Barmen and the ecumenical movement.

Clements, Keith

The Free Synod of Barmen of May 1934 and its Theological Declaration constituted, from the very beginning, an ecumenical event. This was obviously so on the German level, bringing together as it did so many from the regional and confessional diversity of the "German Evangelical Church". But this intra-German and intra-Protestant ecumenism manifest at Barmen immediately exploded onto the wider ecumenical scene. Indeed, the events leading up to Barmen during the previous year and more had already been sending sparks of excitement around the Christian world. Still today, to read the contemporary accounts of what was happening in, for example, the London Times has almost cinematographic effect, witnessing to the extraordinary excitement aroused in both church and public opinion on the international level. So, on Monday 4 June 1934 under the headline, "The Barmen Synod", we read:

 The first session of the Free Reich ("Confessional (1) Synod of the
 German Evangelical Church") Synod ended at Barmen on Friday and
 there is no doubt that the gathering gave evidence of a new
 psychological, as well as practical, phase in the development of
 the so-called Oppositional movement. The furtive atmosphere which
 prevailed before the revival at Ulm in April has given way to a
 cheerful indifference to such possibility of persecution as may
 remain. The leaders seem conscious that the movement has got into a
 swinging stride behind them.

After some further account of the procedure at the synod there appeared the Theological Declaration itself--a summary of the preamble and then the famous six theses in full. There is no doubt that such a rapid translation and transmission of the declaration outside Germany had an electrifying effect and made Barmen synonymous with a decisive "no" to the totalitarian claims of the Nazi regime even though, as the Times report made clear, there was at the synod itself no expression of political opposition to the regime as such. If this and other reports were not enough, throughout the period of the Church Struggle there were also the letters from Bishop George Bell and others commenting critically upon developments. And what happened in the secular press was of course echoed in much of the church press throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. What is more, it soon became clear that such reportage and comment was not just about the Church Struggle but was a vital part of the conflict itself, as the Reich state and church authorities sought to counter not just pro-Confessing Church views but any mention of church turmoil, as such, as malicious propaganda. Therefore even on this immediate popular level, Barmen became a phenomenon in much of the oikoumene.

To speak of "Barmen and the ecumenical movement" is, however, to invite complexity to the table. The "ecumenical movement" at that time, as at other times, comprised no single affair but several distinct if related currents within the overall stream, and they did not all react to Barmen in the same way. Today we would perhaps call the wider impact of Barmen its "reception process". It is important to note, however, that a process of ecumenical receptivity was already well under way before the Free Synod met and arguably this significantly encouraged what happened there. Ever since the Church Struggle opened in the spring of 1933 churches, ecumenical bodies and public opinion in many parts of the oikoumene had taken intense interest in what was happening in Germany, and this interest was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the various manifestations of the "church opposition". Moreover it found notable public expression just days before the Barmen Synod when, on 10 May 1934, Ascension Day, Bishop George Bell, as president of the Universal Christian Council of Life and Work, issued a special message to members of that movement regarding the German Evangelical Church. The message, published in the Times on 12 May 1934, received wide international publicity. It voiced alarm at the autocratic methods being foisted on church government, the measures taken against oppositional pastors and "the introduction of racial distinctions in the universal fellowship of the Christian Church", as well as drawing attention to other problems "which are the concern of the whole of Christendom"--regarding the nature of the church, its witness, freedom and relation to the secular power. A major factor in prompting Bell to issue this statement was the increasingly desperate appeal being made from within Germany by a number of pastors for a word of solidarity from the ecumenical fellowship, an appeal cogently conveyed to him by Dietrich Bonhoeffer who by then had been in London for six months as pastor of two German congregations there. Bonhoeffer personally thanked Bell for his letter "which has made a very great impression on me and all my friends here who have read it ... I am absolutely sure that this letter of yours will have the greatest effect in Germany and will indebt the opposition very much to you" and "which is a living document of ecumenic and mutual responsibility". (2) Those who met at Barmen knew the ecumenical world was watching, listening and praying with them--and waiting for the decisive word.

