Yearly Archives: 2008

December 2008 Newsletter

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

December 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 12

Dear Friends,

We are already in the Advent season and are now looking forward to the Christmas celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. So let me take this occasion to wish you all the very best as the year ends, and to hope that you will have a joyous and restful holiday, even in these troubling times. This also brings to an end Volume XIV of this Newsletter, so I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement which has meant so much to me over this time. For example, I recently received a very generous letter from Peggy Obrecht, which she has allowed me to share with you.

At this time of year with Thanksgiving approaching, I just want to tell you once again how grateful I am for your efforts at turning out, month after month, not just insightful reviews of recent books and articles but fascinating pictures of the religious history of these past centuries. You have provided a great resource for those of us wishing to understand better how the theological and psychological views of church officials and scholars, and their subsequent actions, influenced not just the religious world in which they worked but the greater society around them as well. (Sometimes to the embarrassment of the church but, more often than not, to its credit.)

It has been as good an education as one could have, and many times over the years I have incorporated your thoughts and viewpoints, along with those of your contributing editors, into speeches or sermons I have had to deliver (giving credit where it was due-you will be glad to hear).

May you live as long as I do which, I hope, will be at least another twenty years. ”

I fear that I may not be able to live up to such kind and lengthy expectations, since my seventy-ninth birthday falls this month, but promise to do what I can so long as I am able. I particularly want to thank those who have helped with their contributions this year, especially my fellow workers over so many years now, Matthew Hockenos and Randy Bytwerk.

Some of you have asked me to define the criteria used to select books to be reviewed. The choice may seem rather haphazard (or in the eyes of some perhaps erratic). I have only three criteria: first the availability of new titles, which of course cannot be predicted in advance, and which arrive here in Vancouver in uncontrollable intervals; second, the subject matter has to be concerned with the twentieth century or later; third, I try to be as inclusive of as many branches of the Christian church as possible, regardless of denominational or geographical setting. This provides a wide and ecumenical variety of subjects, so that I hope one or other review is of interest to all of you, some of the time. I am aware that such an arrangement prevents any concentration on particular themes, or special issues limited to one topic. But I hope my preference still continues to find your favour and support. As of now, we have 503 subscribers, scattered all around the globe. May I wish every one of you the very best for 2009.

Contents:

Book reviews

1a) Dietrich Bonhoeffer London 1933-1935
1b) “Ihr Ende schaut an .. “ Evangelische Märtyrer des 20. Jahrhunderts
1c) North European Churches/ European Integration

1a) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, London 1933-1935 English translation, edited by Keith Clements. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 13) Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2007. 524 Pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-8006-8313-9.

The English translation of the seventeen volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings, published in German between 1986 and 1999, proceeds apace. The latest volume to appear is Volume 13, which has been skilfully translated with extra annotations added by the British editor for the benefit of English-speaking readers. It is entitled “London” since it covers the period of Bonhoeffer’s service as pastor of two German-speaking congregations in London during 1933 to 1935. This was in fact a crucial turning point in his career. He was just short of twenty-seven when the Nazis came to power, and when the whole German Protestant community was convulsed and divided along both political and theological lines. At once Bonhoeffer recognized the dangers ahead. He was one of the few. But early on in 1933 he had thrown his support behind those determined to prevent the pro-Nazi faction in the Protestant churches from gaining control of church affairs. He had witnessed with increasing anguish over the summer of 1933 the manipulation of church elections and the apparent victory of the so-called “German Christians”, who sought the whole-scale and willing identification of the Protestant Church with the goals of the Nazi Party.

Bonhoeffer’s decision to apply for the vacant post in London was in one sense a means of distancing himself from the looming church struggle in his homeland. But he certainly did not want to be an exile, or to consider emigrating on a permanent basis. Rather, he saw the posting as an opportunity to arouse concern among his contacts in the wider church world, particularly amongst those engaged in the nascent ecumenical movement. He wanted to inform them of developments in Germany, and to rally their support by making them aware of the errors and indeed heresies being preached by his clerical colleagues. He was convinced that such misguided preaching demonstrated an abandonment of the strict orthodoxy of his Lutheran heritage for the sake of temporary political advantage.

This volume therefore necessarily gives a full account of the German Church Struggle and Bonhoeffer’s continuing engagement in it, often on an almost daily basis by lengthy telephone calls to Berlin, but also by frequent short visits back to Germany. At the same time, this volume also gives details about his running of his two parishes, as well as about his wider involvement in the ecumenical movement. These latter activities culminated in his participation in the 1934 meeting in Fanø, Denmark, which was highly significant in his theological development. In addition, this volume contains the sermons he preached in London. The introduction by Keith Clements gives English-speaking readers a valuable analysis of the origins of the German Church Struggle, which was, at least to begin with, in essence an inner-church conflict over what the nature of the Christian church should be. This reached its apex while Bonhoeffer was abroad in 1934. Because of his absence in London, he was not able to attend the Confessing Church’s formative meeting at Barmen in the Rhineland in May 1934. On that occasion Karl Barth was the principal author of the famous Barmen Declaration, repudiating the claims of the “German Christians” on theological grounds. Bonhoeffer’s comments on that brave statement are highly instructive.

1934 was also the year in which Bonhoeffer began to play a more pivotal role in the ecumenical movement. Despite his young age, his qualifications were considerable. He had already had the advantage of travelling abroad in the immediately previous years. He had served for a year as a curate in the German Church in Barcelona, and then had spent a hugely formative year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where his theological horizons widened rapidly. Here too he gained added fluency in English. Immediately after his return to Berlin in 1931, he had been chosen to go to Cambridge for a conference of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. Here he made such an impression on the older generation of leaders that he was at once recruited to serve as a Youth Secretary of the Alliance, and was given responsibility for promoting its cause among youth throughout central Europe. It was through this work that he first met Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a leading figure in the Ecumenical Council of Life and Work, who was to become so important for Bonhoeffer in the next chapter of his life in England.

Bonhoeffer arrived in London in mid-October 1933, and almost immediately was invited to go down to Chichester for a full discussion of the events unfolding in Germany. This volume gives the background, both in Germany and in England, for such deliberations, of which unfortunately a written record was seldom made. Nevertheless it is clear that Bonhoeffer’s clear and accurate knowledge of the events unfolding in Germany was helpful not only to Bell, but also to his superior, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom Bonhoeffer conferred in March 1934. These church leaders hardly needed to be convinced of the seriousness of the crisis in Germany. The dictatorial steps instituted by the Reich Bishop Müller against his opponents in the Confessing Church seemed to herald the attempt to impose more radical pro-Nazi measures on the whole church. Bonhoeffer of course rightly stressed that such distortions of the universal Christian gospel had to be opposed. But it proved to be an uphill task to mobilize other branches of the church, even in the ecumenical movement, to take action. The official “German Christian” authorities naturally protested against what they considered “unwarranted interference” by such bodies as the Council of Life and Work, led by Bell. Hence difficult and tortuous diplomatic negotiations were called for.

For his part, Bonhoeffer was eager for a strong and open protest. He even refers to the need for an ultimatum, which could be a test of the ecumenical movement’s reality and vitality. In his letters to the Geneva staff of Life and Work, he deplored what he saw as prevarication or vacillation. Instead he wanted the ecumenical community to make up its mind. In April 1934, he wrote: “There is much more at stake here than just personal or administrative difficulties. Christ is looking down at us and asking whether there is anyone left who confesses faith in him” (p. 127).

Naturally he was in favour of Bishop Bell’s Ascension Day message regarding the German Evangelical Church, sent in early May, and advised Bell on how it could be strengthened. In particular the message expressed strong concern about the autocratic measures taken by the Reich Bishop and about the introduction of racial principles in determining the nature of the German Church. Shortly afterwards, the delegates of the various regional branches of the Confessing Church met in Barmen and issued their notable Declaration. This meeting gave added strength to their determination to oppose the unscriptural and indeed heretical attempts to Nazify the Church. One result was the decision to establish the Confessing Church’s own seminaries for theological ordinands, who would thus be rescued from contamination at the state-run university faculties of theology. Bonhoeffer early on came into consideration as the Director for the proposed seminary of the Berlin-Brandenburg Confessing Church – a post he was to assume in the following April. This new development meant that his hope of going out to India to spend time in one of Gandhi’s ashrams to study life together had to be abandoned. But another alternative plan – to start a Protestant monastery inspired by the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount – was in fact to be realized at least in part when he subsequently returned to Germany.

The confrontation between the ecumenical community and the officials of the German Reich Church came to a head in August at the international conference held in Denmark. Actually there were two conferences held simultaneously in the same place. The first was the Youth Conference of the World Alliance with some sixty student members from all parts of the world. Bonhoeffer had taken care to ensure that none of the Germans present supported the “German Christian” position. It was to this gathering that he gave his powerful address in favour of a church-led pacifism and called on the whole Ecumenical Council to unite in proclaiming the peace of Christ against the raging world. It was to be the apogee of his youthful and ardent pacifist idealism. The text is fortunately preserved in full in this volume.

At the same time, the larger conference organised by the Council of Life and Work, saw representatives from the official German Church , attending as duly authorized members, including the head of the Church’s foreign department, Bishop Heckel. As the documents in this volume show, Bonhoeffer had already had his confrontations with Heckel who had tried to use his office’s authority to impose control over and theological views upon the congregations in Britain. Bonhoeffer’s strong resistance against this attempt and his success in gaining the support of Bishop Bell and other leaders of the ecumenical movement now culminated in the Fanø deliberations. Despite Heckel’s vehement objections, the Council was steered by Bell to pass a strong resolution condemning the policies of the “German Christian”-dominated church government. The Council also elected one of the leading figures in the Confessing Church, Karl Koch, to join its ranks, as a strong and public indication of its support. Bonhoeffer left immediately for Germany to inform Koch and his advisors of this support.

Despite these warnings and remonstrances, the “German Christian” campaign to bring all aspects of church life into line with the Nazi ideology, was stepped up in the next few weeks, making much of Hitler’s tactic of theFührerprinzip. Bishops were placed under house arrest, dissident pastors were disciplined, mission work was throttled, and all suggested compromises were denied. In retaliation, Bonhoeffer and his colleagues in Britain resolved to get the support of their congregations to switch their allegiance from the Reich Church to the Confessing Church. Extensive correspondence followed which is reflected in the surviving papers. But how this confession-based transfer could be brought about was still unresolved even after Bonhoeffer was called back to Germany in April 1935 to take up his duties as director of the Confessing Church’s training centre in the remote Pomeranian village of Finkenwalde. Before he left England, he just had time to pay brief visits to three Church of England residential colleges where the ideal of training the future clergy in a monastic setting was still being practised. Some of his correspondence also hints at how this idea grew on him, when he envisaged a community of life together based on the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount

Inevitably, the more personal and spiritual side of Bonhoeffer’s ministry in London is only here hinted at, but the memories of survivors from those days, newly collected in Keith Clements’ appealing and beautifully illustrated memoir, Bonhoeffer and Britain, (reviewed in our Newsletter, October 2006, Vol. XII, no. 10), show that his dedication to his parishioners was much appreciated, as were his thoughtful and often inspiring sermons, several of which are here reprinted in an excellent translation. For a young pastor, who had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday, his achievements in London were to prove formative for his later development. In particular his recognition of the urgency of the Church Struggle, and his determination to reject any form of compromise for the sake of his career, or for nationalist reasons, was to make him a singular figure among his colleagues and age-cohorts. His period in London was to deepen his convictions about the vital need to relate the ethics of the Gospel to the surrounding political events of his day, and if necessary to take up arms against injustice and intimidation. Inspired by the model of the Sermon on the Mount, these were the values he sought to instil in his parishioners and students in the subsequent years. And there can be no doubt that his friendship with Bishop Bell in these few months was one of his most supportive encounters and sustained him until the end. It was to Bishop Bell that he sent his final message from Germany on the day before his execution in Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9th 1945.

“Tell him that with him I believe in the reality of the Christian brotherhood that rises above all national conflicts and interests, and that our victory is certain”.

It was therefore entirely fitting that the first memorial service for Dietrich Bonhoeffer was held in Holy Trinity Church in central London and organized by Bishop Bell only three months later in July 1945. The service was recorded by the BBC and broadcast to Germany. This was how Bonhoeffer’s parents first learnt of his death. Bishop Bell’s sermon recalled: “As one of a noble company of martyrs of differing traditions, he represents both the resistance of the believing soul, in the name of God, to the assault of evil, and also the moral and political revolt of the human conscience against injustice and cruelty.”

It is therefore also fitting that Bonhoeffer is one of the ten Christian martyrs of the twentieth century, whose statues were to be placed on the west portal of Westminster Abbey and unveiled there in the presence of the Queen in July 1998, thus making his connection with London a permanent record of his faithfulness and example of ecumenical fellowship.

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1b) “Ihr Ende Schaut an. . .”. Evangelische Märtyrer des 20. Jahrhunderts, Edited by Harald Schultze and Andreas Kurschat. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2008. 811pp ISBN 978-3-374-02370-7.

This encyclopaedia of German-speaking Protestant martyrs in the twentieth century forms a counterpoint to a similar large-scale compilation published by the German Catholic authorities. The object is to record the names of those Christian witnesses put to death for their faithfulness, both in order to preserve the historical record, and to uphold the ethical impulse these sacrifices can give to later generations. At the same time, these volumes can be seen as a further attempt at coming to terms with Germany’s chequered record during the past century.

This work consists of several hundred short biographical entries, arranged in geographical groupings, such as Germany, the Baltic lands, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and east and south-east Europe. These entries are preceded by two hundred pages of introductory essays, which are valuable in describing the settings in which these martyrs lost their lives.

As is made clear by Professor Harold Schultze, the problem of selection was an ongoing one for the editors. The decision to limit those chosen to members of the German-speaking Evangelical Churches or affiliated communities necessitated drawing boundaries. For example, the numerous martyrs among the Jehovah’s Witnesses were excluded. On the other hand, particular note was made of those who suffered death in the Soviet Union or its satellite territories. And the martyrs who lost their lives while witnessing in the German Democratic Republic, are here included, as are martyrs from the non-established Protestant communities, such as the Mennonites.

How should martyrdom be defined in the present context? Clearly the concept has become widened beyond the early ascriptions to those who confessed their faith publicly and were burnt at the stake. In the twentieth century, both the methods of persecution became more varied, but so did the motives of the persecuted. In many – possibly in most – cases, political and social motives went hand in hand with religious convictions to spur individuals to take up resistance against tyranny of various kinds. It is often impossible to try and prioritize such impulses, but the editors have struggled to find the attestation of Christian witness before the individual was included. Certainly they have sought to avoid honouring only the clergy or office holders in the church. In the wake of the overthrow of the Nazi regime, strenuous efforts were made commemorate those men and women murdered at the hands of the Gestapo or SS, especially those involved in the fatal Putsch of 20 July 1944, whose victims indeed became the best known in this group of Protestant martyrs.

But as this case demonstrates, the mixed religious and political motives of these men and women, and in some cases their previous adherence to or support of the Nazi regime, caused highly ambivalent reactions. The famous Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was for many years regarded with aversion, even in his own church, because he had challenged the long-held Lutheran tradition of obedience to established authority, and had even conspired to assassinate the head of state. Only when the political climate changed, and the majority of Protestants acknowledged their previous complicity with the criminal Nazi regime, was due recognition awarded to Bonhoeffer and his companions. For the same reason, an increased readiness was found to widen the definition of martyrdom so that many of the victims of political repression could be included, even though some explicit Christian witness or conviction was needed in order to be mentioned in this compilation.

At the same time, numerous physical memorials to these martyrs have been built in Germany, not only for Protestants. Particularly such striking monuments as the Holocaust Memorial in central Berlin gave added impetus to the commemoration of these martyrs. Such architectural structures, however, naturally lack the detail of the individual’s service or contribution. So such undertakings as this encyclopaedia provide a valuable and necessary addition, and will help to ensure that the names of murdered and oppressed individuals and their specific witness will not be forgotten or erased with the passing of time.

Of course, commemoration of contemporary martyrs raises troubling questions for the ir surviving successors. Why were they so few? And why did their examples not lead to much wider movements to resist the tyranny of which they were the victims? The silent majority which failed to follow them stood and still stands accused. But at least younger generations are now being enabled through such books as this volume to look at the painful and also terrifying experiences of these martyrs, and hopefully to determine not to allow such circumstances to recur.

While the heuristic value of this volume for German-speaking readers and congregations can be taken fro granted, the historian has also to consider wider issues. Particularly, in the history of the Soviet Union, it seems somewhat one-sided to focus only on the Protestant victims of Stalin’s despotism. Many thousands of other Russian Christians suffered martyrdom, and whole populations were starved to death through famine, or worked to death in the notorious Gulag camps. Should these not also be remembered? And even more controversially, questions have to be asked about those German-speaking Protestants who served in Hitler’s armies, whose ruthless atrocities contributed to the deaths of so many civilians, including Jews. Even after sixty or more years, Germans, including Protestants, have much to contemplate with penitence in the history of their impact on eastern Europe. Remembering the sufferings of these martyrs is only one stage; it needs to be accompanied by a much more comprehensive reckoning, which takes account of the behaviour of the church as a whole. Only thus will the danger of self-justification or self-glorification be avoided. Martyrs must not become an alibi, but rather an abiding witness to a higher standard of Christian discipleship.

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1c) Hugh McLeod, Risto Saarinen, Aila Lauha, North European Churches. From the Cold War to Globalization. Tampere, Finland: Church Research Institute, 2006. 135 pp. ISBN 951-693-270-3

Edited by Lucia Faltin and Melanie J.Wright, The Religious Roots of Contemporary European Identity. London: Continuum 2007. 230 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9482-5

For the past sixty years, the European churches have been attempting to restore and reconstruct the moral and spiritual values of their civil society, which was so ruthlessly and destructively torn apart by the totalitarian powers, first by Nazi Germany and subsequently by Soviet Communism. In the southern lands, around the Mediterranean, this task was taken up principally by the Roman Catholic Church. But in northern Europe, as outlined in the first of these new books, especially in the region of Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic lands, it has fallen to the Protestant churches to tackle this issue. They have attempted to create a new climate of interaction between politics and religious communities in the search for viable and constructive patterns of political behaviour based on the ideals of peace, justice and the preservation of creation. They have sought to encourage the development of international institutions, in particular the fostering of post-war European political integration. This short book, co-authored by three distinguished church historians, one British and two Finnish, describes this process from a variety of national perspectives. With funding provided by the European Union, this team of historians was asked to study the political role of churches in Europe and their impact on the far-reaching project for European integration.

Given the often traumatic experiences suffered by the churches in the course of the twentieth century, some of them self-inflicted, the task of finding common ground on which to unite in binding up the wounds of war and political violence has not been easy. These Protestant churches were all closely attached to their own nations, often established as part of the national institutional structures, and saw themselves as central components of the national identity. Only a few far-sighted churchmen recognized the need to embrace new concepts of pan-European coexistence, while relegating to a back burner the supposedly glorious achievements of their own national pasts. For this purpose the nascent ecumenical movement, born after the first world war, was a valuable training ground. In Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the most notable theologian to expound such views, but he remained a lone and even suspect figure. In Britain, Bishop George Bell, and in Geneva, the Dutch General Secretary of the World Council of Churches after 1948, Visser ‘t Hooft, were similarly advocates of the new proposals for overcoming national rivalries through some form of European integration. But, on the other hand, the anguish caused by the second world war’s disasters, not only destroyed the rather naive idealism of the ecumenical movement’s founders, but also increased the influence of those who followed Karl Barth in believing that any human political institution would be bound to fail. The Church was instead called to be a prophetic voice of healthy criticism towards all worldly rulers and to throw its support decidedly behind the poor and oppressed, the victims of misused power. In the 1950s and 1960s this witness was to become particularly notable in the Third World, where the World Council aspired to become “the voice of the voiceless”.

But in Europe, even though these Protestant ecumenists thought a lot about Europe and its future, it was the Catholics who took the initiative after 1945. Largely due to Pope Pius XII, Catholics were encouraged to look for a restoration of a Christian Europe and to promote Christian cultural values. They therefore gave their support to such initiatives as the founding of the Council of Europe, which provided the ideological, background for the political moves resulting in the creation of the Common Market and subsequent developments in the economic sphere. These led successfully to the closer merging of western Europe, and were to form a model for its later expansion.
But some Protestants remained sceptical. They disliked seeing the notion of western European integration being subordinate to American-led Cold War politics. They suspected Catholic intentions in any new structures. In the Nordic countries, too, longstanding antipathies towards Catholicism were reinforced by their strongly Protestant heritage and equally strong Social Democratic political traditions. In Germany, the most notable Protestant church leader, Martin Niemöller, spoke scathingly of his West German government’s policy as being “conceived in the Vatican and born in Washington”. In such circles, the image of “Europe” was repeatedly portrayed as “capitalistic, conservative, corrupt and Catholic”.

Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, the obvious success of the European Economic Community led to a Protestant re-evaluation. Its institutions, and a more integrated European nucleus, now seemed to be an effective force for the defence of peace, security and human rights. The warmer ecumenical climate induced by the Second Vatican Council and the less rigidly dogmatic conservatism adopted by Catholics also encouraged more collaboration in pro-European initiatives. One offshoot was the founding of the Conference of European Churches which linked all denominations across the Iron Curtain in a sincere attempt to defuse the hostilities of earlier years, and encouraged a consciousness of pan-Europeanism. Another formative influence was the election to the papacy of the Polish Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian in centuries. His influence extended Catholic horizons in their understanding of a new European synthesis.

Historians are still in dispute as to how far religion, especially the Christian churches, was significant in bringing about the revolutionary events which swept over eastern Europe in 1989. But there can be no doubt that participation in religious rituals provided some of the strength for protest groups to combine and mobilize their forces against the totalitarian state’s ubiquitous control. Church members also played a highly important role in preparing the ground for new beginnings, including the proposals for becoming integrated with the successful economies of western Europe. The churches often provided a source of alternative values to those so long upheld by the previous communist rulers. In Russia, for example, the Orthodox Church was the principal link to the nation’s earlier history and culture.

In the 1990s and after the turn of the century, it became the turn of the Catholic Church to try and set the course of European integration along Christian lines. The specific proposal was to write a constitution for the whole European Union, which would explicitly spell out its Christian identity. In 2001 the Conference of European Churches and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Europe published a text which affirmed their willingness to participate in the building of Europe, and stated their conviction ”that the spiritual heritage of Christianity constitutes an empowering source of inspiration and enrichment for Europe”. Such a plan however ran into strong opposition. Not only was this seen as a clearly unilateral move designed to stigmatize other religions, such as Judaism or Islam, but it evoked the spectre of a revived and triumphalist Catholicism of earlier centuries. Even whether God should be mentioned in the proposed constitution was a source of discord. Catholics regarded such a statement as a very important reminder of the cultural roots and commitments of Europe. The eventual denial of this suggestion was deeply disappointing to the Vatican.

In the wider setting, this raised the heart-searching question of whether Europe had a soul, and if so what kind of a soul it was. Some European leaders believed that after the era of godless totalitarianism, the European Union needed a spiritual as well as a political and economic base. But with the incorporation of most European countries west of Russia, the demographic pattern was clearly pluralistic. And although the Christian churches were still powerful and influential institutions, they no longer held a monopoly. There were a rising number of alternatives to Christianity. Since 2001 however, there has undoubtedly been a rise in Islamophobia, which has been sufficiently strong so far to bar the possibility of Turkey joining the European Union. The process of European integration is still in progress, and it remains to be seen whether the religious factor or the attitudes of Christian churches will continue to be a significant contributor to the new patterns of political and social collaboration. The history of religious divisions in Europe is a long and often sad chapter. Has the time at last come when these faiths can decide to live in peace and mutual respect with each other?

The editors of the second book under review both teach at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge. The essays they have collected are written by scholars from different parts of Europe from a wide variety of perspectives, and range over different historical eras. Particularly helpful are the essays analysing conditions in the newly-liberated countries of eastern Europe. But they all seek to analyse the presence of religion in the development of national and continental identities, the manifestation of religion in secular society, and the role of religion in further European integration.

In the fifty years since the Treaty of Rome was signed to establish the initial cooperative measures for anew Europe, the hall-mark of such steps was pragmatism. Economic cooperation was dictated by the need to repair the destruction of the second world war, while political cooperation was prompted by the need for adequate barriers against the Communist threat. But such measures were not defended from any openly-adopted ideological stance. To be sure, the early founders of this movement were clearly aware that the traditional religious physiognomy of Europe is Christianity. But the recent experience of Nazi and Fascist ideological fanaticisms and their consequences deterred the repetition of any such far-flung rhetoric. Europe`s Christian roots were silently acknowledged, but the whole emphasis was on practical matters. At the same time, it was recognized that the sad history of Christian divisions would make impossible any attempt to synthesize some form of European identity out of such a history. Nor was it attempted. Indeed the expectation of many of Europe`s leaders was that the religious factor would soon enough be relegated to the past, or to the less controversial spheres of private life.

But with the addition of so many new members, especially those without the kind of secular traditions fostered in parts of western Europe, and with the question posed as to whether Turkey, as an Islamic state, should be invited to join, the religious issues have moved to the forefront again. Can a European identity be forged on a purely secular basis or not? Already, as can be seen over the question of inter-European immigration, questions of identity, either national or international, are continually raised. The members of the Union have adopted differing answers, some preferring a multicultural stance, others an assimilationist approach. With regard to the presence of so many Muslims in Europe today, we should perhaps note the view of one contributor, Sara Silvestri, who points out that at one period of European history, the late Middle Ages, a peaceful cohabitation and fertile interaction with Islam was both possible and practised, especially in Spain. On the other hand, she is also right that present-day Islam poses serious challenges to Europe, and shows how the legacy of European, and Christian, intolerance produced the failure of relationships which makes political as well as personal integration all the more difficult. Or, as Paul Kerry concludes in his essay: “ Just as the European experience includes multiple motivations and aspirations. . . so the recognition of this variety will allow for richer more thoughtful dialogue between those discussing the religious roots of contemporary European identity”.

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With warmest regards to you all,
John Conway

November 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

November 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 11

Dear Friends,

This month marks the seventieth anniversary of the scandalous Nazi atrocity against the Jewish people, commonly known as the Crystal Night pogrom, during which the churches‚ failure to stand by the persecuted victims was notable, and is today seen as a symptom of their larger failure to oppose the whole Nazi system of ideological fanaticism and political oppression. But a few lone voices did protest. It is therefore perhaps fitting that this month’s reviews should be about the few courageous individuals who stood against the main stream, such as Elisabeth Schmitz, Eberhard Arnold and Pastor Paul Schneider.. Also that we should draw your attention to a new book about the striking movement in the German Evangelical Church after the war, which explicitly saw its Christian mission to bring reconciliation and repentance from Germany to the victims.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) ed. M. Gailus, Elisabeth Schmitz
b) H. Brinkmann, God’s Ambassador. The Bruderhof in Nazi Germany
c) R. Wentorf, Paul Schneider
d) G. Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen. Friedensdienst

2) Memorial Tribute to Bishop Bell by Bishop Huber of Berlin

3) Book notes,

a) Blues Music and the Gospel Proclamation
b) Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania

4) Journal issue: Religion, State and Society

1a) Ed. M .Gailus, Elisabeth Schmitz und ihre Denkschrift gegen die Judenverfolgung. Konturen einer vergessenen Biographie (1893-1977). Berlin: Wichern Verlag 2008 ISBN 978-3-88981-213-8. 230 Pp.

Heroines are seldom found in the story of the Protestant Church Struggle against National Socialism. Very probably, this is because the history was written entirely by men. But now, recognition is being given to one woman, Dr Elisabeth Schmitz, for a small but striking contribution, which was alas! ignored at the time and forgotten ever since. In 1935 she had the courage to challenge the members of her Confessing Church, led by such men as Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, to face up the Nazis‚ increasingly violent persecution of Germany’s Jews. The Memorandum she produced for the 1935 Synod was a model of clarity and foresight, which accurately predicted the likely fate of the Jewish minority in Germany. At the same time, she called on the Church to stand by its responsibility to defend the most threatened members of society, and to protest against the criminal discrimination being practised by the Nazi government.

Such a stance was highly unpopular. Only a few colleagues in the Confessing Church shared Dr Schmitz’s views. The fact that the Memorandum was put forward by a lay woman, who held no office in the Church, cannot have enhanced her cause. It was a sign of how far Nazi propaganda had already affected church ministers that, even in 1935, the majority of the responsible pastors were averse to giving any support to Jews, or at least reluctant to show any hostility to the now increasingly popular Nazi government.

Who was Elisabeth Schmitz? These essays, written for a 2007 conference, (briefly described in a German report in our Newsletter for September 2007) provide a succinct account of her career as a school mistress, trained under such distinguished scholars as Adolf von Harnack and Friedrich Meinecke. Since women were not allowed to be ordained at that time in the Evangelical Church, she went on to teach both religion and history to senior girls in high school. Her disposition was reserved, conscientious and highly upright in the German Protestant tradition. When convinced of the correctness of her views, she could be inflexible and determined. She refused to allow her independence of mind to be compromised for the sake of personal or political advantage. With such high intellectual and moral standards, she was naturally appalled by the fanatical tone of the Nazis‚ anti-Semitic tirades, as displayed in the press, the radio and party rallies. These contradicted her sense of order, truthfulness and human compassion. These propaganda attacks and attendant violence were totally antithetical to the values she tried to teach her students. She was inspired to make her early protest particularly by the fact that a close friend of Jewish origins had been dismissed from her medical practice. Elisabeth Schmitz offered her help and hospitality, and was subsequently denounced to the Gestapo for sharing her living quarters with as member of the despised race. This accumulated poisonous atmosphere, culminating in the Crystal Night pogrom of November 1938, led to Elisabeth Schmitz’s determination to give up her teaching position, since she could no longer in conscience teach as the Nazis ordered. Fortunately she was allowed to take early retirement, and returned to teaching after the war was over.

At the time she prepared her Memorandum on behalf of the Jews in the summer of 1935, the situation of the Protestant churches, and the Confessing Church in particular, was acutely critical. The Nazis had just appointed a new Minister for Church Affairs, and threatened to seize control of church administrations. Invective and propaganda attacks against the churches, as agents of World Jewry, were increasingly common and virulent, especially in the pages of Der Stürmer, the radical newspaper distributed nation-wide by the Nazi party agencies.

Most of the conservative clergy, especially the church leaders, while deploring the extremism of Der Stürmer, sought to prove their national loyalty. None wanted an open conflict with the state, particularly not on such a unpopular and touchy subject as the treatment of the Jews. It was therefore hardly surprising that Elisabeth Schmitz’s Memorandum was not debated at the 1935 Synod meeting. Only a half-hearted resolution was passed, affirming the universal duty of the Church to offer baptism to all, regardless of race. By ignoring the wider issue of the human rights of the Jews in Germany, the Confessing Church was able to avoid the possibility of being suppressed by the Gestapo. It was a Pyrrhic victory.

Three years later, at the time of the November 1938 pogrom, Schmitz repeated her challenge. She wrote a strong letter to Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, who was in charge of Berlin’s most prominent church in Dahlem, after the arrest and imprisonment of Pastor Martin Niemöller. In this letter she called for the mobilization of church opinion to protest against the wanton violence against the Jews, suggested that church space be made available for the orphaned or burnt-out Jewish congregations, and urged that monetary collections be taken up to alleviate Jewish suffering. None of this happened.

The text of Schmitz’s Memorandum is here printed in full, along with a postscript written some months later. Since most of the information came from the public press, it does not reveal anything new about the Nazis‚ anti-Semitic campaign. Rather, its value today consists in showing how much an engaged witness could know about the extent of the violence, hatred, intimidation and discrimination practised against the Jewish minority, and about the dire consequences being felt by these victims. It is imbued with a strong sense of indignation at the injustices being inflicted, and an equal sense of frustration that the churches failed to take timely action to put a spoke in the wheel of such outrageous activities.

