Category Archives: Volume 21 Number 2 (June 2015)

Letter from the Editors: June 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Letter from the Editors (June 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Once again this quarter we’re delighted to offer you a diverse collection of reviews and other contributions relating to twentieth-century German and European religious history. The trend at Contemporary Church History Quarterly is that we’re regularly branching out beyond our core interests in German church history to include diverse developments from across Europe.

Braunschweig Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Huehnerauge. https://www.flickr.com/photos/27086904@N03/2545022352/in/photolist-yXYx5-JovpS-3K4YeQ-agNFSu-4dG2uu-9odkaJ-Yo27-4STUtJ-4uqTAM-7ho3Yf-7ciTw-sHX6hf-stPfBF-stFFC7-stPebV-sHX6SJ-sLhjiz-rPgh8d-sHX3S5-sL5jTU-sLgDkk-sLgGwR-rPsMtV-4rTRNk-4rTR1i-4rTS3D-4rTRVn-4rTSi8-4rTR7F

Braunschweig Cathedral with the heraldic lion of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and of Bavaria. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Hühnerauge: https://flic.kr/p/4STUtJ

In this issue, guest contributor William Doino Jr. has written an overview of recent research on Pope Pius XII’s wartime efforts to rescue Jews. Doino Jr. assesses a number of recent publications from Italy, where scholars have unearthed a variety of primary sources which argue in favour of Pius XII in the so-called “Pius Wars.” His article includes many links to further information on these publications, enabling readers to make their own assessments about the current state of the Italian branch of Pius scholarship.

Our reviews begin with Christopher Probst evaluating Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. We think this is an important book for our readers to know about, since as Roger Morgan explained in Times Higher Education, Confino argues “that the main reason why the Holocaust happened lay not in a basically racialist anti-Semitic ideology, nor (in the end) in the momentum of a banal extermination machinery, but rather with Hitler’s quasi-religious obsession with annihilating the entire tradition and memory of Jewishness, from the Old Testament onwards, as a force antithetical to Christianity as well as to Nazism.” Such an interpretation thrusts religion back into the centre of our ongoing consideration of the Holocaust, which is, as Probst maintains, important.

Andrew Chandler and John S. Conway have written three fine reviews of intriguing books on twentieth-century Britain: David Nash’s Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden’s Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, and Timothy Jones’ Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957. Finally, John S. Conway alerts us to a little book with a big message: Rainer Stuhlmann’s Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina, which describes the work of the Northern Israeli Christian community Nes Ammim to bridge the social and religious divide between Israelis and Palestinians.

Our last contribution in this issue is a description of an interesting new article by the late Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen concerning church building in Braunschweig during the Nazi era. The Braunschweig Cathedral (here pictured) was an important site of this ideological interplay between National Socialism and Christianity.

With apologies to our readers in the Southern Hemisphere, let me wish the rest of you a wonderful summer, as the days grow longer,the temperatures warmer, and (hopefully!) the schedule lighter.

On behalf of the other editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

By William Doino Jr.

On April 1^st, a documentary was televised in Italy entitled, “Lo vuole il Papa” (The Pope Wants It), exploring the role Pius XII played during the German occupation of Rome, when thousands of Jews were given shelter by Catholic institutions in and around Vatican City. The film is based upon the enterprising work of historian Antonello Carvigiani, who cites new evidence indicating Pius XII personally supported these rescue efforts.

Last year, Carvigiani published a scholarly essay, “Aprite le porte, salvate i perseguitati,” (“Open the Doors, Save the Persecuted,”) published in Nuova storia contemporanea (September-October, 2014) one of Italy’s leading academic journals.

In his essay, Carvigiani examined the histories of several female religious communities in wartime Rome, and– analyzing the texts and records they left behind– found evidence that each acted under a common directive of Pius XII to take in persecuted Jews and other endangered people. Though some critics of Pius XII have questioned whether such instructions were ever given, Carvigiani maintains that he has “found evidence of a written or oral order” which was “delivered to all religious houses in Rome, as well as to all parishes and ecclesiastical structures.”