In qualification of what has been stated thus far, it has to be said that churches outside Germany, in all their sympathy with the German church opposition, were more excited by the fact of the Barmen Declaration than its actual content in detail. The basic issue was clear enough: the Christian church had to declare its allegiance and its identity in terms of the gospel and not the dictates of the state or nationalistic impulses. This was very evident barely a week after Barmen, and only three days after the publication of the declaration in English, when on 7 June 1934 the house of bishops in the Convocation of the Church of England took the unusual step of debating and passing a resolution on a "foreign" event, declaring that there could be "no compromise on the principle that the primary spiritual allegiance of a Christian is to Christ and not to the State, and that no earthly leader can be a new Messiah". It was moved by the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and its major advocate was naturally George Bell who "insisted that the issue was one which could not possibly be regarded as relating exclusively to Germany" but to "the actual substance of the Christian faith". (3)

But outside reactions to the German drama, especially in the English-speaking world, tended to focus on the threat to "freedom of conscience" posed by the state and the brutal methods of the nazified church leadership, rather than the positive witness of confessing the faith. Even Bell in preparing his Ascension Day message had needed some warning and correction from Bonhoeffer in this regard. Bell had sent a copy of his first draft to Bonhoeffer, as to others, for comment and received from his new-found German friend the reply:

 You speak "of the loyalty (of the pastors) to what they believe to
 be Christian truth." Could you not say perhaps: to what is the
 Christian truth--or "what we believe with them to be the Christian
 truth"? It sounds as if you want to take distance from their
 belief. I think even the Reichsbishop would be right in taking
 disciplinary measures against ministers, if they stand for
 something else but the truth of the Gospel (even if they believe it
 to be the truth)--the real issue is that they are under coercion
 on account of their loyalty to what is the true Gospel--namely
 their opposition against the racial and political element as
 constituent for the Church of Christ. (4)

Bell took note, and his final text spoke of disciplinary measures against pastors "on account of their loyalty to the fundamental principles of Christian truth". Generally in the English-speaking world, however, the German Church Struggle was persistently seen as one about "religious liberty" or "freedom of conscience" and Barmen as a stand for such freedoms. During the Baptist World Alliance Congress which ten weeks after Barmen actually took place in Berlin in August 1934, M.E. Aubrey, general secretary of the British Baptist Union, stated: "We stand for liberty of conscience in all matters of faith, liberty to speak and worship as the Spirit of God directs us, and we stand for a free, unfettered Church ... We stand by the noble declaration of the Synod of Barmen which ended on June 1." (5) Such sentiments were typical, and not only among the Free Churches for which, due to deeply embedded historical factors, "religious freedom" was the supreme touchstone by which all priorities of the churches in the public sphere had to be assessed. Karl Barth inveighed heavily against what he saw as the typically Anglo-Saxon misjudgement about the significance of Barmen, as when visiting Britain in 1937 he declared the fight being "not about the freedom, but about the necessary bondage, of the conscience; and not about the freedom, but the substance, of the Church" and continued:

 Dear brothers and friends in the Church of Great Britain and of all
 other countries, the only real help, apart from your prayers, which
 you can render the German Church, would consist in this: in your
 declaring with as much publicity and solemnity as was done in
 Barmen itself that in your conviction also, a conviction arising
 from Holy Scripture, this statement with its positive and negative
 content is the right and necessary expression of the Christian
 faith for our day and therefore also your confession of faith. (6)

Barth referred to how the reforming churches of the 16th century helped each other by reciprocally recognizing their confessions, and in a like way the churches abroad should make known to the Confessing Church that they are one with it--not in political disapprobation of Hitler or in concern about "freedom" but rather "in the theological presuppositions of the conflict it is waging". Barth's challenge does not seem to have been significantly taken up by any of the churches abroad and one can only speculate on what might have happened if it had (how, for example, would Anglicanism with its triple love of revelation, reason and tradition, have espoused the first thesis of Barmen?). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for his part, was similarly to complain that as the Church Struggle wore on the ecumenical interest abroad always flared up in response to dramatic police activity against the church, but tended to flag during the ongoing, more mundane campaign for the confession itself. Nevertheless, such sympathy and solidarity as was shown by churches outside Germany, and their admiration for Barmen--however partial their understanding of it--as a symbol of opposition to the totalitarian regime, did matter to the Confessing Church. If there was at some points a misunderstanding from the outside world, at least it was a creative one.

As far as the main ecumenical organizations of the time are concerned, their perspectives on the Barmen Synod and its Declaration reflected their particular self-understandings, interests and relations with the German scene, and the impact of Barmen varied accordingly. We may look briefly at the International Missionary Council (IMC); the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work (together with the closely associated "World Alliance" for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches); the Faith and Order movement; and the World Student Christian Federation.

