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.

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

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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.

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

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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.

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

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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.

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 603 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525-55040-3.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In his work, Priests in Times of Upheaval: Identity and Culture of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945, Thomas Forstner, a freelance historian in Berlin, offers an in-depth examination of the world of parish clergy in Germany during the Weimar Republic and later under National Socialism. Originally produced as a 2011 dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the direction of Dr. Walter Ziegler, professor emeritus for Bavarian regional history, this edition, according to Forstner, has been slightly revised and slightly shortened. Still, the present work inherently reveals its dissertation origins with extensive, but certainly informative citations, which, at times, act as parallel narratives to the text itself. The sources constituting these citations are also equally impressive. Quite significant among the sources are twenty interviews Forstner conducted with priests who had first-hand experience of the priestly world so-well documented in this work. Forstner incorporates selections from these interviews convincingly throughout his work. While all of the above points are naturally of great interest to the historical specialist and perhaps to modern-day clergy, the study’s thoroughgoing nature will more than likely make it daunting for most readers.

forstner-priester From the outset, Forstner makes it clear that his book will depart from the following works: Thomas Breuer’s Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992); Thomas Fandel’s Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997); and Tobias Haaf’s Von volksverhetzenden Pfaffen und falschen Propheten: Klerus und Kirchenvolk im Bistum Würzburg in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). All of these works, he argues, centered primarily on questions relating to resistance and politics without significant consideration of priestly culture and everyday life. Forstner places my own 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press) in the same category, though he does acknowledge that my work included “some” discussion of priestly culture. By contrast to these studies, Forstner seeks to understand specifically the all-too often hermetic world of Munich’s clergy, especially their pastoral training, outlook, and practices, quite closely akin to Monika Nickel’s Habilitation, Die Passauer theologisch-praktische Monatsschrift: Ein Standesorgan des Bayerischen Klerus an der Wende vom 19. Zum 20. Jahrhundert (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2004), a study upon which Forstner lavishes great praise. Nickel’s work examined pastoral practice addressed in the Passau Monthly of Practical Theology.

In his introduction, Forstner spells out the three aims of his work: (1) to describe the formation of the Upper Bavarian clergy in the period between the two world wars; (2) to build upon the research of the late Erwin Gatz among others by further examining the cultural, social and attitudinal history of German Catholic clergy; and (3) to detail the ways in which clergy did and did not overcome the challenges of the tumultuous time in which they lived, especially taking into account the strategies they employed to negotiate the difficulties they faced. In my opinion, Forstner convincingly accomplishes his first two goals, though falls a bit short of his third ambition.

In his efforts to address the aims of his work, Forstner regularly employs the term Lebenswelt, though he purposely avoids the term “milieu” when discussing the nature of Munich Catholicism. According to him, a unique single Catholic milieu did not exist in the archdiocese, even though 89% of its population professed Roman Catholicism. Despite the lack of uniformity, Forstner finds the Catholic clergy of Munich and Freising quite unified in their world view. According to him, the Catholic clergy’s ideals revolved around the understanding of Habitus clericalis – the imposed norms for priestly conduct in private and public life. These priestly ideals embodied the practices of self-sanctification and self-denial. The challenges of the modern world interfered significantly as the clergy strove to live ascetically pure lives. This was especially true as the society, in which they lived, especially following the First World War, became more tumultuous. Increasingly, Catholic clergymen found they often lacked the training and abilities to deal with the harsh realities of modern-day German society. The archbishop and his clerical staff were of little assistance in addressing this situation.

Forstner begins his work by offering an overview of the archdiocese from 1918 to 1945. Throughout this period, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, imposing archbishop of Munich and Freising (1917-1952), set the tone for the archdiocese. Yet, at the same time, his clergy found him distant and aloof. As one priest frankly commented, “Following my priestly ordination, I never saw Faulhaber in my life again, never again. We had no access; he was a feudal Lord in his palace. Any baroness had access to Herr Cardinal, but curates not…. I only remember Faulhaber from his majestic behavior, as if he was a noble’s son, even though he was, I believe, a master baker’s son” (p. 51). Still, Cardinal Faulhaber was an entity from whom many of Munich’s 1.47 million Catholics (in 1933) took heed. Such regard among Catholics did not translate into weekly Mass attendance. In fact, the Munich archdiocese had one of the lowest records for Mass attendance in Germany. Similarly, Munich Catholics offered less support for political Catholicism than Catholics in other regions of Germany. In the 1924 state elections, for example, three out of four Catholics did not cast a vote for a Catholic party. As the rector of the Freising seminary lamented, “The men of our age no longer enjoy the protection and advantage of an ideologically closed culture and a uniform milieu” (pp. 43-44). Yet, within such a diverse culture, Forstner stresses that the clergy maintained their united anti-modern conservative outlook. Only a few priests, minor figures, Forstner argues, embraced a reform anti-Ultramontane strain of Catholicism present in Munich and its environs.

In the following chapter, Forstner examines the recruitment and training of Munich priests. Interestingly, he reports that more than half the priests of the Munich archdiocese came from the countryside, though he finds that this trend began to change after the First World War, especially since German society experienced an upheaval in general. The majority of the priestly candidates began their studies as young teenagers (ages 11-15), attending one of the minor seminaries in Freising, Scheyern, or Traunstein. The seminarians continued their studies at either the Freising Major Seminary or at the more liberally structured Georgianum in Munich – the latter included seminarians from other dioceses who attended classes at the University of Munich, taught by members of its Faculty of Theology. Forstner offers pages upon pages of detail as he richly documents seemingly every aspect of vocation recruitment and seminary life. The directors and rectors of the seminaries made every attempt to ensure that the young men entrusted to their care were kept as far from possible from outside worldly influences. Still, the realities of the times did creep into seminary life. For example, Nazi enthusiast, Father Albert Hartl, a prefect at the Freising Minor Seminary, had his students read and discuss the contents of the Völkischer Beobachter during morning study period. By late 1933, Hartl had further awakened everyone at the minor seminary to the realities of living under National Socialism when he denounced seminary director, Father Josef Roßberger, for speaking against the government. Actually, Forstner reveals that seminary life was never as insular as one might believe. In 1929, for example, 43 seminarians at the Freising Major Seminary supported the NSDAP candidates in local district elections, despite the rector’s assurances to his superiors that no seminarian was a member of the NSDAP.

It became impossible for seminarians to escape the grasp of National Socialism. In June 1935, the German government instituted a law that made six months of labor service (Reichsarbeitsdient) compulsory for all young men ages 16 to 25. According to Forstner, the seminarians, who were used to being away from family and friends for long periods of time, actually fared better than the majority of their peers. Anti-Church propaganda also had a reverse effect, by primarily strengthening the resolve of most of them. In 1939, the German government added another impediment to seminary training by making membership in the Jungvolk (ages 10 to 14) and the ordinary Hitlerjugend (ages 14-18) compulsory. By this time, however, priestly formation was already under significant stress in Upper Bavaria as the government requisitioned seminary buildings for military use, disbanded theological faculties, and altered or ended seminary programs of study.

