Dear Friends,

This is a special issue in commemoration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose 100th birthday falls on February 4th.

Against principalities and powers – letters from a Brazilian Jail
Fr. Betto

Obedience:

I owe obedience
to the poor whom Jesus served
to the pathways of hope in my time
to concrete and effective love for others

I do not owe obedience
to anything that renders me less free
less human
less committed
less aware
to the laws that shackle human beings
and stifle the spread of the gospel
to the traditions that drain the Christian life
of its pristine force
to anything that makes me look
more obedient and less Christian
more prudent and less evangelical

Obedience cannot mean
cowardice
conformism
egotism
over-protectedness
fear of risk
orthodoxy

Obedience should
lead to a cross not a throne

Bonhoeffer Commemoration Symposium, Vancouver, February 17 -18th 2006

To mark the 100th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth, we are organizing a symposium to be held at Regent College, Vancouver, adjacent to the University of British Columbia.. The programme will begin on Friday 17th at 7 p.m. with a showing of M.Doblmeier’s biographical film, and will continue on Saturday 18th, at 9 a.m., when papers will be read by Craig Slane, Jens Zimmermann and J.S. Conway. On Saturday afternoon, we shall show the very moving film “Weapons of the Spirit” about the rescue of French Jews in 1944, made by a survivor, Pierre Sauvage. The public is cordially invited, and there is no registration fee. Further details can be obtained by writing to me at: jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Roberts, Bonhoeffer and King; Böllmann, Bonhoeffer and Jochen Klepper
b) J. de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s friend Eberhard Bethge
c) P.Monteath, Australia’s Lutheran Churches and Refugees from Hitler’s Germany
d) Douglas J. Hall, Bound and Free. A theologian’s journey

1a) Deotis Roberts, Bonhoeffer and King. Speaking the truth to power, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press 2005. 160pp ISBN 0-664-22652-3

Wolfgang Böllmann, “Wenn ich dir begegnet wäre” Dietrich Bonhoeffer und Jochen Klepper im Gespräch, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2005 164 pp.
ISBN 3-374-02259-6

In July 1997 ten new statuettes of Christian martyrs of the twentieth century were unveiled on the front portico of Westminster Abbey. Amongst them were Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite the fact that they lived on different continents and were separated by nearly three decades, comparisons of their respective Christian witness are valuable and instructive – quite apart from the fact that their lives were both cut short at the same early age of 39. J. Deotis Roberts is himself a leading figure among the black Baptist community and intimate with the King family. His own path took him more into academic, rather than activist pursuits. For this reason he has an innate sympathy with Bonhoeffer’s lecturing career, and recognizes how valuable a legacy is left to us in Bonhoeffer’s teachings and writings. He seeks to make the point that however heroic and/or tragic these men’s deaths may have been, it is surely their lives and witness that will count in the long run. In particular Roberts stresses the common thread between them, which lay in their determination to face the political evils of their day with faith and courage, and to speak the truth to power, at whatever cost.

Roberts’short book traces these two men’s parallel biographies, drawing on his personal memories of King and the standard biographies of Bonhoeffer. Readers already familiar with these sources will find little new in his interpretation, but his analysis of the evolution of their respective political theologies is illuminating.

The common factor was their Christian-based opposition to racism. Bonhoeffer, to be sure, was not born into a situation of endemic racial antagonism, but realized early on, even before Hitler came to power, the incompatibility of the Nazi attitudes towards the Jews with any true understanding of Christianity. The majority of his Protestant colleagues, including leading theologians, refused to accept the consequences. Instead they temporized or argued that the political or diplomatic advantages of Hitler’s rule outweighed any extremist antisemitic rantings, which would surely be abandoned once the Nazis took the reins of power. And there is evidence that, to begin with, Bonhoeffer’s protests were centred on the plight of the Christian Jews. Only later did he realize that the call to discipleship demanded defence of the rights of all Jews, converts or not, because Christianity was indissolubly bound to Israel and to all its people. Such an insight was shared by only a few. And still fewer were prepared to engage in illegal and seemingly treacherous actions to put a spoke in Nazism’s wheels.., Bonhoeffer was disowned by his own church after his arrest, and even after his martyrdom. His speaking of truth to power was a lonely and dangerous pilgrimage.

By contrast, King’s opposition to racism was part of his in-bred experience, growing up in a black family, church and community in the southern United States. His commitment to the pursuit of social justice is really self-explanatory. More remarkable was the vitality and leadership he developed in this cause, which distinguished him from so many other black church leaders. Equally notable was the fact alongside his privileged upbringing and elitist education, King had a vision to lift up the sufferings of his people and to challenge the racist structures and policies of the United States. Like Bonhoeffer, King was at first influenced by the example of Gandhi, but also by the sober realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. Both he and Bonhoeffer became increasingly conscious of the power of collective evil and the need to speak out against it from the truth of Christian perspectives.

Roberts can find no evidence that Bonhoeffer’s thought or actions influenced King. Nor was his example used in the black liberation struggle. But Roberts believes that Bonhoeffer ought to be an important figure for blacks, if only to show that in such a cause as theirs they were and are not alone. Hence the cogent summaries of Bonhoeffer’s witness. Roberts sees the significance and the link in both lives as consisting in their commitment to Christian political activism. Both refused to limit their Christian witness merely to the pursuit of personal piety, nor to indulge in wishful thinking that all would work out well for their nations because of their supposedly Christian leaders. Both believed that the struggle against the corrosive forces of racism and injustice required a witness unto death for the sake of the oppressed. In Bonhoeffer’s words: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”. Both were convinced they should speak for the voiceless and suffer on behalf of the powerless. Such a prophetic stance in the end cost both men their lives. But as King said: ” Death is not so much the ultimate evil; the ultimate evil is to be outside God’s love.”

Wolfgang Böllmann gives us another set of comparisons in the potential interaction of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the talented German novelist and poet Jochen Klepper. Klepper is unfortunately little known in English-speaking countries, because his works have not been translated. But he shared with Bonhoeffer a strong sense of Prussian patriotism and a traditional Lutheran respect for established authority. But Klepper was married to a Jewish wife, which unfortunately brought his public career to a sudden end in 1933. For several years he survived on his novelist’s skills, but was unwilling to accept the fact that Nazi barbarism and racism were now the paramount force in Germany. His ambivalence was even more pronounced in 1940 when he willingly joined the German army, and was bitterly disappointed when he was dismissed a year later on account of his Jewish wife. His attempts to obtain permission for her daughter to emigrate led him into a bureaucratic nightmare of refusals. So in December 1942, he, his wife and step-daughter tragically committed suicide.

Böllmann’s close study of both Klepper and Bonhoeffer as contemporaries and Christians leads him to construct a series of fictitious conversations the two men could have had, as they respectively grappled with the evil consequences of Nazi rule. He shares with us some of Klepper’s poetry, infused with his real spiritual piety, and draws on the extensive and revealing diary Under the shadow of thy wings to depict Klepper’s frustrations and terror which led him to decide that suicide was the only way out Four months after that event, Bonhoeffer was arrested, and Böllmann makes use of the surviving Letters and Papers from Prison to draw a portrait of how Bonhoeffer sought to come to terms with his plight. He suggests that Klepper was a direct inspiration for some of Bonhoeffer’s remarkable and deeply inspiring prison poems. Written at a time when Bonhoeffer could, at any moment, have been summarily tried and executed, these poems are a striking witness and thought-provoking legacy. Böllmann’s brief elucidation of the parallels between these two men’s lives is a sincere tribute to the faith which they shared and which we have inherited.

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1b) John W.de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit. Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2005. 221pp. ISBN 0-8006-3758-5

The South African theologian John de Gruchy is to be congratulated on this fine tribute to his German colleague Eberhard Bethge. Bethge, who died in March 2000 at the age of ninety, is best known as the close friend and later the biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred German theologian and resister against Hitler’s tyranny. Bethge was one of the first students at the illegal seminary for pastors directed by Bonhoeffer, accompanied him as he moved from pacifism to clandestine opposition to the regime, and was the recipient of the famous Letters and Papers from Prison. In 1942 Bethge married Bonhoeffer’s niece, Renate, which brought him still closer to the Bonhoeffer family. In April 1945, only days before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer, his brother and two brothers-in-law were all murdered by the Nazis. It was a shattering blow which marked the survivors for the rest of their lives.

Bethge understandably became the staunch supporter of the remaining Bonhoeffer family. With their help he began the long task of compiling and editing his friend’s literary texts. This was in fact to become his life’s work, and was completed only shortly before his death more than fifty years later. His full-scale biography has been recognized as one of the great biographies of the century, and de Gruchy serves us well in describing how this work was undertaken. It was the definitive study just because no one else was so close to Bonhoeffer or understood his theology so intimately. Had anyone else taken on this task, in all likelihood we would have had a rather different Bonhoeffer today. But, as one commentator noted, Bethge’s life work was something very different from the preservation of a legacy; what Bethge had been engaged in was a “highly dynamic and thoroughly open‚ process of recreating Bonhoeffer’s thought for new situations. In short, as de Gruchy points out, without Bethge we would not know or understand Bonhoeffer in the way we do today. But the reverse is equally true: without Bonhoeffer, Bethge’s life would have been very different. He was indeed a “daring, trusting spirit‚, as Bonhoeffer called him in one of his prison poems.

Bethge’s motives were clear: he was Bonhoeffer’s intimate friend for ten years; he was married into the Bonhoeffer family; and he shared a close affinity with Bonhoeffer’s theology. But the task of making his mentor’s views known and accepted was to be an arduous and daunting one. Contrary to the present-day popularity and acceptance of Bonhoeffer’s theology, the situation in 1945 was very different. At the time of Germany’s national defeat, the reputation of those who had participated in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, including those who actively supported the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, was highly controversial. The fact that Bonhoeffer, as an ordained Lutheran minister, should have championed the plan to murder the head of state was regarded as offensive by most of his conservative establishment colleagues. Even years later, when his friends sought to unveil a plaque in his memory at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and invited the Evangelical Bishop of Munich to take part in the ceremony, he brusquely turned them down with the remark that Bonhoeffer had been put to death as a national traitor not as a Christian martyr. In effect he got what he deserved.

In such a climate, Bethge’s efforts were uphill work. The reforming impulse expressed by younger members of the Confessing Church was largely overlaid after 1945 by the desire of the majority of churchmen to return to stability, with a convenient amnesia about their support for the Nazi regime. Even the call for a new beginning expressed in the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 was disputed. The energetic demands for repentance made by Bonhoeffer’s colleague, Martin Niemöller, who had survived eight years in concentration camp, received a lukewarm reception.

Bethge’s determination to act as the interpreter of his friend’s theological views was therefore in part prompted by the need to challenge this post-war atmosphere of comfort-seeking restoration. He rightly saw that Bonhoeffer’s radical ideas developed during his years in Tegel prison would be an effective way of making his legacy known. To this end, he dug up the surviving letters and papers which had been buried in the family’s garden for security. These letters, which had been smuggled out of the prison through the good services of one of the prison guards, were, for this reason, both unique and precious, affording at least a glimpse of the perilous circumstances in which this correspondence was conducted Though incomplete, they contained an invaluable picture of Bonhoeffer’s theological development. Bethge then selected what seemed to him the most relevant theological sections, leaving aside the more personal and private passages. He also omitted his own replies, which were later on shown to have been both a comfort and a significant stimulus to the incarcerated Bonhoeffer.

When they were first published in 1951, these Letters and Papers from Prison had an immediate and remarkable reception, not only in Germany but particularly in the English-speaking world. They rapidly became a Christian classic. The book appeared at the right time, just when the first glimmer of hope arose out of the moral and physical disasters of the war. The challenges contained in Bonhoeffer’s prison thoughts were welcomed by those who sought new approaches and who were no longer content with stale presentations of the church’s traditional doctrines. In addition, Bonhoeffer’s views were enhanced, particularly in North America, by the fact of his martyrdom.

This success prompted Bethge to begin editing more of Bonhoeffer’s earlier texts. At the time he was on the staff of Otto Dibelius, the Confessing Church leader now advanced to be the Bishop of Berlin. Together with a group of younger clergy, many of whom had been associated with Bonhoeffer, Bethge joined a “ginger group” which published a critical magazine Unterwegs in pursuit of their vision for the future of the church. Together they helped him to explore Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

But Berlin at the time was a dangerous place, blockaded by Soviet forces and infiltrated by agents. For those who had survived the Nazi tyranny, it was an uncomfortable situation. Moreover, the atmosphere in West Germany was unpleasant. Attempts to bring Nazi criminals to trial often failed. For example, the SS Colonel Huppenkothen who had interrogated Bonhoeffer and others of the July 1944 conspiracy, was acquitted despite legal appeals, much to the outrage of the Bonhoeffer family. For these reasons, in 1953 Bethge welcomed an invitation to follow in Bonhoeffer’s footsteps by becoming pastor to the German congregation in London, just twenty years after his friend.

In Britain, Bethge noted with pleasure the remarkable interest in Bonhoeffer’s ideas. He was able to link up with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, Bonhoeffer’s champion, and with the British publishing houses, who were very pleased with the success of The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. With their encouragement, and with that of Paul Lehmann of Harvard University, Bethge resolved to undertake the writing of a full biography, based on the considerable compilation of notes and records he had saved. A year’s sabbatical at Harvard Divinity School gave him the time and opportunity to get started.

This biography was no act of nostalgic atavism, or of filial piety. Rather, Bethge always saw it as a contribution towards the reconstruction of church life in Germany. At the same time he sought to present a defence of the moral understandings which had motivated the members of the German Resistance. He had also to describe the Church Struggle against the Nazis, and the fortunes of the ecumenical movement of the 1930s, and as well to outline the developments in theology in the historical context of those years. This was to be a massive task, resulting in the end in 1100 pages of print. But more and more the emphasis came to be placed on the significance of Bonhoeffer’s theology, defending his positions against the criticisms of other prominent theologians such as Karl Barth or Rudolf Bultmann. Thus the book came to be both a historical narrative and a theological interpretation. When it appeared in 1967, despite its great length, it received wide acclaim.

De Gruchy give a masterly account of how Bethge combined the roles of biographer and interpreter. His numerous appearances before audiences in both Germany and North America helped to present a balanced picture of the martyr-theologian and to draw out the lessons for Christians today. De Gruchy rightly notes that Bonhoeffer’s views were broadly disseminated through the appearance of such books as Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God. All at once Bonhoeffer’s phrase “religionless Christianity” came to have wide currency. This upset many who had been earlier attracted by the rather saintly author of The Cost of Discipleship. On the other hand, some “secular‚ or “death of God‚ theologians now claimed Bonhoeffer to be one of them. Bethge was at pains to correct such defective views of his mentor.

In the eyes of some observers, Bethge’s whole life seemed to be one of self-effacing devotion to that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But de Gruchy points out that there were two separate areas in which Bethge made a highly significant contribution in his own right. The first of these was in South Africa. The Bethges were invited to go there in 1973, and were soon caught up in the heated debates about the moral and theological justifications for the prevailing system of apartheid. The impact of racial intolerance was evident on all sides. Inevitably, this brought to mind the parallels with the Church Struggle against Nazi racism. Bethge’s support of the anti-apartheid forces, and his awareness of the black theologians demonstrated a sensitivity clearly derived from his own earlier experiences. He came to recognize more than ever that the burning issues of the day were those of justice, peace and liberation from oppression. He therefore repeatedly stressed the need for a confession of Christ that spoke directly to questions of racism and human rights.

Even more significant was the lead Bethge gave in the contested field of Christian-Jewish reconciliation in Germany. From 1970 onwards he was increasingly burdened by memories and interpretations of the Holocaust He was easily persuaded that the German churches must unequivocally declare their repentance for their complicity in these atrocities. At the same time, they must begin to take appropriate steps to change the sad legacy of the church’s antisemitic, or anti-Judaic, teachings. In this regard he clearly went much further than Bonhoeffer had done. But, as de Gruchy correctly points out, this was a late conversion on Bethge’s part. In his own autobiography, he had described how, in his youth, he had had no contact with Jews. In his biography of Bonhoeffer, the Jewish issue was not tackled head-on. Indeed Bethge remained ambiguous about the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s joining the resistance movement could be attributed to his sympathy for the victimized Jews, or how far Bonhoeffer had repudiated traditional Lutheran antisemitism.

Not until after the biography was finished did Bethge come to see the centrality of the Jewish issue for Christians. But from then onwards, he became the most outspoken champion of the need for all church followers of whatever denomination to adopt a new stance. It would not be enough merely to overcome the social and political prejudices of earlier years. Far more significant, Bethge argued, was the need to change Christian theological attitudes towards Judaism as a whole.

The centuries-old calumny, whereby Christians had seen Jews as deservedly outcast and reprobate, or alternatively as targets of Christian evangelism, should be abandoned. Instead, a new and much more positive approach to Jews and Judaism must be adopted. Persuading his Lutheran colleagues to accept this new stance proved to be a taxing and arduous procedure throughout those years. Admittedly the way had been paved by the declarations from the Second Vatican Council in Rome. But it is clear that these hard-boiled Lutheran clergy were reluctant to learn from their Catholic counterparts.

Bethge played a leading role in urging his own church of the Rhineland to take a clear and strong position. In 1980 this Synod issued an important statement which tackled the implications of the Holocaust, clearly rejected any form of antisemitism, and even called for the abandonment of the traditional kind of missionary activity towards the Jews. Throughout the rest of his life, Bethge continued to wrestle with the issue of how Christians, especially Germans, could find new ways of entering into dialogue with Jews. This meant, primarily, rejecting Christian triumphalism, which so often had caused terrible crimes against Jews. Instead, he argued, along with Bonhoeffer, that the Christian should stand in solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, and the victims, and participate, with Jesus, in their sufferings.

In his retirement, Bethge continued to be fully engaged in writing, speaking and editing. The flood of visitors requesting information or help about Bonhoeffer was incessant. The new and complete edition of all Bonhoeffer’s works, in 17 volumes, required his nearly full-time consideration. We can therefore be grateful to John de Gruchy for giving us this appealing portrait of a great teacher, whose generous humanity and loyalty to his friend Bonhoeffer enriched all who knew him or read his writings. It was Bethge’s particular gift that he could become the interpreter of one of Germany’s most significant theologians. As de Gruchy says, by gathering the fragments of Bonhoeffer’s life and theology into a coherent, meaningful whole, he brought them to appropriate posthumous completion through his scholarship and his ministry. His was a remarkably fulfilled life.

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1c) Peter Monteath, Dear Dr. Janzow. Australia’s Lutheran Churches and Refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Australian Humanities Press 2005. 116 pp. ISN 0-9758313-0-5

Australian attitudes towards Nazi Germany’s persecution and expulsion of its Jewish citizens were ambivalent. The Anglo-Irish majority of the island’s population still maintained considerable anti-German and anti-alien feelings left over from the first world war. Only a few liberal voices expressed sympathy for those suffering under a far-distant tyranny. So too the Australian churches responded in a bemusingly inconsistent manner. Some were still guided by a traditional anti-Judaic stance; others recognized a Christian duty to extend help to those afflicted by dreadful mistreatment in Europe. Among the latter were a group of South Australian Lutherans. In November 1938, one of their leaders, Dr Janzow, described the appalling pogrom in Germany of a few days earlier as “pagan” and said he could not understand how a civilized nation could perpetrate such horrors. At the same time, he announced a scheme whereby the Lutheran churches planned to bring refugee Jews to Australia, by raising funds and making loans so that they could resettle in a new homeland.

This news item found its way into the London Times on 15 November 1938, was widely reproduced and led to a large response from numerous applicants across Europe replying to Dr Janzow’s initiative. Hence the title of this book. These letters were recently exhibited in Adelaide, and Professor Peter Monteath of Flinders University was asked to write an accompanying guide to put them in context. His well-researched study gives the background in both Europe and Australia, to this heart-warming proposal to assist these victims of racial intolerance.

Unfortunately, the maze of bureaucratic regulations in both countries meant that majority of Dr Janzow’s correspondents never succeeded in reaching safety. In fact, as he later admitted, he had not been able to do much for these refugees. Less than a year later, the outbreak of war put a stop to such plans. Only three known individuals came to a new life in Australia under these auspices. One was a Lutheran pastor, who had been brought to England by Bishop George Bell in the summer of 1939, but whose arrival in Australia in 1940 was marred by his prompt incarceration as an enemy alien. It took the Lutheran church four years to secure his release, though his later career was luckily successful. Peter Monteath’s researches tracked down the tragic fate of several more of Dr Janzow’s applicants, murdered in concentration camps. But his achievement is to have preserved and published this moving selection of letters. They show the desperate plight of those seeking a life-line from the persecutions they faced in Hitler’s Germany. “Small though they are in number, and by now far removed from us in time, they nevertheless have the capacity to reach to us across the decades and to touch us. They remind us of the importance of preserving our common humanity and of the costs of losing it” (p. 3).

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1d) Douglas John Hall, Bound and Free. A theologian’s journey. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2005. 156 pp ISBN 0-8006-3773 -9.

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship was the first strictly theological book I ever read. That was in the summer of 1949. I was enthralled by Bonhoeffer from the outset.” So records Douglas Hall, now Canada’s leading Protestant theologian, in his delightful and thought-provoking account of his theological journey over the past half-century. As a young man, he was greatly influenced by German theology, not only by Bonhoeffer, but particularly by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and more latterly by Jürgen Moltmann. He learnt from them that the theologian’s vocation calls for a strong concern for academic excellence combined with a commitment to the welfare of the Christian community. He learnt also from them the twin dangers of detachment and its opposite, seduction by secular ideologies. Dry-as-dust theologians separated from active church life may find themselves without relevance; but no less perilous is what happens to the churches when their teachers mislead them. They become collectivities of a nebulous sort of “fellowship”, or activists willfully pursuing political goals, or undifferentiated pietists. Today there is greater need for sound teaching than ever before. This is, of course, what Barth and Bonhoeffer were saying both during and after the Nazi catastrophe. But Hall reached the point where his theological journey necessitated his growing out of this tutelage. He turned his focus to finding a similarly prophetic tone for the social and political situations and theological witness in North America.

In so doing, he took over Bonhoeffer’s profound respect for the Christian faith, which led him to be extremely critical of the Christian religion. Hall is particularly critical of the kind of Christian triumphalism, either in a fundamentalist other-worldly or a liberal this-worldly guise, which seems to be providing justification for many of the political policies advocated by the world’s most imperialist power today. Instead of legitimizing the dominant culture, he believes, the Church is called to transform it. Theologians must struggle to articulate an alternate but living truth in a world that staggers from one piece of bad news to the next. The theological vocation, as Hall has lived it, requires courage, bound by tradition, but free to explore the realms of transcendence. To be a theologian is both a privilege and a joy.

Hall’s journey included many years of teaching, first in western Canada, and more latterly at McGill University in Montreal. But he continued to learn from the Germans. Moltmann’s The Theology of Hope made a great impression on him, just because he too was well aware of the devastating aftermath of World War II, and because his mentor Reinhold Niebuhr had already laid the foundations. But he found that Moltmann’s message, which was addressed to a defeated, despairing and spiritually empty society, was being taken up in North America as a confirmation of its own hope-affirming, even hope-demanding culture. His book Lighten our Darkness was written in the mid-1970s to counter this kind of easy optimism so prevalent in the churches on this side of the Atlantic. The Church’s hope is, however, based on the cross of Christ, not on material or political advances. “If the Gospel becomes nothing more than a sentimental pat-on-the-back for today’s technocratic utopianism, then we are falling for what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”.

In his subsequent book, The Cross in our Context, Hall again pointed out the dangers of religious triumphalism. Here the exclusionary deed, the aggressive and proselytizing stance, the crusading attitude and acts are products of those who believe that they are possessors of the Truth, with their innate sense of superiority and mandate to mastery. It is not good enough to point the finger at Islam. Christianity adopted such a stance for centuries, and even now reproduces it in various places.

Hall shares with Bonhoeffer and Moltmann, and indeed with Luther, his belief that the theology of the cross shows a better way. For him the glory and power of God are made manifest in the weakness and suffering of the crucified one. Through his suffering on the cross, through his bearing the burden of our griefs and sin, Jesus reconciles us to God and restores creation to its fulfillment. Above all, the cross challenges the easy assumption of mankind’s perpetual progress, or, in church terms, of Christendom’s eventual victory. Instead, forsaking these kinds of external props, the individual Christian must look at Jesus on the cross, abandoning shallow illusions, but embracing hope for the suffering world. Hall’s credo is aptly summed up in his poignant affirmation (p. 94): “If Jesus as he was and is and will be is our Guide into the great immensity that is life in this world, we shall find ourselves beckoned into places and causes and relationships whose breadth and scope will always astonish us, sometimes scare us, and in the end liberate us from the narrowness and provincialism of our own inherited values and destinies”.
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With very best wishes,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Let me send you all a warm greeting for the New Year from a wintry Vancouver. I can hardly believe that we are now opening Vol. XII of this Newsletter, but your words of encouragement over the past months have persuaded me that I should keep up this service as long as my health permits. And, once again, I should be glad to hear from any of you who would like to contribute a review, or a notice of interest, or an outline of your present research interests. Please remember NOT to press REPLY to these Newsletters but to send your comments to me direct at my personal e-mail = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Bonhoeffer Commemoration:

I am glad to announce that a Canadian symposium in commemoration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 100th anniversary will be held in Vancouver on Feb. 17-18th 2006, in Regent College Chapel, which is situated next to the University of British Columbia campus. This will be open to the public without charge, and we are particularly pleased to invite one of our list members, Craig Slane from Simpson University, Redding, California to be one of the presenters.
It is particularly encouraging that the writing of contemporary church history continues to flourish. Despite the decline in the number of dedicated professorships in universities, theological colleges, and seminaries, it is obvious that numerous scholarly works in our field are being published. This is still true in Germany, long the leader in this endeavour, where it can be said that the writing of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte thrives. Both the Catholic and Protestant official commissions responsible for the writing and publishing of such works have seen an increase in the number, and equally significantly in the quality, of the studies produced. So too other series, such as Konfession und Gesellschaft continue to make important contributions. And a scholarly journal with the title Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which appears twice a year, has been produced now for eighteen years. To be sure, the German tradition of writing dissertations on a voluminous scale can be rather daunting, but evidently the generous subsidies given by granting bodies enable these works to see the light of day for the benefit of the wider public. No other country is presently competing on the same scale.

The result is that the pages of this Newsletter are more or less already bespoken for 2006.

My hope, however, is to maintain a certain ecumenical breadth of reviews, though the focus on Germany will certainly shine through in most of the issues. I trust this will prove to be of interest and value to you all.

John Conway

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Good, The Steamer Parish
b) Hauschild, Konfliktgemeinschaft Kirche
c) Plokhy and Sysyn, Religion and Nation in the Ukraine

2) Journal articles

a) Brechenmacher, The Pope and the Persecution of the Jews in Germany
b) Salemink, Dutch bishops’ protests 1942
c) Chapman, Secularisation and the Ministry of John Stott

1a) Charles M.Good Jr, The Steamer Parish. (The rise and fall of missionary medicine on an African frontier), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. 487 pp. ISBN (cloth) 0-226-30281-4, (paper) 0-226-30282 -2

Missionary history has evolved rapidly in recent decades. The old-style laudatory accounts of heroic and self-sacrificing missionaries from Europe and North America serving in intemperate climes from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strands have largely been replaced by more objective sociological studies of the recipients’ reactions to the series of intrusive cultural penetrations by colonialist powers.

Charles M.Good Jr., however, in this excellently researched study of a small Anglican mission in the centre of Africa, adopts a new tack. He takes a highly critical, even hostile approach to the missionaries’ endeavours. Indeed he appears to believe that their spiritual ministry was mistaken, or at least misguided, although he pays tribute to the dedication of certain individuals who devoted their whole careers to what was often a frustrating and certainly costly vocation.

The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa was the direct result of a speech given by David Livingstone at the University of Cambridge in December 1857. Livingstone had called for men to come out to Africa to bring Christianity and (legitimate) commerce as the best way to put a stop to the atrocious evils of the slave trade. The Oxford and Cambridge recruits who responded to this appeal were, however, in a different category from those who had earlier joined the Church Missionary Society after William Wilberforce’s advocacy of the same cause. UMCA members were drawn from, and supported by, the “high” or Anglo-Catholic parishes of the Church of England. This gave their churchmanship a singular character, with its emphasis on the priesthood and on liturgy, service to the poorest and, for the missionaries themselves, a commitment to celibacy. The mission was much more Catholic in style than the prevalent evangelicalism of their sister missions, for example in Kenya or Uganda. UMCA’s sphere of operation was also much more limited, namely to the region of Lake Nyasa, later renamed Malawi, where the slave trade had been particularly vindictive. The first expedition in the 1860s seeking to reach this remote African hinterland proved utterly disastrous, and it was not until the middle 1870s that the mission was resurrected. It lasted for ninety years until Malawi achieved its political independence in 1964.

But Good’s focus is neither on the fortunes or misfortunes of the white missionaries; nor is he really interested in the populations to whom they ministered, who remain largely anonymous throughout. Instead he concentrates his study on the impact of the European technology brought to the region by UMCA. He not only has skillfully researched all the surviving records and publications – necessarily missionary-produced – but undertook his own on-the-spot visits to look for surviving mementos of this far-flung, and to some questionable, episode in Malawi’s history.

In particular, he sought to examine and evaluate two specific aspects, namely the arrival of mission steamships, imported from Britain, and the introduction of European medical practices. His account of the mission is woven around these two salient features. The book’s title reflects the significance of UMCA’s presence amidst the settlements up and down the nearly five hundred miles of Lake Nyasa, which formed the steamer parish. It became a unique and special ministry.

For the sake of protection, the mission established its headquarters on an island halfway up the lake. Here the missionaries were able to build schools, a hospital and eventually a massive and stately cathedral. But it was a choice they later regretted, since it made them entirely dependent on the steamers. As dramatic symbols of European technological and military superiority, the steamers were effective in projecting the British presence, checking the slave trade and establishing unprecedented law and order. The missionaries used them for their itinerant evangelization from village to village along both banks of the lake. Because the steamers were wood-fired, frequent refueling stops were required. So the impact was considerable.

On the other hand, the distances were so vast that even with the steamers the individual missionary could only visit any one settlement every other month. The steamers also carried people and goods, and were fitted out with a chapel and emergency beds, which were frequently in use to carry patients to and from the island hospital. Yet, this European intrusion was not welcomed by all. Several African chiefs, mostly adherents of Islam, found this to be a direct threat to their entrenched interests in the slave trade. The early years of the British presence therefore actually saw an increase in hostility and ecclesiastical rivalry.

After twenty-five years, UMCA brought a second and larger steamer to the lake. The advantages seemed obvious. More people could be reached for evangelism, more goods transported to remote communities, more travel undertaken. But at the same time, these increased expectations were often frustrated by technological failures. The steamers often needed repairs and maintenance. When boilers rusted or leaked, they had to be replaced from Britain. During the first world war, the colonial government commandeered the larger vessel for use against the German-held territory at the northern end of the lake, and didn’t release it until 1920.

Despite the steamers’ availability, and the undoubted drive of some of the missionaries to preach, teach and minister to the villagers along the lake, their ambitious hopes for mass conversions were never fulfilled. In part, the long-established Muslims resisted all such attempts; in part, the European character of the mission, and especially the requirement to live according to Christian principles, for example adopting monogamy, involved too great a challenge to the Africans’ ways of life. But equally, the missions’ success was crucially affected by the colonial government’s overall policies. Because each colony was required to pay for its own social services, the British authorities in Nyasaland imposed a head tax on the impoverished African population, which for ever increasing numbers could only be met by large-scale emigration to work in South Africa’s mines or Rhodesia’s farms. This left Malawi stripped of its most productive work force and only increased its economic backwardness. UMCA is not known to have made any coherent protest, let alone concerted opposition to this exploitative policy.

The colony was too poor to afford public education or publicly supported health facilities. As a result the missionaries were drawn into supplying these needs. To be sure, evangelism remained their top priority, but their knowledge of the local people and their compassion for their evident, and possibly curable, sufferings led them into provision of nursing stations, hospital facilities, maternity clinics and even operating rooms. They clearly hoped that these expressions of Christian mercy would lead their grateful patients to join the Christian communities in their home villages. Inevitably the introduction of western medicine came to be seen as a valuable weapon against the dark forces of superstition as provided by the witch doctor or indigenous medicine man.

Good’s examination of UMCA’s medical services occupies the second half of the book. His research into tropical diseases, their incidence in Malawi, and the various strategies developed to combat them, is exemplary. Basically his argument is that the mission’s resources were woefully inadequate, its strategy misplaced, and its effectiveness probably minimal. In the first place, the mission insisted on celibacy for its staff. When its principal and very talented doctor in the early 1900s wanted to marry the head nurse at one of the mission’s out-stations, they were both obliged to resign and leave the territory. Good is not surprisingly scathing about this requirement, all the more so since UMCA’s doggedly conservative insistence on celibacy created a barrier beyond most Africans’ comprehension. Repeatedly the London headquarters advertised for medical recruits but found none.

In the second place, the emphasis on healing the sick absorbed energies which would have been better deployed on preventive measures. To be sure, when finally the etiology of malaria was established by British scientists, the missionaries learnt to take precautionary steps against infection. And later on their policy of giving injections against virulent diseases or the ubiquitous ulcers, undoubtedly relieved much suffering. But equally obviously, the proportion of the population that could be reached was small. Many Africans remained terrified of western medical practices and preferred to rely on traditional remedies. Medical pluralism was thus a continuing feature, though the Europeans insisted on their superiority and were scornful of what they considered the pervasive evils of African medicine. This insensitivity, Good claims, was clearly part of their racist approach to the backward and benighted African people.

UMCA’s failure to attract medical help from their home base was only compounded by their reluctance to encourage training programmes for Africans. The result was that the available support was spread too thinly and unevenly, or not at all. In Good’s view, UMCA’s pattern was that of taking one step forward, and one or two underfunded steps backward. Particularly in the later years, as the colonial government began to recognize its responsibilities, the missionary hospitals were left behind. The facilities experienced a sad deterioration, and the lack of resources entailed a ever-growing over-extension of its capabilities. The lack of new recruits, or even of text books, meant that new knowledge never reached Malawi, and the training received by the staff so long before in Britain became sadly outdated. To be sure, their efforts were hampered by the generally inconsistent and ineffective fund-raising in Britain.
So Good’s verdict is hardly a positive one. UMCA remained too attached to its British base, too racist in its approach to the African society, and too limited in its outreach. With the coming of independence in 1964, the mission was unable to sustain itself, and was forced to amalgamate with the USPG. Despite genuine heroes, important accomplishments, and good intentions, UMCA never fulfilled its ambitious hope of bringing Christianity to central Africa. Its disappointing record closely parallels that of the whole British Empire. Good’s achievement is to describe soberly and dispassionately UMCA’s impact and legacy in this small and largely forgotten episode of mission history.

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1b) Wolf-Dietrich Hauschild, Konfliktgemeinschaft Kirche. (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Darstellungen Bd. 40) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2004. 426 pp ISBN 3-525-55740 -X

W-D Hauschild is now one of the senior members of the German Protestant fraternity of church historians. Like most of us, he has given lectures and contributed articles in various places, which he now seeks to bring together and publish in a more durable form. They now appear in the reputable series, sponsored by the Evangelical Church’s Commission for Contemporary History, based in Munich.

