Characteristic of the Christian faith since its beginning is the evidently irremovable dialectic between rejection of and the embrace of its environment: dissolving as well as shaping it, on the one hand relativising and undermining religious, cultural and social norms and, on the other, infiltrating, stabilising and pulling them together.

In no way does that apply only to the history of Christianity in late antiquity, in the middle ages or in the early modern period. Schleiermacher offers an example of an orientation directed towards modernity, and thus freed from any strict adherence to structures laid down by the state. On the one side he speaks of the character of the Christian faith as being ‘polemical through and through’ – not only in its stance over against the outside world, but equally ‘within its own boundaries and within its innermost community of saints … and indeed at the same time an ongoing polemicising against all current forms of religion is laid down as a task which can never be completely fulfilled’. Conversely, Schleiermacher emphasises the necessity of ‘custom’ shaped by the ‘common spirit’, which is thus ‘carried and determined by the shared ethos of the members of a society’. The possibilities and dangers concealed within this bipolarity will here be explored not on a theoretical level, but in the light of an important and justly contested text from recent German church history. Our concern then is with the so-called ‘Darmstädter Wort’ of August 1947.