In chapters three and four, Forstner centers upon parish ministry and the ideals of priesthood within active ministry. He offers an extensive portrayal of parish life, including a detailed examination of pastor-vicar work relationships, priestly social life, and remuneration. In particular, he illustrates how parish life revolved around the pastor who served not only as a pastoral care provider who dispensed the sacraments but also as an individual from whom everyone in a particular area sought advice. The latter role underwent a gradual but significant change as mayors more and more assumed this role. After 1933, this was even more the case when the National Socialist government removed priests from most honorary local positions.

In chapter five, Forstner discusses a topic rarely addressed in the existing literature on the German Catholic Church in this period: clerical deviancy and punishment. After explaining the various penalties that Church hierarchy had at its disposal to deal with recalcitrant priests, Forstner examines specific problems that befell individual priests and offers brief individual case studies. These issues included breaking celibacy, partaking in financial irregularities, and suffering severe psychological illness. In the latter discussion, the case of Father Richard H. stands out. Soon after his ordination, Father Richard manifested schizophrenic symptoms so his superiors placed him in Schönbrunn asylum, a Catholic sanitarium run by Franciscan sisters. His condition worsened and the asylum’s director, Monsignor Josef Steininger, approved his transfer to Eglfing-Haar, a state asylum in which the decentralized euthanasia program was still taking place – a fact of which Steininger was well aware. Soon after his transfer, the 35 year old Father Richard was reported as having died “officially” of fever and pneumonia, but, quite possibly, Forstner argues, a victim of the euthanasia program. Forstner speculates about Steininger’s choices and role in Father Richard’s death.

The sixth chapter deals with complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Here Forstner examines brown priests, clergymen who openly supported National Socialism. Forstner acknowledges my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) and various articles on this subject, but believes that I did not differentiate sufficiently enough the varying degrees of “brownness” among such priests. Instead he turns to four categories of complicity suggested by University of Heidelberg historian Olaf Blaschke: “(1) Selective Contentedness, (2) Cooperation and Conformity, (3) Loyalty to Consent, and (4) Active Collaboration” (p. 425). Forstner argues that scholars should only label priests “brown” if their behavioral pattern falls within the third or fourth categories of complicity. Such priests consented to the core aims of National Socialism and, in turn, cooperated with National Socialism against the beliefs and practices of their own religious tradition. From this group, he singles out seventeen Munich archdiocesan priests, of which eleven were members of the NSDAP. Forstner offers compelling informative overviews of the careers of almost all these brown priests and concludes that these clergymen can primarily be placed in one of two groupings to explain their reasons for siding with National Socialism: extreme nationalism and opportunism. Forstner also argues that most of these individuals belonged to the generation that Detlev Peukert called the “Superfluous Generation” and Michael Wildt termed the “Uncompromising Generation” – those born between 1900 and 1910, too late to prove themselves during the First World War. While such characterization may help to explain the motivations for some brown priests, it does not cover the overwhelming majority of them. Still, Forstner does build upon and add to the existing literature as he discusses these problematic priests, even if his conclusions are not entirely new.

In chapter seven, Forstner offers a comparative examination of the role of priests in both world wars. In World War I, 6.5% (90 priests) of the diocesan clergy and almost all seminarians served in the military. Of the 301 seminarians who carried arms, 95 perished, a third of these falling in direct combat. Like most Germans, the priests of Munich shared in the nationalism and monarchism that so filled the air in 1914. Michael von Faulhaber, then serving as Deputy Field Provost (Stellvertretender Feldpropst) of the Bavarian army, was no different. His sermons used terms such as “soldiers of Christ” and described the war as “sacred” and “just.” By contrast, Forstner argues that Faulhaber’s public rhetoric during the Second World War was much more reserved. He does acknowledge though that any positive statements about the war, even if in support of the soldiers or seminarians in military service, still served indirectly to support the war effort and Hitler’s criminal regime. Munich’s clergy and seminarians showed much less enthusiasm for this war than the previous one. The church-state conflict clearly had affected diocesan seminary life by then. Despite exhibiting a zealous enthusiasm for the war, theologians were still drafted due to a secret provision in the 1933 Reich-Vatican Concordat. Before the war was over, 230 Munich priests, 270 seminarians and 182 pre-theology students from the minor seminary took part in military service. 10% of the priests and 30% of the seminarians fell in military service, the majority on the eastern front.

In his final chapter, Forstner focuses on the question of resistance among Munich’s clergy under National Socialism. While making great effort to differentiate his argument from other historians, his conclusions are not novel. Few priests, Forstner concludes, participated in open resistance against the National Socialist regime. Most considerations were subordinated and guided by the necessity to administer the sacraments and maintain pastoral care. He arrives at such conclusions without significant archival evidence. Rather, he relies primarily on his analysis of the materials collected by Ulrich von Hehl and his collaborators, published in the third edition of Priester unter Hitlers Terror (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996). Overall, this chapter seems wanting, especially when compared to the depth of study and analysis presented in the other chapters of this work.

According to the portrait Forstner offers, Cardinal Faulhaber did not inspire resistance among his clergy. In a 1940 pastoral conference, Faulhaber told his priests: “Guarding the tongue in the pulpit is the strictest Canon of the time” (p. 532). Evidently, from the number of priests who came into conflict with the state primarily over issues relating to pastoral care, such words of advice were not easily followed. Other priests found Faulhaber of little assistance in their daily negotiation with the state. One clergyman commented: “The man [Faulhaber] left us completely alone as chaplains in the difficult conflict over the schools and in our preaching. We never received any help in the time of the Nazis, never! … The bishops were not for us.” Another priest added: “There was no help to be expected from the Church” (p. 538).

Overall, Forstner has produced a magisterial study on the culture of priesthood in Munich and Freising during some of its most trying times in the twentieth century. Certainly, it will become a standard work on this subject. Despite this important contribution and the information that it contains, the work does little to address the larger questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church with National Socialism and less to engage existing literature in these areas. In all of its 552 pages of text and footnotes, Forstner devotes but five pages (pp. 510-514) to a discussion of relations between clergy and Jews. Neither is any general picture offered on this topic. Those seeking to gain a broader portrait of the Catholic Church in such troubled times will have to look elsewhere. By contrast, those who wish to know specifically about clergy, seminary training, and parish life will find a rich resource in Forstner’s work.

Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion (London: Continuum Books 2011), Xx+ 140 Pp., ISBN PB 978-1-4411-4179-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Rainer Bucher is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Graz University in Austria. As a young seminarian, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, he was curious about and later dismayed by the stance of his older colleagues in the priesthood towards the Nazi regime, and subsequently by their reluctance or even refusal to come to terms with their failure to protest or resist the crimes and cruelties of Hitler’s regime. Two chapters of this book deal with the responses of the Catholic Church and the measures that need to be taken to avoid any repetition of these omissions, which Bucher largely attributes to the fascination exercised by Hitler’s flamboyant and seductive personality and ideas.

