The time: WW2. The place: Nazi Germany. The figurehead of the whole demonic nightmare: Adolf Hitler. Place these realities into conflict with the Word of God, and those submitted to it, like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer et al., and we get a confession or declaration like Barmen, of the so-called German Confessing Church. Barth essentially penned it, along with Bonhoeffer. Barth refers to it, in this German context, in his Church Dogmatics II/1 §26, 171. As typical he has a long small print section on this that is lovely to behold; it is impassioning to read; like fire to my bones. In nuce, Barth boils down all that happened as a result of the satanic attacked spawned by the heathen of the Reich, and identifies that the only bulwark left standing, after natural theology had been repented of by the Confessing Church, was the ‘one Word of God.’ Let me share a bit from the small print, and then meet you on the other side:

But it was a witness. It was obliged to notice what was going to be seen on this occasion—that Satan had fallen from heaven like lightning and that the Lord is mighty over all gods. What it noticed on this occasion was the fact of the unique validity of Jesus Christ as the Word of God spoken to us for life and death. The repudiation of natural theology was only the self-evident reverse side of this notice. It has no independent significance. It affirms only that there is no other help—that is, in temptation—when it is a question of the being or not being of the Church. What helps, when every other helper fails, is only the miracle, power and comfort of the one Word of God. The Confessional Church began to live at the hand of this notice and at its hand it lives to this day. And it is this notice which it has to exhibit to other Churches as the testimony which it has received and which is now laid upon it as a commission. It will be lost if it forgets this testimony, or no longer understands it, or not longer takes it seriously; the power against which it stands is too great for it to meet it otherwise than with the weapon of this testimony. But it will also be lost if it does not understand and keep to the fact that this testimony is not entrusted to it simply for its own use, but at the same time as a message for the world-wide Church. And it may well be decisive for other Churches in the world, for their existence as the one, ecumenical Church of Jesus Christ, whether they on their side are able to hear and willing to accept the message of the Confessional Church in Germany.[1]

I felt compelled to share this because it seems to me that the Confessing Church, wherever she might be found today, is under assault in untold ways. Whether it be the seeker sensitive evangelical churches attempting to be ‘relevant’ to the broader culture; or the straight up ravenously militant atheists making in-roads into the lives and minds of many of those caught up in the former; or the post-secular assault on the culture at large, which penetrates the walls of the churches on so many variant levels; no matter what the beach-head might be, as Barth rightly notes in his own German/Swiss context, the forces of hell itself will stop at no end to destroy all that is holy and pure. Satan himself would like nothing else but to snuff out a whole generation, a whole society of people who find their daily bread from the ‘one Word of God.’ Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the North American evangelical churches, and those in the West, in general, are under this heavy assault.

What Barth is identifying is that even in the worst of assaults, whether they be genocidal, like the Reich’s or Planned Parenthood’s, is that after all has burned away, the living Word of God will ‘endure forever’ and remain standing. Once the Christian can recognize this, not just as an external intellectualism, but once they feel this deep down in the deepest part of their soul, they have something substantial and real to live in and from. This is what happened to the Confessional Church of Germany back then, and because of their enduring witness to the Word of God, it ought to happen to us now. The Word of God does not change, and remains the same: yesterday, today, and forever (Hb 13.8) As Christians, those who stand on the Word of God alone (sola Scriptura), of all people we ought to be able to recognize that we are involved in a spiritual battle with the demons and the lowly brow-beaten devil who make up the kingdom of darkness. Because we stand on the Word of God, and walk from its illuminative reality who is Jesus Christ, we also discern that this spiritual battle with the principalities and powers are not off in some ethereal realm of make-believe, but that these powers have penetrated the very foundations of the earthly powers and elites among us (I typically think of the globalists when I think this way). These powers will stop at no end. They went as far as bringing the son of Man to the cross of Calvary; only to have the power of God’s Word unleashed on them in the resurrected and glorified flesh of Jesus Christ.

But this is what we ought to be discerning as we walk in this world. It should all be under the backdrop of the ‘heavenly’ and apocalyptic battle that is occurring as depicted in the book of Revelation. It doesn’t matter what epoch of world history we inhabit; whether that be premodern, modern, or post-modern: the Word of God, like a stone, crushes all counterforces it encounters, and out of the rubble recreates what the devil had hoped would be the end of God’s Kingdom and the rise of his. Let’s walk with the same passion as Barth was emblazoned with as he confronted the forces of the diabolical Hitlerian regime with the all-powerful (pantocrator) and mighty Word of God. This world, this very cosmos and all it contains, seen and unseen, belongs to the Lamb of God slain before the foundations of the world. This is the Word of God, and Holy Scripture as its living witness, and as evangelical confessing Christians we need to be about proclaiming the unvanquished and victorious kerygmatic reality that the Son of Man has come and He is taking no prisoners; He’s here to liberate the world, and squash the puny machinations of our mortal enemy, satan and death. ἐν Χριστῷ!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 171.