collective shock and dismay when floodwaters were approaching rooflines and still rising.
One mantra I’ve been hearing in the aftermath is “Mountain people are resilient.” And they are. The spirit and the strength of our new community in this crisis is honestly staggering. But any level of preparedness or resilience doesn’t nullify trauma. Or homelessness. Or watching your business literally disappear before your eyes in a mudslide.
As community members and church leaders in the area, my husband and I have been eager to support our neighbors who were impacted by the flood. But widespread cellular and internet outages have made even the most basic communication and collaboration difficult. The first few days after the storm, our lives became hyperlocal: We walked through town, talking and praying with people and pooling resources with friends on our street.
Then, my husband started making his way around the county to coordinate broader efforts. I was at home with three small children and no way to hear or share news or participate in citywide projects. My inability to contribute was maddening. I was wracked with a strange combination of frantically wanting to help and being extremely limited in what I could do.
The truth, I soon remembered, is that limitation is a basic human condition. In our digitized, high-speed age, we believe the lie that we are limitless, omnipresent and omniconnected—but in reality, we are so very finite. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to realize this. Even then, we tend to rage against our limits, punishing ourselves for not being able to do more or becoming so disillusioned that we retreat into apathy.
But on the other side of the frustration is a freeing realization: All that any of us can do is the one or two things in front of us. We feed our kids; we pray for our neighbors; we donate or fundraise or hand out bottled water. These things might feel laughably small or even irrelevant in the face of national or global crises, but they are the very things God entrusts to us. In return, we must trust that God conscripts us, limits and all, to manifest his limitless love and presence in the world.
I see this promise on display in the composite stories around me. One of my neighbors, a pharmacist, is working part-time shifts at the hospital while also caring for her six school-age kids at home. Another, a pastor’s wife and small business owner, helps empty someone’s flooded house during the day and shares her family’s Wi-Fi signal with needy neighbors (like me) at night. This week, a newly ordained Lutheran minister whom we’ve never met drove a truck full of supplies across the state to our Anglican church—supplies she bought with the money she was gifted for her ordination. In their unique ways, each of them is part of the tapestry God is weaving to showcase his beauty in this tragedy.
Each of them also wishes they could do more. Many out-of-state friends and colleagues wish they could do more than donate, send supplies, or pray. But to those of us on the ground, each small offering we receive multiplies—it becomes not only blankets or bottled water or money but also a tangible reminder that we have not been forgotten. Today I unloaded dozens of relief boxes packed by complete strangers, people I will likely never meet or get to thank directly. Their gifts brought tears to my eyes.
Sometimes, of course, even small acts of obedience like packing a relief box or helping to unload it can feel overwhelming. In a crisis, our brains often lock down and we lose the ability to function normally. We feel overwhelmed by all the needs or frozen with confusion and fear. In these moments, the act of obedience entrusted to us might be as simple as getting out of bed or even offering up a prayer for help.
When I lost my brother suddenly six years ago, my first steps forward included choosing to eat breakfast and then going for a walk outside one day at a time. In the disorientation of that grief, I worked on my own small obedience.
But I did not walk alone. People supported me in myriad ways. They sent flowers, brought meals, played with my kids. Then, as now, it wasn’t a singular hero who swept in and fixed everything but an army of people doing the little things they could do to help. Because of them, my memories of a dark season are littered with gratitude and even joy. I believe the same will be true of this season in my town’s life.
I return to this belief as I grow in my understanding of Helene’s impact in my community. When I walked through town today, I began to realize how long this season will be. We will be recovering from this flood for years. The thought overwhelms me. My limited ability to help others over the long haul—or even to help myself when despair wells up in my throat—tempts me to burn out or to give up.
But in view of God’s expansive resources, our personal limitations are a gift to be received. In our collective weakness, we experience his strength. And in our small acts of obedience, we participate in a much larger economy of grace.
In this economy, the line between “helpers” and “receivers” blurs as we all practice saying “please” and “thank you.” And our confidence grows—not in our ability to accomplish our desired ends, but in the Father’s ability to fulfill his purposes through us.
This frees us to offer up what we have every day, even though we know it’s not enough. We trust that he will take and distribute our offering as he sees fit. We can’t control or understand how our offering might multiply. Sometimes we can’t even see it. But in the end, we will all be fed by his mercy—with baskets left over.
