Author Archives: Kyle Jantzen

Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2015).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This book on the Protestant regional church in Baden during the time of the Third Reich is the product of a research project from the early 2000s which focused on the theological milieu and mentality of the pastors and church leaders. The goal was not to write a social history of the “church struggle” in Baden, but to use the rich archival resources on Baden’s pastors to understand their experience and self-understanding, including an exploration of the ways in which political and church-political ideas were codified theologically (17). Continue reading

Share

Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism, Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, February 12-14, 2017

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This year’s annual conference of the Leo Baeck Institute featured the theme of the Protestant Reformation and its impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Some 40 scholars took part in sessions that followed the evolution of Jewish-Protestant relations from the time of Luther and the Reformation era, through the Enlightenment and emergence of modernity to the cataclysm of Nazism and the Holocaust to the postwar era. Most panels were comprised of German and Israeli scholars, though a handful of North American academics were also present. Topics included Jewish perspectives on Christians and Christianity, Christian missions to Jews, conversion (in both directions), music and the arts as a sphere of Jewish-Protestant relations, and Jewish-Protestant relations during and after the Third Reich and Holocaust. The keynote speaker was Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, who challenged the audience with a provocative lecture entitled, “Is God a Virgin? Theological Benefits and Problems in the Protestant-Jewish Relationship.”

The second last panel of the conference tackled the theme of Jewish-Protestant relations “in the shadow of racism and fascism.” Dirk Schuster of the University of Potsdam spoke on the theme “Protestantism and Racial Boundaries: Jews, ‘Aryans’ and Divine Salvation at the German Christian Church Movement.” Drawing on the history of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, Schuster examined the way in which race can function as an exclusive (and excluding) space, sociologically speaking, with respect to religious salvation. Race, a collection of ethno-cultural differences and an imaginary collective which draws up borders against “the other” in the process of defining a national identity.

Schuster is particularly interested in the way in which Jews were denied access to Christian community, sacraments, and salvation on account of their Jewish racial identity. This was certainly the intention of the German Christian movement, when they focused on Martin Luther as a uniquely German holy man, or Adolf Hitler as the “Führer” sent by God to Germany in its fateful hour. Similarly, the German Christian (and Nazi) loathing of  “miscegenation” in not only the biological sense but also the spiritual or religious sense. Even Catholics, whom many Protestants scorned, were eligible for salvation in a way that Jews, who could not (in the German Christian mind) be Germans, were not. The irony in all of this, as Schuster noted, was that the Nazis themselves defined race based on church records–religious criteria!

Still, German Christians believed whole-heartedly in Hitler’s mission as the latest example of the revelation of God in and through German history. Under Hitler, Luther’s Reformation would be completed. All this meant that the political measures to socially and economically isolate Jews and drive them from the German Volk community were mirrored by the application of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the exclusion of Jews from the Christian community. Yet one problem remained: how could the German Christians isolate Judaism from Christianity? Here Schuster referred to Susannah Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus and its account of the Grundmann Institute’s attempt to dejudaize Christianity. For Schuster, this was another way in which the German Christians attempted to create a space in which Jews would be excluded from Christian salvation.

Hansjörg Buss of Göttingen University followed, assessing “The Reception and Instrumentalization of Martin Luther’s ‘Judenschriften’ in the ‘Third Reich.'” Buss explores part of the terrain marked out by Schuster, namely, the ways in which Martin Luther’s antisemitic writings were employed by Nazi Protestants to justify their own antisemitism. National Socialist Protestants responded to those who expressed concern for Jews by reminding them that the founder of their church had advocated burning down Jewish synagogues, destroying Jewish houses, taking away Jewish prayer books, confiscating Jewish money, and forcing Jews to work. Luther, so argued National Socialist Protestants, developed a uniquely German piety that made it impossible to preach a Jewish Christianity to Protestants from the German racial community.

Buss explained that current research on Luther and the Jews emphasizes the continuity in his thinking, rather than the different consequences he proposed in That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, Luther was idealized as a heroic German nationalist–by the time of the First World War, he was regularly invoked by propagandists. It was in this context that Paul Althaus described the reformer as Germany’s “secret emperor.” As antisemitism increased in the later 1800s, Luther was widely quoted, as in Theodor Fritsch’s Catechism for Antisemites (1887). In the Third Reich, Der Stürmer quoted Luther to criticize the churches for being too friendly towards Jews.

During the Nazi era, the German Christian Movement invoked Luther regularly, beginning with the first German Christian “Guidelines” of 1932, which confessed “an affirmative faith in Christ, one suited to a truly German Lutheran spirit and heroic piety.”[1] Buss explained how Luther’s 450th birthday in 1933 turned into a national festival of Protestant nationalist and Nazi ideas, an expression of a “commitment to Luther and Hitler.”

The German Christians built on this Protestant nationalism and emphasized Luther as a nordic fighter against the Jews. Buss noted that virtually all of the publications about Luther referred to the changed political situation under Hitler, and it was not uncommon for Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies to be reprinted and distributed to German Protestants. The Confessing Church, in contrast, avoided Luther’s antisemitic writings, but consistently affirmed both the Nazi state’s authority and its antisemitic policies. As clear as the Second Provisional Church Leadership’s 1936 memo to Hitler was in its condemnation of the state’s hatred of Jews, this was an exceptional occurance. More common were statements from clergy affirming Nazi policy and even noting that Luther had advocated even harsher measures than those taken by the Nazi state of the middle 1930s.

Finally, Buss examined the November 1939 publication of Thuringian Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse, called Martin Luther and the Jews: Away With Them! In this work, Sasse celebrated the way the German people had crowned the Hitler’s divinely-sanctioned fight for the liberation of the German people by attacking the Jews on Martin Luther’s birthday (November 10). Believing that Luther was the greatest antisemite of his time, Sasse went on to ask Nazi officials whether On the Jews and Their Lies could be used as a weapon in the current struggle against the Jews. Similarly, Walter Grundmann’s Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life drew on and twisted Luther’s ideas to advocate for a German racial and dejudaized Christianity. In sum, Buss demonstrates that both Christians and non-Christians used Luther’s antisemitic writings as “mental resources” (quoting Thomas Kaufmann) in support of Nazi antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University, Calgary, provided a North American perspective on the relationship between Jews and Protestants in his paper on “Nazi Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” Jantzen began by explaining how earlier historical accounts of U.S. Protestant responses to Hitler and his persecution of the Jews criticized Protestants for what they didn’t do, at times holding U.S. church leaders to the unrealistic expectations of stopping Hitler themselves or at least convincing the U.S. government to intervene in German domestic affairs.

Rather, Jantzen surveyed U.S. mainline Protestant church publications to discover what writers and editors, many of whom were influential church leaders, had to say about Jews and Judaism. He argued five main points: 1. that Protestant spokespersons viewed Nazism with great alarm and foreboding, sensing crisis in the air; 2. that they were primarily concerned with Nazi persecution of Christians; 3. that they also cared about the persecution of Jews; 4. that they both condemned and perpetuated forms of antisemitism in the United States; and 5. that, above all, they understood the challenge of Nazism in terms of a cosmic battle between Christianity and irreligion.

Even the staunchest mainline Protestant defenders of the Jews–men like Guy Emery Shipler of The Churchman–tended to reframe the persecution of the Jews into an attack against both Jews and Christians, or against religion in general. In part, this was a strategic move to rouse Christian support for Jewish refugees. Similarly, when W. Russell Bowie of the American Committee for Christian German Refugees solicited support, he consistently made the point that over half of the estimated 660,000 would-be refugees still in Germany and Austria were Christians, even if the Nazis defined them as racial Jews, and that the Jewish refugee crisis was very much a Christian problem.

Finally, Jantzen concluded that in 1938, in a context of German racism, American antisemitism, and a growing Jewish refugee crisis, Protestant church leaders understood their Christian duty as a call to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. Clergy writing in mainline church periodicals responded by naming the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without slipping into the language of long-standing anti-Jewish prejudices sometimes, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. Most important to these church leaders, however, was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save the world from self-destruction. Liberal Protestant writers and editors warned their readers about the forces of barbarism, totalitarianism, and war which threatened to destroy civilization, democracy, and freedom, while conservative Protestants focused more narrowly on apolitical Christian spiritual renewal and prayer as solutions for the world’s ills.

A lively discussion followed, as was the case throughout the three-day conference. Along with the host Leo Baeck Institute, the other conference sponsors included the Goethe University of Frankfurt’s Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD); the Minerva Institute for German History and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, both of Tel Aviv University; and the Center for the Study of Christianity at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There are plans for a publication of conference papers in the coming months.

Notes:

[1] Mary M. Solberg, A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), p. 49.

Share

Letter from the Editors (March 2017)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Letter from the Editors (March 2017)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear friends,

I write today to let you know that, rather than issuing a truncated March issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, the editors have decided to hold off on several reviews, reports, and other notes which are in process of completion, and to offer an expanded spring/summer issue of the journal in June. We look forward to publishing that issue, and trust you will find it to be a useful contribution to your own interest in the field.

On behalf of the editors, and with best wishes,

Kyle Jantzen

Share

Letter from the Editors (December 2016)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Letter from the Editors (December 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

Chichester Cathedral Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chichester_Cathedral,_south-west_aspect.jpg)

In this Advent season, we are pleased to offer you a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Our December issue features two reviews of books relating to Bishop George Bell of Chichester, highlighting his efforts on behalf of the ecumenical movement and his role as intermediary between the German Resistance. In the latter work, his contact was, famously, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though Bell had already received much of the information Bonhoeffer would provide from the German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, who had also met Bell in Sweden, a few days before the Bell-Bonhoeffer encounter.

We are also happy to report on some current research relating to the religious history of the Nazi period and, more broadly, the twentieth century. Members of the editorial team and guest contributors have provided information about papers given at five conferences or symposia held in Europe and North America over the course of the summer and fall.

We trust that you will find these enlightening, and wish you a merry Christmas and happy new year.

On behalf of the entire editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Share

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship, Andrew Chandler grapples with the ecumenical and political legacy of this influential bishop. Beginning with a description of the eclectic contents of one of Bell’s little blue notebooks, Chandler explains how it “captures a mind and a soul in perpetual motion in the world: attentive, enquiring, pursuing. It is a testament of Christian life in the middle twentieth century, wrought out of the turmoil of politics, war, persecution, calamity. It is a proof of one man’s decision to take his place in such a world, and to do so as a faithful Christian” (4).

George Bell was born in 1883 on the south coast of England, into a “secure, comfortable middle-class clerical home” (7). He attended Westminster School beginning in 1896, then Christ Church, Oxford, in 1901. Next he enrolled in theological college in Wells, in the West of England, where he was introduced to the student ecumenical movement and to Christian Socialism. Ordained as a deacon in Ripon Cathedral in 1907 and as a priest in Leeds in 1908, Bell returned to Oxford in 1910, where he combined a growing commitment to social justice with a vibrant personal faith. As he explained, “Christianity is a life before it is a system and to lay too much stress on the system destroys the life” (12).

