A Confessing Church in America?

"But who do you say that I am? ... And he began to teach them that the Human One must suffer many things ..." Mark 8:29, 31

AT THE HEART OF THE GOSPELS IS A CONFESSIONAL crisis. It is portrayed in the synoptics as the precise narrative center of the story, a watershed moment on which all other action turns. Who is Jesus Christ? And what is his way in the world?

The crisis provokes the question and the question, the crisis. Close at hand is the disorienting voice of Satan, spreading confusion. Indeed, the voice is heard within the discipleship community itself. And for the first time, openly and plainly, the cross is discussed and enjoined.

All readers of the gospel pass through that confessional moment, personally, and are compelled to declare themselves for one way or the other. In every age and place, the community of faith must also make that declaration in answer to the living Lord.

If recent scholarship has it right, the community of the earliest gospel, Mark, faced its confessional crisis in the midst of a civil war, after the first unsuccessful Roman siege of liberated Jerusalem and before the last that destroyed the temple. It was a confusing time of revolutionary, or messianic, restorationist fever. Conflicting allegiances competed for the community.

Who, they were being asked in utterly concrete terms, is Jesus Christ? And what is the form of discipleship for us here and now? The gospel of Mark is the document that addresses both question and crisis.

In church history, especially Protestant tradition, it is recognized that there are extraordinary times when the church's very identity is imperiled. If its confession is not made unequivocally clear, nothing less than the meaning of the gospel within the church and before the world is at risk. This special time, a status confessionis, is brought on by a historical crisis within the church or without. To discern and name the crisis is incumbent on the community of faith, and to distinguish, clearly as it possibly can, between truth and error, even between life and death.

These reflections are offered with some questions in mind: Are we as North American Christians at just such a juncture? Do military policy and technology, political and economic powers, the burgeoning consequences of the postwar era all converge now in a frightening configuration? Is a historical crisis upon us? Has the faith of the church been confused and compromised by a cumulation of silence, seduction, and outright subversion? If believers continue in practical silence, is the vitality of the gospel jeopardized within the United States? Is it, in short, time for confession?

By the grace of God and the gifts of tradition, we do not grope about in a vacuum. There are some clues and precedents in our recent history. The best-known comes from Nazi Germany.

SWASTIKAS RINGED THE ALTAR of Magdeburg Cathedral. It was 1933 and Adolf Hitler had just come to power. The dean explained from the pulpit: "In short, it has come to be the symbol of German hope. Whoever reviles this symbol of ours is reviling our Germany. The swastika flags around the altar radiate hope -- hope that the day is at last about to dawn." Paul Althaus, a notable German theologian, hailed the rise: "Our Protestant churches have greeted the German turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God."

Following World War I, Germany had suffered not only defeat, but a humiliating peace settlement, crippling reparation payments to the Allies, and then the effects of international depression. Preaching an authoritarian society and traditional values based on family, religion, and German nationalism, Hitler was elected in 1933. When he came to power, he had a good bit of church support, and he carefully curried more.

He threw the support of his own figure and voice behind the German Christians, a church unification movement sympathetic to Nazi goals, including endorsement of the Aryan race and the building of a German Protestant Church on this foundation. They prevailed in church elections and made sweeping changes including provisions that ousted pastors and church officials of Jewish descent. Moreover, with the help of the German Christians, Hitler successfully installed his own "religious affairs" officer as bishop of the unified national church.

Meanwhile, under the guise of anti-communism, and in the wake of the Reichstag fire, Hitler had appropriated dictatorial police-state powers to himself in the name of "national security." Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to Karl Barth on September 9, 1933: "There can be no doubt that the status confessionis has arrived; what we are by no means clear about is how the confessio is most appropriately expressed today."

The form it subsequently took was the notorious theological declaration, drafted by Barth and approved by a Confessional Synod at Barmen on May 31, 1934. The Barmen Declaration has been called a "fighting action" of the church which brought the crisis then brewing to a head.

It begins:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.

