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Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 2014), 464 pages. ISBN: 9783579081687.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a collection of thirty essays first presented as plenary lectures and papers at the XI International Bonhoeffer Congress held in Sigtuna, Sweden in June 2012. The collection is structured in three parts under the headings: Political Resistance; Christian Anthropology and the Political; and Church and Civil Society. The first part, which is most relevant to church historians, contains essays that contextualize Bonhoeffer’s political resistance to Nazism historically and theologically. The second part contains an assortment of theological essays that examine Bonhoeffer’s theology through a variety of interpretive lenses, including his understanding of prayer, grace, guilt, discipleship, redemption, reconciliation, divine mandates, and his critique of religion, among other things. The essays in the third part return to more concrete matters by examining Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between the church, civil society, and the state in the 1930s and 40s, but also in particular postwar contexts, such as South Africa and Brazil. The overall quality of the essays is exceptional and the collection should be seen as a showcase for recent research in Bonhoeffer studies.

Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen A Spoke in the Wheel von Some of the highlights of the collection include the lead essay by Wolfgang Huber in which he provides a theological profile of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance, particularly his involvement in Hans von Dohnanyi’s conspiracy in the Abwehr. Despite the limitations placed on what Bonhoeffer could put into writing during the Third Reich, Huber believes a “theology of resistance” can be teased out of Bonhoeffer’s writing during this time. His call for the Church to take a public stand in solidarity with the Jews against the repressive state; his formulation of a confession of guilt in the name of the church; his theory of a responsible life; and his trust in God’s guidance—all indicate the rudiments of a theology of resistance, Huber believes.

Josef Außermair suggests that in addition to the texts identified by Huber that more attention needs to be paid to Bonhoeffer’s teaching at Finkenwalde to understand his political resistance. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis in his teaching on witnessing to Christ in the world, Außermair argues, was his way to prepare his students to participate in the Church Struggle and to confront the political challenges of the day. Sven-Erik Brodd and Björn Ryman both maintain that Bonhoeffer’s trips to Sweden in 1936 and 1942 played a significant role in the development of his political resistance, especially through his contact with British and Swedish members of the ecumenical movement. And Gerhard den Hertog examines how the success of Hitler’s 1940 military campaigns influenced Bonhoeffer’s reflections in Ethics and his decision to participate in the conspiracy.

Andreas Pangritz, in his examination of Bonhoeffer’s April 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” makes several provocative and perceptive points. First, he points out that in an earlier draft of the essay Bonoeffer had inserted the sub-heading “Ahasuerus peregrinus” or wandering Jew above the section with the offensive anti-Judaic passages that have gotten so much attention. Pangritz concludes that the sub-heading “represents authentically the main focus Bonhoeffer wanted to give to this part of the final edition [of his essay].” Second, he argues that Bonhoeffer’s association of “modern Jewish Christianity” with the alleged Jewish emphasis on a religion of law leads Bonhoeffer to refer to the Nazi-backed German Christians—and their desire to implement racial laws in the church—as guilty of Jewish Christianity. Third, he believes that Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase—best translated as “to fall within the spokes of the wheel,”—comes from the 18th-century writer Friedrich Schiller and was meant by Bonhoeffer to convey an act of “counter-revolutionary resistance” against the Nazi revolution. Pangritz maintains that Bonhoeffer’s political resistance “is aimed at defending the old order against its revolutionary transformation.” Pangritz concludes, that Bonhoeffer’s theological anti-Judaism “provides an ambiguous source for political solidarity with the Jews,” although Bonhoeffer’s rethinking of the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, enables him to call for direct political against the state by the church on behalf of the Jews.

Keith Clements essay focuses on Bonhoeffer and the Bruay Conference of September 1934. Clements maintains that the Bruay report, authored by Bonhoeffer and few other Germans and British representatives from the ecumenical youth movement, should be seen as more than a simple affirmation of the Fanø conference report from the previous month. Although both Fanø and Bruay call on Christians to study the social and political questions of the day and to take action “based upon the responsibility of the church members for the social order according to the Will of God,” the Bruay report offers some eminently practical—read British—steps that can be taken by church members to “reproduce the Christian life to-day.” Thus Clements believes that Bruay created “a contextual ethic of responsibility,” which foreshadows the 1937 Oxford Conference on “Church, Community, and State” and the World Council of Churches.

Wolf Krötke and Victoria Barnett both take up the question of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between church and state and its implications for civil society. Krötke argues that although Poles and East Germans struggling for a more democratic society in the 1970s and 1980s appropriated aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology, his notion of the state as a divinely sanctioned order of preservation has little to offer proponents of democracy. Unlike his more conservative colleagues, Bonhoeffer saw a crucial role for the church in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions in Nazi Germany. His understanding of the church-state relations may have provided Bonhoeffer with the foundation for his resistance to Nazism, but the more widely accepted Lutheran understanding of the relationship between the two kingdoms also provided many of his Lutheran colleagues with a theological defense of the Nazi state and after 1945, the GDR state. Krötke concludes that democracy activists would be better off embracing Bonhoeffer’s concept of “genuine worldliness” rather than his views on the state.

Barnett understands Bonhoeffer’s views on the state similarly to Krötke but focuses her essay on Bonhoeffer’s reaction—politically and theologically—to the Nazi state’s dual suppression of the church and civil society. Especially during his time at Finkenwalde and after, Bonhoeffer reflected on the nature of the church under National Socialism—not only on the church’s role in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions—but also the role of the church and individual Christians in fostering a functioning civil society. After the war began and Bonhoeffer joined the Resistance he increasingly reflected on what would come after the defeat of National Socialism and what role the church would play in these changes. The church, he maintained, could no longer concern itself only with its own self-preservation—it had to become a church that demonstrated its concern for “justice among human beings.” “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing,” Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944, “must be born anew out of prayer and action.” Barnett suggests that Bonhoeffer’s nearly twenty years of wrestling with how to understand the nature of the church and its relationship with the state and civil society culminated in some of his most provocative theological concepts such as the “world come of age” and “religionless Christianity.”

This is just a sampling of the excellent essays contained in A Spoke in the Wheel, all of which deserve a careful reading. The collection brings together for the first time a wide variety of scholarly contributions to the debate over the relationship between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his role in the Resistance.

Review of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 560 Pp., ISBN: 9780199208562.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi

The papacy during the first fifty years of the twentieth century is no easy subject for a historian to cover, and not merely because one of the popes is the ever-controversial Pius XII. Between 1914 and the early 1950s, the supreme leader of the global Roman Catholic Church was forced to contend with two world wars, genocide, and economic depression. Ideologies bent on achieving total control over the societies they governed, including Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and communism in the Soviet Union and China, contributed to vast political and social upheaval. As John Pollard reminds us on the opening page of his book on the papacy of this era, the popes “faced challenges far greater than anything that had arisen since the Reformation of the sixteenth century or the French Revolution” two centuries later (1). This fact, coupled with the strict closure of most of the Vatican’s archival materials on the papacy of Pius XII, means that the scholarship covering the Vatican in this period is riven with division and debate, particularly during the Second World War. Pollard wades ably through this historiographical quagmire and uses sources adroitly for his own analysis. What he produces is a more balanced account of the three men who sat on the papal throne than much of what has come before.

Pollard-Papacy Pollard has an imposing pedigree, which one might demand of a scholar willing to tackle such a contentious subject: he is no amateur in examining modern popes in times of conflict. He has devoted much of his professional career to the Vatican and Catholicism in Fascist Italy, and his biography of Benedict XV is one of the most significant of any language. His introduction includes several crucial definitions and a brief sketch of the papacy up to Benedict’s election in September 1914. His conclusion speaks cogently of the legacy of the period as a whole, which he refers to simply as the age of totalitarianism, and addresses its greatest legacy: bringing the divisions between Church conservatives and liberals to the fore, leading to the most radical changes in Church history at the Second Vatican Council (478).

The book proceeds in chronological fashion, beginning with the accession of Benedict XV and ending with the death of Pius XII. Each pope is fully realized as his own person, though Pollard cannot help but acknowledge the heavy threads of continuity running through Vatican politics in this era. Though Benedict is given the shortest space (only two chapters), Pollard minces no words about his significance: Benedict committed the Church to a peace-making, humanitarian role in a time of total war, and one hundred years later this remains the foundation of contemporary papal diplomacy. Whatever else might be said of Benedict – that his papal “moral neutrality” during the war was at once tenuous and dubious; his tendency towards paranoia; his unhelpful obstinacy; his lassitude in developing doctrine and liturgy – this is no small contribution to the modern papacy.

His successor was Pius XI, whose temperament was “authoritarian” (128) and who, refusing to bow to Roman custom, brought his own housekeeper with him into the papal apartment. Until nine years ago, Pius XI’s reign tended to be overshadowed by the man who worked as his secretary of state from 1930, and who himself became pope in 1939; however, the opening of the archives relating to his papacy in 2006 has allowed scholarship on “Papa Ratti” to grow. The interwar pope did not have to cope with the challenge of bloodshed in Europe, but between the advent of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, the worldwide economic depression, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, continual upheaval and persecution of the Church in Mexico and China, among other places, Pius XI also instituted Radio Vatican, beatified nearly five hundred people, and canonized another thirty-four (189).

Pius XI continued what Benedict had commenced with a reliance on “concordatory politics,” signing a series of important treaties in the interwar period with numerous countries that were aimed at protecting the religious rights of their Catholic citizens, notably including Italy and Germany. His papacy also heavily emphasized teaching, which is borne out by the number of public pronouncements and encyclicals he issued on subjects from Christian marriage (Casti connubii, 1930) to Soviet communism (Divini redemptoris, 1937) to the plight of the Catholic Church in Germany (Mit brennender Sorge, also 1937). His most significant challenges lay in dealing with the two totalitarian ideologies that entrenched themselves in the Soviet Union and Germany, and Pollard understandably delivers some of his sharpest criticism – of both Pius XI as well as the scholarship about him – here. He points to the obvious missed opportunity of the Vatican to have representation at the 1938 Evian Conference, when countries from across the globe met to discuss the plight of Europe’s Jews fleeing Nazism, but does not speculate about why. He acknowledges the collaborative nature of many of Pius’s encyclicals, especially the later ones, though fails to emphasize just how much of the German-language encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, was the work of Pacelli and a handful of German bishops. (See Emma Fattorini’s excellent discussion of this encyclical in Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Ultimately, Pollard insists, despite occasional vacillation, Pius left the papacy stronger than it had been when he began as pope, though on a basic level he remains a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure with regard to certain key issues, particularly the “modernist crisis” (289-290).

Like all scholars dealing with Pius XII, Pollard has to admit that the lack of access to key documents about his pontificate is problematic: until these archives are opened (and when this will happen has been the big question for many years now), scholars will have a difficult time contributing anything genuinely new to the debates. Pollard, though, does the historiography a clear service by summarizing the material that is available for study and by plumbing the controversies about Pius XII to provide fresh insights, especially with regards to his continuity with Pius XI. He underscores the stability within the Vatican hierarchy during the second Pius’s reign, largely due to the connections between the two Piuses – Pius XII had worked under his predecessor as secretary of state from 1930 to 1939. In fact, one argument about the papacy that Pollard makes unassailably is the importance and clout of the man in the position of secretary of state up to the outbreak of World War II. (The power of this position disintegrated somewhat when Pacelli became pope in 1939, though Pollard does not clarify specifically if this was due to the way that Pacelli ruled as pope or the personalities he chose to serve under him in that dicastery – or a combination of both.)

Pollard does not sidestep the controversy surrounding Pius XII. He states explicitly that Pius never mentioned specifically the plight of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, despite the Allies urging him to do so. This was not due to lack of awareness; he estimates that the Vatican knew reasonably well about the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe by early 1942 at the latest (332). Rather, Pius believed he was doing as much as he could within the limits imposed on him by external circumstances. Above all – and here is where continuity shows strongly – he was committed to the policies of his predecessors, especially Benedict XV: in time of war, the Vatican had to remain neutral so as to avoid alienating segments of the Catholic population spread across the zone of conflict. To condemn the atrocities perpetrated by one side or another risked this alienation – and condemning Germany’s atrocities in particular risked isolating the sizable Catholic minority in Germany, a country dear to Pacelli’s heart (he had served as nuncio there from 1920 until he became secretary of state).

Pollard demonstrates historical sympathy in detailing the conundrum Pius XII found himself in vis-à-vis wartime atrocities, including the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Such a show of sympathy is not tantamount to an absolution, though his refusal to be more strident in his criticism will not please those ever ready to condemn the Vatican for its muteness in the face of the Holocaust. Pollard’s heaviest criticism for Pius XII – his “ugliest silence” (346-347), as he calls it – falls on the pope’s lack of reaction to the murderous campaigns of the fascist Ustasha regime in Croatia. Although the Vatican had not formally recognized an independent Croatian state when it was instituted in 1941, it declined to protest the forced conversions and ethnic cleansing that the Croats unleashed, apart from any German initiative in the area, even though Church officials had a full awareness of what was unfolding.