After this overview of Bell’s formative years, Chandler breaks Bell’s ecclesiastical career into a series of chronological chapters which revolve around his positions and causes. Chandler begins with Bell’s time as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury (1914-1924), as dean of Canterbury (1924-1929), and as the newly appointed bishop of Chichester (1929-1932). From there the author examines Bell in his various roles as an interested observer and periodic participant in the German Church Struggle (1933-1937), as an ecumenical leader in a continent hurtling towards war (1937-1939), as a champion of peace in a time of war (1939-1942), as an active supporter of the German Resistance (1942-1945), as a leader in the postwar ecclesiastical reconstruction of Europe (1945-1948), as a key figure in the emergence World Council of Churches (1948-1954), and as an elderly bishop winding down his career (1954-1958).

Throughout these diverse phases of his career, the breadth and volume of Bell’s activities was formidable. Over a span of more than fifty years, he wrote, edited, and contributed to over two-dozen books, ranging from poetry and ecclesiastical biography to credal, incarnational, and pastoral theology, to Christian unity and the relationship between the church and modern politics. Along with his leadership in the Church of England, Bell was a force in numerous international ecumenical institutions, including the World Conference of Life and Work (particularly in Stockholm in 1925 and Oxford in 1937), other ecumenical meetings at Fanö in 1934 and Sigtuna in 1942, the postwar Treysa meeting with German church leaders, and the World Council of Churches, where Bell was elected moderator of the Central Committee at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, in 1948.

Bell’s activities were often centred on German affairs. Almost immediately after the rise of Hitler, Bell and his colleague A.S. Duncan-Jones, who was Dean of Chichester, monitored German politics and visited contacts in the German churches, in order to understand the nature of the German Church Struggle for themselves. Bell soon became a critic of the Nazi dictatorship, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, and the policy of persecution against both non-Aryan Christians and Jews in general. Around this time, the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving in a German congregation in London, and he and Bell began to develop a warm friendship.

Over the following years, Bell regularly spoke out against the Hitler regime and its supporters within the German churches. When the German delegation failed to appear at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, Bell won support for a letter noting the absence of the German delegation and expressing concern over “the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel” (64). After Martin Niemöller’s incarceration in a concentration camp, Bell maintained close contact with the Niemöller family and wrote a stirring foreword for an anonymous biography of the Berlin pastor, in which Bell praised the faith of those standing for the Gospel in Germany. And when the Jewish refugee crisis began to grow acute in 1938, Bell spoke on behalf of refugees in his inaugural speech in the House of Lords, and also lectured publicly about the crisis, describing it as a “crisis of humanity” (69).

Chandler’s description of George Bell’s wartime activities illustrates both the breadth of Bell’s concern and the regularity with which his principled participation in continental political and ecclesiastical affairs pushed him out of step with his peers in the Church of England and British House of Lords. First of all, Bell argued that the church’s role in war was distinct from that of the state. The church was to be a universal body, “charged with a gospel of God’s redeeming love” and tasked with “creating a community founded on love” which would outcast the changes brought about by war (75). Whether in war or in peace, the church, declared Bell, should stand for principles like “the dignity of all men, respect for human life, the acknowledgment of the solidarity for good and evil of all nations and races of the earth, fidelity to the plighted word, and the appreciation of the fact that any power of any kind, political or economic, must be coextensive with responsibility” (75).

Second, Bell worked for peace, championing the vision of a federal union of European states and arguing for negotiation with the German state, even in the midst of the war, in hopes that the Germans would remove Hitler from power. His position was shared by few. Karl Barth felt Bell was “too much a British gentleman and thus unable to understand the phenomenon of Hitler,” while Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrote Bell: “You are an optimist and I am a realist” (81, 82).

In the same way, Chandler shows how Bell’s views on the morality of war were at odds with his contemporaries. When Bell opposed the internment of German and Austrian refugees as enemy aliens in the House of Lords, a fellow member wondered whether the bishop realized England and Germany were at war. When Bell tried to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, he was vigorously opposed in parliament and harangued by a Chichester parishioner. When he protested in the Convocation of Canterbury against the area bombing of German cities, he was shouted down. Worse still, at home in his diocese, he had become so unpopular that Duncan-Jones suggested he not attend a military service at the Chichester Cathedral.

Chandler does an admirable job of explaining the role for which Bell is often best known in German history circles—his activity as secret intermediary between the German Resistance and the British government. In late May 1942, in the city of Stockholm, Bell met with German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, whom he had known for over a decade. Schönfeld explained that there was a growing opposition movement within Germany, determined to topple Hitler from power and restore the German government to a Christian basis. A few days later, he provided Bell with a list of the names of important conspirators. Just after that, Bell met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden. Bonhoeffer also outlined the nature of the German Resistance, urging Bell to ask the British government for assurances that the Allies would negotiate with the German opposition, if it could seize power. This Bell did, meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but to no avail. Chandler explains not only the government’s skepticism about such “peace feelers,” but also the way in which Bell’s continued lobbying made him suspect and undermined his mission further (100).

After explaining Bell’s determined efforts towards postwar reconciliation and the establishment of the World Council of Churches, Chandler assesses Bell’s legacy in a concluding chapter. There he paints the image of Bell as a man of many interests, causes, and campaigns—indeed, as a man of paradoxes. A member of the Establishment who “did not quite belong to it,” Bell “so often refused to conform to categorical expectations” (166, 170). He was an Anglican with an ecumenical orientation, an Englishman who cared as much or more about international affairs as English matters, and a man of deep devotion who lived large parts of his life in the world of politics. Influenced by high-church incarnational theology, Bell worked to bring art and artists into the life of the church, even as he also exerted himself on behalf of social justice for the working classes and hospitality for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution (170-171). Most especially, perhaps, he stood for principled and often unpopular positions, such as ecumenical unity and international peace in a time of nationalism and war.

Sadly, no new biography of Bishop George Bell can avoid dealing with the October 2015 allegation that Bell “had committed sexual offenses against an individual who was at the time a young child” (170). Chandler laments the fact that almost everyone associated with this time has passed away, making it virtually impossible to consider the charges in a normal judicial process. He does not in any way deny that these offenses could have occurred, but does the only thing a historian can do, which is to attempt to place the allegations in their historical context. In an appendix devoted to the controversy, Chandler notes that Bell’s 368 volume archive contains his personal notebooks and pocket diaries from 1919 to 1957, in which he kept track of all his appointments and engagements. He notes Bell’s “conspicuously high view of the standards required by his office,” and adds that Bell was almost constantly observed, that he participated in many disciplinary processes for clergy, that he maintained what seemed like a happy marriage, and that he worked almost continually in the presence of his wife, secretary, domestic chaplain, or driver. Chandler interviewed the only member of Bell’s circle still alive, his domestic chaplain from the early 1950s. This man “is firm, indeed emphatic, that ‘no child or young teenager ever entered during my two years as Chaplain, except on the day in January chosen for the parish Christmas party which he and Mrs Bell laid on every year for the children of the clergy’” (198) Add to this that Bell tended to work with his door open and often held private conversations outdoors in the garden and it leads Chandler to describe the 2015 allegation as “anomalous” and seeming to exist “in its own world, evidently uncorroborated by any other independent source” (199).

Andrew Chandler has published widely on the life and ministry of Bishop George Bell, and is the current acknowledged expert on him. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester is a concise, accessible overview of Bell’s engagement in the world of ecumenism and international politics during the turbulent times in which he lived and worked. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who only know Bell as Bonhoeffer’s friend and English contact on behalf of the German Resistance.

Share

Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, October 20-22, 2016

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Under the title of “Marching to Zion: Judaism, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism,” three scholars from the Conference on Faith and History examined the relationship between American Protestant Christians, Judaism, and Antisemitism during the tumultuous twentieth century.

Daniel Hummel, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, presented “Rethinking Covenant, Land, and Mission: Jewish-Evangelical Dialogue after Oslo.” In it he recounted the history of Jewish-evangelical dialogue in the United States, which was first officially begun in 1969 with a highly publicized meeting between Billy Graham and the American Jewish leaders at the headquarters of the American Jewish Committee in New York City. While interreligious dialogue and politics do not always go hand-in-hand, they are inextricable in the case of Jewish-evangelical dialogue. Since the late 1960s, it has expanded into one of the most active fronts of Jewish-Christian dialogue, while at the same time American evangelical support for Israel was politicized in the Christian Zionist movement. Hummel argued that Jewish-evangelical dialogue has supplied evangelicals over the past 45 years with new ways of thinking about theological concepts of covenant, land, and mission. Through a combination of changing evangelical theology, exposure to strands of modern Jewish theology, and the very act of interreligious dialogue, new conceptualizations of covenant, land, and mission have helped legitimate Christian Zionism. In political terms, the dialogue has rationalized the Christian Zionist focus on a blessing theology rooted in Genesis 12:3. This theology argues that the Jewish people remain in covenant with God. by which the Jewish people are irrevocably granted the Land of Israel (as demarcated in the Bible), while the mission of Christians is to bear witness to this arrangement by de-prioritizing evangelism and strengthening the covenant through support for the state of Israel.

Timothy D. Padgett, who just defended his PhD from Trinity International University, gave a paper entitled “Diverse Discourse on Zion: American Evangelical Public Discussions of Zionism and the State of Israel, 1937-1973.” In it, he traced the evolution of what he argued were diverse evangelical perspectives on Zionism and the State of Israel in evangelical periodicals. Some periodicals, like Arno C. Gaebelin’s dispensationalist Our Hope, were eschatologically minded but ambivalent about Zionism and (later) the Israeli government. In contrast, the editor and writers at Christian Herald (including the pseudonymous reporter Gabriel Courier) were strongly pro-Israel but wholly uninterested in eschatology. The Reformed magazine, Southern Presbyterian Journal, though often published weekly, had precious little to say about Zionism or Israel. Most stereotypically, perhaps, the Moody Monthly was both uniformly pro-Israeli and motivated by eschatological theology. Next, the dispensationalist Presbyterian magazine Eternity combined ardent support for and harsh criticism of Israel. Finally, Christianity Today and its editor Carl Henry were quite positive about the Jewish state, but gave little expression to any theology of the end times. Overall, American evangelicals were generally pro-Israeli, though this did not seem to correlate with their level of interest in eschatological theology.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University rounded out the panel, with “German Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” In it, he assessed the rhetoric employed by liberal Protestant writers and editors in Advance (Congregational), Christendom (unaffiliated), and The Churchman (Episcopalian) in responding to National Socialism, US antisemitism, the German Church Struggle, and the Jewish refugee crisis of 1938. Without doubt, these members of the Protestant church press–many of them church leaders–understood it to be their Christian duty to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. These writers and editors named the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without reviving centuries-old anti-Jewish prejudices from time to time, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. In the end, the plight of the Jews was not uppermost in their minds. Most important to these liberal Protestant spokesmen was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save their civilization, preserve democracy, and protect the world from self-destruction.

