Author Archives: Heath A. Spencer

Article Note: Edward Mathieu, “Public Protestantism and Mission in Germany’s Thuringian States, 1871-1914”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Article Note: Edward Mathieu, “Public Protestantism and Mission in Germany’s Thuringian States, 1871-1914,” Church History 79 no. 1 (March 2010): 115-143.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Edward Mathieu examines the religious and social activism of Thuringia’s bourgeois Protestants. His conclusions are not earthshaking, but his focus on a particular region allows him to qualify some of the conventional wisdom on topics such as secularization and the interplay of theology, class, and politics.

Mathieu challenges the notion that religion was simply retreating from the public sphere by the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, Thuringia’s voluntary Protestant associations were on the rise even as church attendance declined. Rather than fading out, Protestant religiosity was taking on new forms. Mathieu also counters the argument that Lutherans were driven by their theology to leave social problems to the state and limit the church’s role to an exclusive focus on the inner, spiritual life. Rather, Thuringian Protestants demonstrated a high level of social and civic engagement. On the flip side, “secular” press organs such as the Weimarische Zeitung and associations like the Meiningen District Education Association openly expressed an interest in religious and moral questions, and one cannot help but note the “religious tone of bourgeois public discourse” (125). Finally, Mathieu points out that there was considerable overlap in membership across Protestant associations that—at least on the national level—seemed to represent different political, theological, and social-cultural milieus (for example, the Protestant League and the more “conservative” Home Mission).

Throughout the article, Mathieu’s coverage of Protestant discourse is often more descriptive than analytical. However, he does note that Thuringia’s Protestants assumed a close correspondence between Protestant Christianity and German-ness, that liberal ideology and Protestant theology drew inspiration from one another, and that Protestant and bourgeois values (duty, hard work, respect for authority, objectivity, tolerance, intellectual freedom) were often indistinguishable from one another. Like their counterparts throughout the rest of Germany, bourgeois Protestants defined themselves against Catholics on the one hand and proletarians on the other. They found it hard to imagine working-class people as anything other than socialists, delinquents, and a threat to public order—antithetical to Christianity as they imagined it. Mathieu also points to some interesting parallels between Home Mission rhetoric oriented toward working-class Germans and foreign mission pronouncements regarding “savages” in overseas colonies.

Mathieu reminds us that the story of German Protestantism during the Kaiserreich cannot be reduced to a conservative/liberal binary, nor can German religious history be reduced to a simple story of secularization and declining church attendance. Thuringia’s liberal Protestants were involved in the “conservative” Home Mission, public school teachers were affiliated with Protestant missionary societies, bourgeois associations working with delinquent youth tried to place them in “proper” Christian homes, and Protestant liberals and conservatives were members of many of the same associations and united in their opposition to Catholics and socialists.

 

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Review of Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Review of Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 313 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-19-517841-8.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this book, Cohen explores the origin and evolution of the Christ-killer myth from the first century to the present, focusing his analysis on religious texts, sculptures, paintings, stage plays, and films.  The result is a fascinating but sobering study of an idea that has troubled Christian-Jewish relations and contributed to considerable anti-Jewish violence.

Cohen begins by noting that New Testament stories of Jesus’ crucifixion stood firmly within Jewish traditions, drawing inspiration from the Akedah, Passover, and “suffering servant” motifs as well as themes like deliverance and atonement that were already present in Jewish theology.  Unfortunately, the passion narratives also assign Jewish leaders a key role in Jesus’ arrest and trial, and they depict a Jewish crowd that demands his death.  In Matthew’s Gospel, the crowd even cries out, “His blood be on us and our children!”  Cohen is aware that Christians do not all draw the same conclusions from these stories, and he introduces the reader to a range of views among contemporary New Testament scholars, from those who see the passion narratives as historically reliable to those who understand them as “prophecy historicized” (23) or “the Christian faith put in narrative form” (16).  However, even if some of this scholarship has the potential to mitigate anti-Jewish readings of the New Testament, most Christians are not familiar with it and are more likely to be influenced by a long tradition of anti-Jewish thought that builds on and embellishes the already problematic content of the New Testament passion narratives.

Cohen continues with a survey of Christian theologians from antiquity to the early modern era who commented on the passion, noting that most of them promoted the idea – already present in Matthew’s Gospel – that all Jews were guilty of the crucifixion.  Theologians from Augustine to Anselm argued that first-century Jews killed Jesus in ignorance, not realizing he was the Son of God.  However, from the twelfth century on a more sinister view gained currency, as theologians like Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus imagined that Jewish leaders were willfully ignorant, killing Jesus out of hatred and envy.  They would have known Jesus was divine, so the argument ran, if they had not been blinded by their malice.  The notion that Jews were obstinate in their unbelief coincided with more hostile appraisals of Talmudic Judaism and dovetailed with accusations of ritual murder, ritual cannibalism, and host desecration that emerged in the twelfth century and continued into the modern era.  Devotional manuals from this period also instructed readers to imagine Jesus’ suffering (along with those who inflicted it) at length and in exquisite detail.  Together, these developments indicate an intensification of the Christ-killer myth and a tendency to see contemporary Jews as intentional Christ killers.