Moreover, of the three popes that Pollard assesses, Pius XII is not presented as the most unsympathetic towards Jews; Pius XI is. “It is impossible,” he cautions, “to understand the papacy’s relationship with the Jews of Europe in this period except within the broader context of Christian antisemitism” (472), and here he excuses none of the popes. But he singles out Pius XI as the most ambivalent towards Jews. He was continuously conflicted, showing sympathy for their plight in some circumstances but missing several opportunities to endorse a clear renunciation of antisemitism, whether found in Church liturgy or in Nazi ideology. It would take another two decades, and two more popes, before the Church finally took responsibility for its role in perpetuating antisemitism in the issuance of Nostra Aetate. Pollard categorizes this move as the papacy’s “final [divestment] of the last trace of antisemitism” (474), though one might disagree about how final it really was.

Pollard’s contribution to the subject of the popes during the age of totalitarianism has not definitively resolved any outstanding controversies and debates, but he has provided a judicious, nuanced, and well-informed examination of Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Expertly using a truly impressive array of materials in multiple languages, including the most recent scholarship, he grounds these popes in the contexts of both great political crisis and upheaval in Europe as well as the Church’s institutional development and growth as a political and diplomatic player. Without drawing attention away from the experience of the victims of Nazism, he quietly reminds the reader in his conclusion of the impact of communism across the world, from Asia to Europe to North America (Mexico), on Catholics and the Church: “This period of the persecution and martyrdom of Catholics must be ranked alongside those under the Roman emperors, during the Reformation and wars of religion of the sixteenth century, and in the years following the French Revolution of 1789” (460). All three popes under scrutiny made mistakes, some grievous, but their terror of widespread communist victory, which was consistently at the forefront of their thinking and behavior, perhaps makes their actions more human, and more understandable. It is to Pollard’s credit, as historian and writer, that he has made this perspective available to his readers.

Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 405 Pp., ISBN 9781442628281.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

“When Words are not matched by Actions”

“The Pope at times cannot remain silent. Governments only consider political and military issues, intentionally disregarding moral and legal issues in which, on the other hand, the Pope is primarily interested in and cannot ignore…How could the Pope, in the present circumstances, be guilty of such a serious omission as that of remaining a disinterested spectator of such heinous acts, while the entire world was waiting for his word?” (301)

These are strong words, uttered by Pope Pius XII to Dino Alfieri, the Italian Ambassador to the Holy See. Which heinous acts was the Pope willing to denounce? In this case, Alfieri had explained to Pius XII that Il Duce was displeased that in May 1940, Pius had sent a letter of commiseration to Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands upon their invasion by Nazi Germany. In The Pope’s Dilemma, Jacques Kornberg takes the reader on an odyssey to examine the reasons why Pope Pius XII might have chosen silence and inaction over outright condemnation of Nazi atrocities committed during the Second World War. Kornberg’s work represents a monumental compilation of materials, both primary and secondary sources, reflecting a lifetime of study on the role that organized religion plays in our world. Written clearly and argued persuasively, one might hope that this work would be the definitive end to the “Pius Wars,” however, one can assume that this just might engender further responses from both sides of the battle.

Kornberg takes on both sides of the Pius War, questioning the various ways in which scholars have sought to either support Pius’s reactions to the Nazi regime or have tried to find fault with Pius’s response (or lack thereof). At the book’s outset, Kornberg asks the fundamental question that has frustrated both sides of the scholarly debate: “why was the pope unable to deal with radical evil?” (3) Kornberg argues that, in his view, the papacy of Pius XII was a moral failure out of “calculated acquiescence;” meaning that the pope willingly allowed Nazi atrocities to happen “because of his own priorities and responsibilities as head of the Roman Catholic Church” (8-9). Kornberg then tracks how Pius’s reputation drastically plummeted in the 1960s, in no small part to the wildly successful play by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy) which depicted a cold, calculating Pius who sat silent in the face of Nazi crimes for “reasons of state” (16). With this incendiary play, debates raged: was Pius complicit with the Nazi regime due to his silence or was Hochhuth’s play no more than a deeply flawed portrayal of the Pope? Kornberg takes the reader through the play, the reactions and counter-reactions to it and links this to the role of Vatican II in further sealing the demise of Pius’s reputation. A new era was opening up for the Church under the leadership of the charismatic and charming Pope John XXIII and Kornberg dryly notes that in this new climate, “it was inevitable that Pius XII’s reputation would sink like a stone” (35). At issue here was the question of mission: what was the Catholic Church’s role? Was it to serve as a voice of morality to the world, was it to concern itself primarily with pastoral care, or was it to be a mixture of both of these? Raising these questions allows Kornberg to move on to his next chapter, addressing the options of Eugenio Pacelli and his role in the drafting of the Reichskonkordat.

Kornberg takes readers through the historiography of the 1960s-1970s debate between Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen. Scholder denounced the role of then Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli for sacrificing Catholic opposition to the Nazi regime in his single-minded quest for a treaty between the Holy See and the German Reich. On the other side of the debate was Konrad Repgen, who interpreted Pacelli’s actions in a much more favorable light, arguing that the Cardinal Secretary of State was attempting to keep the Catholic Church’s institutions protected in the face of a ruthless dictatorship. Kornberg neatly walks readers through the works of other prominent historians, such as Ludwig Volk, Hubert Wolf, Gerhard Besier, Martin Menke, and many more to summarize their findings that Pacelli, and his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, had both determined that the Vatican’s top priority was to find guarantees that the institutions of the Church would go on. To achieve that end, they followed the German Catholic populations’ lead, deciding to reach an accommodation with Hitler’s regime. This allowed German Catholics to believe that they could be both “good Catholics” while simultaneously behaving as “good Germans.” But, how were German Catholics to behave in the face of war?

Kornberg’s third chapter analyzes Pope Pius XII’s wartime papacy. Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope in March 1939. Two weeks later Hitler seized control of what was left of the Czech state. For the new pope, he was now face-to-face with the totalitarian aims of Hitler and Mussolini and, as war raged, how would the new pope respond? Chapter Three focuses on Pius’s interactions with some of the Catholic belligerent states- Slovakia, Croatia, France, Italy, and Hungary, with the premise that the pope was revered there and should have had some kind of palpable influence over Catholics living in these territories. What emerges, in each case, are examples of local church leaders expressing concern–or even outrage–that Catholics of “Jewish descent”(converts to Catholicism), were going to be impacted by anti-Jewish legislation and deportations. Pius XII feared moving too far ahead of local Catholic popular opinion, so he chose not to challenge Catholics, never urging them to go beyond defending narrowly defined Catholic interests. In each country Kornberg presents, Pius listened to local church leaders, thought about local Catholic consensus, and opted to not alienate Catholics and risk losing them for the Church. Reinforcing the structures of the church, providing sacramental care for local Catholics, trumped publically intervening to save the lives of persecuted minorities such as the Jews. Perhaps the most indicting of all the examples in this chapter, refers to Pius moving heaven and earth to protect Rome from destruction. While Jews of Rome were being deported, Pius spoke out eloquently against the potential destruction of the seat of Christianity. To Pius, Rome was sacred, eternal, and it was his mission to use his spiritual and moral authority to become “the Savior of the City” (121). Through his actions, Pius XII had ensured that Catholics would have access to the instruments of the sacraments, preserving the institutions of the Catholic Church all while remaining silent regarding the round ups of Jews throughout Rome.

Chapter four presents the special case of Poland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, site of unimaginable brutality during the war- against both Catholic Poles and Jews. Surely, the pope would have an obligation to condemn Nazi aggression and the consequent victimization of the Polish population at the hands of their oppressors? Kornberg reveals, however, that the pope opted to hold back, carefully weighing his concerns. Foreign diplomats pressed the pope to utter an open, forthright condemnation of Nazi aggression against Poland, yet, when the pope did speak out, on October 20, 1939, his words were primarily a prayer for Blessed Mary’s intervention in Poland. The pope’s silence was incomprehensible to many who were suffering, but the pope maintained that German retaliation such as was being carried out in the Warthegau region of conquered Poland, kept him from saying more. Again, as in chapter three, we see the pope following the lead of local bishops, the general Catholic consensus, and opting to keep Catholic institutions functioning so as to provide pastoral care to those Catholics who desired it. The pope feared more than anything else that the Church would not be able to provide care for the souls of the people (155) and people was defined as Catholic people, not Jews.

What were the attitudes of Pius XII towards the Jews? This has been hotly contested by historians since at least 1964 when Guenter Lewy argued that traditional antisemitism precluded a true sense of moral outrage in Vatican circles. Beginning with an exploration of Pope Pius XI’s attitudes towards Jews, Kornberg unpacks many of the statements issued by Pius XI (pope from 1922-1939) and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli. For both men, Kornberg demonstrates a strong linkage between fears of communism and Jewishness added on to the pre-existing Catholic Church beliefs in supercessionism and charges of deicide. Both men also used condemnatory language regarding modern day Jews rather than trying to emphasize to their listeners that Catholicism and Judaism had a shared heritage. At a time when Jewish lives were in extreme peril, Pope Pius XII chose to speak only in general terms of suffering where all involved in war were victims. Anti-Jewish decrees were seen as a way of protecting Christian society from the “harmful influences of the Jews” and did nothing to inspire Catholics to protest the transformation of Jews into second class citizens in whatever nations they lived. Pope Pius XII “continued to speak of the guilt of the Jews and their continued hostility to the church. In doing so he did nothing to prevent Catholics from looking upon Jewish distress with indifference, and to continue to acquiesce to the German government’s persecution of the Jews, and ultimately to the destruction of European Jewry” (184).

Because so many historians have accused Pius of silence in the face of such utter destruction, Kornberg looks to earlier popes and their responses to similar crises such as the Armenian genocide or the use of poison gas against civilians in Ethiopia. What Kornberg presents is strong evidence that Pius was one of a piece- examining the policies of Leo XIII, Benedict XV, and Pius XI reveals that each of these popes, when faced with mass atrocities, weighed the advantages and disadvantages to the Church and always chose the option that promised Catholic unity and reinforced papal authority. In one exceptional case, that of the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, then Pope Pius XI issued an ambiguously worded letter, which then led French Catholics to declare that they were immune to papal influence and that the French state was a sacred concept to them. In this instance, papal authority was shown to be without teeth and the limits of papal authority had been revealed. In the case of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and its use of mustard gas against civilians, Pius XI urged conciliation on the part of Ethiopia, recognizing that the Italian people supported the conquest and he feared a further weakening of his authority over Catholics in Fascist Italy. Towards the end of Pius XI’s life, he began to publically address the racism of the Nazi regime. In an encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), in March 1937, the pope condemned the exaltation of one race over another, stressing the common humanity of all, but the true intent of the encyclical was that Pius linked Nazi racism with an effort to establish a national church based on German blood, thus supplanting the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. Racism had also by this time been uncoupled from antisemitism as Pius had argued that Catholics had a right to defend themselves against the corrupting power of secular, liberalized, emancipated Jews (226).

What then were Pius XII’s priorities? Why did he refuse to condemn Catholics who participated in atrocities or those who sat passively by the side allowing such despicable acts to be implemented? Here again, Kornberg takes the reader through the historiography of papal apologists as well as papal detractors. Did Pius XII favor Germany due to his trepidation regarding the spread of Communism? Kornberg argues effectively that, no, Pius encouraged American Catholic support of lend-lease material to the Soviet Union, that he refused to press Germany for a separate peace in the face of growing Communist power, that he engaged in an active plot to unseat Hitler from power. If Pius did not view Germany as a bulwark against Communism, was he silent about Nazi atrocities in order to preserve his role as diplomatic mediator at war’s end? Here again Kornberg argues that no, Pius XII’s diplomatic efforts to avert war ended in failure and that, following the invasion of Poland, his diplomacy was largely ignored. Another explanation offered by the pope’s defenders with regard to his silence is that he worried that if he spoke out, then worse things would happen to the victims. Kornberg examines Pius XII’s own explanations for his silence and finds that Pius cited two different reasons: as “common Father” to all Catholics on each side of the war, he thought he had to remain impartial; the second explanation, regarding potential retaliation against victims of Nazi aggression as it turns out referred to the suffering of the Polish Catholic Church and the threatened loss of sacramental life in Poland.