Bucher-Hitler The bulk of the book, which is written in a somewhat convoluted Germanic style, but competently translated into English by Rebecca Pohl, is based on a thorough examination of all of Hitler’s surviving speeches and writings. Bucher’s main contention is that Hitler’s worldview was far more than just an ideology adopted for tactical reasons in order to gain political support. Rather, in Bucher’s view, Hitler’s ideas constituted a theology, even though it was an intellectually crude and merciless construct, and based on an abominable racism. Bucher is well aware that speaking of Hitler’s theology is provocative because it seems to associate what Christians believe with one of the worst criminals of our era. So he is careful to ensure that he cannot be accused of trying to undertake any kind of vindication. His task is therefore one of explanation rather than condemnation, let alone approbation. In this he succeeds with consummate skill.

Bucher seeks to determine the characteristics of Hitler’s creed which brought him such strong and long-lasting support from the German elites, as well as from broad sections of the wider population. It is not enough, he argues, to claim that Hitler’s fascination was due to his charismatic personality or to his undoubted rhetorical skills. Nor is it enough to suggest that Hitler’s hold was based on his political successes, since it is clear that many of his followers remained dedicated to his ideas even after his defeat and death. Instead Bucher argues that it was Hitler’s use of theological concepts, drawn from Christian traditions, but interpreted in a racialist setting, which appealed to many Catholics, and indeed to other Germans.

Hitler’s theology was not orthodox in any dogmatic or academic sense. But it was expressed in a politically decisive fashion, and provided the legitimization of his political creed of racism. It also adopted an apocalyptic dimension. As such, it attracted the support of a few of Germany’s more “progressive” Catholic theologians, such as Karl Adam, Joseph Lortz, and Michael Schmaus, who were eagerly looking for some new approach to modern society and found the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy to be irrelevant to the problems and issues of post-war Germany. In a bastardized form, the same attraction for Hitler’s ideas was found among the more politicized sections of German Protestantism, especially in the ranks of the so-called “German Christians”.

In fact, one reason for this fascination was the symbolic power of Hitler’s frequent references to a higher transcendent reality. But it was also due, as Ian Kershaw pointed out, to the “quasi-messianic commitment to a set of beliefs which were undeniably simple, internally consistent and comprehensive”. The essential characteristic of such beliefs was Hitler’s sharply racist anti-universalism. His appeal to his fellow-countrymen rested on his unshakable belief in the superiority of the German Volksgemeinschaft. He saw his mission as safeguarding this community, and expelling all those of inferior character, especially the Jews.

Why did this project receive such wide support? In part, it was undoubtedly due to the disillusionment caused by the disasters of the First World War. It was also due to the irrelevancy of much of the Church’s preaching, especially in the Catholic ranks, where any accommodation with modernism had been strongly suppressed by the Vatican. But in part it was due to Hitler’s confident and unchallenged proclamation of his faith in Germany and by the cultic mediation of his ideas in mass rallies, and what Bucher calls “collective experiential orgies” with their striking and impressive staging.

What did Hitler himself believe? In Bucher’s view, Hitler’s world-view was deeply influenced by his Catholic upbringing. He not only admired the Catholic Church as a successful organization which lad lasted for centuries, but was a model for the inculcation of religious loyalty and devotion. The Catholic Church was to be followed by its adoption of infallibility in its theories, and rejection of dangerous rivals, such as the Jews. Whereas political ideologies were liable to engage in compromises, Hitler’s version of National Socialism was exclusive and transformative. It could therefore follow Christianity’s record of intolerance, and single-mindedly fulfill its destiny for the German Volksgemeinschaft.

Bucher rightly suggests that it was this heritage which led Hitler to reject the kind of völkisch religiosity proposed by some of his followers. He quickly realized that the obscurantism and fake religiosity of neo-paganism would never be able to attract the majority of Germans. The ideas of such men as Alfred Rosenberg or the cultic fantasies of the Ludendorffs were therefore rejected as incompatible with his racist politics and political objectives. As early as 1922 Hitler was denouncing the völkisch movement as “a hotbed of well-meaning fools”. He continued to pour scorn on such fantasies, even when supported by leaders of his own party such as Heinrich Himmler, on the grounds that these concepts had lost touch with the scientific basis of modernity.

Hitler’s world-view clearly and consistently included a supra-natural dimension. Almost all of his speeches made use of the concept of Providence, which, as Bucher rightly points out, was cleverly positioned between traditional Christian language and general religious vocabulary. From Mein Kampf onwards Hitler used the idea of Providence to legitimate the National Socialist project, and later on he applied it to his own career. After 1933, Hitler frequently claimed that “Heaven and Providence has blessed our efforts”. This vindication of the Nazi struggle, indeed, became a stereotype in Hitler’s speeches “allowing our plans to ripen fully and visibly blessing their fruits”. Thus Hitler was able to attribute the failure of the assassination attempt in July 1944 to the protection of Providence, whose “warning finger tells me that I must continue my work”. With the help of this notion, Hitler’s concrete political actions were inserted into a divine project, through which God was enacting his plans.

So too, in Hitler’s view, National Socialism served to maintain a decisive work in fulfilment of a divine will. Its duty was to carry out God’s intention to make the German race the dominant force in the world and thus secure forever its eternal destiny. “The man who carries out this path will in the end receive the blessings of Providence”. It was through the use of such ideas that Hitler was able to define himself not as a mere power politician but as the executor of a divine will. By such means, he gave his aggressive nationalist racist concepts a quasi-religious legitimization. And the tragedy was that many people in Germany accepted such a creed, seeing Hitler as a religious savior, a divine messenger, or a prophet. Such was the impact of Hitler’s theology.

Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), xii + 203p., ISBN 978-0-8028-6902-9.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Defining “resistance” to the Nazi regime is notoriously difficult because of the vast array of individual and specific factors underlying the acts that could be deemed resistance. Factors such as race, nationality, religion, occupation, gender, and age, as well as time and place, complicate arriving at a comprehensive definition. Broad definitions of resistance that include all acts of defiance no matter how small are appropriate for certain groups in specific times and places but not for others. In Nechama Tec’s most recent book, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013) she chooses a very broad definition that tries to account for the wide variety of Jewish acts of defiance in Nazi occupied Poland. She defines resistance as, “a set of activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine, or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed.” This definition is broad enough to include armed and unarmed resistance, small acts of defiance and assassination plots, and, most importantly for her, resistance by Jews, who were simply trying to survive in the forests, camps, and ghettos in Eastern Europe. But broad definitions of resistance like this are problematic for those of us interested primarily in German resistance because a good deal of resistance by Germans was directed at specific Nazi policies. Tec’s broad definition of resistance works well for her consideration of Jewish resistance in Poland, where a morale-building activity in the Warsaw Ghetto counted as resistance, but it lacks the nuance necessary for making distinctions between acts of resistance, opposition, single-issue dissent, and non-conformity in Germany.

stroud-preaching Dean Stroud’s Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich uses a broad definition of resistance along the lines of Tec’s definition. This is problematic, because his focus is preaching in the German Confessing Church. In his 48-page introduction to the historical context, Stroud does not engage the vast literature on resistance in Germany or offer his opinion on the competing definitions of resistance by scholars such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, Detlev Peukert, and many others. But one can easily ascertain that he considers pastors in the Confessing Church to be a part of the Resistance, that he believes resistance among pastors was more wide spread than is acknowledged, and that he views Christianity as a radical alternative to Nazism. It is self-evident to Stroud that the thirteen sermons he includes in his book are “sermons of resistance.”