Hauschild’s career has been largely engaged in dealing with the tempestuous and often traumatic history of his church throughout the twentieth century. Hence the title – a church in conflict – which reflects very well the failures of German Protestantism in their attempt to steer through the political shoals and social upheavals of the last hundred years.

To be sure, few other churches have been so riven by theological or better still theo-political dissension, assailed by anti-clerical and anti-Christian onslaughts, and forced to abandon much of their former status and support among the general population. Hauschild’s examination of how the institution’s history has been recorded and remembered by his colleagues is both proper and apposite. He thereby addresses the question lurking in the background which Bonhoeffer posed in 1943: “Are we of any use?”

In his opening essay, Hauschild describes the differing approaches currently adopted. Some practitioners argue that the topic of church history should be treated no differently from any other part of experience, using the same empirical, rationalist tools. But others point to the fact that church historians have a dual loyalty: they have to see events in a theologically-based context, conscious of seeking to explain God’s ways to man, and to introduce criteria of evaluation over and above any secular measurement. As guardians of the church’s collective memory, its historians are also much more directly involved in policy debates than their secular counterparts. Therein lie perils, or at any rate conflict.

How the church should relate to the state has been a continuing and often agonizing problem for Germans throughout the century, and indeed even before. Luther’s legacy has been both an ideal but also contentious. The church is called to a critical stance over against all political systems, and should not fall into the trap of overly identifying with any one party programme, or alternatively withdrawing into a private realm of spiritual abstention. Hauschild argues in favour of a “political diaconia” or watchful office for the church, though well aware how difficult this line can be. But its principal task must be to uphold the moral values of society, drawing on the rich vein of similar endeavours of the past. This will keep the church from again succumbing to the temptations or pressures to adapt itself to seductive modern tendencies or trying to keep up with the times.

Coming to terms with the particular events of Germany’s Nazi past is a prerequisite for all church historians of Hauschild’s generation. It imposes an inescapable duty, not only to explain why so many churchmen were led astray, or why others did so little to put a spoke in the wheels, or why only one theologian, Bonhoeffer, joined the anti-Hitler resistance, or why Bonhoeffer’s reputation for many years after 1945 was disputed among his fellow churchmen and colleagues. Should the church, collectively, feel guilt? If so, how should this be expressed?

Hauschild soberly considers these issues. He shows how readily many Germans, especially conservative churchmen, sought to balance out the Nazi crimes with those inflicted on the Germans expelled from the east by the Soviet armies, or the sufferings resulting from British and American air raids. In the aftermath, the post-war political situation and the desire to preserve their institutions outweighed any widespread acceptance of moral guilt for past complicity. These issues also raised serious questions about the future identity of both church and nation. Hauschild argues in favour of an exact reckoning, which avoids sweeping generalizations, such as Goldhagen’s, but which accepts the burden and responsibility for this ill-fated past.

One aspect of the Nazi years for which the German Evangelical Church can take some credit was the forthright statement issued in May 1934, known as the Barmen Declaration, which resolutely affirmed the theological principles of the newly-established Confessing Church in opposition to the pro-Nazi factions. The Declarations spelled out the limits of the church’s willingness to accede to the new regime’s demands, and in fact became the basis for all future non-compliance with Nazi ambitions to subordinate the church entirely. Hauschild devotes several chapters to a description of the Barmen Declaration and its effects, both during and after the Nazi years.

His subsequent chapters deal with the post-1945 history of this church. To be sure, in 1945 its surviving leaders had their freedom from state control and could determine their own future. But as Hauschild shows, there were still so many unresolved and disputed interpretations of where the church should go and how its polity should be formulated that his book’s title continued to be truly earned. Unfortunately, due in part to the political divisions imposed on Germany, these issues have still not been fully resolved. The German Evangelical Church’s identity, both before and after the political upheavals of 1989-1990, and the subsequent reunification of the country, are still a matter for debate, even at times of conflict. The legacy of the past therefore still requires to be looked through. But its institutional survival now seems assured. More problematic is the nature of its witness both in Germany and to the wider world. In this regard, Hauschild believes church historians have an important role to play. They are in fact the guardians of the church’s past and in some sense its conscience. Given the disasters of previous years, their duty to tell the truth without distortion is all the more significant. The essays collected in this volume will undoubtedly contribute towards this goal.

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1c) Serhii Plokhy and Frank E.Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. 2003. 216 pp. ISBN 1-895571-45-6(bound); 1-895571-36-7 (pbk.) ed. Thomas Bremer, Religion und Nation. Die Situation der Kirchen in der Ukraine. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2003. 147 pp. ISBN 3-447-04843-3.

The early history of Scotland was once described as murder tempered by theology. The more recent history of the Ukraine could also qualify. No other part of Europe during the past hundred years has been so convulsed by turbulent political events, with horrendous and massive losses of life and property. In fact, as a crossroads between East and West, the Ukraine has long been involved in a continuous struggle to obtain independence and identity. In its repeated attempts to achieve a national revival, the local churches have played a significant role, both as inheritors of past traditions, but also as active participants in fashioning new intellectual and ideological agendas, as they relate to the indigenous religious populations.

The complexity and conflictual character of much of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical scene has long deterred western scholars from any evaluative surveys. In fact, the most comprehensive account is by the German scholar, Friedrich Heyer, who recently updated his initial study written fifty years ago. So it is all the more welcome to have the short analysis by two former Ukrainian scholars now resident in Canada, which will help to sort out some of the entangled religious and political questions of the current period.

Because of its earlier history, the Ukraine was always multi-ethnic and hence pluralistic in its religious loyalties. At the same time, its rulers – then and now – have sought to mobilize religious forces to advance their particular cause. The Czarist monarchs promoted the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, while in the western parts of the country, the Uniate Church, which is familiarly but misleadingly known as the Greek Catholic Church, owing its allegiance to the Pope in Rome, predominated under the sponsorship of the Austro-Hungarian emperors. In the twentieth century, further religio-political alliances resulted during and after the first world war. The rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and the subsequent persecutions led to the growth of local groupings such as the breakaway Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox church. During the Nazi occupation, both this splinter group and the Greek Catholics sought to regain ground. But after the Soviet victory, both were liquidated, and the remnants compulsorily amalgamated under the Moscow-dominated Patriarchate

After 1989, the Greek Catholics almost spontaneously resurrected themselves and reclaimed their former churches and constituents. At the same time, another section of the Orthodox community sought to re-establish its own patriarch in Kiev. But for political reasons they refused to acknowledge the autocephalous group, and both are spurned by those who still acknowledge Moscow’s ecclesiastical authority.

These internal struggles, as the authors make clear, are intimately related to the different concepts of national autonomy upheld by rival political groups. Some look back to the past as a model for the revival of Ukrainian cultural and political independence, seeking to promote the Orthodox Church as the upholder of a specific Ukrainian destiny. But the political record of the autocephalists during the second world war has still left a bitter legacy. On the other side, the long subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, with its frequent execution of the Soviet leaders’ demands, has also caused deep resentments. For example, after 1989, a large number of Orthodox priests and congregations switched over, or back, to the Greek Catholic Uniates. But these Uniates, in turn, seek to establish their independence from their Polish neighbours, who maintain the Latin rite and equally see their Roman connection as a vital part of the Polish national revival. Since there is a great intermingling of these respective populations, and no clear acceptance of any one model for national resurgence, the result is still one of unresolved tensions and religious divisions.

Plokhy and Sysyn provide ample evidence of the close interaction between state building and religious movements. The politicians seek to enlist, or even to exploit, the churches in pursuit of their particular view of national identity. This however still remains illusory. These same problems are explored in the collection of essays, edited by Thomas Bremer, which resulted from a Berlin conference in 2001. These authors also stress the need for western scholars to be fully acquainted with the origins and development of each individual Ukrainian church in order to understand its particular contribution to the task of forging religious and political identity. They also provide a useful multi-lingual bibliography.

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2a) Thomas Brechenmacher, “Pope Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli, and the Persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany 1933-1939: New sources from the Vatican archives” in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute,London, Vol. XXVII, no. 2, November 2005, pp 17-45.

Brechenmacher, who is now preparing a definitive edition of the Nuncio’s reports from Berlin in the early period of Nazi rule, has undertaken a parallel study to that of Gerhard Besier (Reviewed in our December 2005 Newsletter). In this extended article he looks specifically at the Vatican’s stance towards the persecution of the German Jews, and comes to very similar conclusions: “It should be asked whether, given the situation in Germany, the official Vatican statements were not too late, and too hesitant. . . The Holy Office wasted two years in endless, learned discussions and scholastic nit-picking, while in Germany the persecution of the Jews was getting worse by the month. . . Concern about the survival of Church life in Germany dominated Rome’s actions: everything else was of secondary importance.” (p.43).

2b) Theo Salemink, “Bischöfe protestieren gegen die Deportation der niederländischen Juden 1942” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 116, no. 1, 2005, p.63-77

A useful evaluation of the protests made by the Dutch bishops against the Nazis’ deportation of the Jews, and how this topic has been treated over the past fifty years in the historiography, both Catholic and Protestant. Salemink warns against exaggerated myths, by pointing out that only 190 Catholic Jews were in fact deported as a result of the protests.

2c) Alister Chapman, “Secularisation and the ministry of John R.W.Stott at All Souls, Langham Place, 1950-1970 in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 56, no 3, July 2005, pp. 496-513.

Alister Chapman has given us a valuable contribution to understanding the impact of evangelicalism in the Church of England in the post-1945 situation. He examines the work of one of the leading figures, John Stott, Rector of a popular up-scale church in London’s west end. Contrary to the widespread losses suffered by the church in these post-war years, Stott successfuly built up a thriving parish with vigorous lay participation. His teaching was traditionally evangelical. but he provided an intellectually robust apologetic, using such popular props as the works of C.S.Lewis to give a fresh emphasis for the intellectual viability of Christian belief

Chapman suggests that Stott’s success at All Souls was due to his presentation of a clear message along with a willingness to interact with the broader culture and some of its values. Unlike some parts of world Protestantism, this was no world-denying anti-modern stance. Of course, the hoped-for revival, sparked by Billy Graham’s crusades, did not take place. And Stott himself expressed disappointment and frustration. On the other hand, his growing reputation world-wide meant that he was less and less present in the parish, and finally he had to hand it over to a successor. Here too his church had to contend with the increasingly anti-authoritarian stance among the youth of the 1960s. Stott expressed alarm at the “steady progress of secularisation, even paganisation” But these gloomy predictions were only partly true. In Chapman’s views evangelicalism in England still flourishes.

With every best wish to you all for the New Year
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Books reviewed in 2004

Bergen, Doris ed The Sword of the Lord. Military Chaplains September
Besier, Gerhard Der Heilige Stuhl und Hitler-Deutschland December
Bottum, Joseph and Dalin, David, eds The Pius War September
Gerdes, Uta Okumenisches Solidarität mit christlichen und jüdischen
Verfolgten. Die CIMADE in Vichy-Frankreich 1940-44 November
Greenberg, Irving For the Sake of Heaven and Earth June
Gruber, Mark Journey back to Eden December
Hauerwas, Stanley Performing the Faith. Bonhoeffer and Nonviolence April
Haynes, Stephen The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon April
Hockenos, Matthew A Church Divided. German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past February
Leugers, Antonia ed Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4 November
Lewis, Don ed. Christianity reborn May
Merkle, John ed Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Judaism June
Palm, Dirk Wir sind doch Brüder. Der evangelische Kirchentag 1949-61 January
Ruff, Mark TheWayward Flock. Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany March
Slane, Craig Bonhoeffer as Martyr April
Spicer. Kevin Resisting the Third Reich. Catholic Clergy in Berlin September
Staritz, Katharina Dokumentation Band 1 1903-1942. January
Steele, Michael Christianity, the Other and the Holocaust October
Tent, James In the Shadow of the Holocaust November
Tischner, Wolfgang Katholische Kirche in der SBZ/DDR 1945-51 March
Tittmann, Harold Inside the Vatican of Pius XII March
Ueberschaer, Ellen Junge Gemeinde im Konflikt October

Article:
Missions to Israel: The Rise and Fall of Protestant Mssions to the Jews 1800-2000
July/August

Dear Friends,

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland
Der Jungfrauen Kind erkannt,
Des sich wundert alle Welt,
Gott solch Geburt ihm bestellt.

—Martin Luther 1524

Contents

1) Book reviews:

a) Besier, Der Heilige Stuhl und Hitler-Deutschland
b) Gruber, Journey Back to Eden

2) Reply to review of A.Leugers, Rosenstrasse 2-4

3) Book notes.

a) P. Cabanel, Les Protestants et la Republique
b) A.Porter, ed., Imperial Horizons of British Missions
c) W.Brandmüller, Holocaust in der Slovakei

4) Journal articles

a) B.da Silva, Peace, Pastors and Politics
b) C.Marsh, Russian Orthodox Christians today
c) M.Menke, German Catholics and National Identity
d) F.Latour, The Holy See and Turkey during the First World War

5) Research in progress: J.D.Wyneken, Post-1945 German churches

1a) Gerhard Besier, in Zusammenarbeit mit Francesca Piombo, Der Heilige Stuhl und Hitler-Deutschland. Die Fazination des Totalitären. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 2004 415pp ISBN 3-421005814-8

Forty years ago a young Swiss playwright wrote a scathing attack on the war-time policieso f Pope Pius XII and his failure to protest the Nazi mass murders of the Jews. Ever since, controversy has raged, usually with more heat than light. A major factor has been the refusal – so far – of the Vatican to open its files for this pontificate, which has encouraged Pius’ critics to believe that the true story is being suppressed. To be sure, the Vatican did authorize the publication of eleven weighty volumes covering the war years. But since they were mainly in Italian, they remained unread. The carping criticisms went on as before.

Two years ago, the Vatican authorities finally got around to mobilizing sufficient resources to open part of the holdings for the reign of Pope Pius XI, i.e. from 1922 to 1939. These documents concern the Vatican’s dealings with Germany, most of which were handled by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who, in 1939, became Pius XII. Consequently, if only partially, and only for the early years of the Nazi regime, we now have access to the documentary evidence for this crucial initial period.

Gerhard Besier, now Director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research into Totalitarianism in Dresden, has been one of the few scholars who have taken advantage of this new opening. (To my knowledge, no scholar from Britain or North America is so engaged). Besier was the pupil of the late Professor Klaus Scholder of Tübingen, whose magnificent two volumes on the Churches in the Third Reich were sadly cut short by his early death. (Besier helped to edit and complete Volume II, and later went on to write Volume III, which was published in 2001). One of the main features of Volume I was a highly critical and much disputed account of the making of the Reich Concordat of 1933 between the new Nazi government and the Roman Catholic Church. These negotiations were largely conducted by Pacelli personally. So Besier was already alerted to the controversial debates this ill-fated treaty gave rise to. Hence he was eager to see whether the newly-released documents would confirm or refute the earlier contentions about the Reich Concordat.

He is greatly to be praised for realizing that this episode needs to be put in its wider setting. His study begins with the evolution of Catholic diplomacy and practice from the turn of the century, but then concentrates on the relations with Germany from 1920 onwards. In so doing he replaces the earlier accounts of Stewart Stehlin in English, Emma Fattorini in Italian or Klaus Scholder in German. His study runs parallel to that of Peter Godman, who teaches in Rome, and whose work is drawn primarily from the files of the Holy Office rather than the Secretariat of State.

Besier states that these new documents offer no really sensational revelations, though they do bring certain surprises. (It can be expected that the same will be found when, finally, the documents from 1939 onwards are made public. This fact will undoubtedly disappoint the whole flock of Pius-bashers whose minds have long since been made up). Besier’s researches are meticulous and scholarly. He marshals the evidence and lays out the essential character of papal policy – even though it is clear that he, as a Protestant, has little sympathy for the Vatican’s presuppositions about how the world should be governed.

The leaders of the Catholic Church could not fail to see that the first world war had been a highly damaging catastrophe for all the churches. The outburst of rival nationalisms, the mutually exclusive claims to have divine approval for their war aims, the seemingly endless casualties and the rapid decline of personal and public morality, were all grave indications of a world-wide moral disorder. The Vatican therefore saw its prime duty to seek to restore peace between and within the nations, to use its influence to stabilize the postwar regimes, to reconcile the former enemies and to heal the wounds of war. Its resources for this vast task were, however, pitifully limited. Fifty years earlier, the new Italian state had seized all the former Papal States and reduced the territory of the Holy See to a small segment of Rome’s inner city. The Vatican had no military or financial power. It was therefore entirely dependent on the mobilization of its spiritual and diplomatic resources. Inevitably there was always a painful gap between its high expectations and the actual results. This was to be a constant feature of papal diplomacy throughout the twentieth century.

The Vatican’s strategy throughout the continent was to seek to achieve internationally- and legally-binding treaties with each state, in the belief that these would strengthen the forces of moderation, and serve as a barrier against the kind of revolutionary and anti-clerical violence which had already seized control in the Soviet Union. In countries such as Austria, Poland and Spain, where the population was largely Catholic, such treaties or Concordats could be easily obtained, even though critics saw them as perpetuating Catholic privileges. In Germany, where the Catholics were a minority, this task proved harder. As Papal Nuncio, first in Bavaria and then in Berlin, Pacelli laboured throughout the 1920s, seeking to find a basis for agreement. He failed, largely due to opposition from the socialist and communist parties.

He had more success on the provincial level. In 1924 the Bavarian parliament signed its local Concordat with the Vatican, paradoxically at the very time when Munich was becoming the leading city in the rise of National Socialism. In 1929 a further agreement was reached with Prussia and in 1932 with Baden. But far more significant was the Vatican’s success in 1929 in reaching a new understanding with the Italian fascist state in the Lateran Treaty. This ended decades of hostility and regulated the legal position of the Holy See. Besier rightly points out the importance of this agreement, which in effect gave the church’s blessing to Mussolini’s totalitarian rule, but which also restored the Vatican’s international standing as a significant diplomatic entity.

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 altered the situation abruptly. One of Hitler’s early moves was to send Goering down to Rome to take soundings about re-opening negotiations with the Vatican. Hitler’s motives were purely opportunistic. By such means he hoped to thwart the possibility of any unified Catholic opposition to his new regime, and at the same time to add to his credibility by dealing with Europe’s oldest diplomatic institution. For their part, the leaders of the papal Curia, especially Pacelli, by this time advanced to being in effect the Pope’s foreign minister, could not resist the opportunity to achieve the long-desired goal of a Reich Concordat. Within a few months, it was both signed and ratified. Critics of the Vatican, including Scholder, have long regarded this step as a culpable betrayal. The Pope’s willlingness to sign an agreement with the new totalitarian leader, the abandonment and collapse of Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, and the failure to demand measures for the protection of human rights and of ethnic minorities, such as the Jews, are all part of this critique. Besier avoids invective. But he also shows that the Vatican’s hasty conclusion of this Concordat cannot be ascribed to illusions about Nazi policies. As early as Hitler’s abortive coup in 1923, Pacelli had been warning his Roman counterparts about the dangers which this movement, with its political and racial radicalism and its vulgar and violent propaganda campaigns, constituted for the church. The risks were acknowledged. Why then were they taken?

Besier, like Godman, downplays the role of personalities. Of course, Pacelli was eager to see the completion of his work in Germany. But this was only part of a world-wide policy consistently pursued under two different popes. There were other factors, both positive and negative, which affected the Vatican’s stance. In Germany, the fears of the hierarchy lest another Kulturkampf be started was offset by the remarkable success of the Nazis in recruiting young Catholics to their cause, despite the bishops’ warnings. The terms offered were far better than those put forward before. On the other hand, the splintering of the Catholic Centre Party left the Vatican without the backing it might have expected. The illusion that being in power would cure Nazism of its radicalism was certainly a factor. On balance, the risk seemed worth taking. Besier might have quoted the remark made by a sceptical Pacelli to the British envoy: “Certainly some of the Concordat’s clauses will be broken. But not all of them, and not all at the same time”

Such pessimism was soon enough justified. Besier’s account of the subsequent exacerbation in the Vatican’s relations with Germany covers well-known ground. Too late, the Curia realized that it would be impossible to admit its mistake. It would not even be able to send a stronger Nuncio to Berlin. And when it did try to help the Nazis’ victims, especially refugees, its efforts were thwarted and blocked even by supposedly Catholic countries. Frustrated by the Nazis’ increasing encroachments, and by now convinced of the regime’s implacable hostility, the Vatican decided in 1937 to issue a warning Encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge. It was smuggled into Germany and read from all pulpits. Its tone was critical but not so sharp as to provoke a revocation of the Concordat. Nazism was not explicitly mentioned, and even the condemnation of racism was wordy and imprecise. Quite possibly for this reason, the Encyclical’s impact was minimal. German Catholics continued to believe they could be good Nazis and still remain true to their faith. The Vatican did not dare to disillusion them, if only because numerous clergy continued to believe that Nazism could be purged of its heretical extremism and settle down to be a valued authoritarian system, uniting with the church in a strongly anti-Communist stand.

Privately Pacelli expressed his strong dislike of the “scoundrel dictator” Hitler, but publicly he had to be more discreet. The Vatican’s impotence was only the more clearly shown when, in March 1938 the Austrian bishops joyfully welcomed the Anschluss with Nazi Germany. In the following months, the Curia watched Germany’s militant diplomacy and war-like preparations with growing dismay. As its senior and most experienced diplomat, Pacelli found the ominous similarities to 1914 more than depressing. Both before and after his election as Pope in March 1939, he threw himself into enormous but ultimately frustrated efforts to save Europe’s peace. With the Bolsheviks now strongly in power in the Soviet Union, with the Nazis showing themselves to be Bolsheviks of another sort, with Italian Fascism drawing ever closer to its northern neighbour, and with the Catholic state of Poland overthrown by Nazi armies, the prospects for the new Pope were inauspicious, even desolate.

Besier’s study of these ill-fated developments is sound and fair. He rejects the wishful thinking of the anti-papal critics, while maintaining a more balanced assessment of papal policy. It is much to be hoped that he will soon be in a position to do the same for the even more disputed Vatican policies of the Second World War, as soon as the long overdue release of these Vatican documents takes place.

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1b) Mark Gruber, OSB, Journey back to Eden. My life and times among the Desert Fathers, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003. 208 pp. ISBN 1-57075-433-0

This, I believe, the first time our Newsletter has reviewed a book about the Coptic Church. So let me warmly recommend Fr. Mark Gruber’s lively and readable account of the year in the late 1980s which he spent visiting several of the Coptic monasteries in Egypt. Originally intending to gather material for his anthropological PhD thesis, Fr. Gruber became so immersed in the life of his subjects that he was more and more drawn into a personal voyage of self-discovery. His diary is therefore both the story of his spiritual pilgrimage and a description of his various hosts, their lives and liturgies, and their contributions to the wider church.

The Desert Fathers of the Coptic Orthodox Church can claim to be the founders of Christian monasticism. From the fourth century down to our own day they have continuously inspired successive generations of Christians. Despite all the political and military upheavals which have swept over Egypt, the Copts have steadfastly upheld their faithful witness in the midst of an assertive Islamic world. The desert monasteries are the spiritual resource centres for the Coptic laity, who honour their heroic inhabitants, count on their prayers, and visit them in incessant pilgrimages.

Fr Gruber, who is an American Benedictine monk, writes with enormous admiration for his hosts. Nevertheless he is fully aware that the cultural differences between Coptic Egypt and the post-Christian West are so great that even the most respectful treatment of the religion of the one by the other will always be problematic. Certainly his reception, both as a Catholic and as an American, proved to be very friendly – much more so, he notes, than he received from the Greek Orthodox authorities in the Sinai desert. The only adjustment he was required to make was to grow a beard! Less easy was the strenuous liturgical life-style, when the monks rose at 2.30 a.m. and began morning prayer at 3. The singing of 70 psalms and other hymns lasted until 6 a.m. – all the while standing. Then followed the daily Mass with its clouds of incense until 9 or 9.30. Only after this daily spiritual nourishment, said and sung with great sincerity, reverence and devotion, were food and drink allowed. Because the Coptic services are conducted in their own ancient and unique language, the sense of history is inescapable – a burden to the modern mind, but joyfully embraced by communities who live in and with history on a daily basis.

Gruber began his stay in the best-known monastery of St Macarius, which was once, and for centuries, the greatest and most popular monastery in Egypt. But with the shifting fortunes of the Coptic Church, St Macarius slowly declined until, by the 1960s, it nearly dissolved. However, in a dramatic turnaround, the monastery was rescued by an influx of young monks, who restored the venerable House almost at once to its prominent role at the centre of Coptic spiritual life and monastic institutions.

To the average educated Egyptian, these monasteries are nothing more than irrelevant relics of a bygone past. But Gruber shows that the Coptic community still possesses the vitality and faithfulness to keep the tradition going, despite or possibly because of the astringent asceticism of the monastic life. Their emphasis on individual perfection and holiness gave the impression of being much more devout than Catholic communities in the United States. Certainly their pre-dawn liturgies, unchanged century after century, made a powerful witness in their presumption that the passing years of history are unimportant when the risen Christ is there in the midst of the praying community. And their ability to turn this ancient tradition into something living and organic for the present day is a remarkable achievement, repeated in each new generation.

Coptic Christians are well aware of their minority status in Egypt. They are muted, because of the endemic danger of oppression. But at the same time they have preserved the church’s missionary spirit and therefore hope. They are squeezed between a great Gospel missionary desire and a great dread of Islam. It is a recipe for apocalyptic expectations. Hence the continuing attraction over the centuries of the desert and its monasteries as places of refuge, but also of renewal.

The desert represents the province of God on the edge of the empire of men. Despite its harshness and aridity, its very emptiness invites the idea that here men, and particularly monks, can find the presence of their God. Not all deserts are flat, but can include rocky or even mountainous outcrops, as in Sinai. There can be found the caves of hermits, such as that of St. Anthony, who is reputed to have received the original impulse for the solitary and holy life. From his remote and even now inaccessible refuge in the desert, not far from the Red Sea, sprang the whole eremitical and monastic tradition, which has been maintained for so many centuries as the source of spiritual insight and inspiration. This is what Fr Gruber observed among the faithful Copts, whose redoubtable witness is here most sympathetically conveyed to a western audience.

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2) Reply to Review of Rosenstrasse 2-4 (see last month’s Newsletter. item 1b)

Dr Joachim Neander writes from Krakow, Poland, as one of the co-authors of this book, to send us the following comments:

“I have to take issue with your review for the following reasons:
1) Antonia Leugers gives ample evidence that Catholic intervention through Bishop Wienken’s meeting with Eichmann to have the interned Jewish/Christian husbands released was ineffective. The review incorrectly hedged on this point.
2) Another of the contributors, Jana Leichsenring (not mentioned by name) gives ample evidence that a communications network existed amongst racially mixed couples in Berlin. But it was all top secret, so it is not surprising that no written evidence can be found.
3) Regarding the returnees sent back from Auschwitz. To be sure Nathan Stoltzfus first wrote about this group, but in this anthology it was I, Joachim Neander, who examined the question. I pointed out that 12 of the returnees were from the Grosse Hamburger Strasse detention camp, and that at least 8 of these were NOT married. So the review was inaccurate to suggest that their wives were among the vocal protesters. What is more, I proved that, in the course of the _Fabrikaktion_at the end of February, more than 120 Jews from racially-mixed marriages were deported to Auschwitz. This fact throws strong doubt on the RSHA’s so-called exemption clauses.
4) I also showed that this _Fabrikaktion_ took place in a typical “push-and-pull” framework. I used Auschwitz documents, which were already known but never considered in this context, to prove that the demands of the Auschwitz workforce could only be fulfilled if the RSHA deported several thousand Jews from racially-mixed marriages. This proves that the RSHA did not take seriously its own deportation guidelines with their exemption clauses.
5) In his contribution to this book, Nathan Stoltzfus commented on the important Lehfeldt document, published here in full for the first time. He showed that the statement “The Nazi decision to exempt, temporarily, Jews in mixed marriages was already in place” is too sweeping and does not tally with the facts. The exemption clauses, in practice, were only one of the many cover-ups used by the Nazis.
6) I also showed, from German sources, that the protests of some (not Œthe’) French Catholic bishops indeed temporarily stopped the deportations. This led to delays that the Germans were never able to make up. In the end, this saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from France. One should not play down this fact, even if admittedly, the deportations to Auschwitz continued.
7) The Dutch and French bishops’ protests were not at all “belated”. The bishops protested at the very beginning of the deportations from their dioceses. How could they have protested earlier?
8) It is a truism to say that “heroic defiance would have to have happened much earlier” than in February/March 1943. Germany celebrates the July 20, 1944 conspirators, who – unsuccessfully – took action one and a half years later than the Berlin women. Non-violent successful resistance by women, however, does not fit into the master narrative of German culture, where “men make history” and a hero must be a tragic hero, such as Siegfried.
9) All of us collected material which challenged the prevalent view of the Rosenstrasse events, which holds that the Nazis did not intend to deport Jews from mixed marriages. But the basic message of our book is to challenge this opinion. That should have been expressed in a scholarly review. None of us would have dared to pronounce something like “the women’s or the Church protests could have changed the course of history”. One should not imply in a review that we said this. But is it, in fact, inconceivable that the women’s protests could have slowed the pace of the “course of history” at least in this very limited aspect? And if they only saved a single man’s life – did they not “save the whole world” as an old Jewish saying goes?”

Joachim Neander
email: jneander@web.de

3a) Patrick Cabanel, Les Protestants et la Republique, Brussels: Editions complex 2000 ISBN 2-87027-780-6

Professor Cabanel is a distinguished historian of French Protestantism who teaches in Toulouse. His latest book is a short account of Protestant political attitudes over the past 140 years. He seeks to account for the fact that this small minority of only 1% of the population has a totally disproportionate place in the leadership corps of French governments. Can this be due to some ideological linkage between republicanism and the Calvinist religion, with its commitment to freedom, equality and justice? Or is it due to historical circumstances where the memory among the French Protestant Huguenots
of their persecution by the monarchy made them valiant in their fight against all authoritarian policies and regimes. Or is it due to their support of the republic’s deliberate anti-Catholic stance, both before and after the disestanblishment of the Roman Church and the abolition of the Concordat? Or was it due to a determination to defend minority rights, including those of Dreyfus and the Jews under Vichy? Cabanal follows these threads, and depicts how Protestants have been found in both the right and left of the political spectrum, giving their names and contributions in full. Their geographical spread is also important. The Alsatian Protestants differ from those in the Auvergne. A stimulating brief account which will help foreigners to understand the French Protestant milieu in all its variety of political expressions.

3b) ed. A. Porter, The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans 2003 250 pp. ISBN 0-8028-6087-7

This useful collection of articles discusses the relationship of British imperialism and the missionary movement in the years immediately before the outbreak of war in 1914. This is missionary history from the top down, but examines the evidence not only from the perspective of the Empire’s homeland, but also from the periphery. The results contradict the widely-held view of secular, or Marxist, historians that religion was a mere tool in the hands of an exploitative capitalist imperialism. On the contrary, the contributors are nearly all concerned to point up the complexities and ambiguities of the attitudes of missionaries to the ruling structures of the British Empire. Of course, they sought to take advantage of the pax britannica, but were increasingly affected by the close contact with the “natives”. The attempt by one missionary society leader to unite all his colleagues behind a united loyalty to the Empire fell apart because of the continuing differences within the missionary ranks. Evangelicals relied far more on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, while the “high-church” missions were offended by the lax theological discipline of their free church partners. Moreover, the bishops at home were increasingly reluctant to heed the call of the empire, fearing that they would lose their best candidates to distant outposts. And the growth of the ecumenical spirit, and of higher biblical criticism, also led to divisions which hampered any unanimity on imperial questions. In the end, these varieties of missionary responses helped to begin the undermining of the ideological justifications for the British empire, which only accelerated after the disasters of the first world war.

3c) Walter Brandmüller, Holocaust in der Slovakei und katholische Kirche
Using the now available records of the Vatican, as well as other Slovakian and German sources, Brandmüller traces the reactions of the Catholic Church, and especially the Vatican Secretariat of State, towards the persecution and deportation of the Jews from Slovakia during the six short years of this nation’s existence from 1939-1945. He examines these documents in detail to show that the criticisms advanced by Fr. J.Morley, and more sweepingly by D.Goldhagen, are essentially misguided. He shows that the Vatican authorities were dismayed that the Slovakian government, headed by a priest, Josef Tiso, would take measures against the Jews which offended all human rights, and serious compromised the image of Slovakia as a Catholic country. They repeatedly sought to uphold these principles and reminded the obsscurantist Slovakian politicians of their duty. But Brandmüller cannot deny that these interventions were only partially successful. He does not quote the most apposite remark made by Msgr Tardini: “It is a tragedy that the President of Slovakia is a priest. All the world knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who would think that we can’t even control a priest?”

Articles:

4a) B. da Silva, Peace, Pastors and Politics, in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 47, Summer 2005, pp. 503-529. Fifteen years after the overthrow of the Communist regime in the former East Germany, Brendan da Silva has revisited the discussion over the role of the Protestant pastors in bringing about a peaceful revolution, or alternatively in helping to provide the regime with some stability. He had the advantage of being able to get to a larger number of archives, and to interview a few of the main actors. So he is able to refute the more extreme opinions on both sides. Yes, several leading clerics did seek to maintain a conservative stability, and even co-operated with the Stasi to do so. But, yes, the younger pastors often sought to find ways of expressing the wider popular discontent by organizing unconventional activities in their church buildings, which later on became the focus points of protests. Only a minority served the Stasi as informers, but the bishops tried to keep the lid on any open opposition – in vain. In all, the church did not deserve the title of heroic system breaker, but neither was it suborned to be merely subservient to the Communist rulers.

4b) Christopher Marsh, Russian Orthodox Christians and their orientation towards church and state, in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 47, Summer 2005, pp. 545-561.

A valuable account of the changes in state policy towards the churches in Russia since 1990, and a sociological survey of the religious, civic and political orientations of Russian Orthodox Christians today. Marsh finds that only the staunchest believers look to the church to provide them with political guidance, or to provide answers about social problems. His survey shows that the vast majority of Russians do not view the Orthodox Church as a significant source of social improvement. But, he holds, there is still a relationship between church and state, or rather only a thin wall of separation. But the Orthodox Church is not always a supporter of the state, as can be seen in its active part in the Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’.

4c) Martin Menke, Thy Will be done. German Catholics and National Identity in the twentieth century, in Catholic Historical Review, Vol 91, April 2005, p.300ff.

How could Catholic Germans reconcile the conflicting demands of their nationalism and their faith? These struggles were particularly acute when Germany’s political regimes changed so dramatically, and often for the worse, during the past hundred years. Menke examines the consequent political dilemmas and the moral problems which arose, but suggests that many Catholics were conscious of the difficulties of finding out what God’s will actually was. He uses the examples of Alfred Delp and Willi Graf, both executed by Hitler, to show how high-minded Catholics responded to the ideological pressures of Nazi nationalism.

4d) F.Latour, Les relations entre le Saint-Siége et la sublime porte a l’épreuve du génocides chrétiens d’Orient pendant la grand guerre, in Guerres Mondiales, no 219, July 2005, pp 31 ff.