Note that Hitler's name never comes up, but you don't have to be a political genius to read between the lines. Here is a document that reads on the face of it as a mundane, doctrinal statement (indeed one that functions today as a confessional standard for the Presbyterian Church and appears liturgically in their hymnal) but whose signers, it has been pointed out, were, every last one of them, pursued by the Nazis and subsequently exiled or imprisoned or executed. Mundane indeed.

Note also the yes-no format, an affirmation followed by a renunciation. This rhythm is sustained throughout the document, and it is a telling structure. Not only does it intimate resistance, but more precisely -- and here the dreadful hazard of a confessional state -- separation. The decision of the synod drew a line between itself and the German church's false doctrine and practice.

Bonhoeffer went so far as to say: "Whosoever knowingly separate themselves from the Confessing Church in Germany, separate themselves from salvation." That is a theological mouthful. Yet the very substance of the gospel was at issue. That line marked off belief from unbelief. It unified and divided at the same time.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, THERE WERE HEATED responses and counterconfessions from German Christians of the day. One such statement was politically explicit: "As Christians we honor with thanks toward God ... every authority ... as a tool of divine preservation ... In this knowledge we as believing Christians thank God that he has given to our people in its time of need the fuhrer as a 'pious and faithful leader' and the National Socialist political system as 'good government,' a government with 'decency and honor.'"

The Barmen Declaration dealt explicitly with the doctrine of the state, a thorny one for Lutherans prone to a "two-kingdoms" approach, and with the Lordship of Christ in every area of life, thereby paving the way for political resistance. It also addressed the servant character of church leadership, over against the heavy hand of Hitler's reichbishop.

However, Barmen was deathly silent on the matter of the Jews. And while state intervention within the church is very much to the point, the confession betrays no rebuke of Nazi tactics: arrest without warrant, imprisonment without trial, intimidation and violence administered by the state. (I am aware that these will be recognized as commonplace in many client states supported and financed by the United States. But our consideration of the similarity to our own situation and silence must wait yet a moment.)

What Barmen effectively did was declare the sovereignty of the Word of God in every aspect of life. In that sense it was like a breath of fresh air. It created an arena of freedom, a space in which to think and move.

It was more like a liturgical event than a political manifesto, but the political implications and consequences were enormous. Members of the Confessing Church went in admittedly different directions, including practicing ecclesiastical and overt political resistance, but all in the radical freedom of complete obedience to Christ.

Two postscripts are in order. Both report postwar convenings and declarations of the Confessing Church. The first took place in Stuttgart in October 1945. There the remnants of the church met to acknowledge publicly their guilt and responsibility. "Unending suffering has been brought by us to many peoples and countries," they confessed. "We accuse ourselves that we did not witness more courageously, pray more faithfully, believe more joyously, love more ardently."

Perhaps such a penitential spirit might have served well the original declaration. More to our own point, it may well be that any attempt to confess the sovereignty of God in a concrete situation of confusion or death is best served by an explicit acknowledgment of complicity in the sin that is being renounced.

The second document is a petition at least partially drafted by Karl Barth and spearheaded by Martin Niemoller and other leaders of the German Confessing Church in 1958. It sought to declare a status confessionis with respect to atomic weapons. Their statement, submitted to the Synod of the Evangelical Church, invoked the Barmen, professed that modern weapons had created a situation in which the church could not remain neutral, and stressed that Christians must not participate in the design, testing, manufacture, stockpiling, or use of such weapons. The petition garnered signators and fostered a storm of debate, but was never adopted.

What happens, one may ask, when a confessional moment arrives, and the church passes it by, failing to speak or act? What is the toll exacted upon the church? What becomes of its capacity to discern, or its ability to speak with clarity and be heard? These are questions that haunt us even today.

BEYERS NAUDE WAS THE FIRST PERSON in South Africa to publicly suggest that a status confessionis had arrived for the churches with respect to apartheid. It was 1965. Naude, who had spent some time in Germany during the 1950s studying the Confessing Church, had become convinced that such a crisis, though uniquely its own, had arrived for the South African church.