Cohen’s exploration of “The Myth and the Arts” reveals a fascinating correlation between developments in Christian theology and the visual arts.  For example, early medieval depictions of the figures “Synagoga” and “Ecclesia” reflected the belief that Jews rejected Christ out of ignorance, whereas works from later periods depicted Jews (but not Romans) enthusiastically torturing Christ in his final hours.  Often, the Jewish tormentors were shown wearing the same kinds of clothing as the artist’s contemporaries, collapsing past and present in a provocative manner.

The book ends with analysis of the Christ-killer myth on stage and on the screen.  Cohen tracks the evolution of the famous Oberammergaupassion play, which had a strong anti-Jewish slant until quite recently but then went through considerable revisions in 1980, 1984, 1990, and 2000.  The blood curse of Matthew’s Gospel has been eliminated, Pilate is portrayed less sympathetically, and Jesus’ Jewish identity is acknowledged.  However, the Jewish priests still conspire against Jesus and the Jewish crowd still demands his death, so Cohen sees the changes as largely cosmetic.  Films about the passion also get mixed reviews.  Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) portrays Jews as obstinate, but it also universalizes the story, making it suitable as a commentary on twentieth-century Italy.  The Gospel of John (2003) does a better job than the Fourth Gospel itself in placing Jesus in his Jewish context, and it projects much of the evil onto a single Jewish antagonist.  Nevertheless, Cohen still sees an anti-Jewish bias in the depiction of the Pharisees and the crowd.  The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Jesus of Montreal (1989) largely avoid overt anti-Judaism, though the public controversy over Scorcese’s film brought some antisemitic rhetoric out into the open.  Mel Gibson’s  The Passion of the Christ (2004), on the other hand,  exonerates Pilate, demonizes Jesus’ antagonists while highlighting their “Jewishness,” and serves as a stark reminder that the Christ-killer myth still resonates with many in spite of all the work that has gone into debunking it.

One serious weakness of Cohen’s book is its almost exclusive emphasis on intellectuals, artists, and other elite individuals.  Several other recent studies on religion and violence demonstrate that the behavior of ordinary people did not always correspond to the decrees of rulers or the writings of intellectuals.  Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration shows that in early modern Europe, hateful ideas were often combined with a kind of pragmatic toleration.   New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine (The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus) sees a similar phenomenon in contemporary American society.  Cohen promises that his book will explore “the direct effect that theology had on the treatment of Jews in Christian lands” during the Middle Ages (6), but in most cases he simply assumes that bad theology will have uniformly bad effects, as if ideas had a consistent and autonomous power regardless of context.   For example, Cohen presents the famous example of Thomas of Monmouth, who used a ritual murder accusation to promote the cult of St. William of Norwich.  However, one might also want to know what impact such a story had in a given locale.  Did it lead to popular violence, judicial murder, or apathy?  How many people cared enough to visit the shrine?  Anthony Bayle’s “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290” (in Patricia Skinner, ed., Jews in Medieval Britain) reveals that donations to the shrine of St. William of Norwich eventually fell as low as 6d per year, an indication that ritual murder accusations did not always gain traction or maintain their appeal.  Medievalists Robert Chazan (In the Year 1096…The First Crusade and the Jews) and Jonathan Elukin (Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages) also highlight the broad spectrum of Christian attitudes and behaviors toward Jews, even during episodes of intense conflict.  Understanding the causes of anti-Jewish violence – or its absence – requires more than a mere survey of anti-Jewish ideas.

Cohen does acknowledge important shifts in Christian teaching following the Holocaust, most notably in the Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate.  However, he finds such developments insufficient because they fail to challenge the historicity of the New Testament passion narratives and often refuse to acknowledge the contribution of the churches to a long history of anti-Jewish thought and action.  If the source of the Christ-killer myth is the New Testament itself, Christians are faced with an intractable problem, and Cohen expresses little optimism they will achieve a satisfactory resolution.  Nevertheless, his book can raise awareness among Christians that their scriptures and institutions have created an anti-Jewish mythology with destructive potential.  Perhaps such awareness will deny the myth some of its power, even if it can’t be eradicated.