So, what were the pope’s priorities then? Kornberg places Pius’s top priority in his pastoral responsibilities of a universal church. His goal was to not alienate any Catholics from the Church and, hence, from potential salvation. Therefore, he concluded that he could not challenge Catholics to choose between their loyalty to the Church versus their loyalty to their State. Taking the long view of history, the Pope was envisioning a time when the war was over and Catholics from all of the warring nations would have to be reunited in the Church. Any Catholics who had participated in atrocities could receive forgiveness and salvation if they were truly repentant. Kornberg concludes that a great sacrifice was made in this decision: “Pope Pius XII looked the other way when human rights were being trampled on, and when Jews were deported to face unprecedented horrors, and continued to look the other way when Catholics participated in these crimes” (264). Religious values of the “good” trumped the moral imperative.

Finally, Kornberg brings the reader back to his opening question: why did the pope retreat before radical evil? To that, Kornberg responds with a thorough examination of Church doctrines ranging from the creation of the early Church under the Apostles, to the writings of St. Augustine, to the time of Pope Pius XII. The manuals that would have been available for Pius to consult would have been the culmination of centuries of teaching, and those manuals would have stressed that human beings are prone to sin and weakness but, through the power of the sacraments, provided by the Church, salvation was still a possibility. For Pius, as head of the Church, his primary responsibility as he saw it, was to provide access to the sacraments so that the faithful could be saved. This meant that the Pope could not overly burden the consciences of ordinary Catholics whose weak faith might result in their damnation. Weighing ‘greater evils” versus “lesser evils,” this type of casuistry led Pius XII to engage in “calculated acquiescence to mass atrocities when committed by fellow Catholics in order to hold out to them the prospect of God’s forgiveness and grace” (274).

Pius XII, at the war’s end, could feel that he had done his duty: he had preserved the institutions of the Church. Unfortunately his claims of being a moral authority who spoke truth to power and encouraged Catholics to resist evil were only words. Words not matched by actions.

Review of Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Vatican’s Secret War against Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Vatican’s Secret War against Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 375 Pp. ISBN 9780465022298.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

That Pope Pius XII was involved in several failed plots to kill Hitler has been publicly known since the 1960s, if not since the close of the Second World War. But there have been few investigations into the actual cloak and dagger. Mark Riebling’s methodically-researched detective story, cast in the genre of a thriller, deserves widespread attention for the light that it sheds on this clandestine world of intrigue and terror in which the pontiff played a central role.

Riebling-Church In the detail given to the spy rings operating out of the Vatican, Riebling’s account goes far beyond earlier accounts like those of the American scholar, Harold Deutsch. It adduces evidence from published documentary collections, state, church and intelligence archives in Britain, Germany, Poland and the United States as well as the extensive interview transcripts found in Harold Deutsch’s papers in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In light of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the sheer volumes of conspirators, adversaries and agendas, this research is one that only a historian of intelligence could have pulled off so compellingly. Shaping the contours of this book is Riebling’s broad range of experiences as an editor for Random House, security expert and terrorist analysis. This is simply the finest work on the subject in print.

At the heart of Riebling’s sleuthing are three plots in which Pius XII served as an intermediary between German plotters and British diplomats with whom he held midnight meetings. The Vatican, he makes clear, was one of the world’s oldest spy services. He tells how Pius XII had Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, secretly install a secret audio recording system. Such technical expertise notwithstanding, all three plots were unsuccessful or aborted. In late 1939 and 1940, German generals were supposed to assassinate Hitler, but both they and the British got cold feet. In 1943, two bottles of cognac filled with explosives failed to detonate on board Hitler’s airplane. In 1944, Stauffenberg’s bombs only wounded Hitler. Riebling describes the unraveling of these plots and their aftermath, a gruesome litany of interrogation, torture and execution.

In many ways, however, the star of the show is not the pontiff but a Bavarian lawyer and future co-founder of the CSU, Josef Müller. Pius himself features in less than half of the chapters; it is the world of the plotters, and most notably Müller, that takes center stage. From his home in Munich, Müller was one of the masterminds, a courier bringing reports of Nazi persecution of the churches to Robert Leiber, SJ and Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, an influential German Jesuit and the former Center Party leader residing in the Vatican. At the same time, Müller, though his base in the Abwehr, the military intelligence branch of the Wehrmacht, developed strong ties to well-known plotters like Wilhelm Canaris, Alfred Delp, SJ and Hans Oster, all of whom perished following the failure of the assassination plot of July 20, 1944. True to its genre as a historical thriller, this book closes with a final revelation, how Müller, languishing in concentration camps, was given a last-minute reprieve from the gallows.

Riebling makes it clear that this is largely a Catholic story, the Protestant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer serving as the lone exception. The Catholic plotters quickly discovered that they could not persuade Lutherans in the highest ranks of the army and church to go against centuries-old traditions of obedience to state authority, those anchored in Romans 13 and Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. Riebling somewhat mistakenly attributes these same understandings to Calvinists, claiming that Calvin too deferred to state authority. In reality, Calvinists had historically proven to be far more inclined to resist unjust political authority under the maxim from Acts 5:29 that “we ought to obey God rather than man.” But even so, the resistance front was gradually become ecumenical, a part of cooperation that would infuse the founding of the interconfessional CDU in 1945.

What is missing from Riebling’s account is a discussion of how credible his sources are. What might the motives of the postwar storytellers have been in recounting their role in these conspiracies and their failures? Almost by definition, writing the history of such conspiracies runs up against two fundamental problems. For obvious reasons, clandestine plotters tend not to leave behind written records such as letters and diaries. They destroy them or better yet, never commit their plans to paper. Interrogation transcripts produced by their captors are typically unreliable, frequently the product of torture and deprivation. Even worse: ex-intelligence agents are often notoriously prone to exaggeration. Some seek to bolster their accomplishments post facto or settle scores with one-time rivals and adversaries. Nearly all are influenced by the political and ideological climate in which they recount their stories.

Josef Müller provides the perfect illustration of these problems. Riebling relies on his postwar memoirs published in 1975 and a series of interviews carried out by Harold Deutsch at points in the 1950s and 1960s. But how reliable this testimony compiled twenty to forty years after the events in question had taken place was remains open to question. Müller’s account has to be read through the lens of his own postwar political career, one punctuated by both triumph and defeat. After co-founding the CSU, Müller found himself under fire from the conservative integralist wing of the party led by Alois Hundhammer. His political opponents, in the grossest of ironies, denounced him as a former Nazi, forcing Müller to undergo a humiliating ordeal of denazification before a tribunal in late 1946. Müller was also forced to step down from his position as Bavarian Minister of Justice in 1952, having been accused of illegally receiving 20,000 DM from a Jewish rabbi, Philipp Auerbach. He also lost a race in 1960 to become the mayor of Munich. The extent to which these subsequent events colored his recollections is unclear. He was obviously driven by the need to exonerate Pope Pius XII from the allegations raised by Rolf Hochhuth, Saul Friedländer and others that the pontiff had refused to actively resist National Socialism. He was also influenced by prevailing currents that as late as the 1970s continued to see the men of the resistance movements as traitors. Most perplexing is that one of his handlers and co-conspirators until his arrest in early 1941, the Bavarian cathedral canon, Johnannes Neuhäusler, maintained a public silence about these plots until his death. To be sure, Riebling’s account, intended in so small measure for a popular audience, cannot delve into these puzzles in all of their complexity. Nonetheless, weaving the story of the ambiguous sources into the larger narrative would have lent the author’s larger conclusions even greater credibility.

For Riebling ultimately shows that under the guise of silence, Pope Pius XII was working to undermine National Socialism. The silence, for which he has been excoriated by many since the premiere of Hochhuth’s play in February, 1963, was in fact necessary for his covert activities. Riebling quotes what Müller told Harold Tittmann, an American diplomat to the Vatican, on June 3, 1945. “His anti-Nazi organization had always been very insistent that the Pope should refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope`s remarks should be confined to generalities only” (248). Müller added that “if the Pope had been specific, Germans would have accused him of yielding to the promptings of foreign powers and this would have made the German Catholics even more suspected than they were and would have greatly restricted their freedom of action in their work of resistance to the Nazis.”

Yet Riebling does not let Pius off the hook completely. “Judging Pius by what he did not say,” he writes, “one can only damn him.” (28). He had the duty to speak out – and on the whole did not. “During the world’s greatest moral crisis,” he notes, “its greatest moral leaders seemed at a loss for words” (28). Nor does he exonerate German Catholics. That it was the pontiff who would have to become involved in such plots speaks volumes about the fact that too few Catholics lower in the hierarchy chose a course of opposition.

Riebling’s masterful account will long remain the definitive account of the papal involvement in the conspiracies to topple Hitler. Yet it cannot remain the final work, the Vatican not yet having made fully available the papers from the wartime pontificate of Pius XII.

Review of Mark R. Correll, Shepherds of the Empire: German Conservative Protestant Leadership 1888-1919

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Mark R. Correll, Shepherds of the Empire: German Conservative Protestant Leadership 1888-1919 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 283pp. ISBN: 978-1-4514-7295-0

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Mark Correll’s Shepherds of Empire is a study of a particular stream of conservative Protestant theology and preaching in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany. It is not, as the subtitle suggests, a book about the conservative Protestant church leadership as much as an in-depth theological study of what Correll calls “believing” Christians or Christians for whom the Scriptures remained authoritative despite the challenges of biblical criticism. In the first four chapters Correll examines how two conservative Protestant theologians, Martin Kähler (1835-1912) and Adolf Schlatter (1852-1938), and two conservative Protestant preachers, Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and Christoph Blumhardt (1842-1919), sought—in different ways—to make conservative theology and preaching compatible with the modern age. Kähler and Schlatter sought to create a modern conservative theology by bridging the divide between traditional Protestant doctrine and modern critical scholarship, while Stoecker and Blumhardt engaged in the social question. In two final chapters, Correll examines the theological nature of preaching in Wilhelmine Germany and during the First World War. He concludes that of the four men examined in the first four chapters only Stoecker had a significant influence on the practical Christianity of pastors in Germany. Blumhardt, Kähler, and Schlatter, however, deserve to be read, studied, and admired—not for the influence they had on practical Christianity—but for their important theological and spiritual advances in attempting to overcome the modernist-traditionalist divide that defined Protestantism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany.

Correll-Shepherds Correll begins with the court preacher Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909), who created the church networks and organizations that provided believing theologians and church leaders with a community of likeminded churchmen in which they could expound their modern conservative responses to the crisis of Protestantism at the turn of the century. Although Adolf Stoecker is best known for popularizing political anti-Semitism, his conservative political vision of a triumphant Germany, united in thrown and altar, and fending off Germany’s multiple enemies —Austria, France, Catholics, Socialists, Liberals, as well as Jews—appealed to more than just anti-Semites. While he saw the defeat of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 as the beginning of a great awakening in Germany, he became increasingly disappointed that the Prusso-German leaders failed to rally the growing working-class to participate in this national and Protestant awakening. In addition to founding the Christian Social Workers’ Party to harness the poor for his conservative Christian cause, another central concern of his was to combat the threat of liberal or critical theology in the church, which was gaining ground at the time. To this end he founded the “Positive Union,” an organization bringing together believing church leaders, theologians, and pastors, with the purpose of maintaining control of the key leadership positions within the church and thereby limiting the destructive influences of liberal theology on the pastorate. While the Positive Union was mostly a success, his conservative and anti-Semitic political party never gained any traction among workers. Nor did his idea to do away with the state church and found an ultra-nationalist—albeit independent of the state—Volkskirche, which would work side-by-side with the state to further the cause of a conservative Christian Germany.

Despite these two failures, Correll believes that Stoecker played a crucial role in not only organizing the believing community but in establishing “a template for a general nationalist sermon” in which “God blessed Germany in direct proportion to the obedience of the nation.” (43)

Adolf Stoecker’s brother-in law, the systematic theologian and Halle professor Martin Kähler, consciously identified with the collective of conservative or believing theologians and preachers assembled in Stoecker’s Positive Union. Like Stoecker, Kähler feared that the Bible was losing its centrality in church life and the life of the nation primarily due to the attacks by theological liberals and critical scholars. Over his lifetime Kähler sought to developed a theology that occupied a middle ground between the critical scholars for whom the Bible was just one of a number of ancient texts that needed to be scientifically studied and the conservative biblicists or fundamentalists for whom every word of the Bible emanated directly from God—the so-called doctrine of verbal inspiration. Kähler worried that this schism was tearing the Protestant church apart and weakening it ability to shepherd the German population and to ward off the challenges from Catholicism and modern Enlightenment thought.

At the center of Kähler’s theology was a defense of the Bible’s authority for Protestantism—an authority that he believed transcended human reason. But in contrast with the adherents of verbal inspiration, Kähler did not believe that the Bible was an infallible text. In fact, he valued the critical scholars’ study of the ancient languages and the history of the ancient Middle East for providing a more nuanced understanding of the history surrounding the Bible. For Kähler the authority of the Bible did not rest on its historical verifiability but in its efficacy to change lives. The purpose of the Bible was to inspire faith in God, to transform the life of the faithful, and to stimulate Christians to live an ethical life and to encourage others to do so as well.