Of the thirteen sermons, twelve are by Protestants, and include such luminaries as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Niemöller. Paul Schneider, who was murdered in Buchenwald, and Helmut Gollwitzer, who took over Niemöller’s parish after his arrest, each have two sermons. Julius von Jan’s famous sermon in the wake of Kristallnacht is included as is a 1944 sermon by the Confessing Church pastor, Wilhelm Busch. The final Protestant sermon is by Gerhard Ebeling, who studied under Bultmann and Brunner, and later Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde. The sole Catholic contribution comes from Bishop von Galen and is his famous August 3, 1941 sermon against euthanasia. Stroud also includes as an appendix a sermon written for pastors in the Prussian church on the loyalty oath to Hitler, the authorship of which is unclear.

The thirteen sermons vary widely in their topics and in their degree of condemnation of the Nazi regime. In my mind what they have in common is not that they are all “resistance sermons” but rather sermons that in diverse ways seek to provide Christian guidance at a time of confusion and crisis brought about by Nazi rule and the rise of the German Christians. Paul Schneider’s January 1934 sermon rages against the German Christian heresy, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and “leading figures of the new Germany” who embraced racial thinking in the church. He reminds his parishioners of the error of placing “blood and race alongside the will of God revealed alone in the words of the Scripture.” But he also mentions aspects of the new regime that he finds appealing, i.e., “the will for political unity, for national honor, for a social community [Volksgemeinschaft].” Stroud comments in a footnote that Schneider “seems to be looking for areas of cooperation between church and state, as one would expect of a good Lutheran pastor nourished by the ‘two kingdoms’ teaching of Protestantism.” This type of observation, which is extremely rare in Stroud’s book, is of central importance to understanding the weaknesses of the Christian resistance to National Socialism. Stroud would have better served his readers had he chosen to use his considerable knowledge about Christianity, preaching, and the German language to analyze the sermons in greater detail with particular focus on how many of the leading figures of the Confessing Church forcefully opposed Nazi intrusions into the affairs of the church while at the same time found areas of agreement with National Socialism.

Despite Stroud’s background as a Presbyterian minister and German literature professor, he does not provide more than snippets of his own interpretation of the sermons. His 2-3 page introductions to each sermon are mostly concerned with providing historical and biographic background information. His rather long introduction to the book has over twenty subsections on well known topics such as Hitler’s notion of “positive Christianity,” the German Christian movement, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration. He relies heavily on Klaus Scholder and John Conway to provide the historical context to the Church Struggle and Michael Burleigh for general background to the Nazi period. The most interesting and original sections of the introduction are when Stroud abandons the secondary sources and provides his own analysis or commentary. For example, his analysis of the essay, “Was ist positives Christentum?” by pastor Wilhelm Rott and his commentary on an essay that appeared in Barth’s series Theologische Existenz heute by theology student Max Lackmann introduce readers to two men who engaged in the Church Struggle, who have received very little attention thus far. Stroud also provides at the end of his introduction some useful tips on how to read the thirteen sermons with an eye to how Christian vocabulary could serve as subversive language.

If there is one underlying thesis to the book it is “Christianity’s total incompatibility with Nazi doctrine.” And herein lies the biggest problem. For Stroud Christianity and Nazism are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. He does not address the role that Christian anti-Semitism and nationalism played in Christian complicity, including by the Confessing Church, in Nazi rule and the Holocaust. He writes, “Although the Nazi program included a counterfeit ‘positive Christianity’ and although Hitler peppered speeches with references to God, neither he nor Nazism had a single thing in common with traditional Christianity.” The pastors and theologians in the Confessing Church are portrayed as the representatives of traditional Christianity in complete opposition to the Nazis and German Christians. Although Stroud does mention Niemöller’s early anti-Judaism, he concludes without equivocation that after 1934 Niemöller was an opponent of Nazism. Besides this brief mention of Niemöller’s anti-Semitism, Stroud does not give any serious consideration to the ways that Nazi rule might appeal to a faithful Christian.

The Confessing Church as a whole was never opposed to Nazism as a whole. The authors of the thirteen sermons were unique in their courage and the Nazis viewed them as such a threat that they banned, exiled, jailed, or murdered several of them. Publishing beautiful translations of their sermons honors them and provides a wonderful resource of scholars and students. But if there is one thing that the scholarship on the Confessing Church over the past two decades has uncovered it is that the Confessing Church and its leaders had a complicated relationship to National Socialism that involved different levels of consent and dissent at various times during the 12 years of Nazi rule.

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014), Xx + 384 Pp. ISBN 978-0-295-99308-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Arne Hassing’s achievement is to write the first comprehensive account in English of the Church Struggle in Norway, concentrating on the period following the invasion and occupation of the country by German troops in April 1940. Although news about conditions in Norway, and particularly about its churches, was printed in England during the war as a means of war-time propaganda, Hassing’s more complete study based on the official archives and several decades of secondary sources will undoubtedly become the authoritative account. As such, it is a valuable addition to scholarly learning. As he correctly remarks, church historians of this period have neglected the struggles of smaller nations such as Norway or Holland, and have concentrated on Germany where the complications and complexities of the churches’ relationships to the Nazi state have been intensively studied. But Hassing’s illuminative account of the conditions in Norway has much to offer, particularly in terms of the solidarity of church members against the imposition of an alien ideology and their resistance to any unwanted divergence from the national traditions. Although the main outlines of this resistance, and particularly the special role of the chief bishop, Eivind Berggrav of Oslo, have been known earlier, this book’s detailed analysis will undoubtedly be a major resource for future treatments of European church-state relations during the early twentieth century.

hassing-church He begins with an account of the Norwegian reception of the German Church Struggle in the pre-1940 period, since he rightly notes that both nations had Lutheranism as their official Protestant state religion and as their traditional focus of loyalty. The challenge of Nazi ideology and its attempt to corrupt Luther’s teachings was therefore immediately recognized. Hassing pays tribute to the skilful manner in which Bishop Berggrav differentiated the Norwegian understanding of Luther from that held by many theologians in Germany. He also notes the skill with which the Norwegian church leaders were able to forge an alliance amongst themselves and resolve long-held theological antagonisms, in order to oppose the invaders and their supporters in Norway.

