The Confessing Church

The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) emerged in 1933–1934 as an organized opposition within German Protestantism to the regime's attempt to consolidate the churches into a single Reichskirche aligned with Nazi ideology. The specific flashpoint was the Aryan paragraph, which excluded Jews and Jewish Christians from church office. The Confessing Church rejected the paragraph, repudiated the regime's theological co-optation, and issued the Barmen Declaration in May 1934 — a six-article statement, largely drafted by Karl Barth, asserting that Jesus Christ, not the Führer, was the church's sole lord. Bonhoeffer was a founding participant. The Confessing Church was not uniformly heroic. It was divided, compromised, and frequently inadequate to the crisis it faced. But it constituted, for Bonhoeffer, the concrete community within which the demand for costly grace could be tested and, partially, practiced.