The relationship between the Holy See and the Ottoman Empire during the First World War was delicate. Even though the Catholic Church had benefited ever since the sixteenth century from the guarantees that the “Capitulations” had offered, this was no longer true once the Ottoman Empire went to war against France, the traditional protector of the Eastern Catholics.. Papal diplomacy had to adjust. Benedict XV tried to square the circle in defending the Christians, including the Armenians who were the victims of a real genocide, and rescuing them wherever possible, while at the same time maintaining close contacts with the Turkish government. This was done to protect these same Christians and to preserve the politico-religious interests of the Catholic Church in the East. The dilemmas for the Holy See over how to respond to the Armenian genocide set a pattern which was to be repeated thirty years later in eastern Europe.

5) Research in progress:

J.K.Wyneken, Concordia University, Portland, Oregon writes:

My research interests center primarily on the relationship between Christian belief/activism and international relations during the twentieth century. My dissertation, Driving out the Demons: German Churches, the Western Allies, and Memory in Postwar Germany, 1945-1952, focuses on how the activism of the German Protestant and Catholic churches influenced the course of the Allied military occupation of Germany, and how this reflected the churches’ development of their official memory of the Nazi past. It is my contention that the relations between the Allies and the churches, especially their often strained relations over denazification, war crimes, Displaced Persons, and Prisoner of War policies, effectively internationalized the formation of memory about the Nazi past and simultaneously weakened the effectiveness and appeal of these important Allied policies. The support given to the German churches by international Christian observers and organizations also played an important part in this process, as did the steady readjustment of Allied priorities away from punishing Germans and towards resisting Soviet communism that developed between 1945 and 1952. My long range research goals include a broad study of the importance of Christian activism in the global context of the Cold War, and a study that examines the popular understanding of religious resistance to Nazism from 1945 to the present day.

With all best wishes for the Christmas season,
Yours sincerely,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

To mark the November Days of Remembrance:

Jesus bleibet meine Freude,
meines Herzens Trost und Saft,
Jesus wehret allem Leide,
er ist meines Lebens Kraft.
meiner Augen Lust und Sonne,
meiner Seele Schatz und Wonne;
darum lass ich Jesum nicht,
aus dem Herzen und Gesicht.
(from a Bach Cantata)

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Gerdes, Okumenische Solidarität
b) Leugers ed. Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4
c) Tent, In the shadow of the Holocaust

2) Journal articles:

a) Crang, Compulsory church parades
b) Sykes, Popular religion in the Black Country

1a) Uta Gerdes, Okumenische Solidarität mit christlichen und jüdischen Verfolgten. Die CIMADE in Vichy-Frankreich 1940-1944. (Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Darstellungen Bd 41). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2005 ISBN 3-52555741-8. 380pp.

French Protestants are very conscious of their community’s Huguenot history and of the persecution they suffered for their beliefs from successive French monarchs in earlier centuries. This still leads them to express their solidarity with victims of state oppression. In the circumstances of the Second World War, this was the main motive which very rapidly led to the mobilization of concern among French Protestants for those persons suffering from Nazi political, racial or religious persecution. Especially among young French Protestants, the desire to help led to their joint efforts to create the Comite inter-mouvements auprés des evacués, commonly known as CIMADE. Drawn from the YMCA, the YWCA, the Scout movements of both sexes, and from the French Student Christian movement, these young people undertook a mission of social assistance as a sign of their Christian witness and dedication. They were not to know how quickly this commitment would lead them to become involved in far more demanding and dangerous endeavours, which broadened their horizons and challenged their faith. But their efforts to assist the Nazis’ victims, both Christian and Jewish, deserve to be recognized as a paradigm of Christian growth and obedience in an age of menacing ideologies, and as a small but valiant contribution to the story of the Second World War’s resistance movements.

Dr Uta Gerdes’ scholarly and valuable account of CIMADE’s activities deserves high praise for a variety of reasons. Firstly, she brings this story to a wider, German-speaking, readership. Although CIMADE’s humanitarian record has been extensively set out in French accounts of the war, German readers have only now begun to look beyond their own nation’s debates and controversies for or against participation in resistance against Nazism. Secondly, Dr Gerdes has taken advantage of the passage of time to avoid the kind of heroizing treatment of earlier years, but instead to give us a critical reconstruction of the activities of this small Christian group in the context of their contemporary setting. At the same time, she notes particularly their especial contribution to the growth of international and inter-faith understanding and service. Thirdly, she draws out in new ways the significance of the co-operation between various international church agencies in the vital tasks of rescuing those persecuted by the Nazis. Finally she offers an analysis of the importance of these experiences for the young women involved, and the extent to which they became empowered to take a larger role in the church, as well as to challenge its male-dominated power structures in subsequent years.

CIMADE was formed in late 1939 in the first instance to look after those persons from Alsace evacuated to other parts of France after the outbreak of the war. But its mission was soon extended to those civilians interned as non-French aliens. Some 25,000 emigrants, refugees or fugitives from the Spanish Civil War were now rounded up and herded together in overcrowded and unsanitary camps in remote areas, such as Gurs in the Pyrenees and Rivesaltes near the Mediterranean coast. CIMADE was only one of the voluntary agencies which sought to alleviate the harshness of these internees’ plight, in what rapidly became a notorious situation of hardship and squalor. But CIMADE successfully sought to be allowed to establish in each camp a foyer where their workers could provide some comfort and cheers to the inmates. Their particular objective was to assist any Protestant detainees and to provide opportunities for educational and cultural programmes with a specific religious tone.

The defeat of France in June 1940, the division of the country into occupied and non-occupied areas, the establishment of the Vichy regime and the imposition of German-dictated policies towards foreigners, refugees and internees obliged CIMADE to concentrate its resources on the needs of the internment camps’ inmates. Their situation was soon to be made even more demanding in October 1940 when a large contingent of 10,000 Germans of Jewish origin was forcibly transferred to these camps in southern France. CIMADE’s social diaconate was now obliged to extend its services to these Germans, particularly to the minority among them who were Protestants. But their workers always tried to be inclusive, and made their facilities, their libraries, and their cultural and educational events available to all in the spirit of international and interconfessional friendship. Their mission was to meet as many of the physical and spiritual needs of the inmates as they could. The surviving evidence is that they brought a touch of humanity and civility to the often downtrodden and despairing prisoners.

The resources for this task were never enough. But CIMADE’s leaders had deliberately established links to their international counterparts, especially to those like the YMCA, YWCA and World Student Christian Federation who had their main European offices just over the Swiss border in Geneva. In addition CIMADE was actively supported by the newly-created of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), whose Dutch General Secretary, Visser ‘t Hooft, proved to be a tower of strength. The refugee secretary of this agency, Dr Adolf Freudenberg, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, was to play a even more active role in assisting CIMADE’s endeavours. In the early months he actively organized a large programme to send food parcels, books and clothing to the camps, all of which were greatly appreciated as a sign that the recipients had not been abandoned but were in fact very much a concern of the ecumenical church family in the outside world.

By the end of 1941, the extension of the war and the Nazis’ apparent success at dominating Europe were deeply depressing for the young French idealists in CIMADE’s ranks. The leaders, particularly the redoubtable Madeleine Barot, herself only in her early 30s, became all too well aware that their relief efforts were only palliative. Moreover, since they could only operate with the permission and under the control of the Vichy government regulations, they came to see that in many ways they were condoning or compromising with the repressive policies of this regime. Protests against the inhumanity of the internment system would however certainly lead to the rapid closure of their work, to the detriment of those they were trying to help. This moral dilemma was to become even more acute in the following year.

By the summer of 1942, the Nazis’ plans for the complete extermination of European Jewry were in high gear. At the end of July the Vichy authorities gave permission for foreign Jews in France to be deported to ‘unknown destinations in the east’. The inmates in the internment camps were amongst the first to be affected. No one knew what lay ahead, but all surmised that conditions could only be worse The first selections were made at the end of August, leading to 5000 persons being deported from southern France to the notorious collecting point of Drancy outside Paris, and thereafter to Auschwitz. Scenes of horrendous anguish took place in the camps. CIMADE’s workers tried desperately to intercede on behalf of their charges, invoking the list of exemptions – that they were too old, too young, too sick or too engaged in running the camp. But too often they were confronted with the moral dilemma that the selection teams were under orders to find a set contingent. If one person were exempted, another would have to be selected.

At the same time, CIMADE set up refuges outside the internment camps and successfully obtained the transfer of a considerable number of the internees, both Christian and Jewish, to their new homes. Some of these were situated in Protestant areas, such as Le Chambon, where already Pastor Trocm?? was mobilizing his parishioners to assist refugees and fugitives from the Nazis. CIMADE gave valuable assistance in working out a strategic plan, whereby the appearance in the locality of any Vichy or German police units led immediately to the evacuation of these refugees to hiding places in outlying farms or woods – an operation already known to English-speaking readers from Philip Hallie’s splendid book Lest Innocent Blood be Shed.

But this marked an important change for CIMADE. Up to this point they had been a duly authorized social work agency, co-operating with the Vichy authorities. But from 1942 onwards they necessarily were drawn into illegal activities, through the deliberate attempt to protect Jewish refugees from deportation, and eventually by adopting far-reaching schemes to smuggle them out to safety over the border to Switzerland.

Uta Gerdes makes clear that this step was no light matter. But after the disastrous scenes in the camps in late1942, the boundaries of Christian obedience to the Vichy state had been reached. Thereafter, the whole organization came to realize that they now needed to do more than provide palliative and humanitarian care, but rather to go beyond the norms of legality in the cause of a justified resistance.

As was the case in other countries, these French Protestants found overcoming their moral scruples against illegal political acts to be difficult and costly. But they were much helped by a series of theological reflections, conferences and statements put out by their leaders after France’s humiliating defeat in 1940. In order to guard against the danger of compromising their faith by capitulating to the seductions of Nazi-led totalitarianism, these French Protestant theologians wrote a strong statement of their beliefs, which was largely based on the similar declaration made by the German Confessing Church at Barmen in 1934. The Pomeyrol theses of September 1941 reaffirmed the supremacy of God’s commandments over all human affairs, and saw the state’s legitimate role only as a vehicle for implementing divine laws. The task of the state should be to uphold the values of justice and freedom, not to claim an absolute authority over and above biblical precepts. The Church had to accept the consequences of the national defeat, but was under the spiritual necessity of resisting any form of totalitarian or godless influence.

Even more significantly, these French theologians went beyond their German counterparts in adding an extra thesis, which clearly and deliberately affirmed that ‘the Church recognizes in Israel God’s chosen people, in order to send a Saviour into the world and to remain a constant witness in the midst of the nations to the secret of His loyalty. Therefore the Church must protest strongly against any law which seeks to exclude the Jews from the human community’.

It is notable that Madeleine Barot was one of the twelve signatories of this document.The result was to unite CIMADE’s workers in accepting the necessity of opposing the police whenever the lives of Jews were threatened, and to engage in underground or illegal activities in order to rescue them. But at the same time CIMADE refused to join the armed resistance movement, or themselves to carry weapons. Unarmed resistance, they believed, was the truer form of Christian discipleship – a stance which reflected their pacifist and idealistic preferences. But, as Dr Gerdes points out, the major emphasis in the historiography of the French Resistance has been on the armed and militant exploits of such groups as the Maquis – necessarily a largely masculine group – as part of the national struggle against the German invader. So Madeleine Barot’s vision of resistance as primarily one of service to the victims, particularly the persecuted Jews, has been largely overlooked or ignored. Dr Gerdes’ notable achievement is to redress this omission. She rightly asks why rescuing Jews and other victims, at the risk of their lives, should be dismissed as mere non-conformity, whereas the heroics of assassination attempts, sabotage acts, or paramilitary exploits are seen as the truer forms of the Resistance. In fact, she claims, the real honour should be given to all those who sought to challenge the murderous intentions of the dictators and their collaborators. Christians who witnessed in their own way by protesting against such inhumanity likewise deserve to be recognized as vital and valid resisters.

The most exciting chapter of this study comes at the end where Dr Gerdes describes CIMADE’s secret steps taken to smuggle Jews across the frontier to Switzerland. Needless to say, no written records of these rescue efforts were kept. But postwar reconstruction from the Genevan archives suggest that a minimum of 500 persons were saved directly because of the co-operation between CIMADE and the refugee service of the World Council of Churches. In France, the CIMADE workers provided the fugitives with false papers and escorted them by bus or train to the frontier area, mainly in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Here they often had to stay overnight in friendly houses or convents until locally recruited scouts were available to take them to the border itself, to evade the police patrols and to assist them across the barbed wire, walls or streams which separated the two countries. Once in Switzerland, the WCC contacts had to be alerted to receive them. The dangers were obvious. Anonymity was obligatory. Little acknowledgment could be later made on either side. But the achievements of this small band of 53 women and 27 men were not negligible, They were rightly and honourably characterized in later memoirs as ‘les clandestins de Dieu’. And we can therefore be grateful to Dr Gerdes for telling their story, and describing the significance of their contributions, in such an illuminating and convincing manner.

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b) Antonia Leugers ed., Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4: Protest in der NS-Diktatur. Annweiler: Plüger/Mooshausen 2005 ISBN 3-89857-187-4

At the end of February 1943 a group of women led a protest in the back streets of Berlin demanding the release of their Jewish husbands from a Gestapo lock-up. At the end of a week the men were sent home. Much controversy has occurred in recent years about this episode. One side argues that this represents a successful popular defiance of Nazi rule, which saved at least these victims from deportation to Auschwitz, and hence forms a significant episode in the whole Holocaust development. The other side claims it was simply due to a change in Gestapo directives or that the popular protest had no influence. This debate is now updated in this new book edited by Antonia Leugers, who is herself a strong supporter of the view that here at least German women made their influence felt and succeeded in their show of solidarity. Her own chapter deals specifically with the redoubtable career of Margarete Sommer, a social worker for the Catholic diocese of Berlin, whose sense of outrage led her to urge her superiors in the Bishops’ Council to issue a public protest through all the churches and a call for intervention by the Pope. The bishops rejected both suggestions, but did at least send their emissary to meet with Eichmann. But it is not clear whether this step had any effect on the Nazis’ decisions.

Another of the contributors believes that the most helpful step taken by the Catholic church workers was their information service, which enabled the victims’ partners to be alerted about their incarceration in the Rosenstrasse, and about the possibility of joining the demonstration. But exact evidence seems to be lacking – possibly because the later fate of the whole of Berlin was so much more awful. One of the most extraordinary incidents concerned the 35 Jewish men, rounded up and taken to the Rosenstrasse, and a week later deported direct to Auschwitz. After two more weeks, however, they were brought back and released – being among the very few Jews ever to be released from Auschwitz. Their story is mentioned by Nathan Stoltzfuss in his well-researched book Resistance of the Heart, and again in his chapter for this anthology. The reasons for their return can only be speculative, but the fact remains that their wives were among the vocal protesters.

The most convincing explanation is surely that internal conflicts within the Nazi hierarchy between the extremist fanatics wanting mass extermination and the more pragmatic exploiters of Jewish labour for the war effort were played out in the Rosenstrasse episode. The women’s protests were certainly a factor and caused Goebbels, for one, much concern. But it would surely be presumptuous to place too much weight on this one rather limited instance. In any case, it was only a matter of timing. The Nazis’ programme for mass murder of all the Jews was unchanged, even if such protests led to the postponement for some of their ‘Final Solution’. Nor did the Rosenstrasse protest alter the immediate situation, since the Nazi decision to exempt, temporarily, Jews in mixed marriages was already in place.

Heroic defiance would have to have happened much earlier and on a much larger scale to bring about any significant change in the Nazis’ intentions. Even when the Dutch and French Catholic bishops issued their belated protests, the deportations to Auschwitz continued. So the belief that women’s or church protests could have changed the course of history is only wishful thinking. But the thorough research displayed in this book deserves attention and congratulation.

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c) James F.Tent, In the shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans. Modern War studies. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2003. xvi + 280 pp. ISBN 0-7006-1228-9

(This review appeared first on H-German, and is reproduced by permission of the author).

Forgotten victims of the Holocaust: Germany’s Mischlinge

James F.Tent’s monograph emerges explicitly out of his encounters with Germans of partial Jewish descent who survived the Holocaust. The book is essentially an account of the experiences of some of the roughly 72,000 Mischlinge, Germans with either one or two Jewish grandparents, during the Third Reich. In the preface, Tent explains how he was led to pursue this topic of research by an encounter with a retired East German professor during a 1978 train journey, and by subsequent friendships with other Germans of partial Jewish descent who had survived the Holocaust and gone on to study at the Free University of Berlin. These relationships motivated him to write a ‘history that showed how people of partial Jewish ancestry coped with conditions on a day-to-day basis from the time of the Nazis’ seizure of power until they were vanquished, and then to show how the legacy of that antisemitic hatred has lingered in the minds of the victims ever since’ (p.xii). Rather than replicate the comprehensive studies of Nazi policy concerning the Mischlinge (the term he uses throughout the book), Tent acknowledges the groundwork done by other historians and declares that his interest lies in ‘personal accounts and case histories’ (p. xii). [1]

To this end, Tent bases his work largely on extensive interviews with twenty surviving Germans of partial Jewish descent, supplemented by other cases drawn from archives in Hessen, Berlin, and North Rhine-Westphalia.

In successive chapters, he follows the lives of these persons who were (generally speaking) driven from their schools, occupations, and social networks, and eventually compelled to perform forced labour during World War II. Lastly, he tries to understand the impact of the marginalization of these persons as they restarted their lives following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. Each chapter consists of a synopsis of the issue at hand, followed by roughly twenty to twenty-five accounts of individual experiences. In a short conclusion to the book, Tent highlights the difficult choice most Germans of partial Jewish descent made to stay in Germany after 1945, and reiterates his motivation for writing the book, which was ‘to utilize the oral histories that only such eye witnesses can provide’. He goes on to praise their courage: ‘by volunteering such information, they have bequeathed to future generations further proof of the human cost of the Holocaust’ (p.241).

Tent’s case histories are the strength of this book. Indeed the stories of these Germans – many of whom would not have identified themselves with respect to their Jewish heritage before 1933 – are poignant. Young men and women, most of them school-aged at the time of Hitler’s seizure of power, generally lost their opportunities for education, careers, marriages and families. Instead, most were forced to eke out a living performing menial jobs, living as quietly and as privately as possible, coping with denunciations and police surveillance, and eventually serving in some form of forced labour, whether they were men toiling in heavy construction camps or women struggling in war-related industries. Their stories demonstrate the dreadful loss of opportunity they all suffered, but which has often been forgotten beside the greater tragedy of the slaughter of their Jewish relatives. Many of Tent’s subjects were successful at rebuilding their lives after the war, but only at the price of a deliberate and painful silence about their past.

This is not an analytic study of Germans of partial Jewish descent in Nazi Germany. The cases Tent studied are of too narrow an age and educational bracket to be representative (p.18). If anything, at times Tent tries too hard to read meaning into each story he tells, causing him to make conflicting generalizations, or generalizations based on only one or two cases. The result is that one often feels that the condition of Germany’s partially Jewish citizens rises and falls from page to page. For instance, in his chapter on education, after only one case involving a brother and sister, he concludes: ‘all over Germany similar scenes were taking place’. One case later he asserts ‘ a pattern of social exclusion for Mischlinge was emerging all over Germany as National Socialism permeated the educational system’ (pp.29-30). Later still, Tent adds that one student’s ‘school experiences demonstrated that teachers could inflict terrible emotional damage on children’ (p.36). In contrast to these assertions, other cases within the same chapter demonstrate that conditions did not worsen for every one of Test’s subjects and that a few of their teachers and school administrators were kind and helpful. As a result the conclusion at the end of the chapter – that ‘when the issue turned to multiethnic minorities, as far as the Nazis were concerned, Germany’s Jewish-Christian citizens had become by far the victims of choice in 1933’ is not especially convincing (p.59).

Both the Roma people and Afro-Germans suffered racial persecution at least as severe as Tent’s subjects, many of whom received nominal protection thanks to the presence of their ‘Aryan’ parent. It would have been far more effective for Tent to have argued that educational opportunities depended largely on the attitudes and actions of their teachers and local school administrators. A few managed to earn an Abitur, but most were pushed out of the system far earlier.

Along with too many unsubstantiated generalizations, there are frustrating inconsistencies and overstatements in the text. For instance, Tent describes extramarital sexual relations in National Socialist Germany as ‘frowned upon by large segments of society’ and ‘not the done thing’, while four pages later, in another case study, he argues ‘in the normal . . . scheme of things, such a relationship would have aroused little comment’ (p.112 and 116). Later there are conflicting signals about how determined Hitler was to get rid of the Mischlinge (pp.142-50). In the same section, before a series of two dozen stories of those who survived forced labour, Tent asserts that the labour camps were ‘an unmistakable indication of the steep descent of Germany’s Mischlinge into the category of outcasts being readied for slaughter just like Germany’s hapless Jewish citizens’ (p.149).

As a result In the Shadow of the Holocaust is a book which succeeds in spite of the author’s analysis, simply on the strength of the stories he tells Though difficult at times, it is worth reading for the reason that it was written – to put a human face on the suffering of the thousands of Germans of partial Jewish descent who were caught in the racial politics of the Third Reich.

Note: 1) Tent recognizes many of the newer works relating to Germans of partial Jewish descent in Nazi Germany, including Jeremy Noakes, The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge’ 1933-1945, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989), pp. 291-354; Beate Meyer, ‘Juediche Mischlinge’: Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahung 1933-1945, Hamburg:Doelling und Galitz 1999; Sigrid Lekebusch, Not und Verfolgung der Christen juedischer Herkunft im Rheinland, 1933-1945: Darstellungen und Dokumentation, Koeln: Rheinland-Verlag 1995; Gerhard Lindemann, ‘Typisch juedisch’: Die Stellung der Ev.-luth Landeskirche Hannovers zu Antijudaismus, Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus 1919-1949, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1998; Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish soldiers: The untold story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish descent in the German Military, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press 2002; Nathan Stoltzfuss, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, New York: W.W.Norton and Co. 1996; Alexandar-Sasa Vuletiae, Christen juedischer Herkunft im Dritten Reich: Verfolgung und organisierte Selbstilfe. Kyle Jantzen, Alliance University College, Calgary

2) Journal articles: a) Jeremy Crang, ‘The Abolition of Compulsory Church Parades in the British Army’ in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 56, no. 1, March 2005, 92ff.

a) Crang neatly outlines the arguments for and against compulsory church parades, which finally led the British Army to order a change in its Regulations in 1946 after 300 years of British Army tradition. He shows that in fact the clerical leaders were more reactionary than the generals (except Montgomery), but the experiences during the Second World War with its mass conscript armies showed that true religion and compulsion could not be combined. The counter effect of church parades on this generation of young men was undoubtedly another cause for the post-1945 decline of religion in Britain.

b) Richard Sykes, ‘Popular Religion in decline: a study from the Black Country’ in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 56, no.2, June 2005, 987 ff.

A combination of four major factors contributed to the decline of popular religion in England’s West Midlands in the period 1920-1965: the effects of war, particularly the second world war; an increasing emphasis on the importance of the private nuclear family and changing attitudes towards children; the disappearance of older working-class neighbourhoods and communities; and the increasing availability of secular leisure activities. These factors weakened the foundations of religious beliefs and experiences, and sapped religiously motivated behaviour. These social changes, so Sykes believes, whose anti-religious results were more accidental than deliberate, were more influential than intellectual onslaughts which presented a head-on challenge to the credibility of religion, as recently posited by Callum Brown. This places the debate back in the field of religious sociology, and while Sykes’ focus is rather narrow, the evidence suggests his findings are representative across Britain.

With best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

“Der Anfang, das Ende, oh Herr, sie sind dein,
die Spanne dazwischen, das Leben war mein.
Und irrt ich im Dunkeln, und kannt’ mich nicht aus,
bei dir Herr ist Klarheit und Licht ist dein Haus”.

Fritz Reuter, 19th century German poet, often quoted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Contents:

1) Obituary: Brother Roger of Taizé
2) Book reviews:

a) Ueberschaer, Junge Gemeinde im Konflikt
b) Steele, Christianity, the Other and the Holocaust

3) Work in progress:

a) C Probst, Protestant reception of Luther’s anti-Jewish treatises in Nazi Germany
b) B. Pearson, Democracy and West German Protestantism.

4) Book note: ed. A.Cross, Ecumenism and History

5) Journal articles:

a) Berggren, President Carter
b) Balzer, Religion in Siberia

1) Brother Roger of Taizé

Brother Roger Schutz, the 90-year-old founder of the Taizé Community in France, died on 16 August after being attacked by a visitor to the community. He was widely respected because of the lead he had given for many decades in the field of ecumenical and spiritual witness.

Roger Schutz was born in the village of Provence, near Neuchatel in Switzerland, the son of a Swiss Protestant pastor and a French mother from a family with a long Protestant tradition, on 12 May 1915. He originally wanted a literary career but bowed to the wishes of his father and took up theology instead. It was as a theology student that he arrived in 1940 on his bicycle in the tiny Burgundian village of Taizé, near to the border between Vichy France and the German-occupied part of the country with the idea of founding a house for prayer and contemplation. Here he would make his home for the next two years, welcoming refugees, members of the resistance, and Jews. After his return to Geneva in 1942, he was warned not to go back to France because he had been denounced to the Gestapo.

In Geneva he resumed his theology studies, forming a community of prayer and contemplation with Max Thurian, who would become Taizé’s liturgist and theologian, and two other friends. He was ordained a pastor in 1943 in the Swiss Reformed Church but preferred to be seen as a brother and nothing more. In 1944, he returned to Taizé, and five years later, on Easter Day 1949, the first brothers of the community made a commitment to a life in celibacy, to community of possessions, and to simplicity of life. Already in the early 1950s, Brother Roger (as he was now known) had a brief meeting with Pope Pius XII, and representatives from Taizé were invited to attend meetings in Rome. However, it was Pope John XXIII who cemented the relationship with Taizé, inviting Roger Schutz and Max Thurian as observers to the Second Vatican Council.

By the beginning of the 1960s the reputation of Taizé had spread and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people would visit the community each year. The Romanesque church which the Catholic Church allowed the Taizé brothers to use had become too small. In 1962, the Church of Reconciliation, was inaugurated having been built with the help of young volunteers sent by the German church agency ‘Aktion Sühnezeichen’ – which promoted reconciliation between wartime enemies – creating. an enduring link with Germany. In 1970, Brother Roger launched the idea of holding a ‘Council of Youth’, and when it opened in 1974 after four years of preparation, the inauguration brought about 40 000 young people to Taizé, as well as representatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch, and leaders of various Protestant denominations.

Schutz had been a close friend of Pope John Paul II since Karol Woytila’s days in Krakow, and Pope John Paul himself visited Taizé in 1986. At John Paul’s funeral, Brother Roger took communion from the hands of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI. Answering enquiries, the Taizé Community simply referred to a quotation from Brother Roger in which he said he found his ‘own Christian identity by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without rupture of communion with anyone’.

The influence of Taizé was felt well beyond the Burgundy countryside. The vigils, candles and chants which characterized the community not only became an established part of the worship of many denominations but also accompanied East Germany’s peaceful revolution of 1989 in which Christians played a significant role. The annual new year meetings launched in 1978 and attended by thousands of young adults, usually taking place in a large European city, can also be seen as an inspiration for the World Youth Days launched by Pope John Paul II. Indeed, the news of Brother Roger’s death came as thousands were gathering in Cologne for the 2005 World Youth Days.

Brother Roger received many honours, including the Templeton Prize (1974); the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1974); the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education (1988); the Charlemagne Prize (1989); and the Robert Schuman Prize (1992).

Roger Schutz, theologian, born 12 May 1915, died 16 August 2005

Contributed by Stephen Brown, World Council of Churches, Geneva.

2a) Ellen Ueberschaer. Junge Gemeinde im Konflikt. Evangelische Jugendarbeit in SBZ und DDR 1945-1961. Konfession und Gesellschaft, Volume 27. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2003. 360 pp. Notes, bibliography, index of names. EUR 35.00 (paper), ISBN 3-1701-7898-9.
(This review first appeared on H-German in May 2005, and is reprinted by permission of the author)

Protestant Youth Work, GDR Politics, and Secularization

At the end of World War II, the society and culture of the future German Democratic Republic were marked by vibrant Protestant church life, anchored in a strong and influential tradition and revitalized by ideological conflict with Nazism, and by the pressing needs of postwar society. After forty-five years of Soviet and Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) rule the situation was very different, with the bulk of the East German population alienated from the church and with many ignorant of the most basic points of doctrine. In this study of Protestant youth work in the early years of the GDR, Ellen Ueberschaer seeks to explain this radical transformation, arguing for the centrality of the youth work and youth politics of both the East German Landeskirchen and the SED regime to this process of secularization. At the same time, she seeks to contextualize the forced, state-driven secularization that took place within the GDR as part of longer-term developments that were also at work in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Ueberschaer’s explanation of these developments, which is only clearly laid out in the conclusion of her study, ties together the findings of the two otherwise separate lines of inquiry that make up the bulk this book. The first traces the development and implementation of the “Junge Gemeinde” conception of church youth work. In contrast to the ideas embodied in the youth missions and associations of the nineteenth century, this model emphasized the integration of youth work into the formal institutional structure of the Landeskirche on the one hand, and the integration of youth into the life of the local congregation on the other. The second line of inquiry follows the development of Soviet and SED church and youth politics until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the ensuing relative stabilization of the SED state. Here, Ueberschaer argues that the alienation of youth from traditional religion was always central to the church-political and youth-political goals of the SED, although the party attempted to realize these goals in different ways at different times and in different places. She argues that these opposite but mutually-reinforcing programs of _Verkirchlichung_ and Entkirchlichung combined to drive the secularization process of GDR society.

The Verkirchlichung of Protestant youth work began in the late nineteenth century, but especially developed in the first two decades of the twentieth, as a response to the threat of secularization posed by changing social conditions and by the growth of nationalist and socialist youth movements. Although this process was temporarily stalled during the Third Reich as members of the confessing church resisted German Christian attempts to impose their authority through centralization, it was also strengthened in many ways by the legacy of the Kirchenkampf. To Protestants in postwar Germany–both in the East and in the West–the lessons of the past indicated the need for a strong and socially influential church, which could stand against the dictates of a total state. At the same time, they showed the need for all church work to be rooted in the fundamentals of Christian life–in Bible study, prayer, and congregational worship.

In the Soviet Occupied Zone, where similar threats to the church seemed imminent, such lessons were taken to heart by both the church hierarchy and by individual youth workers. As the Soviet authorities began to restrict church activities–as early as 1946 in Saxony, where local communists were particularly anti-clerical–the institutionalization of youth work and its integration into congregational life was also promoted as a defensive measure, which would put the full authority of the church behind youth activities. Although this process was gradual and contested–and more pronounced in theory than in practice–it did result, in most EasternLandeskirchen, in the eventual coordination of youth work under the authority of Landesjugendpfarrer and Jugendkammern, and, on a higher level, in the creation and coordination of policy in the Jugendkammer-Ost of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland.

Soviet and SED policies of Entkirchlichung were driven, according to Ueberschaer, by both church-political and youth-political considerations. On an ideological level, the teachings of the Protestant churches were viewed as a potential threat to the spread of a materialist and Marxist worldview. On an institutional level, the youth groups of the churches could rival the communist Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), or, if integrated into the local FDJ, could hinder its effectiveness in developing a new generation of communist leaders. Despite these relatively constant goals, the practical policies adopted by the Soviets and by the SED varied with the immediate domestic and geo-political circumstances.

In the first years of the Soviet occupation, severe limitations were placed on church youth gatherings, although these limitations did not follow any coherent centralized policy. Especially targeted were transregional youth gatherings and activities that were not essential to the functioning of congregational life. These pressures peaked from 1950 to 1953 in a period of open repression, marked by the more systematic hindrance of church youth gatherings, by denunciation and defamation of “imperialist” Protestant youth groups, by more concerted observation of Protestant groups and leaders, and by the removal of “Junge Gemeinde” members from the FDJ. These heavy-handed tactics were replaced in the following years by a more subtle and effective strategy of hidden repression. This later strategy, which was less institutional and more individual in focus, aimed especially at the heavily Protestant ranks of Oberschueler, combined repression and anti-Christian propaganda with incentives and rewards for accepting the SED system and the
communist worldview. It culminated in the implementation of the Jugendweihe–a secular confirmation ceremony incompatible with Christian confirmation–as a necessary prerequisite for access to higher education.

In conjunction with more general social modernization trends, these measures were extremely effective, resulting in a 25-to-50 percent decline in the number of church youth groups, and to similar declines in individual group membership (p. 274). They also resulted in a thorough transformation of the East German Protestant milieu, from the status of educated middle-class elites to the position of educational, economic, and social outsiders. At the same time, Ueberschaer argues, this transformation of the Protestant milieu created new opportunities. East German Protestants became the carriers of an alternative culture, capable of supporting limited criticism of the SED regime and, thus, laying groundwork for the collapse of the communist system in 1989.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of this book is its failure to integrate the various lines of its inquiry into a strong central narrative or argument, at least until the conclusion. While Ueberschaer ultimately argues that theVerkirchlichung strategy of the churches and the Entkirchlichung program of the state served to confirm the worst suspicions of each toward the other and to escalate their confrontation, this dynamic is only hinted at in the body of her work.
The choppy and sometimes idiosyncratic narrative, which contains several tangents of marginal relevance to the book’s main arguments, creates the impression of an author who is still a little too close to her sources to step back and focus on the bigger picture. Yet Ueberschaer has done a valuable service in drawing attention to the importance of youth work as a field of ideological and institutional conflict. Her findings will be of interest to both church historians and scholars of the GDR.

Benjamin Pearson, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

b) Michael R.Steele, Christianity, the Other and the Holocaust. Contribution to the Study of Religion, number 70
Westport, Connecticut/London: Greenwood Press, 2003. xiv + 185 pp. $64.95 cloth (This review appeared first in Church History, Vol .72 no.4, December 2003)

Sixty years after the mass murder of the European Jews, commonly known as the Holocaust, debate still continues concerning the responsibility of the Christian churches both for the genesis and the implementation of these atrocities. As with the parallel debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust, scholars have been unable to reach an agreed consensus. For several decades now, the issue has been contended as to whether the tragedy of the Jews was the latest round in a tradition of anti-Jewish bigotry by Christians of all denominations, as a result of the legacy of hatred and intolerance built up over the centuries. Or was the religious factor merely a background one, to be overtaken by the far more virulent and violent antisemitism of German racialism, whose exponents in the Nazi ranks were in fact putting into action a modern secularized ideology of the twentieth century.

Michael Steele is clearly committed to the first of these propositions. Western culture, he says, as shaped by Europe’s Christian civilization and especially by the Roman Catholic Church, propagated an exclusionary vision of mankind, which relegated all non-believers outside its orbit to be marginalized, dehumanized and often destroyed. Marked down as “Other”, such outcasts were treated as worthy of discrimination or destruction, and indeed suffered such a fate whenever Christianity was dominant. The persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust is thus the culmination of characteristic Christian features of triumphalism and supersessionism, an intricate cultural process developed over seventeen centuries. It can be seen as part of a long lamentable pattern.
Steele seeks to examine how the development of a certain kind of prejudgment about The Other could lead to the growth of a theology of sacred violence, which in turn was the basis for the physical subjugation or even destruction of whole populations, in a series of alarming preludes to the Holocaust. Steele claims to find a continuing and cumulative process of Christian violence against outsiders and non-believers, especially Jews, ever since the reign of the Emperor Constantine. Subsequently, the same features were taken over by the expansionist, aggressively missionizing Christianity of later centuries, leading eventually to a claim to world-wide dominance. Possession of the one, true religion justified the consequent enslavement, and even extermination, of enormous numbers of innocent victims in the pursuit of the eradication of all alternatives.