At the same time, he does accept the fact that this Church Struggle in Norway never reached the kind of intensity as for example in Poland. This was due not so much to the firm adherence by Norwegians to Christian doctrine but more to the reluctance of the German governor, Josef Terboven, to engage in an open and costly Church Struggle. Still, Christian resistance of a more passive kind could be seen in the refusal to join the ranks of the pro-Nazi clergy, who followed the line adopted by the chief pro-Nazi Norwegian, Vidkun Quisling. The overwhelming proportion of the Norwegian church members, clergy as well as laity, refused to participate in services which the few pro-Nazi clergy tried to organize. Hassing makes good use of the available statistics to show the bankruptcy of this attempt to create a Nazified Norwegian church.

On the other hand, he also evaluates the somewhat unheroic stand of the Church of Norway in the matter of the persecuted Jews, and points to the lack of any timely mobilization of protest on humanitarian grounds. Even though the number of victims was small, the belated recognition of this issue by Norwegian church leaders has to be acknowledged.

Hassing’s book concludes with a valuable epilogue, pointing out that the defeat of Nazi Germany and the restoration of the pre-war church polity in Norway did not lead to any revival or intensification of church life. In the end, the church struggle reinforced the conservative and pietistic character of the Church of Norway but was insufficient to deflect the social developments led by the socialist and largely secular governments of the post-war period.

My only criticism of this work would be that more should be said about the role of the laity. Hassing’s concentration on the small number of anti-Nazi bishops and clergy, who constituted the essence of church resistance, does not tell us enough about how this lead was followed by the people in the pew, whose attitudes are surely recorded in parish records or personal memoirs. The title of the work would suggest a much broader participation by Christians, but we are not given the evidence, even in retrospect.

Hassing’s excellent command of the large number of secondary sources and his systematic exploitation of the archival records, especially those dealing with the German side of the Norwegians’ church affairs, is commendable in every respect. His esteem for his original homeland shines through, but at the same time, his study gives us a balanced and not uncritical account of the turbulent events of seventy years ago in a country too little recognized as one in which the popular barriers to Nazi ideas were effectively raised and maintained.

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), ISBN 978-1789763552, Pp. xix + 300.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In his biographer’s view, the reputation of Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, has suffered unfairly in the seventy years since his death. He was attacked for being “proud, pompous and prelatical” and is often remembered only for the critical public speech he made during King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis in 1936. This seemed to lack any sign of Christian charity towards the monarch he had earlier sworn to serve loyally. But Robert Beaken presents a more favourable picture, based on a full examination of Lang’s papers in the Lambeth Palace library. He portrays a church leader faced with complex and difficult situations, both ecclesiastical and national, whose temperament was elitist but not cavalier, and who held together the divergent segments of the Church of England with considerable adroitness. That said, Lang lacked both the theological scholarship and the charismatic personality of his successor, William Temple. And in the changed atmosphere of the post-1945 world, he appeared to be a devotee of the past and the top-heavy establishment of the Church of England. In Beaken’s view, however, Lang deserves the credit for holding the Church together during the Second World War without reproach, maintaining the morale of the public and helping the Church to adjust to a variety of thorny political situations.

beaken-lang Lang was born in Scotland, the son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he came to study in Oxford, he switched allegiance to a moderate high Anglicanism and opted to be ordained in the Church of England. His gifts were obvious and he quickly gained preferment. In fact, in 1890, at the age of 36, he became a suffragan or assistant bishop, and at the age of 44 was selected to be Archbishop of York, the second highest appointment in the English hierarchy. He spent twenty years there, before being moved to Canterbury in 1928. In Beaken’s view, it was hardly his fault that he was appointed to York too early and to Canterbury too late in life. He was a loner and a workaholic, and a bachelor who had difficulty in relating to others even of his own class and complexion. As a result, he never established any personal associations and had no following to uphold his legacy. This biography will, however, serve to record his achievements and gives a sympathetic analysis of Lang’s actions during the difficult and traumatic years of the 1930s.

Beaken admits that Lang was ambitious and a snob, and even speculates whether his keen desire to attain high office may have stemmed from a need to justify his conversion to and ordination in Anglicanism. His greatest gift was to be an administrator, getting on with the daily grind of an archbishop. This made for an uneventful career, broken twice by major crises, one ecclesiastical and one political.

The first of these arose in the 1920s over plans to issue a new Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England, to update the 1662 liturgies, which had survived largely unchanged since Cranmer’s days four centuries earlier. After the shock of the Great War, such reforms were held to be necessary for revitalizing church life. The reformers, especially in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, sought a liturgy more inclusive of their desires for more colourful and prayerful services. But evangelicals viewed such ideas as an attack on the Reformation heritage of their church, and as a dangerous precedent for “creeping Romanism”. By law all such changes had to be approved by Parliament. But when the new Prayer Book was presented in 1927, it was twice defeated in the House of Commons, due to the mobilization of those MPs who were fearful of any innovations, especially if derived from Roman Catholic practices. Following this setback, the then Archbishop Davidson resigned, and Lang was left to pick up the pieces and to try and heal the obvious disagreements about churchmanship.The two major issues were: first, who held the lawful authority to alter the Book of Common Prayer and its rituals; and second, what changes, if any, were desirable or acceptable to the majority of the Church of England? Beaken regards Lang’s actions as insufficient and tepid. Certainly he appointed a high-level commission, but it took seven years to produce a report, and then recommended keeping the status quo. On the second point, there was no agreement, so confusion reigned. Different parishes, even adjacent ones, could and did provide wholly different liturgies, and the situation still remains unresolved. It was not, in Beaken’s view, Lang’s finest hour.

On the matter of King Edward VIII’s abdication, the second of Lang’s crises, Beaken claims that Lang played a much more decisive part. He acquits him on the charge of organizing a “plot”, along with Prime Minister Baldwin, to force the king to abdicate. But he does suggest that quite early on Lang recognized Edward’s unwillingness to maintain the role of a dedicated Christian monarch upholding traditional values, as had his father before him or his niece after him. Lang saw the monarchy in sacramental rather than merely political terms. But Beaken is critical of the speech made shortly after the abdication which scolded the former king for not upholding the ideals of the Church on Christian marriage, and for associating with those “whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts of his people”. At the time Lang was attacked for being smugly sanctimonious—and not only by the king’s supporters. At the time, too, most people in Britain blamed the king’s mistress, Mrs. Simpson, the twice divorced American, for causing the catastrophe. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now share Lang’s view of Edward’s unsuitability, and can be thankful that his successor was quickly able to restore the aura of the monarch, as could be seen in the splendid ceremonies of the 1937 coronation, over which Lang presided.

Lang’s leadership of the church and nation as the war clouds regathered over Europe earns Beaken’s praise. He had learnt the lessons of the earlier war, and avoided any claims of divine guidance or approval of Britain’s war efforts. Most of his time was spent in keeping the administration and pastoral witness of the Church of England going. It was not glamourous, but rather a humdrum necessity. Lang did, however, lead in denouncing the Nazi victimization of the Jews, and guided the country during national days of prayer. Even though he was outspoken in opposing the Nazi regime, he also warned against any spirit of vindictiveness or hatred towards the enemy. He joined his colleague Bishop Bell in condemning the blanket bombing of German cities and gave his support to the pacifists’ desire for conscientious exemption from military service. He also gave leadership to discussions for future post-war plans, but soon the added strains of war-time, including the bombing of Lambeth Palace, led him to recognize that he should retire. A younger man would, in any case, be needed to take up the burden of post-war reconstruction. So, in March 1942 he resigned and was replaced by William Temple.