Share

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War,” German History 33, no. 1 (March 2015): 80-99.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Thomas Brodie of Jesus College, Oxford, has drawn from his doctoral research on German Catholics on the home front during the Second World War to publish this interesting article about the vagaries of religious practice among Rhenish Catholics displaced by Allied bombing. He follows Catholic evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia to places like Thuringia, Saxony, and southern Württemberg, where they often struggled to make new homes and develop healthy spiritual practices.

The article begins with a strong historiographical section, placing the author’s research in the context of recent scholarship on the air war, evacuations, the home front, and German religious history. While many accounts have suggested that the experience of the Second World War was conducive to an upswing in religious activity and clerical influence, Brodie disagrees, arguing that scholars have taken “insufficient account of the manifold strains the conflict imposed on the Churches’ pastoral structures during this very period” (82). To the contrary, he suggests that, “It was indeed precisely from 1943 onwards, as Allied bombing of northern and western Germany intensified, that civilian evacuations increasingly disrupted established religious geographies and networks of clerical ministry in these regions” (82). In short, he suggests that the western German Catholic milieu didn’t survive displacement.

Brodie asks a series of useful questions: Were clergy able to minister to their displaced parishioners, or were evacuees essentially removed from their influence? Did evacuation to Protestant or remote Catholic regions weaken the faith of Catholics from the Catholic strongholds of the Rhineland and Westphalia? Do the experiences of Catholic evacuees tell us anything about the wider level of religious engagement in German wartime society? And how did the Catholic clergy and laity understand their experiences as evacuees? His overarching argument is that population movements were significantly disruptive to confessional life: “German society may not have been disintegrating by 1943/1944, but the measures required to maintain the national war effort were proving increasingly corrosive of traditional ‘milieu’ boundaries” (83).

In the sections that follow, Brodie draws on the reports of Rhenish clergy working with evacuees to illustrate a series of problems created by the mass evacuation of western German Catholics. For instance, often Rhenish priests simply lacked important materials for their ministry, like Bibles, catechisms, or prayer books. Moreover, they frequently wanted for the necessary means of transportation to reach widely scattered evacuees. Large parishes and poor public transportation meant that they were frequently cycling 10 to 20 km to minister to families or provide religious instruction. Then, even if they could reach their charges, clergy needed a place to meet with them. In Thuringia, for example, the Protestant church government refused to allow Catholics to use their church buildings at any time during the war. On top of that, the Gestapo often prohibited Catholics from holding religious services in schools or homes. Even when evacuees ended up in Catholic regions, however, religious practices were often so different that the Rhinelanders struggled to join in.

Compounding these problems were others. Often, clergy had no way of knowing how many Rhenish Catholics had been evacuated, where they had settled, or if they had returned home. In one case relating to the Cologne Archdiocese, out of about 250,000 evacuees, only 16,500 had registered for religious supervision in the diaspora (86).

Brodie also notes the acute shortage of Catholic clergy. In late 1943, 9 percent of German parishes lacked a priest, and the vast majority of theology students and trainee priests–at least in the Cologne area–were being called up for military duty. (This research mirrors the reality in many Protestant regions, where many clergy cared for two and three parishes during the war and administrators struggled to fill gaps.)

In Protestant regions, Catholic priests often faced confessional hostility from Protestant lay people or police. Both they and their parishioners felt this, and Rhenish clergy developed a self-understanding of working in exile. They often complained about the secularism of Protestant regions like Thuringia, and viewed their labour as a participation in the wider effort to stem the tide of godlessness in Europe. Drawing on their neo-Scholastic theology, these clergy interpreted the spiritual apathy they observed to the Reformation’s “depowering of the sacraments and the sacrifice of the cross.” The result was, as one priest put it, “the whole faith increasingly collapses” (92). In Austrian Catholic regions to which evacuees had been sent, this declining religious vitality was attributed to “enlightened Josephinism” and its modernizing effect. Everywhere, however, priests also pointed to the morally corrosive effect of the war itself, including the prevalence of adultery and marital breakup.

In the final section of his article, Brodie suggests that the weakness of Catholic evacuees’ religious practice in wartime and their observations about Protestant secularism in places like Thuringia and Saxony suggests that the narrative of a general upsurge in German religious activity on the Second World War home front may be mistaken. In fact, Brodie suggested confessional identity took a beating, with Catholics slipping into Protestant services or (more often) just going shopping or sightseeing on Sunday. In parts of Saxony, for instance, the movie theatre seems to have outdrawn the church (95). Ultimately, if many Rhenish Catholics struggled to attend church at home, how much less likely were they in the situation of displacement?

In his conclusion, Brodie reiterates his primary argument that wartime was not conducive to increasing clerical influence or religious engagement. Rather, “the experiences of the Catholic diaspora as a whole indicate that although German society was not completely atomized during 1943 and 1944, certain traditional customs and networks were fraying under the pressures of war” (98).

Share

Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

By Gerhard Naber, Nordhorn, and Oliver Arnhold, University of Bielefeld and University of Paderborn; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Note: Normally Contemporary Church History Quarterly publishes historical rather than theological material. However, given the relevance of any German theological debate concerning the validity of the Old Testament to the antisemitic history of the German Christian Movement in the Nazi period, it seemed useful to publish this report from a noteworthy conference. The following account demonstrates that the conference “Not Without the Old Testament” grappled not only with contemporary theological problems, but also with the shadow of this history. Translator’s additions appear in square brackets.

Conference organizers: Protestant Academy of Berlin; Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies; Moses Mendelssohn Foundation; Protestant Church of Berlin, Brandenburg, and Silesian Upper Lusatia; Church and Judaism Institute (Humboldt University).

Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), by Joshua Koffman

Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), by Joshua Koffman

On the invitation to this conference and also on the huge display wall at the front side of the French Church of Friedrichstadt, we see two young women with crowns (princesses, perhaps?). They are similarly clothed, level with one another, and facing each other—each of them occupied with a scripture: the left one with a scroll, and the right one with a book marked with a cross—clearly a Torah and a Bible. What is special, however, is that neither looks (only) at her own scripture, but—in this moment—is interested in the scripture of the other.

The picture fascinates and confounds.

Such a composition is well known from medieval imagery. On almost all gothic churches we can find Ecclesia and Synagoga, an image of anti-Jewish theology with the message: Israel has been rejected; the Church has triumphed. But here, both figures are on the same level, made equal. They read their writings, but are also interested in the things that concern the other. This image of dialogue between Israel and the Church, created by Joshua Koffman, is entitled “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” (2015).

This representation symbolizes better than any other the protocol for the conference “Not Without the Old Testament.”

The background for this conference was the current, so-called “Slenczka Debate.” In 2013, the Berlin systematic theologian Dr. Notger Slenczka published a treatise in which he expressed concern that it might be time—in the intellectual tradition of Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Bultmann—to decanonize the Old Testament, i.e. perhaps to downgrade it to the status of the Apocrypha and in any case not to grant it the same status as the New Testament for Christian theology and for the Church.

This was certainly impetus enough to fundamentally reexamine the importance of the Old Testament for Christians and the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] for Jews.

After greetings from Dr. Eva Harasta of the Protestant Academy and Dr. Julius H. Schoeps of the Moses Mendelssohn Center, the first session revolved around the question “Text and Politics.” Dr. Rolf Schieder spoke first on the theme of “The Political Responsibility of Christian Theology towards the Old Testament.” He criticized the fever of the debate, the style of the confrontation. It was important that technical questions be kept at the center. Slenczka’s thesis should therefore be taken seriously, insofar as he sees his position within the realm of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christians should not worm their way into the covenant with Israel; they should respect the Old Testament as a record of Jewish faith. Finally, the speaker proposed a “dogmatic disarmament”—not to understand the canon as normative, but as a collection of texts for use in worship, teaching, and personal devotion. In this sense, the Old Testament is certainly part of the Christian canon.

Dr. Oliver Arnhold, Department Head for Protestant Religious Instruction in Detmold and Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Paderborn and Bielefeld, examined aspects of the “Ecclesiastical and Theological Treatment of the Old Testament among the German Christians (DC).” Arnhold made it clear that the DC were no unified block, and provided various examples of gradations in the question of the status of the Old Testament. On the one hand, Friedrich Wienecke advocated for the maintenance of the Old Testament, while, on the other hand, Reinhold Krause called for a radical separation from the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament at the “Sport Palace Rally” [in Berlin in November 1933].

Arnhold gave a detailed outline of Walter Grundmann’s position in the “28 Theses of the DC”: The Old Testament is not of the same value as the New Testament; rather, it should serve as an example of the failure of the Jewish way (Thesis 12). The abandonment of the Jews by God resulted in the curse of God on this people—up to the present day (Thesis 13). And for his part, Siegfried Leffler, co-founder of the Thuringian Church Movement of the German Christians, wanted to replace the Old Testament with stories from German history.

A key institution for this movement was the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life” (“Dejudaizing Institute”), founded [by Grundmann] in 1939 in Eisenach. By 1941, Grundmann had managed to win about 180 associates for the scholarly work of the Institute, including 24 university professors from 14 Protestant theological faculties, along with ecclesiastical dignitaries and emerging scholars. These served voluntarily in working groups, research projects and publishing activities. A total of 46 research projects and workshops aimed to erase Jewish elements from theology and Church, among other things. In place of the Old Testament, personnel in the Grundmann Institute proposed the legends of German heroes and saints as the model and ideal for religious life.

“The Combination of Politics and Theology in the Controversy concerning the Old Testament: A Jewish-Civil Society Perspective”—this was the topic of the evening lecture by the Jewish Education scholar Dr. Micha Brumlik, who went into great detail about the life and thought of the theologian Emanuel Hirsch. Hirsch understood “Volk” as the concrete place, where the message of God is encountered. Thus he became a member of the German Christian Movement out of conviction, and the National Socialist Party too. In 1933 he proclaimed “a YES to the German year!” and praised Hitler “as an instrument of the Lord of all.” The Old Testament served for him as a demonstration of a false, inadequate understanding of God that should crumble. Brumlik pointed out that the line of tradition in which Slenczka stands includes not only Schleiermacher and Harnack, but also theologians like Hirsch, who fawned over National Socialism.

The second day of the conference—Wednesday, December 9, 2015—was devoted to the theme of “Text and Hermeneutic.” It was opened by Dr. Andreas Schüle, Professor of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis at the University of Leipzig, under the title “Bible Minus Old Testament: A Blind Alley.” At the outset he demonstrated that uncertainty arises if faith becomes “questionable” and people insist upon resources of certainty. The Bible is one such resource, but that idea is hard to understand outside of a worship service and outside of church. Along with Niklas Luhmann, Schüle describes the Bible as a “communications medium,” that with its diverse histories, ideas, images, and motifs can be understood in diverse ways and can withstand selective attacks. This is a very “low threshold” approach to the Bible: it is not understood as a norm; no dogmatic determinations are made; and so there is no strong awareness of a canon.

