Category Archives: Volume 20 Number 3 (September 2014)

Letter from the Editors: September 2014

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Letter from the Editors: September 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

It is with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that I wish to announce the new edition of Contemporary Church History Quarterly: delight at the illuminating content of this issue, and embarrassment at its late release, the result of a busy launch of the fall semester at my home institution.

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Berlin

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Berlin

In the course of editing the various reviews and notes, I have noticed afresh how deeply the central theme of much of the history regularly discussed in CCHQ–namely, the mixture of and relationship between Christianity, nationalism, Nazism, and antisemitism found in the Third Reich–is connected to earlier and later developments in both religious history and Christian theology. Topics in this issue of CCHQ range from the challenges faced by military chaplains in the First World War to the influence of Christian pacifism (so prominent in the interwar period) and the Harlem Renaissance on Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the efforts of Christians in Saxony-Anhalt, North Elbia, and Bavaria to suppress and later come to terms with their conduct during the Nazi era. In addition, you will find Barth scholars grappling with the historic and contemporary meaning of his positions on Jews and Judaism, Bonhoeffer scholars trying to glean new insights from the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, reflections on East German Christian responses to communist rule, and contemporary scholars struggling to find the right language with which to discuss historic Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism.

We hope you find this a stimulating collection of reviews and notes.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

 

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Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

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

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 544 pages.

Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013). 272 pages.

Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).

In 2003 the British historian Andrew Chandler (one of the contributing editors to this journal) wrote “The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer,” a review essay of the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) that to my mind remains the best analysis of the challenges of contemporary Bonhoeffer interpretation that has been written.[1] One of his main points was that most of the authors who have written about Bonhoeffer come from a theological or religious background and interpret him, as well as his historical context, through that perspective. The dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage. For decades, the main source for that story has been Eberhard Bethge’s definitive biography of Bonhoeffer, but increasingly Bethge’s text is being augmented by the vast collection of documents now available in English in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE) (the final index volume will be published this fall).

When I edited the new unabridged English edition of the biography about 15 years ago, I was struck by the thoroughness of Bethge’s research and by how much of it was correct. Although not a historian, Bethge went to great pains to get the history right. He himself had been part of the Confessing Church, the battles about theological education, and the resistance circles before he was conscripted into the German Wehrmacht, and he reconstructed the parts of the story that he had not personally experienced (such as Bonhoeffer’s early ecumenical period and his year of study in the U.S.) by consulting with others who had known Bonhoeffer during those periods, obtaining copies of correspondence from others and relevant documents from other archives.

There was a just-the-facts modesty in Bethge’s approach to the historical story. There were other versions of certain events, of course, and after the biography appeared there were people who disagreed with him on certain points, and there were pieces of the historical puzzle he did not have. New insights into Bonhoeffer have emerged in recent years from other historical studies that remind us that Bonhoeffer was not nearly as central or prominent as the biography made it seem. Finally, there were issues—notably the centrality of the persecution of the Jews and the churches’ reactions to this—that became dominant in the historiography only after the biography had appeared. Yet it must be said that Bethge was markedly open to all these developments, questions, and new challenges, and in later writings and lectures he began to address these issues.

Nonetheless, a Bonhoeffer mythology developed early on; in fact, it predated the publication of the biography. Particularly because of The Cost of Discipleship and the Letters and Papers from Prison, both of which were available in English by the early 1950s, Bonhoeffer was already being read as a Christian martyr by the time the biography appeared, and the historical narrative that Bethge laid out was interpreted accordingly. Bethge was as surprised by this as anyone. When he arrived in this country during the 1950s to begin writing the biography he observed that “everyone has his own Bonhoeffer,” and once the biography was published he had to spend some of his time countering popular re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology, notably those from the “death of God” movement.

The mythology remains the crux of the problem in Bonhoeffer interpretation. As Chandler noted, the common portrayal of Bonhoeffer as martyr and hero goes “hand-in-hand with a number of historical arguments about the world he inhabited.” Those historical assumptions emerged during a period in which the history of the German churches under Nazism was largely a hagiographic account. Not only was Bonhoeffer’s actual role in the Kirchenkampf, the ecumenical circles, and the resistance overemphasized, the role played by these groups were portrayed far more heroically and clear-cut than it had actually been.

In the decades since, historical research on the German churches, especially the church struggle and the Confessing Church, has given us a very different picture, and yet the popular historical picture of Bonhoeffer and his context remains frozen in time. The historiography shows, for example, that the Nazi state did not try to impose the 1933 Aryan paragraph on the churches and that the attempted nazification of the churches was carried out largely from within. The ensuing internal debates were the focus and framework for most of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings between 1933 and 1939. A side effect of these debates was pervasive caution throughout the Confessing Church about directly confronting the state. As the documents in DBWE indicate, Bonhoeffer had such moments of caution himself, even advising his seminarians in 1939 to fill out Aryan certificates if the state demanded it.

Yet the dominant narrative in most books on Bonhoeffer continues to portray the church struggle as a clear battle that the Confessing Church bravely waged against the Nazi state, rather than the reality, which was an ongoing internal series of disputes within the German Evangelical Church between German Christians, Confessing Church leaders, and so-called “neutral” church leaders. Until the 1980s the persecution and genocide of the Jews was largely ignored in historical works on the churches (and it was not a central theme in the Bethge biography), but as attention to this topic grew, it was simply assumed that concern about the Jews was Bonhoeffer’s primary motivation in opposing Nazism and that Bonhoeffer was far more outspoken on the issue than in fact was the case. That assumption ignores a number of important nuances—notably the distinctions made at the time by church leaders inside and outside Nazi Germany between secular and observant Jews and so-called “non-Aryan Christians” (i.e., Christians of Jewish ancestry who after 1933 were affected by racial laws). As a result, in much of the Bonhoeffer literature the phrase “the Jews” is uniformly applied to everyone affected by the racial laws, including those (like Franz Hildebrandt) who adamantly did not consider themselves to be Jewish.

The purpose of critically engaging such issues is not to pull Bonhoeffer off the pedestal but to understand the complexities that he himself confronted and wrote about. Chandler concluded his review essay by warning that unless the theologians learned from the historians, the DBWE volumes might themselves simply “become an imposing obstacle to a more mature and profound historical understanding of many substantial questions.”

There is now an extensive and more critical body of historical literature (much of it by the editors of this journal) on the German churches and the Holocaust, especially with regard to the Jews, that has definitively repudiated the early hagiography on this topic. There are new studies of sermons, the influence of Luther’s thought during this era, and localized studies of parishes and pastors that give a nuanced portrait of the Confessing Church. There are new theological and historical examinations of the ideological nationalism and antisemitism that shaped many Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders of the period. There are now studies that show a broader, continent-wide phenomenon in which ethnonationalist, explicitly antisemitic forms of Christianity were emerging in other parts of Europe and the Deutsche Christen were simply the German expression of this.