Given Steele’s predetermined stance, the examples chosen to illustrate this thesis are predictable. Christians took over the militant imperialist mindset of the Roman Empire, launched the Crusades, invaded and subdued with barbarous ferocity the indigenous populations of Asia, Africa and America, imposed the horrors of the slave trade, and all along sought to eliminate their nearest religious rivals, the Jews, by legitimated acts of homicidal violence. Given the shortness of the book, there is an inevitable compression, which, as a result, leads to unilateral distortion. Steele’s teleological point of view flattens out the complexities and divagations of historical circumstances. He ignores the evidence of whole periods and territories where historical conditions do not confirm his thesis. Nor does he critically examine alternative views, but repetitiously invokes the parallels between Christian violence against Jews in the past and Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust. His arguments are based on numerous secondary sources by authors who agree with him. In short, this is not how history should be written.

Like Daniel Goldhagen, who recently wrote a book with similar theme, it would appear that Michael Steele is not a historian, but a moralist. As such, he does not fail to denounce Christianity as a repressive belief system, which over the centuries has motivated perpetrators to murder innocent victims, especially Jews, with impunity, and has led bystanders to ignore, or pass by, the inhumanity of such actions. Logically, his adoption of the culmination theory as an explanation for the Holocaust should lead him to a highly pessimistic view of the future, since Christianity has not abandoned its dogmas or structures, and since its adherents, he believes, are incapable of overthrowing the grip of such a powerful ideology. Perhaps it is only wishful thinking which leads him by the book’s conclusion to advocate the growth of a pluralistic society, which has been brutally thwarted during so many centuries of Western Christian history by the sacred, violent denial of its vision. But this is certainly not a historical judgment.

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3) Work in progress:

a) Chris Probst, Royal Holloway College, London

Protestant reception of Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish treatises in Nazi Germany

Martin Luther wrote at least five treatises on the subject of “the Jews”. One treats Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen, which – though heavily weighted with cogent theological argumentation – nonetheless contains typical late mediaeval antisemitic accusations, along with seven severe recommendations for dealing with the Jews. This treatise has fueled the greatest discussion of the reformer’s attitude towards Jews and Judaism

How did German Protestants during the Nazi era receive these writings, which were now being widely disseminated throughout their homeland? Did Protestants confront the “Jewish question” by the light of these treatises, either explicitly or implicitly? How were the surrounding events interpreted by Protestants in the light of Von den Juden, if at all? These are the central questions to be answered in my dissertation.

Though not central to my thesis’ argument, I have suggested that Von den Juden contains both anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric. With Gavin Langmuir, I contend that the now-traditional distinction between “theological” anti-Judaism and “racial” antisemitism (e.g.Maurer, Oberman) is not empirically verifiable, and thus should be discarded. Instead we should consider the rational, irrational and non-rational aspects of theological thought. Irrational rhetoric (the Blood Libel, for example) may be considered antisemitic, while some (though not all) non-rational argumentation (such as Luther’s application of biblical passages to contemporary Jews) can be considered anti-Judaic.

Using an intellectual history approach, I will show that the reception of Luther’s ideas about the Jews helped some German Protestants in the Third Reich to look favourably upon Nazi antisemitism and thus to support – or at least not to oppose – the antisemitic policies and practices of the regime.

b) Benjamin Pearson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

I am currently in the early writing stage of a dissertation which examines democracy and West German Protestant political identity at the German Protestant Kirchentag from 1949 until the early 1970s. Basically I examine the different ways in which West German Protestants understood their new role in a democratic society in the post-war years. I then trace the ways this understanding changed during the period of my study. What I have found so far is that the early 1950s were dominated by an optimistic belief in the politically and socially transforming power of Christian faith. This gave way to a more academic and classically liberal phase in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Finally in the mid-1960s a new more activist and liberationist conception of democracy began to prevail.

4) Book Notes: ed. Anthony Cross, Ecumenism and History: Studies in honour of John H.Y.Briggs, Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press 2002 ISBN 1-84227-135-0 362 pp.

This Festschrift for John Briggs, a leading British Baptist, long-time academic, and champion of ecumenical causes, brings together essays from his many friends. Although too diverse for a coherent review, one contribution deserves special notice. Keith Clements, the retiring General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, writes a splendid, if too short, piece on biography and history. He uses as his text the pithy remark by the American novelist Bernard Malamud: “The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay out of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly: as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction”. But Clements disagrees. The historical record is a necessary corrective to fictional biography. A biographer has therefore to be “at one and the same time, fact-gatherer, chronicler, detective, psychologist, portrait-painter and (yes) historian”. He quotes his own experience as the author of the magnificent life of J.H.Oldham, and his subsequent writings about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Reconstructing the consciousness and the motivations of the person involved is a truly demanding task. To fill in the details not recorded in documents requires an imaginative empathy, even artistic licence. But it must not violate either the factual record or known character for the sake of dramatic effect or propaganda interests. Clements rightly therefore takes issue with the recent film about Bonhoeffer, Agent of Grace, which distorts the known facts and produces a seriously diminished, even embarrassing picture. Bonhoeffer’s biography necessitates treading a fine line between a mere chronicle and an innovative fiction. Clements’ plea is to search for “the inner links of a multifaceted life with all its ambiguity and paradox, its hiddenness as well as overt character”. By such means, the radical challenges of Bonhoeffer’s theology can be linked to the tragic drama of his career, making for “a fascinating life of daring integrity lived among evil and compromises with evil.”

5) Journal articles:

a) D.J.Berggren, “The living faith of President Carter” in Journal of Church and State, Vol 47, no. 1, Winter 2005, 43ff.
Berggren outlines how the Christian principles of honesty, thrift, goodness and peacemaking guided Carter’s Presidency (1977-81), set his policy priorities, and were reflected in his post-presidency initiatives. His 2002 Nobel Peace Prize was an overdue recognition of his strong Christian principles, illustrating his firm commitment to the absolute ethic of the Gospel.

b) M.M.Balzer, “Whose steeple is higher? Religious competition in Siberia” in Religion, State and Society, Vol 31, no. 1, March 2005, 57ff
Dr Balzer reports on the varieties of recent religious experiences in Siberia. Religion, she claims, has become an idiom through which competing definitions of homeland and national pride are being shaped. Christian missionaries from outside Siberia are in competition with local nativist shamans and with Moslem and Buddhist immigrants. These activities all indicate that a large-scale abandonment of Soviet atheism is taking place and a multi-faith community is arising.

With all best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Contents

1) Book reviews:

a) Spicer, Resisting the Third Reich: Berlin clergy
b) ed..Bottum and Dalin, The Pius War
c) ed Bergen, The Sword of the Lord

2) Journal articles

a) Porter, Australian chaplains
b) Wolf, Pius XI and Nazi ideologies
c) Lee, Watchman Nee in China
d) Kirby, Freemasonry and the Church of England

1a) b) Kevin Spicer, Resisting the Third Reich. The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin. By Kevin P. Spicer. (De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp.xi, 254. $36.00 US.) ISBN 0-87580-330-X

(This review first appeared in Catholic Historical Review, Vol.91, no.1 January 2005)
In 1933 the majority of German Catholics greeted the Nazis’ rise to power with enthusiasm. Hitler promised a new beginning, the restoration of Germany’s place in world affairs, a bulwark against Communism, and strong leadership. All served to outweigh the reservations expressed by some of the bishops. The groundswell was enough to bring almost universal approval when Hitler offered to sign a Concordat with the Vatican in July 1933. These warm expressionsof support for the new regime by bishops and clergy, however, became a liability when Nazi policy increasingly launched anti-Catholic and anti-clerical campaigns designed to undermine the Concordat’s intentions. At the local level, the priests were often confronted with an undeclared war. How they dealt with the situation is the subject of Kevin Spicer’s well-researched investigation.

Forty years ago Guenter Lewy published the first English-language survey of the Catholic Church and the Third Reich, which was highly critical in tone. More recently, other American church historians have chastised the German Catholic leaders for not acting more forcefully to protest or resist the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Spicer, however, avoids any kind of wishful thinking about what might have happened if only, but rather examines the actual conduct of the Catholic milieu and explores the dilemmas confronting its clergy as the political situation became ever more confrontational.

He has chosen for his case study the diocese of Berlin. This can hardly be considered representative, since Catholics were a small minority in the nation’s capital where the spirit of Bismarck still reigned. Nevertheless, Spicer shows that the range of responses by the Berlin clergy to the Nazi onslaught was matched in other parts of the country. A very few priests gave openly fervent support to the Nazi regime, eagerly demonstrating their loyalty to the Führer, down to the very end. Spicer’s chapter on these “brown priests” breaks new ground. On the other side, only a few were clear-sighted enough to recognize the pernicious character of the Nazis’ ideology and practices. The most notable example was that of Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg, whose combative willingness to challenge the Nazi state far outstripped that of the rest of the clergy in his diocese. Spicer devotes a whole chapter to his unique witness. The majority of the clergy, however, adopted a stance of passive withdrawal from politics, and a concentration on their pastoral duties in their parishes. Spicer makes use of the term Resistenz, as outlined by the noted German historian Martin Broszat, to describe this attempt by the clergy to protect the local Catholic milieu and their prized ministerial freedom.

Spicer sees the outrageous murder of a leading Catholic layman in Berlin, Erich Klausener, on the occasion of the so-called Röhm putsch in June 1934 as the turning point which cured most clergy of their illusions about the Nazi regime. The bishops became more circumspect. But, as others have already shown, their divided counsels prevented any more cohesive or open opposition. However, from 1935 onwards, Berlin had as its bishop, Konrad Preysing, who had no doubts about the incompatibility of National Socialism and Catholicism. Nevertheless he too shared his colleagues’ inherent nationalism and hesitancy to question governmental authority. He too sought to avoid any direct clash with the state.

Only when the Nazis’ encroachments on Catholic sacramental duties and doctrines became so constant and threatening were the bishops and clergy ready to take up more active forms of resistance. But the circle of obligation was limited to their own supporters. As Spicer shows in his chapter on Jews and the diocese of Berlin, the majority of Catholics did not feel obliged to make forceful protests on behalf of Jews or other victims of Nazi repression. Provost Lichtenberg was the exception, and paid the price of imprisonment by the Gestapo for his outspoken witness for the Jews. As a result, the Church’s leaders were even less ready to provide encouragement to act on behalf of this persecuted minority.

Spicer’s narrative necessarily blends events in Berlin with the national picture of swelling Nazi propaganda and intimidation, and the increasing smell of fear among the clergy. In 1943 four of the Berlin diocese’s priests in Stettin were arrested and executed. Bishop Preysing, despite his adversarial stance, was deterred from open defiance. Spicer gives details of the Gestapo’s harassment of nearly one-third of the parochial clergy of the diocese, many of whom had been denounced by parishioners. His description of their dilemmas in seeking to protect the church’s sacramental witness, especially in war-time, is well done. Some comparisons with the similar predicament of Berlin’s Protestant clergy would have been helpful at this point, drawing perhaps on the new study edited by Erich Schuppan, Bekenntnis in Not.

In conclusion, Spicer claims that, at a time of political extremism and ideological radicalism, the clergy’s acts of Resistenz provided an alternative space for Catholics to challenge Nazism’s all-pervasive momentum. Only a few priests were called to face martyrdom, when they died heroically. But, for the majority, their faithful pastoral ministry, he suggests, was an effective, if unspectacular, witness against Nazi heresies and totalitarian ambitions. Given the paucity of English-language studies of German Catholicism, Spicer’s balanced account of this regional church at this particularly traumatic time is much to be welcomed.
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1b) Joseph Bottum and David Dalin eds., The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), 282pp. With an Annotated Bibliography of Works on Pius XII, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

The Pius War is a selection of reviews, previously published, of recent books critical of Pope Pius XII’s stance on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The remainder of the book, fully 183 pages, is an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Pius XII, by William Doino Jr. An introductory essay by Joseph Bottum, a journalist and published poet, sums up the view of the editors.

Bottum insists the reviews show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the books critical of Pius XII misread documents and are brimming with factual errors. The defenders of Pius XII have won all the battles, he asserts, but they have lost the war, for against all reason the prevailing view is still highly critical of the pope.(1) He explains this state of affairs with an ad hominem argument: the scholarship of those critical of Pius is singularly unpersuasive, but prevails because of bigotry, specifically “overblown hatred” of Pius, and anti-Catholicism.(8-9)

The reviews that follow are exceptionally uneven: some do not measure up to conventional standards of scholarship, while others have merit. The lapses in scholarship are frequent, not incidental: documents are misread; statements are quoted with no source provided; words and action are cited, divorced from historical context.

Let us take up misread documents first. Ronald Rychlak tells us that Pius XII personally helped “1,000 German Jews” emigrate to Brazil.(36) But one has only to consult an editor of the Vatican’s own diplomatic papers, to learn that the “German Jews” were in reality “non-Aryan Catholics.” (Pierre Blet S.J., Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, pp. 141-49. From Blet’s account, the number was far fewer than 1,000) We also learn from Rychlak that in the 1933 Concordat with the Vatican, “German officials agreed to regard baptized Jews as Christians,” and that this saved thousands of Jewish lives. (230. In: Rychlak, Hitler,the War, and the Pope, p. 60) No provision of the Concordat is cited for this unique and bizarre claim.

Another example: Russell Hittinger reviewing Kertzer’s, The Popes Against the Jews, insists Kertzer is wrong is stating that the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, contains “no direct attack on anti-Semitism.” Hillinger claims the encyclical discusses why Scripture and the Incarnation “forbid any racial derogation of the Œchosen people’.”(49) I went back to the encyclical to check this claim, and found that the only place Scripture is cited in connection with “the people of the old covenant,” is to remind us of their “materialism and worldliness.” As for the Incarnation, the encyclical tells us that Jesus “took His human nature from the people which was afterwards to nail Him to a Cross.” (“Mit brennender Sorge,” The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich. New York: Longmans, Green, 1942. pp. 526-27.)

A final example: we learn from William Doino, that “Cardinal Pacelli sent explicit instructions to the papal nuncio in Germany, on April 4, 1933, to oppose Nazi anti-Semitism.” As evidence, Doino cites a letter discovered in the newly opened archives of Pope Pius XI. (126. It can be found on the internet, Zenit News Agency, 17 February 2003.) The letter from Cardinal Pacelli states that the pope had been asked to intervene regarding “anti-Semitic excesses in Germany,” and asks the nuncio “to see if and how it is possible to be involved in the desired way.” This is not the same as explicit instructions to oppose Nazi antisemitism. Doino also omits the nuncio’s response, which was to recommend against an intervention, which would be interpreted as a protest against government policies. The matter was then dropped. (Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, p. 33.)

The next lapse is that sources are not cited, as if we are to take evidence on faith. Rabbi David Dalin mentions an account by the Italian princess Enza Pignatelli Aragona Cortés, of Pius’ surprised response to the roundup of Jews in Rome. (“But the Germans had promised not to touch the Jews.”)(15) We have no way of assessing the reliability of this account, as no source is provided.

Another example: Ronald Rychlak faults Susan Zuccotti for not consulting certain transcripts attesting to the aid Pius XII gave to the Jewish people. Nothing is said about where these transcripts are available.

The final lapse in scholarship is the inattention to historical context. Peremptory claims are made, short bursts of ammunition, meant to refute an extended argument. Thus Dalin, again without citing sources, states in vindication of Pius, that in August 1942, the nuncio in France protested against the deportation of Jews.(18) How much does this tell us? Was the protest emphatic or lame? Why did the pope himself not say something in support of the protest of French bishops, since the Vichy regime sought the goodwill of the Vatican? Why was the Vatican interest in the anti-Jewish decrees of 1940 and 1941, limited to concern over baptized Jews? Why was the Jewish issue forgotten by the Fall of 1942 when Vichy offered concessions to the Church, including subsidies for religious schools? On that occasion the nuncio proclaimed that the “new France” was being built on a foundation of “spiritual values.” (See Marrus/Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp.200-03, 272-79) The short burst, with dramatic flourish, is not an argument.

There are contributions of merit in this book as well. Kevin Doyle on The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, is right to point to the tendency to second-guess actors of long ago, while neglecting to steep ourselves in the values and circumstances of the time. Training our moral gaze on the past rather than on ourselves in the present breeds its own hypocrisy. But Doyle is no hagiographer and he considers the record of the Church “uneven.” (56) I took issue with John Jay Hughes’ negative assessment of Michael Phayer’s, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, but he is rightfully indignant at the picture on the dust cover of the book, which depicts the Vatican and the Nazis as partners in genocide. Rainer Decker’s review of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, is thoughtful and judicious, as is John Conway’s piece on the ill-fated joint Catholic-Jewish Commission which reviewed the eleven volumes, Actes et Documents du Saint Siége relatifs á la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Michael Novak makes some valid criticisms of Daniel Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning, as does Robert Wilkin of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword.

Doino’s meticulous and thorough annotated bibliography is a valuable source for those interested in the controversy over Pius XII. It includes primary sources, biographies, accounts of diplomats, books and articles by defenders and critics of the pope, works on the Concordat, the anti-Nazi resistance, national Churches, and much else besides. Nothing seems to have escaped his notice, and the bibliography is worth the book. A point well-documented in his bibliography, which includes wartime newspapers and diaries, is that Pius was perceived during the war as an anti-Nazi, and sympathetic to the Jewish plight.

It would be a mistake, though, to be guided by Doino’s notes. He tells us that he takes a positive view of Pius XII; it can also be said that he takes a negative view of critics of the pope. Works critical of the pope are uniformly “uneven” (9. Eamon Duffy), “less reliable,” (112. Frank Coppa), and demonstrate “superficial knowledge.” (182. John Pawlikowski, Donald Dietrich, István Deák, and Robert Wistrich.) On the other hand, Doino insists that David Dalin’s eight-page defense of the pope in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard (26 February 2001, pp. 31-39) “became one of the most talked-about statements ever published on Pius XII.” (190) I tell my students that what I look for in their essays are cogent arguments, not set conclusions. For Doino, what seems to count in evaluating a book is the right conclusion, not the cogency of the argument, or thoroughness of research.

Regrettably, one has to wade through flights of fantasy to get to some of the telling points in the book. For a defense of the Pius XII, the reader would do well to turn to the works of such scholars as Robert Graham S.J., Pierre Blet S.J., Owen Chadwick, Victor Conzemius, Ludwig Volk, and Konrad Repgen, for reasoned arguments and telling evidence, but most of all for their respectful appeal to our intelligence. This book, however, is driven by a self-righteous indignation at those who would dare criticize Pius XII; it speaks to those already convinced rather than to those with an open mind.
Jacques Kornberg, University of Toronto

1c) ed. Doris Bergen, The Sword of the Lord. Military Chaplains from the first to the twenty-first century. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2004. ISBN 0-268-02176-7, 298 pp.

Military chaplaincies have not often been the subject of academic surveys, especially over long periods, or on a comparative basis. These papers from a conference held at Notre Dame University and skillfully edited by Doris Bergen are therefore welcome in giving a far-ranging coverage to this topic. The unifying theme is however clear: how have or do military chaplains solve the dilemmas posed by the tensions between their loyalties to their God of love and peace, and those to their temporal employers in national armies, pursuing victory through war and violence. The book is inclusive by not limiting its purview solely to Christian chaplains. A valuable chapter by an American Jewish chaplain in the second world war adds an additional perspective.
Necessarily the early chapters on chaplains in antiquity are academic in approach. At least from the fifth century Christian military chaplains are recorded as seeking to minister with word and sacrament to soldiers in their highly precarious profession. In his contribution, Michael McCormick has even dug up a morale-boosting homily for warriors at the Carolingian court in the ninth century. And David Bachrach shows how the armies of the mediaeval centuries could depend on priests to see them through the terrors and moral dilemmas inherent in the great crusades.

Little changed with the Reformation, except that by the seventeenth century, as Anne Laurence outlines, a large number of written pamphlets survive, which report the arguments used by chaplains attempting to prove that God was on their side. The evidence would seem to suggest that religious propaganda of this sort only encouraged violence against sectarian opponents, and that the chaplains’ pens as well as their swords could inflict fatal wounds.
By the eighteenth century, the creation of professional armies by the Prussian kings led to a similar development among military chaplains, drawing on the reservoir of Pietist preachers trained in Halle. The emphasis in their ministry was already based on Romans 13:1, and on their function to bring religious support to the monarch’s cause. Inevitably this gave an obrigkeitshörig character to this service. And subsequent waves of nationalist feelings only reinforced this belief in the sacredness of each country’s national destiny.

By the time of the first world war, chaplains were expected to be officers and gentlemen, who frequently saw their duty as upholding idealistic, even chauvinistic notions as to how God would bless their armies. Very often their prayers for national victory were complemented by efforts to demonize the enemy as non-Christian, or alternatively to claim the virtues of a sacrificial death in battle. In the tragic and traumatic circumstances of trench warfare, these were features which led to a rapid decline in the credibility of the chaplains’ proclamations, and in the long run to a major crisis for the future of the whole church.

The post-1918 revulsion against this kind of religious-political propaganda, and the rise of various pacifist movements, led to further challenges to the whole institution of military chaplaincies. By the second world war, virtually all prophetic utterances were low-keyed, and the chaplains came to see their duty primarily in pastoral terms. The distance between the world of politics and war, on the one side, and the world of spiritual care and consolation, on the other, remained awesome.

In the aftermath of this war, even for the victors, there was great disillusionment and ambivalence about the chaplains’ ministry. Army regulations and compulsory worship services were greatly resented, and were rarely offset by the personal witness and compassion of the individual chaplain. Their common recourse to a concentration on welfare work only revealed the failure of their religious vocation. For far too many of the ordinary soldiers, the chaplain’s stance seemed to be hypocritical with its moralistic censoriousness and lack of sympathy, and incommensurate with the appalling casualties both military and civilian. The contempt for conventional religion only grew, and, in some cases, as in Nazi Germany, was prompted by the political authorities. A negative view of military chaplains prevailed. But in part this was unjust, and more a reflection of the abiding resentment against war in general and its failure to make a brave new, if not Christian, world.

In retrospect, the second world war raised in many minds the acute moral dilemma of participating in an immoral war of annihilation and wholesale destruction. The chaplains’ failure to protest against mass murders of civilians came to be source of anguish, as was also their virtual inability to assist the victims. Particularly poignant is here the report of Rabbi Max Wall’s service in Germany in 1945. And Fr. Joseph O’Donnell’s heartfelt reflections on his service in Vietnam demonstrates the paradoxes and challenges of present-day chaplaincies.

In her summary, Anne Loveland points out that the U.S. military authorities still impose on chaplains their secular requirements for morale-boosting, the inculcation of sexual morality and ideological conformity. The consequent alienation of many soldiers, given their secular upbringing, becomes a serious factor which hinders, if not contradicts, any strong Christian proclamation. The increased emphasis on pastoral concerns is partly because chaplains are well aware that they are clearly inhibited from any prophetic utterances critical of the policies of their government or president. It is only a pity that she makes no reference to chaplaincy work in Iraq.

Fr. Baxter, in his afterword, turns back to the central issue of whether a Christian can in good conscience participate in military chaplaincy, or indeed military service at all, or whether this does not demand a narrowing of allegiances, which promote only a national or political agenda for secular reasons. The debate continues.

The comprehensive bibliography dealing with all aspects of military chaplaincies is commendable and helpful.

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2a) Patrick Porter, The Sacred Service. Australian chaplains in the Great War, in War and Society, Vol. 20, no.2, 2002, 23ff
Australian military chaplains shared with their British imperial colleagues in the Great War the experiences of intimate contact with the realities of modern warfare, which compelled moral and theological responses The majority of them had quickly taken the same line as their Englsh counterparts and sanctioned the war as God’s will. But not all were enthusiastic about legitimising killing of the enemy. There is little evidence that Australian chaplains, or indeed any others, enjoyed participation in trench warfare as a kind of masculine masochism. On the contrary most abhorred the slaughter, eve while supporting the war. They grew out of venerating youthful sacrifice or regarding the war as spiritually uplifting. Their revulsion against the bloodiness of battle was authentic. But the war changed the content of their faith. The emphasis necessarily came to be placed on suffering, and on whether God’s good purposes were overruled by human sin. The path of suffering and death was not infrequently balanced by mystical visions of the crucified Christ, offering protection and redemption to the dying soldiers. Such experiences only increased the sense of distance from the Australian home front, and made for traumatic readjustments after 1919. Nor was it easy somehow to uphold the idea that the war’s suffering and deaths had been meaningful. Pardres in Australia and elsewhere were enlisted in the civic religious ceremonies of the post-war years and had to steer a fine line between nsational glorification and their awareness of the need for repentance and mourning. As war sanctifiers as well as disturbed witnesses, these chaplains played an ambivalent role. Drawing from the extensive records of the Australian Chaplaincy Service, Porter shows that these men reached the same conclusions as their colleagiues elsewhere, as they struggled between the two worlds of meaning and futility, redemption and despair.

2b) Hubert Wolf, Pius XI und die “Zeitirrtümer” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol.53, no.1, January 2005, pp.1 ff
The papers in the Vatican archives dealing with Germany during the reign of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) were opened two years ago. One of the first results to be published is the report by Professor Hubert Wolf of Münster. He describes the steps taken from 1934 onwards by various branches of the Curia to examine the writings of leading Nazis to see whether they should be publicly condemned. A syllabus against racism was in the course of preparation, but in fact was never published before Pius XI died. However many of the ideas were expressed in the notable Encyclical of March 1937 “Mit brennender Sorge”. In Wolf’s view, the Curia was always torn between its desire to condemn dangerous heresy, and the need to prevent any recurrence of another Kulturkampf in Germany.

2c) J.T-H.Lee, Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China in Church History, Vol. 74, no 1, March 2005, pp.68-96
Watchman Nee (1903-72) was an independent Protestant evangelist who built up a conservative following, known as the Little Flock, which refused to accept the imposed leadership of the Communist dictatorship after 1949, and suffered the consequences.

Lee’s insightful article explains the tribulations experienced by this sect in trying to avoid Maoist political control, and to keep its distance from the more collaborationist Three Self Patriotic Movement, which still continues today. The latter accepted the need to obey the government’s edicts in order to pursue its main goal, which was to strike free from control by foreign missionaries, and to propagate a self-governing, self-financing and self-propagating Chinese model church. Nee’s Little Flock was no less dedicated to Chinese autonomy, but with his firm belief in the empowerment of the laity, refused any “guidance” from outside authority. Consequently Nee’s attempts to recruit those congregations whose foreign leadership has been expelled soon ran into difficulties. In 1956 Nee was denounced as a reactionary and died in a labour camp in 1972. Nevertheless the Little Flock survived, and demonstrated the failure of the Maoist state to exercise absolute control in the religious sphere.

2d) Dianne Kirby, Christianity and Freemasonry: The compatibility debate within the Church of England in Journal of Religious History, Vol 29, no. 1, February 2005, pp 43 ff.

Dianne Kirby gives a sprightly account of the continuing debate in the Church of England as to whether membership in a Masonic lodge is compatible with the Church of England’s beliefs. During the early 1950s, both the monarch, George VI, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Fisher, were Masons. But there were some Anglicans, particularly Anglo-Catholics, who noted that the Vatican had always banned membership and wondered whether in fact the two loyalties could be combined. Demands for enquiry by various synods were successfully headed off, when Archbishop Fisher argued that he and 16 other bishops were men of true faith, whose judgement should not be questioned. But the theological issues were never truly aired, as Masons are forbidden to discuss their beliefs and practices with non-Masons. Outsiders were fobbed off with the view that the actions of these well-meaning and charitable men were all part of the traditional establishment, or perhaps “a fairly harmless eccentricity”. In all, the conclusion was that “it would be a sad day when there was no room for eccentricity in the Church of England”. But even today the current Archbishop, Rowan Williams, has acknowledged his own concern about the secrecy of Masonic rites and the implications of the oaths involved.

Best wishes to you all, especially for those still enjoying a summer holiday,
John Conway
jconway@Interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

I take the liberty of sending you this month a paper I recently read to a meeting of the Commission internationale d’histoire ecclesiastique comparée in Sydney, Australia.

Missions to Israel: The rise and fall of Protestant missions to the Jews, 1800-2000

John S.Conway
University of British Columbia

Mission is fundamental to the life of the Christian Church. But the earliest and longest continuous Christian mission – that towards the Jewish people – has undeniably been one of only limited success, and more often has been marked by frustration and failure. These were the sentiments which by the fourth century had led to the polemical anti-Judaism of the ancient church fathers like Chrysostom. More ominously these animosities promoted the kind of hostility, social and political as well as theological, which characterized Christian attitudes towards Jews for so many centuries. Nor did the Reformation bring about a significant alteration. As the example of Luther shows, mediaeval anti-Judaism could easily be carried over into Protestantism.

We therefore need to find some additional factors which led to the surprising re-invigoration of missions towards Israel at the end of the eighteenth century, despite the accumulated evidence that Jews were ready to suffer persecutions, expulsions and martyrdom rather than desert their historic faith. The first factor was the remarkable revival of the Protestant prophetic tradition, beginning with the English Puritans of the seventeenth century, and the German Pietists of the eighteenth century, which coalesced into the notable evangelical impetus, through the growth of missionary societies, in the nineteenth.
Interest in mission to the Jews can in part be traced to that branch of Protestant thought which took literally the biblical prophecies concerning the restoration of Jews to Israel and their conversion. Thereby they rejected the doctrine, prevalent since the time of Augustine, that the Church had superseded the Jews as the Chosen People of God. Calvinist preachers in particular honoured the Old Testament, named their children with Jewish biblical names, and in so doing dissociated themselves from all mediaeval i.e. Catholic anti-judaic antagonisms.

In the ranks of the growing Pietist movement in Germany in the eighteenth century, the influence of Philip Jakob Spener was considerable. His belief in the need for the conversion of the Jews was linked to his millenarian expectations, which in turn were taken up by others, for example, in England by the group of Protestant non-conformists who adopted a similar theology.

These Calvinist-indoctrinated groups defined the Jews as heirs of ancient Israel whose return to their homeland in Palestine had long been prophesized as a prelude to the return of the Messiah. This eschatological train of thought was undoubtedly greatly reinforced by the traumatic political events associated with the French Revolution. Many earnest Protestants came to believe that what was happening before their eyes was the apocalyptic sequence of events prophesized so long ago. Dispensationalists placed the Jews in the centre of Christian hopes for the end time. Their desire was also to save individual members of the Jewish people from dying in unbelief. Such eschatological hopes, however, would be much expedited by promoting the return of all Jews to their promised land, since their role was to be a blessing to the nations, whose conversion would be the prelude to the final end of the world. 1)

The institutional embodiment of these ideas was the establishment of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, later the Church Mission to the Jews, in 1809. It was part of the great expansion of missionary endeavours launched in these decades, when British and later American evangelicals took advantage of newly-developed technologies to promote their missionary vision world-wide.

As men’s geographical horizons expanded, so did their religious ambitions. The notable and successful campaign against the slave trade being organized during these years was, as is well known, sponsored by the evangelical church party in Britain Its ability to mobilize the enthusiasm, organizational skills and often the heroic self-sacrifice of its individual supporters became a model for all nineteenth century missionary endeavours. In reaching out to the Jews, however, it is notable that few British evangelicals were equipped for this task. For several decades the first recruits for the Church’s Mission to the Jews were all drawn from German Pietist ranks. In the initial stages, the majority of those targeted for this mission were in Europe. In the 1820s and 1830s, together with parallel societies established in Berlin, the Rhineland, Saxony and Detmold, mission stations were established in eastern Europe as well as in trading centres where Jews were settled such as Constantinople, Aleppo, Beirut, Baghdad and Cochin. The distribution of tracts in English, Hebrew and German reached astonishing totals.

At the same time, secular developments leading to the emancipation of the Jews in many parts of Europe encouraged some Christian authorities to believe that Jews would now be willing to embrace the theological insights of the majority culture. With the opening of the ghetto gates, the last remnants of the Middle Ages would vanish. It was a unique opportunity for the presentation of the advantages of the Christian faith.

These great ambitions and exalted claims were most clearly spelt out in the project launched in the 1830s for collaboration between the Prussian monarch, Frederick William IV, and the British government, along with the Church of England, to set up a jointly-managed episcopal see in Jerusalem, specially to convert the Jews resident there. 2) The endorsation by these two major Protestant powers of their belief in the restoration of Israel was a triumphant vindication of the ideas of the London Society’s members, led by the prominent evangelical Lord Shaftesbury. The appointment in 1841 of the first bishop. Michael Alexander, a former Prussian citizen of Jewish origin and now ordained in the Church of England, seemed to symbolize the mission’s international and interfaith character. As one commentator remarked: “The prospect of a Jewish successor for Saint James was an entrancing one. It would demonstrate both the respect with which the House of Israel should be treated by Christains and the opportunities in the Church open to converts” 3)

This assertion of a British presence in Palestine, which was nominally if corruptly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, was strongly promoted by Shaftesbury as a part of his zealous pursuit of what was to be known as Christian Zionism. Certainly these endeavours were motivated by the desire to show compassion for the sufferings of the Jews, to promote their welfare in Palestine and to demonstrate a spirit of Christian love and kindness, which would be markedly different from the contempt of earlier centuries. But at the same time, the millenial hopes for the conversion of the world beginning in Jerusalem played a significant role. In Shaftesbury’s view, this could best happen under the umbrella of British protection.

Inevitably, however, political circumstances in both Europe and Palestine came to affect such lofty ideals and the fortunes of this new Mission. By the 1850s the romantic notion that Britain could lead the cause of the restoration of God’s ancient people to the land of their forebears was being actively disputed by both Catholic France and Orthodox Russia in quarrels which played a role in causing the outbreak of the Crimean War. The conflation of religious and political considerations was, not for the last time, to prove both contentious and troubling for those seeking to bring the Kingdom of God nearer to hand.

The restoration project launched by these evangelicals was based on modern hopes and ancient promises. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, its momentum diminished. Certainly the major drawback was the reluctance and indeed obstruction of the Jewish authorities to participate in a Christian venture, however much they looked forward to a return next year to Jerusalem. In Palestine itself, the resident Jewish population proved determined to preserve its own identity. The Church’s Mission to the Jews was always peripheral, and the new Jerusalem bishopric became increasingly more involved instead with providing services to the Arab population, almost totally neglected and badly in need of health and education.

By comparison with other aspects of the European missionary expansion, the Missions to Israel had a narrower range. They could not boast of large-scale successes, nor could they be seen as part of the civilizing process of Europe’s widening empires. But, upheld by the stricter Calvinists’ belief in the election of the Jews to be God’s chosen people, and prompted by their millenarian expectations, the supporters of the mission expanded their mission stations and indeed received remarkably large donations for this purpose.