The attempt to decanonize the Old Testament or place it at the same level as the Apocrypha always results in a crisis situation: “The Old Testament will be up for debate when the gospel becomes murky.” So it is a crisis phenomenon, that we have to depart from the (seemingly!) murky in order for the (supposedly!) essentials to become clearer. The subject of the “Old Testament” has contributed to this crisis, in that it is understood essentially as a historical subject, oriented towards the past rather than the future. In this context, reference was made later in the discussion to the approaches of Frank Crüsemann und Jürgen Ebach.

The speaker listed several components of Schleiermacher’s thought which related to the Old Testament: the New Testament was the faith document of the early Christians; there were references to the Old Testament in the New Testament, but these concerned only historical aspects, not grounds of faith; the Old Testament was the legacy of a less developed religion, possessed therefore less dignity, and was perceived as somewhat alien, while the New Testament was understood to be distinct from the Old; the brilliance of the gospel was dulled by the proximity of the Old Testament.

Von Harnack took a more positive stance towards the Old Testament, particularly the Prophets. He sees in the Old Testament, however, a religion steeped in legalism and ritualism which was only broken by Christ; with Christ, the Old Testament had become irrelevant.

Gerhard von Rad thought very differently from this. For him, the Torah was not a monolithic block; rather, it witnessed to a movement “forwards,” because tradition had to be reinterpreted again and again. So also, the Jesus-event required interpretation, and this through recourse to the Old Testament, namely the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature; this was not “e-mancipation” (leaving the Old Testament) but “mancipation” (taking the Old Testament in hand). Schüle’s closing point was that the question of Jesus Christ must once again be a component of Old Testament research. The influence of the Old Testament on the New Testament scriptures must be researched. Therefore, we can learn from Jewish biblical research.

The retired Württemberg state rabbi Dr. Joel Berger gave a lively presentation exploring “How Jews Read and Understand the Bible: An Orthodox Perspective.” Jews, as he began by asserting, do not “read” the Torah; they “study” it. Moreover, the Torah is not only “text” but also “revelation.” As he put it, “If Slenczka wants to leave us alone with the Old Testament—okay!” Scripture study is not about knowledge, but about living devotion, about imitating the saints. To learn from Abraham means to learn action.

After the Orthodox rabbi, a representative of the liberal wing of Judaism spoke: Rabbi Dr. Edward van Voolen of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam. His theme was “Love of Teaching: Jewish Exegesis of the Tanakh.” According to the rabbi, the Torah establishes tradition; the Torah was given to Moses, who passed it on to Joshua, who passed it on to the Elders and so on from generation to generation. Based on section Baba Mezi’a 59b of the Babylonian Talmud, van Voolen explained that the text of the Torah must be interpreted anew again and again, which represents our adulthood and with it our fundamental rejection of any dogmatism or fundamentalism. The interpretation of the Word of God is given into human hands. According to the Talmud Chagigah 3b, texts always contain several possible interpretations—even different ones. Does this lead to anarchy in exegesis? Not when the doctrine is being constantly renegotiated. Dialogue is necessary here.

The section on “Texts and Community” was opened by Dr. Alexander Deeg, Practical Theologian from Leipzig, and his paper “Hermeneutical Problems and Homiletical Opportunities: Preaching Texts from the Old Testament.” At the outset he introduced the discussion process with the compilation of a new series of pericopes. In doing so, he noted that there was great interest in including more Old Testament texts. Old Testament texts were not now perceived as foreign, but as true-to-life and of direct concern to people. In connection to this, he referred to the Protestant practice of reading daily watchwords: the nucleus of the watchwords is comprised of an Old Testament verse, to which a New Testament verse is matched. Moreover, self-selected scriptures for baptism, confirmation, and wedding ceremonies are often taken from the Old Testament. There are also countless examples of art and culture with Old Testament echoes. For instance, he found 3750 instances of biblical traces in modern lyrics alone.

One ground for this was that the Old Testament includes a wide variety of genres, and contains texts originating from an extremely long span of time and out of diverse life experiences. Exodus stories, lamentations, and biblical laws are not abstract treatises, but texts with great earthiness.

Concerning the “professorial problematization” of this enthusiasm for the Old Testament, the speaker stated that Jews are the first ones to whom these texts are addressed, and so it is easy to run the risk of monopolizing or even expropriating them. Beyond that, the choice of texts is rather selective: people choose “nice” selections and avoid “nasty” ones (displays of violence, psalms that curse). For many Christians, the Psalms constitute a natural supplement to the New Testament—baptized as quasi-Christian.

In dialogue between Jews and Christians, there must be an unlearning of the traditional Christian methods of handling the Old Testament, which rest on categories like “promise and fulfilment,” “universalist” versus “particularist,” “antithetical,” as in “christological interpretations.”

A new hermeneutic must be followed:

  1. The Old Testament is a necessary background of Christ, without which we do not know what we are talking about.
  2. The Old Testament describes a history into which we listen, in which we belong, but which, at the same time, is the history of Israel and Judaism.
  3. The Old Testament is the “No” to Jesus as the Messiah, which we have to hear and which protects us from any triumphalism.

To the last point, the texts of Israel illustrate that where there is a spillover of the promise [from Judaism to Christianity], there is also a void in the fulfillment, which makes it clear that we are both waiting, expecting—both separately and together.

From the Jewish side, Rabbi Dr. Andreas Nachama, Director of the Topography of Terror in Berlin, addressed the theme: “The Reception of the Biblical Text in the Community: Preaching on Texts from the Tanach.” His basic thesis concerning the debate at hand was that Jews can actually be, in the first instance, indifferent to the ways in which Christians see the texts of the Old Testament. Studying the Torah and the other scriptures forms the basis for the cohesion of the Jewish community. Studying the Torah means, in the first instance, that the text is carefully recited, intensively read. To understand, we have “to read not only the black of the letters, but also the white between them.” If we read the Old Testament only as a historical text, it is rather uninteresting; if, however, we read the text in such a way as to be personally involved, then the Passover story from Exodus, for example, becomes immediately existential: it is as if we ourselves are being liberated from slavery and bondage.

Jewish stories attempt to make the text come alive approximately in the manner of the Midrash. In this stream of tradition, the year 70 after that time is particularly important: the loss of the temple demands a paradigm shift. Religion can no longer be based on temple worship, priestly service, and sacrifice, but must now “work anywhere.” Out of the traditional religion of sacrifice, two new developments have emerged: Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

After the French Revolution, a liberal stream arose alongside the orthodox life of faith. Nachama explained the liberal approach using the example of dealing with homosexuality: the texts must be maintained, but the interpretation will change due to the fundamental changes in the cultural context, and after that the corresponding conduct will change. It is important in Jewish-Christian dialogue that Jews and Christians compare notes on their respective ways of handling the texts of the Tanakh.

The conference section “Text and Controversy” was cancelled, since the anticipated discussion participant Professor Slenczka refused to take part. In a letter to the speakers, he mentioned that the program—unlike what was previously discussed—ultimately pursued the goal of a “statement” of his position in order to arrange an “ostracism,” without him having the opportunity to adequately defend himself against “misinterpretations” and “insinuations.” He accused the Protestant Academy of “fear of debate.”

As a result, the final day—Thursday, December 10, 2015—began under the heading “Text and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” with a presentation by Dr. Rainer Kampling, Professor of Biblical Theology at the Free University of Berlin. It was entitled, “‘For the One God is the Creator of Both’: A Roman Catholic Perspective.” Based on the document “Decretum de librissacris” from the Council of Trent (1546), the speaker explained that, without the Old Testament, not only would Christians be rid of their God, but also they would run into a linguistic homelessness in their religious existence. At the time of the Reformation, neither Protestants nor Catholics ever considered whether the Old Testament was fully valid, but rather only considered which scriptures could be taken in a more or less binding way. Thus the representative of the old belief, Eck, argued that the Maccabean Books were indeed not in the canon, but had to be believed canonically, while Luther retorted that only the canon is canonical.

On the question of the validity of the Old Testament and New Testament, the council determined that “Unus deus sit auctor” (“God alone is the author”), where “auctor” means “originator” and not “writer.” To fix the canon, the council decreed once and for all that the specified scope of the canon itself become an object of faith, and not only the content of the canon. Thus the Old Testament is in a full sense the Word of God, meaning that, in the Roman Catholic Church, no theology can modify this principle. This issue could well revolve around ways of reading.

So then the formula of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scripture in the Christian Bible” (2001): “The Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures [from the Second Temple period].”

The closing session of the conference was comprised of a discussion round under the question “Where does Jewish-Christian dialogue stand, and where is it going?” with the participants: Bishop Markus Dröge, Professor Julius H. Schoeps, Professor Christoph Markschies, Rabbi Joel Berger, Professor Rainer Kampling und Professor Micha Brumlik, moderated by Dr. Werner Treß und Dr. Eva Harasta.

Brumlink began from the concept of “shyness with strangers” (“Fremdelns”), which—in the development of a child—is always noticeable when fears arise due to changes in the environment and the child has to form new relationships. The stranger can appear as a source of fascination or trembling.

Bishop Dröge showed—starting with the image of a pulpit with Moses as a fundamental pillar—that Judaism has a continuing importance as a sign of God’s faithfulness. Moreover, the Church must repeatedly “make clear the fundamental role of the Jewish faith for the Christian faith.”

Schoeps referred to the “Rhenish Synodal Resolution” of 1980. At that time, he was full of hope for the dawn of better times; but then the resolution was repeatedly criticized by various parties (and immediately by the Bonn and Münster theological faculties), who fundamentally rejected the resolution. For Schoeps, this aroused a skepticism over the sense of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

State Rabbi Berger was intensely critical of the behavior of specific parts of the Protestant Church (“Pietcong” [i.e. radical Pietists] in Württemberg parlance), asserting that dialogue would be used as a cover for pure Jewish mission, and that with highly questionable methods. Along the way, he called attention to the destructive activity of the so-called “Messianic Jews.”

The church historian Christoph Markschies pointed to the guilty history of theology at German universities. At the “Institutum Judaicum” [a preparatory course for Protestant theologians intending to engage in missionary work among Jews], the Old Testament was taught as a “placeholder of pre-Christian experience of God.” He expressed the wish that an information sign would be placed beside the memorial plaque for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Berlin’s Humboldt University, which would indicate that in 1936 this university dismissed Dietrich Bonhoeffer as private docent, and moreover that the church historian Erich Seeberg energetically campaigned for the abrogation of the Old Testament and its replacement with texts from Meister Eckhart.

Professor Kampling stressed that since the [Second Vatican] Council resolution “Nostre aetate”—promulgated exactly 50 years ago and just now this day again realized through a Vatican pronouncement—it has become increasingly clear that Judaism is in salvation; Jesus as the mediator of salvation remains a mystery. “There is a thin trace of friendliness towards Jews in the history of theology!”