Certain parallels are obvious: racist ideology (though, in this case, targeting a black majority population rather than the Jewish minority); a false unity of church and "nation"; an emergence of Nazi tactics (a historic affinity exists between Germany's National Socialists and the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, which was the architect of apartheid); government intrusion or pressure on church affairs; and the church's sin of silence before a massive, manifest injustice.

The 25 years since Naude's original suggestion have been marked in South Africa by a continuing confessional struggle within the churches. There have been a series of statements invoking or echoing in spirit and structure the Barmen Declaration. And Christians have also seen some watershed moments, decisive acts of truth risked.

One of the most remarkable came in 1982 at the World Alliance of Reformed Churches meeting in Ottawa, Ontario. Allan Boesak urged the gathering to take the special responsibility of recognizing apartheid as irreconcilable with the gospel of Jesus Christ. "If this is true," he said, "and if apartheid is also a denial of the Reformed tradition, then it should be declared a heresy." In a moment of courage and clarity, the world body agreed, suspending from its membership the two white Afrikaner Reformed Churches until such time as they renounce the doctrine of apartheid.

Historically, the church has understood a heresy to be a fundamental distortion of the gospel that leads to division within the body of Christ and a false witness before the world. Apartheid Is a Heresy, edited by John DeGruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, spells out variously how the doctrine qualifies. As a political policy, it has been sanctioned with an array of theological justifications: Calvinist, predestinarian social arrangements; promised-land white destiny of chosenness; blacks as the cursed offspring of Ham; and others. As an anthropological heresy that impugns and denigrates the very humanity of black people, apartheid functions to divide the church at the altar, separating the body of Christ at the precise point of its visible public union: the table of the Lord.

God knows there are frightening dangers in pronouncing against a heresy. It smacks of a witch hunt (and we know in retrospect how violent and mistaken they can be). Self-righteousness is a patent temptation, and dialogue would seem to be foreclosed instead of invited. All that notwithstanding, if the gospel itself is jeopardized by confusion, if the integrity of the church's common life is at risk, and if silence permits the most horrifying crimes, then it is not a rash step.

Indeed it remains an invitation to reunion and reconciliation based on the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the evidence is that the black churches in the Dutch Reformed family have continued to call their sisters and brothers to account in the most loving and passionate face-to-face terms.

An edifying complication of the theological issues in South Africa is that the so-called English-speaking churches, over this same 25-year period, made repeated public statements condemning apartheid but effectively have done nothing to implement them in their own life or in the life of South African society. These churches continued to indulge in what has been called a "heresy of practice." They failed to translate their theology into concrete action in solidarity with South Africa's poor.

However, the emergence of a document generated from the grassroots of the South African church struggle helped to force the issue. The theological statement is the Kairos Document. Written collectively by more than 50 black pastors ministering in the townships around Johannesburg, it received broad circulation and study since it surfaced in 1985. Many more signed it by the early 1990s.

Kairos is one of the New Testament words for "time." Among its meanings are: the decisive, critical moment, the time of opportunity, a crisis hour dense with the possibilities of grace. It is a fitting and evocative title.

The Kairos Document is a theological broadside aimed at apartheid in South Africa. Like its predecessors, it does not hesitate to use the strongest theological terms. Apartheid is a "heresy"; and the god of the South African state is not merely an idol or false god, "it is the devil disguised as Almighty God -- the antichrist."

In the document, both "state theology" -- which abuses chapter 13 of Romans to justify unquestioned obedience to the government -- and "church theology" -- which distorts the meaning of nonviolence, justice, and reconciliation into passivity and gradualism -- are critiqued biblically. Then the challenge of this moment is thrown down to the church: to "take sides" with the poor, to join actively in the struggle, to begin by transforming its own life, and to engage as required in open acts of non-cooperation and civil disobedience. It has a biblically discerning eye.

The challenge to the churches is inescapable, in part because it has been so clearly articulated in the light of scripture, but even more so because it has been incarnated. Kairos has become the symbol of an actual movement, signifying the emergence of a "church within the church."