The documentary, based upon Carvigiani’s essay, expands upon his findings, with new testimony of individuals connected to these wartime events.

Dr. Andrea Tornielli, one of Italy’s leading Vatican commentators and author of a major biography on Pius XII, praised the documentary: “The story of the docu-film is not told by a narrator but by the actual images and testimonies of two survivors, only boys at the time, and by the nuns of the cloisters who had heard from the older sisters what had happened….The director chose to concentrate on the cloisters of SS Quattro Coronati, Santa Susanna, and Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, and the community of the Istituto di Maria Bambina, whose walls still harbor diaries and chronicles handwritten by the people at the heart of the stories. All of them vouch that the call to offer charity and refuge to the persecuted came from above. Written and oral testimonies refer repeatedly to the Pope, but also to the Deanery of Rome or to Giovanni Battista Montini [the future Pope Paul VI] and close collaborator with Pius XII.”

The aim of Carvigiani’s documentary is “not to be apologetic,” writes Tornielli. Rather, it is to “shed light on an, until now, little-known aspect of it.”

In the war diary of the community of Maria Bambina, continued Tornielli, “every day there was another request [and] every so often a telephone call from the Secretariat of His Holiness from the Vatican, and the reason was always the same: someone on the run, a persecuted family to take in, to protect, to help. One could not have refused a request from the representatives of the Pope…”

The wartime diary of the Augustinian Nuns of the convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati, first publicized in 2006, is one of the most explicit on record regarding Pius XII’s assistance. Relating events in the Fall of 1943, we read:

“Having arrived at this month of November, we must be ready to render services of charity in a completely unexpected way. The Holy Father, Pius XII, of paternal heart, feels in himself all the sufferings of the moment. Unfortunately, with the Germans entry into Rome which happened in the month of September, a ruthless war against the Jews has begun, whom they wish to exterminate by means of atrocities prompted by the blackest barbarities. They round up young Italians, political figures, in order to torture them and finish them off in the most tremendous torments. In this painful situation, the Holy Father wants to save his children, also the Jews, and orders that hospitality be given in the convents to these persecuted, and that the cloisters must also adhere to the wish of the Supreme Pontiff….”

In the register of the cloister of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, we read: “At this time, Jews, fascists, soldiers, caribinieri and nobility sought refuge with religious institutions, who, at great risk to themselves, opened their doors to save human lives.” This was the desire of Pius XII, “who was the first to fill the Vatican with refugees, using the Villa of Castel Gandolfo and the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.”

The reference to Castel Gandolfo is significant, since many historians have overlooked, or are unaware that Pius XII protected many refugees there, including Jews. During the war years, contemporaneous reports put the number of refugees at Castel Gandolfo at 10,000 or more desperate and frightened people who were clothed, fed and protected there (a number of women even gave birth). Moving pictures of the overflowing refugees survive, and highlight one of the Church’s most significant humanitarian accomplishments during the War.

Of special significance is a dispatch published in the June 22, 1944 issue of the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post), from a correspondent reporting directly from Vatican City, just weeks after the liberation. Under the headline, “Sanctuary in the Vatican,” the correspondent wrote:

“Several thousand refugees, largely Jews, during the weekend left the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo–the Pope’s summer residence near Marino–after enjoying safety there during the recent terror. Besides Jews, persons of all political creeds who had been endangered were given sanctuary at the palace. Before leaving, the refugees conveyed their gratitude to the Pope through his majordomo.”

Since only Pius XII had the authority to open the doors of Castel Gandolfo, it is unreasonable to maintain that these “several thousand refugees, largely Jews,” were given aid only by other Catholic officials, acting without a clear directive from Pius XII. The sincere gratitude expressed by Jews in Vatican City that day was not misplaced, but given to the man who had supreme authority over Castel Gandolfo, Pius XII, who obviously made their survival possible.