This collection of essays, ably edited by Professor Manfred Gailus, is a heart-warming, if belated, tribute. But it hardly explains why Schmitz’s contribution was for so long forgotten, or even incorrectly attributed to others. Gailus suggests some of the relevant factors, but the mystery remains. It is possibly all part of that painful and reluctant process of coming to terms with the past on the part of the German Protestant Church. It is also part of the process of trying to forge a new and better relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. It is therefore good that we can now hear the pioneering but lonely voice of this courageous lay woman, Elisabeth Schmitz.

It is equally welcome news that an American filmmaker, Steven Martin, has now compiled a documentary DVD film, entitled Elisabeth of Berlin, which will shortly become available for distribution. This 60-minute English-language documentary, fills in the background of Schmitz‚ protests. Archival footage of the Crystal Night is linked to the feelings of outrage shared by such people as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmut Gollwitzer. The English commentary is excellently supplied by Professor David Gushee, Martin Greschat and Andreas Pangritz. An eye-witness from those days, Rudolf Weckerling, now in his 90s, makes forthrightly apt comments, and the documentary is knit together by Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin. Steve Martin tells me that he is now available to show this film to interested groups or churches. Contact Vital Visions, 171a Mitchell Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, USA.

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1b) Hugo Brinkmann, God’s Ambassadors. The Bruderhof in Nazi Germany. Farmington, Pennsylvania, Robertsbridge, Sussex, England: Plough Publishing House. 2001.

Five hundred years ago, Jakob Hutter, a German Anabaptist, called on his disciples to follow the pattern of communal life described in the Acts of the Apostles, renouncing both violence and private property. These Hutterites were persecuted for their pious nonconformity and exiled. Eventually and much later, a few managed to establish colonies in remote rural areas of the United States and Canada, where they still survive.

In Germany, after the disastrous defeats of 1918, a lone but courageous and charismatic preacher, Eberhard Arnold, decided to revitalize Hutter’s ideas. He managed to establish a community, or Bruderhof, on a piece of run-down farmland in the hilly area of central Germany, near Fulda. His inspiring evangelical leadership attracted young idealists, longing to escape from the sinful world of war and capitalism, and including a number of young pacifists from Switzerland, Holland and Sweden. They eked out a living by looking after children in need, referred to them by the local authorities, or by peddling their handicrafts.

Arnold was well aware that such a ministry was both daunting and even dangerous. As he said: “To be an ambassador is something tremendous. It seems that we are nothing at all except what the King of God’s Kingdom would have us do. When we take this service upon us, we enter into mortal danger”.

This prediction was soon enough fulfilled after the Nazis took power in 1933. The Bruderhof aroused suspicion that it was a communist cell, and its declared pacifism antagonised its neighbours. Arnold’s open refusal to support the Nazis’ rearmament programme, and his declared opposition to the hate-filled antisemitism of the new regime, only led to open hostility. In November 1933, when he refused to endorse the national plebiscite requiring undying loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the result was predictable. A gang of Nazi thugs descended on the Bruderhof, searching everywhere for seditious literature or hidden armaments. By 1934 their school was forcibly closed, the foster-children’s support was cut off, their charitable status was revoked, and their assistance to homeless vagrants declared to be a menace to public order. Their economy was throttled. They were forced to evacuate their children to an Alpine refuge in Lichtenstein lest they be forcibly placed in a Nazified school.

Arnold’s apocalyptic theology had always led him to expect persecution, although he maintained a loyal attitude towards the state and its rulers. But he and his followers would not compromise on their basic beliefs. So inevitably tension rose steadily. Luckily he managed to preserve many of his sermons, addresses and letters to his supporters. These form the basis of this account, written by Hugo Brinkmann, of the Bruderhof’s sufferings at the hands of the Nazis. They have been excellently translated and published in a very small edition for an English audience by his American followers, Art and Mary Wiser, of Ulster Park, New York.

As the Nazis’ pressure on the churches to conform increased, the pastors and congregations were more and more caught in a clash of loyalties between their faith and their nation. For his part, Arnold fully shared Luther’s view of the two kingdoms: the state existed to control evil, if necessary by force; but the Church is within the sphere of absolute love. It must proclaim the spirit of unity and purity, but could have no truck with heathen Nazism.

This incompatibility became even clearer in March 1935 when Adolf Hitler reintroduced compulsory military service for all young men. In the Bruderhof, the memory of the earlier Hutterites’ sufferings for the cause of peace was evoked vividly. All the affected youth left at once for Lichtenstein, and were replaced by foreign nationals. But the Bruderhof’s prophetic witness to the power of Christian love and the need for non-violence and social justice was overwhelmed by the Nazis’ militaristic propaganda and preparations for a future war. The subsequent proclamation of the Nuremberg racial laws only increased Arnold’s sense of impending doom and disaster. And the community’s future was also imperilled by the lack of funds, the blatant hostility of the local authorities and its neighbours, and even by the failure of some of its members to live up to Arnold’s spiritual expectations.

In November 1935, Eberhard Arnold died in hospital after a botched operation to mend a broken legbone. A few months later Arnold’s successors decided to move the Bruderhof from both Germany and Lichtenstein to England. Although penniless, they were able to rent a farm property in the Cotswolds, and start all over again. Luckily the British authorities granted them refugee status and the Quakers came to their financial rescue. However, even in England, resentment and hostility against this tiny band of God’s ambassadors was evident. As the threatening clouds of war gathered, this group of Germans, pacifists and exiles was often isolated or at least cold-shouldered.

In Germany, in April 1937, by order of the Gestapo, the Bruderhof’s farm was compulsorily confiscated and the community dissolved. The few remaining members were expelled under guard, apart from three men detained in prison for alleged fraud. They were finally, after several months, released and packed off to Britain. The story of their escape to freedom makes a fitting close to this lively account of Hutterite obedience to the faith they had received and the sufferings they endured as a consequence.

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1c) Rudolf Wentorf, Paul Schneider, Witness of Buchenwald, translated by Daniel Bloesch. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing 2008. 401 Pp. ISBN 978-1-57383-417-9.

Pastor Paul Schneider was murdered by the guards in Buchenwald concentration camp in July 1939. Subsequently he became commemorated as the first martyr of the German Evangelical Church to die at the hands of the Nazis. After the war his widow published a moving and widely read memoir, Der Prediger von Buchenwald, translated into English in an abbreviated version by Edwin Robertson in 1956. Luckily a much fuller biography was later published in Germany by Rudolf Wentorf, which included an almost day-to -day account of Schneider’s valiant and persistent defiance of the Gestapo and other Nazi agencies. Thanks to his assiduous research in police, state and church archives, Wentorf is able to reproduce contemporary documents which outline the Nazi tactics to get rid of this unwanted challenger to their supremacy. Schneider was a simple Rhineland pastor, who early on raised the flag of alarm at the readiness of his colleagues and parishioners to compromise with the ideological heresies of Nazism. From 1933 onwards Schneider’s steadfastness in defence of the Gospel, and his refusal to accept any deviance, was taken as a dangerous political protest by the local Nazi authorities. In fact, Schneider belonged to the wing of the Confessing Church which was largely apolitical, but staunchly dedicated to the truth upheld in the Church’s tradition. By 1937 his controversial stance, and the denunciation of some of his parishioners, had led the Gestapo to order his eviction from his parish. But he refused to leave, and, even when expelled forcibly, returned to his pastoral charge in order to fulfil his God-given responsibilities. The result was that in November 1937 he was sent to Buchenwald and placed in solitary confinement. But he there maintained his faithful witness by shouting out his prayers and sermons to any who could hear, and thus earned the description of the Pastor of Buchenwald.

It is therefore very welcome that Wentorf’s biography has now been republished for the first time in English by Regent College Publications, Vancouver, in an excellent translation by Daniel Bloesch. This makes available to a wider audience the story of Schneider’s resistance to the subtle and relentless pressure to conform imposed by the Nazis, as well as the horrendous stages of persecution which eventually led to his death. Though not as well known as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider’s faithfulness will remain highly significant for all those who seek to learn from the lessons of Nazi Germany for the life and witness of the Church.

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1d) Gabriele Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen. Friedensdienst. Aber man kann es einfach machen. Göttingen: Lamuv Verlag 2008. 371 Pp. ISBN 978-3-88977-684-6

In 1945 only a handful of Germans was prepared to come to terms with the atrocities, violence and mass murders committed by their Nazi rulers in the preceding years, or to face up to their own collaboration and complicity. One of them was Pastor Martin Niemöller, newly released from eight years in concentration camps, who called his colleagues and parishioners to a mission of repentance. He became highly unpopular. And the 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, of which he was a principal author, likewise aroused negative feelings among many churchmen. The vast majority of Germans took refuge in a blanket amnesia, looked for convenient alibis, and concealed their own participation in Nazi crimes.

It was therefore many years before the full extent of the German criminal activities, especially in Eastern Europe, became known, or the consequences recognized. Only then could more positive measures begin, seeking to restore Germany’s moral reputation. One of those most actively involved was Lothar Kreyssig, whose Christian motivation led him to seek reparation for the victims of German warfare and bloodshed. He was a Saxon provincial judge, and very active in church work. By the 1950s he had been elected as President of the German Evangelical Church’s National Synod, and was thus an influential member of the church hierarchy.

In 1958 he introduced a resolution calling on the Synod to support a programme whereby young Germans would spend a year in restoration work on behalf of the Nazis‚ victims, especially in Poland, the Soviet Union and the newly-established State of Israel. For Kreyssig, this was far more than a gesture of humanitarian goodwill. Rather it was to be a dedicated mission of reparation and reconciliation by which at least some practical measures of Christian solidarity could be expressed, especially across international borders. Too often after 1945 Germans had focussed attention on their own sufferings, and had ignored those they had inflicted on foreigners. Kreyssig was determined to put this right. He was particularly concerned to attack the self-righteousness of many Germans who had turned a blind eye to the Nazis‚ crimes. Even those who now claimed they had opposed Nazism all along should remember that they had not done enough to prevent these disasters in the first place.

This moral urge for reconciliation led Kreyssig to launch his idealistic scheme and to recruit a small band of self-conscious Christians to undertake works of practical service for the survivors in the victims‚ homelands. Only such concrete activist experiences could carry credibility, and also avoid any pretence at self-congratulation. Only thus could Germany’s moral reputation be restored, and the past crimes finally be atoned for.

Naturally such an endeavour met with bureaucratic difficulties, particularly from the communist countries, including Kreyssig’s own East German authorities, who suspected the intentions of such an explicitly Christian group. A more favourable response came from ecumenical partners in both Holland and Norway. The first group of volunteers went in August 1959 to northern Norway to construct a home for the mentally and physically handicapped. These first ventures were spontaneous but ill-prepared. Not enough care had been taken to ensure that the projects were feasible, or could be executed by well-meaning but ill-trained German youth. Too little contact had been established with the local authorities, both secular and church. There were the usual language difficulties, and personality clashes. But above all, these young people only partially caught on to Kreyssig’s vision of making them ambassadors of expiation, bearing the burden of Germany’s guilt. Many of these young people were not too enamoured of the explicit piety, with morning devotions, bible study, and evening worship, which were built into the programme. And as the years went by, it was increasingly difficult for these youngsters to feel a sense of remorse for crimes committed before they were born, and for which they felt no responsibility. Many, in fact, would cheerfully have undertaken the same kind of relief work if under secular auspices. In the long run Kreyssig’s hopes for a reinvigoration of dedicated churchmanship had to be laid aside. As Ms Kammerer notes, this German venture came to resemble other similar youth programmes such as the American Peace Corps or the British Voluntary Service Overseas, whereby the motive of reparation was replaced by reconstruction.

Inevitably Aktion Sühnezeichen was caught up in the polemics and politics of the Cold War. Kreyssig’s aim was to have his young helpers, recruited from both east and west, make a common witness for peace and reconciliation across the Iron Curtain. This hope was thwarted by the politicians. The East German teams were refused exit visas even to neighbouring Poland. Likewise the deep-rooted antagonisms between Germans and Poles, even in the churches, were not easily surmounted. The first Sühnezeichen group to undertake work in Auschwitz had to travel there individually and unobtrusively by bicycle. Their work of reconciliation in this camp was a small contribution towards changing the poisoned atmosphere in both church and politics. But it was still many years before similar resentments at home in Germany were overcome. Too often these small acts of Christian witness were attacked as “befouling their own nest” or “capitulating to the communists”. And the fact that Kreyssig and his staff were based in East Berlin, and hence, after 1961, unable to visit the projects undertaken by his West German supporters, only made for unavoidable tensions. In 1968 the first work-camp in the notorious Czech fortress of Theresientstadt was cut short by the invading Soviet troops. The message of reconciliation and peace seemed threatened by overwhelming political forces, even though now more than ever necessary.

The 1970s were a period of sobering reassessment. In East Germany Aktion Sühnezeichen was hobbled by the communist authorities, and its activities increasingly watched by the Stasi. Emphasis was placed on local work on behalf of the mentally or physically handicapped, on repair of Jewish cemeteries, or on pilgrimages to former concentration camps. In the western half of the country, greater freedom existed to promote the Aktion’s peace work. But it still aroused opposition from conservative circles. Only in the 1980s did the international consensus move towards support for peace through disarmament. But criticism also came from the Aktion’s own participants. Why did so many of these social action projects seemingly prop up the status quo, instead of radically altering the corrupting social structure? Why were the founder’s pious ideals not turned into prophetic political witness? Too often, it seemed Realpolitik guided the organization.

But the call of peace through reconciliation was too important to be abandoned. And in the 1980s new horizons opened up. In West Germany, Aktion joined with other peace groups to oppose NATO’s military policies; in East Germany, many Aktion participants were to be found in the peace groups which sprang up in local Protestant churches, and which eventually grew to be a significant political force. The overthrow of the communist regime in 1989 broke all previous patterns. After the 1990 reunification of the whole country, Aktion’s call for reconciliation was much needed, especially in the controversial union of the agency’s east and west branches. Its overseas projects were to be expanded into thirteen different countries, usually with the support of local governments and churches. But Christian solidarity with the victims of war and violence is still the group’s hallmark.

Gabriele Kammerer’s well-researched and incisively written account of the organization’s fifty years is amplified by a number of well-chosen photographs, identifying the individuals and projects involved. It is much to be hoped that an English translation could be produced, since the story of this courageous German agency for reconciliation and peace deserves to be widely known as an example for others.

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2) Memorial Tribute to Bishop Bell

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bishop George Bell of Chichester, the following tribute was written by the German Evangelical Church’s Presiding Bishop, Wolfgang Huber of Berlin:

“Your work will never be forgotten in the history of the German Church”. This was the view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing to his friend George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester in England in 1937. He had good reasons for such praise. No other foreign church leader had shown such a friendly and intensive, yet at times critical interest in the fate of the churches and of the Christians in Germany as had George Bell. He was a valiant campaigner for peace and truth, and did not hesitate to lend the authority of his office and personality to his convictions, including matters in the political sphere. He died on October 3rd fifty years ago – a very proper cause for remembrance.

George K.A. Bell was born on February 4th 1883, the son of a clergyman. After studying theology, he served for three years as a curate in the slums of Leeds. Then came several years as Chaplain and Tutor in Oxford until 1914 when he became the private secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was given the special responsibility for international and inter-church relations. During the first world war he was much engaged in interdenominational action on behalf of the war orphans, and then – together with Archbishop Nathan Soderblom of Uppsala, Sweden – was active in organising the exchange of prisoners-of-war. These experiences led Bell, after the war, to become a champion of collaboration with the Lutheran churches, a strong advocate of the nascent ecumenical movement, and an organiser of international theological exchanges. In 1929 he was appointed Bishop of Chichester, and also from 1932 to 1934 he was President of “Life and Work”, one of the main branches of the new ecumenical movement.

The Bishop of Chichester took an active interest in the German Church Struggle from the beginning. In April 1933 he expressed publicly the ecumenical movement’s concern about the early stages of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany. In September he circulated a strong resolution against the introduction of the so-called Aryan Paragraph, discriminating against Jews, and its adoption by sections of the German Evangelical Church. He first met Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a conference in 1931, and when Bonhoeffer became Pastor for the German Churches in London in 1933, the two men developed a strong and trusting relationship. Bonhoeffer was in fact Bell’s principal source of information about events developing in Germany. For his part, Bell was assiduous in bringing this information to a wider British public, particularly through his frequent letters to the main newspaper The Times. In contrast to some sections of British public opinion and also some leading members of the Church of England, Bell took a strong stand from 1933 onwards in support of the Confessing Church in its struggle, and against all forms of fascism.

Early on, he began to organize measures to assist refugees from Germany. After he became a member of the House of Lords in 1937, he continually urged the British Government to give increased support for such persecuted people. It is possible to suppose that his timely reporting to the British public about the arrest and trial of Martin Niemöller prevented the latter’s murder in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

When the second world war broke out, Bell threw himself into activities designed to help the refugees fleeing the continent, and also the resident Germans interned in England, as well as for British conscientious objectors. Bell was no pacifist, but he decisively and publicly repudiated the tactic of area bombing of German towns, through his passionate speeches in the House of Lords. These speeches were a direct challenge to the British Government and to large sections of public opinion. It was a sign of Bell’s courage and moral determination that he was not deterred to state his opinions and take such an unpopular stand.

George Bell was one of the decisive figures in the post-1945 world who enabled the German churches to return to the ecumenical family. He was one of the first to go back to Germany in 1945 to show his friendship for those “true” Germans who had survived. He gave a most moving sermon in a church service in the heavily bombed Marienkirche in Berlin, and was clearly deeply moved to see the conditions of the refugees crowding the platforms of the Lehrter Station in Berlin. Only two months after the war’s end, he organized a Thanksgiving Service in memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Holy Trinity Church, London. On this occasion he recounted to the congregation Bonhoeffer’s last message to his English friend: “Tell the Bishop that this is for me the end, but also the beginning of a new life. I believe with him in our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests”.

3a) Book note

Dick Pierard draws attention to a new book which he, together with Edwin Arnold at Clemson University, South Carolina, has translated and edited: Theo Lehmann, Blues Music and Gospel Proclamation. The Extraordinary Life of a Courageous East German Pastor, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008. Born in 1934 and son of a distinguished German missiologist, Lehmann studied theology, was ordained and served as a pastor in a congregation in Chemnitz (then Karl-Marx-Stadt) of the Landeskirche of Saxony. An unabashed confessionalist, he also became a youth evangelist and incurred the constant wrath and surveillance of the State. Since reunification, he continues to work as an evangelist throughout Germany. His great interest in life is actually American black music – Negro spirituals, blues and jazz, and he published several things in the GDR on this topic, including a doctoral dissertation at Halle, “Negro Spirituals: Geschichte und Theologie,” which was then reprinted after reunification. His memoir, Freiheit wird dann sein: Aus meinem Leben, has sold widely in Germany. He is not shy of controversy and may not suit all opinions. But well worth reading.

CharRichP@aol.com

3b) L Stan and L.Turcescu, Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania, Oxford 2007. This husband and wife team of Romanian scholars, now both teaching in Canada, provides a useful survey of events in the religious sphere in Romania since the fall of its despotic, manic dictatorship in 1989. Romanians have been obliged to rethink and reshape all their public institutions so the churches have been engaged in what has proved to be a difficult struggle for self-identification and definition. The plurality of church life has been a barrier in the way of the Romanian Orthodox Church’s attempt to reclaim its position as the “national” or established church, and the legacy of its former subservience to the Communist regime still poisons relationships. Disputes over the property of other church bodies such as the long-forbidden Greek Catholics, have only made Romanian church life more complex and unsettled. Doubts remain about the Orthodox Church’s support for a democratic political society, as with its strong opposition to Romania’s joining the European Union, and its tactics in matters of education and morality give rise for concern.

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4) Journal Issue: Religion, State and Society, Vol. 36, no. 3, September 2008 is devoted to six articles on the relations between religion and law in various settings, viz. The European Court of Human Rights, Bulgaria, Post-Communist Russia and Hungary, Spain, Australia and the Middle East. These papers deal with the constitutional and legal problems arising between various denominations as factors in the secular states in which they interact. The authors describe a range of models from strict separation to the established and historic church-state relationship still existing in certain countries.

With every best wish to you all,
John S.Conway

October 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

October 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 10

Dear Friends,

I am happy to tell you that the number of publications on contemporary church history continues to grow. Both Catholic and Protestant scholars seem to be excellently prolific, and not only in German! It is a pleasure to give priority this month to reviewing a new book by a young scholar from California about a much revered Anglican bishop. You should be warned, however, that this review may cause you some distress. Yet in the interests of historical accuracy, we are sometimes obliged to circumvent the worthy adage: de mortuis nil nisi bonum. The second review is of the autobiography of Dr Pauline Webb, aa noted British Methodist, whose services to the Church, both at home and abroad, are here happily recalled.

Contents

1) Book reviews

a) Daughrity, Bishop Stephen Neill
b) Webb, P., World-Wide-Webb
c) Silomon, German Evangelical Church 1969-91
d) Kunter, German Evangelical Church in the GDR 1980-93

2) Journal articles:

a) Daniel, a Russian monastic revival in the 1990s

1a) Dyron Daughrity, Bishop Stephen Neill. From Edinburgh to South India. (American University Studies, Vol. 267) New York/Bern/Oxford: Peter Lang 2008. 365 pp. ISBN 978 – 1-4331-0165-6

Missionary biographies were usually written by other missionaries; hence they were uplifting, even at times hagiographic. But with the overthrow of the colonial empires in Asia and Africa, the era of European missionaries came to an end, as did this genre of mission history. The emphasis today is quite different, and far more critical of the past, and of those whose service abroad was for so long held in high esteem. Dyron Daughrity’s biography of Bishop Stephen Neill, derived from his doctoral thesis at the University of Calgary, is a case in point. Although it deals only with the first half of Bishop Neill’s career, and ends when he left India in 1944, it is nonetheless both contentious and highly damaging to the image widely held about Neill in subsequent years.

Neill died in 1984, leaving behind a voluminous manuscript for an autobiography. It was a while before this could be edited down to a publishable size. The book finally appeared in 1991 with the title God’s Apprentice.But the general opinion was that it concealed more than it told about the author. Particularly it said all too little about the real reasons which had led in mid-1944 to Neill’s leaving his post and returning to England.

The first reviewer of God’s Apprentice was someone who, as a young missionary himself thirty years earlier, had known Neill well, and has since risen to positions of senior leadership in the church. He began by stating that the publication of this autobiography confronted him with a moral dilemma. He could either maintain the conspiracy of silence which surrounded the career of this gifted man, or throw some light on the background of events which brought this career in India to an end. He chose the latter, and now Daughrity has adopted the same course.

Specifically what is referred to was a violent assault by Neill in April or May 1944 upon an Indian schoolteacher at one of his church schools during a counseling visit. Neill demanded that this man accept, as a punishment for his purported misdemeanours, a beating with a cane on the bare buttocks, similar to that used to deal with errant schoolboys at Neill’s boarding school in England. The background and consequences of this “incident”, which were only briefly alluded to by the first reviewer, form the substance of Daughrity’s narrative. For this purpose he has made thorough use of archives in India, Britain and the United States, and a few years ago obtained personal interviews with some surviving witnesses of these events of sixty years earlier. Two of these testimonies, one from a clergyman and the other from a bishop in south India, are fully analyzed in his text, and provide a striking corroboration of the record in the paper trail. They cannot be dismissed as the product of anti-Western or anti-imperialist sentiments. The evidence, as described by Daughrity on an almost day-to-day basis, would now seem to be incontrovertible, even though there is room for debate about Neill’s motivations.

This reprehensible action by an Englishman in authority – and a bishop no less – of inflicting corporal punishment on one of his Indian employees could not long remain secret. The man’s relatives were outraged. At a time when Indian nationalist feeling against British imperial domination was escalating rapidly, this incident could only be regarded as another occasion when Indians were humiliated and subjected, for racial reasons, to the white man’s control. Demands were made for the bishop’s resignation, or else that a full public enquiry should be held by a Court of Episcopal Discipline.

Neill himself quickly recognized the inappropriateness of his behaviour, and according to one of the Indian witnesses, went personally to the teacher’s home village to apologize. But with the threat of publicity, and conscious of his own increasing ill-health, he then sought the counsel of his superior, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Calcutta. Early in June he left his diocese, which is situated at the southernmost tip of India, to take the lengthy and wearisome journey to Calcutta. On arrival, he sought the senior bishop‘s advice, offered his resignation, and asked for an immediate leave to return home for medical treatment. This last request was in fact granted, and within a month Neill had departed for England on a troopship, leaving behind his bishopric irrevocably.

This 1944 “incident” leading to the assault upon an Indian subordinate, was not, according to the first reviewer, due to Neill’s ill-health, depression or insomnia, which were the reasons he gave for his return to Britain. Rather it stemmed from a deeper and darker malady. Neill suffered, he asserted, from some version of controlled sadism throughout his whole life, and had an obsession with punishment, derived from his Victorian Evangelical background. For his part, Daughrity eschews either a medical or a theological explanation. He attributes Neill’s disastrous and repeated outbursts to the unresolved conflicts which characterized his psychological temperament. He points out that Neill’s early days, when his restless clergyman father was constantly changing parishes or going off to a missionary posting in India, deprived the boy of a stable family upbringing. At his boarding school, he was in continual dispute with the tyrannical headmaster, who lacked any sympathy for his pupils. At Cambridge, Daughrity claims, he had an internal struggle about his future, when he was faced with the rival claims of an academic or a missionary career. His first posting in India was to a small village dominated by the long-term missionary Amy Carmichael, who for 25 years had run a renowned mission to rescue abandoned children in her orphanage. But her simplistic faith and pietistic devotion were hardly on the same wavelength as the newly- elected and brash young Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. The resulting tensions were only resolved when Neill moved to a new posting. So too clashes developed when he was in charge of the diocesan seminary, between his high expectations of his ordinands in terms of their theological training, and their own humbler prospects in what was in essence a community of lower caste farm workers. Naturally Neill was caught up in the ongoing controversies over the relevance of Christianity and its theology in the wake of the first world war, but it would surely be too much to see this in conflictual terms. And certainly, like all Englishmen of his generation, he was undoubtedly affected by the shattering world-wide events which led to the outbreak of two world wars and to the decline and dissolution of the British Empire.

It would however be presumptuous to accept Daughrity’s thesis that these factors were all productive of the conflicts in Neill’s life, or that his fragile health and mental state was responsible for his indulgence in the physical punishment of others. Daughrity does not suggest that each of these elements was cumulative in effect, or led inevitably to the final chapter of his “formative years” with the loss of his bishopric. Certainly Daughrity paints a picture of a highly gifted man enmeshed with struggle and frustration. Yet Neill’s career, in almost all but the most crucial aspect – his psychological deformity – was not too different from that of other men of his class and upbringing. Many English middle-class boys went through the same kind of boarding school experiences, including corporal punishment, without noticeable harm. All talented undergraduates faced searching, but not necessarily conflictual, questions about their future careers. Many young novices found their first posting uncongenial, or were later to be involved with professional rivalries and disputes in their respective professions. All Britons were affected by the sacrifices of war, even when, like Neill, they were not directly called up for military service. And millions of imperialist Britons mourned the loss of the Jewel in the Crown. It would be hard therefore to see these as contributing factors to Neill’s sado-masochism which caused his downfall.

Despite the inadequacies of Daughrity’s thesis of conflict, which he imposes on Neill’s career and which is needlessly repeated too often throughout the book, we can be glad that he refrains from any moralistic speculations about episcopal delinquency or possible homosexuality. At the same time, he also contributes a positive assessment of Neill’s achievements. Not only does he pay tribute, as do many other commentators, to Neill’s outstanding scholarly works and academic prowess, but also uniquely gives a positive evaluation of Neill’s service as bishop in south India. “All are agreed that Neill’s leadership was strong, if at times onerous. However his concern for the diocese was evident. The progress the diocese made under his leadership was remarkable indeed”. And one of his clergymen is quoted as saying: “The people, even today, say Neill’s bishopric was the Golden Age”.

With such a balance, Daughrity makes a valuable contribution to the study of the complexities of this highly-talented individual and also to the rather neglected history of the church in the southern part of India during the tense and tumultuous days at the end of empire. Daughrity’s plan is to extend the biography in a second volume, and to further assess Neill’s notable career in very different later spheres after his Indian years of episcopal governance. Neill’s subsequent services to the wider church through the ecumenical movement, and his numerous theological and historical writings, deserve the kind of careful recording which Daughrity has already demonstrated. We can look forward to the results.

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1b) Pauline Webb, World-Wide-Webb. Journeys in Faith and Hope. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press 2006 230pp.ISBN 1-85311-756-0/978-1-85311-756-5

Too few of the leaders of the Christian churches are women. Consequently there are too few autobiographies which describe how these women achieved their prominent positions in a profession hitherto always dominated by men. Pauline Webb’s lively story of her career over the past sixty years is therefore most welcome. She gives us a personal account of her pioneering efforts to use the various branches of the churches to seek to rectify past injustices. She particularly campaigned for those she believes have for so long been denied their full recognition and autonomy, both at home and abroad, both in the church and in secular society. Her talents as a communicator, inspirer and mediator gave her the ability to display a particular sympathy for widely differing groups of people, and a heart-warming senditivity to the needs of women in many different parts of the world.

As a student at King’s College, London, shortly after the end of the second world war, Pauline Webb hoped she might be able to follow her father’s footsteps as a Methodist minister. But, to her great disappointment, the British Methodist Conference rejected the ordination of women, and only changed its mind thirty years later. So she began as a religious education teacher, but with a strong interest in missionary work overseas. Two years later she was called to become the youth secretary for the Methodist Missionary society, and grasped the opportunity with full enthusiasm. It was a particularly exciting time when significant changes were happening in the mission field. Throughout Asia and Africa the handover of political control by the former imperial powers was matched, in the churches, by a similar devolution to local control from the European-based missionary societies. Webb’s first assignment was to go to India and write a script for a film on the newly-established Church of South India, formed out of former British-controlled denominations. This was followed by a similar experience in West Africa.

These assignments enormously widened her horizons, both politically and theologically. She came to see her mission as focussing on four areas of witness and service to which the new world conditions were calling the churches. These were to mobilize concern in the churches for the problems of world poverty, to arouse anger against the evils of racism, and particularly South African apartheid, to build up support for women’s opportunities and vocations, and to campaign for church unity. Her autobiography therefore concentrates on the part she played in these respective spheres and the leadership she courageously provided on a global scale.

Pauline Webb quickly realised the advantages provided by the new techniques in communication. She became adept in using both radio and television, and later on the internet. Hence the book’s title. And her ability to direct such communications skills to the causes she had at heart was undoubtedly the reason why she was invited to become the organizer of religious broadcasting overseas for the BBC in London, where she served for ten exciting years. At the same time she effectively developed her skills as a preacher and promoter of new ideas in furtherance of her aims.

Her opportunities to do so were greatly enhanced by her work on behalf of the World Council of Churches, based in Geneva. First established in 1948 to bring the Protestant aand Orthodox churches closer together in doctrinal unity, the WCC quickly grew with the addition of new churches overseas. And by 1968, when Webb was first sent as a British Methodist delegate to its Assembly, its horizons were expanding to see the church’s world mission in social and political, as well as merely ecclesiastical terms. This Uppsala Assembly had a prophetic ring when it called on all the member churches to unite against the evils of racism and to accept the responsibility of fighting world hunger and poverty. Since these were at the top of Webb’s priorities, it was hardly surprising that she was elected for a six-year term as the WCC’s Vice-Moderator, a leading lay position. This brought her to the heart of the organization’s affairs, and established a very close connection for the next three decades.