The IMC, child of the Continuation Committee of the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, and its agenda still largely that of the work of European and North American missionary societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, might have been expected to afford little attention to an intra-national church dispute in Europe. But the case was far otherwise. For one thing, the Nazi revolution had immediate and savage consequences for the German Protestant missions, and on two levels. First, in parallel with the attempts to impose Gleichshaltung on the churches themselves, there was an attempt inspired by the so-called German Christians to force all the mission bodies into one organization under central control. Second, the regime's severe restrictions on the export of Reichsmarks meant that virtually overnight German work in the mission fields faced destitution and closure. Both these issues landed on the London desk of the IMC secretary, the British ecumenical pioneer J.H. Oldham and his assistant William (Bill) Paton as the German mission leaders appealed for solidarity and help--and within their means the IMC leadership did respond. (7) This in itself impelled the IMC leaders to an innate sympathy with the church opposition in Germany. In its survey of developments in the "sending countries" for 1934, the year of Barmen, the IMC journal could report on the difficulties being faced by the German missions while noting that their alliance with the Confessing Synod and the "German Christian movement" was "disintegrating". (8) Similarly, the following year it was reported that the growth of "neo-paganism" in Germany was being met by the "uncompromising attitude of the Confessional Synod to 'this new menace to Christ"'. (9) It is, admittedly, of some surprise that the IMC does not appear to have convened or published any reflections on the Barmen Declaration as such, given the central concern of the IMC at that time for a renewed contemporary understanding of the Christian message. What is difficult to assess, however, is the extent to which a knowledge of the contents and significance of the Declaration may be assumed to have been part of the consciousness of those speaking and writing at the time. Even Hans Ehrenberg, philosopher and Confessing Church pastor and for a time imprisoned in a concentration camp, as a refugee in London in 1941 could write a cogent article for the IMC on "The Nazi Religion and the Christian Man" (10) without a word about Barmen--yet it is hard to imagine its absence from his mind. And perhaps there is no more telling clue as to the pervasive effect of Barmen than the way in which J.H. Oldham himself-admittedly already becoming attuned to the theological notes being sounded by Karl Barth--could speak at an international student gathering in 1935 on "The Christian World Community" and with unmistakable echoes of the first Barmen thesis could ask what more momentous question there can be for a person than "whether there is a living Word which he may hear, which he may trust, which he can and must obey?" (11)

The respective responses of "Life and Work" and "Faith and Order" to Barmen and to the Church Struggle as a whole make for one of the most controversial chapters in the ecumenical story, (12) and still pose pertinent questions today. The Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, set up in 1930 out of the Continuation Committee of the 1925 Stockholm Conference, had as its principal aim "to perpetuate and strengthen the fellowship between the churches in the application of Christian ethics to the social problems of modern life". Faith and Order, emanating from the Lausanne Conference of 1927, understood itself as primarily "to draw churches out of isolation into conference" on the major doctrinal issues in order to discuss obstacles to reunion and create better mutual understanding. Put over-simply, perhaps, Life and Work concerned itself with the responsibility of churches in the socio-political field, and Faith and Order with fundamental doctrines of the churches and the basis of the unity they sought. There is, therefore, immediate irony in that while what was produced at Barmen was a Theological Declaration, and that while Barth and other framers of the declaration stressed its "theological" nature in order to distinguish it from any political or socio-ethical statement, it was not Faith and Order but Life and Work which engaged most closely with it and with the ensuing career of the Confessing Church. Certain of the reasons for this are quite clear. Given its agenda of ethical concern Life and Work could not help already being seriously exercised by the overall German situation since the Nazi revolution of January 1933, as seen by the resolutions on the persecution of Jewish and other minorities passed by the executive committee of Life and Work at its meeting in Novi Sad in September 1933 (and the still more outspoken statements made by the World Alliance in Sofia a few days later). As the Church Struggle unfolded during the winter of 1933-34 the harassment and persecution of the church opposition could hardly be ignored. Sympathy with the Pastors' Emergency League was a natural concomitant culminating, as we have seen, in the solidarity expressed in Bell's Ascension Day Message to the Life and Work membership just days before Barmen.

