Category Archives: Volume 17 Number 4 (December 2011)

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

St. Martin’s Cathedral, the thousand-year-old seat of the Archbishop of Mainz.

It was exactly seventy years ago that the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, took the striking step of writing a Christmas message to be broadcast by the BBC to his friends in the churches of Germany. For Bell, the message affirmed the unity of all Christians, however they may be divided by national borders and all the extremities of war. Naturally, such a message was acceptable to his own government: it offered its own, unequivocal condemnation of the evils of Nazism and marked a clear line between the ideology of the Hitler regime and the faith of Christians everywhere. Bell addressed some of his words directly to Martin Niemoeller.

In this December issue of the ACCH Quarterly, the broadcast of 24 December 1941 might also remind us that the issues which arose in Germany between 1933 and 1945 were at once the concern of observers, friends and allies abroad. They, too, became participants in the tragic history that unfolded in these years. And we might continue to reflect on the importance of pursuing our own international friendships in a world where creative intellectuals and men and women of faith still seek to make their voice heard in countries governed by dictatorship, repression and alienation.

On behalf of the editors,

Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Bishop George Bell of Chichester, BBC Christmas Message to Germany, 1941:

I AM talking to all Christians in Germany; for all Christians in Germany are oppressed. Many of you are my friends, and it is impossible to forget you now. I am a poor hand still at speaking German, and so I have asked a German pastor who is your friend and my friend, Pastor Hildebrandt of the Confessional Church, to read what I want to say.

This Christmas Eve I want to give you my heart-felt greetings as a fellow Christian. In the years before the war many of us worked together in closest fellowship on the tasks of the Church. My mind goes back to the meetings at the Wartburg of German and British scholars, with Archbishop Soderblom in the midst; and to another memorable conference at Eisenach a year or two later. Some of you have been my guests at the Palace in Chichester. Do you remember that walk, Doctor, in a rather muddy field one spring afternoon, with the Cathedral spire behind us, when we talked of the German Evangelical Church and its organisation? I thank God for the strong stand you have been taking ever since 1933 against those who are trying to destroy Christianity within the German nation. I think of some of you in your homes in Marburg, Hanover and Berlin, where you made me so welcome. I can picture you now, watching the Christmas tree, and thinking of the absent sons and daughters. Do you remember, old friend in Berlin, an evening party of Confessional Church leaders in your house four years ago, when we discussed the latest news of the German Church conflict? I can see your wife and daughter now, so courteously helping us all at the table. How vivid the talk was, and how friendly! Do you remember the young pastor saying, with such prophetic truth, that once a revolution had started like the Nazi revolution, its very logic compelled it to go where the extreme men drove it?

Well, the Nazi revolution has gone where the extreme men drove it, with a vengeance. The Nazi leaders have dealt sharper and sharper blows at the Christian Church. They have attacked everything for which Christianity stands in Germany. And the logic of their attack is compelling them now to try to destroy everything for which Christianity stands all over the earth.

Christmas means Christ and His rule of love. It brings good tidings of great joy, and speaks of peace and goodwill. Could anything be in greater contrast to the injustice and violence with which those who persecute the Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church would enslave all nations? It is good to remind one another on Christmas Eve that you and I have a bond as fellow Christians which all the anti-Christian forces in the world are powerless to destroy.

I remember the sermon Pastor Niemöller preached on New Year’s Day, 1937, in Dahlem, only a few months before his imprisonment. He was very frank about the fight the Nazis were waging against faith in Jesus Christ. But he was full of encouragement. Christians, he said, are not to imagine that they are alone, a forlorn little group, facing certain ruin. ‘In the world nothing counts but what men can see. But God’s Word decrees otherwise. God’s Word speaks plainly enough, even concerning very high personages. … It is truly not worth our while to hang our heads and to be afraid because the wicked spring as grass and the evildoers flourish as though their power were eternal. They spring as grass – yes, but, says God’s Word, only as grass, and they flourish-yes, says God’s Word, but only until they be ‘destroyed for ever.’

Ah, Martin Niemöller, my friend, I rejoice to hear your brave voice. I rejoice to hear your voice too, Bishop Wurm in Stuttgart, and yours, Bishop von Galen in Münster; and all the other voices, soft or loud, which swell the chorus of those who speak up for Christ and His Church in these days when wickedness walks the earth, and destroys freedom, and takes its ghastly toll of human life.

Believe me, fellow Christians in Germany, we understand you. You are not alone. Keep up your faith. Help to save your country’s soul by resisting the evil spirit by which it is now possessed. Your fellow Christians everywhere are by your side. Your struggle is our struggle. The days are dark, but Christmas brings salvation. Light will break through. Hold fast, never yield. Trust in the Power of God, and the Love of Christ.

24 December 1941

Review of Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), ISBN 9780802866172.

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

Eberhard Busch, a Reformed theologian and pastor as well as a former student and assistant of Karl Barth’s, is perhaps best known in the English speaking world for his colorful biographical study of his mentor, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (1976). In this text, still the best introduction to Barth’s Lebenslauf, Busch introduces Barth’s role on behalf of the Confessing Church and in particular his leading role in drafting the Theological Declaration of Barmen in May 1934. Now, in the volume under review, Busch provides a detailed analysis in just over 100 pages of each of the six Barmen theses and a brief introduction to the historical context in 1933 and 1934. The seven chapters are a revised and expanded version of the Warfield Lectures Busch gave at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2004. In addition to his close relationship with Barth, Busch has another personal connection to the Barmen Declaration—his father, a pastor, attended the Barmen meeting and voted for the declaration.

The Barmen Declaration consists of a preamble, six theses, and a conclusion. Each of the six theses begins by quoting Scripture followed by an explanation of the passage and a condemnation of error or damnatio. The theological committee designated to draft the declaration for the Barmen synod consisted of Karl Barth, the relatively unknown Bavarian Lutheran churchman, Thomas Breit, and Hans Asmussen, a pastor and theologian from Altona near Hamburg. Although Asmussen was a Lutheran, and after the war a rather conservative one, he was sympathetic to Barth’s theology during the church struggle. Despite the presence of two Lutherans on the theological committee, there is no question that Barth was the principal author of the declaration. According to Barth, while Breit and Asmussen took an afternoon nap he wrote the six theses. As Barth described it, “The Lutheran Church slept and the Reformed Church kept awake. …The result was that by the evening there was a text. I don’t want to boast, but it was really my text.” Although a Reformed theologian wrote the text, Busch emphasizes that not only did Lutheran and United churchmen accept it at the synod but that many of the churches within the EKD continue subscribe to it or recognize its importance.

The primary significance of the Barmen Declaration for Busch is that the Lutheran, United, and Reformed Protestant churches of Germany confessed together at Barmen that the churches had lost sight of the First Commandment when they applauded Hitler’s rise to power and the consolidation of his rule. Busch points to a veritable explosion of confessions in 1933 in which “the confession of faith in the triune God was rather glibly connected, even mixed in, with the confessional commitment to the German people and its special history, to its authoritarian form of state, its Fuehrer, and its German race.” The Barmen Declaration broke with this tendency. The preamble makes clear its purpose is to confess evangelical truths in light of the errors of the German Christians and the Reich Church government that were devastating the church. “Its strength,” Busch writes, “is that it guides the church in a very particular situation to listen solely to the Word of God, trusting it alone, and obeying it alone.” However, the Barmen Declaration is in no way bound to the situation in which it arose; it is relevant and meaningful today to many churches outside of Germany.

In his analysis of the first thesis Busch addresses the criticism of Pinchas Lapide and Eberhard Bethge that its emphasis on Christ as the “one word of God” and as the one entryway to God and therefore salvation separates the church from the synagogue and has the potential to incite anti-Semitism. Busch respectfully disagrees. He acknowledges that the first thesis and the declaration as a whole failed to state that the church “stands and must stand in an essential bond with the Jews.” Nor did the Barmen Declaration forthrightly condemn anti-Semitism. This, however, was not because the declaration itself was anti-Jewish. In fact, its emphasis on the fundamental importance of the First Commandment “you shall have no other gods before me” and its rejection of a second source of revelation in the German Volk, undermined the anti-Semitism of the German Christians and gave the true church unlimited resources in the Scriptures to rebut anti-Semitic propaganda. If the emphasis on sola scriptura is recognized in the first thesis, “then the exclusive character of the statement that there is one Word will be understandable to Jews,” Busch believes, “as the acknowledgment of the exclusivity of the first commandment.” (32) Jesus Christ then becomes not a wall of separation but “a bridge built by God” between Christians and Jews. Busch provides plenty of evidence that this was the way Barth understood the first thesis but it seems quite likely that German Protestants, perhaps even some of those present at the synod, would have read it not only as a rejection of the German Christian heresy but also of the Jews.