Overall, it was agreed that Jewish-Christian dialogue has generated many positive things. Bishop Dröge brought forth as evidence “Study in Israel” [a year-long study program for German theology students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem], new exegesis (“Preaching Meditations in Christian-Jewish Context” [a publication from “Study in Israel”]), various meetings and significant changes in preaching and religious education. Brumlik even spoke of a “success story.”

More critically, Professor Markschies noted that the departure taken in 1980 had not been carried on decisively enough, especially in the direction of the theological education of the following generations. Many emerging theologians simply lack a solid study of the Old Testament. Correspondingly, Micha Brumlik asserted that it is necessary for more Jewish people, especially from the younger generation, to become interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue. The Reformation jubilee of 2017 would surely illustrate this—there are still aspects [of the Jewish-Christian relationship] to be negotiated that revolve around more than simply narrowly religious matters.

Finally, it must be noted that despite the refusal of Slenczka to attend the meeting, a productive exchange of views took place, in which both Jews and Christians highlighted the importance of the Old Testament. The presentations illustrated how much the question of the importance of the Old Testament relates to the very core of Christian theology. It became clear that not the detachment but the engagement with the diversity and the richness of the canon is not only theologically necessary but also illustrative of the great benefit derived for Christianity from the participation in the Hebrew Bible. Thus the title image for the conference—the sculpture “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman—was very well chosen. The artwork illustrates how Jews and Christians can enter into a dialogue on eye level with one another on the foundation of a common collection of texts, and how the will of God can be rightly understood in their sacred scriptures.

Share

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick: ‘Ethnotheism’ and Official Nazi Views on Religion”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick: ‘Ethnotheism’ and Official Nazi Views on Religion,” German Studies Review 37, no. 3 (2014): 575–596.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Over the past few years, Samuel Koehne of the University of Melbourne has published a series of insightful articles on National Socialist views of religion, as disseminated in various official publications. In this article, he revisits the problematic text of Article 24 in the 1920 Nazi Party Program, interpreting it in light of four other documents: the 1919 Grundsatz or Foundational Principle of the German Workers’ Party (predecessor to the 1920 Nazi Party Program), Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925-1926), and—most importantly—Alfred Rosenberg’s 1923 and Gottfried Feder’s 1927 commentaries on the Party Program. Koehne has chosen these in part because he wants to understand what National Socialists had to say about their religious policies before they took power in 1933.

Koehne is unsatisfied with the existing conflicting interpretations of Nazi religious policy. He argues that Nazism was neither a neo-pagan religious movement, nor a political religion, nor a quasi-Christian movement. Rather, he advances “a new conceptual approach: ‘ethnotheism,’ or religion defined by race and the supposed moral or spiritual characteristics that the Nazis believed were inherent in race” (576). Ethnotheism, writes Koehne, was the unifying principle around which a wide array of religious beliefs could flourish under National Socialism. Within Article 24 of the 1920 Party Program, ethnotheism is found in the Nazi determination to oppose any kind of religious doctrine which might “endanger [the state’s] existence or offend the ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race” (588). Importantly, Koehne argues that the subsequent sentence about the Party’s support for “positive Christianity”—normally seen as the centrepiece of Nazi religious policy—was less important. It was purposely vague, he suggests, and had no precedent or subsequent life within Nazi statements on religion. In contrast to this, the 1919 Foundational Principle of the German Worker’s Party proposed “non-interference in religious matters, except as they were matters of state or threatened the existence of the people or nation (Volk) and its ‘morality and ethics,’” as did other völkisch parties (580). This elevation of race over religion was the central principle at work, and the source of Koehne’s ethnotheism.

Koehne identifies several key Nazi ideas: that religion caused division, which would only be overcome by a common commitment to antisemitic racial nationalism, and that morality was blood bound. As Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg put it, “Morality is completely racially conditioned, and not abstract Catholic, Protestant or Muslim” (582). Similarly, ideologue Gottfried Feder proclaimed that Nazism would attack any religious teachings that offended German morality (583). And Hitler wrote much the same thing in Mein Kampf, where he rejected mixing of politics and religion and argued that pious German Protestants and Catholics would be united in a joint völkisch world view and racial struggle against the Jew (585). Indeed, this “ecumenicism of National Socialism” was what accounted for the strange mixture of Norse religion and Christianity in the work of Rosenberg. Any number of religious beliefs could be practiced under the banner of antisemitism, racial morality, and the swastika, “an Aryan symbol of renewal” (587). All this is supported by Feder’s arresting assertion that Article 24 in the 1920 Party Program was “the spiritual foundation of the entire position of National Socialism towards the Jews” (588).

Koehne’s position draws on important sources and is well-argued. Moreover, it fits with other elements of Nazi ideology, such as Hitler’s assertion that the soul of a people was contained in its blood, or that Jews (with impure blood) were devoid of spiritual capacity. It also accounts for the confusing and contradictory religious statements made and religious practices supported by leading Nazis. There is good potential in Koehne’s concept of ethnotheism. We look forward to its continued development.

 

Share

Letter from the Editors (March 2016)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Letter from the Editors (March 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

As Lent will soon give way to Easter, it is our pleasure to publish once again a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, with short articles, book reviews, and notes on the contemporary history of German and European religious history. In this edition of the journal, we see the full spectrum of response by Christians to the moral challenge of National Socialism.

Hartmut Ludwig of Humboldt University in Berlin has contributed a copy of a public lecture he gave recently at the Topography of Terror in Berlin, and which John S. Conway has kindly translated. It describes the work of Pastor Heinrich Grüber of Berlin, who partnered with a good number of Christians (many of Jewish descent) to care for the persecuted Jews of Germany. At great risk to themselves, they established a relief agency that facilitated the emigration of close to 2000 Jews from Germany between 1938 and 1940.

Berlin memorial plaque to Elizabeth Schmitz. Von OTFW, Berlin – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17086962

Accompanying the Ludwig lecture is a review of Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik, an edited volume by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals. Victoria Barnett of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reviews this book, which assesses the determined efforts of a group of Protestant women to resist Nazi racial policies. The contributors highlight an impressive list of resisters, many of whom took action when the men in power around them refused: Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg at the Garrison Church, Potsdam, March 21, 1933. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S38324 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5369386

On the other end of the spectrum, Kyle Jantzen reviews another edited volume by Manfred Gailus, Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945. Gailus and other scholars explain the ways in which individuals and groups of theologians, church leaders, and clergy who voluntarily accommodated themselves to the ecclesiastical and racial policies of the Third Reich, in many cases becoming participants in the perpetration of great evil. Various chapters focus on the Day of Potsdam, the German Christian Movement, Gerhard Kittel, “Brown Priests,” Hanns Kerrl and Hermann Muhs, Walter Grundmann, Karl Themel, and Erich Seeberg.

Other contributions round out the volume, including a book review on the Church of England in the First World War, two conference reports (each covering a good number of sessions and papers), and a call for papers for the journal Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations.

We hope you enjoy this issue. Please feel free to comment on anything you read, either out of appreciation or a desire for debate.

With best wishes, on behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Share

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-TaeterFollowing Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.

Share

Letter from the Editors: December 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Letter from the Editors (December 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

As Advent begins, it is our pleasure to publish once again a new issue of short articles, book reviews, and notes on the contemporary history of German and European religious history. This issue is focused on the two individuals who receive more attention than any other figures in twentieth-century German religious history: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pope Pius XII.

Zingsthof, first home of the Confessing Church seminary directed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zingsthof_06_2014_005.JPG

On Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kyle Jantzen provides a long overdue assessment of the work of Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, and suggests that his biography of Bonhoeffer encompasses both liberal and conservative views of the dynamic theologian. Matthew Hockenos follows that with a review of a multi-author volume considering the relationship between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his resistance activities.

Three of our editors assess works on Pius XII and the papacy in the era of the two world wars. Lauren Faulner Rossi reviews John Pollard’s The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958, while Beth A. Griech-Polelle evaluates The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War, by Jacques Kornberg. Then Mark Edward Ruff tackles Mark Riebling’s much publicized study, Church of Spies: The Vatican’s Secret War against Hitler.

Bookending this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are two very different sorts of articles. Our first article is a contribution by guest contributor Hartmut Lehmann, who considers what it means to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in an increasingly secular Germany. (We have also included a note about recent German Studies Association panels devoted to the life and thought of Lehmann.) At the close of the issue, Andrew Chandler reflects on three church historians who passed away far before their time–Markus Huttner, Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, Huamin Toshiko Mackman–remembering not only their work but also their lives.

As always, we hope you find this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly interesting and informative. And now let me wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen

Share

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer [1]

In recent years, the field of Bonhoeffer studies has been dominated by debates about two biographies: Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[2] While members of the popular media and Christian commentators have generally lauded these stylish works, historians of the period as well as many Bonhoeffer scholars have generally been critical of them.

One of the reasons for this difference of opinion, argue Victoria J. Barnett and Andrew Chandler, is that many recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been driven by theology rather than history. As a result, often “the dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage.”[3] Related to this is the mythology which quickly grew up around Bonhoeffer in the years after the war, when his books Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison established him as a serious biblical Christian and martyr, both of which were especially attractive to a North American audience. For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit. It is surely the power of his life, writing, and testimony that has accomplished this, thanks in good measure to the tireless efforts of his best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge. Still, it means he is an easy figure to lift out of his historical context. Finally, a third factor which influences recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer is the contemporary prominence of Holocaust studies, which tempts authors to make the subject of Jewish persecution and annihilation more important to Bonhoeffer and other Protestant leaders than it actually was back in the day.[4] As Stephen Haynes argued in his 2004 work The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, theological radicals, liberals, and conservatives have all identified Bonhoeffer as one of their own, a tradition only continued by Metaxas and Marsh.[5]

Schlingensiepen-DBLost in all of the attention paid to Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is the fact that an English-language translation Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s 2006 biography of Bonhoeffer was also published in 2010.[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance is surprisingly unknown and seldom reviewed. Even this journal—dedicated to twentieth-century German church history and replete with Bonhoefferiana—failed to assess either the original German version or the subsequent English translation. Nor can this oversight be explained on account of any inadequacy in the qualifications of the author or the quality of the research. The following analysis is both a compensation for the absence of a more timely review and an attempt to reconcile differing views of Bonhoeffer through a close analysis of Schlingensiepen’s work.