One of her first tasks was to assist in the establishment and promotion of the World Council’s Programme to Combat Racism, which raised consciousness as well as funds, and supported beleaguered agencies such as the African National Congress in South Africa. This campaign aroused enormous hostility among more conservative churchmen, who denounced the World Council for promoting terrorism and violence, and even accused it of using church funds to purchase weapons. Webb spent a great deal of time refuting such charges, and pointing out that the small sums sent to Africa were explicitly for humanitarian, not military, purposes. But the argument became part of the wider process of trying to involve the churches in the world’s most significant crises – a stance which many churchmen regarded as politically one-sided, and beyond the scope of any church organization even at the world level. This prophetic witness was exactly what Pauline Webb thrived on, and her engagement in such endeavours was both energetic and rewarding. She was continually on the move attending conferences in different partts of the world, from Mauritius to the Yukon, so that at times the book reads like a stimulating travelogue. But this was all part of the sincere effort of the World Council to bring the concerns and decisions of its leadership down to the ordinary women and men in the pews, and thereby to seek to overcome the barriers of language and distance from its headquarters in Geneva. Webb proved to be a most effective ambassador for such an enterprise. Her infectious enthusiasm, and her steady and unstrident advocacy, especially for women, made her a most welcome guest wherever she went. And her talks on the BBC World Service gave her a platform to share her experiences and her witness to a very wide audience.

It may perhaps be regretted that she did not include more of the substance of the numerous talks and sermons she gave, since this would surely have confirmed the impression of an impassioned and dedicated follower of Jesus Christ. So too it would have been good if she had said more about how the World Council evolved over the years from a theology mainly concerned with church order to a theology whose major emphasis was on human liberation. Inevitably not all the initiativess she so resolutely sponsored have been successful. World poverty is still unresolved. The Christian churches have also just begu to realize their need to relate to other faiths. The position of women still remains marginal in many societies. But undoubtely, Pauline Webb can take heart, and even some of the credit, for the role the World Council played in helping to dismantle apartheid in South Africa, when it offered a platform for such leaders as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. As one who inherited great visions from the past, and contributed to their realization in the present, Webb’s legacy, now handed on to younger church members, especially women, is to inspire them to new and greater visions for the future.

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1c) Anke Silomon. Anspruch und Wirklichkeit der “besonderen Gemeinschaft”: Der Ost-West Dialog der deutschen evangelischen Kirchen 1969-1991. (Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 764 pp. EUR 99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-55747-1.

1d) Katharina Kunter. Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume: Evangelische Kirchen in Deutschland im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Sozialismus (1980-1993). (Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 346 pp. EUR 59.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-55745-7.

These two books were reviewed for H-German on July 30th 2008 by Benjamin Pearson, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, and are reproduced here by kind permission of the author.

German Protestants between East and West

Between 1945 and 1989 the Protestant state churches enjoyed a unique position in German politics, society, and culture. As the German nation was divided into competing Cold War camps, churches remained among the most important bridges between the two Germanys. Until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Protestant state churches in the FRG and the GDR maintained close institutional ties as common members of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD). Indeed, even as the Berlin Wall made it more difficult to maintain personal and institutional contacts, they maintained formal unity in the EKD until 1969, when the East German churches split off to form the Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR (BEK). Throughout this period of formal unity, the Protestant churches and their affiliated organizations played a leading role in maintaining inter-German dialogue and contact, and in giving expression to the desire of many Germans for political reunification. At the same time, the churches in East and West also developed in different directions, responding to their contrasting social and political circumstances. The creation of the BEK in 1969 offered the East German churches new leeway to reinvent themselves as a “church within socialism,” while West German Protestants were also forced to come to terms with the seeming permanence of both ecclesiastical and political German division. Yet, even after 1969, the Protestant churches in the two German states still claimed to be united in a form of “special community,” maintaining a variety of formal and informal contacts. Both of the books examined in this review deal with the nature of this “special community,” with the important bonds and the significant differences between Protestants in the West and East German states. Anke Silomon focuses on the formal relations between the EKD and the BEK at the highest levels of church leadership. Following a lengthy assessment of the scholarly literature, the book’s extended introductory section surveys developments in the churches between 1945 and 1969, paying particular attention to the process of formal institutional division that led to the creation of the BEK. The remainder of the book addresses two attempts by the leaders of the EKD and BEK to maintain some form of high-level contact, first in a Beratergruppe and from 1980-1991 in the work of the smaller and more specialized Konsultationsgruppe, which focused on the churches’ mutual responsibility to foster world peace. In both of these sections, Silomon maintains a relatively close textual focus on the discussions between group members, with a primary interest in what these interactions can tell us about the nature of the “special community” between the EKD and BEK. She concludes that the Beratergruppe was successful in maintaining the ideal of contact and communication between the West and East German churches, but that it fell short of achieving fully the claims of “special community” between the churches. The group was hindered in these pursuits by the lack of a stable membership over time–exacerbated by the restrictions facing West German church leaders on visiting the GDR–and by the failure of the EKD and BEK to invest their members with greater authority. It remained a useful sounding board for both churches, allowing them to share ideas and experiences with “brothers and sisters” on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it failed to take on any greater significance. TheKonsultationsgruppe, in contrast, developed into a more fruitful forum for discussion and common action. Founded in 1980, in the wake of the churches’ common statement commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the onset of war, this group was a smaller, more narrowly focused forum where members of both churches could find common ground in exploring the theme of world peace. The proceedings of this group also demonstrated the gulf between the experiences and beliefs of West and East Germans. However, the members were able to engage in much more extensive and fruitful deliberations about basic theological, political, and social ideas.

An extremely well-footnoted and dense reconstruction of the work of the Beratergruppe and the Konsultationsgruppe, Silomon’s study provides an invaluable reference to others pursuing work in closely related fields. However, this high level of detail, accompanied by a reluctance to engage in broader contextualization and analysis, limits the book’s usefulness to the general reader. One cannot help but wish that Silomon had engaged more extensively with the influence of these deliberations on the world outside of the churches, or, indeed, even on the lives and beliefs of ordinary church members.

In contrast, Katharina Kunter’s Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume targets these groups explicitly. Kunter focuses not on the church hierarchy of the EKD and BEK, but on a dense, decentralized network of pastors, theologians, and lay people working in the ecumenical “Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation” in the 1980s and early 1990s. In her complex, multi-layered analysis, Kunter details the origins of this ecumenical process, examines the separate and common work of the East and West German churches, and–most importantly–explores the ways in which the ideas and basic assumptions of German participants in this movement were strongly shaped by their different religious and political experiences in the two German states.

Founded in the early 1980s, the Conciliar Process was a broad, decentralized ecumenical movement under the aegis of the World Council of Churches and European Council of Churches. Small groups of European Christians had been engaged in efforts to foster world peace and social justice since the 1960s and 1970s, and these efforts gained an especially public resonance in the protest movement against the deployment of American Pershing missiles in Europe of the early 1980s. With the failure of these efforts, a small circle of German theologians–most notably Heino Falcke in the East and Ulrich Duchrow in the West–hoped to channel the frustrations of anti-nuclear protestors into a form of positive engagement for world peace. Their joint effort came to fruition when the East German delegation to the 1983 assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver issued a public call for the creation of an ecumenical peace council. This movement was given an additional boost in 1985 when–under the guidance of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker–the German ProtestantKirchentag, the massive lay assembly of West German Protestants, chose the promotion of world peace as its overriding theme. Other large ecumenical conferences continued this work throughout the 1980s while, at the same time, countless smaller consultation and discussion groups emerged across Europe.

As Kunter persuasively argues, the activity of the Conciliar Process, especially at the local grassroots level, played an important role in energizing a generation of Protestant activists in both German states. In the West, several of these activists have since risen to prominent positions of church leadership. However, the effects of the movement were much more pronounced in the East, where ecumenical dialogue for the promotion of peace and social justice created a new, critical public space for East German Protestants. By the late 1980s this increasingly bold and public activity was broadening to include fundamental criticism of the injustice of the East German state itself. Turning their attention to the possibilities of a better, more democratic socialist system, members of Conciliar Process played a leading role in the emergence of East German civil society groups in 1989-90.

Yet, many of the members of these groups, frustrated when their efforts to theorize democratic socialism were overtaken by political events, came to see the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a failure and a missed opportunity. In a similar way, figures on both sides were disappointed by declining interest in the movement following the events of 1989-90. Although their efforts had a lasting impact on the churches, in particular by opening up the hierarchy to new ideas and by grooming a new generation of leaders, Kunter argues that the movement failed to sustain a lasting impact on ordinary church members. This disillusionment was compounded, especially among former East Germans, by their difficulty in finding a place for themselves and their experiences in the West German church. In one of the most interesting sections of her work, Kunter locates the origins of this disillusionment in the different religious and political experiences of Protestants in the two German states. She argues that East German Protestants were strongly shaped by their experiences as outsiders in the GDR. Their religious attitudes were rooted in family and congregational life, where they found a separate space for themselves in East German society. This pietistic, oppositional perspective in turn led many to embrace a utopian form of political theology that denigrated all forms of real existing politics. The religious attitudes of their West German counterparts, by contrast, were much more overtly political from the very beginning. In describing the evolution of their beliefs, the West German Protestants in Kunter’s study only rarely referred to the influence of family and congregational life. Instead, most pointed to the formative role of a personal religious-political awaking in their teens or twenties that continued to influence their religious belief and identity as Protestant Christians. This underlying difference in religious identity formation has contributed to numerous misunderstandings within the churches since the early 1990s and remains an important factor in the mental gulf that continues to divide the reunited EKD. Both of these books offer the reader insights into the complex relations between the Protestant churches in West and East Germany both during and after the Cold War. While Silomon’s work will be of primary interest to church historians, Kunter’s has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience. By situating her work within the worldwide ecumenical movement, broadening her research to include a wide spectrum of theologians and laity, and providing a densely layered and compelling analysis of the larger significance of her findings, Kunter has written a work of church history that should appeal to anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of recent German politics.

Benjamin Pearson

2a) W.Daniel, Reconstituting the “Sacred Canopy”. Mother Serafima and the Novodivichy Monastery, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 59 no. 2, April 2008, p. 249-71.

Wallace Daniel is an American scholar who has devoted much time to studying the rebirth of Orthodoxy in Russia since 1991. His travels took him to the Novodivichy Monastery, or rather nunnery, just outside Moscow, one of Russia’s noblest shrines. There he met the Mother Superior, Serafima,, who for five years from 1994, at the age of 8o, undertook the enormous task of restoring the monastery to its former glory. Monasteries have always occupied a special place in the life of the Russian people. They preserved memory, nurtured the spirit, taught ethics and offered a special way of looking at the world. In the post-Communist society, with its rampant cult of individualism and consumerism, such a service, Mother Serafima was convinced, was badly needed. She therefore opposed the secular trend by promoting the cause of charity, not just to help the poor, but to evoke the Christian virtue of Miloserdie, dear heartedness, which should empower Christians in their relationships with others. Mother Serafima’s short years of service were filled with activity to revitalize not only the external and physical, but also the internal and spiritual vitality of this great monastery. Wallace Daniel’s tribute is therefore well deserved.

Journal note: Church History, the quarterly journal for the American Society for Church History, now edited from Florida State University, has a new pictorial coloured cover page, which is most attractive.

The contents are however the same as before. The latest issue, for June 2008, has a perceptive article by Dae Y. Ryu on “The Origins and characteristics of Evangelical Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century” as well as reviews of the two latest volumes in the Cambridge History of Christianity, viz, Vol V: Eastern Christianity, and Vol. IX: World Christianities c. 1914 to c. 2000.

Best wishes to you all,
John Conway

September 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

September 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 9

Dear Friends,

I expect many of you are even now preparing to return to your lecturing duties at the beginning of the new academic year. So let me wish you all the best for your renewed endeavours. For those who had the opportunity to undertake research abroad during the summer break, I would like to offer you the chance to share your findings with our colleagues. Do send me a short precis of what you discovered or contemplated, and possibly any conclusions about the state of church history and its writing. I am always glad to provide space for younger scholars to share their findings with others. and hence to give their researches some extra and doubtless well-earned publicity.

Let me also remind you that all the texts of these Newsletters can be found in reverse chronological order on the website = www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/akz. There is also a search engine which enables you to find individual topics or personalities. We are all indebted to Randy Bytwerk for his efforts in keeping this website up to date.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Tavard, Vatican II and the Ecumenical Way
b) Berdahl, Where the world ended
c) eds. Wolf, Flammer and Schuler, Galen als Kirchenfurst

2) Conference Report: Bishop Bell Memorial Conference, Chichester, U.K.
3) Book note: Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance and Martyrdom. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich.
4) Dissertation Abstract: B. Pearson, German Protestant Kirchentag 1949-69
5) Journal Issue: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History

1a) George H.Tavard, Vatican II and the Ecumenical Way, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 2006.
(This review appeared in the Catholic Historical Review, March 2008, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author)

During the last third of the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was a compass point not only for Catholics but also for ecumenically minded Christians. With the passage of four plus decades, however, the discussions and especially the debates and the drama behind the conciliar documents are increasingly in danger of being misinterpreted, if not forgotten altogether; it is then important to preserve the memories of the dwindling number of participants for the benefit of posterity both as a matter of historical record as well as a resource for ecclesiological interpretation.

The present volume, which is variously autobiographical, analytical, and anecdotal, presents its author’s personal reminiscences and theological reflections about the ecumenical dimensions – antecedent, concomitant, and subsequent – of the Council. In this respect George H.Tavard has been uniquely privileged: a theologian with ecumenical interests and involvement prior to the Council, when “ecumencism” was an unfamiliar, even suspect, word among Catholics; a conciliar peritus and staff member of the Secretariat for the Promotion of the Unity of Christians that was responsible for drafting ecumenical statements for the Council’s consideration; a participant in numerous official national and international postconciliar ecumenical dialogues; as well as the author of dozens of volumes on a wide range of topics: ecumenism, theology, history and spirituality.

Perhaps the major value of this short book comes from its author’s extraordinary ecumenical experience; for example, one can read elsewhere about the institutional ecclesiology that prevailed in Catholicism prior to Vatican II, but gaining a feel for an ecumenical ecclesiology of “divine presence” comes only through the experience of dialogue; in other words, ecumenical theology is not abstract, but experiential. Similarly, while one might carefully chronicle the long history of interdenominational polemics, their resolution requires a healing of memories that includes the “act of forgetting”: “the Church needs to be disencumbered from things remembered that ought to be forgotten” (p.112). One might also note the author’s candid appraisal of the postconciliar Church as torn “between gauchist deviation and reactionary conservatism” which can be attributed to (1) “a glaring lacuna at Vatican II itself,” (2) “hesitancies on the part of Paul VI”, and (3) “the heavy weight of institutional inertia” (p. 122). Ecclesiologists as well as ecumenists, might then take to heart the “problems of reception” that have plagued even the best intentioned ecumenical documents; finally theologians would do well then to give explicit attention to the author’s concluding question: “Can Theology be Non-Verbal” (pp 141-480?

Unfortunately, one finds some slips in this book: for example, the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, published on July 25, 1968, could hardly have “caused an unexpected turmoil in the Summer of 1967” (p. 126). Also the enumeration of footnotes is sometimes out of sync. In addition, some opinions are at least debatable: for example, while “the condemnation of Anglican Orders, in 1896, by Leo XIII” may have been ecumenically problematic and historically questionable, it seems a stretch to claim , “The canonical category of validity no longer provides, if it ever did, an acceptable standard to describe and evaluate the sacramental experience of other Churches than one’s own” (pp. 92-93).

Such shortcomings aside, readers who once eagerly and sometimes seriously followed the proceedings of Vatican II will be treated to a retrospective that awakens memories, if not nostalgia. Readers for whom Vatican II is a matter of historical investigation and theological reappraisal will also benefit from the insights of an influential insider.

John T. Ford, Washington, D.C.

1b) Daphne Berdahl, Where the world ended. Re-Unification in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press 1999. 294 pp. ISBN 0-520-21476-5.

Daphne Berdahl’s career as a social anthropologist was sadly cut short by her untimely death last October. So her principal legacy will be this well-researched and illuminating study of a small village in central Germany during the period immediately following the overthrow of the Communist regime in 1990.

The village of Kella in southern Thuringen was exactly on the border between East and West Germany, on the eastern side, and was hence placed in both the restricted and security zones. This fact cut its inhabitants off from most contacts with their East German neighbours, and totally isolated them from the West. Berdahl’s interest was to study what happened when suddenly both the political and geographical barriers were removed.

In fact Kella had been a border village for centuries in a much older division in Germany – that between Catholicism and Protestantism. So religious ties had long played a part in the villagers’ identity. Berdahl’s observations on the role of the Catholic church will therefore be of interest to our readers. This historic legacy was the reason why, after 1945, the villagers remained devoted to their faith, despite the resolute efforts of the Communist authorities to root out such “superstitious survivals”. In 1953 and 1954 church services were prohibited. But the villagers walked ten kilometres to the nearest available chapel, and were finally successful in having the edict overthrown. But in order to assert its authority, the state government refused to allow the use of a pilgrimage chapel because it was situated in the no-man’s-land between the security fences. It remained visible but inaccessible for more than thirty years.

The Berdahl family were the first Americans the villagers had ever seen. But the warm welcome extended by the Catholic priest did much to break down the villagers’ reserve and suspicion of these alien guests. And they soon became aware of Kella’s strong attachment to its Catholic faith, and consequent immunity to the blandishments or threats of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), or the upstart claims of the German Democratic Republic. Fewer than 6% of the villagers joined the SED, and less than half of these were natives. The church members remained an obstinate pocket of resistance, even if many of them were obliged, for opportunistic reasons, to be recruited to one or other of the state-organized activities or associations.

Chapter 3 is devoted to an analysis of the interplay between religion and identity, as well as between popular faith and institutionalized religion. As noted above, during the forty years of Communist rule, these religious traditions converged in opposition to the socialist state. But after 1989, with the state no longer hostile, there has been a renegotiation and a redefinition of religious identity and practices. In Kella, the Catholic community survived by being largely inconspicuous. As in most border areas, it clung to a highly traditional liturgical practice and concentrated on personal devotion. In fact the area was largely regarded as a religious and social backwater. These Catholics therefore played no part in promoting a climate of reform before 1989. This was left to the Protestants in the more active urban centres. In any case the small number of Catholics induced a sense of quiescence towards the state, which was abandoned only days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

By the summer of 1990, some of the Catholic religious practices, which had been prohibited under the communists, such as pilgrimages to local chapels, had been revived. The sense of reattachment to their traditions and past seemed more potent than doctrinal convictions. The church served to create an ethnic belonging which fulfilled people’s desires. This kind of popular religion withstood both socialist political pressures, and obtrusive reformist measures by the church hierarchy. Thus the first action by the villagers in November 1989 was to replace the original statues for the Stations of the Cross leading to the now available pilgrimage chapel. The wooden cross held together by barbed wire still remains an imposing image of Kella’s suffering and a symbol of their enduring Catholic faith.

In the immediate aftermath of 1989, however, the Church lost much of its appeal and influence, Consumerism gripped most East Germans. The Church could do little but protest against the sins of covetousness. Most villagers, while still maintaining that they were “good Catholics”, were rather easily seduced. Increased mobility has also meant that the villagers could satisfy their religious inclinations elsewhere. The transfer of Kella’s energetic priest seemed to indicate a loss of interest by the higher church authorities, already remote enough from the parishioners. Many felt abandoned or even betrayed. It became clear that, in the new state, church officials could no longer assume obedience and loyalty. They needed to earn it from their congregations. Popular religion endures, but support for the wider ecclesiastical institutions remains questionable.
Ms Berdahl’s perceptive analysis shows that, in religious life, as in other spheres, the re-integration of this small village where the world ended, was a costly but creative process, which is still continuing. It is a tragedy that she will no longer be able to provide us with a sequel.

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1c) Wolf, Hubert, Flammer, Thomas and Schueler, Barbara (Eds) Clemens August von Galen. Ein Kirchenfürst im Nationalsozialismus, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007. vi + 280 incl. 3 figs. ISBN 978-3-534-19905-1.

(This review appeared first in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, April 2008)

German Catholics are still attempting to come to terms with their church’s record during the Nazi era. The facts have long since been established: Catholics failed to mobilize more than a minimal opposition against the criminal atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. The church’s officially propagated view, ever since 1945, that Catholics were amongst the first victims of Nazi discrimination and persecution is so obviously inadequate that there is still a need for more sophisticated defensive apologias. To this end, Catholics have concentrated on the career of the one bishop who did protest against the Nazi injustices and murders, although only partially and without any intention of trying to overthrow the regime itself. The heroic stand of Bishop Galen of Münster against the so-called “euthanasia” of mentally-ill patients is well-known and has been much exploited by Catholic supporters. His public protest in July and August 1941, at the height of Hitler’s military victories, was undoubtedly an extremely courageous act. Whether it should compensate for the silence with which German Catholic greeted the annihilation of the Jews is debatable. Such issues are outlined in this conference report marking the sixtieth anniversary of Galen’s death in 1946. But since the majority of the contributors are well-known defenders of the Catholic cause, the overall tone is hagiographic. Indeed, the final chapter describes the steps taken which have already led to his beatification and may eventually lead to his canonization as a saint of the church.

To be sure Heinrich Mussinghoff’s chapter on Galen and the Jews admits that he offered no protest on the occasion of the November 1938 pogrom, even though the Jews of his own see city were affected. And when he became aware of the mass murders occurring in Poland and Russia, prudence dictated a strict silence lest worse befall the Catholics too. The contrast between his image as “the Lion of Münster”, and his share in the widespread antipathy and disinterest towards the plight of Jews and foreigners is only too evident. It can be explained in part by the traditional Catholic theological prejudice against Judaism, but even more by Galen’s ingrained conservative, aristocratic and nationalist background. The remaining articles in this collection shed more light on his political and social views, his early upbringing during the years of harassment under the Bsmarckian Kulturkampf, his apprenticeship in Berlin, and his undoubted lack of sympathy for the loud-mouthed radical racialism of the Nazi movement. Like his fellow bishops, Galen’s priority was the protection and preservation of the catholic milieu. It was principally his awareness that many of those killed in the so-called “euthanasia” process were faithful Catholics which prompted his outspoken intervention. But his circle of obligation was limited. Few of the contributors to this volume seem to think that this was something which should be regretted.

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2) Bishop Bell Memorial Conference

2008 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bishop George Bell, one of the most prominent leaders of the Church of England in the early twentieth century. The anniversary is being widely observed in Britain, with an exhibition at the House of Lords, the opening of a new George Bell House at Chichester Cathedral and a celebration at Christ Church, Oxford. It is in this context that the conference ‘Art, Politics and the Church: Bishop George Bell, 1883-1958’ took place at Chichester in 23-5 June. The academic programme was organized by Andrew Chandler, Director of the George Bell Institute, which is now based in the newly-established University of Chichester.

He reports: The conference was truly an international gathering, bringing together scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, India, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States. It was inaugurated by the present bishop of Chichester, John Hind. Sessions on Politics, Art, Education, Ecumenism and the Refugee Crisis were chaired by Professor Michael Hughes, head of the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, the Revd Canon Alan Wilkinson at Portsmouth cathedral, Rachel Moriarty of Chichester Cathedral, Dr Katharina Kunter of the University of Karlsruhe, Professor George Wedell, formerly of Manchester University (a godson of Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and Dr Kenneth Wilson (formerly Oxford and Birmingham).

Bell’s career led him after 1914 to become heavily involved with the affairs of Germany, and particularly with those of the German Protestant Churches. From the 1925 Stockholm Conference onwards, he took a very close interest in the political developments and attitudes developing in the German churches. He was greatly disturbed by the rise of Nazism, and therefore was particularly glad to strike a warm friendship with Dietrich Bonhoeffer when the latter arrived in Britain in late 1933. Bell and Bonhoeffer’s friendship meant much to both men. Professor Gerhard Besier (Dresden) proceeded to explore Bell’s relationship with Visser ‘t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, in the context of the burgeoning ecumenical movement, a defining friendship which remains fundamental in this international landscape. Joseph Mutharaj (Bangalore) explored Bell’s relationship with Indian independence and the creation of the Church of South India.

It was Bell who invited Gandhi to spend a weekend at Chichester in October 1931, and Bell who took on the British opponents of the church union in India after 1945. In his paper Geoffrey Chorley (Liverpool Hope University) discussed Bell’s position in the education debates which took place in British politics before the passing of the 1944 Butler Act. Here, he found Bell ‘going underground’ in his attempts to conserve some place for the Church of England in the life of the country’s schools. At the end of the afternoon the conference went to a reception at the Bishop Otter Gallery to celebrate the visiting Art in Exile exhibition, presenting work by Dachinger, Bilbo, Meidner and Feibusch, curated by Jutta Vinzent and Jenny Powell at the University of Birmingham. In the evening the religious drama group, RADIUS, gave a presentation of readings drawn from the Bell archives and from works by John Masefield and TS Eliot in the university chapel.

In a second day committed to the Arts and international politics, Peter Blee (Berwick, Chichester diocese) discussed Bell’s patronage of artists from the Bloomsbury circle and from further afield. This paper set Bell’s work in a wider context of the church’s relationship with creative art and public life at large, something which Bell himself saw divorced by the Protestant Reformation. The brilliant and productive friendship between Bell and the exiled German Hans Feibusch was a strand further developed by Michael Ford (Chichester) in his presentation of a succession of Chichester commissions executed by Feibusch between 1939 and the 1970s. These remain intact today, but the closing of churches has also created dilemmas of preservation. One of Feibusch’s grandest and largest commissions – a mural based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – is today falling apart in a redundant church in Eastbourne. A third paper by Peter Webster (Institute of Historical Research, London) discussed Bell’s place in the revival of religious drama during the first half of the twentieth century, with particular reference to The Coming of Christ, a production which combined the gifts of John Masefield and Gustav Holst, performed at Canterbury Cathedral when Bell was Dean there.

Three subsequent papers explored Bell’s significance in the landscapes of the second World War and the Cold War. Philip Coupland (Wellingborough) examined Bell’s contribution to the new European movement during the war and after. Bell was, indeed, distinctive in repudiating national priorities and pressing the claims of Europe as a political and religious whole. Dianne Kirby (Ulster) explored Bell’s Cold War role within the context of Church-State relations in Britain itself. Here, she argued, church leaders were constantly used by politicians to fortify various policies of their own, and, for their part, church leaders were ready to lend weight to a contest between democracy and dictatorship on official visits and with publications. Tom Lawson (Winchester) discussed Bell’s opposition to a number of war crimes trials in Germany in the wake of the war, arguing that his debatable understanding of the relationship between the Nazi regime, the churches and the German armed forces led him to a succession of misjudgments. He suggested that Bell’s desire to see reconstruction in post-war Germany eclipsed his perception of the justice owed to the victims of the Nazi state. The day was concluded by a public lecture at Chichester Cathedral given by Dame Mary Tanner, a president of the World Council of Churches, an event attended by almost 300 people.

On 25 June James Radcliffe (Chichester; formerly British Foreign Office) told the story of the various refugee organizations at work inside Germany between 1933 and 1939, with which Bell worked to extricate a number of ‘Non-Aryans’ in the churches there. Charmian Brinson (Imperial College, London) discussed Bell’s support for refugees from Germany and Austria, with particular reference to the Internment controversy during the war. Here, she found Bell a constant advocate, and also an apparently inexhaustible practical friend to those in need of pastoral support. Accordingly, the conference glimpsed the refugees both as emigrants and as immigrants. Two final papers returned to the ecumenical theme. Jaakko Rusama (Helsinki) explored Bell’s ecumenical theology and looked to its legacy since 1958, with particular reference to Anglican-Lutheran understanding. Tamara Grdzelidze (Georgia and Geneva) sought to apply Bell’s ecumenical arguments to present ecumenical issues and approaches at Geneva and found it a very different landscape indeed.

A final plenary session looked to the future of Bell research in an international context. There is much now to be done. The Bell archive at Lambeth Palace Library in London is vast and its significance within international church history is, potentially, immense. There are now plans for a new collected edition of Bell’s letters and papers, overseen by Andrew Chandler. But further financial resources must be raised for this work and this is something is best attempted within a explicit international framework of supporting institutions. If Chichester now offers a viable centre for such research in Britain itself, it remains to be seen what other bases can be found for such an enterprise in other countries, particularly in North American colleges. Much of great value could now be accomplished by some simple, strategic alliances. If you have an interest in jumping onboard, please contact Andrew Chandler at A.Chandler@chi.ac.uk

3) Book Note:

Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance and Martyrdom. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich. (translated by Dagmar Grimm) Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 2008. 834 pp ISBN 0-299-20790-0 cloth, 0-299-20794-3 pbk

It is welcome that at last an English translation has appeared of Garbe’s masterly account of the fate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the hands of the Nazis, which originally came out in German in 1993. It was reviewed at some length and favourably in this Newsletter in the issue for December 1995, section 5: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Nazi period. You are asked to turn to our web-site: www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/akz and use the Search engine to locate it.
Apart from a few pages of illustrations, the text is the same as in the original edition, which is undoubtedly the most comprehensive account of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ sufferings during the traumatic years 1933-1945, but leaves unsettled the issue of whether the Witnesses can be considered part of the anti-Hitler resistance movement.

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4) Dissertation abstract

Benjamin Pearson, who is about to join the University of Northern Illinois, last December completed his dissertation entitled “Faith and Democracy: Political Transformations at the German Protestant Kirchentag, 1949-1969” under the direction of Konrad Jarausch at the University of North Carolina.

During the 1920s, the German Protestant churches were among the strongest opponents of the democratic political system of the Weimar Republic. Socially and culturally reactionary, politically authoritarian, and virulently nationalist, they contributed strongly to the discrediting of the Weimar system. In the process, they helped to pave the way for the Third Reich. However, the experiences of the Nazi dictatorship and Second World War caused many Protestants to question their traditional social and political assumptions. In the decades following World War II, West German Protestants struggled to make sense of the lessons of their past, reforming their own religious and political traditions. In the process, they became important contributors to the ultimate stability and success of the democratic Federal Republic.

My dissertation examines this transformation at the meetings of the German Protestant Kirchentag, one of the largest and most diverse postwar forums for the Protestant laity. Meeting every year from 1949 until 1954, and every second year thereafter, the Kirchentag regularly drew crowds in the tens- and hundreds-of-thousands to its five-day program of teaching, preaching, worship, and celebration. Until 1961 its audience was drawn from both East and West Germany, and its role as a bridge between the two German states gave it an especially prominent place in public life. As an organization specifically devoted to promoting the responsibility and activity of the Protestant laity in all aspects of church and public life, the Kirchentag addressed a wide variety of religious, political, and social issues in its meetings. Officially independent from the state churches, it also enjoyed the unique freedom to pioneer new topics of discussion and to approach old topics in new ways.

Drawing on material from the Kirchentag, my dissertation focuses on three broad areas of change in postwar German Protestantism. First, it examines changing understandings of the role of churches and religious belief in postwar society. The early postwar years were marked by optimism that the renewal of popular religious belief would thoroughly transform German life: an optimism that helped to draw large numbers of Protestants into the political process. However, this attitude became harder to maintain as the economic recovery of the mid-to-late 1950s led to renewed religious complacency. In response to these developments, Protestants at the Kirchentag continually experimented with new ways to maintain the churches’ social relevance, embracing economic and social modernization in the late 1950s and more radical religious, social, and political reforms in the 1960s.

Second, my dissertation looks at efforts to come to terms with the legacies of German nationalism, military aggression, and mass murder. These efforts began in the early 1950s along two different tracks. On the one hand, many church leaders worked to promote Christian faith and Christian “brotherhood” as alternatives to the virulent nationalism of the past, proclaiming that the church itself was a new “Heimat” [homeland] for those displaced by the war and its aftermath. At the same time, however, others pointed out the churches’ own complicity in the Nazis’ crimes, calling for a thorough rethinking of the National Protestant tradition. By the end of the 1950s, self-critical voices had come to dominate at Kirchentag gatherings, as evidenced in prominent discussions of German guilt and Jewish-Christian relations. By the middle of the 1960s, this self-critical perspective was giving rise to a new, international sense of German Protestant identity founded on the promotion of world peace and social justice.