Carvigiani’s new research and documentary is consistent with the testimonies of priest-rescuers like Cardinals Paolo Dezza and Pietro Palazzini (honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations) and Msgr. John Patrick Caroll-Abbing, who testified to Pius XII’s active support for the Jews of Rome, and to their rescuers. (There is also evidence and testimony that Pius helped the famous anti-Nazi Irish priest, Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, as well). Carvigiani also builds upon the work of noted historians Michael Tagliacozzo, a survivor of the Nazi raid on Rome’s Jews, and one of the outstanding authorities on it; Andrea Riccardi, author of L’inverno piu lungo, 1943-1944: Pio XII, gli ebrei e I nazista I Roma (The Longest Winter, 1943-1944: Pius XII, the Jews and the Nazis in Rome, 2008); Anna Foa, Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome; and Sr. Grazia Loparco, who has done extensive research on papal rescue in Rome. Foa has written: “Precisely with regard to Rome, the ways in which the work of sheltering and rescuing the persecuted was carried forward were such that they could not have been simply the fruit of initiatives from below, but were clearly coordinated as well as permitted by the leadership of the Church.” Similarly, Sr. Loparco has stated: “From the documentation and testimonies emerges evidence of the full support and instruction of Pius XII…Many concrete events, such as the opening of monasteries and convents, prove the fact that many Jews were lodged because of the direct concern of the Vatican, which also provided food and assistance.” More recently, Loparco has written an article entitled, “An Order from the Top,” for the Osservatore Romano, (English-language edition, January 30, 2015) in which she gives additional evidence of specific instances where papal instructions were given to rescue persecuted Jews in Rome.

It should also be noted that, after the liberation of Rome but before World War II ended, Vatican Radio was already broadcasting the life-saving assistance of the Holy See. A review of Pius XII’s charity was broadcast on March 12, 1945 and stated: “During the occupation of Rome, between 8^th September, 1943 and 5^th June 1944, he gave shelter in 120 institutes for women and 60 institutes for men, as well as in other houses and churches in Rome, to more than 5,200 Jews who were thus able to live free from fear and misery.”(Cited in Reginald F. Walker, Pius of Peace (London: M.H. Gill and Son, 1945), p. 94).

No examination of the Vatican and the German occupation of Rome would be complete without a careful study of the most important primary documents available; such a collection has fortunately been produced by Pier Luigi Guiducci, in his work, Il terzo Reich contro Pio XII: Papa Pacelli nei documenti nazisti (The Third Reich Against Pius XII: Pope Pacelli in Nazi Documents). Though not yet translated, Professor Guiducci has given an interview in English revealing his findings.

While scholarly research continues around the record of Pius XII during the Holocaust and doubtless will be further assisted when the Vatican releases its remaining wartime archives, it is encouraging that researchers like Carvigiani have brought forth fresh evidence which provides a more complete and balanced picture of Pius XII’s pontificate.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

[3] Ibid., 23.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 no. 2 (April 2015): 340-371.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In their article, the late Friedrich Weber, former university theologian and Lutheran Bishop of Braunschweig, and Charlotte Methuen, church historian at the University of Glasgow, consider the nature of church building in the Lutheran regional church of Braunschweig during the National Socialist era. This article had its genesis as a presentation by Weber at a Glasgow research seminar. This is reflected in the structure of the article, which begins with a brief explanation of Braunschweig church politics in 1933 followed by a general overview of the responses of the German Protestant churches to National Socialism. When Weber and Methuen turn to the discussion of church building in Hitler’s Germany, they begin not in Braunschweig but in Berlin, with a description of the Martin Luther Memorial Church, built between 1933 and 1935. In recent years, this church building, long neglected, has been studied by historians and preserved as a historic site.[1]

Weber and Methuen use the building and renovating of churches as a window into the relationship between the churches and the National Socialist state. They do this by asking questions about “the motivation for embarking on building projects, the mood in which they were received, and the architecture and decoration that resulted” (p. 341). Their understanding of the complex church-state relationship begins with a consideration of the events of 1933, which they see as “a re-Christianization of Germany and a rejection of the principles of the Weimar Republic” (p. 345). Drawing on the work of Manfred Gailus, they argue that distinctions between the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement were not absolute, and that many clergy embraced the Confessing Church without abandoning their ties to the German Christian-led state churches. Conversely, many Nazis considered themselves Christians.