Then, barely three months after Barmen, came the scheduled biennial meeting of the council of Life and Work on the Danish island of Fano, 22-28 August 1934, in conjunction with the management committee of the World Alliance and concurrently with a youth conference sponsored jointly by Life and Work and the World Alliance. Fano was the first major international ecumenical gathering since Barmen and it was obvious that the German situation was going to dominate the agenda, bound up as this was with the final decisions to set the theme of the 1937 Oxford Conference: "Church, Community and State". The tensions and dramas of those six days are well documented. (13) They included Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call for a universal church council to declare against war, and for the Fano gathering, as itself a manifestation of the universal church, to initiate it.

But as far as the immediate future of the ecumenical movement went the crucial step was taken by Life and Work to identify with the Confessing Church as its German Protestant partner. A resolution was passed confirming Bell's Ascension Day message and condemning the autocratic methods of government and the attempts to ban free discussion in the church. This was a blunt "no" both to the "German Christians" and to the Reich church as led by bishop Ludwig Muller--and as represented at Fano by bishop Theodor Heckel, director of the church foreign office who had made strenuous but counter-productive appeals to the gathering to mind its own business as far as German church affairs were concerned. The resolution declared unequivocally: "The Council desires to assure its brethren in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church of its prayers and heartfelt sympathy in their witness to the principles of the Gospel and of its resolve to maintain close fellowship with them." Bell in his Ascension Day Message had been able to refer only in an undefined way to pastors suffering for loyalty to the gospel. Now, a quite specific identification had been made: the Confessing Synod. Without Barmen, and by unmistakable implication its Theological Declaration, the ecumenical movement as represented by Life and Work would have had no clear marker for relating to the German scene. Not that Fano was a complete victory for the Confessing cause, for Heckel managed to get inserted into the final resolution an additional clause stating that the Council wished "to remain in friendly contact with all groups in the German Evangelical Church". This sounded innocent enough at the time but it was to have troublesome consequences.

Faith and Order, on the other hand, never saw itself as called to "take sides" in the German Church Struggle, and regarded Barmen merely as representing one "party" within the German church. Certain human elements came in here--it did not help, for example, that the chair of its theological committee was A.C. Headlam, Anglican bishop of Gloucester, who for years was strongly sympathetic to the Nazi regime and contemptuous of the church opposition. The same could not be said of the secretary of Faith and Order, Leonard Hodgson, another Anglican and one of the ablest English theologians of the day. Hodgson was no friend of Nazism, but saw Faith and Order as essentially a conference round-table at which all sincere Christian convictions could sit in mutual converse. As far as Germany went, this would mean both the Confessing Synod and the "Reich church"--and whoever else "accepts Jesus Christ as God and Saviour". Just how far this could be from the self-understanding of the Barmen Synod and its adherents was seen in the correspondence in 1935 between Hodgson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, by now director of the Confessing Church's illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, had been invited by Hodgson to attend a forthcoming meeting of the Faith and Order continuation committee in Denmark. On learning that bishop Heckel would also be attending, Bonhoeffer protested. The eminently fair-minded Hodgson explained the wish of Faith and Order to be guided "by all sections of Christian thought" and that Germany "should not be represented exclusively by the Reichskirche". Bonhoeffer was incensed, in his reply declaring that the Reich church did not "accept the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour" but subjected itself to worldly masters and powers and the Antichrist. In the light of Barmen, the Reich church government could no longer claim to represent the Church of Christ in Germany or any part of it. This was too much for Hodgson or the leadership of Faith ad Order as a whole to cope with, and the matter was dropped. (14)

Barmen, clearly, had exposed very different self-understandings of the ecumenical movement as well as differing perceptions of what was happening in Germany. No-one saw this more sharply than Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his 1935 essay "The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement" which can be read as a follow-up to his exchanges with Hodgson:

 The Confessing Church represents a genuine question for the
 ecumenical movement insofar as it confronts the latter in all its
 totality with the question of the confession.... It is
 fundamentally impossible to enter into conversation with this
 church at any point without immediately raising the question of the
 confession.... Here the Confessing Church seals herself off
 hermetically against political, social or humanitarian inroads. The
 confession occupies her whole sphere. To this confession as it has
 been authoritatively expounded in the decisions of the Synods of
 Barmen and Dahlem, there is only a Yes or a No. Thus here too
 neutrality is impossible ... (15)