Kähler’s junior colleague, Adolf Schlatter, took Kähler’s project to create a believing theology suitable to the modern world to a whole other level. To begin with, Schlatter’s dissertation and principal interest was in interpreting the texts of first-century Palestinian Judaism using the methodologies of historical criticism. By emphasizing Jesus’ Jewish heritage Schlatter both engaged the field of historical criticism and challenged the prevailing view of Jesus as a product of the first century Greek movements. For much of his life Schlatter found himself at the center of the modernist-traditionalist controversy because of his belief in the importance of the historical study of the Bible. Ultra conservative traditionalists viewed Schlatter with suspicion because of his openness to modern criticism. Liberals, such as von Harnack, found Schlatter’s conservative theology and support of Stoecker’s Positive Union mired in the past.

Correll argues that Schlatter was “the first Protestant believing scholar to set out to define conservative Protestantism wholly in modern terms.” (106) In contrast to many of his conservative colleagues who interpreted the Scriptures through the Reformation confessions or read the Scriptures as the unambiguous and unerring word of God, Schlatter recognized the temporal nature of Jesus’ revelation of God and asked the question, “What does the Scripture man for us?” Schlatter’s modern believing theology was built on the recognition that God’s revelation took temporal forms. This did not, however, stop him from maintaining at the same time that the Bible was the revealed word of God. God, Schlatter argued, chose to reveal himself through the historical narratives presented by the Bible’s authors. The authority of the Bible was evident to those who made the choice to accept it as the word of God.

Christians who read the Bible as the reveled word of God, Schlatter maintained, would be inspired to practice Christian ethics by their recognition of God’s gifts of love and mercy for his creation. In Schlatter’s ethics, Christians act ethically when they offer their gifts and services for the good of the whole community. Schlatter’s conservative nationalism was on display in his ethical system when he described the first and most important community in the life of a Christian as the ethnic community or Volk.

Whereas there were obvious similarities between the believing theologies and ethics of Kähler and Schlatter—not to mention their close political and organizational connections to Stoecker—it is much more of a reach to include Christoph Blumhardt, the social democratic preacher from Bad Boll, within this group. But Correll makes a convincing argument that Blumhardt “showed one extreme in the spectrum of possibility for conservative Christian thinkers at the turn of the century.” (142)

Blumhardt’s theological conservatism is certainly not hard to pin down. He seems to have had absolutely no interest in engaging seriously the critical scholarship of the time and was, in fact, an enthusiastic advocate of the miraculous events in the Bible and even the presence of miracles in the modern world. Although he had little patience for academic theology—critical or believing—his view of the Bible as the means by which the word of God come to believers was in line with Kähler and Schlatter. But for Blumhardt the Bible was not absolutely essential to faith. One could have faith in God by simply recognizing all the ways in which God intervened regularly in the world.

Blumhardt saw his primary calling as preaching the coming kingdom of God and the need for every Christian to work toward this end. In contrast to Kähler, Schlatter and particularly Stoecker, he harbored little if any nationalism and did not give Germany any particular role in the coming of the kingdom. He associated the kingdom of God with the struggle of the working class and the coming of God’s righteousness to earth. He defended his membership in the Social Democratic Party by claiming that socialists were doing more to establish God’s kingdom on earth than many Christians. He believed that Christianity and socialism were fully compatible in that they both wanted to change the world for the better. Socialists did this through their political actions and Christians did this through ethical behavior inspired by their relationship with God. Theologically it makes some sense to include Blumhardt in the same circle with Kähler, Schlatter, and Stoecker, but in all other respects they had little in common.

In Correll’s final two chapters he examines the nature of preaching in Germany from the 1880s through the First World War. These chapters are particularly useful for church historians interested in the theological and spiritual message of the Protestant pastorate to their congregations. Here Correll maintains that although theological liberalism reigned supreme in most of the university theology departments—Erlangen and Greifswald were the exceptions—the pastorate remained largely conservative, as did their sermons. Neither critical theologians nor believing theologians seemed to have had much impact on the practical Christianity of the clergy. Theology students were certainly introduced to the debates between modernists and traditionalists during their university training—and were likely to take the side of their mentor—but they made little effort to engage their congregation in the basic tenets of the debate. Instead their sermons were marked by “traditional Lutheran platitudes and nationalist enthusiasm,” associated with Stoecker. Central to most sermons in the decades leading up to the war was the simple notion that God bestowed on the German people blessings and curses in proportion to their obedience and faithfulness. During the war pastors told their congregations that God was on their side and that victory was inevitable. Correll argues that the failure of the church’s leaders and clergy to develop a more honest and critical assessment of the war and to offer a credible interpretation of Germany’s defeat and postwar plight led parishioners to leave the church in droves.

Correll’s study of the theological debates from the 1880s to 1918 is a heavy read—especially the chapters on Kähler, Schlatter, and Blumhardt—but in the end proves quite useful and enlightening. He introduces readers to the traditionalist-modernist debate that dominated German theology in the late nineteenth-century and provides an in-depth analysis of how a select group of theologians and preachers tried to address the theological crisis by incorporating some modernist elements into what was an otherwise very conservative theological and spiritual outlook. Correll is clearly disappointed that the theological innovations of Kähler and Schlatter failed to have much of an impact on the pastorate but his perceptive examination of the sermons from the time nevertheless provide the reader with a better understanding of how the German Protestant clergy utterly failed to prepare the populace for the coming century.

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Xiii + 287 Pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-03514-0.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Catholicism and the Great War is a transnational comparative history of everyday Catholicism. In it Patrick J. Houlihan sets out to revise the story of Roman Catholic theology and lived religion during the First World War era in both Germany (where Catholics were a minority) and Austria-Hungary (where they comprised a majority). His subjects include church leaders, military chaplains, front soldiers, women and children at home, and the papacy. And his scope is not only the war but also its immediate aftermath, which allows him to tackle the additional themes of memory and commemoration. This is an ambitious book.

Houlihan-Catholicism Houlihan’s argument is that conventional interpretations of religion in the First World War, which emphasize the secularizing effect of a shattering war experience as expressed in the voices of cultural modernists, do not capture the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics. Rather, he asserts that Catholics adjusted to industrial warfare because their transnational faith and its practices helped them to cope relatively successfully with the upheaval and brutality of war—more successfully than Protestants, whose faith (in the case of Germany) was more closely tied to the defeated state.

The book begins with a dense introduction, demonstrating Houlihan’s remarkable historiographical knowledge. Here and throughout the book, the author interacts substantively with a wide array of scholarly literature on religion and war, the First World War, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Catholicism, military chaplaincy, religion and nationalism, women’s experiences of war, and numerous other topics. It is indeed the strength of his work.

Methodologically, Houlihan eschews quantitative or institutional history, embracing a transnational approach to his subject, which fits well with the internationalism of Roman Catholicism and enables him to avoid the trap of viewing Christian religion only in terms of its instrumental service to national movements and state interests. He also pursues a comparative methodology, highlighting differences between the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics, though often distinctions are blurred as examples are drawn freely from both regions. Still, it is worth noting that Houlihan finds Austro-Hungarian Catholicism to have been a vital component in maintaining imperial loyalty and social cohesion, problematizing commonly-held assumptions about the inevitable demise of the Habsburg Empire. Finally, Houlihan also attempts to incorporate elements of the history of everyday life of Central European Catholics, and to blur boundaries between battlefront and homefront, creating what he calls a “family” history of Catholicism in the First World War (16).

All of these streams of interpretation are worked out in a series of chapters on Catholicism before the war, Catholic theology during the First World War, the role of Catholic military chaplains, the experiences of Catholic soldiers, the circumstances of Catholic women and children at home, the influence of the papacy, and memory and mourning among Catholics after 1918.

Leading up to the war, Catholics in Austria-Hungary were overwhelmingly rural, living in traditional local communities of belief. At the same time, however, new imagined communities were emerging in Central Europe, thanks to the various national movements which were often connected to Catholicism. German Catholics, on the other hand, were influenced most powerfully by the legacy of the Kulturkampf, which drove Catholics into a defensive posture, as demonstrated by Catholic political and labour movements. But for most Catholics in Central Europe, the outbreak of war in 1914 was seen mainly as yet another trial to be endured, and as a threat to the coming harvest.

Once the war had begun, German and Austrian bishops were prominent public advocates of just-war theology. For German Catholic leaders, war was a patriotic test of faith. For Austro-Hungarian bishops, it was a call to defend Habsburg dynastic honour and therefore the divine order as they understood it. Military chaplains played a significant role in mediating this theology to ordinary participants, not least by praying for divine blessings on military weapons. As the war dragged on, though, public theology began to emphasize the war as a punishment for aspects of modernity that had drawn Europeans away from God and the Church. And after defeat in 1918, Catholics in former Habsburg lands found themselves reimagining themselves at the dawn of a new day of freedom and opportunity—at least those from minority groups formed into new nation states, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Poles, and Slovenes. While the “new theologies” of Max Scheler, Romano Guardini, and Karl Adam would bear fruit only later in the 1960s, other “everyday theologies” were also emerging: positively, the rise of a feminine form of Catholicism; negatively, an upsurge of Catholic antisemitism which would later help to pave the way for Hitler and the Holocaust.

Military chaplains—of which there were 1441 in the Prussian Army and 3077 among the Habsburg forces—provided pastoral care among Catholic troops. This they did more effectively in Austria-Hungary than in Germany, according to Houlihan, who uses a case study of Tyrolean Catholics to support this point. Still, all chaplains were overwhelmed by the magnitude of industrial warfare. Houlihan notes that Catholic chaplains enjoyed better reputations than their Protestant counterparts, since they tended to serve closer to the front lines. In one of the best sections in the book, Houlihan explains how chaplains used the three sacraments of communion, confession, and extreme unction to minister to their troops. On the Western Front especially, the cramped quarters of static trench lines made holding a full Mass a rare event. In the end, Houlihan argues that 1916 was a watershed year. Triumphalist “God-with-us” pronouncements gave way increasingly to private doubts about God’s support in war and public reassurances of Christian hope and perseverance in times of suffering.

Among front line soldiers, Houlihan argues that Catholic religion served them better than has often been assumed, in light of the prominent modernist literature of authors like Jaroslav Hašek, Robert Graves or Erich Maria Remarque. Rather, Catholicism was surprisingly resilient in modern conflict, as ordinary soldiers coped with their circumstances by means of a mix of transnational Church institutions, sacramental practices, correspondence with home, superstition (including amulets, talismans, and letters of protection), and popular piety focused on saintly and Marian intercession.

On “the unquiet homefront,” Catholic women and children both suffered and benefitted from the war. Wartime disrupted traditional gender roles. Though public roles for women included war relief, nursing, and industry increased markedly, Houlihan argues that Catholic women in rural Central Europe tended to embrace more conservative, traditional roles. Just as the Virgin Mary was a powerful symbol for frontline soldiers, so too was Mary was a powerful symbol for Catholic women, either in her virginity or her motherhood. Above all, the home front was a nostalgic ideal of piety and peace. Family networks provided comfort—both for soldiers at the front and their wives and family members left at home. And although the First World War opened up new public opportunities for women, Houlihan finds that most rural Catholic women remained focused on local and domestic concerns and traditional religious practices.

Stepping back from the history of everyday religion, Houlihan argues that the Holy See remained fairly impartial during the early years of the war, “nearly bankrupting itself through its devotion to its caritas network of care, especially for POWs, displaced persons, and children” (188). Pope Benedict XV forecast a bloody, brutal war, but argued that the bonds of common humanity and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church could serve as a force for peace and unity. To that end, his Papal Peace Note of August 1917 called upon the belligerents to embrace peace and civilization. Benedict also oversaw a major revision of Canon Law (1917) designed to strengthen papal power and reinvigorate the Church. Lastly—and here Houlihan returns to his ordinary Catholics—Benedict was important as a symbol. Indeed, many ordinary Catholics wrote to him, hoping he could personally intervene on their behalf or bring peace and reconciliation to a war-torn world.

In his final chapter, Houlihan carries his examination of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholicism into the postwar era, arguing that traditional religious imagery helped Europeans make sense of the war. Themes of collective sacrifice, deference to authority, and universal suffering, grief, and consolation were manifest in monuments and commemorative services, as they had been in the Mass in Time of War. Clergy played an important pastoral role in comforting families of fallen soldiers, just as relics, votive tablets, and other physical objects of memorialization honoured the war dead.