Busch emphasizes the confessional unity around Barmen and its unanimous acceptance by the Lutheran, United, and Reformed churchmen present at the synod. For him the Barmen Declaration is a bridge connecting Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches. There was, however, a group of powerful and highly respected Lutherans who believed strongly that the theological consensus reached at Barmen was an unacceptable dilution of Lutheran theology. The number of critics in fact increased when the German Christian threat diminished after 1934 and especially after 1945 when confessional unity was no longer an urgent necessity. Some Lutherans, like the Erlangen theologian and church historian Hermann Sasse, opposed Barmen because he believed its theological content clashed with the traditional Lutheran Confessions. Sasse asserted in 1936, “He who recognizes the Theological Declaration of Barmen as a doctrinal decision has thereby surrendered the Augsburg Confession and with it the confession of the orthodox Evangelical Church. What is pure and false doctrine, what is and is not to be preached in the Lutheran Church can only be decided by a synod which is united in the confession of Lutheran doctrine, and not an assembly at which Lutherans, Reformed, Consensus United, Pietists, and Liberals were all equal participants, as was the case in Barmen.” Others, such as Paul Althaus, a professor of systematic theology at Erlangen University, seemed more agitated by what they believed were Barmen’s political implications, particularly a curtailment of the state’s authority in thesis five. And Bishop Hans Meiser of Bavaria exemplifies those who voted for the Barmen Declaration primarily to register their opposition to the German Christians—not because they held the declaration itself in high esteem. Fortunately, these objections and reservations did not impact the vote at the Barmen synod.

The publication of Busch’s Warfield lectures in an expanded and revised English edition provides an outstanding resource for students and scholars of the Barmen Declaration, the Confessing Church, and the Church Struggle. Nowhere have the six theses been so lucidly, insightfully, and fairly analyzed in so few pages. Busch’s astute theological analysis of Barmen is refreshingly accessible for non-theologians because he brings to it his many years of committed pastoral and ecumenical service.

Review of Ulrich Bräuel und Stefan Samerski, eds., Ein Bischof vor Gericht: Der Prozeß gegen den Danziger Bischof Carl Maria Splett 1946

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Ulrich Bräuel und Stefan Samerski, eds., Ein Bischof vor Gericht: Der Prozeß gegen den Danziger Bischof Carl Maria Splett 1946 (Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2005), 313pp. ISBN: 3-929759-98-5.

By Diana Jane Beech, University of British Columbia

Picture the scene: It is 1933 in the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk); a semi-autonomous city-state situated between Poland and Germany, under the special protection of the League of Nations. Life in the Free City up until now had been peaceable, with the majority of the population from Germanic heritage, yet represented abroad by Poland in an effort to ensure sufficient Polish access to the sea. For a young German Roman Catholic pastor in the Free City, a sympathetic attitude towards the Poles was indispensable, as was a knowledge of the Polish language. This was characteristic of the early career of Carl Maria Splett (1898-1964). Following his ordination into the Roman Catholic Church in 1921, he returned to Danzig in 1924 to serve the city’s mixed German and Polish congregations.

Once the local National Socialist (Nazi) Party succeeded in taking over the government of Danzig in 1933, however, the dynamics of Splett’s ministry changed dramatically. Despite pressure from the Nazis to install their own candidate as Bishop of Danzig following Bishop Edward O’Rourke’s resignation in 1938, Carl Maria Splett was appointed to the post by Pope Pius XII. Following the annexation of Danzig to Germany in 1939, Splett was further appointed the Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Culm. He was, thereby, firmly forced into a double-bind, in which he endeavoured to maintain friendly relations with the Poles on the one hand, and the Nazi government on the other.

Initially, Splett spurned Nazi demands and refused to prohibit the use of Polish in his diocese. Revenge murders by the Nazis of Polish-speaking pastors within Splett’s bishopric nevertheless forced him to retract his decision. He henceforth banned Polish from all churches under his jurisdiction in the spring of 1940. Under increasing pressure from the Nazi regime, Splett most controversially replaced Polish clergy with German priests, and ordered the complete removal of Polish signs and names from his diocese. In spite of all this, however, Splett is still said to have unofficially continued to support priests who continued to use the Polish language, and provided financial aid to the families of those priests arrested and murdered by the Nazis.

Splett remained in Danzig throughout the Second World War and continued to work both with and against the Nazi regime in an attempt to find his own modus vivendi to survive the war. Once Soviet troops captured the city in March 1945, Splett was arrested but released shortly afterwards. It was not until August 9, 1945, that Polish Cardinal August Hlond called for Splett’s resignation. When he refused to give up his bishopric, Polish officials arrested Splett and put him on trial for collaborating with the Nazis and oppressing the Polish people. Splett was eventually found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison on February 1, 1946.

It is this trial which is the focus of Ulrich Bräuel and Stefan Samerski’s edited volume, Ein Bischof vor Gericht: Der Prozeß gegen den Danziger Bischof Carl Maria Splett 1946. As Bräuel and Samerski make clear in their introduction to the volume, not only has Splett’s own debatable conduct in Nazi-occupied Danzig made him one of the most disputed figures in Polish and German history, but his trial by Poland’s post-war communist regime has sparked recent debate as to whether Splett’s case was a convenient way for the communists to take up battle against the Church as a whole. In an effort to uncover whether Carl Maria Splett fell victim to the ideological agendas of two consecutive totalitarian regimes, Bräuel and Samerski have collected essays from both Polish and German academics from a wide variety of disciplines, which examine Splett’s own history, traditions, and theology. As well, his trial is analysed from both its political and legal perspectives. Even today, there are those who believe Splett acted honourably under the precarious conditions of Nazism. They refer to his trial and lengthy prison sentence in order to highlight the injustices he endured under communism. His critics on the other hand continue to view his punishment as confirming their condemnation of Splett and his anti-Polish directives during the war. It is the editors’ intention, therefore, to investigate both Splett’s actions and those of the Polish authorities that condemned him so that they can begin to reconcile the disparity of opinions that surround Splett’s life and trial.

The volume begins with a short but polemical piece by Jan Bernard Szlaga (21-24), who examines the historical legacy of Bishop Splett and firmly proclaims his belief that Splett was loyal to the Poles, yet prohibited by his powerlessness in the face of Nazi tyranny. Szlaga’s opinion piece is swiftly followed by an overview of the so-called ‘Splett debate’ in Poland by Thomas Urban (25-44), who offers a survey of the Polish reception of Splett, from his branding as a “Hitlerist” in the immediate post-war era to the steps taken towards redeeming his reputation from 1989 to the early twenty-first century.

Stefan Samerski examines the historical context surrounding Bishop Splett’s controversial behaviour during the war (45-93). He provides a comprehensive account of Splett’s formative years, his professional life in the Church, and the influences of ecclesiastical and international politics on his wartime actions. Ulrich Bräuel then provides a detailed analysis of Splett’s trial (95-143), including in his report German translations of the original Polish indictments against the bishop.

The specifically ecclesiastical influences on Splett’s life and trial are covered in the volume by both Thomas A. Amann, who writes on the aspects of ecclesiastical law that affected Splett’s case (145-169), and by Daniel Fickenscher, who provides an insight into how national languages have been traditionally used in Roman Catholic church services and confessions (172-204). Hans-Werner Rautenberg examines the problem surrounding language usage even further in his chapter on the patchwork nature of ethnicities in western Prussia and the impact that this particular mosaic of languages, cultures, and beliefs has had on Catholic liturgical practice in the area (206-246).

Since the analysis of the historical contexts surrounding Splett’s life and trial would not be complete without an appreciation of the political climate in which he was prosecuted, the volume ends with a focus on the communist Polish state, which determined Splett’s fate. Miroslaw Piotrowski’s examination of the Church and the state in Poland in the initial years after the Second World War offers a chronological account of the state’s increasing hostility against the Catholic Church (247-261). This is followed by Lukasz Kamiński’s study on propaganda trials in Poland between 1945 and 1956 (263-280), which provokes thought as to how Splett’s own case fits into the trope of such ‘show’ trials. The final word in the volume is, however, left to Stephan H. Pfürtner (281-313), who considers the case of Bishop Carl Maria Splett as a “Zeitzeugnis”, or a true product of its time. By demonstrating the fine boundaries between secular and spiritual obligations, and between duties to two distinct nationalities and cultures, Pfürtner closes the volume with the assertion that Splett’s life was ultimately shaped by his love for humanity—an expression of the love of Jesus Christ which he preached about on a daily basis.

Ein Bischof vor Gericht encourages its readers, before defending or condemning his actions, to view Carl Maria Splett as a figure firmly trapped by the competing demands of his Catholic tradition, his almost dual nationality, and, most importantly, by the consecutive political climates of National Socialism and communism in which he strove to exist. What Bräuel and Samerski’s edited work has done, therefore, is expose the importance of thoroughly appreciating the historical contexts behind not just the lives of churchmen in Nazi-occupied territories, but also behind their post-war legacies, which may have been shaped and distorted by post-war ideologies and political agendas. All in all, this collection of essays should be praised for shedding much-needed light on the historical standing of churchmen such as Carl Maria Splett, who acted and subsequently defended their actions in the best way their historical predicaments allowed them to.

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 2011), 344pp. ISBN: 978-3-89971-690-0.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

This volume represents the first collective attempt by the German Free Churches to come to terms with the Nazi past and specifically address their relationships with Jews and Judaism. The connecting themes, presented in the subtitle, are familiar to those who study the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches in this era: manipulated theology, long-standing traditions of antisemitism, and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing in the postwar period.

As a collection of essays written by different authors, each chapter addresses an individual denomination. After an opening essay by Wolfgang Heinrichs on the Free Churches’ views on Jews in the nineteenth century, there are contributions by Claus Bernet (Quakers), Diether Götz Lichdi (Mennonites), Andreas Liese (Plymouth Brethren or Brüderbewegung), Michel Weyer (Methodists), Gottfried Sommer (Pentecostals), Andrea Stübind (Baptists), Hartmut Weyel (the Free Evangelical Association), Volker Stolle (Independent Evangelical Lutherans), Dietrich Meyer (Moravian Brethren or Brüdergemeine), and Daniel Heinz (Seventh-Day Adventists). In an appendix, Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer offers geographical breadth with a discussion of two Free Church pastors in Austria (Baptist and Methodist).

Although the scope and richness of sources varies among the essays, the exercise of placing these largely independent narratives alongside each other proves fruitful. In some cases a pattern emerges across the groups: the formation of an image of “the Jew” in the heyday of late-nineteenth-century racial antisemitism, from which essential elements were adapted by the Free Churches. In other cases it is a group’s unique characteristics that are highlighted. Regarding aid and rescue, the proverbial exception that proves the rule is most certainly the Quakers. No other group engaged in organized assistance, solidarity and protest as did the German Quakers, although Claus Bernet argues that they could not have done it without the support networks of the international Quaker community.

It is nearly impossible to draw broad conclusions about the Free Churches as a category since they come together by shared status not shared histories. Still, Daniel Heinz offers a few important observations in his forward. Because of their minority status, the Free Churches lived in the shadow of the complicated relationships between the larger churches and the Nazi state. Many of them experienced relative freedom and acceptance in the form of corporation status in the early years of dictatorship, 1933-38 (10). This is not to say that their experience under Nazism was easy, as they had their share of repression and harassment, but the temptation of legitimacy in the eyes of the state turned out to be too big to resist. For the most part, the Free Churches were not only uncritical of the political developments in their country but appreciated them (10).

Not surprisingly, the available sources are uneven. Much is written in church publications about what the clergy and academics thought about the Jews before 1933 but not so much on how they interacted with them and even less about what the laity thought and did. This situation often leads to a reliance on the earlier material. In some cases the chronology gets lost in the analysis. Most of the authors in this present volume choose to engage three topics, which could broadly be described as: what members of a particular group thought about the Jews, how they reacted to Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and what they did (or did not do) about it.

The Judenfrage was a scholarly topic with immediacy among all the Free Churches in the early twentieth century, as it was in the mainline Protestant church. Of particular value in this volume are the discussions of those groups with a strong pre-millennial eschatology that assigned a special place to the Jews in the end-times (the Pentecostals, the Adventists, and the Brethren). Not one of these groups fostered any sense of kinship with modern Jews. Instead, they rejected the theological concept of Israel’s eternal election and appropriated many of the arguments of contemporary racial antisemitism.

Although it is difficult to demonstrate that there are concrete connections between theology and behaviour, more than one author makes this case. In the context of the Free Lutherans, Volker Stolle argues their discriminative categorizations of Jews had a direct impact on their evaluation of Nazi Jewish policy, especially the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (226). In the case of the Pentecostals, their strong pietistic tradition led them to interpret political happenings as the hand of God, with which they should not interfere (133).

The second way in which many of the authors engage the topic is to discuss how the Free Churches acted and reacted to anti-Jewish measures after 1933, such as the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. Andrea Stübind does an exceptionally good job at placing the Baptists in the wider framework of persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. She also grapples with the particularly thorny issue of the persecution of Baptists of Jewish origin.

A common explanation among the Free Churches for their public support of the Nazi regime—either passive or active—was the fear of being shut down. Virtually every group’s leadership lived under this fear but it seems as though this argument cannot be made for the laity. Daniel Heinz points out that while most Seventh-Day Adventists “did not find the courage to swim against the storm” of anti-Jewish policy, there are several cases of Adventists who opposed the state for religious reasons: refusing to work on Sunday, refusing to give the Hitler salute, and in a few cases, refusing military duty (287). These acts of insubordination did not carry over to opposing anti-Jewish legislation. Sometimes they led to personal penalties such as fines and jail sentences but they did not cause the organization to be shut down. In a similar manner, the Quakers were openly assisting Jews and concentration camp inmates well into the 1940s, and as Claus Bernet shows, it was all done in public (64). These examples show that there was some room for protest in Germany, even in the war years.

Nearly every group has a few anecdotal accounts of people within their ranks who helped Jews in one way or another. The most important point that emerges from these ten separate groups is that outside of the Quakers, aid and rescue happened only on an individual level, not an institutional level. People helped both strangers and neighbours, devout and secular Jews, within Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but they did so on their own initiative and with their own funds. When questioned later about their motivation, they often spoke of a common humanity rather than any theological connections to Judaism, a sentiment reminiscent of the famous Protestants of Le Chambon (63).

Especially pertinent to current trends in Holocaust research is Diether Götz Lichdi’s discussion of the Mennonite connection to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Many Mennonites lived in the immediate area and benefited from prisoner labour on their farms and in their factories (72). Until 1942 there were only a few Jews among the prisoners but that changed as the ghettoes in the cities were emptied and many more prisoners were brought to Stutthof. There are numerous reports of Mennonites sneaking food and clothing to Jewish prisoners. These complicated dynamics are revealed to us today only because of the fact that the Mennonites had become a de facto ethnic group in Central Europe—in many cases it is “Mennonite-sounding names” that Lichdi uses for evidence. This characteristic puts the Mennonites in a unique position among the Free Churches, making it easier to analyze their grassroots participation in and resistance to the Holocaust.

Brief mention should be made of which Free Churches were included in this volume. Many of those that today consider themselves to be Freikirchen are included. The chapter on the Pentecostals was especially useful, as there is very little written on them elsewhere. A notable absence was the Salvation Army (Heilsarmee), which was similar to many of these other groups in size, status, and origin.

Overall, this book is indicative of the maturation of the field of German church history of the Nazi period. Its contributors bring the Free Churches into current scholarly discussions on Christian antisemitism, aid and rescue during the Holocaust, grassroots participation and postwar processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Review of Margaret Ford, ed., An Evangelical Family Revealed: The Bickersteth & Monier-Williams Letters & Diaries 1880-1918

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Margaret Ford, ed., An Evangelical Family Revealed: The Bickersteth & Monier-Williams Letters & Diaries 1880-1918 (York: Ford Publishing, 2010), ISBN 9780956721808.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Ecclesiastical biographies are no longer in fashion. Especially not of Victorian worthies, already entombed in two or three volumes, replete with piety and patriotism. So Margaret Ford has some hurdles to overcome in her retelling the story of the lives of the Bickersteth and Monier-Williams families, who were staunchly evangelical Protestants, many of whose male members were ordained clergymen, and who all believed that God had granted Great Britain the responsibility of ruling over her world-wide Empire and if possible of missionizing it.

Ford brings to this task an enormous and obvious sympathy for the lives and careers of a very large, if like-minded, cast of characters from the late Victorian upper middle class. She was fortunate to find in the Bodleian a huge treasure trove of Bickersteth papers, and assiduously tracked down an equally fascinating collection of Monier-Williams records still in private hands. From these rich sources she has produced a splendidly revealing portrait of the professional and private lives of these two intertwined families which carries conviction, just because they were so representative of their class and generation.

She focuses particularly on the careers of the Reverend Sam Bickersteth, his wife Ella, nee Monier-Williams, and their six sons, all of whom were young men caught up in the excitement and catastrophe of the Great War. The climax of her account lies in the experiences, spiritual crises and subsequent adjustments they underwent between 1914 and 1918, vividly drawn from the numerous letters and records their mother Ella compiled and pasted into a War Diary, which eventually extended to nine bulky volumes.

But first Ford gives a valuable picture of the evangelical background during the earlier nineteenth century. God-fearing, earnest, enthusiastic for service to the Church and the Empire, the Bickersteths were notable in being more broad-minded than most evangelicals, always placing strong emphasis on the sacraments in their Church of England worship, and being more tolerant in their relations with members of other Christian denominations.

Sam’s father had risen to be Bishop of Exeter, and was a redoubtable father figure with sixteen children, very dedicated to propagating the evangelical witness to Christian ethics, and as yet untroubled by the kind of doubts raised by Biblical criticism or Darwinian science. These were the qualities Sam inherited as a hard-working parish priest, with no special intellectual gifts but a strong devotion to the pastoral care of his flock. His ambition to become a bishop like his father was never realised, but for twelve years he was called to serve as Vicar of Leeds, the largest parish in that city, with a huge proto-cathedral of a church, and a staff of no fewer than fourteen curates. His wife Ella was the daughter of the Oxford Professor of Sanskrit, many of whose relatives had served with distinction in India in both the civil and military services. Ella brought to her marriage a single-minded determination to ensure her boys were brought up in the Christian faith of their forebears, which she shared without reservation. Both she and Sam hoped for his preferment and were not free from the kind of social snobbery which was extremely deferential to their superiors in the aristocracy, but cut them off from associating with anyone not considered a gentleman. Such were the values they instilled in their sons.

Though not wealthy, Sam and Ella were determined, as were many others of their class, to send their sons to the best boarding schools, which were already known as the training grounds for Britain’s leading elites. So from the age of eight, these boys were sent away from home, but expected to write to their parents every Sunday. They continued this habit throughout their undergraduate days when, one after another, the boys all went up to Oxford and took over the same rooms in its most prestigious college, Christ Church. These letters were carefully preserved, and as carefully replied to, often with advice as to how the boys should behave. Private prayer should not be neglected. The Sabbath should be strictly observed. Bible reading, and personal dedication to witnessing for the faith with a concentration on each individual’s search for spiritual perfection were constant themes, in the tradition set by previous generations. Ford is clearly conscious how desperately dated such admonitions to adult undergraduates must appear today. She is critical of such values, but at no point censorious. She sees Oxford as the final stage in the casting of the mould which would be tested in the crucible of the Great War.

By 1914 the eldest son Monier had already taken holy orders and served his first curacy. The second brother Geoffrey was studying to take up an academic career. Julian had gone out to Australia as chaplain to the Church of England Grammar School in Melbourne. Similarly Burgon had responded to the call for missionary volunteers and was serving in western Canada amongst the tough work gangs building railways in distant Alberta. But when war was declared all six sons responded with patriotic fervour. Julian and Burgon returned to England as soon as possible, and were soon posted to France. Their younger brothers Morris and Ralph were also recruited as infantry officers in the trenches. Tragically, in July 1916, Morris was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It took all the family’s Christian fortitude to accept his loss, or to believe his sacrifice had not been in vain. But his death only led to a greater resolve to carry on with their evangelical mission as his legacy to them all.

In 1917 Sam moved to the easier post of being a Residentiary Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, where he ministered for another twenty years. Shortly after the war’s end, Julian was called to go back to Australia to become headmaster of a leading boys’ school, and Burgon returned to his beloved Canada. He eventually became a highly popular director of Hart House, the men’s student union of the University of Toronto, where he organized programmes to enhance the intellectual and artistic life of the students along the best Oxford lines. Both men eventually retired to Canterbury and looked after their mother who survived until she was nearly ninety-six, still secure in her fervent evangelical faith.

Several decades later, following in good Bickersteth footsteps, Sam’s grandson John became Bishop of Bath and Wells. In 1987 he organized, as his great grandfather had done, a family reunion in the Palace grounds, attended by a hundred and eighty-seven family members. No fewer than eighteen of these were ordained to the Church of England ministry. All of them, and presumably their descendants too, will now be most grateful to Margaret Ford for her captivating account of their family’s intimate hopes and fears in their daily lives during the late Victorian/early Edwardian period. Her portrait is lovingly based on extensive research into a not untypical vicarage household during those turbulent and troubled years of a century ago. And the picture she reveals of the joys and anxieties they encountered on their spiritual pilgrimage illustrates a tradition of evangelical witness and service which still has its appeal today.

Review of Roger P. Minert, In Harm’s Way. East German Latter-day Saints in World War II

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Roger P. Minert, In Harm’s Way. East German Latter-day Saints in World War II (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2009) 545 pp. ISBN 878-0-8425-2746-0.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Roger Minert’s large-scale book is about one of the smaller religious communities, in East
Germany, in this case the Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons. But the scope of his investigation is limited to the short period of World War II, and mainly to the crucial
period of its final catastrophic ending in 1945-6. This account thus focuses on the time before the imposition of communist rule in the German Democratic Republic, but foreshadows that much-dreaded development.

Rather than investigating the relationship of the Church to the governmental authorities, Minert’s interest is limited to describing in detail the lives of individual Mormons. He concentrates on a biographical approach, seeking to identify and record the experiences and witness of as many as possible of the ordinary members of each branch of the Church, and to draw up a complete listing of all who died during this period. To this end, he began, fifty years after these dramatic events, to interview all available surviving eyewitnesses, to locate biographies or autobiographies by or about eyewitnesses, and to study all available church records. Out of some thirteen thousand German members in 1939, he obtained interviews with five hundred survivors, who in turn also supplied first-person narratives or written stories of their own lives or those of deceased relatives.

Mormons have a strong interest in genealogy. So the records held in Salt Lake City, Utah, provide the historian with much help in linking family histories together. In addition many of the East German mission records for this period survived intact. (It is however not clear from his text why his study was limited solely to the East German Mission). The East German Mormon community, divided into districts and branches (or local parishes) was almost entirely an urban and lower-class phenomenon. These congregations contained almost no professional people. Most of the men were labourers or craftsmen. Only a few possessed their own meeting places, mostly using renting rooms in office-buildings in unremarkable parts of town. But their working-class solidarity was compounded by their loyalty to their fellow Mormons. The pattern of church organization, introduced from the United States, was largely patriarchal, while spiritual authority rested in men chosen or appointed for their dedication to the Mormon beliefs.

After all American missionaries were withdrawn in August 1939, the local branches became more dependent on each other. On the other hand, the conscription of all the younger male members into the German armed forces left many branches without leadership. In many cases, it was years before these men returned from prisoner-of-war camps. In many other cases, they never came back. Minert has successfully carried out the immense task of recording the names and biographical details of all the Saints who lost their lives during the war-time period. As well, he has interspersed narrative passages or vivid and valuable reminiscences drawn from his interviews.

Naturally the main focus is on the shattering events of 1944-5, when East Germany was assailed by the relentless bombing campaigns by the American and British air forces, and then conquered and ravaged by the invading Soviet armies. Many families were expelled from their homes, or had already fled to find refuge elsewhere. The perspective is of course that of the victims, who sustained each other by their devotion to their Mormon faith. Inevitably there is considerable repetition in these accounts, which, predictably, emphasize the sufferings endured, often heroically. The large number of surviving photographs, which Minert has reproduced, add to the immediacy of the narratives.

In his conclusion, Minert touches briefly on the vexed question of Mormon attitudes towards National Socialism. A small number, possibly five per cent, joined the Nazi Party, but the vast majority remained passive though loyal citizens. Nothing in their religious heritage led them to oppose the ruling power, or to refuse to join in its aggressive wars. Any opposition would have led to personal and collective suffering. “If there is any question of guilt on the part of the Latter-day Saints for tolerating an evil government (and in my mind there is not) they certainly paid a terrible price for their lack of action” (519).

This is church history from the pew upwards, but is outstanding as an example of meticulous
record-keeping. The surviving family members must be enormously grateful to have such a
tribute from a dedicated fellow Mormon in distant U.S.A.

Article Note: Roman Catholics and the Establishment of the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Roman Catholics and the Establishment of the Third Reich

Larry Eugene Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933-1934,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 272-318, and Martin R. Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 236-264.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum^{^[1]}

For the German Catholic Church—her princes, her politicians, her clergy and her laity—the period from January 30, 1933, to June 30, 1934 was replete with decisions which would impact and even dictate the path of her faithful until May 8, 1945. During these seventeen months until the shock of the so-called Blood Purge, most dramatic and decisive were the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April 1933.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Law (Ermächtingungsgesetz), or formally, the Law to Relieve the Distress of Volk and Reich (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich) by a vote of 441-94. Only the Social Democrats voted against the law which abolished democracy and the constitutional state.^{^[2]} On that same day, in his speech to the Reichstag, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler promised to “respect all treaties between the churches and the states” and stated that the “rights” of the churches would “not be infringed upon.”^{^[3]} In response, on March 28, the Fulda Bishops’ Conference (Fuldaer Bischofskonferenz) lifted the ban on Catholic membership in the NSDAP.^{^[4]}

That same day (March 28), Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. Everywhere in Germany, the NSDAP established local action committees which were to disseminate and organize the boycott.^{^[5]} On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service abolished the status of the nonpartisan civil servant with life-long tenure. The law specified Communists and Jews, though ultimately, it also affected Socialists and other opponents of the regime (some 30,000 persons total). It contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service.^{^[6]} Lest we imagine today that no individual living in the midst of these events could possibly have understood their enormity and their relationship to German and universal Catholicism, in mid-April 1933, contemporary observer Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI:

All of us who are true children of the Church and observe the events in Germany with open eyes fear the worst for the reputation of the Church, if the Church continues to remain silent. We are also convinced that this silence will be not able to buy long-term freedom from the German government [for the Catholic Church] in the future. For the time being, the [Nazi] fight against Catholicism will be fought in secret and in less brutal form than the fight against Jewry, but it will be no less systematic. It will not be long until no Catholics in Germany have a position unless they prescribe to the new course unconditionally.^{^[7]}

Professors Larry Jones and Martin Menke provide us with two fine articles that speak to the question that Catholics across Europe increasingly faced from the nineteenth century on: how should Catholics engage what Menke calls “the modern evolving secular state,”^{^[8]} and, for German Catholics, the National Socialist state? Menke offers analysis of the German Catholic Center Party’s decision to vote for the March 23 Enabling Act—this after rejecting National Socialism as “incompatible with Catholic teaching”^{^[9]} during the Weimar Republic and in the early months of National Socialist rule. Jones provides the perspective of the right wing German Catholic nobility, whom he calls “Catholic conservatives,” the majority of whom rejected the Center Party as too liberal and opted to support the right wing parties of the DNVP and NSDAP. Jones focuses especially on the political decisions and initiatives of devout Catholic Franz von Papen. Papen, notes Jones, bears the distinction of being “the one person more responsible than anyone else for Hitler’s installation as chancellor on January 30, 1933”^{^[10]} and “the driving force behind the negotiations that culminated in the conclusion of the concordat” between the Holy See and National Socialist Germany.^{^[11]}

In responding to the German National Socialist state, German Catholic Centrists rejected it before March 1933. German Catholic conservatives embraced it. Both did so in pursuit of the same end—to ensure that the secular state espoused their (quite different) understandings of Catholic values. Menke argues convincingly that scholars must look at the events surrounding the Center Party’s vote for the Enabling Law in March 1933 and the subsequent negotiations between Rome and Berlin to conclude the concordat from early April to late July 1933 in the context of the key encyclicals Diuturnum Illud (1881) and Immortale Dei (1885). These encyclicals “defined Catholic teaching about the state and the role of Catholics as subjects and citizens of the state.”^{^[12]} In what became known as the principle of “Accidentalism,” governments were “accidents of history” while the “Church was eternal.” Catholics “should accept any existing authority as legitimate and deserving of Catholics’ loyalty and service as long as the life of the Church remained intact.”^{^[13]} One should look also, argues Menke, at the pattern of Center Party decision-making that came to characterize the Weimar years:

The Center Party had developed a well-practiced if uncomfortable pattern of crisis-management. First, the party maintained a principled position determined by the party members’ own perception of Catholic values as well as by a deeply emotional German patriotism characterized largely by nationalist outrage at Germany’s fate since its defeat in 1918. Then, as a given crisis mounted, the party shied away from any position of responsibility that not only would be incompatible with the Center’s professed values, but also would expose the Center to future recriminations on the political right. Once a crisis threatened the welfare of millions of Germans by risking foreign occupation or economic collapse and anarchy, in other words when a crisis threatened the German people itself, the Center forced itself to accept the unacceptable and bear the unbearable and supply the German government with parliamentary majorities and cabinet leadership to resolve the crisis. Until 1933, this proved largely successful.^{^[14]}

For Catholic conservatives, argues Jones, decision-making was driven by “a deeply conspiratorial conception of history that required them to act (emphasis mine) to protect the values and institutions they held dear” and to embrace “an organic theory of the state and society in which the rights and privileges of the individual were limited by the welfare of the whole and in which the illusory equality of the democratic age would be replaced by respect for the authority of God’s moral law.”^{^[15]}

Centrists who voted for the Enabling Law hoped their vote would protect the cultural life and religious life of the church; Catholic conservative support for the Enabling Law, and Papen’s participation in the National Socialism government as vice chancellor, reflected an active “desire to create a power base” within the structure of the Nazi state.^{^[16]} From such a base, Papen and other Catholic conservatives could build, promote, and incorporate with National Socialism their understanding of Catholic values. Both the Centrists and the Catholic conservatives were to be bitterly disappointed, for Edith Stein’s prophetic words of April 1933, that Catholics in Germany would need to “prescribe to the new course unconditionally,” meant they had sold their souls in vain.

Jones brings personal papers from archives across Germany to the table for his rich and detailed account of the Catholic conservative encounter with Nazism from January 1933 until the Blood Purge of 1934, including the personal papers of Engelbert Freiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg, Max Buchner, Alexander von Elverfeldt, Franz Graf von Galen, Max ten Hompel, the Krupp family, Ferdinand Freiherr von Lüninck, August von Mackensen, Paul Reusch, Emil Ritter, and Otto Schmidt-Hannover. Jones writes that “there is no study of the Catholic aristocracy in the Third Reich” (313, f.159) and he is well-poised to fill this gap. He is among the first U.S. scholars to use the records of the Vatican archives released in 2003/2006 and available in microfilm at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and his findings demonstrate their promise to add yet greater nuance and complexity to the bedeviled months between January 30, 1933 and June 30, 1934.

Both Menke and Jones demonstrate a mastery of the vast secondary source literature, the majority of which is published in German. Here they bring what has been an incredibly dense and robust debate in Germany for decades to this side of the Atlantic, citing the work of Gerhard Besier, Thomas Brechenmacher, Heinz Hürten, Rudolf Morsey, Konrad Repgen, Karsten Ruppert, Klaus Scholder, Ludwig Volk, and Hubert Wolf, to name only some of the important scholarship available in German since the late 1960s.

For scholars of the German Catholic Church during the Third Reich, these two articles are must-reads. Too often in current historiography, the response of German Catholics to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews is viewed separately from their response to Nazi treatment of Catholics. In reality, their own embattled state deeply influenced and affected their decisions with regard to mistreatment of Jews. Nazi anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish policy must be studied together for the most nuanced understanding of the German Catholic church in these years. Precisely such pain-staking and detailed analysis of strands of German Catholic thinking, in this case Centrists and Catholic conservatives, must be placed side-by-side with analysis of German Catholic responses, or lack of response, to persecution of Jews and other non-Catholics.

[1] The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

[2] Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig, eds., Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 237.

[3] Larry Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933-1934,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 290; citing excerpts from Hitler’s statement to the Reichstag, March 23, 1933, reprinted in Hubert Gruber, ed., Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus 1930–1945: Ein Bericht in Quellen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 34–35 (Jones, footnote 69).

[4] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 291.

[5] Zentner and Bedürftig, eds., Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, 104.

[6] Ibid., 154-155 and 145-146.

[7] Original German: “Wir alle, die wir treue Kinder der Kirche sind und die Verhältnisse in Deutschland mit offenen Augen betrachten, fürchten das schlimmste für das Ansehen der Kirche, wenn das Schweigen noch länger anhält. Wir sind auch der Überzeugung, dass dieses Schweigen nicht imstande sein wird, auf die Dauer den Frieden mit der gegenwärtigen deutschen Regierung zu erkaufen. Der Kampf gegen den Katholizismus wird vorläufig noch in der Stille und in weniger brutalen Formen geführt wie gegen das Judentum, aber nicht weniger systematisch. Es wird nicht mehr lange dauern, dann wird in Deutschland kein Katholik mehr ein Amt haben, wenn er sich nicht dem neuen Kurs bedingungslos verschreibt.” Letter from Dr. Edith Stein to Pope Pius XI, No Date. AA.EE.SS. (Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari) Germania (Germany), Anno (Years) 1933-1945, Hitler’s Chancellery 1933-45. Pos. 643, Fasc.158-161. RG 76.001M: Selected Records from the Vatican Archives, 1865-1939, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. An English translation of the April 1933 letter appears on the website of the International Council for Christians and Jews (ICCJ) at the following link: http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=1897 (accessed 8/31/11). Historians knew of the existence of the letter, which Edith Stein referenced in her 1938 autobiography, but it could only be read for the first time with the opening of the Vatican Archives in 2003, when the petition could be read and tracked for the first time (Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 183). The April 1933 letter is referenced and discussed in the following works: Gerhard Besier with the collaboration of Francesca Piombo, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, translated by W. R. Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 125-126; Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000, original edition 1964), 295-296, Konrad Repgen, “Hitlers ‘Machtergreifung,’ die christlichen Kirchen, die Judenfrage und Edith Steins Eingabe an Pius XI. Vom [9.] April 1933,” in Edith-Stein-Jahrbuch 10 (2004), 31-69; Wolf, Pope and Devil, 182-190 and 193-194; and numerous other works. Dr. Stein’s letter was attached to a cover letter dated 12 April 1933 from Archabbot Raphael Walzer, OSB, of Beuron monastery. Cardinal Pacelli did present her petition to the pope in a private audience on 20 April 1933. The heading above his six agenda items for that meeting reads “the archabbot of Beuron sends letters against the National Socialists.” There exists “no evidence in the archives of any other letters that Walzer might have sent.” Pacelli did not note down under this heading any instructions from the pope. See Wolf, Pope and Devil, 188, citing “Audience of April 20, 1933; ASV, A.E.S., Germania, 4 periodo, post. 430a, fasc. 348, fol.30r-v.” Wolf notes that if Pius XI did not articulate any specific instructions, Pacelli would not have made any notes, and thus the task of responding to a submission would have been assigned to Pacelli, the secretary of state, as a “routine matter” (Wolf, Pope and Devil, 188). Cardinal Pacelli answered Archabbot Walzer’s letter in a response dated 20 April 1933. It stated: “May I thank your Grace especially for the safe arrival of the kind letter of the 12^th inst. and the attachment which came with it. I leave to your discretion to let the sender know in a suitable way that her message has been duly put before His Holiness. With you I pray God to take his holy church into his especial protection in these difficult times, and grant all the children of the Church the grace of courage and splendor of mind which are the presuppositions of ultimate victory.” See Besier and Piombo, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 126; and Wolf, Pope and Devil, 189-190. For a discussion of the contents of the letter, see Freiburger Rundbrief: Zeitschrift für christlich-jüdische Begegnung, Neue Folge Heft 1-4 (2003), especially essays by Werner Kaltefleiter (“Der Vatikan öffnet sein Geheimarchiv”) and Elias H. Füllenbach (“Dass die Kirche Christi ihre Stimme erhebe”).

[8] Martin R. Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 236.

[9] Ibid., 238.

[10] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 280.

[11] Ibid., 294.

[12] Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty,” 236.

[13] Ibid., 237.

[14] Ibid., 257.

[15] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 275.

[16] Ibid., 300.

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18 no. 1 (January 2007): 43-65.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Pratt and Göb argue that Christian-Muslim relations in Germany are basically sound, but “a growing sense of unease keeps public interest closely attentive to any conflicts between Muslim habits and secular laws and customs” (44). Such fears have had an impact on inter-religious dialogue, where the focus has shifted from “theological rapprochement” to “questions of acceptance of democratic and liberal values” (53). The notion that Islam might be incompatible with the modern, secular state mirrors suspicions about German Catholics during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s.

The authors describe a wide range of organizations involved in dialogue activities within Germany, including the Intercultural Council, the Round Table of World Religions, Abrahamic Forums, the Christian-Islamic Society, the World Council for Religion and Peace, and the Coordination Council of Associations of Christian-Islamic Dialogue in Germany. The challenges of this work are significant. Christian theologians are often more theologically liberal than the Islamic laypersons they encounter in interfaith conversations. Nominal Muslims and Christians are less hung up on theological differences but have little interest in interreligious dialogue as such. The prevalence of hostile media images of Islam is also a barrier to productive discussion, as are some misguided attempts to use dialogue as a way to pressure Muslims to make symbolic, public affirmations of “Western values”.

The authors see Catholic theologian Heiner Bielefeldt’s recommendations as a more promising approach. Bielefeldt, director of the German Institute for Human Rights from 2003 to 2009 and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief since 2010, argues that the best defense of the secular, constitutional state is to guarantee religious freedom. For Muslims, this includes Islamic religious education in state schools (comparable to what is already offered for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish students), the right to build mosques without undue hindrances, and legal accommodations to Islamic burial practices. In the end, the authors caution that there is no simple answer to current controversies, but careful and sustained work aimed at mutual understanding will be more productive than sensationalism and stereotyping.

Article Note: Keith Robbins, “Contextualizing the ‘New Reformation’. John A. T. Robinson and the Church of England in the early Sixties”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Keith Robbins, “Contextualizing the ‘New Reformation’. John A. T. Robinson and the Church of England in the early Sixties,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 23 no. 2 (2010): 428-446.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest issue of our parent journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, has an interesting article—the only one in English—by Keith Robbins, a distinguished scholar of modern history and a former university president. He throws new light on the celebrated debate launched in Britain in the 1960s with the publication of John Robinson’s book Honest to God. Robinson, who had recently been appointed as a junior bishop in Woolwich, south London, was by training a New Testament scholar. But he took the opportunity to popularize the ideas of three contemporary German theologians, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich. The impact of their radical views was tremendous. Honest to God became the
best-selling theological work of the century.

Robbins’ article outlines the context for the remarkable explosion of interest among church members and highlights the personal and institutional linkages behind the book. According to one commentator, its impact could be compared to the nailing of Luther’s theses to the church door in Wittenberg. The ‘New Reformation’ was hailed as a turning point. It came at a time when many thoughtful people in Britain were attempting to come to terms with the aftermath of the Second World War, the loss of empire, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the awareness of world poverty and the wholly new relationship with Europe. All these issues included a religious dimension, and Robinson’s controversial views reached out to many of those who believed that the new circumstances required new answers. Certainly Robinson desired to see reform, not only in the church’s dogmatic orthodoxies but also in its social witness and its political stance. These ideas were in fact propagated by a Cambridge coterie of younger theologians, many of whom went on to practise their convictions on the local parish level, often in south London. They were attempting to engage with contemporary culture by shedding much of the historical baggage and structures, which the Church of England had built up and maintained for centuries. A new morality which would revolutionize ethics was in fact already happening, but not necessarily in the transcendent sense of Bonhoeffer’s world without religion.

In the end, the hopes for new church structures came to nothing, as the establishment proved capable of institutional survival, even if its popular support has been much reduced. And even the desire for reformulating Christian doctrines in a non-mythological fashion has hardly gained momentum. As Robbins rightly concludes ‘A radical had been unable to deliver the change he wanted’.

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This whole issue is devoted to the topic: The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy. Ever since the days of Emperor Constantine, Christian clergy have been engaged with armies, usually as chaplains, providing pastoral care of the soldiers, raising morale, offering spiritual nourishment and often burying the dead. This task, however, has always presented major moral problems, when chaplains appear to be justifying violence and hatred of the enemy, in strong contrast to the Christian Gospel of love. How this dilemma has been faced over the centuries is the subject of the six articles in this issue of the above journal, each of which has a useful bibliography attached. These describe military chaplaincies in a variety of historical and geographical settings, and reflect on the tensions, challenges and benefits that the system has engendered and still continues to bring. Despite the above title, the most noteworthy aspect is actually on the continuity of the issues involved.

David Bachrachs’ article on the wars in Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries depicts chaplains developing the same kind of spiritual support for secular warfare as prevailed until the twentieth century. Rulers of all kinds have considered the mobilization of such resources by the clergy to be a vital prerequisite for victory But as Oliver Rafferty shows in his account of Catholic chaplains in the British forces in the First World War, the clergy on both sides preached imminent victory for their armies, championed mutually incompatible claims that God was on their side, and even legitimized mass slaughter. Such steps only discredited the office of military chaplaincy, often irreparably.

The moral dilemmas faced by chaplains in Hitler’s armies in the Second World War, as Doris Bergen has shown, were even more acute. They worked hard to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their officers and men. But in so doing they also legitimized the Nazi war aims and thereby sanctioned even the more atrocious war crimes. As Bergen noted, the chaplains contributed to the “spiritual numbing” of the Third Reich. Angelika Dörfler-Dierken’s examination of the post-1945 Lutheran chaplaincies in the reconstituted West German armed forces is therefore valuable in pointing to the changes made. Today the German Protestant Church expects chaplains to be the moral conscience of the army. They no longer hold military rank, hence are not compromised in advance. Their role is to sharpen the consciences of individual soldiers and to question whether the military operations are actually conducive to peace or whether they only add to the spiral of violence. Such a prophetic ministry, promoting the church’s peace ethic, may easily cause conflict with both the military leaders and civilian politicians. How to maintain such a stance in war-like situations, such as Afghanistan, remains to be seen.

In the case of Canada, as Joanne Rennick shows, the military chaplaincy used to be a bastion of Caucasian, male, predominantly Christian conservatism. But after 1945 drastic changes took place, both in the armed forces and demographically in the wider population. The effects of secularization and immigration, as well as the deliberate inculcation of the idea of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers, altered the armed forces’ understanding of their mission, and hence of the role of chaplains. Today chaplains face increasing pluralism among their charges, deinstitutionalized beliefs and a loss of moral consensus. So too chaplains are now obliged by law to accept a wider set of values and lifestyles, which makes conventional forms of religious ministry more difficult. Yet, as elsewhere, chaplains continue to meet the basic needs of military personnel and offer their pastoral services.

Military chaplains in Afghanistan, where Canada also had its share of troops, have faced momentous challenges, as is made clear in the final article by Gutkowski and Wilkes. Chaplains have often had to act as interpreters for soldiers facing a religious “frontier” in a majority Muslim country, where language and cultural barriers, let alone opposition to the foreign military presence, make for almost insuperable hurdles. Christian military chaplains require special training in cultural sensitivity to encounter Muslim populations at the same time as carrying out their traditional roles of providing for the support and pastoral guidance of their own troops.

As these articles show, the ethical and religious challenges of today are not so very different from those of earlier years. But the today’s extra range of encounters, both geographical and ideological, have only made the chaplains’ opportunities for service more demanding as they seek to influence the hearts and minds not only of their soldiers but of the local populations as well. The danger still exists that the chaplains’ religious tasks will be instrumentalized by the military commanders for tactical or propaganda purposes. On the other hand, their good intentions may easily be misconstrued. Using the chaplains’ religious authority to persuade locals of the good intentions of international forces, as in Iraq, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, may lead to ambiguous results. But such problems are not new. We can be grateful to the editors of Religion, State and Society for providing this comprehensive look at the contemporary perceptions of the issues connected with military chaplaincies.

Conference Report: Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: “Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, November 13-15, 2011.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

This conference was an unusual symbiosis of two longstanding cooperative international projects: the biennial Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics and the English publication of the 16-volume Bonhoeffer Works. With the imminent conclusion of the Bonhoeffer Works series (two volumes have yet to appear: volume 11 will be published next spring; volume 14 will appear in early 2013) the combination of these two events was a logical move. The conference in New York provided a retrospective of Bonhoeffer’s influence in the theological world in recent decades as well as a look at the promising future of Bonhoeffer scholarship.

The opening Bonhoeffer Lecture in Public Ethics was held by Sam Wells, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and set the tone for the predominantly theological reflections of the first day, which explored Bonhoeffer’s international interpretation by theologians and church activists as well as some new directions in the scholarship. Bishop Emeritus Wolfgang Huber of Germany, a Bonhoeffer scholar in his own right and the chair of the editorial board of the German Bonhoeffer Werke, offered an analysis of Bonhoeffer’s legacy after 1945 in the Federal and German Democratic Republics as well as in unified Germany after 1990. An international panel of Bonhoeffer scholars from South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil and Japan explored the different issues that have influenced the interpretation of the Bonhoeffer legacy in those countries. The afternoon presentations included a panel on “new research related to Bonhoeffer and public life,” with panelists exploring the influences of Harlem Renaissance literature and theology on Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought and activism (these were strong influences on Bonhoeffer during his fellowship year at Union from 1930-31), the theological continuities between Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship and his later Ethics manuscripts, and the development and consequences of Bonhoeffer’s concept of the “church for others.” The day concluded with an analysis of the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s Christology, which is such a central motif throughout this theological writings, can be understood in today’s pluralistic societies.

The second day was devoted to celebrating the publication of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, and speakers continued to explore his historical and theological context. Some background about the content and publication history of this series is in order. (Full disclosure: I have served since 2004 as general editor of the new English Edition, having edited volumes 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. I also worked as associate general editor on volume 6 [Ethics] and served both as volume editor and one of the translators on the recently published volume 15. Wayne Floyd, who resigned as general editor in 2004, edited volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9; the third general editor, Barbara Wojhoski, is a professional copyeditor who joined the project in 2004 and has overseen the copyediting and production phases since then. This arrangement means that I’ve overseen the work on the more historical volumes, although even these volumes contain a great deal of theological material.)

The German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke consists of 16 annotated volumes (plus a 17th index volume). The first eight volumes are his theological writings (Creation and Fall, Discipleship, etc.) plus one volume of his fiction; the last eight volumes are arranged chronologically and contain his correspondence and some correspondence by others, university lectures, bible studies, sermons and various other documents from his life between 1918 and 1945. Much of the material in these last eight volumes has either never been translated into English or has appeared only in abridged form.

In 1990 the English Language Section of the International Bonhoeffer Society signed an agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society and Augsburg Fortress Press for the translation and publication of the German volumes. The translations have been undertaken by a team of translators—some of them native German speakers, some of them Bonhoeffer experts, and some of them professional translators. Each volume was assigned to an individual editor who worked with the translator(s) for that volume and upon completion sent it along to the series general editor for review before publication. As part of the agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society, the German editors of the respective volumes reviewed and commented on the translation.

Hence, the approaching conclusion of Bonhoeffer Works English Edition marks over 20 years of collaborative work by an international team. If the discussions at the New York conference are any indication, this body of work will open new avenues for research about both his theological and his historical legacy. Bonhoeffer interpretation to date has generally fallen into one of these two categories, with relatively few works that masterfully combine the two narratives (the Bethge biography, I think, is one such success).

Bonhoeffer himself was one of the most brilliant and provocative theologians of his generation. He cannot be understood without an understanding of his theological training, the influence of thinkers like Karl Barth, and the larger theological conversations—notably in the context of the Church Struggle and the international ecumenical movement—in which he was a key participant. At the same time, the historical locus of his life and work in Nazi Germany and at the heart of the German Church Struggle—and naturally his role in the German resistance and his execution by the Nazi regime—means that he has always been a figure of great interest to historians.

These very different aspects of his life and thought make him an unusually complex figure, and this is a challenge both to the theologians and the historians. Hence many of us found it particularly important at this conference that participants could hear from both disciplines and I believe that the second day, devoted to the series, successfully highlighted many of the important theological and historical issues. I introduced the day with some remarks about the series, its potential contribution to the field, and the research areas that still remain. This was followed by a panel of seven of the translators who have worked on the series, discussing the particular translation issues that arose in trying to convey the history, the theology, and the person of Bonhoeffer. A paper by the German project liaison Hans Pfeifer explored “the impact of translation on cultural elements in theology,” giving the German perspective on these challenges. An afternoon panel featuring Union Seminary professor Gary Dorrien and several editors of this newsletter (Doris Bergen, Andrew Chandler, Robert Ericksen, and Matthew Hockenos) discussed Bonhoeffer’s place on the historical landscape. The day concluded with a summary of Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions—with some significant new insights for further research—by Clifford Green, executive director of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and Michael DeJonge, author of a forthcoming book on the theological interaction between Bonhoeffer and Barth.

The conference—particularly the contributions by younger scholars—illustrated that there is still much to do, both in understanding the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology and in situating him in the history of his era and his church. The new English edition of the Bonhoeffer Works offers the big picture as well as all the minute details. The theological works in the first eight volumes and the theological/historical final eight volumes inform each other, because they will enable future scholars to trace the emergence of Bonhoeffer’s theology, follow its development throughout his life, and better understand the impact of the times in which he lived and wrote.

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

The annual meeting of the journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, took place in Kreisau, now in Poland, where Helmuth James von Moltke led the “Kreisauer Kreis,” a group of resisters against the Nazi state. We met from September 15-17, 2011, on the Moltke estate, now renovated and serving as a retreat center. German and Polish presenters spoke on the topic, “Kirchliches Versöhnungshandeln im Interesse des deutsch-polnischen Verhältnisses (1962-1989).”

Underlying issues on this topic are obvious. German-Polish relations had not been good since the re-establishment of Poland after World War I and the German bitterness that ensued. German crimes against Poland during World War II then added huge grievances on the Polish side. In the early postwar period, West Germany was tempted to downplay German guilt and complain about things such as the Polish border on the Oder-Neisse line—a border that left Germany without a large portion of its 1937 boundaries—and the perceived injustice of Germans mistreated, dispossessed of property, and driven out of Eastern Europe. This conference, focusing upon church responses to German-Polish relations from 1962-1989, dealt with three main themes found in the churches: German attitudes toward Poland, Polish attitudes toward Germany, and the underlying role of Christian identity in individual nations as well as in Europe as a whole.

Andrea Strübind presented a paper on the “Tübingen Memorandum,” a foreign policy statement by Protestant intellectuals that appeared in Die Zeit on March 2, 1962. This statement was signed by eight prominent individuals: Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Ludwig Raiser, Klaus von Bismarck, Georg Picht, Günter Howe, Helmut Becker, Joachim Beckmann, and Werner Heisenberg. These men identified themselves as Protestants and spoke of the need for private citizens of conscience to speak out on public issues, but the EKD and its more conservative leadership quickly distanced itself from these Protestant voices. The Memorandum offended many West Germans, even though its ideas subsequently drove West German policy. The authors included a claim for the free status of Berlin, but coupled it with the right of self-determination for the GDR, a foundation of human rights in foreign policy questions, and the need for “Wiedergutmachung” and reconciliation—including acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line—in Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe. This statement raised hackles, not least because of its claim to a foundation in Christian ethics. In Klaus von Bismarck’s earlier words in relation to his family’s estates in Pomerania, “We have no claim on lands that God has taken from us.” Not all Germans were so magnanimous.

Polish efforts toward reconciliation in the 1960s included a correspondence between Polish and German bishops, but they mostly talked past each other. Polish bishops were willing to speak of “forgiveness,” rather than “reconciliation.” Christians forgive each other, they wrote. But they also expect confession and changed behavior. In general during the 1960s, West Germans were far more interested in the GDR and eventual reunification, than they were in questions of confession and forgiveness between Germany and Poland. Two decades later, as described in a paper by Gerhard Besier, Helmut Kohl picked up on this idea of Christian unity, making a gesture that combined his own roots in the Catholic Church with the Catholicism of Poles. In November 1989, he met in Kreisau with the Polish leader, Mazowiecki. Kohl insisted that the meeting should include a Catholic mass. This led to a “Friedensgruss” and a hug at the end of the service. It proved a powerful symbol of German-Polish reconciliation, useful both to Kohl and Mazowiecki, whether or not the emotional moment was spontaneous or planned.

Katarzyna Stoklosa presented a paper interrogating the idea of Polish Catholicism and Polish identity as reflected on Radio Maryja. This radio station, quite popular among some portions of the Catholic demographic in Poland (and among some Poles in the U.S.), emphasizes Polish nationalism with strong components of Catholic piety, ethnocentrism, and antisemitism. Willfried Spohn then offered ecumenism as the one hope for harmonious relations between the religions and nations of Europe. He leads a project at Göttingen University focusing on the ongoing effort to create European identity out of disparate nations. Noting the former widespread belief that Europeanization and secularization represent parallel processes, he acknowledged the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Catholic Church in Poland, not to mention the place of Islam in today’s Europe, as elements in a counter-thesis that unbroken secularization is by no means a certainty in the 21^st century.

Having discussed various ways in which Christian leaders tried to deal with the disharmonies of early postwar Europe, conference attendees then speculated on whether religious identity coupled with ecumenism might provide the right set of tools for a harmonious future.

Conference Announcement: 5th Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Announcement: 5th Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, March 8-9, 2012.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

Bob Ericksen would like to announce that the 5th Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education will take place at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, on March 8-9, 2012. The program will include some reference to churches and the Holocaust. Please consult the plu.edu web site for further information. Interested persons may contact Ericksen at ericksrp@plu.edu.

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), ISBN 9780802866172.

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Ulrich Bräuel und Stefan Samerski, eds., Ein Bischof vor Gericht: Der Prozeß gegen den Danziger Bischof Carl Maria Splett 1946 (Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2005), 313pp. ISBN: 3-929759-98-5.

By Diana Jane Beech, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 2011), 344pp. ISBN: 978-3-89971-690-0.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Margaret Ford, ed., An Evangelical Family Revealed: The Bickersteth & Monier-Williams Letters & Diaries 1880-1918 (York: Ford Publishing, 2010), ISBN 9780956721808.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Roger P. Minert, In Harm’s Way. East German Latter-day Saints in World War II (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2009) 545 pp. ISBN 878-0-8425-2746-0.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Roman Catholics and the Establishment of the Third Reich

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum[1]

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18 no. 1 (January 2007): 43-65.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Keith Robbins, “Contextualizing the ‘New Reformation’. John A. T. Robinson and the Church of England in the early Sixties,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 23 no. 2 (2010): 428-446.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: “Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, November 13-15, 2011.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Announcement: 5th Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, March 8-9, 2012.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum^{^[1]}