Confession Makes The Difference
For Pastor Martin Niemöller, it meant being sent to Dachau concentration camp.
On a spring day in 1934, he'd travelled from the suburbs of Berlin to a town called Barmen, which sits along a river in the North West of Germany. There he met with a collection of other pastors who were angry with the Nazi party's increasing control of the church and its doctrine. Together, they agreed to a confession of faith: the Barmen Declaration. Three years later he was taken away by the Gestapo. Other signatories, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were also imprisoned and executed.
But the Barmen Declaration also saved the German church. It invigorated the Confessing Church movement which kept a remnant of orthodoxy alive under the boot of Nazism. And it meant that after the war, there was a part of the church that showed the gospel had credibility. If those German pastors had not made their confession, the German church probably faced annihilation.
Saving the church today.
Today the church faces more subtle threats than Nazism. Secularism threatens to wither Christian communities by making them irrelevant or ridiculously compromised. The church must engage with the wider culture in order to grow. But how can it do that if it doesn't know what it really stands for?
For Carl Trueman, the answer may well be returning to the historic confessions of faith. While the practice of Biblical Theology has brought many benefits, it has led to an evangelical culture of uncertainty about what Christians really believe about God, Jesus, the world and themselves. Instead, we have what he calls, “the futility of reinventing the faith every Sunday.” While he hasn't been sent to a death camp for his controversial statements, this history professor from Westminster Theological Seminary has certainly attracted many enemies.
Confess or Die is a conference that gives today's pastors a great opportunity. The opportunity to seriously reconnect with the historic confessions of faith, to see how they can build the church's confidence as it reasserts its mission.