In his own review of the Metaxas and Marsh biographies, Schlingensiepen echoes the criticisms of Clifford Green,[7] Victoria J. Barnett,[8] and others. Moreover, he sums up the German scholarly frustration with the two American interpretations:

Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.[9]

As his comments suggest, Schlingensiepen’s approach to the Bonhoeffer story is shaped very much by his own history in the German Protestant church. It would be hard to find a scholar with better credentials for writing a Bonhoeffer biography. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s father Hermann was a Confessing Church pastor who knew Bonhoeffer, who directed one of the Confessing Church seminaries, and who participated in the German church struggle. A pastor and theologian himself, Ferdinand maintained a close, fifty-year friendship with Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s confidante and biographer. Indeed, in the Acknowledgements, the author notes that Bethge realized his thousand-page biography was too long for most readers and asked Schlingensiepen to compose a shorter version which would update his own interpretation. Moreover, Schlingensiepen worked for former Confessing Church leader Kurt Scharf for a decade, knew various members of the extended Bonhoeffer clan, and employed the same editor as Bethge had worked with in the completion of his magisterial biography decades earlier.

All this makes Schlingensiepen intimately aware of the context in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived, learned, served, thought, wrote, and acted. His rich contextualization of Bonhoeffer influences the biography in two ways: first, Bonhoeffer is understood not as a lonely genius but in relationship to the many family members, friends, mentors, and colleagues who enriched in his life; second, Bonhoeffer’s theology and politics are developed in close connection to the German church struggle.

Bonhoeffer’s People

Schlingensiepen has much to say about the many people who contributed to Bonheffer’s life. His parents Karl and Paula and siblings Karl-Friedrich, Walter, Klaus, Ursula, Christine, Sabine, and Suzanne nurtured him, inspired him, failed to understand his decision to study theology, travelled with him, conspired with him against Hitler, advised him, corresponded with him, and supported him during his final years in prison. So too did his in-laws from the Delbrück, Dohnanyi, Schleicher, Leibholz, and Dreβ families. Indeed, Bonhoeffer’s entrance into the resistance movement is inconceivable without his family connections, and in particular those of brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, assistant to federal justice minister Franz Gürtner, brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, a high-ranking lawyer for Deutsche Lufthansa, brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher, an important official in the air travel ministry, and uncle Paul von Hase, a high-ranking army officer and the city commandant of Berlin.

Beyond immediate and extended family members, Schlingensiepen weaves a host of other characters into his Bonhoeffer biography. He describes Superintendent Max Diestel as the “discoverer of Bonhoeffer” who watched over his theological development, sent him abroad for life-changing experiences in ministry and education, and introduced him to ecumenical work (33-34). In Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s time at Union Seminary in New York, the author focuses on four deeply influential friends, both at that time and later. Paul Lehmann, an American of German-Russian ancestry, developed a friendship with Bonhoeffer that lasted from their student days to the war years, even though Bonhoeffer resisted his plea to stay in the United States in 1939 (63-64, 70, 230, and 267). Frank Fisher was the American student who introduced Bonhoeffer to the vibrant but marginalized black church in New York (65, 70). Erwin Sutz was a Swiss student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Karl Barth and became both an ecumenical partner and a vital communication link for Bonhoeffer in Switzerland during the war (67-70, 87-88, 262). Finally, Jean Lasserre, a French student at Union Seminary, profoundly influenced Bonhoeffer’s thinking about both pacifism and the Sermon on the Mount and became a long-running partner in international and ecumenical dialogue (70-73, 93, 173-174).

As Schlingensiepen explains Bonhoeffer’s life, thought, and work, there are scores of other influential and often overlooked characters who make their appearances: scholars like Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, and especially Karl Barth; friends and coworkers like Franz Hildebrandt, Hermann Sasse and Wilhelm Vischer, Gertrud Staewen, Julius Rieger, and of course Eberhard Bethge; ecumenical contacts like Wilhelm Visser’t Hooft and Bishop George Bell; the patron Ruth von Kleist-Retzow; and Bonhoeffer’s students from Finkenwalde. Whether he was developing his theology, writing confessional statements, combatting German Christian opponents in the church struggle, educating theology students, engaging in ecumenical dialogue, or resisting Hitler, Bonhoeffer never worked alone. Schlingensiepen always places him among people and regularly shows how dependent Bonhoeffer was on others.

Several examples illustrate this. In the summer 1933, though the formulation of the Bethel Confession was assigned as a joint project to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, Schlingensiepen points out how it was in fact Swiss Old Testament scholar Wilhelm Vischer who contributed the vital section on the people of Israel (134-136). Similarly, the author notes that while Martin Niemöller and twenty other pastors (Bonhoeffer included) founded the Pastors’ Emergency League later in 1933, the idea actually came from two country pastors, Eugen Weschke and Günter Jacob (137).

In 1934, Bonhoeffer spent much of his time combatting August Jäger, state commissioner for the Prussian provincial churches and the violent implementer of the German Christian takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church and attempted creation of a centralized, authoritarian Reich Church. As Martin Niemöller and the Pastors’ Emergency League fought against Jäger’s boss, German Christian leader and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, Bonhoeffer agitated in the same direction from London, where he was pastoring. Here Schlingensiepen introduces Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who supported Bonhoeffer by writing German President Hindenburg about Müller and Jäger. Schlingensiepen explains how Bonhoeffer wrote forcefully but unsuccessfully to his ecumenical partners in Geneva, asking them to oppose the Müller regime. It was then that Bell, who was president of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, sent around a pastoral letter to the member churches of the Council, denouncing the radical unconstitutional seizure of authority in various provincial churches in Germany. Subsequently, after the Barmen and Dahlem Synods, it was the initiative of Bell and through him also the Archbishop of Canterbury—both of whom spoke in person to the German ambassador to England—that pushed Hitler’s government into jettisoning Jäger (152-154, 158-160, and 164-167).

Schlingensiepen also shows Bonhoeffer’s connections to key women in this history who are generally overlooked by other Bonhoeffer scholars. First, when Bonhoeffer began teaching theology in the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde, he met and became friends with Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. She was a Pomeranian noblewoman who went on to introduce him to local aristocrats, to substantially support the underfunded seminary, and to open her home to Bonhoeffer for holidays and writing retreats (180, 244, 247, and 281). Finally, in 1941, after Bonhoeffer heard about various Jewish rescue operations from his ecumenical friends in Switzerland, he returned to Berlin and told close friends about them. Among these was Gertrud Staewen, who had been his friend since the two had worked together with Karl Barth, advocating on behalf of persecuted theology professor Günther Dehn in 1931 and protesting at the Protestant National Synod in 1933 (101, 141). Schlingensiepen suggests that Bonhoeffer asked Staewen to serve as the key link in the rescue of Berlin Jews sometime in the summer of 1941—in short, to take over the work of Heinrich Grüber and Werner Sylten, both of whom had been thrown into concentration camps. Based on her correspondence, Staewen accepted this call, working together with others in Berlin to support Jews being deported and to help some of them go underground. As part of this work, she maintained regular contact with ecumenical partners in Switzerland and with Bonhoeffer, who encouraged her but could not participate in the rescue work directly, because of his involvement in the resistance (263-264). These are just a few examples of the many ways in which Ferdinand Schlingensiepen places Dietrich Bonhoeffer within the larger context of activists engaged in church-political battles, theological writing and training, and subversive political activities.

The German Church Struggle

The second noteworthy aspect of Schlingensiepen’s contextualization of Bonhoeffer is in the careful attention he pays to the German church struggle, from the Nazi seizure of power and rise of the German Christian Movement in 1933 to the end of Bonhoeffer’s leadership of the Finkenwalde seminary in 1937. The author writes of “the many fronts on which [Bonhoeffer] was fighting and the many groups of people with whom he wrestled, … a bewildering abundance of events.” Significantly, he argues that “it was during the chaotic, fateful year, 1933, that the course was set for the 12 years of Hitler’s dictatorship, and thus for everything that was to follow in Bonhoeffer’s life” (116). Having established the significance of events in 1933, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe the events of the church struggle in their necessary detail, avoiding the confusion that so often accompanies this conflict. The author begins with Bonhoeffer’s leadership speech of February 1, Hitler’s seizure of power, the rise of the German Christian Movement, and Bonhoeffer’s essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which he proposes three possible responses to state injustice: to call the state to account, to give aid to the victims, and ultimately, to not only “bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel, but to seize the wheel itself” (126). The politics of the Young Reformation Movement, the rise of Martin Niemöller, the church constitution issue, the takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church government, the church elections of July 1933 and German Christian seizure of Protestant church governments, the emergence of an opposition movement, the drafting of the Bethel Confession, the fall 1933 Prussian and national church synods, and the formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League—all these are given appropriate attention in a single chapter on the year 1933.

From there, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s service as pastor in London and then as director of the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde. At the same time, however, he explains Bonhoeffer’s participation in the church struggle, including the campaign against the Reich Church and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, the Barmen Declaration and the formation of the Confessing Church, the establishment of church finance departments in the Prussian provincial churches, the appointment of Hanns Kerrl as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Kerrl’s attempt to govern the churches through Reich and provincial church committees, and the appointment of Dr. Friedrich Werner as director of the German Protestant Church chancellery and head of the Berlin High Church Council.

Especially noteworthy is Schlingensiepen’s understanding of the relationship between the Barmen, Dahelm, and Oeynhausen Synods of the Confessing Church. For Bonhoeffer and his colleagues, “the decisions of Dahlem were just the necessary ‘form’, the ordering of the Church required by the ‘content’ of the Theological Declaration of Barmen” (165). Indeed, the author argues that “there was no one in the Confessing Church who took the decisions of the Confessing Synod of Dahlem more seriously than did Bonhoeffer” (172). Bonhoeffer consistently refused to recognize the authority of the official church governments, emphasizing that the Confessing Church was the sole legitimate church government and even applying the old formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus to the situation: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church separates himself from salvation” (189). He would not even make peace with Kerrl’s more moderate church committees taking the radical position that “Barmen [was] a tower against the subversion of church doctrine, Dahlem the tower against the subversion of the ecclesiastical order,” and Oeynhausen “our defence against the subversion of the church by the world as, in the shape of the Nazi state, it intervenes through its finance departments, Legislative Authority and committees, and is now tearing into separate groups the church of those who confess our faith. Here we cannot and must not give in one single time!” (194). This aspect of Schlingensiepen’s account is particularly important, since the divisions within the Confessing Church between Lutherans in the “intact churches” of Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hanover who were willing to work with the German Protestant Church government and the Dahlemites who rejected any authority outside the Confessing Church are often misunderstood or ignored. And it is precisely here that we see the radicalism of Bonhoeffer, rejecting both the enthusiasm of the German Christian Movement to fuse Nazism and Christianity and the unwillingness of the Lutheran wing of the Confessing Church to abandon the state church tradition of German Protestantism. Schlingensiepen helps us to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s theological and existential journey through the events German church struggle.