Finally, my dissertation examines Protestant efforts to understand and promote democratic political activity. In the early 1950s, these efforts revolved around the ideas of “Christian Democracy” and the “public responsibility” of the churches. While Protestants found themselves divided on a number of political issues, nearly all agreed that the churches needed to overcome their tradition of political passivity, playing a bigger role in public and political life. As the 1950s progressed, this unity began to recede, as prominent Protestant leaders took opposing positions on major issues such as inter-German relations and West German rearmament. Forced to come to terms with these irreconcilable political differences, Protestants in the late 1950s and early 1960s gradually began to accept and promote the ideal of liberal democratic political pluralism. Although threatened by the emergence of the radical youth movement in the late 1960s, this liberal democratic consensus was able to survive. Indeed, Kirchentag leaders enjoyed considerable success in their efforts to reach out to the representatives of the New Left, laying the foundation for future cooperation.

By demonstrating the important role played by the churches in the postwar transformation of West Germany, this dissertation asserts the continued relevance of religious categories of analysis in the history of the Federal Republic. Drawing attention to competing voices for change within the churches, focusing on the diversity of lessons drawn from the Nazi past and the variety of prescriptions offered for the future, it offers a complex and multi-dimensional view of West Germany’s postwar transformation. Looking at the diversity of political opinion within the Protestant churches, it argues that the Christian Democratic politics of the early 1950s were neither as monolithic nor as one-sidedly reactionary as they have often been portrayed. At the same time, by tracing the changes in Protestant religious and political discourse across the 1950s and 1960s, it highlights the process of democratization not only on the Protestant Left, but also in more conservative circles of the Federal Republic. Finally, this study re-evaluates the impact of late-1960s Protest movements in West German society. Rather than seeing the emergence of these movements as a radical break with Germany’s “fascist” past, it places them within the context of gradual liberalization across the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that their major contribution to postwar democratization did not lie not in exposing the lack of true democracy in West German society, but in prompting more moderate, liberal figures in the older generation to work within the existing system to promote a new set of social and political values.

Benjamin C. Pearson@gmail.com

4) Journal issues

a): Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History. The latest issue of this journal continues the steps taken to make it a bilingual production, including the provision of black-and-white illustrations for the first time.. This bi-ennial is now in its 20th year under the editorship of Professor Gerhard Besier of Dresden, which is a most impressive service. The focus of this issue are the papers from a conference held in Budapest in October 2007 as part of the European Union’s Project: “Overcoming Dictatorships – an Encounter between Poets, Artists and Writers”. Among the articles in English is the notable contribution of Andrew Chandler, director of the George Bell Institute in Chichester, Sussex. This was the paper he gave at the Bell memorial conference outlined above, and outlined the support given by Bishop Bell to the arts during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly by his sponsorship of the revival of religious drama with such plays as T.S.Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” which was first performed in Canterbury Cathedral. For Bishop Bell, as Chandler states, the Church needed to learn from the artist in order to see again the gift of its gospel and to enhance its own power of proclamation. This was a task which had acquired a new urgency in the age of rival ideologies and fanatic dictators. Bell found encouraging support in the poems of W. H. Auden and Edith Sitwell, and for his part, gave commissions to artists.such as Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell or Hans Feibusch to paint murals in churches in his diocese. It was all part of a search for a new unity between religious faith and artistic expression in the context of Europe’s disastrous decline into dictatorship and war.

Another of Bishop Bell’s contributions is outlined in the article by Charlotte Methuen on the Anglo-German theological conferences 1927-1931. These were clearly intended to be part of the attempt to find a basis for international Christian reconciliation and to overcome the still virulent public antipathy between Germans and Britons. Bell brought together some of the most distinguished theologians to discuss finding possible agreement on basic doctrines of the Christian faith, such as on the Kingdom of God, Christology and the Holy Spirit. But the debates only revealed that the differences were not so much between the nations, as between different doctrinal traditions within each nation. Nor did this series of meetings prevent Gerhard Kittel or Paul Althaus giving their enthusiastic support to National Socialism.

With best wishes
John Conway

July-August 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

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July/August 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 7-8

Dear Friends,

I very much hope that all of you in the northern hemisphere are now enjoying this holiday season, but that you will still find time to read this issue of our Newsletter. In the interests of denominational and ecumenical equality, I include in this issue two reviews about the German churches, one about Catholics and one about Protestants, as well as two about different kinds of British Protestantism. I hope that these prove to be of interest. I am always glad to have your reactions, but PLEASE remember NOT to press the reply button above unless you want your remarks to be shared by all of our 500 members.

Contents:

1) Conference Announcement: Regent College History Conference, Vancouver: July 25-26, 2008 – beginning at 1 p.m. – registration at door
“Exploring new frontiers in Evangelical History” Speakers: George Marsden, Mark Noll, David Jones, David Hempton, Bruce Hindmarsh
All welcome

2) Book reviews:

a) ed Damberg and Liedhegener, Katholiken in den USA und Deutschland
b) Ringshausen, Widerstand und christlicher Glaube
c) Shuff, Searching for the true church
d) Hughes, Conscience and Conflict. Methodism, peace and war in the twentieth century

2a) Wilhelm Damberg and Antonius Liedhegener, eds. Katholiken in den USA und Deutschland. Kirche, Gesellschaft und Politik. Münster: Aschendorff. 2006. Pp. vii, 393. Euros 24.80. This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author.

At the time of the Second Vatican Council Germany exercised a powerful attraction for Americans seeking doctorates in Catholic theology. German theologians like Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Walter Kasper, Joseph Ratzinger, and Johann Baptist Metz all counted Americans among their students. Today the tide runs in the other direction. Astonished at full churches in the United States, and impressed with the vitality of American parish life, German Catholics now come in increasing numbers to the United States to investigate a level of religious practice inconceivable in Germany today.

One of those impressed by American church life is the German businessman, Dr. Karl Albrechts, whose Aldi supermarkets can be found on both sides of the Atlantic. His generous grant provided funding for a conference in Berlin in May 2004, at which reports on church life in Germany and the United States were given by eighteen experts from both countries. Delivered in English, the papers have now been translated into German and are published in this volume. Several of the presenters report on the situation in the other country a happy example of two-way cooperation and enrichment.

Despite their great differences, Catholics in both Germany and the United States share elements of a similar history. In both countries Catholics are a minority, suspected by the majority from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Second Vatican Council of owing primary allegiance to the Roman pontiff. German Catholics responded to this challenge by forming a flourishing milieu consisting of numerous Catholic organizations including a political party. American Catholics lived largely in a self-imposed ghetto, dismantled by Vatican II’s opening to the world, and by the entry of increasing numbers of American Catholics into their country’s social, cultural, and educational mainstram.

In other respects church life in the two countries is dissimilar. American parishes and other church institutions have always been voluntary associations, founded and supported by their members. This imposes heavier financial burdens than those borne by Catholics in Germany, whose parishes, church buildings, and other institutions are provided “from above,” and supported generously from public funds. The need for self-support gives American Catholics a greater sense of ownership than those in Germany.

Paradoxically, however, the Catholic Church in Germany has been, since Vatican II, more democratic than that in the United States. Germany’s National Synod from 1972 to 1975, with both lay and clerical representation and enjoying legislative and not merely advisory power, is inconceivable in this country. Parish Councils and diocesan Pastoral Councils are found throughout Germany. In the United States their existence depends on the local pastor or bishop. Also dissimilar is the educational system in the two countries. Schooling, from kindergarten to university, is a state monopoly in Germany. Home-schooling, a small but flourishing feature on the American educational scene, is forbidden by law in Germany under penalty of heavy fines or imprisonment. The German state accommodates Catholic interests through church-supervised religious instruction for Catholic students in state schools, and by public support for state regulated Catholic schools, including the faculties of Catholic theology at the state-supported universities. Of special interest for German readers is the flourishing system of adult catechesis in the United States (the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), still in its infancy in Germany.
The book will be of greater interest for German readers than for Americans. The view of American Catholicism which it presents is colored by the selection of American presenters. They include such well known authorities as Andrew Greeley, Margaret and Peter Steinfels, and Leo O’Donovan SJ. Unfortunately missing are others no less distinguished who could have presented a more balanced picture: Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel.

John Jay Hughes, St Louis.

2b) Gerhard Ringshausen, Widerstand und christlicher Glaube angesichts des Nationalsozialismus, Berlin: LIT Verlag 2007. 509 pp ISBN -104/22/08 3-8258-8306-X

The reputations of those Germans who joined the anti-Nazi resistance movement, or who participated in the abortive plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20th 1944, have fluctuated wildly over the past sixty-five years. At the time, they were regarded by the Nazis, and by many of the established elites, as traitors. Their immediate arrest, summary trial and brutal execution were accepted as being duly deserved for such a heinous crime. But after 1949, the new government of the Federal Republic, based in Bonn, made strenuous efforts to revise this verdict. Instead these men were portrayed as heroes who had sacrificed their lives for the honour of the nation, and as such absolved others of the guilt of having served Nazism without protest. Indeed large-scale and deliberately organized campaigns were launched to show these men as being in continuity with a “better Germany”, which looked back to an aristocratic past worthy of current emulation. This was all part of an attempt to find a usable history on which to base the new West German democratic experiment. These resistance figures could be held to embody positive attributes and traditions, especially if they were aristocrats by birth or practising Christians by conviction.

Such propagandistic attempts often lent themselves to hagiographic overtones. So it was hardly surprising that in more recent years the sceptical work of a younger generation of historians has had a corrosive effect on such glossy portrayals. It is now widely known that many of the July 1944 conspirators had earlier held pro-Nazi sympathies, or had even belonged to the Party. Others, particularly many of the more conservative members, had loyally served in the Nazified German army, and even, at least to begin with, had failed to realize the nihilistic ambitions of their Leader.

So the arguments still continue about the motives of these men; (they were almost all men); also about the political goals they planned to implement in any post-war settlement; but above all about their religious beliefs, as one strong source of their fateful opposition. This is the particular emphasis in Gerhard Ringshausen’s ten biographical case studies of Protestant actors in these traumatic events. He is careful to eschew any attempt to see their careers though the prism of post-war political or religious “correctness”, and instead concentrates on the contemporary evidence available through letters and papers preserved principally by family members. The picture he presents is therefore rich in detail and sympathetic to the crucial dilemmas they all faced.

Religion undoubtedly played a large part in both the indictments and also in the defence statements of these men at their trials after the July plot had failed. To the Nazis, these convictions, if sincere, were proof of the conspirators’ disloyalty to the regime. The defendants’ pleas that their religious obligations had a superior claim was rejected outright, or as a mere pretence to be dismissed out of hand. But others, including historians, have found the validity of such claims to be problematic. The Protestant Church had great difficulty in justifying political murder, especially of the head of state. However evil the Nazi regime and its totalitarian pseudo-religion may have been, the church authorities and their theologians still found it a difficult assignment to abandon centuries of state-affirming Lutheran theology. Attempts to justify the conspirators’ action on Christian grounds – and thereby to separate them from any taint of being influenced by communism – were ardently made, but sceptically received, in the immediate post-war years. Later when historians began to depict a more differentiated pattern of resistance activities, they also perceived a wider range of ethical or religious motivations. With the passage of time, the earlier self-justifications of the resistance participants, or even the cult of “martyrs”, has been replaced by a more sober assessment of the complexity of their situation. Ringshausen places his individual case histories within this broader perspective.

For this reason he avoids the often-used but misleading categorizations which depict the members of the resistance movement as “national conservatives” or “Prussian Protestants”. Instead he draws out the variety of influences which brought these men together to pursue the common goal of ridding Germany of the Nazi tyranny. As the only theologian in the group, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had probably the most coherent religious motivation, connected with his abiding emphasis on ethics. But Ewald von Kleist, a leading landowner and layman, was equally fervent in opposing Nazism from a traditional Lutheran perspective. Moltke, the great-nephew of the famous general, and owner of the Kreisau estate in Silesia, had an American mother who espoused Christian Science beliefs. Elisabeth von Thadden was strongly influenced by the ideas of Christian pacifism, until she was denounced to the Gestapo and executed in September 1944. To the Nazis, of course, the particular variety of Christian motivation was of no account. Their determination to liquidate all opposition was only exacerbated by their virulent bias against the members of the aristocracy or resolute churchmen.

Ringshausen’s contribution is to draw out the variety of often conflicting attitudes and influences of the resisters and to present a detailed account of their political and religious stances. But he also makes clear the cost of the processes by which these men had to overcome many religious scruples, and eventually to assent to being agents of political revolution and assassination. In many cases, these men’s crises of conscience were not resolved before they met their deaths. The failure of their attempts to assassinate Hitler was followed by a widespread rejection among their fellow churchmen. So Ringshausen’s depiction of the convoluted relationship between faith and political resistance will be helpful for future discussions of these complex issues.

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2c) Roger N.Shuff, Searching for the true church. Brethren and Evangelicals in mid-twentieth century England. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Strick Publishers/Paternoster 2006 Pp 296. ISBN 1-59752-794-7.

The Brethren community is a branch of English evangelical Protestantism, which was founded under the influence of an early nineteenth-century preacher, John Nelson Darby. He gained a substantial following in Devonshire – hence the commonly attributed name, Plymouth Brethren. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, Darby was strongly convinced of the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ, and hence called on his followers to separate themselves from the evil world, and to prepare themselves by prayer and witness for the final rapture. This world-renouncing piety was also repelled by the corruption of the existing churches, and hence rejected any professional ordained ministry in their assemblies. Instead they placed, and still place, great emphasis on the weekly service of communion among their believers. Despite the disappointment of their eschatological hopes, the Brethren established themselves across Britain, the United States, in Australia and New Zealand, and even founded assemblies in Europe. Their history in the twentieth century has now been succinctly, but not uncritically, described by two parallel books, both published by Paternoster. As well as the above, there is now the account by Tim Grass, Gathering in His Name. The story of Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland(2006) Roger Shuff, who writes as a detached insider, has as his main concern to trace the influence of Brethren ideas on the wider English Evangelical movement, especially in the middle of the twentieth century. He contends that the revival of evangelicalism, particularly after the end of the second world war, owed much to the vital association of many key Brethren individuals. But he also argues that this resurgence of evangelical fortunes led to increased tensions within the Brethren community, and has in fact led to a serious decline in its support in Britain.

Because Brethren refused to accept any theologically-trained or professional leadership, they relied instead on the spirit-filled gifts of laymen or senior elders in their assemblies. But this often led to schismatic tendencies. Early on, there was a major split between those who sought exclusively to isolate themselves from the world and other religious bodies, or even to deny fellowship to non-Brethren in their own families. In the 1960s these tensions caused by this seemingly intolerant behaviour led to a parliamentary enquiry, though fortunately a proposed Bill to penalize this sect was turned down on grounds of the wider desirability of religious freedom. On the other hand, there were also those “independents” who were eager to participate in wider evangelical and missionary activities.

In the dark days before and during the second world war, the former group gained adherents from those who sought religious security in a reassuring spiritual environment. On the other hand, the more open-minded members promoted a pan-denominational expression of evangelicalism, which was to play a considerable role in the success of the post-war evangelical “crusades” of a young American preacher Billy Graham.

Brethren, and many Evangelicals, were naturally sceptical about the kind of ecumenical endeavours undertaken at this period by the main-line churches, such as those connected to the World Council of Churches. Instead they sought to strengthen such clearly evangelical associations as the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, or, with some reservations, the Keswick Convention. They gave strong support to academically credible scholarship in biblical studies, as undertaken in such colleges as Tyndale House, Cambridge, the London Bible College, or Regent College, Vancouver.

But, as Shuff shows, these endeavours only widened the gulf between the external-looking and the introspective or “isolationist” elements of Brethrenism. Their respective views of the true church proved critically divisive, and have remained so. For the more open-minded Brethren, the revival of evangelical fortunes also proved problematic. They had long assumed that all other religious life beyond their own assemblies could only decline until the parousia. But the evangelical resurgence cast doubts on this assertion. Coupled with this was the serious threat of the 1960s counter-culture, especially among youth with its rampant optimism and hedonism. In the evangelical community, this found expression in the charismatic movement with its vibrant ecstatic exhortation to spiritual encounters. To many conservative Brethren , these phenomena, such as speaking in tongues, and the clearly antinomian atmosphere, were too much of a challenge. Yet they lacked an attractive alternative which could offset these enthusiasms. The result has been an undoubted decline in numbers, as many younger members have been drawn away to more accommodating evangelical gatherings.

Shuff also describes the sad story of how the hard-liners fell under the sway of an American preacher who finally misused his powers and was publicly disgraced. The result was a sharp accentuation in the contrast between the different sections of the Brethren community. The isolationist group is greatly reduced, while the more progressive “independents” still struggle to find an appropriate relationship to other branches of the evangelical fraternity. Having tacitly abandoned their eschatological expectations, the issue of the group’s relationship to the wider world and its future course still remains to be tackled.

JSC

2d) Michael Hughes, Conscience and Conflict. Methodism, Peace and War in the twentieth century. Peterborough, U.K.: Epworth Press 2008, 336 pp.

Michael Hughes, a professor of modern history at the University of Liverpool, has given us a lucid account of the attitudes of British Methodists towards the issues of war and peace during the dramatic and conflict-ridden twentieth century. Why Methodists? Because they formed a cohesive group in British public life whose members, both clergy and laity, gave a remarkably consistent lead on these issues, both orally and in writing. Their sermons and speeches, and the columns of the Methodist newspapers, provided Hughes with an abundance of raw material and a clear picture of the significant issues which recurred again and again across these years. He also seeks to repair an omission in most secular histories of this period, which entirely ignore the religious dimension of public opinion, or dismiss the views of churchmen as irrelevant.

By tradition, Methodists are not obligated to give support to secular governments. Their political stances were, and are, instead drawn from the impulses of conscience and a reading of the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Methodist politics were therefore based on the morality of the pursuit of peace, and an abhorrence of war and its destructive capacities. Their continuing difficulty was, and still is, how to fit such lofty ideals into the contingencies of world politics. A shared moral passion does not lead easily into agreement when faced with the complexities of practical policy, especially in international affairs. This fact was largely responsible for the lack of effective influence by such religious groups as the Methodists as the champions of the “Nonconformist Conscience”.

Already before the first world war this high-minded tradition of pursuing peace and non-intervention in the affairs of others was becoming increasingly outmoded in a world of imperial rivalry and European alliances. The need to deal with situations in which the use of force alone could offer the prospect of preserving peace, or preventing gross injustices, was to become a source of heartfelt contention in the Methodist ranks. A minority, out of conscience, maintained that the Gospel of Jesus Christ could not be compatible with the practice of war, and called on its supporters to adopt an unequivocal refusal to bear arms. But, on the other side, the majority had been persuaded that loyalty to their beliefs was not compromised by a readiness to defend their nation against any aggressors. Many were also supporters of Britain’s far-flung military and naval commitments. Or they were convinced of the civilizing mission of the British Empire, where so much of their missionary endeavour was engaged. Most Methodists, when confronted with Germany’s aggressive tactics, agreed, reluctantly, with the British naval response, but were highly uncomfortable with Britain’s alliance with the despotic regime of Czarist Russia. Nevertheless, the German aggression against Belgium in August 1914 was clearly a moral issue and relieved many consciences.

A significant minority of Methodists dissented from the popular display of jingoism and excitement which enthusiastically hailed the outbreak of war. For the followers of the Prince of Peace, war could solve nothing. This led many to advocate and even practise conscientious objection. But the intolerant treatment of such men when summoned to appear before recruitment tribunals only increased tension. At least a hundred Methodists were imprisoned and subjected to harsh, even brutal treatment, including three who were later ordained.

In the aftermath of the war, Methodist consciences were smitten with remorse. Understandably they eagerly supported political platforms offering a different ordering of international affairs, such as the League of Nations. As a result they became susceptible to the allurements of an idealistic optimism, and used their limited political influences in such causes as international reconciliation, disarmament or even the attempt to secure the abolition of war.

The drawback of such a stance, Hughes rightly points out, led to their agreeing that the 1919 Peace of Versailles was based on vengeance rather than on justice. But what they did not realize, and what Hughes does not explain, was that this moral approach played into the hands of the German conservatives united in their belief in the Versailles Treaty’s iniquity. Methodists blamed the Allied governments, but failed to note that Germany had never expressed any regrets about its aggressions in Belgium or elsewhere. They never asked what sort of peace settlement the Germans would have accepted as being non-vindictive. The answer is none, since most Germans continued to believe that they deserved to win the war, and had only been sabotaged by enemies at home, such as the Jews.

Much of the Methodist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s was essentially wrong-headed, being born of a refusal to believe in the essential evil of international conditions. Even if only a minority of the church’s members were involved, the heat of the debate, especially in the Methodist Peace Fellowship, gave it a feverish pitch. But the failure of the idealists’ efforts over international disarmament in the 1930s, when Britain’s delegation to the Disarmament Conference was led by a prominent Methodist as Foreign Secretary, was to become a bitterly disillusioning process. Religious groups such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation or the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches redoubled their efforts to promote the cause of peace. But apart from passing vague and moralistic resolutions, which stressed Christian brotherhood, they could achieve little. In many cases this minimal and ineffective approach seemed to be enough to relieve their consciences.

Hughes might well have made more of the recurrent impotence of church opinion, most notably in the inter-war period, but also in the great debate over nuclear weapons in the 1960s. One reason was undoubtedly the fact that the fervour of religious pacifism was not matched by any realistic appreciation of the underlying political and international factors. Pacifists like to wrap themselves in the unassailable garments of morality, but had to be reminded that they did not have a monopoly of hatred of war or enthusiasm for peace. It was not enough to accuse politicians who advocated rearmament of being warmongers, or to assume that disarmament, especially of nuclear weapons, would issue in an unprecedented era of (Christian) peace. As Hughes, notes, a strong dose of Christian realism, such as delivered by Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States, never reached the Methodists – at least not in the 1930s, or for many others, not even later.

In 1939, the awful character of the Nazi regime with its ideology of aggression and racial supremacy, helped to simplify ethical dilemmas. On the other hand, as the second world war progressed, the realization grew that the new military technologies raised even more radical ethical dilemmas. The question was not whether to fight the war, but how to conduct it within some moral framework. The final apotheosis of dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, and murdering thousands of bystanders and civilians, could hardly be consistent with any traditional doctrine of “just wars”.

The outbreak of war in 1939 crystallized still further the tensions between pacifists and non-pacifist members of the Methodist Church. The former had played too large a role since 1919 to abandon their cause. But by the dark days of 1940 only the extreme wing which favoured submission as the most Christian way still adhered to any belief in the possibility of reconciliation with Nazi Germany, now poised to invade Britain’s shores.

In practice, Methodists bore their full share of the miseries inflicted by German bombing of British cities and towns. They met the challenge of meeting the pastoral needs of so many conscripts on the battle front or behind the lines. Such an emphasis on practical service did not however deter debate about the wider issues of war and peace. The church leaders upheld their newly-adopted commitment to defend the rights of conscientious objectors, though others were fearful lest Methodism become a refuge for “pacifists, peace cranks or c.o.s.” Once more the majority gave support to the national war effort, but were heavily criticized for calling it a “sacred cause”. The Methodist Peace Fellowship still retained several thousand members, though these were now obliged to face unequivocally, because of the incessant war-time propaganda, the horrors they would potentially have to accept if their pacifist position had been adopted.

Hughes noted that there was less debate in Methodism than in Anglicanism about the relationship between means and ends in modern warfare. Most accepted the government’s argument that bombing German cities was necessary to hasten the end of hostilities. The same applied to Japan. From the relative safety of Britain, few were able to imagine the extent of the sufferings inflicted on distant peoples, let alone on whole races such as the Jews. Only afterwards did the realization sink in that such actions required the rethinking of ideas of Christian pacifism.

In the post-war world the threat of apocalyptic destruction through atomic weapons induced a more sober climate. There were still some like the sometime President of Conference, Donald Soper, who combined moral fervour with political naiveté, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. But the majority, though not pacifist, became charged with the responsibility of formulating ethically tenable positions on nuclear weapons. Many Methodists supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament because they saw that the use of such weapons was highly disproportionate to the ends desired. But this insight was not confined to Methodists alone.

These debates led on to wider issues in which Methodists joined, particularly in the pursuit of global justice. Hughes’ able survey shows how concerned this group of Britons was about the background issues of world peace, and how the Methodist tradition of social activism led to a more critical view of the economic and political structures on the international level. Moral obligations did not end at the nation’s frontier.

Until the end of the century, a strong segment of Methodism continued to hold that the morality of the Sermon on the Mount ought to be reflected in the nation’s policies, and justified civil disobedience if they were not. But a larger majority had learnt that the complexity of international relations could not be so easily resolved. So too, the increasing emphasis in Methodist discussion on global poverty obliged a deeper examination of the basic causes of global injustice. Such issues came to occupy Methodist attention, overshadowing even the spectacular and welcome collapse of the Communist empire.

In the 1990s, the wars in Iraq and the Balkans aroused predictable reactions from church circles. Was foreign intervention morally justified in the interests of a wider international security? After September 2001, the American retaliations against both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the British Labour government’s subsequent support, caused enormous controversy. The resulting civil wars have only added to the difficulty of finding any secure moral compass. Indeed Hughes comes to the conclusion that the nature of modern conflict now seems irreconcilable with traditional Christian teachings about just wars.

Despite the clear decline in Methodism’s numbers in Britain, its adherents still maintain much of their traditional ethos on issues of war and peace. Many are still influenced by an optimistic belief that an individual commitment to oppose war will transform the world. Even though Christian pacifism has remained marginal, and has never affected government policy, nevertheless the basic moral concerns of most Christians has been a significant factor in public debate throughout the century. At its best such witness pointed to the standards of international behaviour to which all Christians aspired. At its worst it fell back on moral platitudes.

Hughes naturally disagrees with those who, in recent years, have seen all religions as malign forces undermining rational solutions to international problems. His thoughtful account of the Methodist experience in the past hundred years, shows, to the contrary, how their consistent commitment and witness have sought to promote peace, despite all the obstacles involved. Their debates on how such ends should be achieved echoed much of the wider society’s concerns. But theirs was a voice which needed to be heard, and was in fact often heard. We can be grateful to Professor Hughes for this valuable and dispassionate analysis.

JSC

With every best wish to you all
John Conway

June 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

June 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 6

Dear Colleagues,

John Conway is on vacation this month. He has asked me to edit the
Newsletter in his absence, which I am pleased to do. Below you will
find a brief note on the death of Bishop Krister Stendhal by John and
two reviews by me on Lutherans and the Church Struggle. Should you have
any comments please feel free to e-mail me at mhockeno@skidmore.edu.

Best Wishes,

Matthew Hockenos
History Department
Skidmore College

Contents:

1) Bishop Krister Stendhal

2) Book reviews

a) Kyle Jantzen, Faith and Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s
Germany (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).

b) Lowell C. Green, Lutherans Against Hitler: The Untold Story (Saint
Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007).

1) Death of Bishop Krister Stendhal (1921-2008)

John Conway writes: It is with sadness that we learn of the death of
Bishop Krister Stendhal, a renowned church leader in both his native
Sweden and the United States. I first met Krister in 1954 in Uppsala
when he was defending his doctoral thesis on “The School of St.
Matthew”, which demonstrated already his early interest in the Jewish
roots of the Christian gospels. Some years later he emigrated to the
United States, and taught at Harvard, where he rose to become a notable
Dean of the Divinity School. While at Harvard, Stendhal developed his
scholarly interests in Pauline theology, and wrote the landmark essay
“The Apostle Paul and the introspective conscience of the west” which
became a chapter in his book Paul among Jews and Gentiles. At
Harvard, it was natural that Stendhal gave a lead to numerous circles
concerned with Christian-Jewish relations, and also served as the
Director of the Centre for Religious Pluralism at the Shalom Hartman
Institute in Jerusalem. In 1984 he was called back to Sweden to become
the Bishop of Stockholm where he served for five years until retirement.
His distinguished leadership there followed in the footsteps of such
fine Swedish churchmen as Archbishops Soederblom and Brilioth, and gave
valuable help to many in calling for a new ecumenical approach and
commitment to Christian-Jewish dialogue.

2a) Kyle Jantzen, Faith and Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s
Germany (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).

Kyle Jantzen’s Faith and Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany
is a superb contribution to the historiography of the Church Struggle.
Through a detailed examination of three Lutheran church districts
Jantzen provides readers with fascinating glimpses of the Church
Struggle from the perspective of parish clergy, local church patrons,
and district superintendents. This “bottom up” approach allows Jantzen
to examine how familiar events in the Church Struggle at the national
level, such as the formation of the Pastors Emergency League and the
establishment of Hans Kerrl’s church committees, were experienced by
regional and local church authorities. Faith and Fatherland is a most
welcome addition to a field dominated by national studies that focus on
leading figures in the Confessing Church or the German Christian
Movement. “Entering into the daily world of German Protestants,” Jantzen
rightly contends, “illuminates many gradations within the
church-political spectrum, as well as the inconsistencies with which
pastors and parishioners thought and acted, shifting their positions and
living in ways that defy our subsequent attempts to pigeonhole them into
neat theological or church-political categories” (13).

While many of the same issues that dominated the Church Struggle on the
national level filtered down to the parish level, such as whether to
recognize German Christian authorities in the “destroyed” churches, the
responses to these issues were incredibly varied from district to
district and parish to parish. Moreover, the Church Struggle at the
parish level often took on characteristics quite unique from the
struggles on the national level – the struggle over pastoral
appointments being a case in point. For both these reasons, our
historical understanding of the Church Struggle is broadened and
diversified by a history “from below.”

Located in three different regional churches, the church districts
Jantzen investigates are Nauen on the outskirts of Berlin in the
Brandenburg Church Province of the Church of the Old Prussian Union,
Pirna southeast of Dresden in the Saxon Lutheran Church, and Ravensburg
just north of Lake Constance in the southeastern corner of the
Wuerttemberg Protestant Church. Whereas the districts of Nauen and Pirna
were located in regional churches that were taken over by German
Christians, Ravensburg remained under the control of the powerful
Lutheran bishop, Theophil Wurm. Despite the proximity of Nauen and Pirna
to large cities, all three districts were rural or semi-rural and church
life played a prominent role in many of the small towns and villages in
these regions. Nauen consisted of twenty-five parishes, Pirna
thirty-nine, and Ravensburg just eleven.

Jantzen’s first two chapters address what motivated Protestant ministers
in Nauen, Pirna, and Ravensburg to support Hitler’s ascent to power and
how Hitler’s goal of “national renewal” translated into a “Protestant
renewal” in many local parishes. He attributes clerical support for
National Socialism to the belief that Hitler would partner with the
churches in generating a national and moral renewal that would
revitalize church life and stem the tide of workers leaving the churches
for the Communist Party. In addition to their nationalism and
anti-communism, Lutheran clergymen, Jantzen believes, were predisposed
to the authoritarian character of the Nazis by their understanding of
Lutheran theology, especially the law/gospel dualism, the doctrine of
two kingdoms, and the theology of the orders of creation.

The belief that Hitler and a National Socialist government would be
beneficial to the churches was at first confirmed by a surge in new
church members in Nauen and Pirna after Hitler assumed power. Jantzen
argues that this wave of religious enthusiasm illustrates the way in
which the political-nationalist momentum of National Socialism propelled
a parallel religious-nationalist momentum in many of the Protestant
regional churches. The German Christians, who swept to power in Nauen
and Pirna, led the charge, spurring the churches on to support Hitler’s
national renewal. However, as the influence of the German Christians
waned in the mid-1930s so did the new found interest in the churches.
Frustrated new members abandoned them in droves. In the eleven parishes
in Ravensburg in southern Germany, however, there were no membership
surges in or out of the churches and markedly less excitement about the
National Socialist seizure of power. This can be explained in part
because Protestants were a small minority in the region of Upper Swabia,
where the district of Ravensburg lay. Catholics were the overwhelmingly
majority in Upper Swabia and they tended to support the Catholic Center
Party. In all likelihood the politicization and disruption of church
life in Nauen and Pirna was the rule for most parishes across Germany.