As wide-ranging and as steeped in the secondary literature as Houlihan’s book is, it suffers from a significant lack of primary source evidence. The author acknowledges this in his preface, noting how hard it is to find archival traces of “prayers, fears, and suffering.” As a result, he asserts that his book “is a religious history that gives an impressionistic portrait” (15). It is of course true that this kind of source material is hard to come by, which is why studies of the interior lives of ordinary people are so often local or micro-historical in nature. Repeatedly, Houlihan makes large generalizations based on scant evidence, as in the case of his assertion that Catholics were worried about the impact of the outbreak of war on the coming harvest. This stands to reason, but the statement, “To many Catholics, war was another cyclical plague, redolent of the sinful human condition; it was not cause for celebration” is supported only by one memoir from a Lower Austrian domestic servant and three secondary sources (48). To give another example, a single diary from an Austrian soldier provides the supporting evidence for the conclusion that “soldiers who had to experience the daily horrors of battle often used their faith to cope” (70). Similarly, a single photo of a church service in Weimar Germany along with two references to secondary sources serves to counter the prevailing historiographical view of declining public piety after the First World War (260-261). And no explanation is provided for why a case study of Tyrol would serve to explain the relationship between military chaplains and soldiers throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary (81-82). In sum, while there is little reason to doubt that traditional Catholic religious practices persisted in rural Central Europe during and after the war, Houlihan’s wide-ranging study of this topic makes overly large claims which rest on overly thin evidentiary foundations. Simply put, it is impossible to discern whether or not the phenomena he describes are generally true for early twentieth century Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary, since the his source material is drawn unsystematically from a wide array of regions and positions within Catholicism. He would be far more successful building his case through a series of studies like his useful regional analysis of German military chaplains in occupied France (Houlihan, Patrick J. “Local Catholicism as Transnational War Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918.” Central European History 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 233–67), where his mastery of the secondary literature is combined with a solid and representative collection of evidence.

Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2014). 473 pages, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783766842992.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The history of “non-Aryan Christians” under National Socialism has been a peripheral issue in much of the historiography and a notoriously fuzzy one even in works that focus on the German churches, reflecting the ambiguities of the category itself as well as the unpredictable fates of those who were so labelled. In Nazi Germany the term “non-Aryan” was often used interchangeably with “Jew,” yet for many Germans there was a distinction. Jews had been persecuted throughout European history, but the Emancipation laws of the nineteenth century opened the way to greater opportunity and assimilation, often but not only through conversion to Christianity. For some, the decision to assimilate through conversion was a pragmatic one, made in the belief that it would lead to a better career and firmer standing in German society; for others, it was made for reasons of marriage or conviction. In any case, it was a double-edged sword, creating a dividing line in German society that became very evident after 1933. Christians of Jewish ancestry did not think of themselves as Jews and were not viewed as such by religiously observant Jews, and many of these Christians shared the antisemitism of the times. After 1933, however, Nazi law designated anyone with Jewish ancestry as “non-Aryan,” blending the religious and racialized categories, and as a result many baptized Christians suddenly found themselves categorized as Judenchristen, Nichtarier, or nichtarische Christen.

Estimates of the number of people who fell into this category under Nazi law vary. This volume gives the total figure as around 400,000 (a figure that includes members of Christian churches as well as secular Germans with some Jewish ancestry). A 1945 World Council of Churches publication that quoted German governmental figures from 1933 put the number at 250,000 (and the number of religiously observant or secular Jews at 550,000), but some ecumenical leaders in the U.S. and Europe who were involved in refugee work in the 1930s gave numbers as high as one and a half million—based, I suspect, on the total numbers of refugees (not just Christians) that these organizations sought to assist.

The Nazi regime began to pass anti-Jewish laws immediately. The two major 1933 laws—the April 1, 1933, “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” and the September 1933 law dis-barring “non-Aryan” lawyers—had sweeping effects. In both instances, there were exemptions for Jewish veterans of the First World War as well as for people who had been practicing law or serving in the civil service as of August 1, 1914, and throughout 1933 and 1934 these laws were irregularly implemented, particularly where so-called Mischlinge, or Germans of partial Jewish ancestry, were concerned. It wasn’t really until the 1935 Nuremberg laws that the categories and degrees of “racial Jewishness” were legally defined.

In the instance of the April 1 law there was another important exemption, elucidated in the May 6 Reichsgesetzblatt: the churches. The April 1 law essentially left the implementation of the law up to the regional and provincial church governments, and in the case of the Protestant churches, of course, the German Christian Movement was eager to introduce a church version of the Aryan paragraph throughout Germany. Their attempts to do so sparked the widespread theological and ecclesial debate that culminated in the Protestant Kirchenkampf. As opponents of the Aryan paragraph argued, it directly contradicted church teachings on universal salvation, baptism, conversion, and ordination. There were of course other church teachings, such as the centrality of love for one’s neighbor, that should have led to a broader solidarity with everyone persecuted under the Nazi regime, but for the most part Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany drew a clear distinction between secular and religiously observant Jews on the one hand, and baptized Christians who fell under the Nazi racial laws on the other. Solidarity with the former group was virtually non-existent (on the contrary, Protestant leaders like Otto Dibelius rushed to justify the Nazi anti-Jewish measures). Concerns for the latter group proved to be erratic and short-lived, as the initial controversies about the Aryan paragraph dissipated and support for those affected crumbled under internal and external pressures.

Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt is not a comprehensive history of this topic; nonetheless it is a valuable contribution to the literature. As its subtitle indicates, it is primarily a Gedenkbuch with brief biographies of 180 German Protestants whose lives were changed by the racial laws and the responses of their church. The editors have cast a wide net. The individuals profiled here include not only theologians and members of the Christian clergy, but individuals who were barred from studying theology before 1945 and others who, barred from other professions, decided to study theology in exile. Also included are teachers of religious education, Christians in “mixed” marriages, Austrians who came under Nazi law after 1938, and even several individuals who were Deutsche Christen or members of the Nazi party. While most of those profiled were members of the German Evangelical Church, there are also several profiles of individuals from Methodist, Baptist, and other free churches.

The editors’ introduction is an admirably clear overview of the subject, portraying the complexities of the Nazi laws and the gradual intensification of pressures on these individuals, and concluding with a brief but devastating portrait of the churches’ responses up to and after 1945. There are several very useful appendixes, including a table that locates these individuals by Landeskirche and “racial” category as defined by the 1935 Nuremberg laws, a bibliography organized by name that gives the sources for the information about each individual, and an extensive bibliography of the relevant literature. An additional appendix is a compilation of all the various measures against each individual as well as their fates and subsequent careers—a listing that gives a poignant overview of the numerous ways in which many of these people suffered. Pastors and teachers were forced into retirement, spouses were publicly humiliated, anonymous threats were sent. A number of people were betrayed by colleagues; some were sent to prisons, concentration camps, or forced labor. Some found safety for a time in one of the Confessing Church institutions. Most of them emigrated and many—though not all—remained abroad after 1945. Those who returned encountered a mixed reception by church leaders and had to wage legal and procedural battles in some instances in order to re-enter their careers. Several people briefly returned to Germany before deciding to leave again.

The 180 biographical studies, written by a number of clergy and scholars, comprise the heart of the book. By extending their study beyond the names of the clergy already known from the literature on the Kirchenkampf, the authors and editors demonstrate the diversity of this sector of the population and have included many women in their profiles, which gives a portrait of the gendered dynamics surrounding the issue. While some of these individuals were familiar names from existing studies of the Confessing church and the Gruber office, there were a number of individuals that I hadn’t realized were affected by the racial laws and there were other names that were completely new to me. There are a number of individuals from “brown” regional churches, and the accounts of their experiences offer important information about how the actions of church leadership in those regions affected both opposition voices and “non-Aryan” Christians.

While some of these people found refuge and solidarity in the Confessing Church, for examples, others found it lamentably passive and silent. Ernst Althausen, the Russian-born grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, worked in the interwar period with ethnic German refugees in the east, leading him to study theology in Berlin. He joined the Pastors Emergency League but complained to Martin Niemoeller that it wasn’t enough to stand up to the German Christians. Althausen worked for the Berlin Judenmission and came under pressure from the Nazi party and the church alike. After he had to wear the yellow star in 1941 his Confessing Church colleagues in Berlin stopped allowing him to hold church services and (at the age of 80), he was banned from public speaking.

The stories of “non-Aryan Christians” who were either sympathetic to Nazism or married to such people are particularly striking. Pastor Georg Börner, a supporter of the Deutsche Christen and the Nazi Party, didn’t join either organization only because his wife was one of the daughters of Kurt Eisner, the Jewish social democrat who was assassinated after leading the 1919 German revolution in Bavaria. Throughout the 1930s Börner was publicly attacked in Der Stürmer and the SS Schwarze Korps, but Nazi party members in his parish defended him, Bishop Hans Meiser stood behind him, and during the war the Bavarian governmental president issued a special order permitting him to stay in his pastorate. His wife remained unscathed, and after 1945 the Börners remained in their parish until his retirement in 1968. One pastor who did become a member of the Deutsche Christen as well as the Nazi Party was Hellmut Fischer, who successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandmother until 1938, when the Bavarian government decided to require Aryan certificates for clergy. Fischer quietly requested to be transferred to a non-pastoral position, but in December 1938 Landeskirche officials told Fischer he would have to leave the ministry. His parish council stood up for him, declaring that he was a good pastor and “politically reliable.” The outbreak of the war resolved things: Fischer was drafted, the Landeskirche tabled the proceedings against him, and he was able to return to a parish after the war in Würzburg.

As these examples illustrate, many of these people are so interesting and surprising that readers will be tempted to do additional research (I found myself wondering, for example, where Eisner’s daughter stood politically in all this, and what happened to Eisner’s other children). The volume as a whole illustrates that those designated as “non-Aryan” Christian represented a broad spectrum of backgrounds and theological and political perspectives. As such it is a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of the issue. The range of Germans affected by the Nazi racial laws was wide and their fates varied widely. Some people came under immediate pressure in 1933; others retained their positions until the late 1930s. Some of the people portrayed here moved toward a broader solidarity and engagement on behalf of all persecuted Jews, in contrast to the rest of their church. And, as the editors note in the introduction, the stories of these individuals attest to the widespread antisemitism not only during the Nazi era but afterward, when some of them continued to suffer under their church leadership and the antisemitism of friends and colleagues.

(The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-Dietrich In fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.

Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945 (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt, 2008), 360 pages. ISBN: 9783374026128.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The immediate aftermath of World War II was one of the most eventful and decisive transition periods in twentieth century history. The Axis nations had been defeated, but there were millions of displaced persons and refugees, extensive destruction of cities and infrastructure, and a rapidly shifting postwar political landscape that eventually culminated in the formation of the Soviet bloc and NATO, the division of Germany into east and west, and the onset of the Cold War.

There was a widespread sense among the victorious Allied authorities that the postwar agenda for Germany was just as crucial as the military defeat of the Nazi regime, and that the long term stability of Europe would depend on addressing the German situation differently than the victors of the First World War had done after 1918. Thus, the postwar policies of the British, U.S., and French occupation governments were focused not just on immediate political and military issues but on the longer-term challenge of ensuring political and civil stability, a task that included changing the political culture of Germany through re-education, denazification and various civil society programs.

This approach particularly characterized the American zone. Whether in Roosevelt’s speeches, Hollywood newsreels, military propaganda, or publications by U.S. aid organizations, the rationale behind U.S. involvement in the war had often been articulated as a fight for American democratic ideals. Hence, a central goal of many U.S.-led postwar programs was to educate and train Germans in the practices of democracy.

Springhart-Aufbrueche Heike Springhart’s Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern is a detailed history and analysis of one such program, the partnership between the U.S. military government and German Protestant church leaders and organizations in Württemberg. Her focus is the work there of the U.S. Branch for Education and Religious Affairs (ERA) between 1946-1948, which she sets in a broader historical context by examining the individuals and organizations, both in the U.S. and in Germany, who during the war helped lay the theoretical and political foundation for the ERA’s work. There is also a concluding chapter that offers a conceptual framework for understanding the potential role of religion in post-conflict processes of democratization and social transformation, drawing on the German example as a case study.

The ERA’s agenda cannot be understood separately from the wartime “White Papers” and programs that began to address these issues before 1945. Springhart particularly examines the influence of Paul Tillich, the religious socialist German theologian who left Germany in 1933, as well as the Council for a Democratic Germany, an organization of leading German emigres and U.S. intellectuals that was founded in 1944. During the war Tillich, who was teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, delivered a series of radio addresses for the Voice of America directed toward “the other Germany” (Thomas Mann regularly spoke on a similar series of radio broadcasts for the BBC). In talks that combined criticism of Nazism, praise of democracy, and an appeal to the deeper cultural and moral standards of the German people, Tillich hoped to reach not only Confessing Church members, but potential oppositional groups in the military and among intellectuals. The Council for a Democratic Germany was one of several U.S. organizations that sought to raise American awareness of “the other Germany” and draft potential approaches for democratization programs after the defeat of Nazism.

