The Barmen Declaration, largely written by Karl Barth in concert with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a ‘declaration’ of the Confessing Church in contrast to the Nazi Church of Adolf Hitler, articulates a theological preamble that is solely rooted in revelational theology in contradistinction to natural theology. Here is how it opens up in its material aspect:

8.10 – 1. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14.6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. . . . I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” (John 10:1, 9.)
8.11 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.
8.12 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.[1]

Notice the distinction this makes between the Church’s voice and Christ’s. The distinction it makes between the Church and God’s Word, who is the Christ. It is this reality that I continuously uphold and affirm as a Protestant and Confessing Christian in my own Anglophone context. The Reformation principle of Scripture, and the Word of God is of up-most importance for Christians today. The Church in North America, and the Western world in general, I would contend, is largely enmeshed in a ‘Babylonian Captivity.’ It isn’t the Church, though, who has the resource to remove itself from this sort of cultural bondage; instead, just as in the days of the early Protestant Reformation, it is the Word of God who has the power to break in and break up this bondage and captivation to the culture.

The theology that most of the Reformed evangelical theologians of today are retrieving for Western Christians is rooted in Thomist realism. A realism that operates in and from natural law and the idea that there is a hierarchy of being that is absolutely and causally interconnected and thus collapses God’s being into the structures of the Church itself. It is this sort of ecclesiological and metaphysical reality that Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church was struggling against. The Barmen Declaration, as you read it in whole, is a confession against a Church that claimed its right of authority from the very ‘nature’ of its natural existence as the Church; as if this in itself gave it an inherent authority from God. The Confessing Church understood, though, as did the early reformers, that the Word of God stands over against His Church, and speaks to it His Lordly voice which calls for repentance and obedience afresh and anew each and every day. Thomist and other like theological superstructures do not have the capacity to make this radical distinction between the Church and the Word of God, and as such only fall prey to elevating the Church to the place that in point of fact only the Word of God should and does indeed have.

We will visit more of the Barmen Declaration in days to come. But I wanted to briefly offer this up for consideration.

[1] Source.