Jantzen’s analysis of pastoral appointments in chapter three is a novel
approach to understanding exactly how parish politics was conducted in
Nazi Germany. In small towns and villages pastors were often more
important than mayors. They baptized, confirmed, married, and buried
their parishioners, educated children, led Bible studies, preached
sermons at weekly services, counseled those in need, chaired parish
meetings, and wrote for and edited parish newsletters. Although the
appointment of a pastor to a particular parish was often a routine
affair, in the Third Reich the process could just as often erupt into a
battle between supporters of the Confessing Church and the German
Christians or between rival factions of the Confessing Church. When a
pastoral position opened–and they opened frequently during the chaotic
years of the Nazi era–parishioners, church patrons, clergy, and
district and regional church authorities all had interests at stake. One
of the many intriguing conclusions that Jantzen reaches is that the
Confessing Church in Nauen was far more adept at getting their clergy
appointed than the German Christians because parishioners and local
church officials, who were quite influential in the appointment process,
were angry about the overt politicization of church life by German
Christians. They believed that Confessing Church pastors were more
likely to be responsible servants of the church and to recognize the
authority of the Bible and the Reformation Confessions. Whereas the
appointment process in Nauen was usually a local affair, in Pirna and
Ravensburg Land Bishops Coch, a German Christian, and Wurm, a
conservative Lutheran in the Confessing Church, centralized control of
the appointment process and appointed pastors whose views were
compatible with those of the bishops.

Although local pastors aligned with the German Christians and Confessing
Church could be fierce opponents in the realm of parish politics, they
diverged very little in their views on Nazi racial policy. Jantzen
writes that, “there is no evidence from the correspondence,
publications, or actions of Protestant clergy in Nauen, Pirna, and
Ravensburg to suggest that they were significantly affected by or
preoccupied with the euthanasia crisis or the “Jewish question” (93).
Most clergymen in the Confessing Church were too preoccupied with
defending the autonomy of the churches from encroachments by the German
Christians and the Nazis to pay much attention to racial policies that
did not directly affect the churches. The anti-Judaic traditions in the
church, the antisemitism of many of the pastors, and the desire to forge
a strong bond between the church and the state all contributed to
pastoral complacency toward, and at times complicity in, the mass
extermination of Jews. There were, of course, churchmen and women who
struggled in vain to convince the church to defend the victims of the
Nazi killing machine, but they were indeed exceptions.

The last three chapters of Jantzen’s monograph examine the course of the
Church Struggle in Nauen, Pirna, and Ravensburg. These chapters are
filled with fascinating sketches of individual pastors, church patrons,
and district superintendents as they try to negotiate their way through
the many trials and tribulations of the Church Struggle. Occasionally
the knowledgeable reader may come across a familiar name but for the
most part the stories recounted by Jantzen depict pastors and
parishioners whose lowly status within the churches did not warrant
their appearance in the more nationally oriented literature of the
field. By reconstructing the subjective experiences of individuals
toiling away in the parishes Jantzen challenges the neat stereotypes of
anti-Nazi Confessing clergy and pro-Nazi German Christians. A much more
nuanced picture emerges, especially of the Confessing Church, that
reminds us of the rich diversity of opinions and experiences in the
Church Struggle and confirms the value of a parish-level approach to
church history.

MDH

2b) Lowell C. Green, Lutherans Against Hitler: The Untold Story (Saint
Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007).

Lowell C. Green’s study, Lutherans Against Hitler: The Untold Story
(2007), is reminiscent of the hagiographic histories written about the
Confessing Church several decades ago. The difference is that Green
replaces the old heroes of the Church Struggle, Martin Niemoeller, Karl
Barth, and their colleagues from the “destroyed” churches, with a new
group of heroes, Confessional Lutherans and leaders of the “intact”
churches including Paul Althaus, Werner Elert, Hans Meiser, and Hermann
Sasse. Green argues that these churchmen, armed only with their
steadfast loyalty to the Lutheran Confessions, successfully countered
attacks on the confessional integrity of the Lutheran churches by the
German Christians and Nazis, on the one hand, and the Barthians and
supporters of the Prussian Union churches, on the other hand. Repeatedly
Green argues that the political theology of Barth and the “radicals” in
the Dahlem-wing of the Confessing Church provided an opening for
Nazi-backed German Christians to takeover most of the regional churches.
By failing to adhere firmly to the central tenets of the Lutheran
Confessions – the distinction between Law and Gospel, the doctrine of
two kingdoms, the natural theology of the orders of creation – the
Barthians and Dahlemites weakened Lutheran resolve, caused a schism in
the churches, and damaged Protestant resistance to the German Christians
and the Nazi Party. After 1945, says Green, these same radicals grabbed
power, established the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), and blamed
Lutheran Confessionalists for the churches’ complacency in the Third
Reich.

Central to Green’s thesis is his assertion that the merging of Lutheran
and Reformed doctrine and practices, whether at the behest of the German
Christians or the Confessing Church, undermined the ability of the
churches to stand firmly on Lutheran doctrine in opposition to Nazi
church policy. “The Confessional Lutherans,” he writes, “found
themselves faced with a threefold threat to their independence during
the Third Reich: the German Evangelical Church or Reich Church, the
Confessing Church, and the Barmen declaration” (28). Green contends that
the forced merger of Lutherans and Calvinists into the Church of the Old
Prussian Union in 1817 destroyed the Lutheran churches in the Prussian
Union and set a precedent for Hitler’s goal of one united Reich church.
The Barmen declaration is, in Green’s estimation, an egregious example
of the confessional mishmash propagated by Barth and the Confessing
Church. Authored by Barth–a Calvinist and the arch enemy of
Confessional Lutheranism,–the declaration’s most serious offense was
that it sacrificed Lutheran doctrinal integrity for unionism. Green
maintains that the August 1933 Bethel Confession, drafted by the
Lutherans Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, was a much stronger
statement than the Barmen declaration and that had it been adopted the
churches’ resistance to Hitler would have been more resolute.

While a study of the Confessional Lutherans during the Nazi era is
certainly a welcome addition to the one-sided historiography of the
Church Struggle, Green’s monograph is problematic for three reasons: his
methodology and use of sources, his relentless polemics, and his narrow
focus on the churches’ struggle for autonomy.

As a theologian with expertise in the Reformation period and the
Lutheran Confessions, Green cannot be expected to be familiar with every
book and article in the field of the Church Struggle. However, his
failure to recognize in his bibliography, footnotes, or the pages of his
monograph the extensive and easily accessible scholarship that directly
relates to his topic is perplexing, to say the least. As one might
expect,, much of this unacknowledged scholarship contradicts Green’s
thesis, but to ignore it entirely gives the impression that he does not
believe it is even worthy of mention. A study of Lutheran theology and
Lutheran resistance during the Third Reich should certainly make some
mention of, even if only to refute their theses, the work of Doris
Bergen, Gerhard Besier, John Conway, Robert Ericksen, Richard
Gutteridge, Wolfgang Gerlach, Martin Greschat, Susannah Heschel,
Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Bjoern Mensing, Kurt Nowak, Eberhard Roehm,
Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Joerg Thierfelder, and many others.
Green’s tendency to rely primarily on published collections of
documents, a limited selection of secondary sources, and the archive of
the theological faculty at the University of Erlangen contradicts his
claim that this book is an impartial study of “the untold story” of
Lutherans against Hitler.

Scholars of the Church Struggle, including many of those named above,
have been critical, even harsh, in their evaluation of the actions and
inaction of Confessional Lutherans during the Nazi era. These historians
charged the Confessional Lutherans with theological inflexibility,
ultra-nationalism, antisemitism, and even support for many of Hitler’s
goals. Green states that he felt compelled to answer these derogatory
charges and, in so doing, redeem the reputations of Confessional
Lutherans, some of whom he had studied under at the University of
Erlangen in the 1950s. Indeed, Green succeeds in providing an entirely
different picture–but at a cost. His monograph is so polemical and
one-sided that it undermines his own argument. A case in point is
Green’s treatment of Karl Barth and the Confessing Church. In the
chapter on Theocratic Enthusiasm Green makes the patently absurd and
offensive claim that, “There were uncomfortable similarities between
Hitler and Barth” and then goes on to compare Hitler’s worldview to
Barth’s (236). He also likens the Confessing Church to a totalitarian
movement. To be sure, Barth and the members of the Dahlem-wing of the
Confessing Church should not escape the scrutiny of scholars nor should
their efforts to protect the churches from Nazi and German Christian
encroachments be mocked.

By focusing disproportionately on the struggle for church autonomy in
the Third Reich, particularly the success that Lutheran Bishops
Marahrens, Meiser, and Wurm had in preserving the independence of their
regional churches, Green directs the reader’s attention away from issues
that shine a less favorable light on the Confessional Lutherans. The
unflattering record of Confessional Lutherans, especially Althaus,
Elert, Marahrens, and Meiser on the Jewish question is virtually ignored
by Green. They may have opposed militant antisemitism but their
statements and silences throughout the Nazi period indicate a latent
antisemitism and insensitivity to the Third Reich’s Jewish victims.
Green’s exculpatory analysis of the 1933 Erlangen response to the Aryan
paragraph, the 1934 Ansbach memorandum, and the 1939 Godesberg
declaration is indicative of his allegiance to the leading figures of
Confessional Lutheranism and his unwillingness to acknowledge the
damaging role they played in undermining Protestant resistance to the
German Christians and the Nazi Party.

A balanced study that neither excoriates Confessional Lutherans for
distancing themselves from the Niemoeller-wing of the Confessing Church
nor extols them for their rigid adherence to the principles of Lutheran
Confessionalism is needed now more than ever.

MDH

May 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

May 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 5

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) DVD review: Theologians under Hitler, Storm Troopers of Christ
2) Book reviews

a) Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. an introduction to his thought
b) Dramm, Dietrich Bonoeffer: und der Widerstand
c) Anglicanism and Orthodoxy

3) Dissertation Research – Reconciliation efforts in post-1945 Germany
1) Two new hour-long documentary films now available on DVD, and produced by Steve Martin of Vital Visuals Inc of Oak Ridge Tennessee, depict in an excellently scholarly mannner the more regrettable side of the Protestant church in Germany during the Nazi regime. Theologians under Hitler is virtually an illustrated version of the book with the same title written by Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Ericksen himself introduces the film and is assisted by an expert team of scholars, both German and American. He describes the careers of three of Germany’s most illustrious theologians, Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch and Gerhard Kittel. Photographs from the archives are melded in with the campus scenery, along with commentary on their writings by today’s church historians. These men backed the Nazi cause as the answer to Germany’s political problems in an effort to restore the national self-confidence after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s energetic leadership appeared to them. the long-sought-after remedy. At the same time they urged German Protestants to abandon their engrained pietistic distaste for politics and to become relevant to the vibrant national community being forged by the Nazis. These views undoubtedly gave support to the Nazi cause, including its racial antisemitism.

None of these men were to express remorse in the post-war situation or to have changed their views. The commentators naturally deplore this scandalous heresy. They share a presentist view which points out the dangers of theologians providing justifications for nationalist or imperialist aggressions. They likewise warn against the intolerance displayed by these German Christians towards members of other faiths, especially Jews. They call for the lessons of the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany to be learnt by today’s Christians, especially in the United States. Storm Troopers of Christ records an even sadder chapter of the Protestant experience in the Nazi era. Its subject is the betrayal of true Christian values by the so-called “German Christians” and particularly their attempt to root out all Jewish influences and elements from the church. These pro-Nazi forces, led by their Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller and by such theologians as Walter Grundmann, argued that only a Germanized Christianity could attract their fellow Germans back to the churches, and restore the church’s credibility by following Hitler’s political lead against the pernicious effects of Jewry. Church archives were therefore diligently searched to discover long-lost Jewish ancestors and to treat these Jewish-Christians as second class, expel them from leadership roles, or even turn them over to the Gestapo. Only a few brave souls stood out against this heretical tendency. Among them was Pastor Martin Niemöller who early on recognized the centrality of the issue of baptism. If the church capitulated to Nazi demands and excluded baptized Jews, then the Gospel’s validity would be destroyed. But the majority of German Protestants placed their national loyalties above sympathy with their fellow Christians of Jewish origins. The film’s commentators are undertandably indignant at this lamentable capitulation to Nazi pressures, which they rightly see as a deplorable breach of faith and a warning to others. JSC

2a) Sabine Dramm. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, An introduction to his thought. Peabury, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers 2007. 255 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-56563-762-7.

In 2001, Sabine Dramm published this book in German, which has now appeared in English in a most attractive translation, put out unchanged by a small publisher in Massachusetts. This forms a prequel to her second book reviewed below by Victoria Barnett, which deals more specifically with Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance.

The present volume is indeed an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s ideas, and the story of his life is only tangentially referred to. But Dramm acknowledges that the exceptional features of his career were due more to his experiences in Nazi Germany than to the development of his thought. However, she provides an excellent summary of his theological progress, beginning with the bases of his Christian creed, and then giving short summaries of his writings, She follows, in the main, the interpretations given by Bonhoeffer’s premier biographer, Eberhard Bethge. But in the forty years since that biography appeared, times have moved on. Dramm shares today’s majority view, which finds it increasingly difficult to understand why so many German Protestants supported Nazism. So Bonhoeffer’s refusal to pay allegiance to that system of terror no longer has to be justified. On the other hand she is also aware that, as we enter the twenty-first century, there is a danger that Bonhoeffer and his theology may be written off as passé, or no longer relevant. But her succinct introduction should help to off-set such considerations. It will be of value especially to theological students or those new to Bonhoeffer. One problem is that, where she cites Bonhoeffer’s writings, the references are taken from the 17 volumes of the German edition of Bonhoeffer’s complete works. Not all of these have yet been translated into English, while the complete German set is not readily available abroad. But her translator has done such a good job that the original sense is neatly captured. So too the footnotes are nicely translated but include no references to any of the numerous English-speaking commentators, who are equally excluded from the bibliography. Since the book is intended to be sold to English readers, this omission is curious. JSC

b) V-Mann Gottes und der Abwehr? Dietrich Bonhoeffer und der Widerstand. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005. (This review appeared first in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 2007/2 and is reprinted by kind pemission of the author.)

Bonhoeffer’s path into the resistance tends to be viewed either as the logical culmination of his theological course through the Kirchenkampf or as a politically grounded decision that contradicted his early theology. At least some of those who studied under him in the early 1930s and the Finkenwalde period didn’t know what to make of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activities or his prison writings. In the context of the Kirchenkampf, of course, Bonhoeffer’s resistance stands in stark contrast to most of his Protestant colleagues, and is read back into his early writings and actions, giving them a greater political clarity and significance than they may have actually had. In the popular literature, as well as most films on Bonhoeffer, his resistance provides the dramatic frame that has led all too often to a kind of mythology that portrays him as a central figure in the German resistance. As Dramm notes, the role of Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge has decisively shaped our understanding of Bonhoeffer the resistance figure, giving Bonhoeffer a centrality in this story (particularly in the portrayals of ecumenical and resistance circles) that is not always borne out by the historical literature. In his later writings and lectures, Bethge was actually more circumspect about Bonhoeffer’s role.

In this book Sabine Dramm explores “the story behind the story”: what did Bonhoeffer actually do in the resistance, and what does this mean for our understanding of Bonhoeffer, theologically and historically? Dramm has read and incorporated most of the pertinent literature in the field, drawing both on Bonhoeffer’s own writings from the 17-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke and on newer research, including the works by Klemens von Klemperer, Marikje Smid, Christine-Ruth Müller, and Winfried Meyer, as well as earlier publications by Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries, such as Jørgen Glenthøj and Josef Müller. Much of the book is simply a recapitulation of the relevant material from these various sources – a useful and very readable synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activities.

The concluding chapter, in which Dramm identifies ten main issues that deserve further study and research, is actually the strongest section of the book, and one wishes that she had focused more on developing each of these points throughout the narrative. Here, Dramm’s conclusions offer some provocative but very legitimate points for further discussion. There may be some truth to her conclusion that Bonhoeffer’s entry into the resistance was essentially a ploy developed by Hans von Dohnanyi to keep his brother-in-law out of military service, yet surely the central involvement of other family members in the conspiracy (not just Dohnanyi, but Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and his other brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher), was also a factor. This, as well as Bonhoeffer’s own wartime writings, would suggest a more deliberate decision to participate in the conspiracy. Regarding his resistance activities, Dramm correctly notes that while Bonhoeffer was indeed involved in the “Operation 7” rescue of 14 “non-Aryans” to Switzerland, his actual role was peripheral. The July 20 resistance circles in which he moved were indeed largely “national conservative” and tend to be treated more critically by historians of the period than by the theologically-trained Bonhoeffer scholars, and I would also concur with her that these conservative tendencies inform many of the passages in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Given this latter fact, Dramm is intrigued by the way in which his theological legacy has shaped progressive and liberation movements in the Christian world. As she notes, the political consequences drawn by the Protestant left after 1945 differ considerably from the worldview of many of Bonhoeffer’s fellow resisters. Dramm also notes the critique by Holocaust scholars of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings on the Jews and argues that here, too, the significance of his resistance activity deserves a more critical and contextual analysis.

Dramm concludes that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not “the theologian of the resistance” but a “theologian in resistance” – that his importance ultimately rests more in what he said (and wrote) throughout the resistance years, and less in what he actually did. I would concur, even as I would argue that this is precisely what opens the way for a reading of Bonhoeffer’s texts from that era as a critique, not affirmation, of the “national conservative” circles in which he moved. His role in the actual resistance may have been minor, and his colleagues in that resistance may have been nationalists and monarchists. But his theological reflections on the challenges that confronted Christians under Nazism, including his reflections on the role of the Church in an ideological dictatorship and the consequences this has for the Church’s very identity, are powerful reminders to all Christians of the dangers of an alliance between Christianity, state authority, and ideology. As a “theologian in resistance”, Bonhoeffer ended his life imprisoned and pondering the very viability of religious faith in an ideological age.

There are a number of interesting comments and insights throughout this work; Dramm is an observant reader of Bonhoeffer and the historical literature, and in addition to her closing chapter, she offers good suggestions for deeper analysis or new avenues to pursue in the endnotes. Given her earlier comparative study of Camus and Bonhoeffer (1998), it would have been interesting had she incorporated some of that analysis or pondered Bonhoeffer’s thought in the larger context of European intellectual resistance. She suggests, but offers no real analysis of the larger issues: how his resistance affected his theology, how this history fits in (or doesn’t) in German Protestantism. Another aspect would be to ponder the compromises and delays made by the July 20 resistance – by all accounts a source of real anguish to Hans von Dohnanyi – and what influence this had upon Bonhoeffer’s prison writings as well as the Ethics.

This is a good synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance, however, and a very readable book for both general audiences and students interested in learning the details of this history – and Dramm’s concluding questions are certainly worthy of further study and examination.

Victoria Barnett, Washington, D.C.

c) Anglicanism and Orthodoxy – an on-again, off-again relationship

(The following review doesn’t really fall within the time frame of the majority of our contributions. But I thought it was so delightful that I wanted to share it with you all. JSC)

When I was a student at Cambridge, nearly sixty years ago, I joined a group known as the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, which sought to know more about the affairs, and particularly about the spirituality, of the Orthodox Churches in eastern Europe. Unfortunately, since this was the height of the Cold War, visits to Russia were almost impossible. Some of us went on pilgrimages to Greece, but unfortunately I never got the chance to go to Mount Athos, that spectacular rocky peninsular in the northern Aegean Sea, on whose crags are built a bevy of Orthodox monasteries, visitable only by men, which pride themselves as being the spiritual power houses for the whole Orthodox communion. But the chaplain of my college, St. John’s. Henry Hill, who was a young Canadian, was greatly impressed. After he returned to Canada, he subsequently became the Bishop of Ontario, and was then invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to become the Commissary for the whole Anglican Communion in its relations to the Orthodox Churches. So he spent all of his holidays visiting eastern Europe, especially Roumania, where he got to know many of the Orthodox hierarchs and visited the wonderfully decorated monasteries in the northern province of Moldavia, which are some of the most precious relics of Orthodoxy’s great days.

At the time, I didn’t realize that the links between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy go back a long way – four hundred years or so! But this fascinating relationship is the subject of a new book, which is the record of a conference held a few years back in Oxford, and now edited by the former chaplain of Worcester College. The title is Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 years after the “Greek College” in Oxford (Peter Lang 2006). The high point of these essays is the story of the establishment of a College for Greek Orthodox students in Oxford. This experiment enjoyed only a brief existence from 1699 to 1705, but was an example of how lively and inclusive ecumenical relations were three hundred years ago. Though long forgotten, even in Oxford, the home of lost causes, this incident has now earned a learned Festschrift which will undoubtedly enrich our understanding of how these two faithful communities can and should relate to each other.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the first generation of Anglican theologians, having just rejected the supremacy of the Pope, were very conscious of the example of the Orthodox churches which had done the same five centuries earlier. Here, they thought, were allies who could be useful in giving them international support against the papal pretensions of Rome. Furthermore they regarded the Orthodox as faithful witnesses to ancient tradition. The new Church of England was eager to show that it adhered to the doctrines of the early church. Its theologians admired the Greek fathers and the Greek liturgy, and had maintained the ancient practice of the apostolic succession for its bishops. This affinity was all the more attractive in the first years of the reign of King James I, when he authorized the translation of the whole Bible into English. The English scholars naturally looked for help from their counterparts who still spoke Greek, the very language in which the New Testament had been written so long ago. Despite the distances of land and sea, and the significant differences of language, culture and religious traditions which separated the Orthodox Church in the east from the reformed Church of England in the west, nevertheless the two communions sought each other out.

In 1615 a letter was received by the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril Lukaris, asking for support to send young Orthodox priests to take advantage of the theological resources of England as part of their training. Lukaris himself was a native of Crete, had studied in Venice and Padua, and had even journeyed to Poland where the Orthodox community was being vigorously attacked by the zealous proselytizing efforts of the Jesuits. He knew very well that the poorly educated Orthodox clergy were at an immense disadvantage when confronted by skilled Jesuits, who had even penetrated as far as Constantinople itself.

Archbishop Abbott was a staunch opponent of Roman Catholicism, as was the monarch King James, though his interest was more for the promotion of reunion among the churches. Both looked favorably on this initiative, and in 1617 the first such scholar. Metrophanes Kritopoulos arrived from Mount Athos and took up residence in Balliol College. He stayed for five years, and then went to London to collect books before setting off overland to his homeland in 1624. It was another twenty years before he was followed by Nathaniel Konopios, also chosen by Lukaris, who had now become Patriarch of Constantinople. Konopios was sponsored by both King Charles I and by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

Unfortunately political events both in Turkey and in England interrupted this scheme. In 1638 Patriarch Lukaris was deposed and subsequently executed by the Ottoman Sultan, while Konopios’ stay in Balliol College was cut short by the English Civil War. Nevertheless both Kritopoulos and Konopios wound up in conspicuous ecclesiastical positions, the former as Patriarch of Alexandria and the latter as metropolitan of Smyrna. However, the distressed condition of Europe during the disastrous Thirty Years War, and of England when the monarchy was overthrown and the king executed, unsettled relations with the Orthodox communities for several decades.

However, in the late 1660s and 1670s several scholars from Oxford and Cambridge served as chaplains to the Levant Company, or to the British envoy to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. This gave them the opportunity to see at first hand the Orthodox community, two centuries after the catastrophic fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, as well as to note the depredations and persecutions suffered at the hands of the Muslim rulers. Their reports and books published after their return kept the subject alive.

Not until after the deposition of King James II in 1688 was the idea of bringing young Orthodox theologians to England raised again. In 1692, a new advocate in Oxford took up the task of promoting this idea. Dr. Benjamin Woodroffe, a Canon of Christ Church, was elected Principal of Gloucester Hall, one of the newer foundations on the edge of the city. Unfortunately, due to the recent political turmoil, Gloucester Hall was largely a ruin and had only a few students in attendance. But Woodroffe, who was clearly an Oxford “character”, had other ideas. Shortly after he was elected, he went to London and secured an interview with the directors of the Levant Company. He must have been persuasive, since they agreed to provide free transport in their ships from the eastern Mediterranean for up to twenty students who should be brought to London, where they would be met by Dr. Woodroffe and escorted to Oxford. It is not clear just who was going to support them while in England. And in any case, various factors led to delays. Not until February 1699 did the first group of five students arrive to be part of what was now to be known at the Greek College.

Woodroffe gave as much publicity as he could to this innovation, and indeed then proceeded to a further striking endeavour in building up good relations with the Orthodox Church. Together with Edward Stephens, another champion of the reunion of the churches, he persuaded the Oxford University authorities to invite a distinguished Greek churchman, the Archbishop of Philippopolis, to come to Oxford. Not only that, but he obtained their support to offer the Archbishop the honorary degree of D.D. – a very seldom honor. The day of conferment of this degree in September 1701 was a great day for Woodroffe. He delivered a speech of welcome in Greek – to the astonishment of his colleagues – and proudly showed his guests around the newly refurbished Gloucester Hall, introducing them to his prize Greek students. The next year, 1702, Queen Anne herself came to Oxford on her way from Windsor to Bath, and was received with all due honors. Included with the numerous addresses was an ode in Greek hexameters spoken by the senior Greek student, Simon Homerus. It was all very impressive.

Woodroffe was boastful of his students’ progress. Writing in 1703 to Lord Paget, one of his patrons, he reported that they had not only picked up ancient Greek and Latin but were now able to speak English as if they were natives, “even disputing with us in Divinity in the Chappel”. Unfortunately, however, there were dissentions. Three of the students were lured away from Oxford by emissaries from the Roman Church, who promised them a still better education if they converted. They were passed on to Brussels and later were put on their way to Rome. However, two now came to regret their haste, and sought to return to Gloucester Hall. Woodroffe forgave them but they appear to have been sent home to Smyrna later in the year. And then the three new students who arrived with Lord Paget began to complain that their studies were too scrappy, and took themselves off to Halle in east Germany where they were offered much better conditions of accommodation and study by the Saxon Protestants. This defection effectively killed off the Greek College in Oxford, and the Levant Company refused to accept any more students. Woodroffe now found himself in financial difficulties, which were eventually to land him for a time in the Fleet prison – a singularly unpropitious fate for such a flamboyant clergyman. He died in 1711.

Despite this setback, interest in the Orthodox Churches continued among some Anglicans, particularly those known as the Non-Jurors, who refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs after 1689, William and Mary, on the grounds that they had already taken an oath to serve King James II and his heirs. Most of them were deprived of their offices and positions, so now looked elsewhere for support, in particular from the eastern Orthodox patriarchs. Their abhorrence of the Roman pretensions led them to look back to the roots of the Church in Britain which had been established even before the departure of the Roman legions in the fourth century. They revered the Christian traditions derived from the ancient Church in Jerusalem, and the faith delivered by the Apostles and confirmed by the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. On the other hand, there were still doctrinal differences, between the Church of England and Orthodoxy, particularly over the doctrine of transubstantiation and the worship of ikons. And on these points, the Orthodox leaders refused to make any concessions, or to agree that the goal of a full and perfect union required mutual accommodations. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, heard about these negotiations in 1724, he wrote off to the Patriarch of Jerusalem denouncing these Non-Jurors as schismatics and in no way representative of the Church of England. That put an end to the correspondence for a good many years.

One interesting legacy of the Non-Jurors, which shows their desire to link their worship to the days of the early church fathers – a tradition shared by the Orthodox – was the Liturgy of St James, printed in full as an appendix in Doll’s book. This was entitled: “An Office for the Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist being the ancient liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem”, and was researched and used by a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the middle of the eighteenth century. The patristic spirituality of the Anglicanism of the day is profoundly present. The reordering of the Eucharistic liturgy particularly emphasizes the spirit of adoration of the triune God, thanksgiving for the gifts of the whole created order, and the joining together of heaven and earth, of time and eternity. It makes for a powerfully effective and accessible rite.

In the twentieth century, the Orthodox Churches bore the brunt of the violent onslaught of the Communists, first in Russia after 1917, and then, after 1945, in Roumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Constantinople, the new secular rulers of Turkey after 1922 proved to be somewhat more tolerant than the Sultans, but the great days of the Byzantine Church could not be restored. The great Church of the Hagia Sophia having been a mosque for four centuries, is now a museum. In Jerusalem, the Orthodox patriarchate became embroiled in the bitter conflicts between Arab and Jew. Not until the overthrow of the Soviet Empire in 1989 did a new era begin. The Russian Orthodox Church, buried for more than seventy years under the scorched earth of Marxist domination, now started to put forth shoots of new growth. In the past twenty years, thousands of churches have been restored or rebuilt, the seminaries are attracting younger recruits, and the artistic revival in the liturgies and icon-painting has been notable. Even in remote Macedonia, monastic life has experienced a remarkable rebirth, witnessing to the priority given to such spiritual endeavors At the same time, the church has begun to undertake the task of coming to terms with the darker side of its past, through the unfortunate but enforced collaboration and even complicity with the former dictators. All these developments have stimulated the interest of numerous Anglicans who seek to share their heritage and insights with these long-estranged fellow Christians. The basis is now once more established for a strengthening of Anglican-Orthodox relations, which we hope will bear fruit in the years to come.

John Conway

3) Dissertation Research: Steven Schroeder, Fraser Valley College, Abbotsford, British Columbia
(Steven Schroeder successfully defended this thesis at Notre Dame University, Indiana, last February, under the direction of Professor Doris Bergen. Congratulations, Steven!)

Reconciliation in Occupied Germany: 1944-1954

This dissertation examines how, from 1944 to 1954, a wide variety of individuals and groups in all four occupation zones began the processes of reconciliation between Germans and their wartime enemies. Reconciliation is defined as the process of establishing peaceful — or at least non-hostile — relations between former enemies. This dissertation argues that reconciliation was encouraged through interactions between the Allies and Germans from the outset of the occupation of Germany and that non-government organizations (NGOs) were able to foster reconciliation in ways that governments and military personnel did not.

After the collapse of the Third Reich, most Germans were unwilling to engage critically with the recent past. Still, the conditions of Allied occupation and demands of the international community led Germans to acknowledge, however reluctantly, the crimes of the Nazi era. In all parts of occupied Germany, German and international NGOs — aided by a disparate array of individuals and groups — played a key role in shaping public memory of the past. In western Germany, Germans engaged in discussions and negotiations that acknowledged Nazi crimes and recognized and compensated victims of Nazism. Discourses created in eastern Germany also acknowledged Nazi crimes but did not admit that Germans in the Soviet zone/GDR bore any responsibility for them. Instead, they categorized and ranked victims according to Stalinist ideology and Soviet conventions, a method that left tens of thousands of victims, including thousands of Jews, without official recognition or compensation. In general, the motives of people involved in initiating dialogue between former enemies and between perpetrators and their victims mattered less than actions and their repercussions.

This NGO diplomacy achieved numerous positive results for both the short and long-term stability of Europe — most notably in Franco-German and Christian-Jewish reconciliation — and occurred when Germans had no means of conventional diplomacy. Indeed, the combination of early domestic and international efforts that produced these discourses of victimhood that contributed to recognition and compensation of victims of Nazism also served German reconstruction, and assisted German integration internationally. In approaching this little-explored realm of the history of occupied Germany, this project sheds new light on the understanding of postwar German political developments, both democratization and Stalinization, and offers insights into the significant roles that NGOs can have in post-conflict reconstruction.

Most surprising, perhaps, is the finding that the achievements of NGO diplomacy in postwar Germany did not rely on altruism or lofty ideas. Instead, idealism was only one part of a combination of outside pressure, German self-interest, and the participation of former victims that produced lasting results.