In summary, Beaken believes that Lang left the Church of England in better shape after his fourteen years in office. At the same time, he notes a certain sadness about Lang’s character. “He sat at the top of an ecclesiastical pyramid, the focus of all sorts of unrealistic hopes and expectations, trying to hold together and to guide his Church, and coping with an unenviable workload. … As Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang simply kept going, doing his best for long hours, day by day, filled with an almost Calvinistic sense of duty and obligation” (238-239). He had inherited a ramshackle church government, and struggled under a heavy burden of office without adequate support. Still, his vision for a Christian England was upheld and in many ways is still in place.

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Freising Cathedral, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freisinger_Dom_aussen_01.jpg.

Once again I have the privilege of introducing a new issue of reviews and notes on contemporary church history in Germany and Europe. This issue features two themes: Bavarian Catholicism under the leadership of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and Nazism as political religion.

The former is treated in an extensive report about a fascinating project to publish a critical edition of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s massive diary. This report is courtesy of Dr. Hubert Wolf, one of the project leaders. Complementing the report on the Faulhaber diary is a review by Kevin P. Spicer examining Thomas Forstner’s Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs, an analysis of the identity and culture of Catholic parish clergy in Upper Bavaria from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

The second theme of political religion is taken up first of all by John S. Conway in his review of the interesting new book by Rainer Bucher, provocatively entitled Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. Then, Kyle Jantzen assesses two recent articles by Samual Koehne, who examines the relationship between Nazism and Christianity from both the perspective of the Nazi ideologues and their concept of “Positive Christianity” and from the perspective of conservative Protestants in Württemberg.

Three other reviews round out our issue: Matthew D. Hockenos on an edited volume of “Resistance sermons” and John S. Conway on two wider European matters: church resistance in Norway and the British Archbishop Cosmo Lang.

We hope, as always, that you enjoy the various reviews and other notes on contemporary church history. Feel free to add your comments at the end of the articles. We always welcome feedback and debate on the books and other material we take up in Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

Best wishes in this season of Pentecost.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.

Letter from the Editors: March 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Letter from the Editors: March 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Lutheran Church of St. Mary, Marburg

I am pleased to introduce the newest issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Several production delays have slowed our work this month, but finally we have our usual collection of reviews and notes to pass along to you. As per usual, there is no shortage of new material on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for us to analyze for you. But we also have the privilege of introducing a new scholar in the field, William Skiles, even as we note the passing of another, Ernst Klee. And we also pass along to you two public addresses–a memorial speech devoted to Elisabeth Schmitz and a lecture on Catholic responses to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.

We wish you all the best as spring comes to the Northern Hemisphere, even if slowly in many places.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Historical Perspectives/Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), Pp. xvi + 258, ISBN 978-4514-6541-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The time has come, the editors said, for a synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s theology and witness. So Clifford Green and Guy Carter invited an international gathering of theologians, translators and historians for a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in November 2011. The papers from that meeting have now been published in this book. But since they were presumably prepared in advance, it is not clear how much resulted from this meeting. The reader is left to make his or her own synopsis.

greencarter-interpretingbonhoeffer The tone is of course laudatory, rather than critical. But at least these papers help to set the boundaries within which Bonhoeffer scholarship can flourish today, and thus exclude some of the more exaggerated theories. For example, in recent years, Bonhoeffer has been characterized as a revolutionary, an assassin and an American Evangelical. None of these authors was invited. On the other hand, it is also clear that the theologians and the historians are not always talking on the same wave-length. The latter’s approach is empirical, concrete and historical, whereas the former seem often to engage in highly theoretical, even metaphysical interpretations, which rarely touch down on the solid earth of Nazi Germany. So this book should help to encourage some cross-fertilization in the debates about Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

Victoria Barnett leads off for the historians, along with three other members of our CCHQ team. She has been the general editor of the English translations of the sixteen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s papers, but still feels that this is only a work-in-progress. And just because the epoch in which he lived is gone, so the challenge is to try and understand the church and faith which shaped him and his students. In the thousands of pages which survived–his biographer Bethge collected everything–it is easy to get lost in the forest and not to see the trees. His life and work remain fragmentary and unfinished. And, as he himself admitted, he was never completely clear about his motives. Barnett rightly states that, contrary to his later fame, Bonhoeffer was a marginal figure in the German Church and the Resistance Movement. For the most part, as he himself admitted, he was amongst those who were “silent witnesses to evil deeds.” His life was cruelly cut short at an early age. His theological enterprise was barely begun. Yet his contribution–at a time when European Christianity suffered drastic blows–was an authentic witness to a world come of age.

Doris Bergen takes up the question of why the churches made so few protests against the Nazis’ crimes. Their silence in face of the Nazi persecutions and outrages has been a charge frequently leveled against Christianity. The question, she thinks, is inadequate. It is not the silence, but the noisy and enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime which concerns her most. Much more pertinent would be to question why the churches so readily backed the Nazi state. Why did they engage in pro-Nazi ceremonies, lend their religious support to Hitler’s wars of aggression, indulge in antisemitic propaganda, and even expel Jewish-Christian members from their parishes? She gives numerous and shocking examples of how the majority of churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, subordinated or distorted Christian teachings in order to provide ringing and voluntary endorsements as loyal Germans, and genuine Nazis. This was the very opposite of silence. She clearly does not have much time for those who were later to argue that churchmen were intimidated by the ruthless police state tactics of the regime, and were fearful lest they be taken off to be imprisoned in one or other concentration camp. As she rightly points out, silence or martyrdom were not the hallmarks of the majority of German Christians, though all honour is due to those who chose this latter path. But she might have considered more fully the principal reason for what seems to us now as widespread apostasy. In my view, the root cause lies in the churches’ shattering loss of credibility in the years after 1918 when their strident preaching of an imminent German victory with God’s blessing was proved false, and their proclamation of God’s beneficence had to come to terms with the millions of corpses lying in Flanders Fields. In the subsequent years, the attempt to regain the allegiance of those they had so grievously misled was their principal concern. Enthusiastic support for a popular political movement seemed to be the avenue to make the church relevant again. For Catholics, who had for so long been regarded as second-class citizens, the opportunity to upgrade their status by joining the Nazi bandwagon seemed to secure their institutional position in the wider society. Protestants too were eager to celebrate their national loyalties and to swallow their reservations about the tactics employed by their new rulers. Their complicity in the regime’s crimes cannot be doubted, even if many of them deluded themselves as to its true nature or intentions. The silence of the churches after 1945 was all the more obvious when, for the most part, they showed no remorse or repentance.

Bob Ericksen echoes the same themes in his short chapter, in which he too strongly criticizes the readiness of so many church people to concur with Nazism, including the majority of the Confessing Church, at least on national grounds. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few pastors of his generation who differed from the majority. This only led to his isolation both during his life, and even more so afterwards. For many years after 1945 the majority of nationally-minded churchmen took exception to his political or to his theological views, or to both. It was at least twenty years before the impact of his “new theology” and the prodigious efforts of his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, paid off. Ericksen has more recently written extensively about the complicity of both the pastors and the professors in serving the Nazi regime, mainly for nationalistic reasons. In this essay he correctly criticizes the churches’ readiness to praise Hitler’s brutal imposition of repressive measures, especially against the Jews, for whom churchmen showed relatively little or no empathy, and all too readily accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews were a threat to German values. Their predisposition to anti-Judaic theological biases rendered them, even Bonhoeffer, incapable of changing to a much more positive evaluation of their Jewish heritage.

Matthew Hockenos gives an excellent summary of how the Protestant churches eventually came to terms with this deficient legacy. He rightly questions the extent to which Bonhoeffer himself changed his theology about the Jews, since we lack any substantial evidence after his very tradition-bound statement of supersessionist theology from 1933. Hockenos points out that the leaders of the Evangelical Church after 1945 were all survivors of the Confessing Church struggle, and still politically and theologically nationalistic. When it came to addressing the church’ share of responsibility for the policies of the Third Reich, these leaders “demonstrated more trepidation than courage, more equivocation than clarity, and more obstruction than determination.” Most of them were shocked by Bonhoeffer’s readiness to take part in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and regarded him as a national traitor not a Christian martyr. They stressed the post-war indignities and sufferings of their own people at the hands of the occupying powers, rather than the far greater sufferings their countrymen had imposed on so many other nations and peoples. It took years before Bonhoeffer’s reforming ideas could take hold. Similarly, years were to pass before a new climate of repentance for Christian prejudice against the Jews could emerge. Hockenos provides a notable if brief description of the slow and often reluctant process of “metanoia” in the Evangelical Churches on the subject of attitudes towards the Jews, and contrasts this with the much more vibrant contributions of such Catholics as John Oesterreicher and Gertrud Luckner, whose pioneer efforts were to find fruition in the Second Vatican Council. But thanks to Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, the same route was finally taken by the German Protestants too.

Keith Clements’ fine contribution focuses on Bonhoeffer’s postwar reception in Britain, which was much more friendly and sympathetic than in his homeland. This was largely due to the friendships he had established with the ecumenically-minded community during his earlier visits to England. Principally it was the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, with whom Bonhoeffer had collaborated in the Life and Work Movement, and who warmly welcomed him on his arrival to look after the German-speaking churches in London. Bell found Bonhoeffer a most valuable source of information about the German Evangelical Church, and resolutely backed the Confessing Church in its struggle to block the Nazi plans. It was also Bell, who most courageously defied public opinion and organized the first memorial service for Bonhoeffer–a dead German–in a large London church in July 1945. So too Bonhoeffer found an ally in Joe Oldham, one of the chief architects of the future World Council of Churches, and in Ronald Gregor Smith, the Editor of the Student Christian Movement Press, which was the first to publish Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in English translation. Its impact caused sensational reactions in the early 1950s. All of these men had a deep sense of the crisis facing Western Civilization, and the need for new visions, not just for the church, but for the world and humanity. Bonhoeffer’s message from his prison cell exactly matched their hopes, and gave a pragmatic concreteness to their witness in those years.

Other essays in this collection explore the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology in such far distant societies as Japan and Brazil, thus giving a world-wide dimension to his legacy. Of course, this global appearance of his ideas and life-story owed much to the successes of his translators, especially into English. Several papers in this book show how this task was undertaken, and how the translators had to wrestle with Bonhoeffer’s cultivated, upper-class, but somewhat dated German, and to find up-to-date and more colloquial expressions in English for his much wider audiences. A very good instance of their dilemmas comes in trying to translate the well-known poem Christen und Heiden. They were also perplexed by Bonhoeffer’s continual use of masculine pronouns for “God” or “Man”, and wondered how appropriate it would be to turn these gendered expressions into some more modern form of inclusive language. It was a delicate course to steer between the Scylla of Bonhoeffer the proto-feminist and the Charybdis of Bonhoeffer the hopeless chauvinist.

The theologians’ contributions focus very largely on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “public ministry” and are drawn from close studies of his Ethics. As the epoch of European-centered Christianity is increasingly replaced by global diversification, and as his homeland Germany, like other parts of historic Christian Europe, becomes more and more pluralistic in its religious allegiances, so Bonhoeffer’s insights will undoubtedly continue to be of value in guiding us forward in fashioning new forms of discipleship for the years ahead.

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 222 Pp., ISBN 978-0-19-977357-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

John Stott was one of the most prominent leaders of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England during the second half of the last century. This sympathetic but not uncritical biography records his achievements and places him in the long tradition of English Evangelicals stretching back to the days of the first Queen Elisabeth, and sustained by the faithful witness of such men as John and Charles Wesley, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce.

chapman-godlyambition John Stott was born in 1921 in a well-to-do professional family and, as was the custom, went to one of England’s most prestigious private (i.e. “public”) schools, Rugby, where his talents led to his appointment as Head Boy. At the age of seventeen, he had a classic evangelical conversion experience and invited Jesus Christ into his life. This was largely due to the influence of an itinerant Anglican clergyman named Eric Nash, whose mission it was to attract young public school leaders and lead them to a life of Christian witness and service . Nash remained Stott’s mentor for many years and undoubtedly encouraged him to seek ordination as a Church of England priest. This decision was to be a great disappointment to Stott’s family, as was (even more so) his resolve not to be conscripted to do military service at the very moment when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Stott took advantage of the loop-hole which allowed students in training for the ministry to be exempt from military service. He was thus one of the few young men taking his war-time undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he moved on to the nearby theological college, Ridley Hall, which resolutely maintained the evangelical tradition of those martyrs burnt at the stake by Queen Mary four centuries earlier.

After his ordination, Stott served as curate at his home parish in central London, but his initial fame came through his series of university “missions” which he conducted in several British universities during the first post-war decade. These were aimed directly at the intellectual elite. He avoided the kind of approach adopted by earlier Evangelicals which stressed an emotional “hell-fire” approach. Criticism of American evangelists and their “enthusiastic” tactics was widespread. So Stott carefully argued along traditional lines for a reasoned defence of the faith, aiming for a broad social influence among his peers. Student interest was also built up through the writings of T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, who argued for a rational form of proclamation of Christian truths. Such views only strengthened the desire for a responsible and conservative social order which prevailed in post-war Britain. The ceremonies of the 1953 Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II gave full expression to this sentiment. Stott was amongst those who looked for a renewed sense of a Christian moral order for which both church and state would collaborate.