When it came to church building, Weber and Methuen note that while the construction of churches was in places forbidden by the Nazi regime—as in the cases of various National Socialist model estates and of the expansion of industrial centres like Salzgitter and Wolfsburg—in other cases, church building was celebrated as a public work which helped reduce unemployment. As Weber and Methuen delve into the history of German church architecture in the 1930s, they note that even members of the Confessing Church called for traditional Christian Germanic art rooted in “blood and soil, family and community” (p. 354). Indeed, the churches were allies in the National Socialist drive to expunge “degenerate” modern art, and the growth of “Christian imagery … was one aspect of the process of re-Christianization under National Socialism” (p. 355).

With this extended preliminary discussion complete, Weber and Methuen turn to the topic of Braunschweig church building under National Socialism. The six Lutheran churches built in Braunschweig between 1933 and 1940 share similarities of design and intent, celebrating the German Volk community and embracing simplicity and modesty. Weber and Methuen use excerpts from dedication ceremonies to emphasize that church building was portrayed as symbolic of the protection of Christianity in Nazi Germany (as opposed to the destruction of churches in godless, communist Spain and Russia), the blessing of God upon Germany, and the important contributions of Protestant Christianity to the Third Reich (p. 360-361).

If these simple new church buildings were supportive of the Nazi ideal of national community without embodying Nazi imagery, such was not the case with the reordering of the Braunschweig cathedral, which was transformed in a most radical way: worship services were suspended in 1936, the pews, altar, and pulpit were removed, and the cathedral was reimagined as a “national memorial” to the medieval German prince Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. In 1939, Hanns Kerrl, Reich Minister of Church Affairs, took the additional step of requisitioning the cathedral on behalf of the state. The memorial to Henry the Lion—in Nazi eyes, an early champion of German interests in Eastern Europe—was greatly enlarged, and Nazi symbols were introduced alongside depictions of Henry’s military campaigns in the East. Only a few remnants of the pre-existing Christian content of the cathedral remained after the “Braunschweig cathedral had undergone a process of almost complete de-Christianization, much more extreme that the co-existence of Christian and National Socialist imagery found in the Luther Church in Berlin-Mariendorf” (p. 367). Beyond the creation of a National Socialist shrine, though, Weber and Methuen argue that the stripping away of “superfluous” décor from the gothic era onwards was itself part of a Nazi attempt to cast off the degeneration of un-German influences and return the building to its original (“the healthy, the strong, the unspoilt”) Romanesque condition (p. 368).

Using these examples, Weber and Methuen show how church building in National Socialist Braunschweig demonstrated both the potential of church-state partnership under Hitler and the danger of Nazi ideological usurpation of church spaces. Yet “as a whole the building programme in Braunschweig testifies to the extent to which the aesthetic interests of the National Socialist regime were at one with those of the majority of German Protestants” (p. 371). These conclusions certainly mirror the outcomes of the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a highly collaborative venture between the parish clergy, council, and congregation, along with higher church officials, the wider Mariendorf community, and the state. Like the church building in Braunschweig, its design, construction, and celebration exemplify the symbiosis and symbolic fusion of Christian faith and National Socialist politics.[2]

Notes:

[1] Stefanie Endlich, Monika Geyler-von Bernus, and Beate Rossié, Christenkreuz und Hakenkreuz: Kirchenbau und sakrale Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008); Kyle Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany: Berlin’s Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche as a Reflection of Church-State Relations,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (2014): 324–48.

[2] Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany,” 348.