Hannah Miller King is a priest and writer serving at The Vine Anglican Church in Waynesville, North Carolina, and the author of a forthcoming book about living with hope in the presence of pain.
The post Facing My Limits in a Flood Zone appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
In recent weeks, a group of evangelicals crafted a Confession of Evangelical Conviction in response to the “social conflict and political division” plaguing the American church, especially amid another contentious presidential election season.
Few know, however, that this confession was conspicuously modeled on another: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, a framed copy of which hangs in my office. It was penned during Nazi-era Germany by Christians who opposed indirect state interference in the work and life of the church.
The Barmen Declaration has since become a model for resistance against other forms of ideologies and political systems that domesticate the gospel and compromise the church’s witness. It inspired both the Belhar Confession, penned in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, and the international Orthodox opposition to the Russian Orthodox Church’s nationalist views after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Making public statements in response to cultural shifts has become a modern evangelical instinct, due in part to the legacy of Barmen. What can we learn from this document, and what critical reminders does it offer the Christian church today? There are many things we might consider, but here are five enduring lessons.
1. Our theology always has real-world implications.
In the 1930s in Germany, a group called the “German Christians” was already sympathetic to the political goals of National Socialism long before the rise of Hitler since they shared its convictions of racial and ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. They hoped to unite various German confessions under a single bishop and establish a single Volkskirche, or “people’s church”—one sympathetic to the Nazi government and supportive of the Germanic ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Reich.
These German Christians believed the divine will was revealed in Jesus Christ and in Scripture, but they also insisted that it could be discerned through natural theology—in nature and historic events. They concluded that the existence of different races and people was God’s design and that each group was to be kept distinct (the intermarriage of Aryans and non-Aryans, specifically Jews, was officially forbidden by the government in 1935). Natural theology for the German Christians was thus one of Volk (“peoplehood”), a mystical fusion of culture, blood (racial supremacy), and soil (land/nation).
In addition, German Christians believed the divine was expressed, and could be discerned, in singular historical turning points. Foremost among these events was the rise of National Socialism and Hitler, which they understood in spiritual terms and took to be the direct work of God’s providence in history for the salvation of the German nation.
In contrast, a group of Christians who called themselves the “Confessing Church” sought to oppose the German Christian teachings and governance. In May 1934 in the city of Barmen, 139 concerned delegates gathered for what would become the Confessing Church’s most famous synod, not least because of the Barmen Declaration that it produced.
Lutherans Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit and the Reformed theologian Karl Barth were commissioned to write the confession, with Barth as its principal author. The confession has six articles—the most well-known article of which is the first, which states,
Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.
From its first article, the Barmen Declaration explicitly rejects the premises of natural theology, and this rejection is a key to its legacy. In a time when distorted theology led to devastating consequences, the declaration sought a return to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture.”
2. The church’s confession must be centered on Jesus Christ alone.
Many National Socialists spoke freely about God, but in terms of an absolute being. Most often, they referred to God with reference to his omnipotence as “the Almighty” (this was Hitler’s preferred way to speak of God). Others, like Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s propaganda minister, spoke passionately of “the Divine” or of “Providence.”
But these were vague utterances. As one pastor during the war observed, the word God in Germany is “an empty word into which any concept can be poured.”
In contrast, every resistance to National Socialism by Confessing Church members—such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Barth—was sustained by an appeal to the singular and supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.
These Christians perceived that, no matter how much traditional Christian language its leaders used, National Socialism was a rival religion that appealed to a different god—whether a god of a mystic ideal of racial superiority, or of the state itself, or of a generic, divine “Almighty.”
Moreover, the theologians in Germany who were most open to a natural theology of nature and history—and in turn downplayed God’s particular revelation in Christ and, at times, denied Jesus’ relation to Israel and Judaism—were those who were the most implicated in compromises with National Socialism.
Only a particular theology of the God of the gospel, a theology of the cross, could ever resist such idolatry in its full force.
3. An exclusive confession of Christ protects against ideological and political capture.
We as Christians can never place our ultimate hope in earthly political leaders or movements, no matter how promising or powerful they seem or however threatened we may believe ourselves to be. (Many Germans overlooked problems with National Socialism and fascism because they were terrified of communism and the Russian revolution of 1917.)