Springhart also explores some of the literature that began to shape this thinking during that war, notably the work of Talcott Parsons, a Harvard sociologist who believed that societies could be changed through “controlled institutional change,” and Richard Brickner, a New York psychiatrist who in a 1943 book (Is Germany Incurable?) argued that the positive qualities of the German psyche had to be strengthened through social and political re-education programs. As early as 1942, U.S. military and political leaders began discussing such programs as crucial tools for the democratization of postwar Germany. It was clear that the implementation and effectiveness of such programs would depend on reliable German partners, and the primary partners identified early on were German church leaders, particularly those with ties to the Confessing Church.

The ERA emerged in 1946 as a distinct division under the auspices of the Office of Military Government (OMGUS), with sub-offices focusing on Catholic, Protestant, and “Interfaith-Relations and Free Church” affairs. General Lucius Clay’s directive to ERA officials was that they offer support and guidance to German religious leaders of all faiths to strengthen the work of existing religious bodies such as church youth organizations and the social welfare programs of the Evangelical Hilfswerk. The ERA also played a key role in the development of various postwar Evangelical Church press agencies and radio broadcasting services. The Allied goal was not that the ERA actually establish and run these programs themselves, but rather help the Germans themselves to do so. Still, over the course of time the U.S. developed a number of programs in conjunction with the ERA’s agenda, including cultural and educational exchanges that brought German clergy and academics to the United States.

In Württemberg the OMGUS staff reached out to Bishop Theophil Wurm, whom the Americans regarded as a trustworthy church leader with a strong anti-Nazi record. Wurm put them in touch with a network of church leaders and theologians that included Eberhard Müller, who founded the first Evangelical Academy in Bad Boll in 1946, and Eugen Gerstenmaier, who as a member of the Kreisau Circle had been imprisoned after July 20 and after the end of the war became director of the Evangelical Church Hilfswerk in Stuttgart.

One of the most interesting aspects of Springhart’s study is the role played by figures like Gerstenmaier, Wurm, and theologian Helmut Thielicke in the ERA’s work in Württemberg. Wurm was nearing the end of his career (he died in 1953), but Gerstenmaier went on to political prominence as a CDU political leader, eventually serving as Bundestag president, and Thielicke became a prominent theologian. Gerstenmaier and Thielicke, both of whom traveled to the United States on governmental cultural exchange programs in the late 1940s, became conservative, pro-Western voices in the German political debates of the 1950s onward, in contrast to other Kirchenkampf veterans like Martin Niemoeller, who quickly became an outspoken critic of U.S. policies. Their early postwar involvement in the ERA programs gives greater insight into their subsequent political perspectives as well as the internal controversies and debates within German postwar Protestantism. All three, of course, had been involved in the internal Protestant Kirchenkampf debates of the 1930s, but they had not stood on the radical Dahlemite end of the Confessing Church spectrum and there were strong tensions between them and more radical Confessing Church voices in Württemberg like Hermann Diem even before the end of the war.

Those tensions erupted in the early postwar period, particularly with respect to how the Nazi past should be addressed. Even among partners like Wurm, there was growing resentment about programs like denazification and the beginnings of the war crimes trials. Springhart’s study reveals considerable ambiguity in how ERA officials addressed the ongoing legacy of National Socialism in the churches, although the reports she cites by OMGUS officials (as well as by critical outside voices like Karl Barth) show a growing awareness that their German church partners were not as consistently anti-Nazi and pro-American as they had thought. In addition, one of the major American church donors to ERA programs for German churches was the U.S. Missouri Synod Lutheran church, whose leaders had a good relationship to Missouri-born President Truman (Truman was Baptist). The German staff officer in the Württemberg-Baden ERA office was Karl Arndt, a Missouri Synod Lutheran accused of making antisemitic and pro-Nazi remarks; despite ongoing controversy about Arndt he retained his position and even defended the revival of a pro-Deutsche Christen group.

The ERA programs were but one part of the extensive outreach by U.S. government groups and churches in postwar Germany, but Springhart’s case study is particularly useful in its portrayal of the philosophy behind many of these initiatives, and for all the challenges they faced they did leave a permanent infrastructure of programs dedicated to broader democratic political discourse in Germany. In the decades that followed, the Evangelical publishing branches, radio and television programming, the Evangelical Academies, and other programs that emerged from the ERA’s work became defining aspects for the public voice of the Evangelical Church of Germany and, it must be added, for the emergence of a different understanding of the public responsibilities of the church from that before 1933. Although published several years ago, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern remains a timely and valuable study of the Branch for Education and Religious Affairs and its local impact, especially amidst the growing number of works on this critical period in German history.

(The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.)

Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvii+270 pp.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Probst, University College at Washington University in St. Louis

This review appeared originally in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 10 (2015), available at http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/8852. It is reproduced here with permission.

Mothering the Fatherland is a focused and sympathetic study of the life and work of a unique group of women who were so haunted by the Holocaust that, in the wake of the Second World War, they formed a Protestant sisterhood focused on intercessory repentance by the “true” Christians of Germany for the sins committed by the nation during the Third Reich. It is an absorbing work of historical theology that is especially significant for the effective manner in which the author situates the theology and practice of the sisterhood in their historical and intellectual contexts and for the author’s thoughtful analysis of the theology of the sisterhood’s co-founder.

George Faithful argues that the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary (Ökumenische Marienschwesternschaft), which was founded in 1947 by Klara (later Mother Basilea) Schlink and Erika Madauss (later Mother Martyria), sought to prevent via intercessory prayer the judgment of God on Germany, which both believed would come unless the nation repented for its sins, chief of which was its involvement in the Holocaust. The idea that Germans, much less Protestant Germans, should repent for the Shoah, was not widely shared in the early post-war era. This fact alone makes the sisterhood a fascinating case study. That the sisterhood also exhibited affinities with elements of German Pietism and (later) with the Charismatic movement enhances the curiosity all the more.

As Faithful recognizes, many Protestants held views that were consonant with some crucial aspects of Nazi ideology, including ardent nationalism and antisemitism. During the Third Reich, a substantial, outspoken minority of Protestants avidly and openly supported the Nazis in their reprehensible goals concerning the Jewish Question. Even so, open resistance to Nazism and secret assistance for Jews living under Nazi oppression and threat of murder were found among small groups of German Protestants. The “Büro Grüber” (Grüber Office), based in Berlin, provided Jews (including Jews who converted to Christianity) who were under dire threat from the Reich with advice about emigration, finding employment abroad, social assistance, legal matters, and educational support. For example, in Württemberg (in southwest Germany), a group of pastors and parishioners sheltered at least seventeen Jewish refugees in sixty church parsonages in a so-called “Rectory Chain.”

Though Schlink published numerous theological works after the war, including books that emphasized the collective guilt of the German nation for the Holocaust, she does not seem to have viewed her work as part of a broader theological discussion that might have included participants in such war-time Protestant rescue groups. Despite their differences, where the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations is concerned, there is a congruence of views between groups such as the Büro Grüber, the Württemberg rectory chain, and the sisterhood. A comparative scholarly study of such groups would be welcome.

The most intriguing chapter of the book is titled “Schlink’s Pseudo-Judaic, Germanic Vision of Nationhood,” in which Faithful examines, among other things, Schlink’s theological outlook on peoples (Völker), in particular “Germans” and “Jews.” Faithful finds that Schlink’s views of peoples, nations, and ethnicities were derived in the main from the Hebrew Bible and from (chiefly nineteenth and twentieth century) German views of nationalism. Ironically, for Schlink, Faithful writes, “To be a Jew was to be a member of a God-ordained, uniquely blessed people whose long centuries of suffering were over. To be a German was to be a self-professed Christian and a Gentile. For Schlink, Jew and German were two mutually exclusive categories, and this, more than any of her ideas, resonated with the worldview of the German nationalists. … That Schlink so comprehensively inverted which pole was positive, elevating the Jewish people to a status above what even many German nationalists had claimed for Germany, marks her thought as definitively anti-Nazi” (p. 132). Faithful highlights here incisively some of the ironies inherent in the thought of a remarkably unique woman – a philosemitic, anti-Nazi theologian and Protestant nun.

On occasion, the main argument is hampered by assertions that are a bit too tentative. Yet, this is mitigated by succinct chapter conclusions and helpful sub-headings within chapters, both of which make the book very readable. Mothering the Fatherland will be of interest to anyone engaged in the study of the Holocaust, twentieth-century German Protestantism, Jewish-Christian relations, and, more broadly, historical theology in the modern era. Caveats aside, this work substantially deepens our knowledge of a previously unknown and fascinating corner of German Protestantism.

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

Every so often, a work of historical scholarship appears that alters the trajectory in its field of research. Where the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is concerned, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was one such work, as were Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann’s The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 and Saul Friedländer’s majestic two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews.[1] Alon Confino’s examination of “the Nazi imagination,” a thoughtful, eloquent, and provocative work of intellectual and cultural history, plows substantially new interpretive ground and may change the state of play in Holocaust studies for years to come.

The core of Confino’s argument is that Nazi antisemitism was based in fantasy, not reality. For Confino, “a key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened – the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war – because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities.” Instead, “a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?” (6) The Nazi regime was trying to re-write the origins of German and European history and civilization. This main argument gives shape to the book, which Confino offers in three parts.

Part I covers the first five years of the Third Reich, from the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 to the months leading up to the so-called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in November 1938. Here, the “common denominator” for German ideas about “the Jew” was the motif of the Jews as “creators of an evil modernity that soiled present-day Germany” (31). In Part II, Confino analyzes the attempt by the Nazi regime to eradicate the idea of the Jew as “the origins of moral past” in the period from Kristallnacht to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941. In a chapter titled “Burning the Book of Books,” Confino poses (and answers persuasively) the question “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?” The chapter rightfully appears at the heart of the book, as it represents the core of Confino’s main argument. This is significant, as it moves religion, a crucial component of culture, from the margins of the historical argument closer to the center.

Part III examines the culmination of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe from the onset of the Final Solution to the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Here, the Nazi regime attempted to expunge the idea of the Jew as “the origins of history”; they did this via mass murder, an attempt to actually remove them from history (and, perhaps – though Confino does not emphasize this – from the future).

Confino gets underneath the actions of the Nazis, offering an interpretation of what the Nazis thought was happening and what kind of world they wished to create. In so doing, he goes beyond thick description of life in the Third Reich, positing why the Nazis did what they did. Students in my courses on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust often ask in understandably perplexed tones “but, why did the Nazis attempt to exterminate the Jews?” Implicit in this question is another, deeper question, one that historians are not often sufficiently poised to answer – why did Nazi hatred of Jews so consume them that they felt compelled to kill them all? Confino posits an elegant, incisive and credible answer to these questions.

Despite the originality of Confino’s conclusions, nowhere does he suggest that previous scholarship on these matters is either worthless or misguided. In fact, his work can be seen as building upon the current consensus of a “modified intentionalist” or “modified functionalist” position on the genocide against the Jews of Europe. Further, one can read Confino’s account not as a complete departure from the idea of Nazi Germany as a “racial state” but as a new direction in historical interpretation of the Shoah that perceives the pervasiveness of racial ideology in Nazi Germany as an outworking of the Nazi imagination of a world without Jews. Confino also recognizes more recent trends in Holocaust historiography, maintaining that the Holocaust “should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide. The Holocaust was not unique.” Even so, “it was perceived during the war as unique by Germans, Jews, and other Europeans, and if we want to understand why the Holocaust happened, we ought to explain this” (13).

In trying to build a world without Jews, so Confino, the collective Nazi imagination was immersed in irrational fantasy. “In persecuting and exterminating the Jews, Germans waged a war against an imaginary enemy that had no belligerent intentions toward Germany and possessed no army, state, or government.” (6) Confino’s work demonstrates that, while fantasies operate on a deeper (more unconscious) level than ideologies, they also have concrete expressions – including the burning of Hebrew Bibles and synagogues in November 1938, an outburst of violence that Confino does not believe can be explained by the ubiquity of racial ideology alone.

The emphasis on the irrational aspect of Nazi antisemitism is welcome. “The view of Nazi beliefs as guided by modern racial science gave Nazi anti-Semitism a rational slant, even though it was all fantasy. In fact, Nazi racial science, similar to every science, had an element of mystery, a poetic side, that the Nazis themselves were aware of” (7). Here, Confino rightly underscores the irrational and nonrational elements of Nazi thinking. Yet, in describing Nazi hatred of Jews as “all fantasy” (as he does more than once), Confino may be, on occasion, overstating this aspect of Nazi thinking (and of thinking in general).

As I have argued elsewhere, following Gavin Langmuir, irrational thought conflicts with rational empirical observation while nonrational language, which lies at the heart of religion, is the language of symbol, the kind of language found in art and affirmations of belief. Crucially for Langmuir, much of our thinking is “so habitual, so much a reflex, that most of the time we are not aware of which way we are thinking.”[2] Further, Shulamit Volkov argues, “Any interpretation of reality is an independent, creative product of the human mind, and it is often all the more powerful for being partially or entirely false.”[3] Though Volkov was applying this rationale to nineteenth-century German antisemitism, it certainly applies to Nazi fantasies about purportedly “Jewish” Bolshevism, capitalism, criminality, and degeneracy. Such nuance in describing Nazi antisemitism occasionally eludes in Confino’s otherwise lucid and elegant account.