In examining the many dimensions of reconciliation, numerous standpoints must be considered. A wide variety of sources were consulted to address the central questions posed in this project, including the records of Allied personnel, German and non-German relief workers and other NGO operatives, German and international religious and political figures, and victims of Nazism, both within Germany and abroad. The primary material that informs this dissertation is found in numerous archives and private holdings in the United States, and Canada. The Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) in Koblenz was consulted for the records of the Allied Control Authority, the files of the western Allies, and the files of German administrative bodies and governmental ministries. The Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Archives of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the German Democratic Republic) in Berlin provided the basis for research on corresponding groups in the Soviet zone and the GDR.

The focus on NGOs in this dissertation necessitated vital research on many groups, whose records are scattered throughout Germany and Switzerland, including the records of: the Catholic Church Aid Society; the Societies of Christian-Jewish Cooperation; the Pax Christi group; and the Moral Re-Armament Group. In Berlin, research was conducted at the Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes der EKD (Protestant Relief Work archives), and the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv (Evangelical Central Archives), which holds the files of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s personal papers, and those of numerous Protestant NGOs. Together, these resources informed the details regarding the personnel, vision, and practice of the NGOs that were most effective in reconciliatory work in occupied western Germany.

The records of the NGOs that were most active in numerous aspects of reconciliation in the Soviet zone — the Victims of Fascism group, the Association of Victims of Nazism (VVN), and the Society of German-Soviet Friendship — are all located in the Federal Archives in Berlin. These files revealed the control that both the Soviet Administration and the eastern German governmental bodies had on NGOs, and correspondence between the groups shows the priorities and goals of each. Other useful resources consulted for this project include: the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archives for Research on the History of Jews in Germany) in Heidelberg; the Centrum Judaicum (Central Jewish Archives) in Berlin; the Archives of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana; and the John Conway Collection located in the John Richard Allison Library (Regent College) in Vancouver, Canada, which holds a wide variety of primary documents on the German churches.

Steven Schroeder, History Department, University College of the Fraser Valley, Canada
steven.schroeder@ucfv.ca

The June issue of this Newsletter will be edited by Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College, New York. I am most grateful for his being willing to take this responsibility while I am on pilgrimage to the Middle East.

With very best wishes
John Conway

April 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

April 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 4

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) R.Boyd, The Witness of the Student Christian Movement
b) Austin, China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 18321905
c) Zumholz, Volksfrömmigkeit und katholische Milieu

2) Journal article: J. Steele, Germany’s search for home truths

1a) Robin Boyd, The Witness of the Student Christian Movement. Church ahead of the Church, London: SPCK 2007 ISBN 13-978-0-281-05877-8

When I was a student at Cambridge University nearly sixty years ago, two Christian organizations were active in the colleges, the Student Christian Movement and the Christian Union or InterVarsity Fellowship. Both sought to present the claims of Christ to the student body in most of the universities in the country in a friendly but often zealous rivalry. Both organized very active programmes of weekly meetings, prayer and discussion groups, reading parties in the vacations and summer work camps. The SCM laid its stress on the search for Christian unity, brought together students from different church traditions, and was concerned to bring a Christian witness to the wider political and social problems of the day. The Christian Unions concentrated more on the personal life of each individual student, seeking to enhance his or her knowledge of and commitment to Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Together they attempted to reach as many students as possible and to a large part succeeded.

Robin Boyd, who himself served as an SCM staff member in the 1950s and later was a long-term minister in Australia and Ireland, has written a highly informative and well researched survey of the last hundred years of SCM life. He begins by showing that the SCM and the Christian Union were both products of the evangelical impetus of the late 19th century, often led by charismatic American preachers, who particularly turned to the universities for recruits for the mission field. The Student Volunteer Movement sent hundreds of young men and women out to the mission field, especially China. An outstanding figure of the time was John R. Mott, a gifted YMCA organizer, who made use of the popular slogan “The evangelization of the world in this generation”. Thanks to his efforts, branches were set up to promote this endeavour in many European universities,.and in 1895 they came together to form the World Student Christian Federation. Mott and his followers recognized that mission work would succeed much better if the churches co-operated with each other, as was acknowledged at the famous 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference. From then on such ecumenical growing together became a high priority for the SCMs in many countries, building bridges across the various Protestant denominations, and later on with Orthodox communities. At the same time, a similar commitment emerged to overcome the barriers of race and gender. The same openness was found in the SCM’s tackling of theological exploration, especially biblical criticism. On this latter point, the split occurred with the IVF.

By mid-century, Boyd shows, the SCM had a commendable record of involving students in prayer, study, evangelism, ecumenical engagement and a search for social justice. Its members had a distinctively liberal mind-set, despite the horrors perpetrated in Europe by the Nazis or even the shock of the atomic bomb. Boyd describes the twenty years after 1945 as the SCM’s “golden age” Large student conferences were organized with prominent church leaders on hand. Theological debate flourished, assisted by the publications of the SCM Press in London. The students’ horizons were expanded world-wide by visits from representatives of the SCMs in newly-independent countries, such as D. T. Niles of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Philip Potter from the West Indies, or Bishop Ting of China. These men and women were to add much to the European-based membership of the World Student Christian Federation, and indeed were soon to assume leadership positions in the WSCF and after its inauguration in 1948 in the World Council of Churches. SCM graduates came to be the core group in such endeavours, and Boyd skillfully weaves in their linking stories in the development of these organizations.

As might be expected, the idealism of youth sought improvements in church affairs, were impatient of inherited bureaucracies, and actively sought for new opportunities for Christian witness. They sought to be the “Church ahead of the Church”. They united their faith and their university studies in a compelling and productive mixture. Many went on to hold leading positions in their own denominations, or as university teachers, and brought the optimistic if critical SCM ethos to their later careers.

But at the end of the 1960s, the whole system fell apart. The story of the storm which swept over the SCM’s student ministry makes for sad reading. Boyd clearly laments it. Basically he says there was a sociological or demographic change. Students no longer wanted to accept the authority of their predecessors, or of the churches as institutions. Instead a single-focused attention to political causes led to the abandonment of most of the SCM’s traditional fare. It became a protest not a productive movement. In Britain, the number of branches declined rapidly. The London headquarters were sold, and its surviving staff set up an agricultural community far from the cities or the universities. The emphasis on the prophetic witness to a new world of social justice and peace was no doubt well-meaning, but the move away from the SCM’s carefully-built traditions and structures meant that its effectiveness as a national organization was crippled. For many in the vanguard, the churches were no longer seen as welcome sponsors and friends, but as discredited conservatives to be held at bay. If there was bible study, it was only from the perspective of the poor. Much of the discussion took place in a Marxist framework.

These developments coincided with a sharp decline in support for all main-line Protestant churches in Britain. The reasons for this are still being explored. (Callum Brown’s theories have not met with universal acceptance). The increasing secularization of society was notable. Christian witness at the universities was markedly diminished, and increasingly met with a hostile, or at least a sceptical response. On many campuses the SCM disappeared. All of this Boyd regrets. In his view the situation can best be described in terms of deprivation. “Whole generations of students were deprived of the kind of lively, inquiring, concerned, worshipping Christian community which had been so influential in the lives of their parents and grandparents, and which had contributed so much to the life of the church. At a crucial point in their lives, students were deprived of the excitement and challenge of belonging to a student movement which was also a movement consciously dedicated to wrestling with the Christian faith and to changing the world to the glory of God” (p.129)

If such a view sounds idealized, it nevertheless accurately represented the feelings of many SCMers in the “golden age”. Boyd takes some comfort that this kind of SCM spirit has carried on in the lives of its alumni, many of whom have contributed so much to the work of world-wide organizations such as the World Council of Churches. In more recent years, he sees some signs of hope that the dangers of unilateral and extreme politicized positions on single issues have been learnt. And he quotes with approval the description by a senior British friend of the movement of what the SCM tradition has always sought to do:

to have, as its central thrust, the purpose of testing out the truth of Jesus Christ and of his calling;
therefore to give much attention to careful Bible study;

therefore too to know the community of Christians called to mission-in-unity, patiently being open to all religious heritages and all cultural backgrounds in order to discover and communicate the catholic and ecumenical identity of Christ;

to insist upon the lay leadership of students and teachers, with chaplains and other ecclesiastics at best serving and provoking others to play a larger part;

to assist on the appropriate intellectual calibre for Christian discipleship in higher education;

to be concerned for adventurous thinking and acting, never content with the status quo but always experimenting beyond;
yet to cultivate not least by student leadership a self-criticism, indeed a sense of humour, that stops anyone taking himself too seriously.

Such a goal may seem far off at the present time. Yet, a hundred years ago, so was John R. Mott’s aim to evangelize the world in one generation. It is clearly Boyd’s wish that Christians should all be one in a common desire to make the saving grace of Jesus Christ relevant again to the students of the twenty-first century.
JSC

1b) Alvyn Austin, China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 18321905. Studies in the History of Christian Missions series. Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007. xxxi + 506 pages.

This review appeared first in Church History, December 2007, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

The history of Christian missions in China remains one of the most intriguing and fertile areas of investigation in the study of modern Sino-Western cultural and political relations. Western missionaries in China played a crucially important role in setting the tone and influencing the course of China’s contacts with America and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, the experience of missionaries in China contributed significantly to movements and ideas, disputes and controversies, within the worldwide Christian community itself. In China’s Millions, Alvyn Austin employs his considerable experience as a historian to present a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of the China Inland Mission, describing the impact of its devout representatives on some of the most important historical developments and religious debates of the era. Drawing extensively upon the broad range of materials in the CIM archives, contemporary newspapers and missionary journals, and the biographies and historical accounts of both early missionary writers and modern scholars, Austin traces the growth of the CIM from the time of its precarious origins in the mid-nineteenth century to its emergence as one of the largest and most influential missionary organizations in China.

Embellishing his narrative with the allegorical themes of John Bunyan’s Christian classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, Austin focuses his study on the personalities that contributed to shaping the CIM in the challenging context of one of the world’s most difficult fields of missionary endeavor. The most important, and perhaps most enigmatic, of these personalities was Hudson Taylor (18321905), the founder and undisputed leader of the CIM throughout the first half-century of its existence. Inspired by the heroic, and at times controversial, example of the renowned Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff (18031851), Taylor first ventured to China in 1854, where he struggled to acquire familiarity with the Chinese language and wandered about in Chinese dress in an effort to meld with the population and win the hearts and minds of the Chinese to his fundamentalist version of Christianity. Returning to England in 1860, he acquired a network of supporters who shared his enthusiasm for converting China’s millions, and in 1865, following a “Heavenly Vision” that lent greater spiritual urgency to his cause, he established the China Inland Mission. The CIM was established as a non-sectarian missionary organization specifically dedicated to extending the reach of missionary enterprise in China to regions far beyond the safe and familiar confines of the newly opened treaty ports. Impelled by the pre-millenialist conviction and evangelical fervor that enlivened much of the Christian world in the mid-nineteenth century, representatives of the CIM withstood considerable personal deprivation following Taylor’s directive to live and dress like the Chinese and use their closeness to the people to establish self-propagating communities of Chinese converts.

Naturally, much of Austin’s narrative focuses on the life of Hudson Taylor and the various challenges and setbacks that he encountered in his effort to transform the CIM into one of the most prominent international missionary organizations. Particular attention is directed towards understanding Taylor’s fundamentalist theological predispositions, aspects of which were reflected in his authoritarian style of leadership. The author is not, however, unsympathetic to Taylor’s exceptional insights into the missionary enterprise and presents a relatively balanced appraisal of both his strengths and weaknesses in confronting the various obstacles he encountered in promoting his unique missionary strategy. But Taylor is by no means the only individual associated with the CIM that Austin examines in some detail. Indeed, the chief characteristic of his narrative is the elaborate attention he pays to the many groups and individuals that either contributed to, challenged, or undermined the religious philosophy and objectives of the CIM. There is an abundance of fascinating anecdotal material gleaned from a broad range of archival and published sources that tell of the self-sacrificing devotion, exceptional fortitude, and at times freakish and disruptive behavior of the organization’s missionary workers, leaders, and financiers. This includes several important Chinese converts, such as the indefatigable Pastor Hsi, who assumed a key role in the activities of the CIM as it expanded its work into Shanxi Province in northern China. The missionaries of this region suffered disproportionately during the Boxer Rebellion, and Austin’s description of the circumstances surrounding this tragedy sheds considerable new light on this important incident in the history of modern China.

While others have undertaken to describe the history of the China Inland Mission and its eccentric founder, for the most part they have been either loyal family members or enthusiastic supporters of Christian missions that have accentuated the organization’s positive achievements and overlooked the more embarrassing or unsavory aspects of its work. China’s Millions strives to be more circumspect, and in this sense presents a more revealing and objective picture of its past. But Austin’s study still cannot be regarded completely as the work of an outsider, for he addresses his subject within the context of a Christian worldview and its attendant concerns. He does not cite any non-Christian Chinese sources in his work, and although his title suggests differently, there is very little of the perspective of Qing society in his presentation. In fact, he chooses not to challenge the fundamental religious premises of Christian missionary activity, thereby narrowing the range of insights that might be revealed on the basis of a more world-historical perspective. Nevertheless, this study represents the most expertly researched and pleasingly narrated investigation of this extremely important missionary organization and its workers published to date. It therefore deserves a prominent place on the shelf of all who wish to further their knowledge of the intriguing historical role of Christian missionaries in China.

Michael C. Lazich, Buffalo State College

1c) Maria Anna Zumholz, Volksfrömmigkeit und Katholisches Milieu: Marienerscheinungen in Heede, 1937-1940, im Spannungsfeld von Volksfrömmigkeit, nationalsozialistischem Regime und kirchlicher Hierarchie. [Schriften des Instituts für Geschichte und Historische Landesforschung, Vol. 12.] Cloppenburg: Verlag und Druckerei Runge. 2004. Pp. 745.

This review appeared first in the Catholic Historiccal Review, October 2007, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

In this interesting study, a slightly revised dissertation, Maria Anna Zumholz analyzes a series of Marian apparitions which occurred in Heede, a small village in the remote northwestern German Emsland region. She uses her analysis to offer a nuanced picture of the interplay between popular piety, Catholic milieu, ecclesiastical authority, and national socialist repression.

In a two-hundred page introduction, Zumholz provides a detailed history of the Emsland and its predominantly Catholic population. The Emsland changed hands repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, always between states with Protestant rulers. Repression of their faith, combined with government neglect of this poor rural region, led the Emsländer to form a high level of suspicion of any state authority.

Zumholz argues that this population was particularly prone to beliefs in supernatural occurrences and in special gifts of certain individuals. The author also provides a thorough review of Marian apparitions in Germany and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She points out that, in contrast to circumstances in other countries, no Marian apparition in Germany received ecclesiastical approbation. Zumholz believes German bishops were not only “Germanically thorough” and strict in their review of these events, but they also feared the condescension of the protestant majority, which considered Marian devotion in general and apparitions in particular to be proof of Catholic backwardness. In this context, Zumholz points to David Blackbourn’s study of the supposed apparitions at Marpingen, events which German bishops remembered only all too well.

The Marian apparition in Heede occurred over the course of three years in a village cemetery. Four teen-aged girls claimed to have seen the Mother of God appearing between two trees. They continued seeing the image, although not on a regular basis. The girls claimed to have spoken with the image, whose presence nobody else, even those present, could perceive. While the local priest soon supported the young women in their claims, the Bishop of Osnabrück as well as state authorities of the Third Reich were alarmed by the claims and even collaborated in banning pilgrimages to the cemetery. The bishop’s decrees and the draconian measures taken by the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence branch of the SS), however, failed to stop people, even those traveling considerable distances, from coming to Heede.

Zumholz uses these events to engage current debates about the formation and strength of both popular piety and the Catholic milieu. She argues convincingly that, at least in the Emsland, the milieu was deeply rooted in the community and that it had originated among the laity. She thus rejects the arguments of Olaf Blaschke and others who argue that the Church hierarchy created the milieu as an instrument of social control or even a way of resisting modernity. Similarly, Zumholz shows that while the Church encouraged Marian devotions specifically and expressions of popular piety generally, this particular expression grew in defiance of the bishop’s explicit instructions. Thus, popular piety, too, was not something engineered from above. Zumholz shows how the laity were and are quite powerful in insisting on forms of devotion acceptable to them and how this challenged and challenges bishops to find compromises between their own authority and the demands of the laity.

Zumholz also shows that the laity’s adherence to the milieu strengthened during times of crisis, such as during the repression of the national socialist regime and the trauma of the Second World War. She has marshaled a large body of evidence to demonstrate the failure of the national socialist regime to penetrate the Catholic milieu. Quite the contrary, the milieu appears to have strengthened under pressure from the outside. Zumholz believes resistance to external pressures to be one of the most important contributors to milieu formation, more important than socioeconomic change – largely absent in the Emsland –, modernization, or hierarchical instrumentalization.

There are only few substantive criticisms to raise against this work. Zumholz is too generous in her treatment of Wilhelm Berning, Bishop of Osnabrück during the Third Reich. While she attributes his accommodation of the regime to his desire to maintain adequate levels of pastoral care in his diocese, other bishops cared for their flocks without instructing their clergy to use the Hitler greeting and without instructing one of their aides to maintain regular informal meetings with the local Gestapo representative to resolve issues of common concern. Also, this volume would have benefited from additional editing before publication. For example, most readers who engage this work will not require a sixty-page description of the anti-Catholic views of national socialists such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich or of the organizational structure of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst. Finally, two hundred pages of introductory material, even if it sets the scene carefully, are more than enough.

These criticisms, however, should not detract from the value of this work. More than the study of a particular Marian apparition, this is an excellent, detailed and well-differentiated analysis of the way in which laity, an inimical regime, and church hierarchy interacted in mid-twentieth century Germany. Too often, the history of Catholicism during the Third Reich is the story of extremes of resistance and collaboration. This study shows Catholics who were used to being a neglected if not oppressed minority doing what they had always done: rejecting the outsiders and maintaining their faith.

Martin Menke, Rivier College

2) Journal article: Jonathan Steele, Germany’s search for home truths.

(This article appeared in the Guardian Weekly, Feb 10th 2008)

Painstaking, persistent and anything but remorseless, Germany’s focus on the Nazi past never seems to slacken. As it marked the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power last week, the emphasis was on the fact that he became chancellor with the full backing of the constitution. This was no putsch but the legal transfer of authority to the leader of the party that did best in a general election. Hitler later won the support of the country’s millions of unemployed but as the news magazine Der Spiegel pointed out, most jobless Germans voted communist in the November 1932 poll. The middle class put the Nazis in power, and many of its voters were Protestant Christians.

This point also struck me forcibly when I visited a recent exhibition in the towering brick aisles of the north German cathedral of Schwerin. Blown up pictures and short life histories of a couple of dozen local vicars and parishioners were displayed on screens, with recordings of their voices and brief reminiscences by their friends.

It was a modest testament to modest people, yet one of considerable importance. The men and women in this exhibition all played a special role in the Nazi period, a few as opponents, but most as Christian collaborators with Hitler’s antisemitic discrimination and atrocities.

Germany’s record in coming to terms with its Nazi past has been remarkably good. Since Hitler’s defeat, the process of uncovering who did what has had impressive results, and by now is pretty much complkete – or so, like most people, I used to believe.
In the immediate post-war period, de-Nazification was driven by the victors. Senior Nazis were convicted at Nuremebrg. Revanchist propaganda was banned and textbooks changed. But most lower-level officials who had loyally served the Nazis kept their jobs. The western allies were careful not to impose on Germans the same kind of humiliation that had followed the first world war.

A new attempt to uncover the past came with the worldwide revolts of 1968. In Germany a key element of the youth rebellion was anger with their paents’ silence over what they had done under Hitler. The taboo of family secrecy was broken and parents had to come clean. But even this was confined to families where activist kids demanded the facts. Institutionally and publicly, Germany had rejected Nazism and recognized the nation’s guilt. Privatel;y most familkies avoided looking back.

More monuments to the victims of the Holocaust have been built in recent years. The German culture ministry has announced that the main one in central Berlin would soon be joined by one for murdered Roma and another for the thousands of gay and lesbian dead.. Other cities are putting bronze plaques on pavements to commemorate where a Jewish jeweller or dressmaker once had a shop. Some critics say it allows pedestrians to tread on them. Others say that for the one person in fifty who sees what is underfoot the shock is all the more powerful.

Remebering victims is only part of the story. What about remembering the guilty? Why did the backbone of the country’s middle class accept dictatorship so readily Why haven’t the professions yet opened their archives and done detailed research on how their leaders and members went along with Hitler’s repression? Above all, what happened to the conscience of the Lutherans, Germany’s largest church?

Now that the individuals have all died, it ought to be easier to research the truth. That is why I found the exhibition in Schleswig so fascinating.It was the first official attempt by the Lutherans – as yet confined to Hamburg and Mecklenburg – to name names. “In 1998 the evangelical church in the north Elbe region made a general declaration of guilt. We had to start research what we and the Lutherans of Mecklenburg were guilty of,” as Johann Peter Wurm, Schwerin’s church archivist told me.

German Protestants have tended to hide behind their one big resistance martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis a month before the war ended. Lionised in books auch as Gordon Brown’s Courage: Eight Profiles, Bonhoeffer was the exception. His “confessing church” was a minority strand within German Lutheranism. The Schwerin exhibition recorded how, within weeks of Hitler becoming chancellor, a “Union of Nazi Pastors in Mecklenburg” was forrmed and the local synod brought in “Aryan paragraphs”, which barred converted Jews (of whom there were many) from church jobs. A Nazi member, Walther Schulz, who wore a large cross on his party uniform, was elected bishop in 1934.

Only a few stood out, such as August Wiegand, an elderly pastor who preached against antisemitism and was forced into early retirement by the church authorities, but went on to work with Berlin’s “Büro Grüber” to help Jews escape from Germany.
Much of the new research depends on reading the “chronicles” that every Lutheran pastor was required to keep, a mixture of private diary and official parish note-taking. In the small town of Plau they let me leaf through Wiegand’s ledger. Its later pages included a shocking sermon by a visiting pastor. Furious that some traditional churchgoers were not Nazi enough, he said Germany’s true Christians were outside the church, unlike the “pig-Christians” (Schweinchristen) who came to services.

I have to declare an interest. Wiegand was my grandfather. As with so many families, my German-born mother and her sisters never fully explained what he had done, and he died when I was four. We were told he started his career by trying to convert Galician Jews to Christianity, which sounded more negative than positive. That his later life was a matter of pride remained hidden. Perhaps we were too shy to put questions, fearing shame.

The search for home truths is always hard, but Germany’s new generations need to keep on pushing. Don’t congratulate them too fast. The job is not yet done.

With very best wishes
John Conway

March 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

March 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 3

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Journal issues:

a) Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 21, no. 3, Winter 2007
b) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 20, no. 1, 2007.

2) Book review, Paldiel, Churches and the Holocaust

1a) Almost the whole issue of this issue of the leading journal in Holocaust history is devoted to the role of the churches during the Nazi years, presenting several valuable articles which raise interesting new perspectives and will serve to dispel some of the more prevalent misperceptions

Michael Marrus of Toronto University describes the meetings between leading Jewish representatives and Vatican officials after the end of the war in 1945 when they raised the issue of the missing Jewish orphans, many of whom were presumed to have been placed in Catholic institutions. They asked for the Pope’s explicit intervention and assistance. Their concern was to rescue these children as the future of the whole Jewish race which had been brought so closely to total extinction. The Pope and his officials naturally asked for details and lists, but it would seem that these were only occasionally forthcoming. Nevertheless the Vatican urged its subordinates on the local level to ensure that Jewish children whose parents had survived were given back, while those orphans already baptized and participating in Catholic riutals should choose for themselves. In France, at least, there were few conflicts, even though the Catholic authorities refused to make any general appeal to assist Jewish agencies. Subsequent attempts to portray the Vatican in pejorative terms, or to see Pius XII as an infamous kidnapper, are here shown to be motivated by extraneous reasons and have no historical substance.

In Germany, the Nazis’ deliberate but deceptively-organised campaign in 1940 to murder mental patients by so-called “euthanasia” was first detected and opposed by the director of a large Protestant institution near Berlin, Pastor Paul Braune, as described by Leroy Walters. Before 1939 both the Protestant and the Catholic churches ran numerous homes and institutions for the mental handicapped, so the Nazi decress ordering the transfer of some of these buildings and their patients to state control aroused alarm. In Braune’s case, this concern was only heightened when he received orders that some young women patients should be”transferred” to a state-run institution beyond his immediate purview. Shortly afterwards news came that several of these young women had died. Braune tried to detect what had happened, and soon found that similar steps were being taken in other parts of the country. The alleged excuse of military necessity caused by the war was palpably false. The upshot was that Braune prepared a strong remonstrance which he delivered to the health offices in Berlin, but to no avail. He was himself arrested by the Gestapo for supposedly defeatist attitudes, but was later released on promise of “good behaviour”. But the “euthanasia”programme continued, and was to lead to the Catholic bishop Galen’s more spectacular protest in the following year. Leroy Walters’ article most valuably shows what a determined church leader could find out, as well as the formidable difficulties which opponents of these measures faced.

Michael Phayer, who has been a strong critic of the Vatican’s war-time policies in earlier publications, provides an interesting and in-depth analysis of the considerations uppermost in 1942-3 in the Pope’s policy towards the catastrophes inflicted on the Jews. Pius XII’s “silence” on these matters, culminating in October 1943 when the Jews of Rome itself were deported, has been widely attacked, but Phayer now seeks to show that other factors played their part. He rejects the view that the Pope was uncaring about the disasters sweeping over all of Europe, or about the especially cruel fate of the Jews. But he was at the same time very conscious of the even greater harm which could result from some Papal pronouncement. Phayer lays stress on the Pope’s 1942 Christmas message which had already condemned, in very general terms, the fact that hundreds of thoiusands of persons, solely because of their nationality or race, had been consigned to death. The Dutch bishops took this an an encouragement to make their own publicly-read protest, openly referring to the Jews. But the violent reaction of the German occupiers which led directly to the deportatation and death of Dutch Catholic Jews was profoundly shocking to the Vatican’s leaders. In the following months, increasing numbers of reports were received indicating the scale of the Nazis’ extermination plans. The Holy See was obliged to come to terms with this indescribable horror. But also increasingly the Vatican officials were forced to recognize that they were helpless to stop the process.

In the absence of the surviving documents – still not available for the period in question – Phayer necessarily has to speculate but his observations are based on a close study of the contemporary publicized reports, including those written by the resident diplomats within the Vatican’s walls. Almost universally these convey an atmosphere of apocalyptic gloom, which was only heightened when German troops directly surrounded the Holy See, following Mussolini’s overthrow in July 1943. There was a widespread expectation that Hitler would take steps to carry the Pope off into captivity – a fear that was only relieved when the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop gave repeated assurances that this would not happen, and that Germany would respect the Vatican’s territorial sovreignty. More worrying was the growing fear that Germany’s defeat would lead to a massive victory for Soviet Communism. Perhaps most pervasive was the fear that the cumulative effect of all these disastrous developments woudl mean that the whole of Christian civilization was doomed. Hence the strenuous efforts to get the western allies to proclaim Rome and its Christian treasures as an open city, not to be bombed. But the contradictions still remain, such as the Pope’s letter to the Berlin bishop expressing concern for hidden Jews, even while he was admiring Germany’s struggle against Soviet Communism. As Phayer notes, historians have still to find satisfying explanations for the behaviour of this enigmatic Pope.

Coming to terms with the past is the subject of Tom Lawson’s spirited essay on the Holocaust reception in later years. He points out that many commentators adopted a Christian interpretation of the evils inflicted on the Jews, not in the sense that they deserved this punishment, as mediaeval Catholic theology had taught, but rather in the looser sense that a Christain vocabulary and imagery was deployed to seek to give meaning to these events beyond Auschwitz. In part, at least, this was because the horrors of the Holocaaust were so often so extrreme that no existing language could be found to reveal what had happened. Hence the most widely available imagery was found in the Christian heritage dealing with suffering and death. Especially in more popular forms, such as the numerous films about the Holocaust, the alleged need to provide the audience with some morsels of hope or “resurrection” has coloured the general apprehension by the use of Christian language, often in a very traditional sense. So too commemorative events often seek to find meaning through Christian imagery. The visits of Pope John Paul II to Auschwitz necessarily saw the evocation of Christian symbolism.

Lawson attributes the trend in part to the fact that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was first seen as part of the Nazis’ wider perversion of European – i.e. Christian – civilization. Nazism came to be portrayed as the inversion of Christianity, and propaganda to this effect was useful during the war. Christian sympathy for the Nazis’ victims in the churches could easily be extended to the Jews, and efforts to assist the Jews were recommended for Christian reasons. So the whole Jewish catastrophe was fitted into a wider Christian framework, which continued in many of the post-war assessments. Even the word Holocaust with its connotations of sacrifice and martyrdom uses a language which, if not speciically Christian, is at least subject to Christian interpretation. So too, Lawson claims, such well-known Holocaust figures as Anne Frank and Oscar Schindler are popularized because they offer a messge of hope beyond the tragedy.

Lawson suggests that this kind of expropriation, however well-meaning, can or even ought to be a hundrance to improved Christain-Jewish relations. Theologians need to take note. Lawson has yet to develop his own ideas of how the Holocaust should be more fittingly understood and commemorated. It is a task which will require a different vocabulary, a different imagery, and the renunciation of the language of the perpetrators. We shall follow this undertaking with great interest.

1b) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, Vol 20, no 1, 2007

This international journal for theology and history has been edited for twenty years by Professor Gerhard Besier, who now teaches at the University of Dresden. This is a remarkable achievement by a scholar who has consistently upheld high standards in the journal’s articles and book reviews. In more recent years, there has been a deliberate effort to increase the bilingual character of the journal, with articles written by English-speaking authors and printed in the same language. Such contributions make for interesting contrasts, since the English-speaking scholars usually adopt a narrative and historical approach very different from the more heavily theoretical and abstract Germans! Despite the sad decline in the number of professorships in church history, and especially in contemporary church affairs, nevertheless the quality of this journal speaks to the continued interest in recent church developments in a wider, mainly European, context.

The current issue covers two topics: the churches’ reactions to the striking political changes in eastern Europe since the 1980s, and theology and society in the 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Professor Renöckl who teaches ethics at the University of Linz, Austria, seeks to evaluate the impact of Christian social and ethical ideas in Europe today. Such an assessment can only be tentative, particularly in central and eastern Europe where the political developments of the last twenty years have led to such profound social consequences. But one thing is clear. The hope that the overthrow of the atheist communist system would lead to a revival of church adherence has not been realized. Indeed, in the Czech Republic, for example, the number of church members has markedly declined. But the opposite is true, at least for Catholicism, in the rump state of Slovakia. A similar pattern can be seen in Poland, Croatia, Roumania and Bulgaria, whereas in formerly strongly Protestant areas such as the Baltic states or East Germany, the decline is marked. All have been affected by the changes in economic activity, and also by the political attractions of joining the European Union. But it has to be acknowledged that, in the new Europe, the Christian presence is relatively weak.

Church history affords few pointers in this situation. But can Christian social ethics make a significant contribution? In the face of often inhumane technical and scientific debelopments, the need for a forceful discussion of ethical values seems clear. The rival claims of economic efficiency or of social justice have to be examined in a global context. On the other hand, each individual requires guidance for his or her personal stance.

Europe presently stands at a crossroads. Even though many seek to reject the institutions and ethical systems of the past, nevertheless Christian thinkers have an opportunity to show that the values proclaimed by Christian social ethics are both relevant and helpful. It is good to note that such proclamation is now more than ever made ecumenically.

