A quick disclaimer to start this post: I am a beginner in my effort to understand the Confessing Church in Hitler's Germany. I am simply writing as I am learning. I may occasionally get my facts wrong, or simplify a topic that really shouldn't be simplified. I need to say that aloud. And, at the same time, I am fascinated by what I am learning and I hope to peak your interest in this topic, too. It is important for us to understand how parts of the German church acquiesced to Nazism, and how other parts stood strong and stood against Nazi principles that were in direct opposition to the Gospel of Jesus.

So, here's what I learned the other day: A big part of what prompted the Confessing Church to form was an effort by the Nazi government to remove any and all Jewish people from positions of power and authority in both the German government and the German church.

This is how Dean Stroud explains it:

"On April 7, 1933, the Nazi parliament passed what has become know as the 'Aryan Paragraph,' which made it illegal for non-Aryans to work in any bureaucratic capacity. All public servants who were not 'racially pure' could no longer work in the public sector. For many, including the German Christians, the spirit of the law was as important as the letter; therefore as the 'Brown Synod' (brown being the color of Nazism) in September 1933, the German Christians demanded that churches ... incorporate the Aryan Paragraph. Thus Nazi racial laws, not the Christian gospel, would dictate who could or could not preach in Germany. A Jewish Christian pastor would now have to lose his pulpit because of a government regulation. No longer was it true that Christian baptism incorporated a believer into the body of Christ, where there was no longer Jew or Gentile.

In September, Pastor Martin Niemoller founded the Pastors' Emergency League [the precursor to the Confessing Church], whose first official protest was issued in 1933 ... In the statement, the members of the league ... protested the Aryan clause. One of the members was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Amazingly, the number of pastors who signed on as members of the league reached some seven thousand, and despite harassment and persecution, the Pastors' Emergency League existed for the entirety of the Third Reich."

The German government reached into the world of the German church with mandates about who was "racially pure" enough to preach and lead a church.

This, of course, is not happening in the US today. However, we are witnessing our current government reaching into the world of large law firms, prominent universities and other realms of society, attempting to mandate allegiance to their views and values.

This is a slippery slope, friends. A slippery slope.

And one other quick note: One of the very first groups the Nazi's harassed in Germany was the LGBTQ community. Take note of that as you watch the news these days --- A Naval ship named after a gay man about to be re-named, legal protections for trans people overturned, efforts to wipe bookshelves clear of any books related to LGBTQ characters and themes, a possible move toward overturning legal same-sex marriages, etc.

This too, is a slippery slope and something that should make us all stand at attention and remember. Remember history, remember outcomes, remember how some parts of Christ's church stood silently as humans were cast out of society or worse, and how some parts of Christ's church stood strong on the teachings of Jesus and thus moved to protect and defend vulnerable groups of God's beloved children.

Remember ...

Remember ...

Remember.

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash