The German Christians and the Confessing Church – Hegel Between Accommodation and Resistance
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The “German Christians”: Vulgarized Cultural Protestantism
The “German Christians” (founded in 1932) sought to unite evangelical Christianity with National Socialism. They demanded a church “in keeping with the [German] race,” the exclusion of “non-Aryans” from church offices, the adaptation of the Gospel to the “German folk soul.” At the notorious Sportpalast rally (November 1933), Reinhold Krause demanded the abolition of the Old Testament and the removal of the “scapegoat and inferiority theology of the rabbi Paul.”[1]
The theological basis was a vulgarized cultural Protestantism: the synthesis of Christianity and culture advocated by Schleiermacher and (misunderstood) by Hegel was perverted into a synthesis of Christianity and Volk, of Gospel and “blood and soil.” Hegel’s philosophy of the state – itself already a misunderstanding – became a theological argument for the church’s subjugation to the Nazi state.
But was this Hegel? No. Hitler himself despised Hegel as a “German philosopher of reaction.” The Nazis stood for everything Hegel rejected: irrationalism instead of reason, violence instead of recognition, particularism instead of universalism. The “German Christians” appealed to a caricature.
The Confessing Church: Barth’s Legacy in Resistance
The “Confessing Church” formed in 1934 as a countermovement. The “Barmen Theological Declaration” (May 1934), substantially authored by Karl Barth, was its founding document. Its first article states: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to 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 that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, yet other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”[2]
This was a direct application of Barth’s anti-Hegelian theology: no synthesis of revelation and folk spirit, no mediation of Gospel and Zeitgeist. Revelation stands against all human orders – especially against those that present themselves as its fulfillment.
Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), initially a sympathizer of the National Socialists, became a co-founder of the Confessing Church and spent 1937-1945 in concentration camps. His later confession of guilt (“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out…”) became a symbol of the insight that theological truth has political consequences.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a student of Barth and member of the Confessing Church, went further still: he took part in the resistance against Hitler and was executed shortly before the end of the war. His Ethics (posthumous, 1949) develops a theology of “penultimate things” that is neither culturally Protestant nor world-fleeing – a mediation that Barth himself never achieved.[3]
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On the history of the “German Christians,” see: Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Chapel Hill, 1996. ↩︎
Text of the Barmen Theological Declaration in: Bekenntnisschriften und Kirchenordnungen der nach Gottes Wort reformierten Kirche, ed. Wilhelm Niesel, 3rd ed., Zurich, 1938. ↩︎
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge, Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1949. ↩︎