But few Jews, or Moslems, were converted to Christianity. The failure of the joint bishopric in the 1880s, due to nationalist pressures, only led to the conclusion that the evangelical impulse was better pursued by the individual missionary societies. In essence, however, the Christian presence in Israel became preoccupied with its own affairs, or catered to the ever-growing number of tourists. Mission to the Jews had to contend with the indifference of the majority Christians in the Holy Land, as indeed elsewhere. Indeed, in many countries, the object of missionary activity was as much to encourage warmth of Christian feelings towards the Jews as to promote Jewish faith in Christ.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise of Zionism as a political movement designed to attract Jews back to their former homeland, the overthrow in 1917 of Turkish rule, and the subsequent establishment of the British Mandate, opened a new chapter for Jewish missions. Reactions were mixed. Some of the missionaries welcomed Zionism for its idealism and purposeful resolve, and supported the revival of Jewish culture and society in Palestine. But others deplored the fact that the moral tone of Zionism was explicitly secular and even atheist. But even here, fervent evangelicals thought they might find a divine purpose. The decay of traditional Jewish faith and observance would surely create a spiritual vacuum which Hebrew Christianity would eventually fulfill. To read the inter-war reports of Jewish missions is to encounter a mood in which excitement and frustration mingled. There was undeniably a good deal of self-deception. Even those who claimed there was an increasing demand for the New Testament among the new settlers in Palestine could hardly deny that the growth of Hebrew Christianity was minuscule. Its limited success was almost entirely dependent on outside support and promotion. And worse was to follow. In Europe, the fatal rise of antisemitic hatred and violence, particularly in Russia, Poland and Germany was only infrequently opposed by mainline Christians. In Nazi Germany, its racist overtones blended with and were even supported by earnest Protestants and Catholics alike.

The professional missionaries to the Jews were early on alerted to the dangers of such bigotry. It made their efforts even more difficult, if not impossible. Their sympathy, arising out of eschatology and revivalism, was clearly not enough to protect Jews from Christian antisemitic zealots So too they were dismayed to find that many church authorities, especially in Germany, displayed an increasingly hostile attitude. Some of these church leaders even ceased to see the mission to the Jews as necessary or even justifiable. As one correspondent lamented as early as 1914: “When will the Judenmission at last cease to be the Cinderella of the Evangelical Church and the preserve of a tiny minority of pious Christians?” 4)

For their part the missionaries did what they could to engage their church opponents in a propaganda campaign to emphasize the positive values in Judaism. But they were handicapped by their inability to leave behind the attitudes of paternalism, superiority and supersessionism which effectively denied Judaism any future. This was the stance adopted by Germany’s most noted Protestant scholar in the late nineteenth century, Professor Adolf von Harnack, whose verdict was that Judaism was a “fossilized relic” destined to be replaced by the more progressive liberal Protestantism – a view which he widely propagated among the German middle classes.

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the immediate implementation of sharp antisemitic measures placed the German missionary societies in extreme jeopardy. Their principal purpose directly contradicted the Nazis’ aim to make Germany judenrein. And though some Nazis approved of their desire to restore Jews to Palestine, their motives were entirely at cross purposes. Already at the end of the 1920s, the pro-Nazi faction in the German Evangelical Church – the so-called “German Christians” – openly called for repudiation of missions to the Jews, whom they regarded as a “profound danger for our racial and ethnic identity”. These churchmen welcomed the Nazis’ discriminatory legislation, and are not known to have raised any protests against the Nazi antisemitic fanaticism From 1933 on each and every appeal or utterance from the Judenmission was liable to misrepresentation or censure. The German Jewish Mission societies were faced, on the one hand, with the strident demands of the “German Christians” for the removal of all Jewish influences from German Protestantism, the excision of the Old Testament, the refusal of baptism for Jews, the expulsion of all “non-aryan” ministers and the so-called “purification” of all Church texts, hymnals and prayer books. 5)

On the other hand, the new government was quick to demonstrate its still more forcible hostility. Already by 1935 the Central Society for Jewish Missions (Zentralverein) and the Cologne Society of Friends of Israel were closed down by the Gestapo. A few months later the Leipzig Society dissolved itself. On Crystal Night in November 1938, the Berlin Society’s premises were ransacked. And in January 1941 the Gestapo ordered this mission to be dissolved, prohibited its activities and confiscated its property and bank accounts. Abandoned by its parent church, the Mission’s 130 years of witness was extinguished as an unwanted survival from the past, unfit for any place in the Nazi totalitarian and racist state.

To be sure, the minority of German Evangelicals who formed the Confessing Church vigorously upheld the right of Jews to join the church through baptism, and strenuously rejected any state interference with the church’s autonomy in defining its membership. But even the Confessing Church was too nationalistic to oppose the Nazis’ political goals. The result was a striking ambivalence. Martin Niemöller, for example, preached a traditional Lutheran anti-Judaism, at least until he was incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp. And even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in 1933, would seem to have expressed the usual attribution of Jews being persecuted for their failure to acknowledge their Messiah. His later theological evolution was very much a singular experience, unshared by even his closest followers. 6)

After 1939, Hitler’s manic determination to eliminate the entire Jewish race led to the escalation, across the whole European continent, of campaigns of persecution, segregation, imprisonment and eventually mass murder. The Jewish Missions’ supporters were caught in an insoluble dilemma. They were virtually impotent to prevent or oppose these virulent antisemitic atrocities., which we now know as the Holocaust. Nevertheless true to their origins, they sought to find some theological explanation for such murderous violence. Some could even see Hitler as a modern-day Nebuchadnezzah. At the same time they struggled to avoid being infected or overawed by the regime’s massive and incessant antisemtic propaganda. Instead they strove to uphold their ideal that Christians had an obligation to bring the Gospel of Love to these sorely oppressed and persecuted Jewish victims. But, along with the rest of the German Evangelical Church, their silence or inaction in face of the Nazi crimes was notable. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted already in 1940: “the church was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying to heaven. She has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenceless brothers of Jesus Christ.” 7)

It was therefore left up to the supporters of Jewish Missions in other countries to denounce publicly the evil ideology which seemed to have captured the hearts and minds of so many Germans. The International Missionary Council’s Committee on the Christian approach to the Jew was unequivocal in deploring the effects of antisemitism. The bishops of the Church of England repeatedly called for government action to assist the stricken Jews of Europe, and the Church’s Mission to the Jews actively participated in relief efforts where possible. But the outbreak of war in 1939 cut off most opportunities for aid, and instead revealed the impotence of the churches to prevent the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Instead, emphasis was placed on plans for post-war reconstruction. The churches were called to embark on a re-Christianization of Europe to replace the spiritual corruption of Nazism and its pernicious ideology.

In 1945, when the Nazi dictatorship was overthrown, the surviving members of the German societies for mission to the Jews resolved to start again where they had been forced by the Nazis to leave off. At the end of 1945 the Zentralverein was resurrected. In 1947 the Berlin Israel Mission opened its doors again. By 1949 there were parallel organizations for the Lutheran churches in Frankfurt and Hannover. The International Missionary Council encouraged such revivals.

But, as their publications showed, the familiar themes of earlier Christian Mission to the Jews were once again repeated as though the Holocaust had neverhappened. Or if the terrible murder of six million Jews was mentioned, it was only as an inducement to renewed missionary efforts. The Jews, in their plight, seemed to be in even greater need of the Christian love and witness which these earnest and pious evangelists were offering. “We must discover”, declared the Director of the International Committee on the Christian approach to the Jew, “new and ethically legitimate methods and recognize and stress the responsibility of the churches for Jewish evangelism”. 8)

It is impossible to believe that such zealous enthusiasts for Christian mission to the Jews after the Holocaust had ever consulted the intended recipients of these endeavours. Had they done so, they would surely have been obliged to shed many of the illusions which they apparently still maintained. In 1945, for the majority of the surviving Jews, Europe was a charnel house. The bitter memories of the policies of the so-called Christian nations which had inflicted these terrors on them, and the minuscule amount of support and assistance which they had received from individual Christians, filled most of the remaining Jews with revulsion against what appeared to them to be the utter hypocrisy of such professions of loving-kindness. Jewish survival was their prime necessity. So these offers of conversion to Christianity, which so many held responsible for their dreadful fate, was doubly repugnant. It would be a disastrous betrayal of their identity. It would only serve to complete the “Final Solution” for the Jewish people. It was an impossible option.

It was notable that in these post-1945 missionary circles, with their still keen commitment to evangelize the Jews, there was a marked reluctance for many years to recognize the full implications of the Holocaust. For their part, the German supporters of Judenmission saw themselves as also being the victims of Nazi oppression. But any acknowledgment of guilt for the complicity of German Christianity in the Holocaust or their failure to prevent these crimes was long delayed. Only later did the Christian churches begin to be conscious that the Holocaust was not just a Jewish tragedy, but rather an event of enormous significance to the whole Christian church, which indeed raised excruciating questions about the credibility of Christianity. Over a decade was to pass before a theological reappraisal began, which eventually led to striking changes, in particular on the vital issue of Christian mission to the Jews.

The reluctance of these missionary circles to see the implications for the whole Christian community of the mass murders of Europe’s Jews meant that for several more years their publications repeated the traditional themes of Christian triumphalism, Judaism’s supersessionism, the reprobateness of the Jews’ rejection of their Messiah, and the desirability of conversion as an act of Christian beneficence. But in fact these conventional attitudes were to be fundamentally challenged by the events taking place on Christendom’s periphery in May 1948. In that month, the British Mandate in Palestine was disbanded and the creation or re-creation of the State of Israel was proclaimed. The impact was immediate and inescapable. Christian relations with Jews could never be the same again.

After more than two thousand years of political impotence and often banishment from their original homeland, Jews had succeeded once again in setting up their own state. It was a dream which had long eluded Christian potentates over many centuries. It signified the Jewish people’s re-emergence from powerlessness, and a new political dispensation for the Holy Land, so beloved by Christians as the very place where Jesus Christ was born and buried.

The shock of these events, and the success of the secular-led Zionist movement, was profound, especially among the Christian missionary community. To be sure a small group of liberal Protestants in the USA, for humanitarian reasons, welcomed the Zionist political achievement because it would offer a new haven for the Holocaust’s survivors. And subsequently, President Truman liked to believe that he fulfilled the biblical role of Cyrus in restoring the Jews to their homeland. But for the most part, the Christian churches reacted with confusion. The supporters of Christian Zionism,because of their philo-Judaism, trusted that the best face of Judaism would prevail in the new state, and that Christians would suffer no loss of religious freedom. But the societies for Jewish mission could not fail to see that this rival ideology of Zionism was sure to prove more attractive. And many of the missionaries in Palestine now became fearful for the future of their Arab parishioners. But principally, the missionary movement, and the Christian churches as a whole, were now obliged to face the fact of Jewish revival in a Jewish homeland, fulfilling what seemed to be Jewish biblical prophecies, even if under secular auspices.

The churches were thus obliged to recognize that one of their treasured and centuries-old beliefs, that the Jews’ expulsion from the Holy Land was a sign of divine punishment for their alleged crime in putting Jesus to death, was no longer valid. On the contrary, the visible revival of Judaism and its embodiment in the state of Israel, clearly contradicted the Christian theological myth of Jewish national demise. The churches and their missionary bodies were now forced to find a new basis for theological concepts of Israel and its significance for Christian doctrine.

This was a major challenge. Not since the defeat of the Crusaders centuries before had the churches found it necessary to rethink their basic presuppositions about the Holy Land. In the meanwhile Protestants particularly had resorted to evasive tactics. For many of the more liberal Protestants such terms as the Promised Land, Zion, Jerusalem or Israel had been universalized or spiritualized. They were applied metaphorically rather than geographically. William Blake could build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, while in John Newton’s hymn, “Glorious things of thee were spoken/Zion city of our God”, but no connection was made whatsoever to the Middle East.

Other Protestants continued to regard Palestine purely as a historical museum, useful for guided tours of the Christian holy sites of two thousand years ago. Many were keenly committed to preserving the image of shepherds, donkeys, vineyards and fig trees. Such pious endeavours had no interest in the vibrant activity of rebirth undertaken by the Jewish settlers, affirming in a highly positive but modernistic way their own concept of how to redeem the land.
So too the missionaries of the mainstream Christian churches based in Palestine – the majority of whose adherents were Arab – quickly adopted a critical attitude towards the changes brought about by the State of Israel’s rapid expansion. After the expulsions and injustices suffered by many of the indigenous Arab populations, Christian humanitarian concerns were widely expressed, and continue to be expressed. But there was certainly a political partisanship involved, which effectively placed a barrier against facing the theological issues of a revived Israel and its future destiny. It was many years before any Christian body, let alone any missionary society, could begin to regard the restoration of Israel as a positive step, or one which could become a source of theological renewal for Christians and Jews alike

By the end of the 1950s, a gradual world-wide recognition had taken place of the enormity of the crimes perpetrated against the Jewish people during the second world war. As the historical details of the German atrocities were spelled out, the term Holocaust came into use to describe the whole corpus of Jewish sufferings from 1933 to 1945. But it was not until the 1960s that the repercussions of these events for the Christian churches, Christian theology and Christian missions came to be acknowledged. There was a reluctant but nevertheless inescapable process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for the fateful role of the churches during these traumatic years. But the tentative acceptance of these insights did not yet lead to a radical rethinking of the inherited theological bases of Christian missionary activity. Resolute condemnations of (other people’s) antisemitism were only half the battle. What was needed was a much more far-reaching theological re-orientation, or even the contradiction of what the churches had preached and practised for centuries.

The major factor for such a change taking place was the combined impact of the feelings of guilt about Christian complicity in the Nazi crimes and the re-creation of the State of Israel. The American theologian Paul van Buren may well be right in claiming that neither of these two events alone could have caused such a change. Only when the shock of the horror of the Holocaust was coupled with the other, even greater theological shock of the existence of a Jewish state, do we begin to see the first reversals of the church’s teachings about the Jews. 9)

One of the main hurdles to be overcome was the long-held belief that the Church had replaced the Jews as God’s Chosen people, and that Christians had inherited the covenant relationship, leaving behind Judaism merely as a fossilized relic in the limbo of history. Such a view had led to the widespread teaching of contempt for Judaism, against which the French scholar Jules Isaac had raised his voice in 1946. But abandoning the supersessionist view had major implications for the Judenmission. Already in the 1930s the English theologian James Parkes had argued on these grounds for the cessation of Christian missions to the Jews. He was ignored as a maverick and isolated clergyman with extreme views. But by the 1960s, German theologians of repute were beginning to voice the same opinions. In 1961, at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, a new forum within the large-scale Protestant Rally or Kirchentag in Berlin took the unprecedented step of calling for a new relationship between Christians and Jews, and even invited Jewish rabbis and scholars to take part. Their working party’s statement unequivocally and unprecedentally stated: “Jews and Christians were indissolubly bound together”. But the consequences were also drawn: “At the present moment, especially in Germany, the right form for a new meeting with Israel is dialogue not mission”. 10)

Such statements were of course strongly challenged by the supporters of the Judenmission, as well as by conservative Christians of many denominations. They seemed to repudiate the whole missionary enterprise world-wide. Within the German Evangelical Church the debate became quite heated. The supporters of the traditional mission accused their critics of a sell-out of an essential component of the Christian faith, and a capitulation to what was now becoming seen as “politically correct”. They refused to be persuaded that historical circumstances, however catastrophic, could be used to revise traditionally established Christian doctrine, or to justify the abandonment of the church’s continuing missionary responsibilities.

The advocates of a new stance, however, were convinced that only a new approach to the Jews based on a position of penitence and at least verbal reparation, could restore the tattered shreds of Christian credibility. They were extremely sensitive to the argument widely heard in Jewish circles that the terrible events of the Holocaust had been the result, at least in part, of the accumulated hatreds of nineteen centuries of Christian prejudice, despite the evident efforts of most missionaries to combat such bigotry. They could not fail to see that, from the point of view of the Jewish recipients, the well-meaning endeavoiurs of Christian missionaries were indistinguishable from more sinister forces. Or as the Jewish scholar Raul Hilberg expressed it:

“The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis had at last decreed: You have no right to live.” 11)

To many of the more open theologians, the only way to overcome the burden of this dreadful legacy was to call for an entirely new beginning. They were to be greatly encouraged and assisted by similar efforts being undertaken at the same time by the Catholic Church in the much more public forum of the Second Vatican Council. The 1965 document produced as a result, known as Nostra Aetate, was a ground-breaking and indeed astonishing reversal of Catholic doctrines inherited from the past. As such it was greeted by the more progressive Protestant theologians as a fine example of what the new spirit of Christian ecumenism could lead to.

Most striking was the assertion in Nostra Aetate of the community of the inheritance shared by Jews and Christians. The former should be regarded as the elder brothers of the latter, and treated with all due respect. The ancient calumny of the charge of deicide, or Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus, which had contributed so frequently to popular polemic and violence against the Jews, was no longer to be attributed collectively or applied to later generations. The strong desire for reconciliation and dialogue clearly repudiated much of the traditional missionary approach. And successive Popes since the Second Vatican Council have repeatedly pronounced their support of these objectives.

As for the Protestants, the 1970s saw a vigorous debate on the subject of missions. To be sure, the traditionalists had to acknowledge that Jews could no longer be regarded merely as the objects of missionary endeavour, however charitably intended. Instead, they were now partners whose voices needed to be heard in dialogue. Both faiths needed to explore their common roots and identity. So attempts to convert by stressing the superiority of either faith could only be harmful. In 1975 the national authorities of the German Evangelical Church produced a study of the issues, Juden und Christen, which clearly outlined the gap between the advocates of mission and those of dialogue. But there was a growing feeling that the defenders of the older position were fighting a rearguard battle. Churchmen in many countries were increasingly conscious that the events of the Holocaust with the millions of Jewish deaths for which Christians were at least in some measure responsible, made the repetition of earlier formulations of Christian witness and mission unacceptable and theologically incorrect.

The most notable expression of this new sentiment came in the declaration issued in January 1980 by the Synod of the Rhineland Evangelical Church: “On the renewal of the relationship between Christians and Jews”. Here was an explicit admission of Christian co-responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust. Further the clear-cut claim was made that the continued existence of the Jewish people, their restoration to the Promised Land, and the creation of the State of Israel, should be regarded as the signs of God’s continuing faithfulness towards His chosen people. As a result the Synod concluded:

“We believe in the continuing election of the Jewish people as God’s people and recognize that the church through Jesus Christ has been incorporated into God’s covenant with His people.”

But the most striking paragraph was that which firmly called for a renunciation of the traditional forms of mission:

“We believe that Jews and non-Jews are each in their respective calling witnesses of God before the world, and before each other; therefore we are convinced that the church may not express its witness towards the Jewish people in the same manner as its mission towards other peoples of the world”. 12)

The impact of this pronouncement was profound. It reinforced the growing feeling that the old style of missions with its triumphalist connotations and one-sided assertion of Christian superiority had to be discarded. Eventually such considerations came to be accepted by the supporters of the Judenmission themselves. In 1985 the authorities of the Evangelisch-lutherisch Zentralverein für Mission unter Israel changed the name of the association to the more palatable “Christian Society for witness and service amongst Jews and Christians”. No alteration of the Society’s objectives was intended. The change was solely to avoid misunderstandings, particularly where the word “mission” could be wrongly seen as advocating proselytism. Furthermore, the authorities wished to draw a clear line between their approach to the Jews and to other religions. Their objective remained to strive for a better knowledge of Christianity among Jews, and a better knowledge of Judaism among Christians. Their biblical support was drawn from Romans 1:16: “it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek”.

But in fact, only five years later in 1991, when the Society met again n Leipzig where it had been founded 120 years earlier, a more critical note was sounded. The position paper resulting from this meeting acknowledged that no real change of heart had taken place in the post-1945 years. The resulting isolation of the missionary society from other branches of the German Evangelical Church had only led to a polarization of views. Not until the late 1970s when the post-Auschwitz situation (Shoah/Holocaust) came to be more fully recognized could a genuine new start be made. But now the missionary society’s faults had been honestly faced.

“Looking back on its 120 year history, it has be acknowledged that the Society’s course has been burdened by numerous failures. To be sure, the work of the Society for Jewish missions was carried out in ways not nowadays understood or appreciated. From the beginning, love of the people of Israel and a respect for its special place in salvation history were characteristic of the Society’s endeavours. But this was repeatedly linked to a lack of appreciation for the Jewish faith, and even adopted anti-Judaic or antisemitic ideas and sentiments. When the Jewish people suffered their greatest distress, during their persecution by the Nazis, the supporters of this Society did not find the strength or the courage to confront the oppressors or to make common cause with the oppressed. So the Central Society has to admit to its share in the guilt of the Christian churches towards the Jewish people.

All this became clearer to us during the recent decades as we seek to renew our witness and service. We have been obliged to rethink our positions and to root out any elements of superiority, of contempt or of anti-Judaism in general. So we can only acknowledge that the 120 years of our history contain both elements of continuity and discontinuity . . . .

We acknowledge that the term Mission to the Jews has become so compromised and misunderstood that it is no longer suitable to express the Society’s real purposes. Indeed we are aware that for many of our Jewish counterparts the use of the term Judenmission arouses great mistrust since they see this as only as a continuation of “the Holocaust by other means”. Instead we therefore wish to substitute the concepts of witness and service which express for us far better our desire to encounter the Jewish people with all due respect and trust”. 13 )

In a similar fashion, other branches of the Missions to Israel followed suit. The oldest English-language group, the London Society, formerly the Church’s Mission to the Jews, changed its name to the Church’s Ministry among the Jewish people. The 1988 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion received a report clearly rejecting any idea of missions to Jewish people. The same spirit was reciprocated elsewhere. Missions to Israel in their traditional form have now become a matter of past history. It was the end of a 200 year history of pious hopes, misguided endeavours and mistaken interpretations of the Christian faith. But it opened the way for new opportunities of encounter between Jews and Christians, when members of both faiths would join in worshipping the same God, and seeking to establish His Kingdom on earth. As a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, said:

“Judaism and Christianity have so much in common which is essential for the very life of the world that we should regard it as the truth of which we are common trustees and together we should make its light shine” 14)

The legacy of past prejudices, recriminations and conversion attempts has been abandoned, and has been replaced by a much more sensitive concern for the victims of violence and persecution. It is much to be hoped that on this basis Jews and Christians will collaborate in striving for the future preservation of the world entrusted to their care in the spirit of righteousness, justice and peace.

Footnotes

1) for general surveys, see Barbara Tuchman, The Bible and the Sword. England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour, New York 1956; Christopher M.Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728-1941, Oxford 1994.
2) John S.Conway, “The Jerusalem Bishopric: A ‘union of Foolscap and Blotting Paper’ in Studies in Religion, Vol 7 Summer 1978, 305-15.
3) Patrick Irwin, “Bishop Alexander and the Jews of Jerusalem’ in Studies in Church History, Vol. 21: Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J.Shields, Oxford 1984,p. 318.
4) quoted in R. Gutteridge, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb, Oxford 1976, p. 329.
5) see Doris Bergen, The Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Chapel Hill 1996.
6) see Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were silent. The Confessing Church and the Jews, New York 2002; also E.Bethge,’Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Juden’ in ed. E. Todt, Konsequenzen. Dietrich Bonhoeffers Kirchenverständnis heute, Munich 1980
7) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Eng. trans London 1955, p. 45-50.
8) International Missionary Council’s committee on the Christian approach towards the Jew, Basle Switzerland, June 1947 report, p. 5, 16.
9) Paul van Buren, “Changes in Christian Theology’, in ed. H.Friedlander and S.Milton, The Holocaust, Ideology, Bureaucracy and Genocide, New York 1980, p. 286.
10) ed. D.Goldschmidt and H-J. Kraus, Der ungekündigte Bund. Neue Begegnung von Juden und Christliche Gemeinde, Stuttgart 1963, p. 141; see also ed H.Gollwitzer and E.Sterling, Das gespaltene Gottesvolk, Stuttgart 1965.
11) Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jewry, rev.ed. 3 vols., New York 1985, Vol. 1, p.8-9.
12) Zur Erneuerung des Verhältnisses von Christen und Juden. An English translation of the official text is contained in ed. A Brockway, The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of Churches and Its Member Churches, Geneva 1988, p. 92-4.
13) ed. A Baumann, Auf dem Wege zum christlich- jüdischen Gespräch, Münster 1998, pp 220 ff.
14) 1992 sermon.

Dear Colleagues,

John Conway is on vacation this month. He has asked me to edit the
Newsletter in his absence, which I am happy to do. Below you will find two
reviews by me on books addressing Christian-Jewish relations. Should you
have any comments please feel free to e-mail me at mhockeno@skidmore.edu.

Best Wishes,
Matthew Hockenos
History Department
Skidmore College

Contents:

Book Reviews

1) Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter
between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 2004).
2) John C. Merkle (ed.), Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews
and Judaism (Collegeville, MN: The Order of Saint Benedict, 2003).

1) Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth

Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s steadfast and courageous efforts over the past
four decades to promote a new understanding between Christians and Jews has
rightfully earned him the reputation as one of the most significant
contributors to the post-Shoah Christian-Jewish dialogue. For the Sake of
Heaven and Earth is a collection of nine of his essays on the encounter
between Judaism and Christianity, seven of which were published previously
between 1967 and 2000. Although reading these essays in chronological
order provides a wonderful sense of the development of Greenberg’s thought,
it is remarkable how constant his emphasis on pluralism and dialogue has
been over the years. The collection ends with brief response essays,
mostly praising Greenberg’s efforts, by five renowned scholars of
Jewish-Christian relations: James Carroll, David Novak, Michael Novak, Mary
C. Boys, and Krister Stendahl. There is also a useful seven-page study
guide, which provides study questions intended to facilitate comprehension.

The first two essays in this collection are the two written most
recently. One is a fascinating autobiographical account detailing the
development of Greenberg’s unwavering belief in the need for both Jews and
Christians to develop new theologies of Christianity and Judaism that
eschew the negative stereotypes of the other. Although he is emphatically
clear that it is Christian theologians and church leaders who have the most
work to do in overcoming the church’s nearly 2000-year-old practice of
teaching contempt for Jews, he also unflinchingly calls for Jews to revise
their unflattering depiction of Christianity, especially the claim that
Jesus Christ was a false Messiah. Greenberg acknowledges repeatedly his
respect and admiration for many Christian theologians, in particular Alice
and Roy Eckardt, who over the years have challenged the claims of Jesus’
absolute status and rejected outright Christian assertions of
supersessionism and triumphalism. The Eckardts’ willingness to repudiate
some of Christianity’s most central tenets, despite relentless attacks on
their theology by Christian colleagues, has inspired Greenberg to set forth
his own controversial views on the relationship between Jews and
Christians. The Orthodox Jewish community, of which Greenberg is an
enthusiastic participant, has for the most part not welcomed his insights,
but Greenberg has persevered nevertheless.

In the second of the new essays, “Covenantal Partners in a Postmodern
World,” Greenberg provides a historical narrative of the encounter between
Judaism and Christianity over the centuries in order to demonstrate that
God intended both faiths to play a role in God’s plan to perfect the
world. This essay as well as others that were published in the late 1990s
and appear at the end of this volume represent Greenberg’s most current
perspective on the relationship between faiths in the post-Shoah or
postmodern world. Although he is concerned primarily with Christians and
Jews working together in an evolving covenantal partnership with God, he
also stresses the importance for them to work with other faiths as
well. The challenges of materialism, secularism, and terrorism, he
recognizes, are too great for Jews and Christians to tackle alone. “Jews
and Christians must recognize that the two faiths together cannot
accomplish the full task [of perfecting the world]. Once they admit this
truth, they can respect other faiths as well” (101). Greenberg
acknowledges that for Jews to affirm Christianity as a necessary partner in
this process, Christians must first act like loving brothers and sisters
and repudiate those aspects of the Christian tradition that degrade Jews
and Judaism. “The two [faiths] must realize that the more they overcome
the demons of the past, the more they become God’s witnesses, channels of
divine blessing for a suffering humanity, couriers of redemption” (101).

Fundamental to Greenberg’s theology is the belief that certain historical
events the advent of modernity, the Holocaust, and the founding of the
State of Israel have led to a new encounter between Christians and Jews
and a new understanding of the covenantal relationship with God. As early
as the 1960s Greenberg first began to wrestle seriously with the meaning of
the Holocaust. In contrast to other theologians who concluded that God was
dead, absent, or powerless, he contended that “God’s self-restraint in not
preventing the Holocaust was a divine cry to humans to step up and stop the
evil; it was time for the human partner to take greater responsibility in
the unfolding of the covenant and the redemption of the world” (91). The
covenant God made with Abraham entered a new stage first after the
destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and then again after the
Holocaust. In the aftermath of the Holocaust God no longer related to the
Jewish people by imposing obligations or unreasonable demands to live by a
higher standard than other people. “The covenant of demand (for higher
standards of behavior from Jews) had been morally passed through the fires
of the Holocaust – and found wanting” (27).

The covenant between God and the Jews became voluntary asserts
Greenberg. God no longer commanded, he invited; God invited the Jewish
people to take greater responsibility for overcoming the contradiction
between the divine dream and unredeemed reality. Greenberg hypothesizes
that God is less visible at critical times in order to evoke greater
participation by Jews (and all people) in their own history. Greenberg
maintains that God entered into a covenant of partnership with people so
that they could play a role in their own liberation and in repairing the
world (tikun olam). “In the Holocaust,” he writes, “Jews discovered they
had no choice but to go back into history. If they did not take power,
they would be dead” (158). The urgency with which Jews sought to establish
the State of Israel exemplifies for Greenberg their strong desire to
control their lives and the acceptance of a new stage in their covenantal
relationship with God. Greenberg urged Christians, especially after their
apathy and silence at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, to join Jews in
defending the State of Israel and playing a more active role in repairing
the world.

That some Christians, twenty years after the Holocaust, were beginning to
acknowledge Christian responsibility for the Holocaust signaled the
potential, according to Greenberg, for a new stage in Christian-Jewish
relations the stage of pluralism. Greenberg’s notion of pluralism, which
developed over the years to include multiple faiths, can be traced to his
early use of the concept in his 1967 essay, “The New Encounter of Judaism
and Christianity.” In this essay the concept of pluralism referred simply
to Jews and Christians living together peacefully out of love for God
(120). If Jews and Christians could live together, despite their
passionate commitments, this would act as a model for all peoples and
demonstrate the positive role that religion can play in the world. For
this to be possible, Greenberg realized, both Jews and Christians must
profoundly rethink their relationship to one another. They must talk to
one another in a frank, open, and loving manner. In the late 1960s, when
the Christian-Jewish dialogue was just getting underway, Greenberg’s
understanding of pluralism was undeveloped and his optimism about the
prospects of the Jewish-Christian dialogue was reserved.

Two decades later in his 1986 essay, “Toward an Organic Model of the
Relationship,” Greenberg is far more optimistic. Here he envisioned a
model of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity that would allow both
Jews and Christians to “affirm the fullness of the faith-claims of the
other, not just offer tolerance” (146). But how would it be possible for
Jews to affirm the faith-claims of Christians, in particular that Jesus
Christ was the Messiah? Greenberg argues that a fundamental characteristic
of Judaism is that it generates messianic expectations. “Judaism has built
into its own self-understanding that it must generate future messianic
moments” (148). Thus Jews should recognize that the early Christians “were
thinking like faithful Jews when they recognized Jesus” (149). The
relationship between Jews and Christians faltered when the former referred
to Jesus as a “false” messiah and the latter referred to Jesus as _the_
messiah and claimed that Christians now superceded Jews as God’s chosen
people. Greenberg believes that Jews and Christians should abandon these
claims and acknowledge that Jesus was a messiah a “failed messiah”
(152). “A failed messiah,” according to Greenberg, “is one who has the
right values and upholds the covenant, but does not attain the final goal
[of perfecting the world]” (153). Although Greenberg’s concept of a
failed messiah has yet to be accepted widely by Jews or Christians, it is
one example of Greenberg’s innovative approaches to developing ways to
improve the relationship between the two faiths.

Many more Christians and Jews are likely to be receptive to Greenberg’s
concept of “covenantal pluralism and partnership,” which he has developed
most recently. His argument is quite simple. God established a permanent
universal covenant, the Noahide covenant, with all of humanity after the
Flood. In this covenant God agreed to sustain humanity and to look after
its welfare despite its sinful nature. In addition to this universal
covenant open to all people who want to take part in God’s plan, God
initiates particular covenants with specific groups of people. God does
this because “The best way to instruct people to raise their standards of
ethics and relationship to the Divine . . . is to inspire them with a
human model that freely and lovingly sets an example” (57). Moreover, the
particularization of the universal covenant through God’s initiation of a
covenantal relationship with smaller national groups, such as the Jews,
allows for “varied pathways” toward redemption. Thus particular covenants,
such as the Abrahamic covenant, are different from the universal covenant
because they are rooted in culture, language, and history. Greenberg
believes that Christianity is another particular covenant that God called
into being in order to engage a greater number of people in God’s plan to
redeem the world. Most importantly, just as the Abrahamic covenant did not
supercede the Noahide covenant, the covenant God establishes with
Christianity in no way diminishes his earlier covenant with the Jews.
Tikun olam (the repairing of the world), according to Greenberg, depends
on more than simply Jewish and Christian tolerance or even acceptance of
the other’s covenant. The monumental task of redeeming the world requires
partnership between Jews, Christians, as well as people of other
faiths. “Partnership goes one step further [than pluralism], Greenberg
writes in his 1999 essay, “Pluralism and Partnership.” “This concept of
partnership suggests that my truth/faith system alone cannot fulfill God’s
dreams. Therefore the world needs the contribution that the other makes
for the world’s own wholeness and perfection.” In this concept of
partnership one sees most clearly the dramatic development of Greenberg’s
thought and his optimism that if the wounds of the past can be healed “then
Judaism and Christianity in partnership could lead the world toward
messianic accomplishments in upgrading human life, dignity, and peace”
(47).
2) Merkle (ed.), Faith Transformed

Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews and Judaism is a
collection of autobiographical essays by eleven Catholic and Protestant
biblical scholars, historians, and theologians who address how their
encounters with Jews and Judaism and their participation in the
Christian-Jewish dialogue have influenced their understanding of the two
faiths. John C. Merkle, editor of the collection and a professor of
theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in
Minnesota, states in the introduction that his intention was to bring
together in one text the personal narratives of Christian scholars whose
understanding of Christianity and Judaism have been dramatically
transformed by their contact with Jews and Jewish scholarship. Students
and scholars interested in Jewish-Christian relations will no doubt find
the personal accounts in this thin volume engrossing. Read as one piece
these essays provide an overview of the history of the Jewish-Christian
dialogue in the United States following the Holocaust. Of particular
interest to the reader will be the various pathways that led these
Christians to the dialogue. The autobiographical accounts are followed by
a ten-paragraph statement, “A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith
in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People,” by the Christian Scholars
Group on Christian-Jewish Relations, of which all the contributors to this
collection are members. Irvin J. Borowsky, a Jewish scholar and chairman
of the American Interfaith Institute, brings the volume to a close with an
afterword praising the work of the various contributors and encouraging
Christians to use the Contemporary English Version (CEV) translation of the
Bible, which he deems more accurate and less anti-Judaic.