But it was not to be. In the 1960s British popular culture moved rather rapidly away from the establishment conservatism which John Stott embodied and sought to inculcate. These were the years of the Beatles generation. Britain had lost its empire and was unsure of any future direction. The moral seriousness and sense of national destiny that the empire had encouraged faded away. Church attendance declined strikingly. Increasing numbers of the population no longer saw adherence to Christian beliefs as relevant to their lives. To be sure, there were parishes, especially evangelical ones, which flourished. Among them was All Souls, Langham Place, in the heart of London’s prestigious shopping district. In 1950 John Stott was promoted and appointed its Rector, or senior clergyman. But the change in climate only led to these outposts of evangelical fervour to be regarded with even more skepticism, and their spiritual ministries were disdained by the surrounding population. Still, Stott served for twenty years and upheld thoughtfully and tenaciously the central core of evangelical beliefs, such as a strong devotion to the Bible and the importance of a personal devotion to Christ. At the same time, his focus was not fixed on the past. He began to recognize that the church’s witness had to be not solely spiritual but also social, not just local, but also—taking advantage of the new means of communication—world-wide. Even though some of his parishioners grumbled at his frequent absence on preaching tours in different parts of the globe, Stott earned good marks for bringing the gospel to new audiences and new converts in a sober and dignified but also enthusiastic manner.

Stott’s priority was always evangelism and the equipping of his congregants to join him in reaching out to reach new converts with the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. But Stott’s witness and manner combined a definitive message with an openness which made All Souls a comfortable and appealing place for all classes. Given the high mobility and transience of the local population, this was a recipe which needed to be stressed. Rigid adherence to Anglican formulaic traditions was abandoned in favour of a more open invitation to any and all to attend and take part in the services. This made All Souls particularly welcoming to students and international visitors and reproduced a sense of Christian universalism which Stott was only too glad to encourage. Stott never married, apparently in order to dedicate himself to his ministry. This of course gave him greater freedom to fulfill his world-wide evangelism.

This latter interest was in part driven by the fact that All Souls remained a stubbornly middle-class enclave. The hoped–for converts from the masses never materialized, despite his training of lay evangelists for door-to-door visiting. The social diversity of the parish was elusive, and was only strengthened when the rise of the welfare state severed many of the traditional charitable links between the churches and the working classes. To the latter, All Souls and its Rector appeared patronizing and elitist. All Souls was a parish for the well-educated who appreciated Stott’s learned preaching, his impeccable accent, and the refined music. But even with these devoted followers, the longed-for revival of English Christianity did not occur.

In 1970, after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in the same parish, Stott believed he had said his piece. He was disappointed with the results, and tired of the minutiae of parish life. However his ambition drove him to believe that in other places, particularly overseas, new opportunities for evangelism were to be found with more receptive audiences. Stott was a life-long Anglican, but he now began to look beyond the established church, and to seek out occasions where his kind of evangelism could be the vehicle for a wider Christian unity. Although the Church of England had the advantage of a church in practically every town and village, often inherited from the Middle Ages, Stott was worried about the fact that it had too few evangelical clergy. After the 1958 meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops at Lambeth Palace, Stott took the initiative in founding the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in order “to bear witness with courage and clarity to the great Biblical and Reformation principles.” One of the results was his leadership in the campaign to maintain Parliament’s control over the form of services as enacted in the Book of Common Prayer, which had remained unchanged since 1662. Three hundred years later, both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had petitioned to have the right to institute more flexible and timely changes to the Church of England liturgy, but Stott and his faction saw this as a dangerous move to increase the influence of Anglo-Catholics in their national church . Naturally the Archbishops were incensed at such opposition, but were relieved when Parliament allowed their petition with hardly any murmur. All this meant that the long-standing identification of the national destiny with evangelical Protestantism was no longer valid. Stott and his friends were dismayed. They were fearful of a Catholic drift in the Church of England and were determined to challenge it. By this time, his position of leadership in this cause, and his years of faithful service, naturally led him to believe that he might be in line for promotion to a bishopric, where his influence would be greatly increased. But in fact this never happened. Chapman gives no reason for this lack of preferment, but possibly it was because his outspokenness was too rebarbative for his superiors among the clergy. On the other hand, Stott was not tempted to join in any move away from the national church and kept his faction of Evangelicals loyal to the traditional establishment.

The challenge for Stott and his less rigid colleagues was to try and hold together Evangelicals of different persuasions with no power other than that offered by loyalty, persuasion and success. At the same time, he was aware that approaches for dialogue with other branches of the church might raise alarms among the staunchest Evangelicals. But as he explained, when accepting an invitation to the World Council of Churches Assembly in 1968: “our desire for dialogue does not mean we think all points of view are equally valid, or all theological and ecclesiastical systems equally pleasing to God”. This balancing act between a willingness to learn from others, and a resolve to hold on to the rightness of evangelical faith, was not easy and at times led to misunderstandings. But it was one he sought to implement in a variety of settings around the world. Agreement among Evangelicals, Chapman suggests, is made all the harder because of their individualistic streak, coupled with a tradition-bound rigidity of outlook, which still looked back to the Reformation and was suspicious of any possible infiltration of Catholic ideas or practices.

Evangelicals have often been tempted to focus on their own holiness rather than on social righteousness. But Stott had seen enough of the social problems in London to recognize that the Church’s witness needed to reach out to those who did not or had not aspired to personal salvation. And his many trips abroad widened his horizons. He began to see that the world’s concerns needed a Christian response. Social action to relieve suffering in an unjust world was to become his insistent theme. As he opened his eyes to global poverty, he was ready to hear the critique of Western capitalism that non-Western Christians were making. In Chapman’s opinion, from being a young preacher with little time for social problems, he became a major advocate for Christian social action.

Increasingly Stott’s sphere of action became world-wide. He readily accepted invitations from numerous countries, and made use of the new intercontinental air travel services, so that, for many, he became a new type of evangelical hero for the jet age. His favourite audiences were students, but his wider fame was seen at the notable Lausanne International Conference on World Evangelism in 1974, where he was the principal speaker and chair of the committee writing the conference report. But Lausanne, which had been funded by Billy Graham’s organization, and supported by most of the American evangelical leadership, saw itself as the rival of the World Council of Churches, and therefore downplayed the emphasis on the social gospel and theological modernism, which characterized the WCC. Stott had a hard task in trying to convince the Americans that his view of social responsibility had to be built into any talk of world evangelism. This was an uphill battle, and in Chapman’s view, it largely failed. But that did not stop Stott from pursuing his hopes for the world without apology.

In summary, Stott was a missionary with a world-wide parish. His ministry was to show that evangelicals could present an intelligent witness based on more than just enthusiasm. His numerous books enjoyed a wide circulation, and, although not original, presented orthodox Christianity with verve, and hence were justifiably influential especially among students. He successfully opened the minds of many followers beyond the engrained rigidity of evangelical fundamentalism, and thus restored the intellectual credibility of his message. He showed evangelicals that it was possible to be devout and intellectually creative as well as politically conservative. In this manner he was able to fulfil his godly ambitions.