 

 

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Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 325 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-674-05081-5.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this English translation of Papst und Teufel (first published in 2008), Hubert Wolf successfully challenges the conspiracy theories and sensationalism of a number of playwrights, novelists, journalists, and historians who have assessed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state.  Remarkably, he does so without letting Catholic leaders off the hook or covering up their very real moral failures.  Making use of recently released materials from the Vatican Secret Archives, he has produced a provocative and highly readable account of the “view from Rome” during the turbulent decades between the two world wars, as well as new insights into the way Pope Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) understood, interpreted, and responded to the early stages of a catastrophe that culminated in world war and genocide after 1939.

Wolf begins with an analysis of Pacelli as nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.  The failure of Benedict XV’s peace appeal in 1917 seems to have convinced Pacelli that direct papal intervention in the Great War (and future conflicts) was ill-advised.   Pacelli’s reports from this period also reveal his preoccupation with the ills of modernism (ranging from liberalism and socialism to contraceptives and coeducational sports) and his desire to make state-oriented German Catholic bishops more responsive to Vatican directives.   Although Pacelli was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, he was pragmatic enough to recognize the need for the Catholic Center Party to work with the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic, and although he displayed a level of anti-Semitism that was typical among European Catholics in this era, he strongly condemned the virulent racism of völkisch groups he encountered in Germany during the 1920s.

Wolf follows up with an assessment of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the Vatican during the 1920s.  Unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who posits a uniform and essentialist Catholic anti-Semitism, Wolf finds evidence of diverse views ranging from the philo-Semitism of Amici Israel, a Catholic organization promoting Jewish-Christian reconciliation, to the vehemently anti-Jewish orientation of Raffaele Merry del Val, head of the Holy Office under Pius XI.   Unfortunately, Pius XI took the side of the Holy Office in a controversy over reform of the Good Friday liturgy, leading to the censure of philo-Semites in the Congregation of Rites and the dissolution of Amici Israel.  Pius XI’s famous condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1928 was an attempt to deflect accusations that might emerge when he dissolved a pro-Jewish Catholic organization, as well as a way to distinguish between an “acceptable” Catholic anti-Judaism and racist anti-Semitism.   The back story Wolf reveals to Pius XI’s decree is a more nuanced story of moral failure than the one Goldhagen tells, but it still seriously undermines simplistic representations of Pius XI as a courageous opponent of anti-Semitism.

Wolf’s chapter on the Concordat of 1933 challenges the “package-deal thesis” promoted by Klaus Scholder, who suggested that Pacelli, as Papal Secretary of State, pressured German bishops to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party and encouraged the Center Party to support the Enabling Act—both in order to secure passage of a Concordat with the German government.   Nuncial reports as well as Pacelli’s notes on meetings with Pius XI and various ambassadors to the Holy See reveal that Pacelli was caught off guard by the German bishops when they announced they were lifting the ban.  Wolf argues persuasively that if Pacelli had been pulling the strings, he would have demanded something in return for this concession.  Instead, he had to negotiate the Concordat without some of his key bargaining chips.

In the end, both Pius XI and Pacelli made unpalatable compromises in order to preserve the Church’s ability to provide pastoral care under hostile regimes.   It was easy for them, as well as the German episcopate, to condemn Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, but much harder to openly condemn a head of state—even Adolf Hitler.  In such cases, they preferred indirect approaches, refuting ideas that were contrary to Catholic teaching without naming the authors of those ideas.  Even in the context of race war and genocide after 1939, Pacelli (by then Pope Pius XII) indicated that he preferred public action by German bishops to direct intervention by the Vatican.   When such action was insufficient, Pius XII still considered his own hands tied.

Pope and Devil, by revealing the decision-making processes in the Vatican in such rich detail, presents us with a nuanced story that includes moral successes and failures as well as a large gray zone in between.   Wolf’s theological training, ordination, and prior years of experience in the Vatican Archives work to his advantage as he assesses the interplay of individual personalities and institutional dynamics in the Catholic hierarchy.  His ability to transmit his scholarship to specialists and non-specialists alike earned him the Communicator Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2004, and it continues to play out in his leadership of a critical online edition of Pacelli’s reports to Rome during the latter’s years as nuncio in Germany.  Some American readers will be disappointed that Wolf does not do more to engage credible scholarship on this side of the Atlantic, but perhaps his priority was to address readers who are more likely to have heard of figures like Goldhagen, John Cornwell, and Dan Brown—even though such authors make relatively easy targets.  In any case, the book is a refreshing contribution to a longstanding but still unresolved debate about the Vatican’s responses to National Socialism, particularly where Pacelli was involved.  It will not end the “Pius war,” but by demolishing the most egregious misrepresentations on both sides, it points the way toward more productive discussions in the future.

 

 

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