When rightly understood, Barmen offers a basis for both theological and political resistance against any claims to absolute allegiance made by a state or government. It also serves as an inoculation that fights against any ideology, whether of the left or the right, that might invade the church body.
For Christians, there can only be one Lord, one subject of our ultimate hope and allegiance. As the second article of Barmen declares, Jesus Christ has a claim “upon our whole life,” and Christians should reject “the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords.”
It was thus inevitable that the church would come into irreconcilable conflict with the National Socialist regime. As Judge Karl Roland Freisler of the Nazi People’s Court in Berlin noted at the death trial of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke: “There is one thing, Herr Graf, which we National Socialists and the Christians have in common, and only one: we both demand the whole man.”
4. Theological declarations, apart from confessional community, are not enough.
Those who assented to the Barmen Declaration not only viewed it as a binding confession but also lived a confessional life together in community. These committed Christians strove to remain faithful to the one Word of God and to be in service to the church and the vulnerable. Though few, they lived a life of intentional witness and corresponding suffering.
Most Protestant churches in Germany had no tradition of political resistance, and most Christians in Germany found such a thing inconceivable. Yet the Confessing Christians learned that, at times, discipleship entailed dissent. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the most famous of such dissenters, but there were many others like him.
Despite its shortcomings, the Confessing Church was the only German entity to resist the Nazi regime. Every other part of the nation—industry, the financial sector, the arts, the universities—was subjugated to state control. And the leaders of the Confessing Church paid a steep price for their convictions. Some were sent to concentration camps. Others were imprisoned or executed.
The Barmen Declaration was poignant because it was not only a statement of words but also a call for a holistic commitment to a costly way of life.
5. We should not romanticize Barmen but seek to live out its spirit in our present age.
It is tempting for us to romanticize Barmen, but there are a couple reasons why we should not do so.
Even for those who strongly disliked the government’s interference in their self-governance, most pastors in Germany—including many who were part of the Confessing Church—were not necessarily opposed to the National Socialist movement itself. Most remained loyal to their nation’s government, not wanting to appear unpatriotic or sectarian in any way.
In fact, the majority welcomed the chance to demonstrate their loyalty by signing up to serve in the German army when the war came. And despite several contrary examples, most said nothing when persecution of Jews and others intensified and was evident to all.
Moreover, we should remember that any superficial comparison between modern Western democracies in the early 21st century to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is unhelpful and often distortive. While some Christians in America see themselves as being in a state of persecution, such does not begin to compare to the systematic oppression of the churches that intensified in Germany from 1935 onward and throughout the war.
What can be directly applied from Barmen, though, is that the ultimate task of the church is not to align itself with the levers of political power for its own self-preservation. Rather, the church should trust its safeguarding to the Lord, in whom we find our true and proper power.
Faithfulness to the gospel, not political effectiveness, is the church’s divine commission. And there are real dangers when these are reversed or when the first is replaced by the second.
Two decades after World War II, in his treatise “The Christian Community and the Civil Community,” Barth remarked prophetically, “The secret contempt [that] a church fighting for its own interests with political weapons usually incurs even when it achieves a certain amount of success, is well deserved.”
In the end, the Christians in Germany who were the most committed to resisting the evils of the state were, ironically, those who were the least invested in preserving the church for its own sake. Instead, they were interested only in remaining faithful to the gospel—and this translated into acts of political resistance, often by Christians who were little known and frequently forgotten.
Friedrich Justus Perels was a Christian lawyer in Germany who was deeply involved in the Confessing Church. With remarkable clarity of conviction, he worked to free political prisoners, help relatives of those in concentration camps, and assist Jews in Germany. For these actions, he was arrested in October 1944.
On February 2, 1945, he was condemned to death. During the trial in Berlin, Freisler, the judge who presided over the trial, screamed at Perels: “After the war the Church will be wiped out.”
But Perels calmly replied, “The Church will endure.”
This is the confession of one whose hope was not in the church itself but in God, who through his Son promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
Kimlyn J. Bender is the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University. His books include Reading Karl Barth for the Church and 1 Corinthians in the Brazos Theological Commentary series.
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