The Historical Bonhoeffer

But who is Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer? The author’s short answer is that Bonhoeffer’s life, actions, and death cannot be explained solely according to traits he inherited, but must take into consideration his formation as a youth at home and in university. Above all, Schlingensiepen sees three key characteristics in Bonhoeffer: “intellectual curiosity, an incorruptible sense of right and wrong, and the courage to make uncomfortable decisions with potentially dangerous consequences” (xviii-xix). Moreover, he argues we must also:

become engaged with what, for Bonhoeffer, theology was. Bonhoeffer wanted to expose theology to ‘the fresh air of modern thinking’. He insisted that the message of the Church must always apply concretely to the reality of the world. Timeless truths he considered useless, for ‘what is always true is precisely what is not true today’. (xix)

This is what is so striking about Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer. His combination of curiosity, moral courage, and theological creativity makes him so utterly unpredictable, so full of paradoxes (perhaps even contradictions), and so impossible to pigeonhole.

Bonhoeffer’s Formation

Bonhoeffer’s formation surely contributed to this. He grew up in upper middle class privilege, steeped in the education and culture of a professional family. While he lost an older brother in the First World War, his own wartime service was as a 12 year-old “messenger and food scout” for the family, secretly participating in the black market trading of which his siblings disapproved (11). From an early age, he was independent minded, and surprised his non-church going family by choosing to study theology (16). Time and again, Schlingensiepen highlights the unconventional and unpredictable aspects of Bonhoeffer’s journey, whether it was joining the non-conformist Hedgehog fraternity at Tübingen or quitting the group when they expelled their Jewish members (19). Later, this independent streak showed itself in his choice of Reinhold Seeberg as his doctoral supervisor, even though Bonhoeffer had worked far more closely with Adolf von Harnack, and though Seeberg had little time for Bonhoeffer’s interest in Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation (29-30).

Bonhoeffer’s formation continued along unconventional lines. Already while an undergraduate, he had travelled throughout Italy and down into North Africa, experiencing both Islam and Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it was Bonhoeffer’s exposure to Catholic worship in Rome that fuelled his growing interest in ecclesiology (22-25). Then, following the completion of his doctorate in 1927, Bonhoeffer experienced more of the world, serving as a pastoral assistant in a German congregation in Barcelona for a year, then studying at Union Seminary in New York for another year. There he encountered the friends who introduced him to African-American Christianity and pacifism. During this time he travelled widely in the United States and Mexico, experiencing cultures far outside his own. And even before he went to America, he had also contemplated the idea of travelling and studying in India, in part due to the suggestion of his grandmother, who believed it would give him the benefit of a non-Western and non-Christian perspective (61). Later, of course, Bonhoeffer would continue to travel widely on behalf of the ecumenical movement, giving him relationships, experiences, and perspectives far different from those of most German Protestant clergy. Once again in 1934 he thought of India, and even received an invitation from Gandhi (171). In the fateful year of 1939, he journeyed a second time to the United States, only to break off his stay and return to Germany in order to be present during the crises in church and nation.

Radical Thinking

For Schlingensiepen, this combination of personality, upbringing, and educational formation lies behind Bonhoeffer’s habit of pursuing radical theological ideas and church-political positions. As early as 1928 in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer lectured on the need for an all-or-nothing decision concerning Christ in “the most profound matters we are facing, namely, concerning our own lives and the life of our people” (49). When he turned to the question of ethics, he argued that moral decisions involved the consciousness of the commandments of God, the watchful eye of God, and the grace of God in each moment of life. For Bonhoeffer, ethics were, from the beginning, about doing the right thing in every unique circumstance, not about following abstract principles. As he put it:

There are no acts that are bad in and of themselves; even murder can be sanctified. There is only faithfulness to or deviation from God’s will. There is no law with a specific content, but only the law of freedom, that is, bearing responsibility alone before God and oneself (49-50).

Bonhoeffer carried this same radicalism into 1933 and the events of the church struggle, whether in his February radio speech denouncing Hitler’s style of leadership as seductive and idolatrous (117), in his judgment that German Protestants had “totally lost both their heads and their Bible” when it came to the Jewish question (121), or in his now famous assertion that the church might have to “seize the wheel” and engage in the direct political action of resisting the unjust state (126). In a public debate at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer was the lone representative of the Young Reformation Movement, facing groups of professors and students from the German Christian Movement and the church-politically neutral camp before an audience of 2000 (131). In early summer, he and his friend Franz Hildebrandt even proposed a Protestant interdict—a collective refusal to perform Protestant funeral services until the church’s legal rights were restored. When their shocked colleagues refused to consider the idea, the two men considered leaving the church (132). Still in 1933, Bonhoeffer described the application of the antisemitic Aryan paragraph in the church as a false doctrine and (with friends) distributed protest leaflets at the Protestant National Synod in Wittenberg in September (137, 141).

By the beginning of 1934, by which time Bonhoeffer had taken up pastoral duties in two German congregations in London, he had begun to adopt a prophetic tone concerning the crisis in German Protestantism (154). He fully embraced the radical stance of the October 1934 Dahlem Synod’s resolution that “the constitution of the German Evangelical Church has been destroyed” and that “the Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church creates new organs of leadership” (165). At the ecumenical Youth Conference in Fanø that same year, Bonhoeffer mobilized his students to pass a resolution stating “that the rights of conscience, undertaken in obedience to God’s Word, exceed in importance those of any State whatever.” A second resolution noted that the state has attempted “to become the only centre and source of spiritual life,” asserted that the church and not the state must preach the Word of God, and concluded that “the Church works within the nation, but it is not ‘of the nation’” (169). At the main ecumenical conference in Fanø, Bonhoeffer argued forcefully that “the work of the World Alliance means work of the Churches for peace amongst the nations. Its aim is the end of war and the victory over war.” In a sermon at the conference, he continued on this same theme: “What God has said is that there shall be peace among all people—that we shall obey God without further question, that is what God means. Anyone who questions the commandment of God before obeying has already denied God” (171).

Throughout the balance of the church struggle, Schlingensiepen portrays Bonhoeffer as firm in his uncompromising radicalism. He drew more and more on the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of his thinking, adopted elements of monasticism as the basis for his seminary work at Finkenwalde, argued that there could be no salvation outside the Confessing Church, refused to participate in the moderate process of church committees, looked ahead to a “coming of resistance ‘to the point of shedding blood’,” and emphasized that the obedience and belief will lead the Christian into the image of Christ, including the image of suffering and martyrdom (173-174, 182, 189, 193-194, 198, 207-208). Furthermore, he prepared to refuse an expected call into military service (with the possibility of a death sentence) and sharply rebuked Confessing Church pastors who swore an oath to Hitler in 1938 (208, 212).

In contrast to his uncompromising moral and theological resolution, Bonhoeffer found personal decision making difficult. He often wavered, feeling “again and again that all the decisions I had to make were not really my own” (39). This was true of his time abroad in Barcelona and New York between 1929 and 1931, and again in 1939 when he briefly returned to the United States. He couldn’t identify exactly why he promptly returned to Germany, but was convinced the decision was in God’s hands (230). He saw himself as a sojourner on God’s path (235, 236). This was also true of his decision to enter the resistance and the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. More and more he came to understand that “with God we do not take up a stance—we walk along a path. It goes forward, otherwise we are not with God. God knows where the path goes, throughout its length; we know only the next step and the ultimate destination” (294).

With the beginning of his knowledge about German resistance plans, beginning in 1938, Bonhoeffer entered a new phase, theologically. Much of this is reflected in his work on Ethics, and appears in his many reflections Schlingensiepen includes on decision making, ethics, and Christian responsibility. For instance, in rejecting inner migration as a response to the early successes of Hitler’s armies in the Second World War, Bonhoeffer embraced instead an earthy, situational view of ethics. For him, the world had been reconciled to God by Christ and God had chosen to fundamentally accept the world. As a result, Schlingensiepen explains, the world “can become the place in which human beings assume responsibility, make peace, protect life and overcome murder, violence, and atrocities.” Bonhoeffer did not pursue “principles, standards or duties as eternally valid,” but encouraged people “in every historical situation, to listen anew to God’s commandments and to follow Christ” (251). As a result, Bonhoeffer could both accept the necessity of the removal of Hitler by assassination and reject the euthanasia of handicapped Germans on the basis of the commandment not to kill. The key to this was Bonhoeffer’s radical understanding of freedom. As the theologian put it:

Jesus stands before God as the obedient one and as the free one. As the obedient one, he does the will of the Father by blindly following the law he has been commanded. As the free one, he affirms God’s will out of his very own insight, with open eyes and a joyful heart; it is as if he re-creates it anew out of himself. (251)

Later, as Bonhoeffer became more deeply enmeshed in the resistance, his brother-in-law and close friend Hans von Dohnanyi asked him about the permissibility Christian participation in murder, since God’s law condemned it. Schlingensiepen summarizes Bonhoeffer’s response: “Murder is still murder, even when, in the case of Hitler, it is absolutely necessary. One must be prepared to take the guilt for this sin upon oneself. Bonhoeffer added that if he could get near enough to Hitler, he would throw the bomb himself” (274). This corresponded with his earlier advice to General Hans Oster, a fellow resister, that treason could be morally necessary if it prevented further criminal atrocities as were taking place in Poland. Still Bonhoeffer was not without his doubts. He wondered whether he could still function as a pastor, if he was among those with Hitler’s blood on their hands.

Continuing his discussion of Bonhoeffer’s thinking about guilt and responsibility, Schlingensiepen quotes the famous section in Ethics in which Bonhoeffer confesses the guilt of the church—the guilt of leaving undone what should have been done, and of doing what should not have been done:

The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has been guilty of the lives of the Weakest and most Defenceless Brothers and Sisters of Jesus Christ. (277)

For Bonhoeffer, this sense of responsibility and need to confess was rooted in the relationship between obedience and freedom. As one who knew those involved in the assassination plot, he wrote about “the freedom of those who act responsibly,” declaring “there is no law behind which they could take cover. … Instead, in such a situation, one must let go completely of any law, knowing that here one must decide as a free venture” (281). The free and responsible person breaks the law, recognizes his guilt under the law, and so affirms the law.

During this time, and from 1943 on, when he was in prison, Bonhoeffer’s ethics evolved into a new understanding of Christianity. In this “journey to reality,” Bonhoeffer entered what Bethge called a “turning point from Christian to man for his times.” He focused increasingly on concepts like “earth,” “reality,” and “world,” which he meant in a positive sense (293-295). He amazed himself “that I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible,” at other times drinking in Scripture, but all the while growing in “opposition to all that is ‘religious.’” He added, “But I must constantly think of God, of Christ; authenticity, life, freedom and mercy mean a great deal to me. It is only that the religious clothes they wear make be so uncomfortable” (295).

Schlingensiepen devotes a good deal of attention to these developments in Bonhoeffer’s thinking, which culminated during his time in prison. Even as his romantic relationship with his eventual fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer was growing, even as his captors continued to interrogate and torture him, Bonhoeffer worked on theology for what he called a “religionless” time (349). Schlingensiepen insists this was not the product of the earlier prison shock which had tempted him to consider suicide as a kind of ethical extension of his resistance (324). Rather, it was a new forward-looking orientation, by which he understood that the gospel was always turned towards the whole world. Here Schlingensiepen quotes his own father, who reflected on Bonhoeffer’s prison writings after the war: “This world is, even though at enmity with God or far away from God, still the world that God loves. So there can only be a church which turns toward the world” (351). Bonhoeffer himself wrote of blessing the world, declaring its belonging to God, even as the world inflicts suffering on the Christian.