Although each of the narratives is unique and each of the authors draw
distinct conclusions based on his or her personal experience, there are
several common themes that are addressed repeatedly. Nearly all of the
contributors begin by noting how little contact they had while growing up
with practicing Jews or living Judaism. Many of the authors had little
knowledge of Judaism and the knowledge they did have came from
church-school lessons, which prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65)
taught that Judaism was a fossilized religion that it had been superceded
by Christianity. Norman Beck, professor of theology and classical
languages at Texas Lutheran University, writes that although he was aware
of Jews living in the neighborhood near where he attended college in
Columbus Ohio, “there was virtually nothing about Jews as such in the
curriculum of that time” (72). Clark Williamson, professor emeritus of
Christian thought at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis,
acknowledges that even after receiving his PhD from the University of
Chicago Divinity School “I had not tumbled to the fact that the
anti-Jewish, supersessionist tradition of the Church is a problem” (93).

Several other contributors, however, who attended graduate school during or
after the Second Vatican Council were drawn into the Christian-Jewish
dialogue via their dissertations written on topics that addressed
Jewish-Christian relations. Captivated and intrigued by the issues raised
by Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate (the Declaration on the Relation of the
Church to Non-Christian Religions) contributors Eugene Fisher, executive
director of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations, Michael McGarry,
rector at the Tantur Ecumenical Center in Jerusalem, and John Pawlikowski,
professor of social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago,
refer to Vatican II and their years in graduate school when they began to
read Jewish authors such as Abraham Joshua Heschel as formative experiences.

Friendships with Jews motivated several of the essayists to participate in
the Jewish-Christian dialogue. Walter Harrelson, professor emeritus of
Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University, recalls how his involvement in the
struggle for racial justice brought him into contact with local rabbis and
Jewish leaders in Nashville. “These interfaith struggles for a better
community brought deepened respect for Jews, brought close personal
friendships between my family and several Jewish families, and began my
personal effort to enrich my understanding of Judaism – living Judaism”
(5). For Eva Fleischner, professor emerita of religion at Montclair State
University, the invitation by a Jewish friend to celebrate Shabbat with her
family brought her “into contact for the first time with a living Judaism;
with Jews – modern American Jews – whose faith deeply informed their lives”
(42). Franklin Sherman, professor emeritus of Jewish Christian Studies at
Muhlenberg College, describes his encounter, first through his writings and
then in person, with Heschel as a “great turning point” in his
understanding of Judaism.

These scholarly and personal encounters with Jews and Judaism, as well as
intense reflection on Christian involvement in the Shoah, inspired many of
the contributors to radically reexamine their commitment to traditional
Christian doctrine. While there is something to be learned from all the
essays, the narratives of Alice Eckardt, Eva Fleischner, Mary Boys, and
John Merkle are particularly illuminating.

Alice Eckardt, often in collaboration with husband Roy Eckardt until his
death in 1998, is a pioneer in Jewish-Christian relations. Eckardt recalls
that she had little awareness of Christian antisemitism when she was
growing up or going to Oberlin College. To be sure, American newspaper
coverage of the liberation of the death camps in Europe in 1945 alarmed her
but it was not immediately apparent that the Christian anti-Jewish
tradition had had any influence on the mistreatment and murder of Jews. As
she says, “Neither Roy’s nor my secular and religious education (not even
Roy’s divinity school courses) had taught us any of this Christian
anti-Jewish tradition” (20). The realization by the Eckardts of a
deep-seated anti-Jewish polemic at the core of Christianity occurred in the
mid- to late-1940s while Roy research and wrote his dissertation, which
addressed the various church theologies concerning Jews and Judaism. This
led to a lifetime commitment by both to root out all vestiges of
anti-Judaism and antisemitism from Christian theology.

Living by the motto that good theology cannot be based on bad history Alice
Eckardt has spent much of her life correcting misunderstandings at the core
of many people’s understanding of Christianity. She address, in
particular, the belief held by many that “the Jews” crucified Jesus and
have fallen out of favor with God because of their disobedience. During
the late 1960s and early 1970s she examined, among other things, the early
Christian period when many of the church’s anti-Judaic tenets were
developed. The victories by the Romans and the destruction of the
Jerusalem Temple in the first century led many Christians to the erroneous
conclusion that God was punishing the Jews because of their failure to
recognize Christ as the messiah. In light of the creation of the State of
Israel after the Holocaust, Eckardt “suggested that we might look at ‘the
newly gathered Israel’ as a ‘sign that God is faithful to his promise and
that the call of God to the people of Israel is irrevocable'” (25). Part
and parcel with her repudiation of supersessionism, Eckardt also sought to
develop a Christian theology that in the aftermath of the Holocaust would
no longer assert that the crucifixion of Jesus constituted the ultimate in
human suffering and godforsakenness. The unprecedented suffering that
characterized the Holocaust has led a number of Christians to agree with
Eckardt that, “we must give up trying to find . . . anything salvational in
events of suffering” (29).

Eckardt acknowledges the important influence that Hans Jonas, a German Jew
and student of both Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, has had on her
understanding of God as a _suffering_ God. “With Jonas I am convinced that
_only_ a suffering God, One who continues to suffer with human beings, can
speak to us since the Shoah’s whirlwind of destruction, and that we
mortals, empowered by God, have the obligation to help each other overcome
suffering and thereby ‘help the suffering immortal God'” (29). To the
question “where was God?” Eckardt would agree with Rabbi Irving Greenberg
that God was there in Auschwitz suffering with his people. For Eckardt,
the suffering of God and his people in the Holocaust was a clarion call to
all of humanity, and Christians in particular, to take action to end
suffering.

Catholic theologian Eva Fleischner grew up in Vienna, the daughter of a
Catholic mother and Jewish father. She was raised a Catholic, attending a
Dominican school in Vienna until 1938 when her parents sent her to a
convent school in England to be out of harm’s way. Five years later she
joined her parents in the United States, where she began studying at
Radcliffe College at the age of eighteen. Despite having a Jewish father
she remembers that “my acquaintance with Judaism as a living faith remained
non-existent” – her Jewish friends and relatives were all secular Jews (37).
During and after college Fleischner remained devoted to the Catholic Church
and its doctrine even as she studied other religions and read deeply in the
Hebrew Scriptures, especially the psalms. “To use today’s terminology,”
she acknowledges, “I must reluctantly admit that I was a typical Christian
‘supersessionist,’ believing that the Hebrew Scriptures derived their value
exclusively from their pointing to Christ” (38). It was only in the 1960s
while pursuing a PhD in Christian historical theology at Marquette
University, a Jesuit institution, that she was introduced to the theme of
Christian anti-Judaism and the teaching of contempt for Jews and
Judaism. After a period of intense reading and reflection on the Shoah,
studying Jewish perspectives on Judaism, and building friendships with
Jews, Fleischner concluded that the survival of the Jewish people was based
on their deep sense of Jewish identity “that I trace back to Sinai and the
Jewish covenant with God” (43). She went on to write a dissertation on the
attitude of German Christian theologians toward Judenmission, the
Christian churches’ missionary effort to convert Jews to
Christianity. This excellent study was published in 1975 as Judaism in
German Christian Theology Since 1945: Christianity and Israel Considered in
Terms of Mission.

Fleischner’s research on Judenmission and her belief that Christians can
learn from Judaism has led her to call for Christians to openly renounce
proselytizing Jews and to pray that Judaism continues to flourish. “I have
become convinced,” she writes, “that religious pluralism is not some
inevitable but passing phenomenon, to be endured temporarily in a time of
theological turmoil, but rather a positive development, part of the very
stuff of salvation” (48).

Mary Boys, a professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary,
recalls how in her youth her knowledge of Jews and Judaism was
contradictory. On the one hand, her Catholic education relied on the
catechism prior to Vatican II, which portrayed Judaism as a dead religion
and Catholicism as the only true living faith. On the other hand, any
off-putting images of Jews she learned in the classroom or at Church were
offset by her family’s close friendship with a Jewish woman. The Second
Vatican Council, which coincided with her last three years of high school,
also had a major impact on her. “Belonging to a Church opening its windows
to let in fresh air animated my interest in religion, and provided a major
motivation for my lifelong professional work in religious education”
(164). In 1965 she joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary
and though deeply committed to Catholicism also began to read Jewish
authors, including Abraham Heschel’s book on the prophets. Following
graduation and a five-year teaching stint she entered the PhD program in
religion and education at Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College
at Columbia University.

In similar fashion to some of the other essayists, Boys first began to
grapple with issues of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in graduate
school. Her studies focused on the Church’s emergence from Judaism and she
“realized with increasing dismay the chasm between the findings of biblical
scholars and theologians and what preachers and teachers were saying”
(167). Although these academic pursuits were enlightening, she credits her
friendships with Jews and several trips to Israel as the seminal
experiences that brought about a transformation in her understanding of
Judaism. In particular was Boys’s close collaboration with Jewish
educators like Sara S. Lee, director of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education
at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, that
convinced her that “interreligious learning” must be a key component to
improving Jewish-Christian relations. Interreligious learning, Boys
believes, “takes dialogue to a greater depth by involving persons in a
relationship of mutual study” (171).

Through these interreligious encounters Boys acknowledges coming
face-to-face with the incomprehensibility of God and the finitude of the
Catholic tradition. Anyone who engages earnestly in interreligious
dialogue and mutual study, she suggests, cannot but humbly conclude that
God alone is absolute and infinite and that all faiths are limited and
incomplete. She writes, “Even as I believe ardently in the Way of
Christianity and aspire to live it as a practicing Roman Catholic, I know
it does not exhaust the paths by which God draws us and I cannot believe
it is the superior way by which God calls all to walk” (175). For this
reason she expresses consternation with the August 2000 declaration,
Dominus Iesus, drafted by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of
Faith headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The declaration is highly
suspicious of pluralism and tends to equate pluralism with relativism.
Boys supports religious pluralism only when it is rooted in what she calls
“textured particularism.” Textured particularism implies a person who is
committed to his or her particular faith, passionate about its traditions,
and seriously immersed in its practices but also receptive to other
faiths. “A rich and receptive particularism is necessary for developing a
religious identity that is simultaneously rooted and adaptive, assured and
ambiguous one that allows for engagement with pluralism” (176). A deep
understanding and devotion to one’s tradition, Boys believes, will also
involve understanding the finitude of its beliefs and practices. Pluralism
rooted in textured particularism involves a desire to learn from
differences in belief without adopting those differences as your own.

The final narrative is by the editor himself, John Merkle, whose first
serious encounter with Judaism was also academic. While attending graduate
school at the Catholic University of Louvain in the early 1970s he read a
number of modern Jewish philosophers and theologians including Leo Baeck,
Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, Will Herberg, and, of
course, Heschel. Stunned to find virtually nothing in these books in
common with Christian perspectives on Judaism, Merkle recalls, “I was
shaken to the foundations of my spiritual life by the realization that my
Church had established its identity over against a misrepresented Judaism”
(183). Heschel, in particular, was effective at transforming Merkle’s
understanding of Judaism from the religion of the Old Testament to a
religion characterized by vitality, diversity, community, and covenantal
renewal. Friendships and academic collaborations with Jews served to
reinforce his newfound conviction in the “enduring vitality of Jewish
covenantal life” (186).

Merkle insists, as do many Christians who have also come to understand
Judaism as one way to experience a covenantal relationship with God, that
Church doctrine and practice must continue to be reformed. Although this
process began with Vatican II in the early 1960s and has progressed with
each decade, much work is still needed to eliminate negative images of Jews
and Judaism. He calls on Christians to recognize God’s covenantal
pluralism. “We should acknowledge that Christianity is valid because it,
like Judaism, fosters covenantal life with God. The same God who formed
Israel into a people by way of a covenant, and who regards this people and
their covenant as irreplaceable, also called into being the Church with its
new form of covenantal life” (189). The purpose of the new covenant was
not to usurp the old but rather to enable Gentiles to establish a
covenantal relationship with God as well. Merkle believes that as
Christians rethink their faith in relation to Judaism, there is much to be
learned from reflecting on some of the central beliefs and practices of
Judaism.

Merkle must be praised for envisaging this collection and for selecting an
impressive group of scholars whose personal, spiritual, and academic quests
can be woven together in a virtually seamless narrative. If his hope was
for readers to learn from and be inspired by these accounts then _Faith
Transformed_ is an enormous success. In fact, its success lies in the
possibility that this slim volume may find readership beyond religion
scholars and, in its way, transform the outdated thinking of a broader
audience.

Matthew Hockenos,
Skidmore Colege,
Saratoga prings, New York

Dear Friends,

I feel sure that all of us have felt great sorrow at the passing of Pope John Paul II, and that we will want to express our best wishes to his successor, Benedict XVI. Fr Jay Hughes, a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of St Louis, Missouri, has kindly agreed to give us a short appreciation of the new pope’s character and career.

Contents:

1) Pope Bendict XVI Fr John Jay Hughes

2) Book review

a) ed D.Lewis, Christianity Reborn

3) Journal articles:

a) Lee, Watchman Nee
b) Grams. Sankt Raphaels Verein and Canada

1) The lectures on the Church by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, at the University of Münster in the summer semester of 1965 were the most beautiful I have ever heard on any subject anywhere. Lecturing at 8:15 in the morning, he attracted people from the town, who came to hear him before they went to work in their offices. “He speaks print-ripe,” was a frequent comment. His words could have been printed without alteration. After each lecture one wanted to go into a church to pray. The German students predicted the imminent conversion of a Protestant theology student from South Africa who was a regular hearer: “Bei Ratzinger fällt der stärkste Mann um” (“Faced with Ratzinger, the strongest man capitulates.”) The prediction was not so wide of the mark. Decades later Ratzinger’s tape recorded conversations with the German journalist, Peter Seewald, published as Salt of the Earth and God and the World, resulted in Seewald’s return to the Church. As lecturer Ratzinger spoke softly, though always audibly, reflecting his gentle personality and personal modesty. He was often seen riding around town on a bicycle, wearing a beret.

In his 1997 memoir, Milestones 1927-1977, Ratzinger writes that his appointment as archbishop of Munich in 1977 was an unwelcome interruption of his first love, theological study and teaching, and a complete surprise. Ratzinger’s four years in Munich were not especially happy. Amid the post-conciliar turmoil, he lacked the common touch. His appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope John Paul II in 1981 marked the first choice of a major academic theologian for that position that anyone could remember.

The choice of a papal name not used for almost a century is a declaration of independence. He does not seek to be a Pius, a John, a Paul, or a John Paul. He shares their faith. But the name Benedict says that he will be his own man. Papal conclaves choose a man, not a program. And Popes, like American Supreme Court justices, often confound the expectations of those who select them. The British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote recently: “I have covered all the conclaves held since World War II. In each case, the outcome, in terms of the pontificate which followed, has been quite different from all the predictions made at the time. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen this time, too.”

The last Pope Benedict (1914-22) was a peacemaker. Had the European powers been willing to end World War I on his terms, we would not have had the punitive Versailles treaty. And without the bitter resentments enkindled at Versailles, Hitler would have had scant appeal to his countrymen. Benedict XV was also a peacemaker within the Church, ending the hysterical reaction to modernism by saying that we needed no other label than that of “Catholic.”

The new Pope’s affinity with St. Benedict of Nursia, the founder of western monasticism, may be even more significant. Educated in aristocratic circles at Rome at the end of the fifth century, Benedict reacted against the social disorder and licentiousness of his day by retiring to a life of prayer. In so doing he launched a spiritual movement which would shape the life of western Europe for centuries. As the civilization of the ancient Roman world collapsed, it was the monks who kept alive the flames of culture and Christian faith. They did so by their cultivation of learning, but above all by their dedication to what Benedict called “the work of God”: the public prayer of the Church’s liturgy.

The liturgy has been central for Joseph Ratzinger since his birth on Good Friday 1927. He was baptized the next day in waters newly blessed at the Easter Vigil, then celebrated on Holy Saturday morning. To have been initiated into the Easter mystery at birth he has always considered a special blessing. “The more I think about it,” he writes in his memoir, “the more fitting it seems that I was baptized on Easter Eve, not Easter. We live in this world not in the full light of Easter, but journeying toward that light, full of hope. … The inexhaustible reality of Catholic liturgy has been my companion through all the stages of my life.” Despite Paul Johnson’s warning, it seems safe to expect that Pope Benedict XVI will show special interest in the enrichment and deepening of liturgical prayer desired by the Council, but not always achieved.

Addressing the cardinals the day after his election, he confessed his “sense of inadequacy and human turmoil for the responsibility entrusted to me yesterday,” but said that an “intimate recognition of a gift of divine mercy prevails in my heart in spite of everything. I consider this a grace obtained for me by my venerated predecessor, John Paul II. It seems I can feel his strong hand squeezing mine; I seem to see his smiling eyes and listen to his words, addressed to me especially at this moment: ‘Do not be afraid!'” He pledged to make reunion with other Christians, and dialogue with those of other faiths, a priority. This certainly includes the dialogue with Judaism. Media reports about Ratzinger’s “Nazi past” are absurd. The record shows a strongly anti-Nazi past, reflected in the biting satire with which he writes in his memoir of his wartime experiences as a teenager of Hitler’s “campaign of lies obvious even to the half blind.”

The memoir concludes with a reflection on his coat of arms as archbishop of Munich which is vintage Ratzinger. It contained two symbols: a scallop shell and a bear. The first is the pilgrim’s emblem, still given to pilgrims at the shrine of Compostela in northwestern Spain: a reminder, Ratzinger writes, “that we have here no lasting city” (Heb. 13:14). The shell reminds him also of St. Augustine, about whom Ratzinger wrote his doctoral dissertation. Walking along the seashore as he reflected on the mystery of the Trinity, Augustine came on a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was trying to pour the sea into it with a shell. Augustine realized that his efforts to understand the mystery of God were as futile as the child’s attempt to get the sea into the hole. “The shell reminds me of my great master Augustine, of my theological work, and of the vastness of the mystery which surpasses all our learning.” The words place Benedict XVI squarely in the classical tradition of great theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. What we can know of God remains always less than what, in this world, we can never know.

The bear comes from a legend about Munich’s first bishop, St. Korbinian. Traveling to Rome, the saint encountered a bear which attacked the horse which was carrying Korbinian’s luggage. As punishment Korbinian made the bear carry his pack to Rome. “Isn’t Korbinian’s bear, compelled against his will to carry the saint’s pack, a picture of my own life? The legend says that Korbinian set the bear free once he reached Rome. It doesn’t tell us whether the animal went to the Abruzzi mountains or returned to the Alps. Meanwhile I have carried my pack to Rome and wander for some time now through the streets of the Eternal City. When release will come I cannot know. What I do know is that I am God’s pack animal, and as such close to him.”

The passage takes on special poignancy when we know that Ratzinger several times asked Pope John Paul II to release him from his position in Rome to return to Germany and to his first love, theology. The Pope asked him to stay on. We’re both getting old, Joseph, the Pope said. But we’ll work together. Now his fellow cardinals have asked Joseph Ratzinger to continue carrying his pack, until the end.

2a) Christianity Reborn. The global expansion of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. ed. Donald M.Lewis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2004. 324 pp. Pbk. ISBN 0-8028-2483-8

Although six years have elapsed since the conference was held at which these papers were presented, their appearance in print is much to be welcomed. The contributors include several of the most distinguished historians of Evangelicalism in its British/North American form, and are joined by younger colleagues who provide valuable insights into its impact in different parts of the globe during the last hundred years. Don Lewis, Dean of Regent College, Vancouver, has ably edited this study, and ensured that it contains a valuable bibliography and an index, both rarities in such volumes of collected essays.

The leit-motif of these authors is first to contest the alleged decline of all religion, especially traditional Christianity, due to the forces of secularism, modernism and the dismantling of Europe’s empires. This work seeks to show, to the contrary , that Evangelical Protestantism is thriving in many parts of the world in unexpected and unprecedented ways. The opening essays by Professor Reg Ward for the eighteenth century, and Mark Noll for the nineteenth, develop the thesis that the special characteristics of the movement at that time are still effectively working today. With the impulses from German Pietism, as Prof. Ward has previously shown, Evangelicals were always deeply conscious – as John Wesley witnessed – of the world-wide dimensions of their missionary engagement.
The great burst of nineteenth century evangelical activity, with its plethora of European and American missionary societies and expatriate missionaries, was nevertheless all along committed to planting indigenous churches capable of reproducing themselves. And this, these authors claim, is just what is happening, whether in China since 1949, or in South America or Oceania today.

In the past few decades, the exponential growth of evangelical Christianity, especially in Pentecostal assemblies and other independent churches in the non-western world, has been remarkable. But it has largely escaped the notice of western scholars, partly due to the rapidity and fluidity of such growth, and partly because these new congregations are not much interested in their own history. The future, not the past, is their engrossing passion. But there also features of this expansion which must arouse concern. As Mark Noll observes, these new churches have only a slight awareness of their Reformation origins, or their theological debt to Luther, Calvin and even Wesley. For the most part, today’s evangelicals concentrate on private holiness, and leave aside wider social and political causes. So too, their relationships with secular education and its institutions are strained. Their leaders are often self-taught, relying more on the impulses of inner supernaturalism than on university-derived learning. Very often their understanding of evangelical authority is self-created. There is certainly a risk, observable in certain parts of the world, when such leaders see themselves as extraordinary channels of divine revelations, special instruments of divine healing, or uniquely inspired interpreters of God’s word.

In 1910, the pioneering Edinburgh world missionary conference expressed great hopes that the advance of Protestant Christianity, as promoted by Europeans and North Americans, would accompany the beneficial spread of education, Œprogress’ and the rise of incipient nationalisms. In the subsequent years, as Brian Stanley shows, international history took a very different turn and led to great ambivalences about each of these factors. In many cases the new churches became genuinely indigenous, but also strongly anti-colonial and anti-traditionalist. As a European-trained Kenyan church leader remarked in the 1960s, Africa was “a church without a theology, without theologians and without a theological concern”.

Philip Yuen-sung Leung’s sprightly essay paints a more optimistic picture of the church in China since 1949. He suggests a parallel to the story of Lazarus, in that Christianity in China, after a near death, has now revived and is increasingly vigorous. The early years of Communist repression were severe. Nevertheless the Christians who sympathized with Mao’s social goals ensured that Christianity was not completely rejected as the tool of Œforeign devils’. They could point out that the Three Self Patriotic Movement, which stressed self-government, self-support, and self-propagation, was not imposed by the Communist rulers, but was in fact just the kind of stance the leaders of the Church Missionary Society had promoted in the early nineteenth century.
To be sure the nationalization of all church property in China, including that so generously donated by mission supporters abroad, effectively severed all previous denominational links. The result was isolation from other Christian bodies, who frequently reacted with suspicion that the churches, especially those of the Three Self Movement, had allowed themselves to be politically subordinated to the official Religious Affairs Bureau of the Communist Party.
In turn, the reaction of the more “spiritual” pastors was to go underground with “house churches’ with a distinctly more conservative tone than that adopted by the Three Self leaders. A bitter struggle within the church ensued.
The terrible decade of the Maoist Cultural Revolution after 1966 very nearly killed off all sections of the church. The religious persecution and reality of Christian sufferings, Leung believes, was the darkest period of the Christian church’s history in China since the seventh century. However, after 1978, major political changes, even if not so acknowledged, enabled the churches to undertake a striking recuperation and rapid expansion. No reliable statistics exist for the numbers of Christians in China today, but all agree there has been record growth. Interpretations differ widely about the reasons for this spectacular development. The author calls for a cohesive, co-operative approach amongst both the urban and rural Christians to understand the complexities of the Chinese situation, and to relate the now self-governing church to its counterparts in the wider Christian world.
The veteran American missionary historian, Robert Frykenberg, surveys the troubled state of Christianity in India. Recently, foreign missionaries have been murdered, conversions prohibited, and violence practised against Christians, especially of the lower classes. This campaign has been led by the extremists of the Hindutva group, who combine nationalist fervour with a ruthless determination to protect their own social position, whenever this comes under threat from “upstart” Christians from previously subjected castes. From this perspective, the temptation to convert to any of Christianity’s many forms is a malignant polluting virus from abroad, which endangers India’s great and ancient civilization. For many Christians, however, conversion is a means of escape from social and economic bondage, especially among the dalits or untouchables. There is a centuries-old tradition of Christianity offering such a refuge. But just because of this background the Christian minority remains marginalized.
Nevertheless, due in part to globalization, Pentecostal associations are experiencing rapid growth in India. The emphasis on holiness and healing would appear to draw adherents, while demanding less sacrifice of indigenous identity than other branches of the church. Unfortunately there are instances where American-led impulses are importing alien perspectives and practices, which at times overwhelm local varieties and offer a watered-down gospel of little value but great advertising panache.
On the other hand, Frykenberg finds that there are also large numbers of believers and converts outside formal Christian structures. In short, the complexity of the Indian scene makes it unwise to engage in sweeping generalizations.
If India has demonstrated that the Christian evangelical input, even after centuries, remains marginal, and was successful only among former “outcasts”, the opposite was true in Oceania. In the South Seas, the Protestant missionaries, at the end of the eighteenth century, adopted the model tried out by the Anglo-Saxon church a thousand years earlier. They sought first to convert the chiefs of the various island groups. Their success in persuading these leaders of the virtues of a universal faith suitable for their post-contact needs, meant that whole island clusters converted en masse. Much of Polynesia adopted Methodism; in Melanesia, the Anglicans were predominant; while in the French colonies so were the Roman Catholics. But these were communal churches, still tied to the traditional social patterns. Only the South Seas Evangelical Mission concentrated on individual conversions, and was often spurned. Only in recent years, as Allan Davidson describes, has the monopoly of these older missions been challenged by smaller splinter groups with strong outside backing, a more global approach and up-to-date technology. Here too the rapid diversification of social patterns has disrupted the traditional Christian Œestablishment’ even if it is only a hundred or so years old. The conservative village traditions are giving way to new and radical individual experiences.
Completing this global survey, the third and fourth sections of the book include an analysis of the missionary situation in West Africa by Jehu Hanciles, of the indigenous churches in south Africa by Marinus Daneel, and a thought-provoking exploration of Pentecostalism in Latin America by Paul Freston. He points out the highly complex, fluid, schismatic and disparate nature of the various forms of Pentecostalism, and therefore asks is Latin American Pentecostalism really Protestant? Part of the problem arises from the lack of thorough encounter between scholars and the adherents of most of these highly sectarian communities. Most are not susceptible to study along western academic lines, but Freston attempts to grasp some of the nuances through a social-anthropological approach. There are, for example, enormous difficulties in trying to establish reliable figures for the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America in recent years, though all observers agree that it has been phenomenal.
Most of its adherents would explain this factor as being the result of God’s guidance, as a movement of the Holy Spirit, which is immune to, and does not need, explanations drawn from other eras or communities. So too, the various suggested theories for this apparent and often amazing growth, such as Pentecostalism’s appeal to the dispossessed, are often reductionist in origin, or even Marxist.
True, in such societies as Brazil, Pentecostalism is clearly the religion of the poor, and even more so of the less educated. But in other areas, the political value of a mobilized religious community has been recognized, so that a deliberate opposition has sprung up, both to traditional Catholicism and to socialist-influenced parties. Often the debate over the reasons for Pentecostalism’s success go beyond an academic discussion and become a weapon for religious, political or even commercial polemics. In the eyes of Catholic antagonists, this success can only be attributed to external interference, prompted by politically motivated American money. But the evidence on the ground suggests indigenous factors were more important.
Equally controversial is the question of Pentecostalism’s development over the past decades. Obviously Protestantism as a whole, and Pentecostalism in particular, was imported. But it has succeeded in adapting itself rapidly and in a wide variety of forms to local conditions. Indeed Freston quotes one source as saying “Judging from where the churches were growing rapidly, it seemed as though the recipe for success was for missionaries to leave”. This verdict only confirms the lesson learnt from China. Overall, however, Freston agrees with David Martin, a senior British observer and scholar, in suggesting that: “The optimum chances for Protestantism exist where the church has been drastically weakened, and yet the culture has remained pervasively religious, as in Brazil, Chile and Guatemala”.
But what kind of church emerges? Here too the theories differ widely. In one view, Pentecostalism in Latin America now owes little to its European origins, of which the practitioners have no consciousness. Rather it is now a redeployment of rural Catholicism without priests, syncretic, corporatist and politically passive. But certainly all would agree that Pentecostalism is the first totally autonomous mass popular religion in this continent. Its free range of theological and liturgical possibilities offers great scope for all sections of the community, and does not seek to impose either a unified structure or a dogmatically fixed belief system. And although its leaders make bad collaborators with each other, but good entrepreneurs, their reliance on divine inspiration and intervention has clearly led to successive and successful waves of institution building regardless of the different political and social structures in the various parts of Latin America.
In conclusion, David Martin points out how much Evangelicalism has benefited from the expansion of modern communications. Yet, local cultures and attachments still affect the process of globalization, resulting in a plethora of Protestantisms, some more, some less recognizable and aware of their European roots. The world scene is therefore highly complex, but overall, Martin notes, evangelicalism is undergoing a particular form of global transition, characterized by a fusion of popular and populist religion, which rejects the sponsorship of outside missionary bodies from a now discredited European Christendom. Instead it promotes a vibrant self-conscious faith, framed in a Christian format and brought to life by indigenous carriers. This is a future of faith, hope and promise – the key characteristics of true Evangelicalism.

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3a) J.T-H.Lee, Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China in Church History, Vol. 74, no 1, March 2005, pp.68-96

Wachman Nee (1903-72) was an independent Protestant evangelist who built up a conservative following, known as the Little Flock, which refused to accept the imposed leadership of the Communist dictatorship after 1949, and suffered the consequences.

Lee’s insightful article explains the tribulations experienced by this sect in trying to avoid Maoist political control, and to keep its distance from the more collaborationist Three Self Patriotic Movement, which still continues today. The latter accepted the need to obey the government’s edicts in order to pursue its main goal, which was to strike free from control by foreign missionaries, and to propagate a self-governing, self-financing and self-propagating Chinese model church. Nee’s Little Flock was no less dedicated to Chinese autonomy, but with his firm belief in the empowerment of the laity, refused any “guidance” from outside authority. Consequently Nee’s attempts to recruit those congregations whose foreign leadership has been expelled soon ran into difficulties. In 1956 Nee was denounced as a reactionary and died in a labour camp in 1972. Nevertheless the Little Flock survived, and demonstrated the failure of the Maoist state to exercise absolute control in the religious sphere.

b) Grant W.Grams, Sankt Raphaels Verein and German Catholic Emigration to Canada in Catholic Historical Review, Vol 91, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 83 -104.

Grams teaches in Alberta and has here searched the records both in Germany and Canada for the inter-war period in order to evaluate the successes or otherwise of this German Catholic emigration agency. Actually, the Canadian government only allowed ex-enemy Germans to immigrate in 1924, but thereafter, aided and abetted by the Canadian Pacific Railway, a considerable number of Germans interested in resettling in Canada used the services of this agency. The motivation was purely humanitarian, but at times met with pressures, both political and commercial, to promote or hinder this movement of people. After the Nazis came to power, this “loss” of valuable members of the Volksgemeinschaft was vocally opposed, and Canada increasingly tightened its regulations against any newcomers except farmers. It is a pity that the records do not allow us to see how many “non-Aryan” Catholics were helped to come to Canada, but in any case the Verein was eventually forcibly dissolved, and after 1939 emigration to Canada was impossible.

(Next month’s issue is being edited for us by Matthew Hockenos, of Skidmore College, New York. Once again I am most grateful for his help).

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Newsletter — April 2005— Vol. XI, no. 3

Dear Friends,

It is surely appropriate that this issue of our Newsletter be devoted to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered sixty years ago, on April 9th 1945, in Flossenbürg concentration camp in southern Germany. Germany has produced a large number of distinguished, world-famous theologians. In the early years of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack was widely seen as the most notable German scholar of his day; in the mid-century Karl Barth dominated the Protestant theological scene; but in the final years both have been overtaken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose reputation and legacy are engaging, not just his own countrymen and denominational brethren, but ever wider circles in various Christian communities. He is unique in being recognized not just for his life and thought, but also for his death. In July 1998, his statue was one of 10 unveiled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence of the Queen, on the front portico of Westminster Abbey, in London, commemorating the Christian martyrs of the twentieth century.

The evidence for Bonhoeffer’s far-reaching impact, both spiritual and theological, is to be found in the number of books which have appeared over the years. A few of the more recent ones are reviewed below. But it may be claimed that his world-wide fame and teachings, and his radical rethinking of Christian obedience, continue to provoke and stimulate thoughtful reflection in a “world come of age”. That is his true legacy.

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr
b) Hauerwas, Performing the Faith
c) Haynes The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon

2) Journal articles:

a) Hernandez, Russian village bells
b) Sack, Frank Buchman and college religion

3) Conference announcement – April 15 -16th.

1) Craig J.Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr. Social Responsibility and modern Christian commitment. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58743-074-6. 256 pp.
Craig Slane’s study of Bonhoeffer as martyr is clearly the product of extensive research and meditation, some of which took place in Bonhoeffer’s former home, now a museum and retreat centre for the diocese of Berlin. His achievement is two-fold: first, he analyses the current thinking about Christian martyrdom; and second, he sheds new light on Bonhoeffer’s spiritual pilgrimage in order to show the continuities and congruities in both his life and death. He brings together for an English-speaking readership many of Bonhoeffer’s perceptive theological insights, with which we are already familiar, but which are here linked in a convincing and often challenging pattern.

Today, we have perhaps forgotten that sixty years ago, at the time of his execution by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer was considered a criminal, to be shunned by the majority of his fellow churchmen in Germany. In the eyes of many, he had deserved his fate by participating in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He was branded as a political traitor, not esteemed as a Christian martyr. The remarkable change in his reputation is, of course, due to the untiring efforts of his friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, but also because events have proved him right. But Craig Slane looks more closely to show how the concept of martyrdom has also changed. Today it no longer excludes those whose witness took the form of political activity, and is no longer limited to those who died openly professing the truths of the Christian gospel. He argues that, in the broadest sense, martyrdom has always been political. Furthermore, an especially prominent feature of contemporary martyrs is their calculated solidarity with all the victims of human injustice. Those prepared to suffer and die in the interests of their fellow men and women are in fact living out the imitatio Christi. They recognize that Christ’s death on the cross was the supreme act of reconciliation. And so a martyr, baptized into the structure of Christ’s death and resurrection, may become an instrument by which God communicates his abiding commitment to mend the creation.

Slane spells out the significant characteristics of a modern martyr, and suggests that Bonhoeffer very consciously adapted his witness accordingly. His Finkenwalde community, for example, was deliberately structured to fit a pre-Constantinian pattern in which discipleship and martyrdom were closely connected. Here was a minority group which professed the claims of Christ to its age at great cost, and on the margins of public life, given the situation to which the Confessing Church in the 1930s and 1940s was reduced.

This was the place where Bonhoeffer wrote what is perhaps his most popular and influential book The Cost of Discipleship. The German title Nachfolge had clear martyrological overtones from past history upon which Bonhoeffer now built. But he recognized that, in such a situation, communion and community between the brethren was a vital prerequisite for the tasks ahead. Martyrdom, if this was to be their destiny, was not just a solitary act, but an example of the cost of discipleship borne by all the committed community. So, where outsiders saw the Finkenwalde experiment as a kind of pietistic escapism, Bonhoeffer knew it to be a preparation for self-sacrificing witness and if necessary death.

The title martyr cannot of course be conferred on the living, nor should the living seek to join its ranks. But a martyr’s death is not just accidental. Rather it holds the power to summarize the martyr’s entire existence in a way ordinary deaths do not. So this becomes a signal of resonance between the faith of the living and the faith of the dead.

