The following is an excerpt from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics II/1, 172-78, which was originally published in German in 1940. Note especially the way it ties the logic of Nazified Chrisitanity back to prior parallels (related to what's now called colonialism), with which the European and North American churches were already complicit, which neutered their ability to side with the Barmen resistors early enough to make any difference.
“We will conclude with a short historical commentary on the first article of the Theological Declaration of the Synod of Barmen on May 31st, 1934. The text is as follows:
I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, except through me.” (Jn. 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 through me, he will be saved.” (Jn. 10:1,9)
Jesus Christ, as testified to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, that we must hear, trust, and obey in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine! As if the church can and must recognise as a source of her proclamation, other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation, apart from and besides this one Word of God.
This text is important and apposite because it represents the first confessional document in which the Evangelical Church has tackled the problem of natural theology...
The question became a burning one at the moment when the Evangelical Church in Germany was unambiguously and consistently confronted by a definite and new form of natural theology, namely, by the demand to recognise in the political events of the year 1933, and especially in the form of the God-sent Adolf Hitler, a source of specific new revelation of God, which, demanding obedience and trust, took its place beside the revelation attested in Holy Scripture, claiming that it should be acknowledged by Christian proclamation and theology as equally binding and obligatory... [which was] therefore the transformation of the Christian Church into the temple of the German nature- and history-myth.
The same had already been the case in the developments of the preceding centuries... But during the developments of these centuries this whole state of affairs was almost entirely hidden... It is noteworthy that it was conservative movements within the Church, like those inspired by Abraham Kuyper and Adolf Stöcker, which acted most naively...
If it was admissible and right and perhaps even orthodox to combine the knowability of God in Jesus Christ with His knowability in nature, reason, and history ... it is hard to see why the German Church should not be allowed to make its own particular use of the procedure...
And there were so many parallels to it in England and America, in Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and the Scandinavian countries, that no one outside really had the right to cast a stone at Germany because the new combination of Christian and natural theology effected there involved the combination with a race nationalism which happened to be rather uncongenial to the rest of the world...
It was about two hundred years too late to make and well-founded objection...
The protest – [as] expressed with blunt words at Barmen by Hans Asmussen, who had to explain the whole proposal – was 'against the same phenomenon which for more than two hundred years had slowly prepared the devastation of the Church'...
The dogmatic clarification of Barmen ... carried with it automatically the will and the power to resist... [and] we can already describe it as one of the most notable events in modern Church history...
It is naive in the extreme find in 'Calvinism' or the activity of this or that professor of theology the effectual power of salvation (or corruption) in this affair.... The first article of Barmen was not merely a pretty little discovery of the theologians. The position in the spring of 1933 was not one in which a fortune could be made in Germany with little theological discoveries. Basically it was quite simply a public statement of the very miracle that against all expectation had once again happened to the Church...
For the understanding of what the first article of Barmen has to say ... lies in the fact that Jesus Christ has said something, and what is more, has said it about Himself: I myself am the way, the truth, and the life. I myself am the door.... The Church lives by the fact that it ... do[es] not have to honour and fear any other power as way, truth, life or door."
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