This sole caveat aside, Confino’s original and provocative interpretation gives historians and other specialists working on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust a welcome and penetrating jumping off point. It is bound to provoke discussion among historians and lay readers alike. Even more importantly, it might spur helpful new directions and methodologies in Holocaust studies.

Notes:

[1] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years of Persecution (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).

[2] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3–5.

[3] Ibid., 23.

Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ISBN 978-0-230-57265-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Nash-Christian The cover announces the character of the theme: it is the image of a stained glass window in Worcester Cathedral showing three resolute figures looking up towards the sky, intent, devout, broadly sanguine. One is a nurse and the other two are men of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. The task that David Nash has set himself here is a striking one: in what kinds of narratives might the historian find the relationship between religious faith and active public life in the British twentieth century? How are we to locate the dimension of personal faith in the discussions and dramas of society at large? How are we to know when it is there – or when it is not?

Such a project, of course, requires some recasting of conventional understandings. This book is only to some extent a study of what is often now called ‘corporate’ religion. Nash knows the importance of chasing up other, less obvious paths in search of a new prospect. Above all, he looks purposefully at the sprawling realm of the Christian laity. His chapters enjoy titles like ‘Pilgrims, Seekers, Samaritans and Saviours’, and ‘Salvation, Old and New’. Two chapters explore ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ wars and ‘Loss’ and ‘Remembrance’. The material is lively and the argument vigorous and, in the best sense, provocative. Nash asks many questions which historians have often simply ignored: how did people read the Bible? What was it in their eyes to live and die ‘well’? What was it to doubt, or to be ‘saved’? There is a persistent emphasis on the Church of England which is justified at an early stage, but which still leaves some questions hanging in the air, for it is easy to claim too much for the Anglicans and expect too little of the others. There is also a fair amount of jumping about as far as dates are concerned and this might well unsettle those who look for chronological order. In one chapter the Abdication Crisis of 1938 finds itself in company with the prosecution of the Gay News for blasphemy in 1979 and the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Yet chronology certainly does matter in this book. Nash regards the secularization debate as something tyrannous. Are so many diverse reconfigurations of faith and unfaith really amenable to one vast, unrolling trajectory of decline and extinction? ‘Secularization’ has tried to explain a great deal, no doubt, but has often only ended up distorting perspectives and getting in the way. An awareness of it has even affected the way a pessimistic Church of England, in particular, has come to understand itself. It is surely high time to claim a new freedom and to argue with quite different terms and possibilities. In short, Nash hands back the telescope that many other scholars have provided and instead picks up a kaleidoscope. The new view is fascinating, even if it is difficult quite to know what picture it presents and sort of trajectory might be at work.

This book is something better than an historical polemic and the overall effect is both alert and constructive. Perhaps best of all, it does not seek to lock the subject up inside some self-serving thesis. It frames some bold ideas and opens a variety of new doors. It invites. Does it persuade? That will depend on many things. It is surely right to suggest that later twentieth century religion came to reveal not simply a decline but a ‘diffusion of authority’ (p. 192) and to observe that this should not be seen automatically as a narrative of ‘dilution’. Scholars of secularization may well have been too ready to characterize the contemporary history of religion as a glum history of waning churches and chapels and declining weekly congregations. But secularization, however we understand it, remains difficult to repudiate because there is simply so much diverse evidence about to justify it. This is not to say that it hasn’t acquired an accumulation of questionable forms, or even become something of an ideology. Nash observes sharply that even the most adept secularization theses rather often end up preaching the end of religion and creating for themselves a kind of eschatology, a definitive ‘end time’ for religion altogether. This is plainly dubious. By contrast, Professor Nash is surely right to suggest that it is better to think cautiously and sensitively, not of cycles and grand trajectories but of patterns which might be difficult to identify with confidence. Nothing, after all, is predetermined. At the last this is both a subtle book and a hopeful one. It deserves to be read by an international audience.

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, Studies in Modern British Religious History, Vol. 31 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 325 Pp. ISBN 978-1-84383-911-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

For nearly five centuries, the Church of England has prided itself on its comprehensive character, and has refused to allow any single uniformity to be imposed on its doctrinal, liturgical or political expressions. Evangelicalism has thus remained one of the main pillars of English religious life, drawing on the legacy of the Puritans in the seventeenth century, the pietistic impetus of the Wesley brothers in the eighteenth century, and the social and missionary zeal of men like Wilberforce in the nineteenth. These collected essays, written by a group of scholars from within this tradition, now provide a survey of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century, analyzing its struggles for reform, resistance and renewal over the past hundred years. Readers should be aware that, although two of the contributors are based in the United States, apart from David Cerl Jones’ short chapter on Wales, almost no mention is made of conditions in other English-speaking countries, and no attempt is made to place English Evangelicalism in its wider setting of world Protestantism.

Atherstone-Maiden The opening chapter, written by two Oxford scholars, examines the taxonomy of recent English Evangelicalism, describing the various strands within this spectrum of belief, which share common features in their adherence to the key truths of justification by faith alone and the supreme authority of Holy Scripture as the word of God. Nevertheless each of these strands places its emphasis on different aspects of the faith. Conservative Evangelicals stress the inerrancy of the Bible and refuse to accept the scientific evidence for evolution. More “open” Evangelicals have accepted both the modern theories about the world’s origins and many of the findings of biblical criticism, while most recently the contribution of the charismatic movement, drawn from Pentecostalism, and found in such London churches as Holy Trinity, Brompton or St Paul’s, Onslow Square, has reinvigorated and popularized Evangelicalism among young people. The rivalries—and sometimes the acerbic criticisms of these groups of each other—have meant that English evangelicalism often seems to have been in a constant process of reconfiguration.

Nevertheless, there are many signs of lively renewal, and we can be grateful to these scholars for analyzing both the successes and the failures of these movements during the course of the last century. Undoubtedly the twentieth century has been more testing for all branches of the English Church than was the nineteenth. The catastrophic effects of two world wars and the consequent loss of confidence in God’s benevolent providence eroded Christian faith in wide sections of the population, while more recently the impact of secularism, the sexual revolution, feminism, and political radicalization, have poised challenges which Evangelicals have sought to meet using the resources of their rich and vibrant traditions of personal faith. In some circumstances, Evangelicals have mobilized resistance to social changes, such as the toleration of homosexuality, but in other cases, such as the ordination of women priests and even bishops, they have welcomed the abandonment of long-standing Anglican traditions as a sign of faith-induced reform and renewal. The tension between institutional loyalty and biblical truth has been an ongoing preoccupation.

Within the Church of England’s witness, the Evangelical party has undoubtedly lost ground. For example, a hundred years ago, the usual Sunday morning worship consisted of Mattins, with a heavy emphasis on preaching, while the Holy Communion was an occasional, if prized, event. (In Queen Victoria’s court, Holy Communion was celebrated only twice a year, after considerable personal preparation). But in recent decades, the Holy Communion, along with an enhanced view of the importance of sacraments, has become the normal Sunday service, while Mattins has been relegated to a few odd Sundays in the month. So too, the Evangelical adherence to the doctrine of penal substitution has been softened, as has their resistance to the claims of Roman Catholicism. Leading Evangelicals have led the way in arguing against the kind of biblical fundamentalism or doctrinal rigidity which still prevails in some of their United States counterparts. On the other hand, Evangelicals have sought to play a more constructive role in national affairs, and have placed much more emphasis on the role of the laity in parish leadership. These signs of renewal mean that Evangelicals are no longer content to embrace the kind of reserved personal piety of their elders, but are engaged in social reforming movements of many kinds at many different levels. In the view of these authors, Evangelicalism in the Church of England is now much more diverse, no longer tied to its former rigidity of doctrine or to its defensiveness towards other branches of the church.

Subsequent chapters, written by various authors, give us brief histories of Evangelical groupings in England throughout the century, many of which demonstrated buoyant ambitions but disappointing results. The conservative wing of English Evangelicalism was successful in recruiting younger members through such organizations as the Oxford and Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions, but its more liberal counterpart suffered from a certain diffuseness of theological proclamation and a theology which appeared to many as “vague, ephemeral and unsatisfactory”. There was a constant and recurring tension between adaptation to changing circumstances and fidelity to traditional evangelical faithfulness.

Readers unfamiliar with the details of developments in the Church of England and its Evangelical sections over the past hundred years will learn a lot. A great many names of prominent clergymen are dropped, which leads to considerable repetition in successive chapters. Fortunately the contributors avoid self-congratulatory tendencies, and adopt a suitably critical approach both to the subject and its practitioners. Their evaluations are balanced and well researched. In the latter half of the century, as John Maiden notes, younger evangelical leaders, such as John Stott of All Souls, Langham Place in central London, or Jim Packer of Larimer College, Oxford, demonstrated a greater openness to dialogue and liturgical flexibility. Packer called on evangelicals to renounce obscurantism, isolationism, pessimism and party spirit, and to adopt a warmer relationship with other branches of the church. They were horrified by the extremism of their so-called Protestant brethren in Northern Ireland. As Packer wrote in 1981, “It is a fact and a happy one, that within the past thirty years the previously felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.” At the same time, there were also evangelicals who felt that they continued to be treated with reserve by the Church of England hierarchy, and passed over for suitable preferment. John Stott was never offered a bishopric, and Jim Packer left to join the new evangelical Regent College in Vancouver. Tom Wright, although appointed in 2003 to the prestigious See of Durham, only stayed for seven years before retreating to a much less conspicuous professorship at a Scottish university.

The final chapter, by Alister Chapman, looks at how much Evangelicals in England learned from the world in recent decades. The answer is: not much. This chapter is more introspective than outward-looking, but reveals the limited extent to which English evangelicals responded to outside influences. For example, the early Billy Graham crusades met with considerable resentment to the idea that English evangelicals had much to learn from such brash American presentations, even if well-organized. So too with the loss of the British Empire, the very considerable evangelical engagement in colonial missions faded away and was not brought back to England’s shores. Evangelicals continued to think of themselves going abroad to teach, rather than learn, so the reverse flow was minimal. Or, as in the case of evangelicals in Australia, the influence was perceptibly reactionary. To be sure, the sources of the charismatic movement among evangelicals came from abroad, but had to be suitably “anglified” by such groups as Michael Harper’s Fountain Trust before becoming popular. The original Pentecostals from the Caribbean too often found that they were rejected in local white churches, and so founded their own black assemblies. Their spiritual influence was therefore handicapped by English social conservatism. As Chapman remarks, old habits die hard. And it is doubtful that they are dead, even in this post-imperial generation.

It is a pity that no one was found to give a forecast of Evangelicalism’s place in the twenty-first century. In view of the massive changes in Britain’s social composition with the arrival of so many immigrants from Asia, Africa and the non-Protestant parts of Europe, the impact on all branches of the Church of England has to be far-reaching, and the priorities for evangelism very different. Attempts to integrate and assimilate these newcomers have found strict barriers against religious proselytism. Most of these communities have brought their own religious leaders with them, hampering social intercourse. For the first time in English history, violence and riots have broken out in English towns, spurred on by religious and racial antagonisms.

Evangelicals are therefore confronted with new and often demanding assignations. But these will have to be left for future analysis in a subsequent volume.

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Pp 218. ISBN 978-0-19-965510-6.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In the 1960s the Church of England suffered a striking decline in the number of supporters in many parishes across the country. Some commentators attributed this to the prevalence of science-backed secularism. Others held it was the result of the church’s uncritical support of militaristic nationalism in two world wars. But in 2000 Callum Brown advanced the controversial thesis that this decline was due to the impact of the feminist sexual revolution of those years which exploded traditional sexual morality and led to the radical challenge to the established patterns of behaviour in the church’s constituency. In particular, Brown claimed that it was women’s rejection of Victorian narratives of femininity and subordination which brought about a wholly new set of allegiances amongst church members and introduced new challenges from various women’s movements, especially those urging the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood, and even to the episcopate.