If Barth's wish that the churches at large should affirm the Barmen Declaration as their own confession was not fulfilled, so also was Bonhoeffer disappointed that the ecumenical bodies did not as a whole relate exclusively to the Confessing Church as the sole legitimate expression of the German Evangelical Church and refuse all contacts with the Reich church. Faith and Order, as we have seen, felt that this would contradict its own purpose and methodology as a "conference". Even Life and Work felt it had to compromise here, despite the undoubted recognition by such as George Bell, J.H. Oldham and Marc Boegner that the Confessing Church's claim was right and just. That last-minute clause about "friendly contacts" inserted into the Fano resolution allowed Theodor Heckel and the Reich church to keep a foot inside the door at the Life and Work meetings up till 1936 (aided, it has to be said, by the "open-minded" attitude of the Research Department in Geneva led by the German Lutheran pastor and economist Hans Schonfeld). But at least Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church leaders knew that Bell and his colleagues were doing their best to support the Confessing Church within their legal constraints, whereas Faith and Order was doing its best to keep its distance by appeal to its constitution. Due to travel restrictions imposed by the German authorities in 1937, there was no effective German representation at either the Oxford Life and Work Conference (July) nor the Edinburgh Faith and Order Conference (August), at each of which crucial steps were taken towards forming the World Council of Churches. Therefore at neither event could the implications of Barmen, or the German Church Struggle generally, for the ecumenical movement and its future be discussed in any depth. But at least Oxford delivered a substantial message of concern on the German situation and explicitly affirmed: "We are greatly moved by the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel." (16) The brief message to Germany from Edinburgh which got as far as saying "we are one in heart with all suffering Christians in your land" was diffuse to the point of vacuity. (17)

To summarize the story told thus far, in the years immediately following Barmen, even by those in the ecumenical movement who identified with the Confessing Church, relatively little attention was paid to the specific contents of the Theological Declaration, and much more attention to what the Confessing Church was suffering than to what it was actually confessing. In more recent ecumenical history however, as detailed in other articles in this volume, there has been no lack of interest in "confession". It has especially become an emphasis to describe Christian witness in the socio-ethical sphere. From nuclear warfare to apartheid to the global market economy, the issues have been examined as to whether they constitute a status confessionis. This renewed attention to what confession means is the long-term ecumenical legacy of Barmen. But how did it come about that this legacy with its essentially theological concerns was transmitted to the ecumenical world following the second world war, given that Faith and Order had been so nervous or bemused about "taking sides" in the German Church Struggle, and while even Life and Work was not always clear as to just why it identified with the Confessing Church, nor had it studied especially closely the Barmen Theological Declaration?

In answering this question, another vital player in the 1930s ecumenical scene should not be overlooked: the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). Among the ecumenical bodies none was more definite on where its sympathies lay in Germany, not least because so many (though not all) of its present and former German leaders (such as Hans Lilje, general secretary of the German SCM 1924-34) identified with the Confessing Church. Throughout the 1930s W.A. Visser 't Hooft, secretary of the WSCF and close theological ally of Karl Barth, was able to report at first hand on his visits to Germany in the journal Student World and in 1935 for example wrote: "The German Church stands at the crossroads, one road leading to new life, the other one leading to death" and commented that like St Paul that church was learning that to suffer for Christ's sake was a gift. But crucially and prophetically he continued: "Whether it will prove to be worthy of that gift is a matter which concerns the whole of ecumenical Christendom" (18)--a remark that Bonhoeffer himself could have made. It was in fact in the WSCF, which published articles including by such as Karl Barth and Paul Maury as well as by Visser 't Hooft himself, that the most intensive studies of the theological issues of the German Church Struggle and their implications for ecumenism took place, not to mention also the Evangelische Wochen conferences organized by the SCM in Germany which gave much-needed platforms for the Confessing leaders like Martin Niemoller to encourage their communities. (19) If a long-term route is to be traced from Barmen to the ecumenical movement as it developed through the WCC after the second world war, much of it will lie through the WSCF circles and the ecumenical leadership that emerged from it as exemplified by Visser 't Hooft himself (he became general secretary of the WCC-in-formation in 1938) and such as Hans Lilje.