The documents published in DBWE are themselves another possible source of historical information about these larger events.  They give a rare close-up view not just of the individuals and events in the German church struggle as it unfolded, but of the theological debates inside and outside Germany.  Thus it is possible to arrive at new interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology from within the opus itself, and there are elements that I think Bethge himself overlooked.

This is precisely where the theologians have something to offer, and where a closer examination of Bonhoeffer’s thought would be fascinating: because Bonhoeffer, while certainly writing within the context of Nazi Germany, was addressing these larger issues.  From early on—partly through his travels, his ecumenical engagement, and his exposure to a variety of cultural and theological perspectives, partly through his dialectical approach, partly through his sheer erudition—he thought in terms of the grand sweep of Christian theology and its intersection and engagement with the world. By the late 1930s he understood what was happening in Nazi Germany as part of a much larger phenomenon, theologically and historically.

The question before us is whether, with the completion of DBWE, these volumes will open the door to that new kind of theological scholarship about Bonhoeffer that seriously engages the historical challenges he faced.

As examples of the new ways in which the DBWE are being used, the three books reviewed here show both the potential for breaking new theological ground as well as some of the aforementioned historical shortcomings. The authors come from theological backgrounds. Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1994), a study of the philosophical influences on him, as well as several books on the civil rights movement. Mark Thiessen Nation teaches at Eastern Mennonite University and has authored several works on ethics, pacifism, and the works of John Howard Yoder; Anthony Siegrist teaches at Prairie Bible College and Daniel Umbel, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, is a pastor. Reggie Williams teaches Christian ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary and has written a number of articles on race, ethics, black theology, and Bonhoeffer.

Each of these books marks an attempt to break new ground in very distinct genres. Marsh has written a popular biography that focuses both on conveying Bonhoeffer’s theological development as well as offering a more personal picture of him. Nation and his co-authors focus on the development of Bonhoeffer’s pacifist thought, and openly challenge Bethge’s version of Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance. Williams examines how Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black theology and the Harlem Renaissance during his 1930/31 study year in New York shaped his larger theological development. (Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with all three authors).

Marsh - StrangeCharles Marsh’s book is an eloquent, well-written portrayal of Bonhoeffer and his theological development from his young student days to the end of his life. Marsh offers two primary re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theological development: one concerns the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Bonhoeffer during his year at Union as pushing Bonhoeffer to a more concrete and activist ethics once he returned to Germany. The other is an attempt to show the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s theology was influenced by Judaism, particularly the work of Martin Buber.

Both topics, of course, have implications for understanding Bonhoeffer historically. I found the Niebuhrian connection more convincing; the case for the influence of Judaism is much thinner and Marsh notably avoids the issues raised by Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” entirely (he refers to it obliquely while discussing the Bethel confession). Although Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral dissertation Act and Being makes striking use of the Ich-Du distinction that Buber employed in I and Thou, the interpretation of most Bonhoeffer scholars to date has been that Bonhoeffer meant something quite different than Martin Buber–and it’s worth noting that we don’t know whether Bonhoeffer even had read the book (he didn’t own a copy and nowhere in his writings does he actually cite Buber).  Because these are academic debates of little interest to general readers Marsh doesn’t develop these arguments in depth; on the other hand, precisely because he offers these as new readings of Bonhoeffer’s texts it would have been worth a footnote or two going into more detail to make his case.

Marsh’s primary aim, however, is to render a more personal portrait of Bonhoeffer. A combination of personal reserve and family considerations made Bethge remarkably circumspect about personal anecdotes, and the biography appeared before the era of tell-all biography. The only other sources for such personal glimpses have been Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann’s I knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer with its recollections by various contemporaries, Sabine Leizholz’s memoir of her family, and the published collection of Bonhoeffer’s letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, which did offer readers a completely different and often poignant glimpse of the man behind the theology. In addition to poring through the more personal letters in DBWE, Marsh went through Bethge’s personal papers that are now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and he also gives some wonderful more personalized descriptions of the very different circles in which Bonhoeffer moved.

The results are somewhat uneven, although that may be because this is such an ambitious and difficult thing to do. In rearranging the figure-ground relationship of a biography, how does one know what to emphasize, and does the selection of more personal letters obscure the broader sense of the person that can be gotten from other letters?  Much of the early material Marsh cites makes Bonhoeffer seem surprisingly superficial, and yet there are other letters in DBWE (not cited) by the young Bonhoeffer that show a real gravitas, as well as a closeness and respect for his parents and his siblings that is quite moving; both those qualities seem lost here. But there are strong portrayals of his travels, particularly the trip he took through the Deep South at the end of his Union year and the impression made on him by seeing American racism.

The aspect of the book that has drawn the most attention is the portrayal of the friendship to Bethge as a homoerotic one that on Bonhoeffer’s part really was a romantic attachment. It must be said that there are a few letters in DBWE that can be read this way, and in Bethge’s papers Marsh discovered a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking. Ultimately, however, such an interpretation remains speculative. The love letters to Maria von Wedemeyer do indicate a real affection and certainly a hope in the possibility of a shared future, and in one of those letters Bonhoeffer actually wrote of his earlier love for Elisabeth Zinn. The relationship (and Bethge himself) can be seen in a broader context if one realizes where Bonhoeffer stood in life at the moment Bethge arrived in Finkenwalde: increasingly marginalized in his church as well as in the ecumenical movement, under growing pressure and surveillance, and tasked with overseeing one of the five Confessing seminaries that had been created in the wake of the 1934 Dahlem synod. Bethge–a steady, unflappable person if there ever was one–came along at the right time and Bonhoeffer soon turned to him for help with running Finkenwalde and increasingly leaned on him as pressures mounted. Reading some of the correspondence, it is possible to conclude that Bonhoeffer was often a demanding friend, but most of their exchanges were intellectual and theological.

The exercise itself is an interesting one that raises broader questions about how to interpret the DBWE texts; by highlighting the more personal and informal elements of some of these documents Marsh shows us a different and in many ways more modest Bonhoeffer. The book’s real contribution may be that by illustrating the personal turning points in Bonhoeffer’s life Marsh illustrates that these were theological turning points. Those theological turning points are often overlooked by historians, and yet as Marsh notes, they were the driving impulse in some of his decisions.

Nation - BonhoefferBonhoeffer the Assassin offers a theological examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace from a pacifist perspective (the authors are Anabaptists). It offers a good summary of these texts, from the early period of the 1930s through the prison period, demonstrating the strong theological continuity from his ecumenical speeches to Discipleship to Ethics that shows the centrality of a peace ethic in Bonhoeffer’s thought. The analysis and insights of these texts from a peace tradition perspective is a genuine contribution to the literature.

The more problematic section of the book is the historical section and its contention that because Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist, he could not possibly have supported the conspiracy plans to kill Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and that his actual involvement and knowledge of such plans was peripheral.  This section of the book is an attack on Bethge’s historiography. The authors claim that the “myth” of Bonhoeffer as stated in the provocative title emerged directly from Bethge’s portrayal of this period of Bonhoeffer’s life in the biography and that there is actually no evidence in the DBWE documentation to support this version. The authors argue that Bonhoeffer remained opposed to the planned murders of Adolf Hitler and leading Nazis, and that far from playing an actual role in the resistance activities, Bonhoeffer primarily served as pastoral counselor to the conspirators.

They base their argument in part on Sabine Dramm’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (reviewed in this journal in 2008), but much of their methodology draws directly on the documents in DBWE—as the authors put it, by going directly to Bonhoeffer’s own words and not relying on what they describe as the secondary and erroneous account by Bethge. Dramm did something similar, it should be noted: drawing primarily on the documents in DBWE 16, she argued correctly for a more modest understanding of Bonhoeffer’s entry into and role in the July resistance circles.

Dramm’s outline of events does not contradict Bethge’s account in the biography, but Bethge did emphasize Bonhoeffer’s early knowledge of and support for the conspiracy aims, and this is one of the issues Nation and his co-authors focus on. While it is correct that Bonhoeffer did not write down information about the related discussions in the Bonhoeffer home that took place as early as 1938 (he would have been a fool to do so), there is substantial evidence to support Bethge’s version of things, both in the later accounts of people who knew Bonhoeffer and most particularly in Winfried Meyer’s recent studies of Hans von Dohnanyi and the Abwehr resistance circles, as well as in Marijke Smid’s study of Hans and Christine von Dohnanyi.  By these accounts, Bonhoeffer was Dohnanyi’s most trusted confidant and was informed quite early both about the regime’s atrocities as well as the emerging plans to overthrow the regime.

Moreover there is much evidence in Bonhoeffer’s own writings that contradicts the book’s claims.  Bonhoeffer did in fact speak about “tyrannicide”–in a 1935 study of the Augsburg Confession at Finkenwalde–and he also argued against a simple principled adherence to strict pacifism. Reconciling Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace with his role in the resistance is a challenge that requires an exploration of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism not only through his writings on that topic, but through his writings on ethics and the church/state relationship, with a recognition of the complexity of the circumstances he faced and the decisions he made as a result. Beginning with his deconstruction of the legitimacy of Nazi authority in 1933 and going through to his wartime writings, in fact, the church/state writings offer deep insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the pacifist question.

In his July 1945 eulogy for Bonhoeffer, George Bell said that “deeply committed as he was to the plan for elimination, he was not altogether at ease as a Christian about such a solution.” Bell was in a position to know, since Bonhoeffer had given him information about the intended coup (including the plans to kill Hitler) in 1942 to convey to Anthony Eden. The second part of Bell’s sentence addresses the very dilemma that troubles the authors of this book: how did Bonhoeffer reconcile the conspiracy’s aims with Christian principles? The answer is that he didn’t, and he accepted the full responsibility demanded by such a “boundary situation.” Eberhard Bethge gave a similar reply to Bell’s when I interviewed him about this in 1985, saying that while Bonhoeffer believed that the killing of Hitler and others was necessary he deliberately refused to claim the sanction of the church for this action, saying that this was his personal choice and involved taking a certain guilt upon himself. Bethge’s version was also confirmed by Klaus Bonhoeffer’s widow Emmi when I interviewed her in 1986; she told me that the entire family was unanimous in support of the coup attempt. That might not satisfy doctrinaire thinkers, but I think it is difficult to understand Bonhoeffer fully if we insist on a version of him that ignores such contradictions and complexities.

Here there are insights to be gained from the perspective of contemporaries who were active in pacifist circles and were in fact consistent on the issue– Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Corder Catchpool, George Bell’s sister-in-law Laura Livingston, many of the people in the Gruber office, and Andre Trocme in Le Chambon. One of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends before Bethge came on the scene was Herbert Jehle, who strongly championed Bonhoeffer’s pacifism in postwar debates about it. So this is an especially complex area where–as with the issue of Bonhoeffer’s engagement in helping for Jews–much could still be written.

Another such area is Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the African-American church and the realities of American racism during his year in New York in 1930-31. Bonhoeffer himself acknowledged the tremendous impact of this experience, writing, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches,” and taking recordings of Negro spirituals back to Germany, where he played them for the somewhat baffled Finkenwalde seminarians. Josiah Young’s 1998 book No Difference in the Fare explored this period, particularly in terms of how it shaped Bonhoeffer’s critique of Nazi ideology.

Williams - BonhoeffersReggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus builds on Young’s insights but breaks new ground in offering a detailed and vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full blossom during Bonhoeffer’s time in New York. The course syllabi and reading lists for Bonhoeffer during this time (published in DBWE 10) show that Bonhoeffer read a number of books by black authors like Countee Cullen, and Williams talks about what it was the Bonhoeffer was actually reading, how authors like Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois thought about racism in the broader sense, and what he would have encountered in the culture at Abyssinian Baptist Church and beyond.

William makes the case that these encounters shaped Bonhoeffer’s subsequent thought about the theological questions that were so central for him: what is church?  And who is Christ today? The breakthrough sections of the book are those that explore the influence of the black theology of the day on Bonhoeffer’s notion of Stellvertretung (“vicarious representative action,” in DBWE) and his ecumenism. Williams argues that the theological insights that emerged from Bonhoeffer’s exposure to the black church shaped his further exploration of ecumenical theological identity beyond strictly European concerns and actually included some of the concerns expressed by African-American thinkers at the time.

Historically, Williams offers new information about Bonhoeffer’s seminary friend Albert Franklin Fisher, the son of a prominent Baptist minister in Birmingham who became Bonhoeffer’s guide to this new world. The book also gives an evocative description of the Harlem Renaissance in its full radicality and rawness (similar to some of Marsh’s descriptions of the south). As in each of these books, there are places here where the historical understanding of Bonhoeffer’s immediate context and the issues he confronted falls short. Williams’s use of colonialization theory in particular sometimes leads him to make sweeping claims about the German church struggle and Bonhoeffer’s theological background. The ethnocentric theology of the German Christians, while it definitely has analogies in some aspects of American racism, included a complex mix of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and certain interpretations of Lutheran tradition that led to some distinctive challenges.

The strengths of all three books rest in the theological sections: Marsh’s tracing of the different influences on Bonhoeffer’s theology and where he took them; Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel in the exploration of the development of his pacifism; Williams’ discussion of how the larger context of the Harlem renaissance inspired both Bonhoeffer’s personal spirituality and broader ecumenism.

The other strength, especially in the books by Marsh and Williams, is the vivid portrait of the worlds in which Bonhoeffer wrote and lived: the travels to Spain and Italy, the time in New York, and the theological debates that shaped Bonhoeffer and his circles. Each author has made a serious attempt to go beyond Bethge–through new information, new interpretations of the documents and the history itself, and in the case of Nation, actually challenging Bethge’s version of the history. All three draw heavily on the lesser-known material that is now available in the new DBWE edition, including material that is less familiar to English-language readers. As one of the general editors of DBWE, I welcome this as the necessary step to bring Bonhoeffer scholarship to a new level.

There is important information in each of these works for historians to consider. Nonetheless, Chandler’s warning that theologians need to consider more recent historical literature remains true; in their historical sections these books reveal the inherent limitations of constructing a historical narrative primarily from within the DBWE opus.

Notes:

[1] Published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Jan 2003), 54:1, pp. 89-97.

 

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Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

 

Stephan Linck, Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965 (Kiel: Lutherische Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013). Pp. 352. ISBN 9783875031676.

Antonia Leugers, ed., Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken: universaar, 2013). Pp. 310. ISBN  9783862230594.

For the past seventy years, Germans in general, and their churches in particular, have wrestled with how to come to terms with their stances during the Nazi period, and especially with their complicity in the mass murder of their fellow citizens of Jewish origin. A no less troubling situation has been their experience in the post-war period, as the political and personal crises of the Cold War preoccupied the German people and divided them into rival political camps.

The books under review examine the record of two regional churches, the first in the area north of the River Elbe and the second in Bavaria. These are both written or compiled by younger church historians, often aghast at what they now see as the misguided attitudes of their forebears in these churches. Their objective is clearly to try to rectify, and if possible to improve, the premises for future church political and theological attitudes, especially towards Judaism.

Linck - NeueIn Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965, Stephan Linck analyses the situation in the four Protestant churches which united in 2012 to form the Evangelical Church of North Elbia. He had earlier organized a travelling exhibition which did much to break the silence about these churches’ failures in former years. His central point is that this part of Germany had a long history of extreme nationalism, backed by Lutheran authoritarianism. This made these congregations particularly susceptible to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and encouraged their extremist and anti-communist attitudes, which were only reinforced in this region after 1945, when so many refugees fled to the region to escape the Russian occupation and the subsequent Communist domination of eastern Europe. These churches’ active support of the refugees’ desire to regain their homelands, in Linck’s view, only exacerbated their reactionary political attitudes and entrenched their prejudices.

Linck’s study, of which this is only the first volume covering up to 1965, analyses the primary factors in determining the churches’ political and social stances towards their Nazi past, which can be characterized as evasion and silence. It was only in 1998 that the North Elbian Synod took the first steps to commission Linck to examine the record of their behavior before and after 1945. This was followed in 2001 by a far-reaching declaration which “recognized our errors, admitted our war guilt, opposed all forms of mission to the Jews, supported Christian-Jewish dialogue and respected the difference between us and Judaism”. Similar sentiments were written into the newly-formed united church’s 2012 constitution. But these were all belated steps taken against considerable opposition from the congregations and many of their leading members.

Linck’s aim is clearly to overcome the legacy of the past in order to combat the ultra-nationalist and xenophobic attitudes of many North Elbian Christians. He is encouraged by the evidence that these attitudes have receded since 1965, and plans to provide a further analysis in his second volume for the period up to 1989.  In the major sections of this present volume, Linck describes in full detail, and with increasing exasperation, the mentalities and the policies adopted  by the leaders of these churches, both clerical and lay, in the immediate post-war years. He quotes, as the basic stance taken by many pastors and their congregations, the view that “Never before has a people who have survived a lost war been so humiliated and placed in a hopeless position as we have today.” Indeed, during these traumatic years, many churchmen’s attitudes were marked by their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in Germany’s war crimes, their total lack of sympathy for the victims apart from themselves, their unwillingness to face up to the enormity of the mass murder of the Jews, or their widespread complaints about the mistreatments allegedly being imposed by the vindictive Allied occupation forces. Among the North Elbian church hierarchies, there was widespread reluctance to admit Germany’s war guilt, along with the evasion of personal responsibility and the white-washing of many leaders’ pro-Nazi activities. These were challenged by only a handful of isolated and prophetic voices. At the insistence of the Allies’ investigating commissions, all active Nazi Party members were to be dismissed from their posts. But the churches were allowed to denazify their own structures. This in fact led to a lenient and self-interested defence of those pastors who had been strident supporters of the former regime, and who were merely invited to take early retirement, lest they suffer worse penalties. In many cases these men were reinstated after a few years, apparently with the full approval of their congregations. Another problem was the widespread negative feelings towards the members of the German Resistance movement. The only pastor in the north German region who was arrested and subsequently executed by the Gestapo was regarded after the war not as a hero but as an embarrassing maverick, then forgotten. The reforming initiatives taken by other branches of the Protestant Church were either sidelined or ignored. Only in a few isolated and exceptional cases were pastors willing to take steps to encourage a spirit of reconciliation and repentance for the past.

Leugers - ZwischenThese same features were on display in the Bavarian Protestant Church, too. They are the subject of Björn Mensing’s chapter in the collection of essays edited by Antonia Leugers, entitled Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert.   Mensing also comments acerbically on the apologetic and self-serving accounts of Bavarian Protestantism written by survivors, which excused the early and enthusiastic support given to Adolf Hitler as stemming from a desire to prevent a victory for Communism and as a sign of the “rechristianising” of a war-torn Germany. Those few voices calling for a more critical and less self-justifying account of the Nazi years were quickly sidelined. So too those who had been involved in the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler and had been executed as a result, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were regarded by the majority of the Bavarian Protestant leaders as “traitors to the national cause”. Mensing, who is now the Pastor of the Church of Reconciliation erected in the former concentration camp at Dachau, recounts with some bitterness the opposition to the building of this chapel by the former pro-Nazi pastor of the neighboring parish, clearly backed by the majority of his parishioners. It was only after the generation of participants in the Nazi years had all passed from the scene that a more fitting recognition of the church’s failures and a new sense of repentance could be encouraged. Mensing blames the continuing influence of the conservative leadership in the Bavarian Protestant Church for the slowness with which a greater sense of repentance and reconciliation has at last been adopted. But in view of the entrenched national conservatism of most Bavarian Protestants, Mensing  believes there is still a long way to go before the deficiencies of the past can be finally laid to rest.

Other essays in this collection deal with the experience of Catholics in Bavaria from 1919 onwards.  The editor, Antonia Leugers, is a junior member of the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Tübingen University, where once Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and the intrepid scholar Hans Kung both taught. Leugers’ own essay provides more insights about the attitudes in 1918-9 of the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, drawn from his recently opened diaries for this period. These sources confirm the already established view that Faulhaber’s deeply conservative and monarchist sympathies were shattered by the events in Munich in those revolutionary months. Not surprisingly, he saw these alarming events as a deliberate challenge to his vision of a Christian-led authority, and readily enough accepted the stereotypes of “the barbarous Bolshevik hordes” whose attempts to overthrow the existing order were at least partly inspired by the fact that many were Jewish communists inspired by the revolutionary successes in the Soviet Union. Faulhaber’s subsequent political views were, in Leugers’s opinion, largely influenced by his experiences in those traumatic days.

In a second article, Leugers follows Faulhaber’s mixed utterances during the 1920s on the subject of international peace. On the one hand he called on Catholics to support world peace efforts, but on the other he deplored the actions of the victorious allies in imposing on Germany the unjustifiably vindictive terms of the Versailles Treaty. He also took issue with the decision of the French government to station black African troops in their zone of occupation in the Rhineland, which aroused enormous hostility, and led to a campaign against the so-called “Rhineland  bastards”. Such racially-based resentments only played directly into the hands of the newly-formed Nazi Party. Indeed, Adolf Hitler frequently quoted Faulhaber’s views, which probably was the basis for his later cordial meeting with the Cardinal in November 1936, when both agreed on their common hostility to Communism.

A parallel article by Axel Töllner describes the very similar reactions of the Bavarian Protestant press, which equally mourned the loss of the monarchy, deplored the moves made by the new Education Minister to sever the links with the churches and remove all church subsidies, and welcomed the forcible restoration of a conservative government in May 1919.  At the same time, these press organs gave little or no support to the democratic impulses in the  Weimar Republic, but clearly preferred authoritarian governance.     Hence they were already susceptible to the kind of propaganda shortly to be launched by the Nazi Party in Bavaria with ever increasing success.

In a second article, Töllner describes the perverse influence during this period of Erich and Matthilde Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been one of Germany’s leading general during the war but was subsequently misled by his wife to break with his Protestant upbringing and to establish the Tannenberg League as a centre for the propagation of belief in a German God, combined with radical nationalism. Ludendorff used his considerable prestige to wage a violent anti-Christian and anti-Semitic campaign, which included the assertion that Germany’s defeat in 1918 and its subsequent enslavement had been due to an unholy alliance of Jesuits, Freemasons and Jews. Despite the similarity of views with those of the more radical Nazis, the Ludendorffs openly criticized Hitler for his “capitulation” to the Vatican in signing the 1933 Concordat. That same year, the Tanneberg League was prohibited.  A reconciliation only followed when Ludendorff died in 1937 and Hitler ordered him to be given a state funeral. The churches demonstrated their loyalty to the Führer by having their buildings fly the swastika national flag. In the 1940s, the Nazis’ prohibition was thrown out and Matthilde Ludendorff resumed her sectarian campaigns. At the time of her death if 1966, her group had apparently some 400 adherents.

Thomas Forstner provides a useful overview of German Catholic attitudes since 1945 about their experiences under the Nazi regime. To begin with, their leaders depicted the Catholics as being resolutely opposed to Nazism, a view conveniently also adopted by the Western Allies. The bishops’ early pastoral letters talked of Catholics being the victims of a clique of criminals who had seized power and inflicted their anti-Christian views on the nation. Where Catholics had collaborated, this was due to their feelings of loyalty and to their innocence in political affairs. Any accusation of collective guilt had therefore to be rejected. Such an idealization of the recent past left no room for a more critical examination of Catholic complicity in the Nazis’ crimes, and so it was passed over in silence. It also gave opportunities for favourable treatment of former Nazis, especially if they rejoined the Catholic ranks. Priests only too readily provided letters of exculpation, which then served to consolidate the conservative forces dedicated to averting the dangers of communism or socialism in post-war Germany. The victims of Nazi crimes and injustices were largely forgotten or ignored.

This favourable view of the Catholic Church’s record during the Nazi years was later supported by the large-scale academic productions of the Catholic Commission for Contemporary History. In the 1960s, however, such apologetic accounts were challenged, most strikingly by the 1963 production of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which accused the then Pope Pius XII and by implication the entire Catholic hierarchy of failing to stand by the Nazis’ victims, and of being interested solely in preserving  the church’s own institutional life. Such protests were frequently regarded by leading Catholics as designed to weaken the political hold of conservative Catholicism, as established since 1949 under the Catholic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Left-wing Catholics in West Germany had continually to contend with accusations that they were sympathetic to the Communists in East Germany. The collapse of the latter regime in 1989 was taken as an indication of the correctness and validity of conservative and nationalistic Catholicism.

In the most recent years, in Forstner’s view, there has been a tendency to compensate for the lack of support for the Jews during the Holocaust by stressing the religious commemoration of Catholic converts such as Edith Stein, murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 and declared a saint nearly sixty years later. Similar attempts to canonize Pope Pius XII have so far not succeeded. In Forstner’s opinion, such encouragement of martyrology rather than accurate history-writing is a mistake and will not increase the credibility or reputation of the Catholic Church in a now largely secularized world.

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Review of Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ix+296 Pp. ISBN 978-0-230-23745-2.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The first casualty of the Great War, beginning in August 1914, was the wave of patriotic enthusiasm, which led thousands of men, in all European countries, to volunteer for active combat. They expected that the conflict would be short, sharp and victorious, and that they would be home by Christmas. They had also been led to believe that victory would be theirs because God was on their side. But when the fighting began in the muddy fields of Flanders, the resulting death and devastation was disillusioning both militarily and spiritually. For many, if not for most of these eager recruits, one of the salient consequences was that the credibility of the Christian gospel, as preached by the army chaplains, was tested and often found wanting.

madigan - faithEdward Madigan’s valuable study begins with a comprehensive survey of the literature about chaplains and their war-time contributions, some written by chaplains themselves, such a Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, or the far more influential novel by Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. Many of these books presented a largely negative picture of the war records of these chaplains, finding that they were generally not respected by either officers or men, being considered inadequate to the tasks they faced.

Such critical, or even cynical, assessments in the post-war period only accelerated the decline in the fortunes of the Church of England, which has since proved irreversible. Madigan’s book seeks to examine more closely how far these pejorative judgments are supported by the surviving archival sources.

In his view, the Anglican chaplaincy service was handicapped from the beginning by serious obstacles, both civilian and military. The War Office, to be sure, had an establishment of a Chaplain-General–a Presbyterian–with a limited staff of regular army officers. But the Army High Command thought in terms of a short, mobile professional-conducted campaign, and were therefore reluctant to have the services of any non-combatants anywhere near the front lines. They were unwelcoming of the large number of civilian clergy–and amateur soldiers–who now offered their services as volunteer chaplains. As such, they would have to be given officer status, which meant that each would have to be provided with a servant, a horse, a groom, and space for extra luggage, not to mention basic food and shelter, but none of whom would actually do any shooting. As such they were seen as an unaffordable luxury whose number were best kept to a minimum.

At the same time, the Church of England bishops were reluctant to release men from their parish duties to undertake military activities, for which, despite their eagerness, they had no training. The bishops held that participation in front-line fighting contradicted not only the Ten Commandments but also their ordination vows. Very obviously, none of these potential chaplains had any pastoral experience of war-time conditions, and most had lost touch with the generation of young men, especially from the working classes. Their status as officers, and their clerical training mostly as university graduates, created social barriers which limited their effectiveness. Furthermore, the Army’s reluctance to let them get anywhere near the front lines was a cause for resentment among the troops. They were often relegated to rear echelons or hospitals, and were often suspected of being too lily-livered to actually fight. In these same rear areas, these clergymen were often confronted with restless, sex-starved soldiers, who were eager enough to sample the military-established or at least-tolerated brothels as a relief from the deadly dangers of the trenches. The chaplains’ pious exhortations to maintain standards of decency often fell on deaf, mocking ears.

Only slowly did the War Office realize the value of the chaplains’ contributions to building and maintaining morale, or appreciate their pastoral care for the wounded or the dying. But the chaplains themselves often felt they remained outsiders. Their high hopes that the Church’s witness to the troops, and its evident support for the war effort, would lead to a large-scale return to church worship and attendance were to be sadly disappointed. The example set by many chaplains of diligent and inspiring service was not enough to staunch the post-war ebbing away of the Church’s following, or to reverse the war-induced skepticism about the Church’s message.

As Madigan makes clear, many of the chaplains themselves entertained unrealistic expectations. They had had no previous exposure to the dehumanizing effects of battle combat, so their idealistic optimism was easily shattered. They were unprepared to meet the difficult circumstances in which their religious ministrations were often rejected or regarded as irrelevant. The majority of the troops demonstrated apathy, indifference or even hostility to organized religion. The army’s compulsory church parades were particularly resented. There was little or no sign of any spiritual revival. Such conditions presented an acute challenge which few chaplains were able to deal with successfully.

The result was often loneliness and isolation, making it hard for the chaplains to get alongside the men in the ranks. The situation was only reinforced by the lack of training for service among men under intense moral and physical stress. Only in the later stages of the war were these defects overcome, but they did little to tackle the wider questions about the incompatibility of war itself with the Christian gospel.

Madigan does his best to amend the pejorative views of the chaplains’ services as expressed in later memoirs. He produces the evidence of laudatory testimonies from their superior officers, and points to the number of chaplain decorated for their war-time accomplishments. But he is obliged to note that while many chaplains were respected and well-liked, this was in spite of, not because of their status as priests and representatives of the Established Church. He also notes that their hard-hewn skills at providing comfort and inspiring courage in front-line troops were qualities not much in demand in post-war Britain.

The fact was that the horrors, tensions and bloodshed on the battlefields destroyed faith in a beneficent God for many men, including chaplains. They were overcome by the atmosphere of death and devastation, and adopted a grim fatalism, which made more bearable the impotence and insignificance of the individual soldier. And yet, Madigan points to the unspoken, virtually unrecognized fact that many soldiers adhered to an “essential” or “unconscious” Christianity and to deep-seated beliefs in the goodness of man. It was these manifestations of self-sacrifice, fraternity, charity and humility which enabled them to cope with the strains of trench warfare. It was a vague but real faith.

After the Armistice, the veterans returned home and were treated as heroes. But Britain was far from being a place fit for heroes to live in. The reforms in both church and state which many chaplains longed for never came. There was much disillusionment. But, in his final chapter, Madigan describes some of the more progressive initiatives arising from the chaplains’ war experiences. Dick Sheppard at St Martin’s-in–the-Field in Trafalgar Square, “Tubby” Clayton and his Toc H fraternity, Studdert Kennedy and his Industrial Christian Fellowship, and William Temple and the Life and Liberty Movement, evoked new and reforming images of the serving church. These post-war social service organizations owed much to the former chaplains’ charisma, and were testimony of their founders’ determination to improve the lot of their fellow combatants. They now had the advantage of a much improved familiarity with working-class men, and an enhanced sympathy for their interests and welfare. These contributions were not therefore just to the Church but to society as a whole.

In Madigan’s view, the negative representations of chaplains in post-war literature seem unwarranted and biased. His book will undoubtedly help to dispel the myth of insincere or cowardly parsons, who indulged in un-Christian demonization or preached hatred of the enemy. Instead he tells the story of chaplains who ministered effectively to men in extreme conditions, and who drew from these experiences the strength to serve both church and state in their post-war careers.

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Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism,” 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference, Princeton Theological Seminary, June 15-18, 2014.

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

The connections and tensions between Karl Barth’s theological approach to Judaism, his stands on the Aryan paragraph in the early period of the German Kirchenkampf, and their greater implication for the entire period of Nazism and the Holocaust have been explored by theologians and historians alike. Barth is often compared unfavorably with Bonhoeffer on this point, primarily because of the different position he took in September 1933 as to whether the time had come to break with the German Evangelical Church, which at the its General Synod had just passed an Aryan paragraph that would apply to clergy. In a letter to Barth, Bonhoeffer urged such a break; Barth’s reply of September 11, 1933, urged caution at that particular moment, arguing that the best tactic was to fight from within (“we must be among the last actually to leave the sinking ship”). That position has been strongly criticized, particularly in Wolfgang Gerlach’s work on the Confessing Church, and has led to a general assumption that Bonhoeffer was clearer than Barth on this issue not only in the Kirchenkampf  but in his general political critique of Nazism. At the same time, the theological centrality of Israel in Barth’s thought made it foundational in his opposition to the German Christians and Nazism. Eberhard Busch, the dean of Barth scholars, as well as theologians like Mark Lindsay have long argued that Barth’s theological approach to Israel needs to be taken into account in any analysis and conclusions about his role between 1933-1945.

This issue was the theme for this year’s annual Barth conference at Princeton Theological Seminary. While the focus of many of the plenary and session papers was on Barth’s theology, there were several historical papers, including my own plenary remarks. Other plenary presentations included remarks by leading Barthians Eberhard Busch, Mark Lindsay, and George Hunsinger, and papers by Ellen Charry (Professor of Theology at Princeton), who has done much work in this area, as well as two leading Jewish scholars, David Novak (Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Toronto) and Peter Ochs (Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at The University of Virginia).

The result was a far-reaching discussion that covered a great deal of theological and historical territory. In my own paper I focused on Barth’s significance for the early postwar interfaith circles. Barth’s theology of Israel influenced several of the early interfaith pioneers of Jewish-Christian relations. People like Karl Thieme and John Oesterreicher began to incorporate this theology into their thought during the 1930s, and Barth was invited to attend the 1947 Seelisberg meeting of the International Conference of Christians and Jews (Barth was unable to attend). Barth’s student Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt brought Barthian theology to bear on postwar Jewish-Christian dialogues in Germany. In addition, Barth’s outspoken support for the war against Nazi Germany and his connections to Swiss refugee and German resistance groups (not only his Bonhoeffer connection, but his active support for the activities of Gertrud Staewen and the Kaufmann resistance circle, and the cover letter he signed with Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, Emil Brunner, and Paul Vogt for the Auschwitz Protocol, a 1944 document with details about the death camps that was sent to international leaders) led to postwar invitations to dialogue with Jewish groups.

Eberhard Busch traced Barth’s development both historically and theologically, noting that Barth was incorporating the theology of scholars like Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber during the 1920s; in turn German Jewish thinkers like Emil Bernhard Cohn and Leo Baeck read and engaged Barth in conversation. Even before 1933 Barth was critical of the strong anti-Judaism in German Protestant theology. His attack on völkisch theology was based on three points that were central in his own theology: the notion that Christianity constituted a completely new religion, the rejection of Judaism as a result, and the “orders of creation” theological understanding of God’s law. Busch argued that this led to a theological clarity about Judaism that went beyond that of Bonhoeffer.

David Novak offered an overview of some of the key elements of Barth’s theology that have opened the door to Jewish-Christian conversation, notably his understanding of the law and his emphasis on Christianity’s continuities with Israel. Novak observed that Barth demands that Jews address Christians precisely as Jews, which changes the conversation and makes it possible for Jewish thinkers to engage with Barth’s work in a deeper way. Peter Ochs explored Barth’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures and Judaism, noting both the ways in which a Christian (particularly a Christocentric) interpretation of these texts is necessarily supersessionist and yet because Barth affirms the Tanakh there are ways to engage. Nonetheless, the interpretation of these texts from within Judaism itself will always differ from the Christian approach, which references and interprets them retrospectively from the theological standpoint of the Christian gospels.

Ellen Charry offered a much more critical analysis of Barth’s understanding of Christianity, both in light of his Christology and particularly his interpretation of Romans. In viewing the Jews as a people essentially “elected for rejection,” she noted, Barth’s support for modern Judaism was grounded in the supersessionist notion that their existence served the church and the Christian understanding of salvation. Mark Lindsay, author of the recent Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology, acknowledged some of these elements in Barth’s thought, yet argued that because of the continuities he draws from Judaism to Christianity, there are opportunities for post-Holocaust theologians to engage with Barth.

There were several other conference papers of particular interest to historians, including a presentation on the Baptists responses to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particular the statements that emerged from the 1934 International Baptist Congress held in Berlin by Lee B. Spitzer (an American Baptist scholar in New Jersey); a study of Confessing Church pastor and postwar theologian Helmut Gollwitzer’s understanding of Judaism by W. Travis McMaken (who teaches religion at Lindenwood University); a paper on Hans-Joachim Schoeps by David Dessin (University of Antwerp); and an overview of Barth’s encounters with Judaism in America (Jessica DeCou, University of Basel). In the concluding conference remarks, George Hunsinger (Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton and director of the Barth Center there) stated that the influence of Barth’s theology has shaped Christian understandings of Judaism in a way that does not undo the damage of Christian antisemitism but opens the way for other conversations. The publication of the conference presentations is being planned.

 

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Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” Church History 82, no. 4 (December 2013): 877-903.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the denazification of the German churches exhibited many of the same shortcomings as denazification in the broader society.  Church leaders rarely acknowledged the complicity of their institutions during the Third Reich, and many former supporters of Nazism remained in positions of authority in the postwar era.  The broad contours of this story are well-known, but there is still a need for further research on regional and local variations, and this is where Luke Fenwick’s article makes an important contribution.  His close analysis of the postwar “self-purification” of two regional Protestant churches in Saxony-Anhalt reveals diverse motives and priorities among key players as well as the continuation of the “church struggle” under new circumstances.

In his analysis of the Church Province of Saxony, Fenwick notes that in 1946, 170 of the approximately 1400 pastors and other church employees were former members of the German Christian Movement or the Nazi Party.  The regional church administration dismissed only four of these pastors, while four others were placed on probation, six were transferred, and ninety were encouraged to participate in re-education seminars.  Not surprisingly, state authorities found these measures to be insufficient.  However, religious leaders insisted that the Church Province had been a bastion of resistance against Nazism, the state had no right to interfere in church affairs, and church policy had to be oriented around forgiveness rather than vengeance.  Fenwick argues that an additional, unacknowledged motive was simply the need to maintain adequate staffing at the parish level.

The State Church of Anhalt had a different history and followed a slightly different path forward.  About half of the pastors in this regional church had belonged to the most radical faction within the German Christian Movement.  The postwar church administration established a commission to determine which of those clergy had been “activists” and which had been purely “nominal” affiliates, and by May 1946 it had dismissed ten pastors and transferred six others.  In addition to mandatory re-education for former members of the German Christian Movement, church authorities required individual declarations of repentance from those who hoped to remain in office.  Overall, denazification in Anhalt was as lenient as in the Church Province of Saxony, yet in this case state authorities expressed their approval rather than their displeasure, because they had been consulted throughout the process.

Fenwick draws a number of important conclusions from his study of these two regional churches.  He confirms for the Soviet zone what Doris Bergen (Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich)found to be true in the American zone—that a more accurate description of clerical denazification would be “de-German-Christianization.”  Though both regional churches were now controlled by former Confessing Church members, these postwar leaders were willing to leave former German Christians in office for the sake of church unity, pastoral care and evangelization—so long as they submitted to the new church regime and its theology.  However, church unity was elusive.  On the one hand, Confessing Church pastors complained that former German Christians were still in the pulpit.  Some also invoked their Confessing Church credentials to gain advantage when competing for positions or when in conflict with other clergy.  On the other hand, ordinary parishioners were inclined to protest the dismissal or transfer of clergy, for personal rapport often mattered more to them than whether their pastor had supported the German Christian Movement.