Add that the government thrust this church into the spotlight of the front lines politically by banning virtually all other alternative organizations and by subjecting its leadership to public attack. It is as though the powers acknowledged that the fundamental issues are, in truth, theological, and consequently marked off the appropriate grounds for combat.

The outcome still hangs in the balance.

MEANWHILE, ANOTHER KAIROS DOCUMENT has appeared, this one closer to home. At Easter 1988, approximately 80 people gathered in Managua, Nicaragua to draft and sign a Central American kairos statement. In keeping with the familiar Latin American method which insists that theology is not the point of departure but the "second act" of reflection, the statement begins with a painfully sober account of the then-current political moment within the 500-year struggle of Central American peoples. Only then does it apply the eyes of faith to identify signs of the kingdom which may be seen.

Among those are the growing number of Central American martyrs, the new forms of pastoral work emerging, the resources of hope that are being nourished, the ways in which the cross is being embraced. And if there are specific points in the document with which Christian sisters and brothers disagree, that is specifically encouraged and invited. Please circulate and criticize, they say. Write us, they urge. Let's be in conversation.

The document casts a pointed, sidelong glance toward the imperial center. It does not mince words about our complicity, lamenting Christians here and there who "remain buried in their comfort, excusing themselves because of distance, the lack of clear information, their pretended neutrality, the complexity of the problems ... while the poor die." Nevertheless, they invite the churches of the United States, even as they commit themselves, to acts of penitence and self-criticism, solidarity and political intercession.

Its overall effect is to raise the question of whether an American crisis is upon us. Is it time for a North American kairos?

Hence, we return roundabout to our original question. Not that it's the first time this has been asked in the United States. The crisis times of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War have put it in the minds of Christians struggling with church and state. And periodic events associated with the anniversary of the Barmen Declaration have raised it as the subversive memory against which to measure our own times, our own theology, our own action. (The 50th anniversary in 1984 was the occasion for numerous conferences and forums, but none so thoughtful and lucid as George Hunsinger's essay "Barth, Barmen, and the Confessing Church Today," and its subsequent responses in the summer 1985 and fall 1987 issues of Katallagete.)

Barmen and its story function for us not as a prescription but as a parable. We must not be reduced to scrutinizing our times for the technical parameters of a status confessionis, or looking for precise analogies (even if there are a few to be found) with the Nazi era.

Perhaps we would do well to recognize that there have been "confessional times" in North America, even if rarely articulated. The civil rights movement, in fact, did serve as a kind of "church within the church." Christ was confessed in the music and the preaching and the prayer that preceded and accompanied those actions and campaigns. The movement's leaders, most notably Martin Luther King Jr., were among the greatest American theologians of this century, and they didn't hesitate to cast political issues in fundamentally theological terms.

An edifying story is told of the late theologian William Stringfellow that exemplifies the misunderstood confessional character of the movement. At a national conference on religion and race convened in Chicago in 1963, Stringfellow mounted the podium for an address. "The issue, the only issue, at this conference is baptism," he began. The session never got beyond that opening one-liner. Jewish participants sat in stunned silence. The other delegates rose to their feet and the place was reduced to uproar.

What was the issue? The solidarity with all human beings, indeed all of creation, that Christians affirm in their act of baptism. The undivided unity of humanity as celebrated and verified, ostensibly, within the common life of the body of Christ. Simple as that. It was for the church what might be termed a confessional issue, close to the heart of the gospel.

Throughout those years of struggle, Stringfellow never ceased the work of naming racism as a demon and an idol that had invaded the church. To my knowledge, he never specifically invoked Barmen in this connection, but whether he was ever heard or not, he consistently pressed the confessional issue.

SO ARE WE IN THE MIDST of a crisis today, or are these ruminations an undue hankering after Barmen nostalgia? We are indeed suffering a crisis. Is it recognized within the churches? Barely.