Of course, as with all legacies there arises the possibility of misuse. In calling for a "confessing" stance on a particular issue are we doing any more than saying, "This is a very serious issue on which the church's voice must be heard"? What is really to be gained, other than rhetorical effect, by using the language of "confessing"? Or might it even be, as one recent careful examiner of the whole issue of "confessing" puts it: (20) "self-dramatizing paranoia"? Notwithstanding its ambiguities and unclarities, what Barmen both the Synod and the Theological Declaration--stood for were the supremacy of God's word in Christ and the universal embrace of the gospel without qualification, over against the divisive powers and claims of this world. Wherever it is these which are at stake, and where a quite specific and concrete measure is required by the church in its own life and ordering, and where this consequently asks for a decision from the whole ecumenical family, this is where the echoes of Barmen are truly heard and where the ecumenical movement can expect to be both disturbed and renewed. In measured retrospect, one could wish that the Barmen Declaration itself could have been examined and discussed more thoroughly in ecumenical circles at the time. The ecumenical family might thereby have been more severely and healthily challenged. Equally, for all that it was a "misunderstanding", the concern by many ecumenical friends for the issues of "religious freedom" might in turn have prompted the Confessing movement to see that notwithstanding its insistence that Barmen was a purely "theological" statement it was at least implicitly political and, whether acknowledged or not, in taking its stand the "Free Synod" was also taking a stand for aspects of the whole humanum as well as for the Evangelical Church of Germany. Therewith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's complaint written from prison in 1944, that the Confessing Church had largely lapsed into a defence of its own cause rather than "existing for others" might have been mitigated. All this, however, is a way of saying that for its own good the ecumenical movement needs continually to attempt to re-live how it would have faced up to the challenges presented by Barmen, and how much has really been learnt and applied since then in its own life.

(1) In this article I retain "Confessional" as the title of Bekennende Church or Synod, when used in English citations from the time, and the more accurate and generally used later translation "Confessing" in my own usage.

(2) Bonhoeffer, D. (2007), Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Volume 13. London 1953-35. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p.147ff. Full text of Bell's message is on pp.144-146.

(3) Cf. The Times, 8 June 1934, and Jasper R.C.D. (1967) George Bell. Bishop of Chichester. Oxford University Press, London, p.113.

(4) Bonhoeffer (2007) p.140.

(5) See Clements, K. (1990) What Freedom? The Persistent Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bristol Baptist College, Bristol, p.84.

(6) The British Weekly, 22 April 1937.

(7) See Clements, K. (1999) Faith on the Frontier. A lift of J.H. Oldham. World Council of Churches, Geneva, pp.290- 296.

(8) International Review of Missions [IRM] Vol. 24 (1935), p.101.

(9) IRM Vol. 25 (1936), p.91.

(10) IRM Vol. 30 (1941), pp.363-373.

(11) See Clements (1999) p.290.

(12) The "official" accounts e.g. in Rouse, R. & Neill, S. (eds) (1967) A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948. SPCK, London, do not bring the tensions into relief.

(13) See especially Scholder, K. (1988) The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. 2. SCM Press, London.

(14) See the Hodgson-Bonhoeffer correspondence in Dudzus, O. & Henkys, J. (eds) (1996) Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 14: Illegale Theologenausbildung: Finkenwalde 1935-1937. Chr. Kaiser/Gutersloh Verlagshaus, Gutersloh; and Bethge, E. (1999) Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A biography. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p.481ff.

(15) Bonhoeffer, D. (1965), The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement. In: E. Robertson (ed.) No Rusty Swords: Lectures and Notes 1935-39, pp.321-339. Collins, London.

(16) Oldham, J.H. (ed.) (1937) The Churches Survey Their Task. Report of the Conference at Oxford, July 1937, on Church, Community and State. George Allen & Unwin, London, p.275.

(17) Hodgson, L. (ed.) (1938) The Second World Conference on Faith and Order, Edinburgh, August 3-18, 1937. SCM Press, London, p.39.

(18) Hodgson (1938) p.39.

(19) See Visser 't Hooft, W.A. (1973) Memoirs. World Council of Churches, Geneva, chapter 13, "The Church Struggle in Germany".

(20) Bertram, R.W. (2008) A Time for Confessing. W.B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids/Cambridge, p.3. This posthumously published work offers many important insights into both Barmen and subsequent situations of "confessing".

Keith Clements is a British Baptist minister who served as general secretary of the Conference of European Churches from 1997 to 2005, and who has written extensively on ecumenical life and thought, including works on J.H. Oldham, the German Church Struggle and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.