Jones-Sexual Timothy Jones follows this lead by undertaking a study of the major changes in gender politics in the Church of England from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He focusses on six episodes during this period which, he claims, demonstrated the often reluctant posture of the church leaders when challenged to take a stand on matters affecting gender or sexual politics. Over the course of this hundred year span, English society evolved rapidly and adopted a much more liberal stance, which was often reflected in parliamentary debates, and found its way into progressive legislation. The result was a frequent clash of interest with the more conservative and traditional sectors of opinion, including those of the Church of England. Jones begins his survey with the debates about marriage in the mid-1850s and concludes with the heated controversies about consensual homosexuality in the 1950s. Rather than indulging in detailing the reactionary attitudes of some Church of England leaders, Jones skillfully weaves into his account the variety of positions taken over the years, and displays a commendable sympathy for most of the participants in this on-going search for new understandings amongst church members about gender and sexual politics.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the long established pattern of Anglican marriage and gender politics was disrupted by a series of secular legislative reforms, such as women’s suffrage, the official acceptance of birth control, the call for women’s equality in employment (including positions within the ordained ministry), and the pressure for more relaxed acceptance of homosexuality in later years. None of these movements originated from within the Church, but public opinion, including that of church members, was so strongly affected that the Church was obliged to recast its regulations or guidance principles in order to accommodate the changed climate. The most significant change was brought about by the suffrage movement at the turn of the century, which resulted in women being granted the vote, first in 1918 and more fully in 1928. In Jones’ view, this step radicalized Anglican discussions about gender. It brought the politics of equality into the heart of the Church’s discussions, and profoundly unsettled the balance of forces in the various parts of the community. It is not difficult to see the connection between this step and the decision of the Lambeth Conference in 1930 to amend the marriage service to stress equality between men and women, as also to accept the findings of modern medicine and to remove the previous prohibition against contraception. The arguments of the conservative opponents of such steps were usually based on either the Bible or tradition. But by the 1920s already the biblical injunctions of the New Testament were seen to be completely compatible with gender equality, while the arguments from tradition were increasingly regarded as outmoded. Women’s political emancipation was most prominent in a series of legislative changes which marked a significant cultural shift from a hierarchic to an egalitarian understanding of the sexes. Anglo-Catholics, in particular, had difficulties with such egalitarianism, since in their view, the position of a priest represented the authority of a male God and a male Christ. Both social and metaphysical order would be upset if the previous patriarchal system were overthrown.

On the other hand, Anglo-Catholics applauded the efforts of women to establish their own sisterhoods and nunneries since these reinforced the ideals of spiritualized femininity and service. Certainly the spread of such communities in the later nineteenth century provided middle-class women with much more effective and fulfilling opportunities than the life of an unmarried spinster. But the twentieth century’s opening of many more professions to women inevitably led to alternative and possibly more attractive occupations. The devotion and piety of these sisters was much praised, but did not encourage those women who might have hoped that this would lead to future ordination to the priesthood.

The campaign for the ordination of women engrossed the Church of England throughout the twentieth century, and has only now come to a completion after many adherents have abandoned their loyalty to the Church of their birth. It brought the Anglican Church to the limits of its capacity to imagine sexual equality. When it was first proposed at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, it was greeted with shock and almost universal incomprehension. In the 1920s and 1930s a series of reports struggled to find an ideological basis for such opposition, but fell back on the traditional defence that the Church was not ready for such a revolutionary move. The question was forcefully raised by the movement’s advocates as to why the priesthood merited the maintenance of the sex-bar in contrast to other professions. They never received a satisfactory answer. In 1935 the Archbishops’ Commission could still say “We believe the general mind of the Church is still in accord with the continuous tradition of a male priesthood … based on the will of God”. Such sexual double standards were naturally rejected by the supporters of women’s ordination, who argued persuasively that gender and sex were not theologically relevant to ordination. But nevertheless in this period the leading minds of the Church were unable to frame a persuasive and broadly acceptable theological argument for any change. Such a view asserted that there was a natural divinely ordained gender order which involved women’s subordination to men, though not implying women’s inferiority. Women priests were hence seen to invert a hierarchy of spiritual and domestic authority which stretched all the way to the Godhead. The male priest as symbol of religious authority had many centuries of unbroken tradition behind it, not only in the Christian version. Such considerations were only overcome after the 1960s when the impact of the so-called secular sexual revolution led to a much more open and generous realization of the contributions that women priests could offer.

Jones’ final chapter deals with the question of the Church’s attitudes towards celibacy and homosexuality. Remarkably enough, it was the Church of England which took a lead in 1952 in promoting homosexual law reform, and urging the decriminalization of homosexual acts. He argues that the Church’s negotiation of new understandings of sexual identity led to a striking level of institutional accommodation and acceptance of homosexuality. The change in the 1930s saw an abandonment of moralistic condemnation and an acceptance of medico-psychological theories about sexual preferences. In 1954 the Church of England Moral Welfare Council produced a report “The Problem of Homosexuality” which was written in almost exclusively medical terms and proved to be highly influential. Homosexuals were no longer to be regarded as perverts but to sublimate their urges into positive social roles. Nevertheless the ambiguity about the morality of homosexuality still remains widespread throughout the Church of England.

The writing of church history has traditionally focused on theological or political matters. Jones’ survey of what might be described as the undercurrent in gender and sexual politics therefore fills a vacant segment in this historiography. As of last year, 2014, with the appointment of the first female bishop, and with now a generation’s experience of women priests serving in numerous parishes across the country, we may hope that it not be long before a historian will be coming forward to comment on the repercussions of this significant change in the otherwise staid history of the Church as it approaches the five hundredth anniversary of its establishment in England.

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

(Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2015), 155 Pp. ISBN 978-3-7615-6179-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

After serving for thirty years as a pastor in the Rhineland Evangelical Church, Rainer Stuhlmann is spending part of his retirement as Director of Studies at Nes Ammim, a Christian centre in northern Israel. Nes Ammim was established fifty years ago by a Dutch Reformed couple, who were convinced of the need to have a visible sign in the newly-established state of Israel of the Christian desire for reconciliation and repentance for Christian complicity in the Holocaust. They believed the best way to do this would be to follow the example of the Zionist pioneers, and build a farming community in order to contribute both practically and spiritually to building new relationships. For many years they grew roses, which were picked, packed and sent every day to the Frankfurt flower market. Some years ago, when this venture no longer proved viable, they switched to running a guest hotel, staffed mainly by young Christian volunteers from Germany, Holland and Switzerland. Pastor Stuhlmann helped to organize their free time with programs enabling them to study more of present conditions in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. This book is essentially a record of these encounters, written as a series of snapshots from the perspective of a keenly involved observer doing what he can to enhance the growth of communal friendship and harmonious relationships.

Stuhlmann-Zwischen The Holy Land is of course full of holy history, also of holy geography. Stuhlmann sees his job as motivating his young guests from Europe to understand the dimensions of both these features and to encourage a courageous encounter with the many history-laced dilemmas which are met in so many corners of the “promised” land. He is clearly against the kind of religious tourism which brings Christian visitors to Israel, but seeks to isolate them in the first century without ever meeting with Israel’s present-day inhabitants or their troubles. He is equally opposed to the kind of narrow eschatological proclamation of certain Christian groups, especially some American evangelicals, or to the equally one-sided Jewish extremists who wage a continual battle against their Palestinian neighbours. He is grateful for the fact that he and his younger colleagues from Germany are now looked on as representatives of the “new Germany”, and that the horrors of the Holocaust, though loudly trumpeted in state-controlled media, are not attributed to the younger generation or to him personally. Likewise he is encouraged by the friendliness of the Palestinians who see these visitors from Europe as a hopeful sign that their cause is not being forgotten by the rest of the world. And he draws hope from the fact that there are many signs of confidence building between young Jews and Arabs, not least those established at Nes Ammim itself.

Anyone visiting Israel/Palestine cannot fail to be impressed, even intimidated, by the weight of history which pervades every corner of this Holy Land. Even more forceful is the evidence on all sides of the many centuries of nation building and the equally obvious evidence of these attempts’ downfall. Stuhlmann would like to be optimistic, but is obliged to recognize that the forces of national bigotry and self-preservation have a long start. Every time he takes parties of students to Jerusalem, they are confronted with the most recent evidence of the endemic hostility between Israelis and Palestinians, namely the so-called Separation Wall around the city, which was constructed a few years ago. This was built as a barrier against terrorist attacks but has since been extended to expropriate large sections of Palestinian land holdings and vineyards, which he sees as a most brutal robbery by the Israeli state. This Wall in fact forbids the inhabitants from the Palestinian side crossing into Jerusalem without control, and hence denies the opportunity to have social contact or conversations. This is exactly the contrary to Nes Ammin, where such relationships are deliberately encouraged. It all points to the fact that, in the ancient capital, where three religions have existed in rivalry for centuries, and every stone witnesses to unresolved conflicts, the atmosphere is much sharper and confrontational than in northern Galilee. But given the escalation of conflict in all the surrounding countries, the hope that Israel will maintain a precarious peace and allow more positive steps for creative relationship between the inhabitants must be seen as an exercise in faith.

Stuhlmann is well aware that the history and the land of Israel have been and still are full of promises. Some are extravagant, some are unfulfillable, but all contain at least the hint of conflict. For this reason he avoids giving support to any of the limiting or exclusivist claims, whether political or religious, which are put forward to back one or other of the opposing sides. But to act as a reconciler, it is necessary to face both ways. Praying with the Psalmist for the peace of Jerusalem may seem a lost cause, but for Stuhlmann it is the only and most heroic stance to adopt in the midst of the present Middle Eastern strife. He places his hopes in what Nes Ammim has always done best, which is to bring together young people from both or all sides, and hope that their personal contacts will allay hostilities and rivalries, and that they will then go on to work for a resolution, or at least the alleviation of the tensions so visibly shared by the inhabitants of this Holy Land. He is sustained by the memory of how, in Germany, for forty years from 1950 onwards, two sides across the Iron Curtain adopted the same kind of biased and obstinate prejudices, and refused any kind of personal interaction across the well-defined and defended border. But then in 1989 all barriers were broken down, and humanity reigned again.

But in Israel, the separation has now lasted for fifty years. And a very deliberate policy of “Boycott, Disengagement and Sanctions” has only increased the suspicions and hostility on both sides. While there are those on the Jewish side who recognize that the occupation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians is a catastrophe for their vision of Zionism, their advocacy of a two-nation solution has achieved nothing, and indeed still raises doubts about its viability. Equally there are those on the Palestinian side who refuse any contact with Jews. Stuhlmann naturally deplores such intransigence or the unwillingness to enter into dialogue even on a personal level. He realizes how difficult a task it remains to be supportive of the Palestinians without becoming an opponent of the Israelis. But he also deplores the widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Arab animosity stirred up in many western countries. Above all, he rejects the continued use of Israeli force to humiliate the Palestinian population under its control and to deny the destructive impact of their land confiscations or the malignant policies of establishing more settlements in the West Bank territories. He is convinced that such tactics seriously damage the Israeli cause, and he knows how offensive such policies are to the many Jewish friends he has found in Israel. The quest for both security for Israel and freedom for Palestine remains elusive and seemingly distressingly distant. The human toll is incalculable.

Zwischen den Stühlen is chiefly directed to his German audience in the hope of inducing a more balanced presentation of Middle Eastern politics. He cannot avoid the feeling that the widespread sympathy for the Palestinians will be interpreted, by some Jews at least, as a replay of the anti-Semitic attitudes shared by many Germans in previous decades. And the call in some western cities for a boycott of Israeli-produced goods evokes a reminder of the similar boycott organized by Josef Goebbels in April 1933. On the other hand, those Germans who loudly profess themselves to be Friends of Israel are seemingly willing to overlook the gross injustices inflicted on the Palestinian population in what they refer to as their “Nakba” or catastrophe. Similarly Stuhlmann regrets the enthusiastic support given to Israeli policies by the right-wing Evangelical Christian Zionists, eagerly awaiting the return of the Messiah. In his view, all such confrontational attitudes can only be harmful for the cause of peace. But at the same time, he greets enthusiastically all demonstrations against anti-Semitism, which must be resolutely opposed. Part of the problem is that both sides like to portray themselves as victims. Israelis harp on their status as survivors of the Holocaust of seventy years ago, and Palestinians see themselves as the victims of a hundred years of Zionist aggression. Both sides justify their defensive measures accordingly, which successfully prevent the growth of any climate of accommodation or agreement. Nevertheless Stuhlmann and his team of expatriate volunteers remain dedicated to their aim of reconciliation and mutual understanding.

Nes Ammim is situated near Acre. As a Christian centre, it stakes a claim to be a place of peaceful encounter for all faiths. But in 2013, it was itself the near-target of rockets fired from somewhere across the Lebanese border. Neither the aggressors nor the reasons for the attack were discernible. But the Israeli defence shield saved it from further damage. The paradox of being protected by the military power he has so readily criticized for its mistreatment of its Palestinian population did not escape Stuhlmann, and only heightened his awareness of the difficulties of trying to face both ways. Steering such a course in the often polarized climate in Germany makes Stuhlmann’s message of reconciliation and inter-faith dialogue even more hazardous, but equally even more necessary. He is in fact attempting to express solidarity with both Israelis and Palestinians without attempting to judge or condemn either side. This short book will undoubtedly assist those who look for the spirit of Nes Ammim to be vindicated in the troubled circumstances of the Holy Land today.