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Abstract
Although the Barmen Declaration and the Belhar Confession are celebrated within Reformed Protestant history, they tend to be relegated to the margins of Reformed political theology. This is due in large part to their being misunderstood as anomalous due to their social context and/or incongruous due to their political content. I argue that their political content is neither idiosyncratic nor illegitimate. These confessions are not merely responsive to contingent features of Nazi and Afrikaner ideology. They are expressive of essential factors internal to Reformed theology. To do so, I situate them in the context of Karl Barth’s normative paradigm of Reformed Confession, which is inherently political and intrinsically democratic. I demonstrate that the operative praxis of Barmen and Belhar conforms to Barth’s paradigm. And on that basis, I articulate a “politics of Reformed confession” defined by an “analogy of citizenship” by which the rule of faith is a pattern for the rule of law and the freedom of the Christian is a prototype for the freedom of the citizen.
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Search for other papers by Derek Alan Woodard-Lehman in
Current site
Google Scholar
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Abstract
Although the Barmen Declaration and the Belhar Confession are celebrated within Reformed Protestant history, they tend to be relegated to the margins of Reformed political theology. This is due in large part to their being misunderstood as anomalous due to their social context and/or incongruous due to their political content. I argue that their political content is neither idiosyncratic nor illegitimate. These confessions are not merely responsive to contingent features of Nazi and Afrikaner ideology. They are expressive of essential factors internal to Reformed theology. To do so, I situate them in the context of Karl Barth’s normative paradigm of Reformed Confession, which is inherently political and intrinsically democratic. I demonstrate that the operative praxis of Barmen and Belhar conforms to Barth’s paradigm. And on that basis, I articulate a “politics of Reformed confession” defined by an “analogy of citizenship” by which the rule of faith is a pattern for the rule of law and the freedom of the Christian is a prototype for the freedom of the citizen.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Full Text Views | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 0 | 0 | 0 |