In line with the thinking of others who have been writing and speaking about these same things, I will name four elements of our historical crisis, though more might well be added:

First-Strike Weaponry: While the country was enjoying the upbeat optimism of the 1989 presidential inauguration, the USS Tennessee was making its way from the Electric Boat shipyard in Connecticut to its new home port at Kings Bay in St. Mary's, Georgia. The Tennessee is a floating historical watershed. It was the first Trident submarine to be outfitted with Trident II missiles and D5 warheads, which represented the latest in pin-point accurate, first-strike nuclear technology.

There is good reason to be wary of the incipient despair implicit in certain technological time lines that would mark off a historical point of no return. However, when their red-letter date is upon us and goes all but unnoticed, I shudder as an act of discernment.

East-West tensions may indeed be easing with Mikhail Gorbachev leading the Soviet Union. It seems we may now be spared the Manichaean dualism of the Reagan rhetoric. The Cold War is declared at an end. Movements for democracy around the world have forced a shift in the political winds. All to the good. But at the very same moment, the technological juggernaut quietly slips its chute, almost beyond political control, certainly beyond common notice. Insofar as the driver's seat bears a human driver, it is occupied by the consummate technocrat, content to portray a kinder, gentler face on the deadly machine.

Since Hiroshima, first-strike capability has been structured into military policy -- end to beginning, top to bottom, from Pentagon nuclear scenarios down to the terrors of covert warfare. No amount of international mood swings or media-induced amnesia will make it go away easily. First-strike weapons are now being loosed upon the earth, and that betokens a crisis.

Moreover, the advent of first-strike weapons has been paralleled by a theological crisis. The passivity of the church in the face of it would itself be sufficient to name it so. However, "nuclearism," the ideology that in various forms has accompanied these weapons, also retains the character of a secular religion.

The intrusion of that "religion" within the church under the guise of political pluralism constitutes a heresy to be named and renounced. More than that, as Jurgen Moltmann among others contends, the elevation of the bomb to divine status is not merely a "heresy"; it is "apocalyptic blasphemy," the blasphemy of the antichrist. That one does not evaporate with a shifting wind. (One helpful attempt to apply confessional theology to the nuclear crisis is G. Clarke Chapman's Facing the Nuclear Heresy, 1986.)

The Threat of Ecological Collapse: Present patterns of production and consumption within the international economy are assaulting the ecological support base of all life. We are reaching the limits of what earth, water, and air can bear from toxic poisons. The rain forests are being razed and the atmosphere depleted. The ozone layer is at least much discussed. Have we damaged it to the point of fundamental climatic change?

The coincidence of this crisis with the implementation of first-strike nuclear weaponry is ironic in the very least. Its causes are rooted in industrialization but have been accelerated in the same postwar period by recent consumer technology, the fossil energy required to drive the military-industrial complex, and the advent even of missile engines.

A kind of spiritual connection also exists between the environmental crisis and the arms race: Once you have declared as a matter of national policy that you are prepared to incinerate half of the planet for the sake of national security objectives, then a practical indifference to the long-term consequences of this or that economic practice seems small potatoes indeed.

Plenty of theological issues emerge in this discussion (some even blaming anthropocentric Christian theology for the crisis), but the main one will be the place of genuine repentance in concern for creation. A technological fix, the perennial American temptation, apart from a fundamental act of repentance, will yield only new forms of more of the same.

The Structured Injustice of the Global Economy: The poor of the world, as many as 40 million people a year, die from hunger and hunger-related causes. The view from North America is that they go quietly. No one notices. Perhaps the worst crisis, like with the weapons deployment, is the one that goes unnoticed because it has become so normal. Is it really a crisis? Ask the 40 million.

The widening of the North-South gap is paralleled by a similar gap within our own country, as a permanent underclass develops of homeless and unemployed people who live in a separate, and again mostly invisible, socio-economic world.

The financing of our churches, from the lifestyles of those in the pews to the offering plate passed, from the pension fund to the property-laden tax exemption, is deeply implicated in this structural economic injustice. In Europe, theologians such as Ulrich Duchrow (author of Global Economy: A Confessional Issue for the Churches?) are giving serious study to whether the world economic system itself, and the church's place within it, constitute in and of themselves a status confessionis. It must begin to be considered by North American Christians.