Slane seeks to show that Bonhoeffer’s pilgrimage from 1931 onwards, when he became “converted” by studying the deeper meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, was really his deliberately chosen course towards death. Indeed Bonhoeffer’s desire to follow in Jesus’ footsteps increasingly led to his recognition that the Christian life has to include the practice of death, particularly the death to human selfishness and sin.

In this sense, Bonhoeffer affirmed, the encounter with Jesus is fundamentally different from that with Goethe or Socrates. Jesus lives. He cannot be avoided. But his redemptive power is found through his suffering and death. Christ allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. And man is challenged to participate in these sufferings at the hands of a godless world. Indeed it is just this participation in the suffering and death of God in the life of the world that makes a Christian what he is.

Contrary to the ancient martyrs, whose deaths were often public spectacles, on the morning of Bonhoeffer’s hanging there were scarcely any witnesses. The final stages of his life were spent in the high secrecy of political conspiracy, with no opportunity to confess the faith openly. But, through the lens of martyrdom, his unadorned death, freely and voluntarily accepted, can be seen as the “coming out”, the proclamation of his faith in the political sphere.
It is only in recent years that Bonhoeffer has been legally acquitted of the crimes for which he was condemned, or publicly admired for attempting the violent overthrow of the nation’s ruler.

At the time, few of his fellow churchmen supported him, or even recognized the moral ambiguity through which he struggled to find justification. But this did not deter Bonhoeffer from his chosen course of discipleship. The final months of his imprisonment were brutal and degrading. Yet, as the Letters and Papers from Prison show, he gained in certainty the assuredness of God’s nearness. Indeed as his final letters affirm, he believed himself surrounded by the powers of good. He learnt to face death because he experienced dying daily with Jesus Christ. “Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live in us. Physical death in the true sense does not become the end, but the consummation of life with Jesus Christ.”

And his final recorded words were: “Das ist das Ende – für mich der Beginn des Lebens” (This is the end – but for me the beginning of life). It was a confident assertion of the Christian belief in resurrection.

For this reason, as Slane justly comments, “more than a witness to the transcendent Christ, and more than an earthly referent to the divine reality, the martyr’s ordeal becomes a concrete instance of God’s suffering presence in and to the world.”

In the midst of the twentieth century, tortured by genocide, military violence, ideological fanaticism and sheer hatred for humanity, Bonhoeffer is a witness to God’s love, to justice, and to hope. He fulfilled the martyr’s key role by living and dying as the embodiment of these values.

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b) Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith Bonhoeffer and the practice of nonviolence, Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press 2004
ISBN 1-58743-076-2 252 pp.

Stanley Hauerwas is a well-known advocate for Christian pacifism, and has contributed two chapters on Bonhoeffer’s political theology in his latest collected essays, Performing the Faith. Like many others he seeks to explain how Bonhoeffer’s early commitment to Christian pacifism can be reconciled with his later decision to participate in the plot to kill Hitler. The stages of this transition cannot now be determined with certainty, but Hauerwas is convinced that both stances were part of his dedication to a Christian discipleship, which could stand out against the brutal powers of the world and their attempt to make history without God.

This oppositional stance was clearly influenced by Karl Barth’s theology and hence can be seen early on in Bonhoeffer’s thought. Despite his training in the very best school of liberal Protestantism, he rejected the kind of adaptations and compromises with the world so frequently advocated by these scholars. Instead, Bonhoeffer asserted, the mission of the Church should not be to justify Christianity in this present age, but rather to justify the present age before the Christian message.

So, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, he opposes all those who try to argue for a “God of the gaps”, providing an explanation beyond what secular reason can supply. At the same time, he opposed those pietists who called on God as a kind of therapeutic device when secular medicine failed. Instead, he proclaimed, God reigns, in life, in death, in politics, in society – in short, everywhere. The Church’s task is to proclaim this fact unequivocally, and not allow itself to be rendered irrelevant on the margins of society.

Nationalism, and its attendant evil of militarism, was defended by some Lutherans as part of an inalienable “order of creation”. But Bonhoeffer posits a more dynamic image of the “orders of preservation”, which required the church to adopt a determined policy of challenging any state power which threatened to overstep the ethical bounds of justice and peace.

Yet he is also clear that all practical actions taken by the individual Christian, or the sanctified Church, stand under the judgment of God and call for a vivid awareness of sin and the need for repentance. Hence any open-ended call for “democracy” or “freedom” forgets the fact that such forces can easily lead men to the depths of slavery, because of its deification of human effort. God is relegated to the sidelines, and there are no barriers to nihilism. Too often the Church has allowed itself to be pushed out of politics, or has relied solely on its privileged position in a Constantine-era situation. But in a post-Constantinian world, the Church has to strive to earn or regain its own visibility, based on the power of Jesus’ teachings.

Hauerwas rightly points out that Bonhoeffer was a relentless critic of any way of life that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness. This was the weakness of the ecumenical movement, which Bonhoeffer at first championed. But the unwillingness of the Geneva-based officers to cut their ties with the official Reich Church, controlled by the Deutsche Christen, and the refusal to recognize the Confessing Church as the only true witness to Christ in Germany, disillusioned him. He came to see that more extreme measures were required to prevent the overthrow of Christian civilization. Toleration in his eyes could lead to compromise, and hence to the abandonment of truth.

Most of his contemporaries did not want such honesty. Nor could they accept the view which Bonhoeffer had expressed already in 1934: “the time is very near when we shall have to decide between National Socialism and Christianity. It may be fearfully hard and difficult for us all, but we must get right to the root of things with open Christian speaking and no diplomacy. In prayer together we will find the way”. Failure to do this could only lead to equivocation or cynicism. Hence the failure of the Church to oppose Hitler was the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world.

In the politically frenzied world created by the Nazis, the Church’s role was to speak the truth in political witness. “The commandments of God indicate the limits which dare not be transgressed, if Christ is Lord. And the Church is to remind the world of these limits”. And the same would apply to the new order to be created once the war was over. Bonhoeffer was to sketch out in very general terms in his Ethics how this task should be fulfilled. In Hauerwas’ view, this was possibly Bonhoeffer’s most significant witness. If the Church does not preach the gospel truthfully, but instead is ready to accommodate itself to every so-called “progressive trend”, then we are all condemned to see our Christian civilization destroyed. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom is the clearest witness to his determination not to let this happen.

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c) Stephen R.Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon. Portraits of a Protestant Saint. Minneapolis: Fortress press 2004. 280 pp
ISBN 0-8006-3652-X

In this the sixtieth anniversary year of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death, the wealth of “Bonhoefferiana” continues to grow at an astonishing rate, not only within the ranks of professional scholars but also, and just as powerfully, within a more popularist corpus of novels, plays, films and websites. It is to Haynes’ great credit that his latest offering provides a thorough overview of both the academic and popular representations of Bonhoeffer that have shaped the German theologian’s reception in the six decades since his execution.

Haynes’ book has, at its core, a readily-identifiable objective: to demonstrate that, irrespective of technical definitions, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, work and death – his vita, in fact – enables him, in death, to function as a saint. Moreover, this distinctive appellation is the key to rightly understanding his other functions of seer, prophet, apostle, cultic-figure and bridge (pp.xi-xii). Working from Lawrence Cunningham’s ‘The Meaning of Saints’, Haynes seeks to show that the normative Catholic constraints on the definition of sainthood do not ultimately preclude Bonhoeffer from being received in popular religious consciousness as a de facto, if not de jure, saint.

In much the same way, argues Haynes, Yad Vashem’s strict criteria for the bestowal of the title of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ does not, in the end, disenfranchise Bonhoeffer from that distinction in the wider religious imagination. Just as fictional works such as ‘Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace’ (2001), ‘Saints and Villains’ (1998), and ‘The Cup of Wrath’ (1992) assert Bonhoeffer’s rigorous defense of the Jews as the primary reason for his execution, Richard Rubenstein has similarly suggested that Yad Vashem’s imprimatur is not ultimately necessary for the ajudication of Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’ (pp.114-116, 119). While both Bonhoeffer’s sainthood and his ‘gentile righteousness’ may remain contested issues, Haynes does show well that institutional endorsement is not, in a postmodern and essentially de-institutionalized (Protestant) world, the final arbiter of popular religious reception.

These conclusions at which Haynes arrives are founded upon a broader gloss of liberal and evangelical assessments of Bonhoeffer within the book’s earlier chapters. Bonhoeffer, as read by Haynes, has been variously adopted as the champion of radical ‘death-of-God’ theology ( JAT Robinson, Gabriel Vahanian, Harvey Cox), liberal theology (Larry Rasmussen, Geffrey Kelly) and conservative evangelical theology (Georg Huntermann, David Gushee and, somewhat incredibly, James Dobson).

These chapters are, to my mind, simultaneously the book’s strength and weakness. At one level, Haynes ably demonstrates the malleability of the Bonhoeffer legacy into any number of pre-determined paradigms; by its very nature as fragmented and incomplete, Bonhoeffer’s life and witness is susceptible to being hijacked by causes and movements, which are often at odds with one another. That Bonhoeffer has been press-ganged into advocacy of the pro-life movement, Vietnam veterans, and the anti- Iraq War protest, and that he has been characterized as both the arch-enemy and the purest example of both liberalism and evangelicalism is a sobering reminder of the fluidity of subjective reception and indeed the persuasivity of popular consciousness.

On the other hand, it is slightly disconcerting that Haynes lets the respective interpreters of Bonhoeffer speak for themselves with little critical assessment from him. Most notably absent is any thorough engagement with Bonhoeffer by Haynes himself. It would be unduly harsh to labour this point, as clearly Haynes’ intent is not to add yet another layer of Bonhoeffer-analysis to an already-weighty corpus, but rather to scan the existing and competing assessments of him. Nonetheless, there are times when the exhaustive ‘literature review’ produced by Haynes would benefit from a greater level of Haynes’ own critique on the basis of his own reading of Bonhoeffer’s vita.

A final, smaller, complaint is that, with the exception of the first two chapters in which European, Asian and Latin American interpreters are mentioned, Haynes’ interpretive view is primarily North Americo-centric. It is, to a significant extent, a survey of Bonhoeffer’s reception within the USA. While this is undoubtedly a legitimate endeavour, there remains scope for further exploration of the ways in which Bonhoeffer has been received (or not) elsewhere in the world. Haynes indeed notes that the 4- yearly International Bonhoeffer Congresses now draw delegates from all corners of the
world (p.166). Inclusion of the insights from these more liminal receptors would not only be immensely insightful but would also reflect the genuinely ecumenical and international outlook espoused so clearly by Bonhoeffer himself.

These slight criticisms aside, though, Stephen Haynes has presented a timely and provocative assessment of the current state of Bonhoeffer-studies. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, ‘The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon’ is sure -and deserves – to become a vitally important text in the coming phases of Bonhoeffer- research.

Mark R. Lindsay, Melbourne, presently Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge.

2a) Richard L.Hernandez, Sacred Sound and sacred substance: church bells and the auditory culture of Russian villages druing the Bolshevik ŒVelikii Perelom’ in American Historical Review, Vo. 109, no. 5 (December 2004) p. 475ff

During the Communist government’s massive attempts in 1928-1932 to propagandize and enforce the “great turn” in rural Russia away from old beliefs and habits, in order to introduce the new socialist system, church bells frequently came to play a role as symbols of peasant resistance. Richard Hernandez shows how the village bells reinforced traditional religious identity in practice over and against Bolshevik idolatry. Despite vigorous efforts made by various party organizations to confiscate, suppress and destroy all bells, the backlash was significant, and led to violent confrontations, even riots. In some cases, the Red Army had to be called in. These incidents served to show the mingling of sacred and secular causes in the struggle against the entire Bolshevik project.

b) Daniel Sack, Men want something real: Frank Buchman and Anglo-American College Religion in the 1920s in Journal of Religious History, Vol. 28, no. 3, Oct. 2004 pp. 260ff

Frank Buchman was a Lutheran evangelist and sometime YMCA secretary in Pennsylvania who in the 1920s repackaged evangelical Christianity for British and American elite universities, creating a religious message tailor-made for a community of young men. Stressing a personal experience of God, Buchman’s message owed much to the kind of evangelical exhortation found in Keswick.

He reached out to “key men”, or elite members of the university, and later the wider society, especially the wealthy, offering help to sustain their personal morality through group meetings and dedication. The religious group experience, especially the importance of repentance and the cultivation of love, rather than the adherence to, or propagation of, theological doctrines, became the hallmark of Buchmanism, later to be “re-christened” as Moral Re-Armament.
Sack shows that this creed appealed to men, and sought to avert what many evangelicals thought was the regrettable “feminization” of Christianity. Concentrating on undergraduate heroes, especially champion athletes, Buchman propounded an evangelism suitable for the leaders of the post-1918 world’s commercial and scientific age. But by concentrating on a narrow personal morality – and often only on questions of sex – Buchman avoided any wider challenge to the existing social order. In Britain his Oxford Groups propagated these views through very popular house-parties, often held in lavish country mansions. The aim was to evangelize from the top downwards. Certainly these cells seemed to fill a social and spiritual need, challenging the conformist and cultural Christianity of the day with a more intense and masculine spirituality.

Sack’s account focusses mainly on the American scene, and notes that probably Buchman’s most enduring legacy is Alcoholics Anonymous, whose techniques are directly derived from the Oxford Group’s evangelical methods.

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3) A commemorative conference to mark the 6oth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death is to be held on April 15-16th at St John’s College Ministry Centre, Morpeth, New South Wales, Australia. The principal speakers will be Dr Maurice Schild, Adelaide and Prof John Moses, Armidale, NSW.
Contact: stephen.moore@ozemail.net au

Best wishes to you all,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

As we all pray for the recovery of Pope John Paul II, this issue is appropriately concerned with the affairs of the Catholic Church of yester year.
May you all have a happy and blessed Easter.
Contents

1) Book Reviews

a) Ruff, Catholic Youth in post-war Germany
b) Tischner, Catholic Church in East Germany
c) Harold Tittmann, Jr., Inside the Vatican

2) Journal articles a) Sack, Frank Buchman’s evangelism
3) Conference report: AHA, Seattle Jan. 2005

a) German Catholics and Spain
b) Pope Pius XII’s defenders

1) Mark E. Ruff, The Wayward Flock. Catholic Youth in postwar West Germany, 1945-1965 Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 2005. 284 pp ISBN0-8078-2914-5

Mark Ruff, who now teaches at St Louis University in Missouri, is one of the younger North American historians currently studying the recent history of the German churches. He rightly recognizes that the time has come to move on from the well-trodden battlegrounds of the Third Reich. So his examination of German Catholicism in the postwar period is doubly significant: first, because he brings to the English-speaking readership this newly researched tranche of German Catholic church history, and second, because he departs from the traditional approach of an institutional history, usually apologetic in its perspective. Instead he adopts a critical stance towards the planning and execution of the Church’s youth work, which does not hestitate to show up the weaknesses of this often mistaken ecclesiastical strategy. His basic question is: why did the long-established institutions of the Catholic milieu, in what was to become the new state of West Germany, lose the support of so many young men and women? Why did these youth groups prove to be so wayward in their fading allegiance, after so many generations of ardent and loyal support to this particular subculture?

His answers seek to depict the effects of increased leisure, liberty and consumerism amongst young people, as well as the often heated debates among church leaders as to how best youth could be retained and retrained to uphold the kind of conservative values so successfully being exemplified in the nation’s political arena. In this way Ruff’s study of the erosion of the Catholic milieu and its changing environment adds a valuable corrective to many of the secular histories which see the 1950s as a glorious success story for conservative restorationism.

Empirically this study looks at the re-establishment and the subsequent decline of the numerous Catholic youth organizations, which rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Nazi Third Reich. The objective was to rebuild the network of associations which had served and protected German Catholics through the long years of minority status, social ostracism and state persecution. But in the post-1945 situation, Catholics were no longer in the minority, no longer subject to repressive restrictions, and had a dominant position in the West German political arena. Despite the boastful assertion that Catholicism had triumphed over National Socialism, and the implication that its value system would now come to refashion the social and political climate, in fact there were soon to be major difficulties, particularly relating to young people and to youth work.

In the first place, the loss during the war of an entire cohort of youth leaders, lay and clerical, delivered a blow to youth work from which it never fully recovered. Then the postwar mood was far more sceptical and critical than before. Concerned Catholics were, as Ruff rightly remarks, haunted by the Church’s easy capitulation to the Nazis in 1933 and by the failure of their institutions to confront or hold in check the Nazi colossus. Furthermore, the youth themselves were deeply affected by seeing their elder brothers and sisters seduced, coerced, propagandized, recruited and finally marched to their deaths in the service of a criminally-flawed ideology. They had a strong sense of betrayal, and were resolved not to be caught again. In the ruins of so many bombed-out cities, idealism, even in a Catholic garb, found few takers. Ohne mich was their watchword.

It is not surprising therefore that the plans of the Catholic leaders to rebuild a large-scale Catholic youth organizational structure, which would help to rebuild German society with Christian values and traditions, soon ran into difficulties. Its elitism, hierarchical patterns and belief in discipline and obedience were all to be rejected by the postwar youth as unwanted reminders of the discredited past. Ruff is suitably critical of the outdated preference for uniforms, banners and marches, all signs of an authoritarian approach to youth work.

Equally unsuccessful were the attempts to revive the activities and associations for young women, based on the highly traditional models of preparing them to be helpmeets for men and mothers of the next generation. Modesty, humility and chastity were no longer the preferred values of the postwar female cohort. After their regimentation by the Nazi female leaders, after the ruinous bombing of their homes, and the often traumatic readjustments when their men returned from the war, these young women sought new horizons. As a result the Catholic Church was forced to relinquish its carefully delineated conceptions of gender, its “feminine” forms of piety, and its insistence on unfailing obedience to church authority. Instead the youth sought new freedoms in enjoying mass culture, often imported from America, in film, jazz and hit songs. These activities were individualistic, and unconnected to any larger religious or political purposes. Together with the rapid expansion of leisure activities, and a flourishing economic revival, German young people were able to have fun on their own terms as part of a new youth culture.

Religious and social conservatives naturally deplored such developments. Some wanted to go back to the good old days of a closed Catholic milieu. But the more progressive were also obliged to see that by opening up their activities to new patterns, their religious message and opportunity became diluted. Young people too often simply disregarded church teachings, and, in so doing, ultimately eroded the authority of the church altogether. Where parish clergy were left to organize youth activities, they found themselves outmoded by the professional resources of the secular world. The church could no longer provide, even in rural areas, the kind of fare to be found in cinemas, dance-halls or shopping malls. Television was to cement the demise of any number of youth groups.

Once young people began to choose for themselves, and to determine their own futures, they were no longer willing to commit to those religious activites and professions that required the greatest degree of dedication and sacrifice. The number of candidates for the priesthood sank rapidly. Monasteries and convents lacked recruits. Instead, all too often, young Catholics, like young Protestants, opted for a cafeteria style of religious belief, choosing only those elements which suited their new-found and freer lifestyles.

Ruff describes all these developments without recrimination or lamentation. His material is drawn principally from the diocesan archives of Cologne and Würzburg, the one mainly industrial, the other mainly rural. But in both the erosion of the Catholic milieu took place relentlessly. The struggles of the older generation of youth leaders to stem the tide seemed to be counter-productive, and often induced infighting which wasted far too much energy. The basic question of how such a traditional church, which for so long had been on the defensive, could adjust to the demands of the modern world, remained unresolved. It was to require the even greater upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s before German Catholicism was obliged to discard the mental attitudes of earlier years, and to seek to create new communities and forms of identity capable of meeting the challenges of a new and forceful culture of consumerism

Ruff’s elegant and well-researched narrative carries conviction. His arguments could, conceivably, have been strengthened by some references to the very similar developments in the Protestant, and even in the socialist, milieux. And, at some points in his tale, it would have been desirable to build in some personal recollections of participants, who are presumably still able to recall their wayward youth. But Ruff’s service in documenting this chapter of German Catholic history is a noteworthy contribution which merits reflection in many quarters.
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b) Wolfgang Tischner, Katholische Kirche in der SBZ/DDR 1945-1951, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B, no 90, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag 2001 ISBN 3-506-79995-9

(This review appeared earlier on H-German, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author)

This work is the result of Wolfgang Tischner’s 1999 dissertation completed under the direction of Ulrich von Hehl. It represents an enormous amount of research and work on the relatively unexplored position of the Catholic Church in Soviet-occupied Germany during the opening phases of the Cold War. It is divided into two major sections: one dealing with the development of the Catholic Church and its offices at the close of the World War II, and a second sectiuon addressing the build-up of Catholic instiututions in Communist-controlled East Germany. Throughout the work, Tischner agues that despite each loss of political representation, German Catholics continued to maintain and even create new institutions that permitted them to foster a “Catholic” identity and culture.

Section One offers a wealth of information regarding church personalities and the interplay among the church leaders in Germany, the occupying powers and the Vatican. The dominant figure of this time period was, of course, Cardinal Konrad von Preysing of Berlin. Surveying such regions as Thuringia, Meissen, Mecklenburg, Paderborn and Breslau, Tischner highlights the problems of restructuring and rebuilding in these war-torn areas, and emphasizes the role Preysing played in each area. By June 1945, Preysing had formulated the church’s political position regarding the Soviet occupation. He admonished the clergy to act on behalf of human rights and the freedom of conscience, and urged them to support wholeheartedly a democratic form of government (p.61). By the end of the year, despite the absence of any major confrontation with the Soviet military government, the struggles that lay ahead were clear.

Towards the end of the year, the announcement from the Vatican that Pope Pius XII had elevated Preysing to become a Cardinal was a pleasing addition to his prestige in this tumultuous time. The promotion did not, however, guarantee that Preysing would have an easy time. Tischner depicts these early post-war years as filled with internal power struggles involving Preysing’s closest advisors, Heinrich Wienken, Aloysius Muench and Wilhelm Weskam, largely over how to deal with the escalating clashes between the Catholic Church, the Soviet authorities and their East German communist satraps. At the end of this early phase, Preysing’s pronouncements set the tone for many East German Catholics (p.111). This opening section represents an astounding compilation of institutional and political history in an area long neglected by many German historians.

Section two branches away from the earlier more standard political-institutional account. In this exhaustive section, Tischner argues for the creation of what he calls a Catholic “sub-society” (Subgesellschaft). Rejecting descriptives such as “milieu”, the author devotes close to four hundred pages to explain how Catholicism not only survived the communist years but emerged alive and well after the regime’s fall in 1989. In order to prove his argument, Tischner leaves high political approaches behind, and instead examines various institutions that were protected or preserved by German Catholics with each challenge to their political rights. He examines the role of Catholic newspapers. radio programs and other publications. In addition, he analyses the humanitarian work of the Catholic social assistance organization, Caritas, and the impact of Catholic social services such as hospitals and orphanages in the GDR. So too he explores the work of kindergartens, after-school programs, extracurricular religious instruction, and the youth programs designed to combat Communist-led youth groups. All of these sections are meant to show how Catholics still managed to retain their religious identity in what had become an officially “atheist” state.

One missing element which might have strengthened his arguments would be an examination of Alltagsgeschichte. Tischner’s work is invaluable in describing the position of Catholic institutions in a Soviet-dominated government, but there is little or no coverage of the life of rank and file Catholics in the GDR.

Tischner shows convincingly that German Catholics were able to form an independent “sub-society” in the GDR by 1951. It would be very interestung to have a sequel describing the tougher years ahead when the communist regimne cemented its hold. Nevertheless, this work remains a valuable contribution to the study of Catholic institutions under hostile governments.
Beth Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State Universityc) Harold Tittmann, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII. The memoir of a American Diplomat during World War II, New York: Image 2004. 224 pp.

(This review appeared in the November 2004 issue of First Things, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the authors. Slightly abbreviated.)
Critics of Pius XII have long claimed that the Allies were bitterly frustrated by the pontiff’s official neutrality during World War II. Among the evidence for this they cite some of the official dispatches of Harold H.Tittmann, Jr., who from 1940 to 1946 was chief assistant to Myron Taylor, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Vatican. In works from Saul Friedlander’s 1966 Pius XII and the Third Reich to John Cornwell’s 1999 Hitler’s Pope, the occasional criticisms expressed in Tittmann’s dispatches have been quoted against Pius. Now we have the dispassionate postwar reflections of Tittmann himself, which paint a very different picture.

Although Tittmann lived until 1980, he rarely spoke about Pius XII. Instead, he quietly worked on his memoirs, which his son, Harold III, (who lived with his father in the Vatican during the German occupation of Rome) has now edited and published under the title Inside the Vatican of Pius XII. Given Tittmann’s importance in the debate about the papacy during the war, these memoirs may be the most important document to be published on Pius XII in over twenty years. And they prove to be, far from an indictment, an overwhelming defence of the Pope and the Catholic Church. . . .

There are at least half a dozen major revelations in this memoir. Perhaps the most interesting comes when Tittmann relates his discussions with Joseph Mueller, the anti-Nazi Bavarian lawyer who served as a middle-man between Pius and the German resistance. “Dr Mueller said that during the war his anti-Nazi organization in Germany had always been very insistent that the Pope should refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope’s remarks should be confined to generalities only”, Tittmann writes.

To have this testimony from a leading member of the anti-Nazi resistance means that Pius XII’s conduct during the war was not due solely to his personal instincts but also to the explicit advice of the anti-Nazi resistance.

Other revelations include the Vatican’s maintenance of “special accounts in New York banks” operated by Archbishop Spellman, as well as a “personal and secret account” for Pius XII (“about which Spellman knew nothing”), which the Pope “used exclusively for charitable purposes” during the war. Pius revealed the accounts to Tittmann in a “strictly confidential” meeting, after Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing American assets of hostile European countries. How much of this money was distributed to those persecuted by the Nazis is unknown, but Tittmann at least strengthens the testimony of Fr. Robert Leiber, Pius’ longtime aide, who told Look magazine in 1966: “The Pope sided very unequivocally with the Jews at the time. He spent his entire private fortune on their behalf”

Tittman provides, as well, new details of the Vatican’ anxiety over written documents that might expose the Pope’s anti-Nazi activities and collaboration with the Allies. “It was only rarely that records were kept by the Vatican officials of conversations the Pope had with his intimate collaborators or even with important visitors from the outside, such as ministers, ambassadors, or private individuals offering information or suggestions”, Tittmann writes. When the German occupation of Rome began on Septemeber 10, 1943, Nazi surveillance increased dramatically, and Pius’ secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, quickly recommended that any compromising documents be destroyed. Tittmann notes: “At a meeting on September 14, the Allied diplomats decided to follow the cardinal’s advice by destroying all documents that might possibly be of use to the enemy. Osborne [British minister to the Holy See] and I had already finished our burning, and the others completed theirs without exception by September 23, when I reported to the State Department” As a result, even the many official diplomatic documents which survive the war years represent only a fraction of Pius XII’s activities. . .

Discussing the charge that Pius went easy on Nazism because of his fears of Soviet communism, Tittmann insists that the Pope “detested the Nazi ideology and everything it stood for,” and he describes in fresh detail Pius’ intervention for an extension of America’s lease-lend policy to Russia, persuading the American Catholic hierarchy to soften its stand against the Soviet Union in order to serve a greater, and more immediate, cause – the defeat of Nazi Gemany. “Thus Pius XII himself had joined the President,” Tittmann says, “in admitting that Hitlerism was an enemy of the Church more dangerous than Stalinism and that the only way to overcome the former was an Allied victory, even if this meant assistance from Soviet Russia”.

Although a strong admirer of President Roosevelt, Tittmann does not flinch from criticizing the Allies’ carpet-bombing of Italian cities and religious institutions (including the attack on Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope was sheltering thousands of refugees).

Tittmann also reveals how Roosevelt, anxious to secure American Catholic support for the lend-lease program for Russia and eager for the Pope to intervene for him with the American bishops, wrote Pius a letter claiming that “churches in Russia are open” – and asserting his putative belief that there was “a real possibility that Russia may, as a result of the present conflict, recognize freedom of religion” Obviously embarrassed by this, Tittmann quotes another State Department official who had been stationed in Moscow as saying “he could not understand how such a letter as the President’s could ever have been written in the first place in view of all the contrary information that was on file in the State Department”

Critics oftren charge Pius with refusing to speak out against the Third Reich publicly and explicitly. Besides being inaccurate – the Vatican had excoriated Nazism long before Hitler came to power – the criticism is simplistic. As Tittmann points out, soon after World War II began, Pius XII authorized Vatican Radio to specifically condemn Nazi war crimes in Poland, naming the Nazis as the perpetrators, and Catholics and Jews as their victims. “However,” writes Tittmann, “the Polish bishops hastened to notify the Vatican that after each broadcast had come over the air, the various local populations suffered Œterrible’ reprisals. The thought that there were those paying with their lives for the information publicized by Vatican Radio made the continuation of these broadcasts impossible” Pius XII had tried the route of “explicit” condemnation – and it failed.

Toward the end of 1942, when reports of Nazi atrocities were increasing, Allied diplomats asked Pius to brand the Nazis by name. Despite his concern for ongoing reprisals, which had wrought havoc the previous July in Holland, Pius agreed – on condition that he name the Soviets and condemn their war crimes as well; he reasoned that as a universal pope, he could not condemn one totalitarian regime and wholly refrain from mentioning another whose principles were strikingly similar. But when the Allies learnt that Pius XII intended to include the Soviet Union in his condemnation, they dropped their request immediately, lest Stalin become enraged.

Tittmann concedes that the Pope had the better of the argument: “It was difficult for us to argue these points effectively with the Pope and in the end we were obliged to resign ourselves to the failure of our attempts” The debate may have been unnecessary, for as Pius himself told Tittmann shortly before his 1942 Christmas address, “I have already stated in three consecutive Christmas broadcasts that antireligious, totalitarian principles are iniquitous. These are the principles of the Nazis as any child can see”

As to whether there would have been fewer victims had Pius been more outspoken, Tittmann says: “There can be no final answer. Personally, I cannot help but feel that the Holy Father chose the better part by not speaking out and thereby saved many lives. Who can say what the Nazis would have done in their ruthless furor had they been further inflamed by public denunciations coming from the Holy See? It should also be remembered that the Nazi authorities were gradually realizing that they were destined to lose the war and the psychological effect of such blighted hopes could easily have caused to react even more violently to outside pressure. To the wealth of information in the archives on similar situations garrnered by the Vatican over the centuries, and to the help of expert historians using these archives, Pope Pius XII was able to add his unusual personal knowledge of the Nazi and German character. There was much inside information available to the Pontiff from such sources. Who could have been more qualified than this Pope to decide under the circumstances?”
Tittmann’s final assessment of Pius is persuasive and, indeed, moving. “With his diplomatic background, he was inclined to see both sides of a question, and this may have given others the impression that he was sometimes timid and reluctant to make decisions, especially in foreign affairs. In reality this was not the case. He was, in fact, decisive . . . I do not for a moment overlook his great spiritual qualities. Whether near him or away from him, one was always conscious of them. To me, he was definitely a spiritual man . . .Very possibly the future will rate him a saint”

William Doino Jr. and Joseph Bottum

2) Conference Report: Catholicism and Antisemitism in the shadow of National Socialism

a) The Spanish Civil War and the “Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy
Beth Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University, Ohio

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the conflict was quickly presented to the world as one of Christianity against Communism. The Vatican, horrified by the anti-clerical excesses of the Republicans, took this line, while Hitler justified his support of Franco’s Nationalists as being Germany’s contribution to destroy the danger of Bolshevism. But at this very moment, the Nazis were implementing their own anticlerical, and especially anti-Catholic, measures at home. The German Catholic bishops thought they should demonstrate their national loyalties by endorsing Hitler’s stance on Spain. Such support against Bolshevism, they optimistically hoped, would result in a slackening of Nazi persecution. Beth Griech-Polelle cites the vehement anti-Communist speeches of Bishop Galen, and Cardinal Faulhaber’s meeting with Hitler in November 1936 as evidence of how the Catholic bishops provided legitimacy to the Nazi campaign against the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy”. She regards this as a capitulation to the Nazis’ machinations. Of course Hitler never fulfilled his side of the bargain. In 1939 Galen publicly rejoiced in Franco’s victory over Bolshevism. But only a few months later, Hitler signed a Non-Aggression Pact with the Bolshevik leaders, thus embarrassing and compromising the German Catholic leaders, and revealing their naivety.

b) Jacques Kornberg, Pope Pius XII’s defenders

Jacques Kornberg’s contribution to the continuing debate over the war-time policies of Pope Pius XII takes the form of an excellent analysis of the main – but still largely unread – documentary source, the eleven volumes of Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la deuxieme guerre mondiale, published during the 1960s and 1970s in answer to the criticisms launched by Rolf Hochhuth. Kornberg rightly points out that the documents do not support some of the more exaggerated claims put forward by Pius’ defenders with regard to the alleged rescue of Jews from the Nazis. Instead the evidence shows, he says, that the Vatican’s priorities were continually more limited to a defence of the institutional forms and the sacramental witness of the Church. But Kornberg ignores the clear theme running thoughout these volumes that Pius’ international policy was directed towards the restoration of peace. His aim was to preserve the Vatican’s impartiality so that he could act as a mediator. To be sure, this attempt was repudiated by both sides. By 1943 Pius was obliged to recognize his failure. But so long as he clung to this hope, he was inhibited from a stronger stance of protest on behalf of wider humanitarian goals, such as by denouncing the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews. Above all, these volumes demonstrate the notable and distressing diminution of the Papacy’s moral influence during the war years. As Kornberg suggests, the Church’s emphasis on the primacy of the sacraments was not a heroic or prophetic stance. But it reflected the priority of those traumatic disillusioned times. It is certainly true that more could have been done; it is not true that nothing was done.

Next month’s issue will be dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered sixty years ago, on April 9th 1945.

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

We learn with regret of the death in Calgary on December 28th of our colleague and list-member, Frank Eyck (1921-2004).

Born in Berlin, he was forced by the Nazis to flee to England as a teenager, and subsequently went to St Paul’s School in London. Briefly interned as an “enemy alien” in 1940, he then joined the British army and served until 1946. After obtaining his B.A. in 1949 he worked for the BBC foreign service, but later on went to the University of Exeter to teach Modern European History. While there he wrote a political biography of the Prince Consort. In 1968 he moved to the University of Calgary, and took up his “inheritance” as a German historian from his famous father Erich. In the same year he published his pioneering work on “The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848-1849”. On the basis of meticulous research, and with a precise statistical breakdown of the 48ers, he disputed Disraeli’s derisive claim that it had been a “professors’ parliament”. In 1982 he wrote a sympathetic biography of his mentor and family benefactor “G.P.Gooch: A study in History and Politics”. After half a century of struggling with his heritage, both national and religious, Frank produced a monumental tome on “Religion and Politics in Germany: From the Beginnings to the French Revolution”. Therein he tried to come to grips with the troubled relationship that defined much of modern German history. In many ways it was his legacy to German historiography.
Contents:

1) Book reviews a) M Hockenos, A Church Divided
2) Book chapters

a) Religion in China Today
b) Christianity in China
c) Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust

3) Journal articles

a) M.Greschat, Martin Niemöller’s activities after 1945.
b) M.Höhle, 13 August 1961 and the churches
c) A.Chandler, Bishop Bell and the German Resistance

1a) Matthew D. Hockenos, A Church Divided. German Protestants confront the Nazi Past. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004. 269 pp. ISBN 0-253-34448-4

Coping with the Nazi past has been a preoccupation for Germans for the past sixty years. For those institutions, particularly the major churches, which saw themselves as the moral guardians of the nation, this task has been both continuous and bafflingly difficult. Admitting guilt for supporting so enthusiastically a regime which turned out to be criminally and deliberately genocidal presented major psychological hurdles for the majority of the population. The resulting malaise presented the churches with enormous problems throughout the early years of reconstruction after 1945.

