"Here, where those whom I don’t like are sitting next to me among the faithful, this is precisely where the church is."

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“The only criterion for membership in the Body of Christ is the Word of God and faith.”

In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Karl Barth asks:

Does the behavior of the OTHER lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the OTHER from Christian fellowship?

(In case you haven’t read Romans, the answer is an emphatic “No.”)

In the context of Romans 14, the issue was between the “weak” who attempted to keep some form of the Mosaic kosher commandments and the “strong” who demonstrated their Christian freedom by “eating everything.”

The real issue was that both the weak and the strong saw the Other as phony Christians, illegitimate in their application of the faith.

In our own day, it appears not to be a contrived analogy to suggest that politics is to the church what meat-sacrificed-idols was to the Christians at Rome. The “weak” and the “strong” are those who would anathematize their fellow believers for their respective support of Team Red or Team Blue.

Does voting for Donald Trump lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the MAGA voter from Christian fellowship?

Does voting for Kamala Harris lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the progressive voter from Christian fellowship?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced what would prove to be a more drastic form of this dilemma in 1933 when Germany instituted the so-called “Aryan Paragraph,” excluding Jews and other non-Aryans from civil service positions. While this ban did not include church leaders, German Christians quickly moved to implement similar proposals in the Reich Church. Even the prominent theologian Emanuel Hirsch called for segregating Jewish Christians into their own congregations.

It was in this foreboding context that Bonhoeffer composed the following discussion theses in preparation for the Old Prussian General Synod of September 5–6, 1933. In them, he reasserts the claim that a racial precondition— indeed, any precondition— for church membership undermines the nature of the church.

“The only criterion for membership in the Body of Christ,” Bonhoeffer insisted, channeling Romans 14, “is the Word of God and faith.”

Here are some of the discussion theses Bonhoeffer prepared for the synod in 1933 to discuss this challenge to the nature of the church.

1. Radical version of the Aryan Paragraph:

Non-Aryans are not members of the German Reich Church and are to be excluded through the establishment of their own Jewish Christian congregations.

2. Second version of the Aryan Paragraph:

The law governing state officials is to be applied to church officials; thus employment of Jewish Christians as pastors should be discontinued, and none should be accepted for new employment.

3. Third version of the Aryan Paragraph:

Although the Reich Church constitution has not adopted the Aryan paragraph, it has made clear by its silence that it recognizes the regulations affecting students, which are designed to exclude Jewish Christians from theological study, as binding on the church. Thus it accepts the future exclusion of Jewish Christians from the ministry of the church.

Re: version 1.

The exclusion of Jewish Christians from the church-community destroys the substance of Christ’s church, because first: it reverses the work of Paul, who assumed that through the cross of Christ the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles had been broken down, that Christ has “made both groups into one” (Eph. 2), that here (in Christ’s church) there should be neither Jew nor Gentile . . . but rather all should be one.

Second:

if the church excludes the Jewish Christians, it is setting up a law with which one must comply in order to be a member of the church-community, namely, the racial law. It means that Jews can be asked at the door, before they can enter Christ’s church in Germany, “Are you Aryan?”

Only when they have complied with this law can I go to church with them, pray, listen, and celebrate the Lord’s Supper together with them. But by putting up this racial law at the door to the church-community, the church is doing exactly what the Jewish Christian church was doing until Paul came, and in defiance of him; it was requiring people to become Jews in order to join the church-community.

A church today that excludes others has fallen away from the gospel, back to the law.

The German Christians say:

The church is not allowed to undo or to disregard God’s orders, and race is one of them, so the church must be racially constituted.

We answer:

The given order of race is misjudged just as little as that of gender, status in society, etc. . . . In the church, a Jew is still a Jew, a Gentile a Gentile, a man a man, a capitalist a capitalist, etc., etc. But God calls and gathers them all together into one people, the people of God, the church, and they all belong to it in the same way, one with another.

The church is not a community of people who are all the same but precisely one of people foreign to one another who are called by God’s Word. The people of God is an order over and above all other orders.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? . . . whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” [Matt. 12:48, 50]. Race and blood are one order among those who enter into the church, but it must never become a criterion for belonging to the church; the only criterion is the Word of God and faith.

The German Christians say:

We don’t want to take away from Jewish Christians the right to be Christians, but they should organize their own churches. It is only a matter of the outward form of the church.

We answer:

(1) The issue of belonging to the Christian community is never an outward, organizational matter, but is of the very substance of the church. Church is the congregation that is called together by the Word.

Membership in a congregation is a question not of organization but of the essence of the church.

(2) To make such a basic distinction between Christianity and the church, or between Christ and the church, is wrong. There is no such thing as the idea of the church, on one hand, and its outward appearance, on the other, but rather the empirically experienced church is the church of Christ itself.

Thus to exclude people from the church-community at the empirical level means excluding them from Christ’s church itself. That part of the church that excludes another is, of course, the one that is truly shut out.

(3) When the church’s organizers exclude anyone, they are interfering with the authority of the sacraments. Here in our church, Jewish Christians have been accepted, by the will of God, through the sacrament of baptism. Through baptism they are joined together with our church, and our church with them, by indissoluble ties.

If the church that has baptized believers now throws them out based on any law, it makes baptism into a ceremony, which implies no obligation on its part.

The German Christians say:

The German church people can no longer endure communion with Jews, who have done them so much harm politically.

We answer:

This is the very point where it must be made crystal clear: here is where we are tested as to whether we know what the church is.

Here, where those whom I don’t like are sitting next to me among the faithful, this is precisely where the church is.

If that is not understood, then those who think they cannot bear it should themselves go and form their own church, but never, ever, can they be allowed to exclude someone else. The continuity of the church is in the church where the Jewish Christians remain.

In summary:

The church is the congregation of those who are called, where the gospel is rightly taught, and the sacraments are rightly administered, and it does not establish any law for membership therein. Any expectation for membership other than faith is therefore a false doctrine for the church and destroys its substance.

— DBWE 12:425–432

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