War on the Poor: A kind of warfare dubbed "low-intensity conflict" has become more and more perfected as the imperial strategy of preference in the Third World. The deftly combined economic, diplomatic, psychological, and covert military warfare employed by the U.S. government against Nicaragua for nearly a decade is one prime example. The financing and manipulation of dictatorial regimes, as in El Salvador, where death squads hover in the streets, popular leadership is assassinated, or disappeared, administrative torture is practiced, and popular organizations are destroyed -- all in the name of democracy -- is another adaptation of the same strategy. It is systematic. And it is well thought through and coordinated.

It is totalitarianism and we are party to it. We are also victimized by its largely covert character, carried out as it is by "enterprises," "secret teams," special forces, client states, the CIA, and other extra-constitutional authorities of hidden government. These subvert the remnants of democracy at home, effectively numbing and deceiving our people. (Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has written an excellent and readable book, War Against the Poor, that summarizes much of the recent literature on low-intensity warfare and sets it explicitly in a confessional context. )

SO WHAT DO WE NEED? A theological document? A confessional statement convening and defining a movement? Maybe, but one suggests such things only with great reluctance.

U. S. Christians crank out statements by the volume in conventions and conferences. Condemnations of injustice, pastoral letters on the arms race, resolutions, and covenants gather dust without action. The American idols of religious and political pluralism grant them a wide, dismissive tolerance. They do not bind the church or truly guide it. They signify little.

In Bonhoeffer and South Africa, John DeGruchy makes much of his ecclesiological reflection that "the first confession of the Christian community before the world is the deed." May it be so. Frankly, we can rejoice in recognizing that there are communities of the deed in North America. There are, among the nonviolent resistance communities, the sanctuary congregations, the communities -- urban and rural -- of simplicity and service, a de facto confessional movement nourished by prayer, sacrament, and scripture study.

Still there remains a palpable hunger -- I know it in my own guts -- to name the present crisis, and in the same moment to name the wide community that is confessing the sovereignty of the Word in this our history.

In fall 1988 biblical peacemakers from around the country gathered in the wake of the national elections. Time in prayer evolved into a session of "discerning the times." The several crises mentioned previously were on the table, as were the numerous signs of hope, and we voiced our yearning for some kind of common declaration of faith and practice to meet the times.

Others have expressed these questions directly: Is it time for some explicit form of confessing community? Is it time for a kairos document for Christians living in the United States? Could we incarnate confessional words into creative actions that would breathe new life into our communities and nation?

I say yes, though Bonhoeffer's question seems to remain precisely our own: There is no doubt that the time has arrived; what we are by no means clear about is, How shall the confession be most appropriately expressed today? Providentially, the question is beginning to be asked and prayed in a number of quarters simultaneously, within the church and at its edge.

In the course of writing this article, I had a dream. I am running late and rushing to a morning worship service in a huge, impersonal, well-appointed, granite church. I vest hurriedly from a vast stock of robes and stoles, taking my place in the procession. It is my part to carry this big liturgical casket borne vertically like an upright mummy case on a refrigerator dolly. I don't understand its place or function in the service, and it is heavy and the aisle is steep.

This casket drags me forward down the carpeted aisle, bumping along as if being rolled down steps. At the foot of the chancel, I'm lost. Inquiring about its proper place, I'm told, "This is the symbol of Christ. It belongs at the high altar." Full of ambivalence and heartsickness, I simply walk out by the side aisle, my shoes clacking conspicuously on the terrazzo floor.

Does an honest confession mean marching noisily out of the church? By no means. My fears and heartsickness, though, I take as a clue to the times. My yearning is for the bursting of the coffin right there before the church and so before the world. I hear the living Lord inquire pointedly of us all, "Who do you say that I am?"

This terrible and merciful question, as well as the answer in repentance and tears, is our kairos.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Sojourners contributing editor and a United Methodist pastor, taught in Detroit at the Whitaker School of Theology for the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan when this article appeared.