On a somewhat narrower scale, Josef Pilvousek of the newly recreated University of Erfurt, examines the role of the Catholic Church in the former East Germany since 1985. During the years of communist rule, the Catholic Church withdrew into its own milieu, took protective measures against the undermining tactics of the Stasi, and resolutely refused to accept the premises of Marxism-Leninism. It was an unheroic stand. Compared to the Protestants, the Catholics played little part in the decomposition of the regime. But by the end of the 1980s the spirit of openness to the world, as proclaimed at the Second Vatican Council, found its expression in a number of well-attended conferences on the subject of Justice and Peace and the Preservation of Creation. Several of the leaders were to play a fuller role in politics after the regime’s collapse. Catholics were now urged to take a more active part in political life and to leave the ghetto mentality behind.

But Catholics were only a minority in East Germany, compared to the unreligious or Protestant majorities. They had gained the reputation of having abandoned their social responsibiolituies in the face of communist pressures. Since 1989 they have been repeatedly urged to become more active in their pastoral work, which can now be deployed freely. This process has been helped by the Vatican’s willingness to establish new dioceses, even though contacts with their former linkages in West Germany are actively propagated. In the meantime, such temporal matters as the church tax or religious education in schools has been assimilated to the West German practice. Catholic social work agencies have been given a new lease of life. But much will depend on whether the church can call on more of the East German population back from the secularized existence propagated under communist rule. Herein lies the main challenge for the years ahead.

Most welcome is the English-language contribution by the Finnish scholar Mikko Ketola, on the Baltic Churches since 1985. The fate of these small countries is not well known, and their complex church history even less so. So Ketola’s splendidly precise description is helpful. He first notes the striking changes in the religious map of the Baltic states since the 1930s. The dual invasions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the long years of Soviet domination, reduced the Lutheran churches in both Estonia and Latvia to minorities in a highly secularized society. Immigrants or settlers from Russia have increased the Orthodox church populations, even though these are divided between the supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate and those who looked to Constantinople. Only recently have these two groups been able to merge.

Lithuania presents a different picture since Catholicism was the predominant denomination, though again much weakened during the Soviet period. Yet its followers made few compromises with the dominant regime and may now be able to recover lost ground. Its members were certainly active in the struggle to regain independence and have a strong commitment to human rights. In Latvia, by contrast, the entire Lutheran hierarchy was voted out of office for its subservience to Soviet wishes. In Estonia, the same thing happened but their Archbishop was allowed to continue on the grounds of his personal piety.

All of these states, Ketola shows very graphically, have had to come to terms with the past. Each set up a historical commission to investigate the crimes committed by the Nazi and Soviet occupiers. Because of its longer duration, the Soviet period has been considered to be the more harmful and destructive. But another factor is the persistence of a cultural antisemitism, which has limited the investigations of Nazi atrocities. Yet the Lithuanian church has followed Pope John Paul II in asking for forgiveness for individual Catholics (but notably not for the church institutionally).

In Latvia, a new “Christian” party, drawing its ethos from American right-wing circles, has won a position in politics, adopting a rigid progarmme of social conservative values, and attacking homosexuality and abortion as convenient targets to mobilize its supporters. Protestant preachers are prominent in the membership. Their espousal of family values parallels the demands for more religious education in schools. So too the widespread support in the Baltic countries for the adhesion to the European Union can be seen as a means of rejecting both the Soviet past and of repelling the renewed Soviet pressures or assimilative moves, which are reputed to be on the rise again.

Theological education is a top priority. But after so long a period of isolation, only the more conservative brands of Lutheranism have been welcomed. These churches are very sensitive to real or imagined pressures from western church bodies to update their ideas, for instance on female ordination. This has led to a strained relationship with their most generous donors in Sweden and north Germany. But Catholics also have difficulty in coming to terms with the innovations of the Second Vatican Council. Such factors have undoubtredly hindered the task of fitting these churches for the twenty-first century.

Keith Robbins, a distinguished British historian, and former Principal of Lampeter Collge in Wales, examines the relationship between the British churches and eastern Europe over the past decades. This is a lucid but at times controversial account of this chapter in the wider dealings between Communist countries and a limited, if influential, number of British churchmen. In the decade after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. British churchmen began to become concerned about how these churches in eastern Europe, as institutions, were surviving under Communist rule. The British Council of Churches appointed a working party whose report, published in 1974, was written by an Anglican clergyman and journalist, Trevor Beeson. It was entitled Discretion and Valour, referring to the two basic stances adopted for Christian witness under Communism. On the one hand, there were those who sought to accommodate themselves to their new situation and to promote their faith discreetly. On the other hand, there were those who refused to make any compromises, and were ready to face the possible consequences of persecution and even martyrdom. This they believed was the more valourous path.

In Britain, only a tiny handful of church members were openly sympathetic to the Soviet system, notably the “red” Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson. The majority were divided as to whether discretion or valour was to be preferred in combatting totalitarianism. Some urged that a policy of constructive engagement should be attempted, whereas others believed that the experience of Nazi Germany had shown that resolute opposition was the only permissible stance, lest Christians fall into the trap of collaborationism.

During the 1970s and 1980s British church visitors were involved on both sides of this debate. Some supported the cause of Christian-Marxist dialogue or the activities of the Christian Peace Conference, based in Prague. The leading figure in this group was Rev. Paul Oestreicher, who worked for the British Council of Churches, and was also chairman of Amnesty International. Others were more concerned to make public the abuses of religious rights in Communist countries. Especially valuable were the publications of a group at Keston College, first in Kent and later in Oxford, led by Reverend Michael Bourdeaux. The rivalry between Oestreicher and Bourdeaux, though very polite, was an indication that British church opinion remained divided. In one sense, the events of 1989 surprised both groups. The wishful thinking of those who believed that Communism would soon “improve” or reform itself was shown to be a fanciful error, while on the other side, the overthrow of the Soviet system in all its satellite states, largely deprived Bourdeaux’s supporters of their raison d’etre. After 1991 there was no more need to smuggle bibles into Russia. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new period of religious life in all of eastern Europe, which was wholly welcome to the British church community. But more energetic steps are now needed to take advantage of this freedom to build more solid bridges of Christian fellowship between east and west.

The second half of this journal’s issue is devoted to studies in the theological trends of the 1920s. Ricardo Bavaj, who teaches in St Andrews, describes Paul Tillich’s political thought in the early 1920s, which was prompted by his sense of eschatological despair and by his traumatic wartime experiences. Tillich’s theology was one of crisis – or Kairos – and often took a mystical and antirationalist tone, full of idealism but too vague to be easily grasped. His political leanings were antinomian, almost anarchistic. He was also to be accused of undermining the rational democratic political system of the Weimar Republic. But in fact his influence was limited to his academic circles. His attempts to find a highly abstract synthesis between Christianity and Socialism aroused considerable opposition even amongst his univesrity colleagues. His appeal to the Social Democratic Party to recapture its earlier revolutionary impetus was also unsuccessful. But his early warnings against the dangers of National Socialism grew ever more urgent. In Bavaj’s view, Tillich’s political thought revealed very clearly the deficiencies of either the decided refusals to accept the existing political situation or cloudy projections of vague alternatives. Such ideas were characteristic of left-wing intellectuals in this decade.

Tillich was one of the first professors to be dismissed from his post in April 1933, and subsequently sought refuge in the United States, where a new and more positive chapter in his thinking began.

Charlotte Methuen, who teaches theology in Oxford, provides an excellent account of the three meetings between German and English theologians at the end of the 1920s (even though her article is mistitled as The Anglo-American Theological Conferences). These began as a result of Archbishop Nathan Soderblom’s lead at Stockholm in 1925. He nelieved that theologians had a significant role to play in binding up the wounds left by the first world war. He was supported by Geroge Bell, then Dean of Canterbury, and later Bishop of Chichester. Bell was amongst those who had been appalled by the readiness of his German colleagues to give unstinted support to their nation’s war efforts, or even to attempt to preempt God on their side and to demonize their enemies. He was equally shocked when similar features were found in Britain.

The records of these conferences offer a fascinating glimpse of the theological concerns of the day. They were an attempt by high-minded churchmen to find some appropriate language and methodology for a common witness to the cause of peace. A careful choice of delegates, almost all theology professors, was made to ensure harmony. Although fundamental dissent was voiced, it was not as much between the English and the Germans as within each delegation.

The first conference held in 1927 took up the subject of “The Kingdom of God” as an explicit continuation and deepening of the theological work started at Stockholm. In the following year the conference considered “Christology” since the first debates had shown a need to include a full treatment of this topic. The third meeting was held in Chichester in 1931 to discuss the nature of the church, about which there was much less agreement. The friendships established undoubtedly enabled both sides to learn more about the other’s theological traditions or presuppositions. But, as was soon to be revealed, even such an ecumenical approach did not lead to any lessening of the support these men gave to their own nation’s cause. In fact, on the German side, Gerhard Kittel and Paul Althaus warmly supported the Nazi cause, while Bell, warned by the young Bonhoeffer, became a strong champion of the Confessing Church.
For his part, Arne Rasmussen begins his account of the theological trends in Germany during the Weimar Republic by pointing to the controversial views of Karl Barth. Barth attacked his fellow theologians either for their vaporous liberalism or for their ultra-nationalist conservatism. For example, Barth accused Harnack and Troeltsch for being Kulturprotestanten, while Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus were attacked for their collaboration with the Nazi Party. During and after the second world war, Barth’s views predominated, especially among Anglo-American theologians and supporters of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Only in more recent years have Trutz Rendtorff and his colleagues in Munich attempted to put forward a revisionist view. They criticized Barth for his supposedly rigid dogmatism, and suggested that Barth’s dialectical theology only served as a hindrance to the liberal basis of the Weimar Republic’s democracy.

In fact, as in secular history, the period of the 1920s saw a remarkable pluralism in theological views. Liberal theologians like Troeltsch provided justifications for the nascent political democracy after 1919. But their opponents in the nationalist and conservative camps had also given theological justification for Germany’s war efforts and for the demonization of its enemies. They remained highly visible anad vocal and were later to give significant support to the völkisch movement which supplied many of the Nazi Party’s recruits. In Rasmussen’s view, Barth’s criticisms of both the modern German nation state and of the theologians who justified its existence were very plausible.

In Rendtorff’s view, however, the tragedy was that so few theologians and church leaders followed Troeltsch, Harnack and Martin Rade in supporting the democratic experiment. He criticizes Barth for his refusal to sacralize any political form, since the Kingdom of God was not to be found in human terms or by human effort. Yet Barth was equally attacked by the nationalist anti-liberals, such as Hirsch, Althaus and Elert, for his lack of support of the German state which they regarded as the primary carrier of God’s historical action.

In fact, all of these German theologians had been traumatized by the loss of the war and the fall of the Empire. Each “school” sought to come to terms with these unexpected and unwelcome developments. But no consensus could be found.

In 1933 Barth’s chief concern was only to defend the independence of the church and to protect it from political interference by the now dominant Nazis. He was not concerned with politics because to him the church was more important.than the future of Germany. His protests were also ethical, since he recognized the danger of state dictation overwhelming Christian convictions. In the same year, however, many liberals and democratic Protestants, such as Martin Rade, threw their support behind Hitler. Their nation was going to be rejuvenated. And in the interests of the nation, the church must not be left behind. Cultural homogeneity was more important than defending pluralism or protecting individual human rights. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze was almost the only German liberal theologian who made any stand on behalf of the Jews.

Rasmussen’s defence of Barth takes issue with Rendtorff’s apologetic revisionism in the current theological scene. It is all part of a continuing debate.For, as he says, historiography cannot be separated from theology, and theology cannot be separated from historiography.

2) Mordecai Paldiel, Churches and the Holocaust, Unholy teaching, Good Samaritans, and Reconciliation. Jersey City, New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House, 2006. 443pp. The following appeared first in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as above, p.488

In 1953 the Israeli government established the Yad Vashem center as a memorial to the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Ten years later this commemoration was extended to include non-Jews who had rescued or assisted Jews to escape from death at the hands of the Nazis or their associates. Over the years some twenty-one thousand of these “Righteous Gentiles” have been identified, after careful scrutiny of the depositions made on their behalf. Each was remembered with the planting of a tree in the stately Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles and a plaque giving the name and country of origin.

Mordecai Paldiel, director of this section of Yad Vashem’s activities, has now selected the stories of some three hundred Christian clerics, both male and female, of a variety of denominations across the European continent. (Their names are listed by country in a useful appendix). While much of this material is already known, his convenient and comparative summary is welcome. His aim is to show that, despite the long history of Christian intolerance towards Judaism, nevertheless there were Christian clergy who acted with humanity and generosity towards Jews in their hour of peril. In so doing, he claims, they paved the way for the striking change in Christian theological attitudes implemented in the 1960s, particularly at the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II and his memorable visit of repentance to Jerusalem in 2000 set the seal on this unprecedented process of reconciliation, and opened the way for a whole new era in Christian-Jewish relations.

Paldiel’s narratives, which are organized by nationality, are designed to offset the feelings many Jews share that Christian anti-Semitism is ineradicable. He seeks to show that there were clergy who had shed such views, or who acted despite them. “The overwhelming motivation of clergy rescuers of Jews was compassion for their sufferings coupled with a Christian duty to help others in need; motivations powerful enough to overcome the traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudice” (p.225). In Poland, for instance, where Catholic anti-Semitism was widespread, the Christian rescuers faced not only danger from the brutal German occupiers but also from their own anti-Semitic kinsmen. Their heroic deeds deserve particularly to be honored for “Polish rescuers occupy an elevate position of selfless devotion and great courage, unmatched in any other country” (ibid.).

Motivations are extraordinarily difficult to pin down. And Christian clergy rescuers would naturally express themselves in terms of compassion and mercy. But there can be no question that they were in a minority, and often without support from their superiors, which makes their risk-taking all the more notable. In Germany, even leading figures of the Protestant Confessing Church, such as Martin Niemöller, who opposed the Nazis openly, still held to the traditional Christian delegitimization of Jews. Paldiel includes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this category. So too leading German Catholic bishops, such as Galen of Münster, even if opposed to some Nazi policies, did not take a stand for the Jews. Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin was the only leading Catholic clergyman to pray for the Jews and was imprisoned for his daring. His Protestant counterpart, Hermann Maas, was equally isolated but survived to give courageous testimony after the war. Paldiel then recounts the names and stories of lesser-known German clergy rescuers who deserve recognition.

In describing events in successive countries across the continent, Paldiel adopts a convenient pattern. He first gives a survey of the situation of the Jewish community before and during the German occupation, followed by a section on the responses of the churches in general, which were all too often negative in tone, demonstrating the majority’s indifference or at least inaction. Then he gives details of the church rescuers, drawn principally from the files accumulated in Jerusalem, supplemented by comments from the numerous secondary sources. (A useful English-language bibliography is appended). In several situations, the desire to rescue Jews was undoubtedly seen as part of resistance to the German invader. But the motive of Christian compassion was clearly uppermost – at least in these sources. It is hardly surprising that, in some cases, those who cared for Jewish children should have desired their conversion, though in other cases, which Paldiel naturally applauds, this urge was not yielded to. For the same reason, in Holland for example, Christian rescuers who had become attached to the orphans in their charge, were most reluctant to hand them over after the war to unknown Jewish organizations, merely for the sake of preserving the Jewish race or building up the new Israel. But Paldiel fairly acknowledges the courage and open-mindedness of many of these helpers who were inspired by a genuine regard for God’s chosen people. Many of the stories he records are both touching and heart-rending. Not all rescuers were saints; many lost their lives as the price of their altruism. But their witness was a significant contribution, making it impossible for the pre-war climate of ideological hostility to remain unchallenged.

Paldiel’s lament over the failure of the church leaders to protest or prevent the mass murder of the Jews culminates in his chapter on Italy and the Vatican. He does not go into the heated and still continuing debates over the so-called “silence” of Pope Pius XII, which he attributes, not to anti-Semitism, but to an uncourageous prudence which amounted to a dereliction of moral leadership. Yet he argues that the fact that Pius did not publicly condemn the crimes of the Holocaust, does not mean that he did nothing to help the Jews. The thousands of Jews hidden in religious establishments throughout Italy were there with his knowledge and consent, and perhaps in some cases at his instigation. Paldiel then recounts a whole batch of notable rescue efforts by priests and nuns, implying that these were mainly spontaneous actions. The net result was that, thanks to these clergy, Italy was the Catholic country which saved the highest percentage of Jews, more so than any other country under German domination.

In conclusion, Paldiel contends that the higher ecclesiastical clerics were too much blinded by their anti-Jewish traditions to be able to act courageously in face of the moral challenge presented by the murderous Nazi anti-Semitism. But the lesser clergy and nuns were freer of these misguided doctrines and so acted humanely. Twenty years later, the shock of the Holocaust was sufficient to lead to an abandonment of the unfortunate teachings of contempt and supersession, and to create of a new climate which Jews should now embrace and welcome. Even if the belated Christian apologies for past intolerance fall short of what might be desirable, nevertheless he believes there is now room for dialogue and coexistence. The “Righteous” clergy can serve as role models for a new and constructive relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

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With ever best wish
John Conway

February 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

February 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 2

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Burleigh, Sacred Causes
b) Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto
c) Zurek, The Churches and German-Polish Reconciliation

2) Journal article. Baran, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia

3) Conference report: Sandford, Christian Science in East Germany

4) Book note: Gerhard Besier Festschrift

5) 10th International Bonhoeffer Congress, Prague, July 2008

1a) Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes, New York/ London: HarperCollins Publishers 2006 556 pp. ISBN: 978-0-06-058095-7

The British historian and journalist Michael Burleigh has already gained a notable reputation for his books on Nazi Germany. He has now embarked on a broader survey of European history since the French Revolution in two volumes, of which Sacred Causes is the second, covering the period from the first world war to the present.

Burleigh’s focus is on the clashes between religion and politics, which he analyses in a series of well-researched episodes, drawing his material from widely separated parts of Europe. His overall aim is clear. He seeks to dispute the claim put forward in numerous surveys of European history, that, since religion plays only a marginal role in most European societies, it can be treated as an irrelevant factor in twentieth century history.

To the contrary, Burleigh asserts, the major conflicts of this century which brought such disasters to Europe were in fact the result of attempts by pseudo-religious movements, such as Fascism, Nazism or Communism, to supplant and replace the institutions and values of the established Christian churches from Spain to the Soviet Union, in pursuit of their own totalitarian ambitions. Despite the continuing divisions of the Christian churches, their resistance to these ideologically-based challenges, and their determination to outlast such ephemeral political experiments in social and political engineering, have proved successful. In Burleigh’s view, the Christian religion in its various forms still constitutes a valid component of Europe’s social and intellectual perspectives, both as the upholders of the moral and spiritual values of the past, and also as the guardians against other future totalitarian dangers.

Burleigh is not the first, but possibly the most forceful advocate of the view that the political extremism which swept over Europe after 1917 can be attributed to the catastrophes of the first world war. Not only did the slaughter of a whole generation of leaders produce a sweeping loss of confidence in the established classes, but even more vitally the collapse of credibility in the moral and spiritual values of the previous era had fateful consequences. To be sure, Burleigh admits, the Christian churches, especially the Protestants, had brought on these ominous developments by their over-eager support for jingoism, militarism and nationalism. The spectacle of each opponent claiming to have God on their side, while demonizing the enemy as un-Christian, in mutually contradictory and exclusive terms, had discredited their entire witness for many years to come.

In the aftermath, liberal churchmen sought to rebuild their faith through a naive support for peace movements and institutions, such as the League of Nations, while conservatives concentrated on a nostalgic longing for a return of the past, as seen in the universal commemoration of the war dead in cenotaphs and war memorials. Neither strategy was to be sufficient to equip the churches to resist the new forces of political radicalism, which appealed to the disillusioned populations. The offers of a secular vision of political recovery and reform, through the creation of a new man and a new society while repudiating the religious traditions of the past, proved to be alluring whether in a Fascist, Nazi or Communist guise. These are all effectively examined and analyzed comparatively in Burleigh’s narrative.

The rise of totalitarian movements, Burleigh believes, was brought on by the demands of so many millions of insecure and frustrated people looking for some powerful object or person in whom they could place their trust and faith. As was clear in the German case, this cult of the pseudo-divinity of the modern state or leader was not the invention of singular individuals, however charismatic, such as Hitler. Rather, it pointed to the apocalyptic mood amongst the people, which gave support to forms of political messianism or ersatz religious symbols and practices. The appeal of blood and soil was particularly seductive.

In the same way, the Bolsheviks in Russia campaigned as saviours of their country through the eradication of traditional religious life in pursuit of applied rationality along Marxist-Leninist lines. The cost in human suffering was indisputably enormous. The political extremism which accompanied the Bolshevik experiment in social engineering was ruthless and implacable. At least twenty-five million people are believed to have starved in the Volga and Ukrainian regions. Relief efforts by foreign church agencies were virtually prohibited. The plight of the peasants was used as an opportunity to smash the opposition from Russia’s church population, Burleigh is particularly good at evoking the pseudo-religious mentality of these persecutors, and in quoting from their writings. Opposition to the dominant secular creed was left to a handful of the faithful, mainly elderly women.

This secular triumphalism was also the hall-mark of Fascism, which, according to Mussolini, “is a religious conception in which man is caught up in his immanent relationship with a superior Law and an objective Will”.

The responses of the Catholic Church to these challenges is still a matter of dispute and debate among historians. The Vatican’s strategy after 1918 was to attempt to create legally-binding relationships with the new European states through treaties or concordats. But these did little to combat the extremist tendencies of the totalitarians. In predominantly Catholic states, such as Portugal, Austria and Ireland, a semi-autocratic Catholic regime was established, but in Spain such an attempt only provided the fuel for a convulsive civil war, for widespread and horrendous murders of opponents, and for the imposition of a political religion of the right.

All these developments are described by Burleigh with mordant exactitude, based on his extensive researches, particularly in English and German sources. In his view, only the mobilized integrity of a continent-wide Catholicism had the ability to withstand the forceful onslaughts into which it had been drawn.

By contrast, the Protestants were too divided or confused to be of much use. He can even state that “there is no evidence that the Nazis persecuted the Protestant Churches. . . despite what happened to a few dissenting individuals”. Such an astonishing misjudgment ignores the undoubted fact that the Nazi ambitions for total control made no exceptions. To be sure, in 1933, too many Protestants – as well as too many Catholics – welcomed Hitler as a national saviour, but the subsequent staunch opposition of a significant portion of German Protestantism, in the ranks of the Confessing Church, who also supplied numerous members of the Resistance Movement, cannot be so easily overlooked.

Despite such oversimplifications, Burleigh is surely right in stating that the relationships between the churches and the totalitarian political regimes were infinitely complicated and require considerable effort to reconstruct. His verdict on Pope Pius XII is suitably balanced. He admits that there may be many criticisms one might make of this Pope regarding what could or could not be done during the second world war. But he resolutely refutes the idea that Pius was “Hitler’s Pope”, and suggests that many of the attacks on this enigmatic pope derive from the kind of anticlericalism in which both the Nazis and the Communists excelled.

His chapter on the religious roots of the troubles in Northern Ireland is written both in sorrow and anger at the narrow-minded bigotry displayed on both sides, But his analysis is undoubtedly a most convincing one for the general reader. Here is a nutshell has been a case of religiously-propagated tribal warfare, in a province suffering periodic explosions of communal violence, and caught in a web of historical traditions, from which they are unwilling or unable to escape. Here the lamentable effects of the clash between religion and politics has been clear for all to see.

On the whole Burleigh does a masterly job in depicting these challenges to the churches’ life and witness across the continent. In the post-1945 conflicts, he stresses the more positive role played by churchmen in helping to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire. His hero in this account is undoubtedly Pope John Paul II, but he equally praises the insights on these matters of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately at times his bias shows in unnecessary passages of vitriol against “trendy left-wing professors, especially of sociology”, which may possibly be merited, but do not belong in such a valuable historical survey.

Burleigh’s achievement is to provide a synoptic view of the last century which restores the religious dimension, and makes an effective case for its relevance in European history.

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1b) Peter Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto. An epitaph for the unremembered. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2005. Pp xii,160. This review first appeared in the Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 93, April 2007.

In the writings about the Warsaw Ghetto, little is made of the some five thousand Christians of Jewish origin, mostly Catholics, who shared this plight. Jewish contemporary observers ignored this small group, or made disparaging comments about them. Afterwards, political factors dominated the writing of histories of these events. Archival sources were unavailable, and survivors were often too intimidated to speak out. So it has been left to Peter Dembowski, as an eye-witness, to describe the complexity and perils of their lives and deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto.

These Jewish Christians were a minority within a minority. Most of them had no sense of belonging to the Jewish community, and were only forced to accept this designation when expelled to the ghetto in February 1941. There they shared the fate of 300,000 full Jews in being murdered in the series of enforced deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. In Dembowski’s view the Jewish Christian community ceased to exist in the early stages of the Nazi Aktion.

Within the largely Jewish part of northern Warsaw, there already existed three Catholic parishes: St. Augustine, where the priests lived outside the ghetto, but were later forbidden to enter, and services ceased; All Saints which was the largest church building in Warsaw, built in an imposing classical style; and the Church of the Nativity whose courageous priest resided there throughout the ghetto period, refusing to leave and helping Jews where he could. Like many others, these priests did not consider “their” Catholics to be Jews at all, and were shocked by the Nazi decision to include them in the ruthless isolation and persecution.

Since most of the Jewish Christians were educated and assimilated to Polish society, they were often resented as “enemies of Israel” by the Yiddish-speaking majority of full Jews. But Dembowski, who knew many of them personally, takes a more favourable stance. For their part, the Jewish Christians, usually of a higher social class, sought to maintain their former contacts in Polish Catholic society, attended the church services with diligence, and avoided contact with the majority of Yiddish-speakers around them. For those who had lost any contact with their Jewish roots, or had not been aware that they had any, the shock of being thrust into the ghetto was traumatic.

Another feature of the distance between the two groups can be seen over the plans made by the Catholic clergy to rescue Jewish children by finding places for them to hide in monasteries or convents. These efforts were misinterpreted as “soul snatching”, or in order to gain extra income for these institutions. Jewish observers had a long memory of such Catholic attempts to gain converts. They were rarely convinced by the priests’ assurances that these children would not be subject to proselytism. In fact, even though giving assistance to Jews of any age was punishable by death according to Nazi rules, the evidence is that many children were rescued, especially in 1942. Far more was at stake for these “righteous Gentiles” than monetary gain or conversionary fervour.

One moving testimony is the memoir, as yet untranslated into English, of the prominent Jewish Christian doctor, Ludwig Hirszfeld. His career was suddenly cut short by the Germans in 1939, but he was allowed for a few more months to practice in his hospital for typhus patients until forced to relocate to the ghetto. There he became one of the leading personalities in All Saints parish, and a great admirer of the selfless work of the priest Fr. Godlewski. Luckily he was able to escape just before the deportation Aktion of July-August 1942 when the remaining members of this parish were transported to their deaths in Treblinka. After this terrible atrocity, nothing more is to be found about the Christians in the Warsaw ghetto. In her post-war novel Hana Krall recalled “When the Germans cleared the church of all the Christian Jews, there was only one Jew left in the church: the crucified Jesus above the altar”.

Dembowski is well aware that the converts held an ambiguous position, often resented by both Catholics and Jews, and unable to convince others of the genuineness of their spiritual motivations. Forty-five post-war years of censorship, self-censorship, half-truths, “official” truths, lies and silences have made discussions of this difficult problem in Polish-Jewish relations highly problematic. But the fact that these Christians from the Warsaw Ghetto were murdered along with their fellow Jews undoubtedly affected the basis of the church-synagogue relationship. Today’s fully altered attitude in the Christian church towards Judaism may be said to be the mostfitting epitaph for these unremembered martyrs.

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1c) Robert Zurek, Zwischen Nationalismus und Versöhnung. Die Kirchen und die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen 1945-1956. (Forschungen und Quiellen zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte Ostdeutschlands. Cologne: Böhlau 2005 413pp
ISBN 3-412-10805-7. This review appeared first on H-German on December 10th 2007

The churches played an important role in improving German-Polish relations, which traditionally have been difficult. At the end of 1965, an exchange of letters between the Polish and the East and West German Catholic bishops prepared the way for a change in politics, which led to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling in front of the Warsaw ghetto monument in 1970. Robert Zurek focuses on the relationship between the national Catholic churches in Poland, East Germany and West Germany after World War II until 1956 when the Stalinist regime in Poland ended. One of the most important factors in all three societies was the Church, which constituted the largest mass organization and was committed to Christian love for one’s “neighbour”. This book will be of interest to all church historians, as well as scholars dealing with the relationship between politics and cultural history.

Zurek’s study offers an important insight into the powerful German-Polish and Polish-German resentments in place after World War II, even among Christians. The German attack on Poland and the persecution of its population and its priests strengthened :the existing Polish bias against Germany and Prussia. After Germany’s defeat, no amends or restitution payments and only general confessions of guilt were made. Instead, German fugitives and expellees published accounts of Polish atrocities after 1945, which strengthened existing prejudices. Catholics, Protestants and their clergy in Poland and East and West Germany did not differ in their attitudes from their societies at large, which they sought to influence. This state of affairs is hardly surprising in light of the war and events in its aftermath, such as the expulsion of Germans. The wounds of many were still open and fresh, so forgiveness and reconciliation between Germany and Poland were not on the agenda for some time to come. The title of the book appears to imply that the national churches and German-Polish relations were dominated by nationalism in the early period and the will to reconciliation in the latter. This apparent dichotomy does not accurately describe the situation. During the years 1945-56, only a few attempts were made at reconciliation, and no significant differences in attitude existed between the churches, despite the multi-layered situation.

After a short introduction, Zurek focuses on the German-Polish relationship between 1772 and 1956, yet only briefly mentions the role of the national churches in events between 1939 and 1945. This portion of the book is plagued by some problems: for instance, the author uses the unfortunate terms “German Christians” (deutsche Christen) for the Nazi period and also for the period after 1945, which suggests an (ecumenical) unity of Christians which did not exist. The study is then subdivided into seven chapters: “The Churches and National Socialist Crimes”; “The Church, the Expulsion of Germans and the Problems of the German-Polish border”; “The Church and National Minorities”; “The Church and Respective National Views of the Other”; “The German Church and the Persecution of the Polish Church”; “The Churches and their Mutual Contacts”; and “The Church and German-Polish Reconciliation”. In all of the chapters, the author addresses both the Catholic and Protestant perspectives.

Each section concludes with a summary and evaluation. This repetitive presentation does at times impede reading. More importantly a lack of contextual information plagues the analysis throughout. The author refers to different concepts of Kollektivschuld, for instance, but does not provide a rigorous historical discussion of this issue. Sweeping generalizations like “Christian ethics”, “principles of Christian morality” and “Polish reasons of state” are not explained or elaborated upon. In general, readers will expect more information than Zurek provides as to how these principles applied in particular contexts, why they were not followed, and why Christians seemed to have behaved in a very un-Christian manner. Apart from the four main causes of failure to live up to Christian ideals – the antagonistic constellation of German-Polish relations, negative national stereotypes, a difficult socio-political, economic and social situation, and thinking in categories of power and politics but not in religious or ethical ones – as summarized on p. 364 – others factors might have been taken into account. Mentioned in passing is the papal wish, expressed to the head of the German bishops, not to discuss the topics of the pope, Poland and the German-Polish border. This may have been one reason for silence on the German Catholic part. Another factor may have been the pressures put upon the Christian press by the Stalinist political authorities, not discussed here. Moreover at least theologically, reconciliation demands the recognition of guilt and its confession. As there was little consciousness of guilt on either side, forgiveness and reconciliation were impossible.

Among the strengths of the books are the sources. The author relies heavily on the Christian press in order to investigate reconciliation approaches and activities. He consulted thirty-eight newspapers and periodicals from Catholic and Protestant churches in each country. The newspapers heralded even a few private or unofficial initiatives. Exploiting these sources makes it possible to analyze the positions within the churches in all three countries and to draw comparisons. Often biases and similar concepts on opposing sides were revealed, which in turn crystallized the mentalities of the Christians involved. From this approach the reader is given well-documented insights into both mainstream and marginalized voices within the opposing churches.

