Freedom of Assembly has to be Non-Violent. The World Council of Churches The Ecumenical Center Geneva, Switzerland en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Council_of_Churches The World Council of Churches (WCC) is an inter-church organization founded in 1948. Its members today include most mainstream Protestant Christian churches, but not the Orthodox Catholic nor Roman Catholic churches, which sends accredited observers to meetings. The Confessing Church en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church The Confessing Church (also translated Confessional Church) (German: Bekennende Kirche) was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church. Barmen Declaration The Barmen Declaration or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 (Die Barmer Theologische Erklärung) was a document adopted by Christians in Nazi Germany who opposed the German Christian movement at that time. In the view of the delegates to the Synod that met in the city of Barmen in May, 1934, the German Christians had corrupted church government by making it subservient to the state and had introduced Nazi ideology into the German Protestant churches that contradicted the Christian gospel. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barmen_Declaration The Barmen Declaration rejects (i) the subordination of the Church to the state (8.22–3) and (ii) the subordination of the Word and Spirit to the Church. George Bell (Bishop) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bell_%28bishop%29 George Kennedy Allen Bell (4 February 1883 – 3 October 1958) was an Anglican theologian, Dean of Canterbury, Bishop of Chichester, member of the House of Lords and a pioneer of the Ecumenical Movement... From 1932 to 1934 he was the president of Life and Work at the ecumenical council in Geneva, at whose Berlin conference at the start of February 1933 he witnessed the Nazi takeover at first hand. Ally of the Confessing Church After 1933, Bell became the most important international ally of the Confessing Church in Germany. In April 1933 he publicly expressed the international churchs worries over the beginnings of the Nazis antisemitic campaign in Germany, and in September that year carried a resolution protesting against the Aryan paragraph and its acceptance by parts of the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, or DEK). In November 1933 he first met Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was in London for two years as representative of the foreign churches - the two became close friends, and Bonhoeffer often informed Bell of what was going on in Germany. Bell then made this information (and thus what was really happening in Germany) known to the public of Europe and America, for example through letters to The Times. On 1 June 1934 he signed the Barmen Declaration, the foundational manifesto of the Confessing Church - it proclaimed that Christian belief and National Socialism were incompatible, and condemned pro-Nazi German Christianity as false teaching, or heresy. Bell reported on 6 June to a gathering of the bishops of the Church of England and clarified the difference between confessing and rejecting, and the separation between a lawful and an illegitimate calling on Jesus Christ. This was the first reaction to the Declaration from the international church.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:28:35 +0000
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