Schlingensiepen explains that for Bonhoeffer, the core question which emerged was “what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (351). In his prison letters, Bonhoeffer began to wrestle with the concept of “religionlessness.” For him, the conduct of the German churches during the Nazi period was one more factor that invalidated traditional religious language. Beyond that, however, the older problem of the church’s refusal to face modern science and its explanations of the world apart from any reference to God meant that the church was always on the defensive, always turning God into a God of the “stopgap.” Grappling with what it meant to live in such a world come of age, he argued for the need to bring God into this very place of worldliness: “The same God who makes us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God, is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God.” In this context, Bonhoeffer understood God as near, as suffering, as weak. Continuing, he wrote: “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross, God is weak and powerless in the world, and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us” (353). Schlingensiepen explains that, in his religionless Christianity, Bonhoeffer understood Jesus in the idea of presence. “Being-for-others” was both the essence of Jesus and the calling of the Christian who would live in faith (353-354).

Conclusion

There are many other rich thematic veins to be mined in Schlingensiepen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945 which I have only touched on: Bonhoeffer’s consistent peace ethic; his pastoral activity; his ecumenical journeys to England, Switzerland, and Sweden; his approach to theological education; his participation in the rescue of Jews; his friendship with Eberhard Bethge; his romance with Maria von Wedemeyer; his doubt- and confidence-filled incarceration; his death; and his status as martyr.

What must be clear, however, from the detailed analysis of Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s relationships, his participation in the German church struggle, his unconventional formation, and his radical theological ideas, is that Bonhoeffer is exceedingly complex. No biographer will portray him faithfully without a great deal of historical and theological spade work. Schlingensiepen focuses on Bonhoeffer’s intellectual curiosity, strong moral compass, courage, and creative modern theology. I have suggested that these characteristics make Bonhoeffer unpredictable, paradoxical, and impossible to pigeonhole. Conservatives value a Bonhoeffer who teaches the Bible, stands upon confessions of faith, and takes the lordship of Christ so seriously that he is willing to kill or die for it. He is, to be sure, a serious Christian. Liberals value a Bonhoeffer committed to peace, internationalism, and ecumenical Christianity—a cultured and curious man open to literature, music, and modern life, including an intellectually critical relationship with both the Bible and confessional theology. In Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer, we discover a man who encompasses both of these images and somehow holds them together in a life marked by a most radical, subjective, and challenging form of Christian discipleship. Here is someone worth knowing.

Notes:

[1] Although I arrived at the title for this review article independently, I later discovered that my colleague Andrew Chandler of the University of Chichester had written a review of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) under an almost identical title. See Andrew Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54, no. 1 (January 2003): 89-96. It is with his kind permission that I continue to use it. I would also like to thank Victoria J. Barnett for her encouragement to examine Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer and for her helpful editorial suggestions.

[2] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010); Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

[3] Victoria J. Barnett, “Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 20, no. 3 (September 2014), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2014/09/interpreting-bonhoeffer-post-bethge. See also Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

[4] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich: How Bonhoeffer was Made Fit for America,” The Bonhoeffer Center for Public Engagement, http://thebonhoeffercenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37:schlingensiepen-on-metaxas-and-marsh.

[5] Stephen R. Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).

[6] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, trans. Isabel Best (London: T&T Clark, 2010). See also the original German version: Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Eine Biographie (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006). Henceforth all references are to the English edition and are noted parenthetically.

[7] Clifford Green, “Hijacking Bonhoeffer,” Christian Century, October 19, 2010, 34-35.

[8] Victoria J. Barnett, “Review of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 15, no. 3 (September 2010), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2010/09/review-of-eric-metaxas-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy-a-righteous-gentile-vs-the-third-reich.

[9] Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich.”

 

Share

Conference Report: Panels in Honour of Hartmut Lehmann at the 39th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Conference Report: Panels in Honour of Hartmut Lehmann at the 39th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association (GSA), Washington, DC, October 1–4, 2015

by Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

The most recent German Studies Association conference featured a series of panels that celebrated the career of renowned historian of religion, Hartmut Lehmann. Organized by Doris Bergen, Benjamin Marschke, and Jonathan Strom, the five panels and their participants reflected the wide-ranging contributions and temporal and geographic scope of Lehmann’s career. Participants included colleagues, students, and friends from Germany, Austria, Israel, Canada, and the United States.

Lehmann PosterThe panel participants began the conference with a dinner to honour Hartmut and his wife, Silke Lehmann. James Harris spoke about Hartmut’s life and career trajectory, emphasizing his close ties to the United States, which began with a high school exchange program and continued through many visiting positions at UCLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1987 Lehmann became the founding director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, returning to Germany in 1992 to serve as director of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. He has been professor emeritus at the University of Kiel since 2004, while continuing to visit the United States often, most recently as a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.

One thread that ran throughout the panels was Lehmann’s ability to bring people and ideas together. Sometimes it has been countries that have come together, particularly Germany, the United States, and Israel; in other cases it has been institutions, like universities, governments, and foundations. But Lehman’s own research and publications have connected different fields that typically remain separated: early modern and modern history, religious history and social history, and the history of European Christianity and global Christianity, to name but a few.

The first panel, chaired by Peter Becker and commented on by Robert Ericksen, offered a timely reflection on Luther memory and commemoration—a topic on the minds of many historians in anticipation of the 2017 Luther year. Greta Kroeker’s paper discussed Luther’s relationship with Christian humanists and the implications of their very different views on eschatology. Christopher Close examined the first centennial Luther commemoration in 1617, contrasting local commemoration in Strasbourg and Ulm. He showed how commemoration was instrumentalized to shape a particular memory of the Reformation. Manfred Gailus contextualized Luther’s “On Jews and their Lies” within German Protestantism during the Nazi period, warning us not to overemphasize Luther’s infamous tract in shaping German Protestants’ antisemitism. Thomas Brady also considered the instrumentalization of Luther by discussing three different constructions of Luther: Luther as a Protestant hero by nineteenth century liberals; Luther as a German reactionary by nineteenth century socialists; and finally Luther as a teacher of progressive politics in the GDR.

The second panel, chaired by Richard Wetzell, with a comment by Doris Bergen, engaged the notion of secularization, suggesting some level of skepticism about its pervasiveness with the title, “Secularization? Secularism, Religion, and Violence.” Carola Dietze’s paper was premised on the idea that usual narratives of secularization are specific to European history, and offered a very different narrative with the case of the American abolitionist John Brown. Anthony Roeber’s paper placed Hartmut Lehmann’s work in conversation with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, discussing both scholars’ contributions in moving forward discussion on secularization. Victoria Barnett discussed the Kirchenkampf in a global context, considering how Christians outside of Germany viewed the German Church Struggle through the lens of a struggle between ethno-national religion and internationalism.

The third panel turned its attention to Pietism in a transnational context. Chaired by Kelly Whitmer and commented on by by Simon Grote, this panel included papers by Benjamin Marschke, Jonathan Strom, and Manfred Jakabowski-Thiessen. Marschke revisited the question of how to define Pietism, questioning whether we should speak of Pietism as one reform movement, and making a plea for “many pietisms.” Strom considered the role of British conversion narratives in eighteenth century German Pietism, noting that influence flowed in both directions, although more strongly from Britain to Germany. Jabobowski-Thiessen discussed the importance of networks among Pietists, in this case Württemberg Pietists in Denmark. Several of the panelists reflected on Lehmann’s contribution to Pietist studies, praising his transnational approaches.

The fourth panel, titled “Germany and America,” was chaired by Silke Lehmann; the comment was given by Andreas Daum. Martin Geyer spoke about nation building and international technical standards (including currency and standards of measurement), and the meanings that people infused into them in the nineteenth century. James Melton gave a paper on slavery, Johann Martin Bolzius, and the German-speaking Pietists who migrated to Georgia in 1734. Claudia Schnurmann’s paper explored Martin Luther in the American biographical imagination from 1799 to 1883, bringing together many of the themes from the series of panels, including Luther memory and transatlantic exchange.

The fifth panel considered Harmut Lehmann’s works and influences and was chaired by Roger Chickering. Doug Shantz offered a reassessment on Lehmann’s 1969 work, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Würrtemburg. Frank Trommler spoke about “the Lehmann era in Washington” (1987-1993) and Irene Aue-Ben-David’s paper spoke to the contribution of the Max Planck Institute for History in German-Israeli research cooperation. Hartmut Lehmann concluded the panel with some brief remarks, expressing his gratitude to all of the participants and the organizers of the series of panels.

Share

Letter from the Editors: September 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Letter from the Editors (September 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

Once again we are pleased to offer a new issue of short articles, book reviews, and other notes relating to the contemporary history of German and European religious history. In this September issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, two themes loom large: coming to terms with past failings of the Christian Church and finding hope in the life and practices of Christianity.

The Brandenburg Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Steffen Zahn. https://flic.kr/p/nWVSrg.

The Brandenburg Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Steffen Zahn. https://flic.kr/p/nWVSrg.

The ongoing challenge of coming to terms with the past informs Susan Zuccotti’s article on the relationship between Pope Pius XII and the Catholic church institutions which rescued Jews in and around Rome during the Holocaust (a response to William Doino Jr. and the film Lo vuole il Papa, reviewed last issue), just as it does Manfred Gailus’ public lecture (here translated and abridged by John S. Conway) on pro-Nazi Protestants associated with the Brandenburg Cathedral. In the same vein, Christopher Probst’s review of the George Faithful book, Mothering the Fatherland, explores how a spirit of repentance for the role of the Church in the Holocaust can lead to positive actions.

The second theme of hope in the life and practices of Christianity can be found in Patrick J. Houlihan’s study of sustaining Catholic practices during the First World War era, reviewed by Kyle Jantzen, and Keith Clements’ study of the importance of international and ecumenical church relations for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reviewed by John S. Conway. Similarly, Victoria Barnett reviews Heike Springhart’s analysis of the contribution of religion and church to the postwar reconstruction in West Germany.

Other contributions round out the issue: Matthew Hockenos reviews Mark R. Correll’s Shepherds of the Empire, which compares the ideas of two conservative Protestant theologians, Martin Kähler and Adolf Schlatter, and two conservative Protestant preachers, Adolf Stoecker and Christoph Blumhardt, all active in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Victoria Barnett reviews an important contribution on the Nazi persecution of Christians of so-called “non-Aryan” descent. Heath Spencer alerts us to an article on the relationship between secularism and antisemitism in the late nineteenth century, and Victoria Barnett reports on two interesting research initiatives: a Bonhoeffer Conference in Flensburg and a summer research workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We hope you find this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly stimulating, and wish you all a productive autumn season.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen

Share