“Another Faith, Another Spirit, Another God”
When the Church Plays Politics
By Keith Johnson - Posted at Substack:
On January 23, 1934, Karl Barth took the express train from Bonn to Berlin to attend a meeting to which he had not been invited.
Some of the most influential Protestants in Germany had gathered to finish a memo they planned to deliver to Adolf Hitler two days later. Their meeting with Hitler would be the culmination of a weeks-long plan to remove Ludwig Müller, the Reich Bishop who represented the German Christian Faith Movement. After two months of mounting pressure, they believed they were about to secure a political victory for the church.Barth received a frosty welcome when he arrived. Otto Koopmann, a Reformed minister, met him at the door and told him it was too late to take part in the discussions. Barth entered anyway and, according to later accounts, “took a seat as though nothing were amiss, and lit a cigarette.”
At the table sat three conservative Lutheran bishops, Hans Meiser, Theophil Wurm, and August Marahrens, along with Martin Niemöller, leader of the Pastors’ Emergency League. Others in the room were newer to the resistance. Friedrich Gogarten, once Barth’s ally in the dialectical theology movement, had been a German Christian for three months before resigning. Karl Fezer had until recently served as Müller’s theological advisor. He had written the draft under discussion.
To understand how they came to be in that room, we have to go back to November.