Fenwick’s article focuses primarily on the highest levels of authority in the two regional churches, but some of the most provocative illustrations revolve around individual pastors and their parishioners.  For example, we see Pastor Erich Elster (Dessau-Ziebigk) explain his former affiliation with the German Christians in such a way as to satisfy the Anhalt church council, and we see Pastor K. at the church of St. Martin continue to preach nationalistic sermons and use the German Christian hymn book until he is transferred in 1946 (much to the dismay of his congregation).  The local particularities and variations revealed by such examples suggest that additional research on denazification at the parish level would yield important insights.

 

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Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

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Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

By Roger Newell, George Fox University

Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, the founding organizer of the famous peace prayers in the 1980s, died on 30 June, at the age of seventy-one. Not long ago, Professor Roger Newell of George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon took a party of students to visit sites of special significance in European Church history. One of their stops was in Leipzig, about which he reported as follows:

We were welcomed by the good Pastor who led us straight into the church, right up to the main altar, explaining that this was formerly reserved for the priests in centuries past, but now was open to everyone. There we got a short tour of the church building, its history and the tradition of music (including the link with J.S. Bach, who functioned mainly in the nearby Thomaskirche). Then he took us to the adjacent priests’ vestry, where he told us the story of his ministry beginning in the early 1980s.  He reminded us that it was a time of increasing tension between East and West. The Cold War’s trench cut Germany in half.  On both sides of the Berlin Wall, Germans grew increasingly anxious that Germany could become the battleground for Europe’s third war in this century.  At the same time, what was then the government of East Germany vastly increased its police-state controls through its secret policy (the Stasi) which deployed a huge force backed by unofficial collaborators to keep tabs on any possible opponents and dissidents.  It made for a highly oppressive situation where suspicion and mistrust reigned.

This was the brooding climate in which Pastor Führer opened the doors of the church to young people anxious to discuss such things.  The initial gathering took place in 1981 when Pastor Führer invited people with concerns about peace and the arms race to meet at the Church late in the evening (possibly to avoid Stasi attention).  He expected maybe ten or so people to come and let off some steam. But to his astonishment ten times that number showed up. They were mostly young, many of them dissidents who were not getting along with the Communist government.

Next, Führer described how he brought everyone right to the central altar, sat them on the floor of the church  and laid a large rough wooden cross on the floor in their midst. He asked everyone who wanted to raise a point to take a candle, light it, and speak to their concern as they placed their candle around the cross.  If the dissidents were surprised to find themselves at an old-fashioned prayer meeting, it was Pastor Führer’s turn to be surprised when every single person lit a candle, spoke a concern and shared in what turned out to be the most significant prayer meeting in the forty year history of the German Democratic Republic  The sharing continued past midnight as gradually the bare wooden cross changed into a cross glowing with light.  The mood of openness, freedom and acceptance was so life-giving that no one wanted to leave. It was a harbinger of things to come of which no one sitting there could have foreseen.

As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

When we open the church to everyone who has been forced to keep silent, has been slandered or maybe even imprisoned, then no one can ever think of a church again as being simply a kind of religious museum or a temple for art aesthetics.  On the contrary, Jesus is then really present in the church because we are trying to do what he did and what he wants us to do today. This is the hour of the birth of the Nikolai Church–open for everyone–also for protest groups and those living on the margin of society. Throw open the church doors!   The open wings of the church door are like the wide open arms of Jesus: “Come unto me, everyone who is troubled and burdened, and I will relieve you! ”  And they came and they come!

From this first event Führer would eventually arrange what he called ‘peace prayers’ to meet every Monday evening at 5 p.m. to pray for peace in both local and international situations of conflict. Later these prayers were sometimes followed by the people walking into the streets carrying candles to witness for peace and freedom. These were the largest and also the most peaceful of any such demonstrations in the GDR.

A particular moment of tension occurred in May 1989 following a blatantly fraudulent election in which the Communist party claimed to have received 98% of the votes cast. The public was outraged at such a flagrant deception.  Calls for reform grew louder.  The police reacted by blocking all driveways to the church, seeking to shot down the Monday prayer meetings, which they determined had become a cover for political insurrection. Nevertheless the crowds only increased.

On October 7, the GDR was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary. President Gorbachev, the author of the movement for openness and Perestroika, attended from the Soviet Union. Naturally the government did not want the occasion to be used for any kind of public expression of discontent. In Leipzig, for ten long hours police battered and bullied defenseless demonstrators who made no attempt to fight back. Many were taken away in police vehicles.

In this heightened atmosphere, just two days later, Monday 9 October, the peace prayers were to be held.  The government warned protesters that any further demonstrations would not be tolerated. All day long, Führer told us,  the police and military tried to intimidate them with a hideous show of force. Schools and shops in the city were shut down. Roadblocks were built. The police had guns loaded with live ammunition. Soldiers with tanks were mobilized and surrounded the central area. Extra beds and blood plasma had been assembled in the Leipzig hospitals. Rumors from many reliable sources circulated that the government intended to use the “Chinese Solution” and repeat the massacre of Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

To neutralize and perhaps disrupt the prayer meeting, 1ooo party members and Stasi went early on to the church. 600 of them filled up the nave by 2 p.m. But,as Führer described it in the brochure:

They had a job to perform. What had not been considered was the fact that these people were exposed to the word, the gospel and its impact!   I was always glad the the Stasi agents heard the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount every Monday. Where else would they hear these?

So the stage was set, the actors assembled for the climatic Monday prayer service. Huge numbers came out to pray, not only at the Nikolai Church but at other churches throughout the city, which had joined the peace prayers. During the service, the atmosphere and the prayers were serenely calm. As he prepared to send the people out into the streets, Pastor Führer made a final plea to the congregation to refrain from any form of violence or provocation. The Sermon on the Mount was again read aloud.

As the doors opened for the worshipers to depart, something unforgettable happened. The 2000 people leaving the sanctuary were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands. That night an estimated 70,000 people marched around the main city streets. Though the police and the military were everywhere, Pastor Führer said: Our fear was not as big as our faith … Two hands are needed to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing. So you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time.

As the good pastor noted: 

There were thousands in the churches. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the city centre. But not a single shattered window. This was the incredible witness to the power of non-violence. … It was an evening in the spirit of our Lord Jesus for there were no winners and no defeated. Nobody triumphed over the other, nobody lost his face. There was just a tremendous feeling of relief.

It was later reported that Horst Sindemann, a serving member of the Central Committee of the GDR, summed up both the extensive preparations of the authorities as well as their inability to know how to respond to the events of that evening:

We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.

A month later the Berlin Wall was breached, and the whole Communist empire crumbled away.

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