Still, the author’s source examination is not as strong as it might be. Aside from printed sources, unprinted material was also consulted. Fifteen archives are listed, although their contents are not specified. A survey of the footnotes suggests that some archives were only consulted for rare printed periodicals or books. Somewhat surprisingly, the author boldly claims that it was unnecessary to consult Catholic archives in the former German Democratic Republic. In contemporary history, such an attitude might prove fatal, as it is nearly always possible to find new material, particularly background information about church leaders or on the minutes of ecclesiastical conferences, which are discussed insufficiently in this work. It is to the author’s credit that he consulted both Polish and German sources for a balanced account. There are some errors in his bibliography, and it is a shame that he did not consult the works of Gerhard Besier to amplify his discussion. It would have helped to include the 2002 issue of the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which specifically dealt with the role of the churches in German-Polish relations during the past two centuries. Finally, given that the topic is one of such contemporaneous history, it would have been enriched by the inclusion of more eyewitness accounts.
Overall this books fills in a blank space on the historical map. But, in essence the balance sheet has to be a negative one, since, for the period covered by Zurek, hardly any attempts were made at reconciliation. Despite their Christian ideals, little or no action followed. Only in the following decade did the ice begin to melt, and a new more positive relationship result. But, for the years covered in this book, the author has given us a balanced and fitting account of the situation as it unfolded.

Klaus-Bernward Springer, University of Erfurt, Germany..

2) Journal article: Emily Baran, “Continental Victims. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Russian Orthodox Church 1990-2004” in Religion, State and Society, Vol. 35, no. 3, September 2007, p. 261 ff.

Coming to terms with the past has proved to be a difficult task for many of the churches who lived under dictatorial regimes. Emily Baran examines the rival strategies adopted after the collapse of the Communist empire in Russia amongst the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Russian Orthodox Church. Both wanted not so much to reveal the story of their repressive experiences under Stalin and his successors, but to use these for more presentist concerns, and in fact to avail themselves of this ammunition to dispute the claims of the other.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have since 1990, so Ms Baran claims, become the fastest growing community in the new Russia. As elsewhere, their steadfast witness has drawn in new supporters, and their record of intrepid resistance to state tyranny has been a valuable drawing card. Indeed, as in other countries, the Jehovah’s Witnesses seek to be the barometer of religious freedom in general in the new Russia. But the Russian Orthodox Church sees things differently. They view the Jehovah’s Witnesses as undermining the traditional religious heritage of Russia and as exploiting the Soviet victimization in order to lure citizens away from Russian Orthodoxy. Both organizations see the role of religion as central in Russia’s transition to democracy and have looked to the state to confirm their map of Russia’s religious boundaries.

The new Russian rulers have yet to work to come to terms with the Communist past. No consensus is to be found. Consequently both the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Russian Orthodox Church can portray themselves as victims of repression, while denying that the other had any credible case to speak for the whole religious community. These rivalries are only likely to grow. But who were collaborators, who perpetrators, who victims? Ms Baran’s analysis of these issues brings up a lively discussion which undoubtedly has international repercussions, of which we should take note.

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3) Conference report: Greg Sandford: The Church that came in from the cold. The experiences of Christian Science in East Germany.
This paper was read at the 2008 meeting of the American Historical Association.

The Communist policies towards religious communities in the former East Germany were marked by repression and harassment. The strategy was clear. The Marxist regime sought to eliminate any possible political or ideological rival, to seize control of the education and media outlets, and to monopolize all sections of the national economy. In short, they set out to build up a socialist state through the emergence of a new socialist man. Using the model of the Soviet Union, and availing themselves of many of the former Gestapo’s tactics, the early years of the regime’s governance after 1949 saw a deliberately-induced Church Struggle, which sought to reduce church membership and limit its practices to private pursuits within church walls. Several lesser sects were prohibited outright, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Salvation Army. These regulations continued until the whole experiment was overthrown in 1989
But there were some exceptions. One of these was the Christian Science community about whom Greg Sandford reported at the AHA meeting. Sandford teaches at the Christian Science College in Elsah, Illinois, so his account is predictably one written with filial piety. But he was able to find documentary sources which revealed the surprising reversal of fortunes for this small sect at the end of the Communist era.

When they were banned in the early 1950s by the East German authorities, the sect’s members were faced with the same difficulties as they had experienced under the Nazis, who had placed a ban on their activities in 1941. Nevertheless, so Sandford believes, the unrelenting determination of the surviving members to continue their allegiance to their principles finally brought about a change in their fortunes, and recognition as a legitimate religious society.

Christian Science was founded by Mary Eddy Baker in the late 19th century. In 1945 the few survivors in Germany were able to start again with the help of the Mother Church in Boston. But after the East German regime was firmly in power, restrictions and police searches began, clearly aiming at the sect’s suppression. Their connections with the United States were suspect. Christian Science was accused of having links to Free Masonry, or of being engaged in “lively propagandistic activities to recruit foreign legionaries for the predatory American war” in Korea.

Further suspicion was aroused by the Christian Science practice of healing, which the Communists believed was undertaken solely as a financial swindle. During the 1950s the net got even tighter. In March 1951 Christian Science was struck from the list of permitted religious denominations. Inevitably, members who could leave went to West Germany. Those who remained were increasingly put under surveillance by the Stasi. After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, their isolation was even greater. Underground meetings of a few supporters was the only means of survival.

Not until the 1980s did the East German authorities begin to show a more flexible mood. Klaus Gysi, the State Secretary for Religious Affairs, was surprisingly favourable to this small group – only 500 people, mostly elderly – which had caused no trouble, was clearly law-abiding, and was likely to put in a good word for the regime with its American backers.

At the end of the 1980s, permission was given for the importation of Christian Science literature from Boston on a private basis. In late 1987, for the first time, an official gathering of Christian Science members was approved, when an American visitor was allowed to speak. A leading Christian Science member, also a pensioner, was allowed to travel to the USA. The Stasi reports on Christian Science grew visibly warmer. In fact the Stasi officer reported that he could find nothing negative about Christian Science and stated that he would have no objection to their recognition. This was in fact granted exactly a week before the Berlin Wall was breached.
Greg Sandford has done an admirable amount of research in the surviving Christian Science as well as Stasi records. He has also had extensive interviews with survivors, including Stasi agents. His account, however, would have been strengthened by including references to the equally surprising fortunes of the Mormon community in East Germany, which obtained even greater and more remarkable concessions at an even earlier date. Nevertheless his account adds another stone to the wider mosaic of the former East Germany’s religious history.

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4) On the occasion of Gerhard Besier’s 60th birthday, his colleagues have gathered a fine tribute in a Festschrift entitled Glaube-Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den USA.
Edited by Katarzyna Stokosa and Andrea Strübind, and published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen, this 900 page volume contains contributions by 53 colleagues. The essays are grouped under three headings: Historical Theology, Religious Minorities and their legal status, and European and North American contemporary church history. Your editor is one of those who was glad to send in a heartfelt acknowledgment of our debt to Besier’s leadership in the field of contemporary church history over the past twenty years.

5) International Bonhoeffer Congress, Prague, July 2008

The following letter has been received from Keith Clements, the Chairman of the next International Bonhoeffer Congress
His address is Ckwclem@aol.com

Dear Friends,

Many of you will know already that the 10th International Bonhoeffer Congress will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, 22-27 July 2008. The theme will be Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theology in Today’s World – a Way between Fundamentalism and Secularism? The theme will be treated not only by an impressive panel of plenary speakers beginning with the Professor Juergen Moltmann of Germany who will give the keynote address, but also in over thirty seminars on a wide variety of particular topics by scholars from many different parts of the world.

Those of you who are not, as yet, aware of the Congress but would like to have the full information about programme, accommodation, costs etc are encouraged to consult the Congress website, where you will find all the necessary details.

There is also a special reason, however, for my writing to all of you. Thanks to the generosity of some donors we are able to offer a number of scholarships to cover the costs of registration and accommodation at the Congress for participants who would otherwise not be able to participate for financial reasons. Priority candidates for such bursaries will be participants, especially students, from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. The Congress Planning Committee especially wishes to make known this availability and you are therefore cordially invited to publicise it through your institutions and networks of communication, and wherever you have contact with people whom you consider could qualify for consideration. Application forms may be obtained from the Congress office in Prague (see webpage, above).

Thank you in anticipation of your kindness in attending to this!

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Keith Clements
Chairman, 10th International Bonhoeffer Congress

With every best wish
John Conway

January 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

January 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 1

Dear Friends,

Jesu, nimm dich deiner Glieder
Ferner in Genaden an;
Schenke, was man bitten kann,
Zu erquicken deine Brüder:
Gib der ganzen Christenschar
Frieden und ein selges Jahr!
Freude, Freude über Freude!
Christus wehret alle, Leide.
Wonne, Wonne über Wonne!
Er ist die Genadensonne.

J. S. Bach, Cantata BWV 40

A very warm welcome to you all in the New Year. I trust you had a blessed and refreshing holiday and are now about to resume you manifold interests in your different parts of the globe. I am always glad to hear from you, but please do NOT press the reply button above unless you want your remarks to be shared by all of our Newsletter subscribers. Instead, send me word to my private address = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

I am hoping in the coming year that the reviews and notices I send you will continue to be of interest. I try to be as ecumencal as possible, and not to concentrate too much on any one subject. But I will admit that I may possibly have some hobby-horses, and some of you rightly commented earlier that I gave these too much free rein! Your comments and suggestions are very much apprreciated.
We were saddened to learn this month of the death of two distinguished members of our fraternity, who made significant contributions to our field of church history. Their obituaries are printed below.

Contents:

1) Obituaries:

a) Rev. Edwin Robertson;
b) Professor Gordon Zahn

2) Book reviews –

a) Ed. Spicer, Antisemitism, Christian ambivalence and the Holocaust
b) Plokhy/Sysyn, Religion and Nationalism in modern Ukraine

3) Conference report – American religious responses to the Kristallnacht

List of books reviewed in Vol. XIII – 2007

1a) Paul Oestreicher wrote the following tribute in The Guardian, London:

The Rev Edwin Robertson, who has died of bronchial pneumonia aged 95, was a renaissance man with a breadth of knowledge and a sharpness of wit that never diminished and never ceased to delight. He was a Baptist minister, broadcaster, author, translator and editor, notably in making known the life and work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis just before the end of the war.

Born in West Ham, London, Robertson saw little of his father, a ship’s cooper, but was devoted to his deeply religious mother. Life was spartan and he never ceased being a puritan in the best sense of the word. His politics were shaped by the harsh reality of his early environment. In 1938 he began his ministerial life in Stopsley, Luton, and married Ida Bates the following year. They moved to Luton and later St Albans, but war intervened. Having gained a first-class degree in physics and chemistry at London University before training for the Baptist ministry at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, he was directed into oil research, specifically on fuel for Spitfires.
Robertson took a deep interest in German Christians who resisted Hitler and befriended those exiled to England as well as German prisoners of war. Like George Bell of Chichester who, alone among the English bishops, was close to Bonhoeffer and the resistance inside Germany, Robertson deplored the bombing of German civilians. That perhaps made him the ideal person to head the religious affairs branch of the British military administration of occupied Germany, with the rank of brigadier. Speaking fluent German, this involved everything from getting food to the undernourished, setting up clergy training schemes and befriending survivors of the opposition, such as Martin Niemoeller, who were now Germany’s church leaders. In 1949 Robertson was made assistant head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, the start of his broadcasting career. He helped to shape the Third Programme and was a distinctive voice on Any Questions.

From 1956 he spent six years in Geneva as study secretary of the United Bible Societies and consultant to the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council. He then introduced to England, during a brief spell in Yeovil, the Bible weeks he had encountered in Germany.

The years 1964-75 were a natural progression from his work at the BBC. He was executive director of the World Association of Christian Broadcasting, responsible for the mass-media training of students from around the world. Together with the Evangelical Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church – a hitherto unheard of combination – he set up the churches’ advisory committee for local broadcasting. Based from 1975 at Westbourne Park Baptist church, he continued this work with his own radio studio, tutoring many students. To this he added a commitment to psychotherapy.

The author of nearly 100 books, Robertson wrote biographies of John Wycliffe, Paul Schneider, Lord Tonypandy, Chiara Lubich and Igino Giordani. Discovering that the only serious biography of Bell neglected his involvement with Germany and Bonhoeffer, he put that right with Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (1995). Robertson treated academic theology with scepticism and the growth of religious fundamentalism disturbed him. Like Neville Cardus, he was dedicated both to cricket and to music. He was confident that Bach was not the only composer he would meet in heaven, where the angels would surely be singing Mozart. He was made a Lambeth doctor of divinity two years ago.

Edwin Hanton Robertson, clergyman, writer and broadcaster, born February 1 1912; died November 3, 2007.

1b) Gordon Zahn (1918-2007)

Gordon Zahn, an internationally known Catholic peace activist and scholar, died on December 9th in Wisconsin, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He leaves behind a significant legacy which deeply influenced the Catholic Church’s teaching on conscientious objection, and helped propel Zahn’s hero, Franz Jagerstatter, on the path to sainthood.

Born in Milwaukee in 1918, Zahn took the highly unpopular stand during World War II of refusing to serve in the United States army, and served in a Civilian Public Service camp in New Hampshire. He would later write about that experience in his memoir, Another Part of the War: the Camp Simon Story (1979).

After the War, Zahn went on to earn a doctorate in sociology from the Catholic University of America, and then to teach, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, until his retirement. He also served as president and director of the Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, Zahn published and edited numerous works, the most famous beingGerman Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (1962) and In Solitary Witness: the Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter (1965).The first book—which argued that the German Catholic hierarchy had provided moral support to the German war effort, even as it rejected the evils of the Nazi regime—provoked a firestorm of criticism, which led him to move from the Jesuit Loyola institution to the more secular University of Massachusetts. Paradoxically, however, it was there that he completed his most important Catholic work, notably his biography on Franz Jagerstatter. In Solitary Witness revealed the now-famous Austrian martyr’s story to the world—and most importantly, to the attention of the Catholic Church. Had Zahn never unearthed Jagerstatter’s witness—discovered while he was researching his book on German Catholics—it is unlikely that this humble Austrian farmer, who stood up to Hitler and died for his Catholic convictions, would ever have been beatified (as he was in October, 2007)—a fact Jagerstatter’s own widow, Franziska (still living at 94), has gratefully acknowledged. Zahn was too ill to attend the beatification ceremony in Linz, Austria; but those who did were made aware of Zahn’s indispensable role in bringing it about.

Zahn, at his best, influenced the Catholic Church in a profound and positive way. The progressive National Catholic Reporter commented: “Without Zahn’s work, one can hardly imagine the publication of the American bishops, ‘The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response’ in 1983. There, for the first time in Catholic history, nonviolence received equal billing with the just war tradition. The pastoral letter’s foundation, acknowledged in its footnotes, was the scholarship and research by Zahn.” More importantly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while clearly affirming traditional just war teaching, also strongly defended the rights of conscientious objectors: “The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community.” Many believe this passage vindicates Zahn’s entire life’s work.

Despite the gravity of his subject matter, and the many rebuffs he suffered, Zahn never lost faith in the justice of his cause. He always believed education could enlighten and persuade people to promote the Gospel’s mandate for peace. As one of his friends told the Chicago Tribune: “Gordon had a deep sense of the pain of the world, but he also had hope and optimism.”

Gordon Zahn was, by all counts, a pious and gentle man, who touched the hearts of all those who knew him, including those who sometimes disagreed with his positions.

William Doino Jr.

2a) ed. K. Spicer C.S.C,. Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 2007 xxi + 329 pp.
ISBN 113: 978-0-253-34973-9 cloth)

This review first appeared on H-German on December 6th 2007 (revised) Reviewers do not like coping with collections of essays. Either the topics covered are too diverse, or the quality of the contributions varies too widely. Some essays are abbreviated versions of books their authors have already written, others are a foretaste of books yet to be undertaken. The present volume, edited by Kevin Spicer, who now teaches at Notre Dame University, shares all these characteristics. But it is held together by the common thread of how the European churches of the twentieth century reacted to the ideology of antisemitism and to the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust which resulted from it.

The contributors, both historians and theologians, are suitably ecumenical, including Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Most are younger scholars, and are united in a highly critical view of Christian theology and prejudice in the early twentieth century, particularly in its propagation and encouragement of antisemitism. They all share the new perceptions about Judaism adumbrated since the Second Vatican Council, though some argue that the earlier pejorative antisemitic views still persist The editor, Kevin Spicer, maintains that even today antisemitism is present in Christian ranks because of the failure to understand and acknowledge Judaism on its own terms.
These essays are therefore designed both to record the fateful role antisemitism played in the Christian churches of the past, especially in their responses to National Socialism, and also to warn against any relapse into similar attitudes in the future.

The essays are grouped in four sections: Christian theology, clerical pastoral practices, Jewish-Christian dialogue and popular perceptions which Jews and Christians have of each other. The authors of the first group of essays predictably condemn the theological antisemitism of earlier centuries with its emphasis on Jewish disobedience, deicide and divine punishment, along with the accompanying claim that Christianity had superseded Judaism, leaving only the hope of conversion as the remedy. But they equally take issue with the argument put forward by some theologians of the twentieth century that a sharp dividing line should be drawn between Christian anti-Judaism, which was regrettable, and racial antisemitism, which was still more regrettable. In these authors’ eyes, following the lead given by Uriel Tal forty years ago, the two overlap and reinforce each other, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish the precise sources of prejudice and antipathy. There can be no doubt that ideological intolerance provided a fertile seedbed for Nazi propaganda. The real question is how far, or to what extent, were the Nazi attacks on the Jews supported, or at least not opposed, for theological reasons.. This remains much more difficult to estimate.

These authors may be criticized for assuming that theology or theologically-based anti-Judaic resentment, played a more substantial role than other factors. Alternatively, where sentiment favorable to Jews was expressed, as in Denmark, they seek to show that this can be attributed to an anti-German or nationalist pride rather than to any sympathy with Jews as such. This suggests that national and political factors rather than theology were determinant, both for or against the Jews. In Thorsten Wagner’s view, it was only after the protests against the Nazis’ actions against the Jews became an act of national resistance that the process of rethinking began in milieus affiliated with the church. But, as Robert Krieg points out, none of the theological factors which earlier fueled prejudice against Jews and Judaism, specifically the notion of supersessionism, the rejection of historical reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry and Jewish world, and the disavowal of religious freedom, are accepted any longer by the Catholic Church or by mainstream Protestants.. The second group of essays asks why certain churchmen demonstrated support for extreme right-wing political views and parties. Examples are quoted from Germany, Poland and Romania, though no essay deals with either Italy or Iberia. The reason is simple. Liberal democracy had never caught on east of the Rhine. The disasters of the first world war discredited all liberal panaceas. The violence and bloodshed in the newly-established Soviet Union destroyed belief in a socialist alternative. Security and safety could best be found in the historical rootedness of one’s own community. Dictators could be regarded as father figures. Antisemitism was only part of the much wider anti-alienism, which sought to exclude all baneful influences from abroad. Right-wing parties appeared to support the churches against the dangers of godless communism. As Donald Dietrich notes, the abstract neoscholastic theology taught in seminaries seemed totally inadequate to build up resistance to totalitarian movements. And, as the experience of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII shows, the church lacked an institutional platform to identify and resist political extremism or racial policies leading to extermination.

The third group of essays describes the attempts at Christian-Jewish dialogue in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Matthew Hockenos analyses the German Protestants who finally, after five years, came to realize the need for a full metanoia. So too Elias Füllenbach records the similar process of shock, renewal and crisis in the Catholic Church which culminated in the path-breaking Declaration of Nostra Aetate (1965). Füllenbach notably outlines the contributions made by the journalists Waldemar Gurian and Karl Thieme in the 1930s warning German Catholics against any concessions of the racial question. After 1945, Thieme linked up with Gertrud Luckner, a redoubtable social worker, whose efforts on behalf of the Jews during the war had led to her being incarcerated in Ravensbrück. Together they began from their base in Freiburg to campaign for a renewed Catholic attitude, despite warnings and even prohibitions from the Vatican. Luckner’s main achievement was the annual publication of the notable Freiburger Rundbriefe, which collected all statements and documents relating to the theme of improved Catholic-Jewish relations. At first, these authors still cling to the view that, because of the Holocaust, Jews would be psychologically disposed to accept Christianity. But later they went through a painful internal development to rid themselves of any anti-Judaic stereotypes and theological concepts, and instead to welcome Jews and Judaism on their own terms.

The final section describes Jewish reactions. Understandably there were and are still strong reservations to any encounter with Christians. Some Jewish scholars believe that distance has to be maintained since Jewish monotheism can never be reconciled to any other creeds, all of which are idolatrous. But other scholars argue that, given the churches’ new stance, there are now avenues of collaboration open to all those who seek to oppose any possible resurgence of the destructive antisemitism of the past. Gerson Greenberg’s article relates the various views put forward in the aftermath of the Holocaust. both assessing the significance of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the way forward while still living in a largely hostile world. He quotes with approval Maimonides’ exhortations to his people to ensure that they remembered the singular destiny of the Jewish people and religion.

To sum up, these essays are motivated by the eirenical desire to improve Christian-Jewish relations. They are therefore written with a “presentist” agenda, with all the benefits of enlightened hindsight, an approach that runs the danger of distorting the historical balance of past events. On the other hand, they do serve to remind us that the Holocaust’s legacy is not purely historical. The Church’s past ambivalence towards Judaism need now to be replaced with a much greater sensitivity and awareness, which is largely happening thanks to contributions such as those provided by these authors. While the book offers little new historical research, it will be pedagogically useful for undergraduates and for those who believe that analyzing the Church’s former and mistaken views of Jews and Judaism offers a means of achieving a more positive relationship in the future.

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2b) Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. 2003. 216 pp. ISBN 1-895571-45-6 (bound); 1-895571-36-7 (pbk.) $39.95 (bound) $27.95 (paper)
Religion und Nation: Die Situation der Kirchen in der Ukraine. edited by Thomas Bremer, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2003. 147 pp. ISBN 3-447-04843-3. Euro.36. (paper)

This review appeared first in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol 41, no 4, Winter 2007.

The early history of Scotland was once described as murder tempered by theology. The more recent history of Ukraine could also qualify. No other part of Europe during the past hundred years has been so convulsed by turbulent political events, with horrendous and massive losses of life and property. In fact, as a crossroads between East and West, Ukraine has long been involved in a continuous struggle to obtain independence and identity. In its repeated attempts to achieve a national revival, the local churches have played a significant role, not only as inheritors of past traditions, but also as active participants in fashioning new intellectual and ideological agendas, as they relate to the indigenous religious populations.

The complexity and conflictual character of much of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical scene has long deterred western scholars from any evaluative surveys. In fact, the most comprehensive account is by the German scholar, Friedrich Heyer, who recently updated his initial study written fifty years ago. So it is all the more welcome to have the short analysis by two former Ukrainian scholars now resident in Canada, which will help to sort out some of the entangled religious and political questions of the current period.

Because of its earlier history, Ukraine was always multi-ethnic and hence pluralistic in its religious loyalties. At the same time, its rulers – then and now – have sought to mobilize religious forces to advance their particular cause. The Tsarist monarchs promoted the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, while in the western parts of the country, the Uniate Church, which is familiarly but misleadingly known as the Greek Catholic Church, owing its allegiance to the Pope in Rome, predominated under the sponsorship of the Austro-Hungarian emperors. In the twentieth century, further religio-political alliances resulted during and after the first world war. The rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and the subsequent persecutions led to the growth of local groupings such as the breakaway Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox church. During the Nazi occupation, both this splinter group and the Greek Catholics sought to regain ground. But after the Soviet victory, both were liquidated, and the remnants compulsorily amalgamated under the Moscow-dominated Patriarchate.

After 1989, the Greek Catholics almost spontaneously resurrected themselves and reclaimed their former churches and constituents. At the same time, another section of the Orthodox community sought to re-establish its own patriarch in Kiev. But for political reasons they refused to acknowledge the autocephalous group, and both are spurned by those who still acknowledge Moscow’s ecclesiastical authority.

These internal struggle,as the authors make clear, are intimately related to the different concepts of national autonomy upheld by rival political groups. Some look back to the past as a model for the revival of Ukrainian cultural and political independence, seeking to promote the Orthodox Church as the upholder of a specific Ukrainian destiny. But the political record of the autocephalists during the second world war continues to leave a bitter legacy. On the other side, the long subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, with its frequent execution of the Soviet leaders’ demands, has also caused deep resentments. For example, after 1989, a large number of Orthodox priests and congregations switched over, or back, to the Greek Catholic Uniates. But these Uniates, in turn, seek to establish their independence from their Polish neighbors, who maintain the Latin rite and equally see their Roman connection as a vital part of the Polish national revival. Since there is a great intermingling of these respective populations and no clear acceptance of any one model for national resurgence, the result is still one of unresolved tensions and religious divisions.

Plokhy and Sysyn provide ample evidence of the close interaction between state building and religious movements. The politicians seek to enlist, or even to exploit, the churches in pursuit of their particular view of national identity. This, however, still remains illusory. These same problems are explored in the collection of essays, edited by Thomas Bremer, which resulted from a Berlin conference in 2001. These authors also stress the need for western scholars to be fully acquainted with the origins and development of each individual Ukrainian church in order to understand its particular contribution to the task of forging religious and political identity. They also provide a useful multi-lingual bibliography.

JSC

2) Conference Report – North American responses to Kristallnacht

Three scholars recently unveiled new research into American religious responses to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 at the Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Conference this past November 8-10, 2007.

Dr. Maria Mazzenga, Education Archivist at the American Catholic History Research Center and Adjunct Instructor of History at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., examined Catholic institutional responses to Kristallnacht, by contrasting the antisemitic bombast of Father Coughlin with the penetrating critiques offered by Catholic clerical and lay leaders in a national radio broadcast held on November 16, 1938. The speakers on the broadcastFather Maurice Sheehy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Education at Catholic University and assistant to the University Rector; Archbishop John J. Mitty of San Francisco, California; Bishop John M. Gannon of Erie, Pennsylvania; Bishop Peter L. Ireton of Richmond, Virginia; former Democratic Presidential Candidate and Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, and Catholic University Rector, Monsignor Joseph M. Corriganargued that the violence unleashed on Jews and Jewish property in Germany was immoral, contrary to Christian teaching, and out of step with the religious and civic freedom valued by Americans. As Sheehy asserted, “The Catholic loves his Jewish brother, because, as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

Dr. Patrick Hayes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology at St. John’s University in Staten Island, presented an explanation of the relationship between National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and the refugee policy of the United States government. Hayes focused on the work of the NCWC’s Bureau of Immigration Affairs, staffed by Bruce M. Mohler and Thomas F. Mulholland , two Catholic laymen, and its cooperative efforts alongside the Committee for Catholic Refugees from Germany (CCRG), headed up by Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans. The result was that Mohler and Mulholland were able to facilitate the immigration of almost four thousand Catholic non-Aryans to America in 1938 and 1939.

Kyle Jantzen, Associate Professor of History at Ambrose University College in Calgary, analyzed the immediate responses of mainline North American Protestants to Kristallnacht, finding them to be both swift and decisive. In keeping with liberal traditions that emphasized the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” church leaders in the Episcopalian/Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist traditions protested the Kristallnacht pogrom in ways that were both similar to and deliberately embedded in the broader American and Canadian outcry. In doing so, they emphasized the barbarism of Hitler and his Nazi movement and called upon government officials to make complaints to their German counterparts. This Protestant reaction was centred on four key moments: first, the Armistice Day remembrance services and hastily organized Anti-Nazi League radio broadcast on November 11; second, the Sunday worship services and public denunciations of Germany made by Protestant denominational leaders on November 13; third, the national radio broadcast sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) on November 14; and fourth, the ecumenical and interfaith rallies held to mark the FCC day of prayer held throughout the United States on November 20 and echoed in at least seventeen rallies held that same day across Canada. Many of these protests not only condemned Nazi Germany for lapsing into barbarism, but also expressed sympathy for Jewish “brethren,” lamented the loss of human rights in Germany, and called for the defence of freedom of religion, liberal democracy, and western civilization. In some cases, leaders also called for the Canadian and American governments to open the doors of their nations for Jewish refugees to find new homes.

Much of this new research was facilitated by support from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Mazzenga, Hayes, Jantzen, and seven other scholars (Michael Berkowitz, University College, London; Matthew Burton Bowman, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.; Gerald P. Fogarty, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Gershon Greenberg, American University, Washington, D.C.; Karen Riley, Auburn University, Montgomery; and Victoria Barnett and Suzanne Brown-Fleming of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM) met together in a USHMM Summer Research Workshop this past August, under the theme, “American Religious Organizations and Responses to the Holocaust in the United States: Reichskristallnacht as a Case Study.” Comparing Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant reactions to the pogrom of November 1938, the members of the workshop converged on four interpretive questions. First, they noted that the problem of American antisemitism influenced the responses of American religious leaders to Kristallnacht, raising questions about whether protests were focused on the particular issue of Jewish as victims or the universal problem of the violation of human rights and the creation of a refugee crisis. Second, the workshop participants discovered that most protests drew on the American values of religious freedom and pluralism, contrasting their liberal democratic world with the fascist (and communist) dictatorships of men like Hitler. Third, the scholars found that many of the religious protests against Kristallnacht were ecumenical and even interfaith in nature. This was particularly true of a number of significant radio broadcasts involving important public and religious leaders in the days and weeks following the Nazi attack on the Jews. Fourth and finally, the members of the workshop discovered that at least in some circles the Kristallnacht pogrom became, among other things, a significant moment of theological Kairos. Members of the workshop plan to publish their research in two volumes: a collection of essays drawn from the summer institute itself, and a primary source volume collecting and analyzing the various radio broadcasts organized in protest against the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Kyle Jantzen, Calgary

List of books reviewed in 2007.

Ackermann, S Christliche Frauen in der DDR May
Allen, J. Rabble-rouser for peace. a biography of Desmond Tutu November
Austin A. and Scott, J. S. Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples July
Berkman, J.A. ed Contemplating Edith Stein January
Böttcher, M. Gratwanderungen einer Freikirche im totalitären Regime
Die gemeinschaft der Sieben-Tags-Adventisten in der DDR May
Brechenmacher, T. Der Vatikan und die Juden February
Carter, R., In search of the lost. Martyrdom in Melanesia March
Chandler, A. The Church of England and the politics of reform 1948-1998 November
Chertok, H. He also spoke as a Jew. The Life of James Parkes April
Coupland, P. Britannia, Europa and Christendom October
Franz Jägerstätter December
Gailus, M. and Krogel, W. eds. Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft
der Kirche im Nationalen June
Heinecke, H. Konfession und Politik in der DDR January
Humel, K-J and Kösters, C. eds. Kirchen im Krieg.Europa 1939-1945 July
Krondorfer, B., von Kellenbach, K. Reck, N. Mit Blick auf die Täter March
Kushner, T. and Valman, N eds. Philosemitism, antisemitism and the Jews April
Lawson, T. The Church of England and the Holocaust February
Linker, D. The Theocons. Secular America under Siege June
Mau, R. Der Protestantismus im Osten Deutschlands May
Mitzscherlich, B. Diktatur und Diaspora. Das Bistum Meissen 1932-1951 December
Munro, G. Hitler’s Bavarian Antagonist: Georg Moenius May
Parkes, James End of an Exile. Israel, the Jews and the Gentile world April
Peart-Binns, J.S. A heart in my head. A biography of Richard Harries September
Raina, P. Bishop George Bell. The greatest Churchman May
Richmond, C. Campaigning against antisemitism April
Scherzberg, L. ed. Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung May
Schmidtmann, C. Katholische Studierende 1945-1973 October
Snape, M., God and the British Soldier. Religion and the British Army October

With all my good wishes for the start of the New Year

John Conway