Matthew Hockenos, who teaches at Skidmore College in New York State, has written an excellently researched study of the German Evangelical Churches in the immediate postwar years between 1945 and 1950. He gives a masterly account of the often strident controversies which raged, particularly in the hierarchy of the Protestant churches, over how to understand the Nazi past and the churches’ role during that fateful era. For this reason, he can rightly entitle his book “A Church Divided”. He shows, on the one hand, why and how so many conservative Lutherans were unwilling to examine their own political and theological presuppositions. On the other hand, he also describes the steps taken by reformers to create a new and more ecumenically sensitive climate, which in later years was to prove successful in overcoming the church’s divisions.

Hockenos’ first-rate use of the archival records is supplemented by a notable command of the secondary literature.

His illustrations and appendices are particularly apposite. And his skillful presentation of these often very Germanic issues for his English-speaking audience brings up to date the 1973 account by Frederic Spotts, The Church and Politics in Germany.

In 1945 Germany lay physically ruined and morally humiliated. The sense of loss through the damage and destruction of virtually all the major cities was compounded by the disasters of national defeat. The overthrow of a regime which the majority of Germans had supported left the population bereft of any comfort.

Fears for the future only added to the guilt for the past. As the only surviving institutions, the churches became a place of refuge, providing relief to the people’s bodies and souls in their unprecedented plight. The burdens placed on the clergy were therefore demanding and complex. Hockenos’ approach is both sober and sceptical. He sees clearly enough the difficulties of the Protestant clergy when faced with the tactics of self-pity and evasion adopted by their parishioners, and carefully analyses the strength and weaknesses of the responses they formulated. Coming to terms with their own record was only part of their wider responsibilities in supplying answers, particularly to the painful questions: why did this happen? What are we to do now?

. In 1945 the disappearance or dismissal of those church officials who had been ardently pro-Nazi left the way open for the surviving leaders of the Confessing Church to take charge, who had all along resisted the Nazification of the church’s doctrines and practices. But they were well aware that more was needed than just a change of church bureaucrats. The catastrophe of the hour demanded a re-examination of the whole Lutheran theological and political tradition, especially of its long-held mentality of loyalty to the state.

In fact, as Hockenos ably shows, the divisions within the church arose between those who looked for a return to Lutheran religious orthodoxy and traditional political obedience to the national state, and those who campaigned for a complete reconstruction of the church’s structures and social attitudes, based on a much more radical theology. This division, in brief, can be said to have been fostered by the alternative priorities each group put forward. To the more conservative, the pastoral needs of their congregations seemed to require the church to play the role of comforter, advocate and defender against all outside dangers. To the more radical, the church was now called to a prophetic witness, especially political, and to chart a new course of Christian discipleship for the future.

The champion of this latter cause was Pastor Martin Niemöller, the former U-Boat captain and survivor of seven years in concentration camps. He drew his inspiration from the Swiss-German theologian, Karl Barth, whose stinging criticisms of his more conservative colleagues for their capitulation to Nazism and nationalism, had made him many enemies. The Barthians, as they were called, called their brethren to account, and relentlessly attacked the evasions and theological subterfuge which soon enough began to be adopted to deal with the what became known as Œdie Schuldfrage’. The resulting failure to agree on the legacy of the past was the principal cause of the church being divided. Hockenos is to be congratulated on showing not only how these churchmen addressed this legacy, but also why they addressed it as they did.

In so doing, he disputes the widely-held view that post-1945 Germans were too exhausted or demoralized to face the question of their recent past. Instead he gives us a thorough analysis of the often heated debates within the Evangelical Church, culminating in the notable declarations of 1950 on the most sensitive issue of all, the lamentable heritage of Christian antisemitism.

But the division equally arose over the future policies of the church. To the surprise of most conservative nationalists in the parishes, they found that, in the summer of 1945, their conquerors, with their military administrators, proved sympathetic to the churches. They offered the churches help in rebuilding, and encouraged their pastoral work for the needy, the sick and the refugees. They furthermore made it clear that the churches were free to decide their own future, provided that they resolutely cleansed their own ranks of Nazi sympathizers. At two major conferences in 1945, at Treysa and Stuttgart, the surviving leaders sought to achieve a consensus of unity and to lay out a practical course of starting again. But the future could not be planned without dealing with the unresolved past. Hockenos quite rightly points out how nearly the whole attempt failed for this reason.

Hockenos recognizes that these clergymen all shared a theological perspective on the world and its affairs. His description of events therefore rightly gives us the gist of the theological arguments deployed – in contrast to Frederic Spotts’ previous survey which avoided theology entirely. He shows very well how both the conservatives and the reformers could make use of the considerable theological resources of their Lutheran heritage to justify their respective positions. But, nevertheless, the issues to be faced were highly political in their consequences.

The reformers, led by Niemöller, and backed by Barth, wanted to rebuild a church totally independent of the state. Instead, such a church should be a prophetic scourge of all power structures, and the chastiser of any misuse of state power. They preferred a congregational church polity, the abolition of all hierarchical structures and a voluntary church membership. It was to be a “Living Church”, instead of the Erastian establishment of the past. Only thus could the church become a powerful voice for peace and justice, steadfastly repenting of its past nationalism and its too close association with state power. The lesson of the Nazi years demanded a suitably penitent stance for the future.

This programme, militantly proclaimed, was strongly opposed by the majority of church members. They much preferred to embrace self-exculpating versions of events, whereby the church had been victimized by the Nazis, and now again by the Allied military governments. They rallied around those leaders who saw themselves as upholding the true German national spirit. The Nazi excesses were excused as the work of a handful of brown-shirted fanatics, diabolically misled. The encroachments of the foreign conquerors should be repelled by the resurgence of loyalty to the nation. Examination of past errors, let alone sackcloth and ashes, was distinctly unpopular.

The clash between these contentious and seemingly irreconcilable views was only averted by the eirenic plea for unity expressed by the senior bishop, Wurm of Württemberg. He took the lead in 1945, chaired the early meetings, and sought a compromise position which would include as many church members as possible. Largely at his instigation, the existing church regional structures and polity were retained. Former Nazis, unless very prominent in their attacks on church doctrine, were allowed to return to their parishes. The church was called to act as the people’s advocate towards the occupying powers, to resist all ideas of German collective guilt, and to cherish a sense of national identity again.

Yes, at the same time, Wurm recognized that Niemöller and his followers had to be listened to. Repentance for the mistakes of the past was obligatory. A new beginning, and a new relationship with churches abroad, was now a paramount necessity. Self-congratulation for their own survival, or attempts to turn the clock back had to be resolutely opposed.

The result of this pressure could be seen in the notable Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945, which tackled this highly contentious topic in very general terms, but also promised to take up the church’s God-given commission with renewed dedication.

Hockenos ably outlines the various arguments the church leaders put forward to defend these positions. Many of them were self-serving, some were vague and mystical, all were opportunistic, in the sense that they were designed to give theological justification to the respective plans for the church’s future. But, as Hockenos laudably points out, by the light of later judgment, all fell short by avoiding any precise admission of the church’s most glaring omission, its failure to stand by the Nazis’ chief victims, the Jews.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, for instance, made no specific mention of the Jews. It is clear that, in the immediate post-war years, the church’s preoccupation with its own plight took precedence over any thorough theological reflection. This was in fact a widespread phenomenon and not confined to the German Protestants alone. It was only in later years that the mood began to change.

By the end of 1945 the conservatives in the churches had begun to rally. They loudly voiced the general feeling that Germany was being maltreated by its conquerors, resisted the Allies’ compulsory de-Nazification programme, and lamented the imposition of alien ideologies, i.e. western democracy or eastern communism. Bishop Wurm even publicly accused the Allies of seeking to destroy the German “race” by starving them with inadequate rations. Self-pity became far more prevalent than any sense of repentance. Conservative churchmen became adept at balancing Germany’s own destruction and losses against the suffering inflicted on others. While the Nazi crimes were admitted, these could be blamed on the small number of gangsters who had seized power. The church was seen as non-involved and hence blameless.

Hockenos’ narrative of these developments is exemplary. His analysis of the theological issues is sophisticated. His sympathies clearly lie with the reformers, but here he follows every English-speaking writer on German church affairs. Most notably he breaks new ground in describing how the churches dealt with the Jewish question. His final two chapters outline the initial and tentative steps taken by the reformers to come to terms with the realization of how much Christian anti-judaic traditions had led to the endorsement of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and had precluded any open resistance to the Nazis’ crimes.

This painful reassessment began when a group of former Confessing Church leaders, some of whom had been in concentration camps alongside Jews, recognized the need for a fundamental transformation of the church’s relationship to Jews and its understanding of Judaism. This process was slow and reluctant – in Hockenos’ view, much too slow. But it was no easy task to overcome the deep-seated legacy of popular anti-Judaism, combined with an antisemitism which continued even after the horrors of the Nazi-inflicted atrocities became known. Only when the prevalent myths of Christian triumphalism and supersessionism were abandoned was the way open for a new beginning.

This movement was at first the work of only a handful of Protestant clergymen, none of them well known. Their superiors argued that there were other more pressing priorities. Some of the advocates were drawn from the missionary movement. They were appalled by the sufferings the Jews had experienced, so now argued that the church must redouble its attempts to show love to the survivors. But, too often, this meant a redoubled effort to convert Jews to Christianity, since this was the greatest gift such missionaries could confer. Needless to say, none of these ardent souls ever asked the surviving Jews if such missionary proselytizing was their desired form of reparation. And even those Jews who had voluntarily or earlier joined the church often felt forsaken by the wider church community. Antisemitic stereotypes still remained prevalent in many church circles.

Only slowly did the realization sink in that the “Jewish question” could not be solved by Jewish missions. Much more crucial was the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948. Led by Karl Barth, Protestants were now adjured to see this as a sign that God had remained faithful to His chosen people. At the same time, Christians should acknowledge their indebtedness to their elders in faith, and join in thanks for the gift of the Jewish scriptures. The fateful “teaching of contempt” was to be replaced by feelings of respect.

No less striking was the emergence of a new mood, at least in West Germany, where Protestants took the lead in seeking opportunities to meet in dialogue with Jewish representatives, such Rabbi Leo Baeck. A new approach based on humility and reverence was to be encouraged. The result was the notable statement issued at the 1950 Synod, when the German Evangelical Church for the first time explicitly admitted its guilt towards the Jews. It was the initial opening of a new chapter, which in the intervening years has gained a wide theological consensus.

Hockenos concludes with the thought that the divisions caused by the rival doctrines and policies of conservatives and reformers are still with us. “Although the conservative legacy survived into the post-war period and dominated church affairs in the decades to follow, the alternative vision of the church as the conscience of the people and champion of a new political ethic challenged the majority view and continues to influence a minority within the Protestant Church today” (p. 177).

This is an authoritative account which combines both theological insight and political judgment. Hockenos’ shrewd and often critical analysis of the character of the main actors and their ecclesiastical and political choices carries weight. It is much to be hoped that his study will soon appear in a German translation.
JSC
2a) ed. Daniel Overmyer, Religion in China Today, Cambridge University Press 2003.
This excellent collection of articles by China specialists seeks to describe the present state of religious life in today’s China, and has been put together by scholars from the University of British Columbia. The editor’s introduction shows that, contrary to Communist theory, religious life in China has not withered away, but is very much flourishing in a variety of guises. The consequent struggle for authority in the Marxist-ruled state is here explored in depth by Pitman Potter, who demonstrates the ambiguity of the current regime towards religious groups, still seeking to control their activities, while claiming to encourage a “more tolerant management of religious organizations”. Daniel Bays, now of Calvin College, Michigan, contributes a notable essay on the current resurgence of Chinese Protestant Christianity. On any given Sunday, he holds, there are more Protestants in church in China than in all of Europe. Richard Madsen, of San Diego, provides a counterpart essay on the mixed results of the Catholic revival during the reform era. The bibliographical aids are particularly helpful. This valuable overview concentrates on the present situation, but often enough refers to the past. In one sense, this collection supersedes the following work:

2b) ed. Daniel Bays, Christianity in China, Stanford U.P. 1996
Included in this useful survey is a fine article by Tim Brook on “Toward Independence: Christianity in China under the Japanese Occupation, 1937-1945.” This outlines the impact particularly on the Western- based missions of the Japanese attempt to control the Chinese society and economy in pursuit of their imperial goals. Brook shows that the aim of many Chinese Christians to achieve independence and union were greatly assisted by the enforced retreat of the foreign missionaries. To be sure the Japanese occupation power promoted the Chinese Church’s independence for its own reasons, but the net result was to encourage the mood which resulted in the 3 self patriotic movement of later years. The dilemmas of the Christian Chinese leaders, caught between the need to accommodate themselves to the new ruling power, to ward off the suspicions of their fellow countrymen who had fled to the Chinese-controlled parts of the country, and to still maintain some contact with their former supporters in the mission boards, are here well demonstrated. But Brook suggests that the strategies worked out during this period were to be significant when the even greater onslaught of the Communist revolution took place a few years later.
2b) eds. Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus, Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, Westport, Conn: Praeger 2004
Perhaps I may be allowed to mention an essay of my own included in this book: J.S.Conway, “Changes in Christian-Jewish relations since the Holocaust”. This outlines the virtually revolutionary changes brought about in the major Christian communities of western Christendom by the advent of the state of Israel and by the reflections on the Holocaust. The theological changes prompted by the latter have been enormously complicated by the political impact of the former, as this essay seeks to show. But the sad history of the church’s long involvement with theological anti-Judaic prejudice has now been replaced by a much more eirenic stance in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. The current teachings will now, it is to be hoped, become irreversible.
3a) M.Greschat, Der ist ein Feind dieses Staates!’ Martin Niemöllers Aktivitäten in der Anfangsjahren der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 114 (2003), no.3,pp. 333-56.

At the end of 1951, in the midst of the Cold War, the German public was shocked to read the news that Pastor Martin Niemöller, the former U-Boat captain, former concentration camp inmate, and now Church President = Bishop of the Protestant Church in Hessen-Nassau was about to pay a fraternal visit to the Soviet Union. Ostensibly his purpose was to meet with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. But, in view of his erratic political stances, his activities were a cause of alarm among many of Germany’s conservative leaders, who suspected more sinister motives.

Niemöller had survived the war by a hair’s breadth, and saw his post-war mission at first to call for repentance and reconciliation. But the onset of the Cold War, the creation of the West German Bundesrepublik under the Catholic leader Konrad Adenauer, and the consequent division of the country between the rival alliances, made these goals highly debatable. Niemöller became the champion of having a disarmed, demilitarized but still united country, freed from the control of either Washington or Moscow. Not surprisingly this goal was regarded with grave suspicion by all those who distrusted such far-flung idealism.
Martin Greschat\s article is a masterly summary of the various responses Niemöller’s activities evoked, though he doesn’t quote Adenauer’s reported outburst, following the English king Henry II: “Who will rid us of this turbulent priest?”

In fact Niemöller’s politics were often naive and always moral. His motif: “What would Jesus say to this?” was hardly adequate to the complexity of the issues to be faced. So Greschat’s sympathy is limited with this attractive, often heroic, but always challenging, leader of German Protestantism. His accurate assessment of Niemöller’s inspiring but sometimes wrong-headed vision is a most welcome addition to the post-1945 history of the German churches.

3b) Michael Höhle, Der 13 August 1961 und die Kirchen in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Vol 114 (2003), no 3, pp. 364-83.

The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 saw not only the physical division of the city, but also the enforced separation of the ecclesiastical authorities. Both Catholics and Protestants had attempted up to then to hold together both parts of Berlin in a wider national framework. Höhle describes how the GDR regime deliberately and skillfully pursued its plan of weakening the churches and of obliging their eastern members to play a subordinate role under the Communist leadership. He illustrates the subsequent dilemmas confronting particularly the Roman Catholic Church in Berlin.

3c) A.Chandler, Bishop Bell and the other Germany during the second world war in Humanitas, Vol. 6 no. 1, Oct. 2004, p.3 -30.

Bishop Bell’s heroic but often unpopular support of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany is here analyzed by a leading scholar of the Anglican Church’s political role in the last century. Bell was essentially a liberal and ecumenical church leader, who sought to promote reconciliation and peace between the former enemies. But his eyes about the Nazi regime were opened by his contacts in the international Life and Work movement and by such representatives of the Confessing Church as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His support of Neville Chamberlain “appeasement policy”, however, led to his being shunned once war broke out. Churchill and his government never had any sympathy with the view that there were “good” Germans ready to make peace. Bell’s argument that these men should be given some indication of British support fell on completely deaf ears. And his subsequent criticism of the British demand for unconditional surrender, and the blanket condemnation of all Germans, was equally ineffective. The anti-German propaganda, associated with Lord Vansittart, was sweeping away what little sympathy remained for Bell’s point of view. He remained convinced, however, that the conspirators, who failed in July 1944 to overthrow Hitler and his regime, might have succeeded better if they had been encouraged from abroad. Chandler is doubtful, but praises Bell’s efforts to try and bring a Christian moral perspective to the conduct of politics in a world of hatred, conflict and destruction.
Best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Today I am celebrating my 75th birthday, and the beginning of Volume XI of this Newsletter. Both events astonish me, and no doubt you too! But having survived so far, I can only pray to be given strength to go on for a while yet. Certainly, I am equally astonished and delighted by the number, range and quality of books on contemporary church history which continue to appear – and hence require notice. This revival of interest in church history in general, and our period in particular, is of course to be greeted with pleasure by all who believe that the Christian faith and its history can and must be presented to the world as the on-going process of God’s good providence. I can only hope that my small efforts to this end have met with your approval, as is indicated by the fact that our mailing list continues to grow! Your support over the years has been an enormous encouragement to me. So the New Year affords an opportunity to send you all my very warm thanks in gratitude for your support, and also to send greetings and best wishes for your respective endeavours in the coming months. I am always glad to hear from you with your comments, so long as you send them to me at the address below.
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Katharina Staritz: Dokumentation Vol. 1

b) D.Palm, Evangelische Kirchentage.

2) Book chapter: H.Lehmann, Religious Socialism, Peace and Pacifism.

3) The situation in the Ukraine, December 2004.

List of books reviewed in 2004
1a) Katherina Staritz 1903-1953, mit einem Exkurs Elisabeth Schmitz Dokumentation Band 1: 1903-1942, eds. Hannelore Erhart, Ilse Meseberg-Haubold, Dietgard Meyer. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlagshaus. 2nd edition 2002. ISBN 3-7887-1682-7

Katherina Staritz was one of the first women to become an ordained minister of the German Evangelical Church. In this role she was to become one of the few heroines of this church during the Holocaust. But she has largely been forgotten, even by those who followed in her pioneering footsteps. It is safe to say that abroad she is completely unknown. So it is particularly welcome that three of her friends – perhaps disciples – have undertaken this excellent and careful documentary compilation of her letters and papers, along with an illuminating introduction to her career. The difficulties she faced in pursuing her goal to become a theologian, her courageous engagement on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution, and her sufferings at the hands of the Gestapo, are the main themes of this preliminary first volume, which takes her story up to the time of her imprisonment in Ravensbrück, the notorious concentration camp for women. This documentary collection provides a fascinating view of the Church Struggle and its consequences as seen through the eyes of this sensitive and dedicated woman.

Katherina Staritz lived most of her life in Breslau in Silesia, and began her studies after the end of the first world war. It was a time of great confusion and intellectual turmoil, with so many of the pre-war certainties overthrown and discredited. Her desire was to seek for answers in the study of theology, but her father saw no career prospects for a woman in that field, so encouraged her to study Arts with a view to teaching. But she persevered and eventually switched faculties and obtained her theological degree.

She was encouraged in this course by a family friend, Professor Hans von Soden, who later became Dean of the Theological Faculty at Marburg. Katherina’s correspondence with him over the span of twenty years is, in fact, the main source used in this book. He saved her letters, and after his death in 1945, they were all returned to her. Unfortunately his letters to her seem to have been lost when she was forced to flee Breslau on the approach of the Red Army in 1945. But her attractive openness in discussing with her mentor in respectful tones the theological issues in which she was involved give an illuminating picture of some of the main currents of debate within the Protestant churches of the time.
Hans von Soden was a systematic theologian with a liberal slant. But both politically and in church politics he was conservative. Hence he early on attacked the Nazi Party for its radicalism and saw to it that Marburg was not infiltrated by pro-Nazi theologians of the “German Christian” sort. In fact, with the help of Rudolf Bultmann, Marburg became one of the fortresses of the Confessing Church, and Katherina Staritz one of the loyal following of this school.

In the early 1930s, her letters to von Soden tell of her struggles to gain recognition of her gifts and training. To be sure, since 1927, the Evangelical Church had issued regulations for the employment of theologically qualified women, but only in subordinate positions. They did not enjoy the right to be fully ordained, were subject to the supervision of a male pastor, and most shocking of all, were obliged to abandon their careers upon marriage. (To be fair, this same highly discriminatory regulation was applied to women teachers in British universities until the 1950s!) The best these women could expect was the title of “Vikarin”, clearly to distinguish them from “Herr Pastor”.

As a result, Katherina was employed in Breslau, on a city-wide basis, to minister mainly to women and children, to preach only occasionally, and not to celebrate the sacraments. Her success was such that in 1938 she was rewarded with “tenure”, though still at lower rates of pay than her male counterparts.

Largely because she was assigned to what were considered fringe tasks, she became involved with ministering to the Protestants of Jewish origin, whose plight in the late 1930s became of increasing concern to the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church had all along refused to accept the Nazis’ blanket condemnation of all Jews, whether converted or not. Instead, they recognized that baptism brought any converts into the Christian fold, and therefore they must be unequivocally supported. The November 1938 pogrom, commonly known as the Crystal Night onslaught, was thus a major challenge, and created a dangerous rift in Protestant ranks. Thanks to the initiative of Pastor Heinrich Grüber in Berlin, Katherina Staritz was put in charge of the Breslau branch of his “Büro”, established to assist such victims. Their main effort before 1939 was to advise those seeking to emigrate, but also to deal with the traumatic situations of those with no prospect of leaving the country.

For those who, like Katherina, sought to help, as her letters make clear, the frustration and sense of powerlessness resulting from the Gestapo’s increasingly repressive measures, imposed an ever-growing psychological strain. Moreover it became more and more obvious that helping the Nazis’ Jewish victims was personally dangerous. In December 1940 Pastor Grüber was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. With emigration banned from the summer of 1941, and with no public means of rallying support, the aid workers were silenced, dispirited, and distraught.
The crisis for Katherina Staritz came in September 1941 when the Gestapo announced its nation-wide decree that all Jews must wear a visible yellow star on their clothing. This was intended to bring about the further isolation and separation of persons of Jewish origin from the rest of the population, and indeed achieved this end. But, for those Christian Jews who were already in a threatened minority situation, this edict meant the probable loss of one of the few sources of comfort and consolation they still had. Many expressed fears of the physical dangers they now would be subject to if they appeared at the church services they had frequented, often for years.

Katherina Staritz was well aware of this predicament and resolved to take action. She therefore, with the backing of her immediate superior, but without consulting any higher ecclesiastical authority, sent round a circular to all the clergy of Breslau city, which stated:

“It is the Christian duty of the parishes not to exclude anyone wearing the Jewish star from their worship services. These persons have the same right to be at home in the church as any other parishioner and are in special need of the comfort of God’s word. The danger exists that some not truly Christian elements may be led astray, so that the Christian honour of the church might be sullied by un-Christian behaviour, Instead parishioners should be reminded to behave pastorally, see Luke 10: 25-37, Matthew 25:40, and Zechariah 7:9-10. Practically, I ask you to consider whether or not, church officials, vergers, sidesmen etc, could be instructed to act in an especially pastoral manner to these members of the parish, now so singled out, and when necessary to provide special seats for them. Perhaps some reserved seats could be set aside, but not as a form of bench for the poor only, but rather to prevent them from being rejected or expelled by any un-Christian elements. In order to ensure that no unevangelical discrimination creeps in, it would be desirable for true and loyal parishioners, who know what the church really stands for, or hold official positions, to also sit next to those who are obliged to wear the Jewish star. Perhaps also such persons could be escorted to church services, since several have told me that they are not sure if they dare to come to church”.

Within a few days, this text had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo – probably leaked by one of the pro-Nazi pastors, and the skies fell in on the unfortunate Vikarin. Her office was raided by the Gestapo and all remaining copies of her circular were confiscated. She was then summoned to meet the Church President = Bishop, and told that she was immediately suspended from duty. When she protested that she was only carrying out her pastoral responsibilities, for which she had been ordained, she was publicly rebuked and let fall by her ecclesiastical superiors up to the national level.
Even in her own parish church, the church committee led by some laymen passed a resolution demanding that no one wearing the Jewish star should be allowed on the premises, thus making impossible the counseling services she had provided. When the four pastors united to protest, they were overruled. And the highest church authority announced that from henceforth “baptised ‘non-aryans’ had to remain away from the church life of German parishes, and would have to make their own arrangements for separate worship and pastoral services”. This betrayal of the Christian cause marks the nadir of the church’s capitulation to Nazi pressures in Silesia.

Worse was to follow The Gestapo passed this circular on to the Reich Propaganda Ministry, under Goebbels, where it was seen as a most useful piece of evidence for proving the churches’ perfidious undermining of the National Socialist ideology. Consequently a virulent attack was launched in the Nazi media on Katherina Staritz as a prize example of the national treachery to be expected from such church members. She was denounced for her sabotage of the war effort at the very moment when Germany’s destiny was being decided. As a result, in March 1942, she was arrested and taken off to Ravensbrück.

Her subsequent fate will be described in Volume 2, due out later this year. JSC

1b) Dirk Palm. “Wir Sind doch Brueder”: Der Evangelische Kirchentag und die Deutsche Frage, 1949-1961. Arbeiten zur Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002. 360 pp. Table, notes, bibliography, index. Euro 49.00 (cloth), ISBN 3-525-55736-1.
(This review appeared first on H-German on November 7th 2004)

Anyone who has experienced a German Kirchentag (church gathering) is aware that there is really no analogy in religiously-heterogeneous American society; even an English translation of the term is difficult. At the Dresden Kirchentag held under the big-tent theme of “Dare to Trust” in July 1983, this reviewer witnessed how East German Protestant laity posed explosive political issues such as peace and militarization, ecology and human rights, pressing church leaders and the SED regime to respond even as both church and state preferred to shield the Luther-year celebration from the rising tide of social dissent. Until the candlelight marches in the final days of the GDR, such massive gatherings of several hundred thousand people were impossible in any other context than a Kirchentag closing service. This carnival of Kirchentag–Bible studies and political discussion, grassroots organizing and event management, high level negotiations between church and state juxtaposed with spontaneous demonstrations and surveillance by the Stasi–is the object of Dirk Palm’s in-depth and well-researched study. Even though Palm focuses on the early postwar years, the mix of motives among leaders and laity, the partisan interest and politicization by the media, the changing international context characterized the institution Kirchentag in its formative years as well.

Palm’s main goal is to describe and interpret the founding of the Kirchentag in its heyday as an all-German movement after World War II. His chronology ends in 1961, when the Berlin Wall and GDR policy precluded the possibility of such mass meetings. The author provides rich biographical description of the individuals who were instrumental in this movement, in particular Reinold Thadden-Trieglaff, long-time chair of the German Evangelical Kirchentag organization. In the process, the author develops a three-fold typology of conceptions which informed the motives of the various actors and provide the basis for the political tension and compromises which proved necessary to mount such large public events in the context of the widening division of Germany. Thadden-Trieglaff’s vision of “popular mission” and rechristianization after the Nazi era clashed with that of those, such as the founder of the Evangelical Academy, Eberhard Mueller, and Bishop Hans Lilje of Hannover, who conceived of its function in terms of an “academic-problem oriented conception,” a forum for dialogue among elites (p. 304). Still others, such as Berlin Bishop Otto Dibelius and Hessen-Nassau Church President Martin Niemoeller, emphasized a “political-symbolic function” in their conception of the Kirchentag.

The study reflects extensive use of archival sources, including not only GDR sources (SED, state, and CDU-East), but also church archives of the EKD/Kirchentag and important regional churches and official West German sources found in the Federal Archives in Koblenz. Palm augments this with extensive analysis of media coverage of the Kirchentage in order to determine their public resonance. Finally, he uses personal papers and interviews on a limited basis. Palm is thereby able to develop greater insight into the motives and interactions of the multiplicity of actors involved.
Palm investigates the process whereby the fundamentally religious goal of the Kirchentag was altered as a result of the founders’ efforts to institutionalize this new organization, requiring political, logistical and financial support from a host of actors which were largely pursuing their own non-religious interests. For example, to mount all-German Kirchentage the leaders had to navigate the shifting sands of the two German states which were seeking to use the Kirchentag to delay FRG rearmament and integration into the West (in the case of the GDR, CDU-East, and Niemoeller) and to delegitimize the GDR by giving vent to popular dissent (in the case of the FRG, CDU-West and Dibelius). By exploring the agenda and debate at the Kirchentage, Palm demonstrates the effect of the widening political division on the substance of the Kirchentage. Issues such as rearmament and educational discrimination in the East gave way to more focus on issues relevant to the respective part of Germany, such as Mitbestimmung in the West and political activity in the East. Palm demonstrates clearly how shifts in the general East-West climate directly affected the Kirchentage: holding them in Berlin and Leipzig in 1951 and 1954 represented GDR forebearance in the face of Soviet initiatives, whereas rejection of plans for Thuringia and Berlin in 1957 and 1961 reflected the new-found self-assurance of the GDR, in particular Ulbricht’s hard-line wing of the SED.
Other fronts that Palm explores and documents include that between the FRG government under Adenauer and the Kirchentag. Adenauer supported the Kirchentag as a means of developing greater support for the CDU among Protestants and of putting the GDR on the defensive. The Catholic competition with the Protestants also factored into the Kirchentag’s efforts. For its part, the Kirchentag leaders needed the financial support and participation of FRG leaders to make the institution viable as well as gain visibility in German society.
On the internal church side, this study reveals fault lines not obvious to the outsider, but crucial to an understanding of this institution. For example, the split between conservatives and leftists among Protestants manifested itself in the diplomacy involved in planning the Kirchentage and in the debates themselves. In scheduling speakers, Heinemann had to be balanced by Gerstenmaier, Niemoeller by Dibelius.In addition, Palm nicely plumbs the nuances of church support for the Kirchentag. On the one hand, it represented a means of outreach to laity and social relevance. On the other hand, it engendered suspicion in the institutional/clerical church, which often contended that it alone embodied ecclesiastical authority. The largely-successful efforts of the Kirchentag to gain financial support from the FRG and the United States, and from business sponsors provided greater autonomy from the institutional church, even at the expense of increased political dependence.

Ultimately, however, Palm’s purpose in exploring these internal factions is to explain how the Kirchentag sought to establish itself as an element of civil society in an increasingly asymmetrical East-West context. After its hopes to deter West German integration into the West were dashed, the GDR’s efforts to limit the church to the cultic sphere would necessarily target the all-German public forum, Kirchentag (pp. 254-255). Not surprisingly the proposals for parallel Kirchentage in East and West in the late 1950s presaged the split in the Kirchentage movement itself and foreshadowed the 1969 split in the EKD. Dresden 1983 showed that despite the rupture in all-German institutions, the element of civil society did not die out: the reopening of the German question in the 1980s would lend new “political-symbolic significance” to the Kirchentage in both East and West.
Robert F.Goeckel, State University of New York, Geneseo

2) Book chapter, H.Lehmann, “Religious Socialism, Peace and Pacifism” in eds. R.Chickering and Stig Foerster, The Shadows of Total War, Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, and Cambridge University Press, 2003 ISBN 0 521 81236 4

Hartmut Lehman’s short account of Paul Tillich’s spiritual and political pilgrimage is very welcome. Had he been an English clergyman, his theological development and subscription to radical left-wing politics, including pacifism, would not have been remarkable. But, in the German Evangelical Church, it was indeed notable, if only because so few others joined him in his search for Christian alternatives to war, nationalism and capitalism. Equally notable is the fact that, with the rise of Hitler and his expulsion from Germany, Tillich began to lose that sense of idealism and eventually, in trying to persuade his American audiences, argued that the responsible use of military power was necessary to regain and safeguard world peace. At the same time, he denounced the sacralization of the nation, which had been the downfall of so many German Protestants. He saw his mission to teach the German people that there were higher values than the nation.

Of course, the same course was followed by some others, notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Unfortunately Lehmann doesn’t go into the similarities of these two theologians’ pilgrimage, nor the reasons why other pacifists, especially Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, possibly German Protestantism’s most notable pacifist in the 1920s, did not adopt the same path. But Lehmann correctly notes that Tillich’s resolute refusal to compromise with Nazi totalitarianism earned him a moral authority which resulted in his being received with honour in his native country in the 1950s. JSC

3. On December 6th (Feast of St Nicholas), the German Evangelical Church’s News Service carried the following item about relief efforts in the Ukraine:

“Kiew verwandelt sich in eine Festung” – Deutscher Auslandspfarrer schreibt aus der Ukraine.
Seine Kirche sei voll von erschoepften Menschen, erklaerte Pfarrer Peter Sachi Ende November am Telefon. Er hatte es eilig, wollte sich wieder um die Leute kuemmern. Sachi ist Pfarrer der Deutschen Evangelischen Gemeinde St. Katharina in Kiew. In den Unruhen nach den ukrainischen Praesidentschaftswahlen bemuehe sich die Kirchengemeinde Herberge und Schutzraum zu sein, so der Pfarrer in einem offenen Brief nach Deutschland. Der Kirchenvorstand, der Wachdienst, Gemeindeangehoerige und er als Seelsorger sorgten nach Kraeften dafuer, die taeglichen Gottesdienste und Veranstaltungen aufrecht zu erhalten. Die Unterstuetzung aus Deutschland, Briefe, Anrufe sei dabei sehr wichtig. “Denn wir haben auch Angst, wir sind muede, die Nerven sind duenner geworden.” Die Kirche sei eine “Herberge am Weg”. Hier koennten die Menschen durchatmen, ausruhen, Kerzen entzuenden und beten. Sachi berichtete von gegenseitigem “Hoeren und Verstehenlernen”.

I trust you all enjoyed a restful and pleasant Christmas, and take this opportunity to wish all the best for the New Year
John Conway
jconway@inyterchange.ubc.ca

List of books reviewed in 2004:

Barrasch-Rubinstein,E Reading Hochuth’s The Deputy November Besier, G. ed, Zwischen nationaler Revolution und militarischer Aggression January Benz, W. Uberleben im Drittten Reich October Braaten C and Jensen R. Jews and Christians June Coady. M.F. biography of Fr Alfred Delp January Fennell, N. The Russians on Athos May Gilbert, M. The Righteous October Goodman, P. Hitler and the Vatican July/August Greschat, M. Evangelische Christenheit February Hein,M. Die saechsiche Landeskirche nach 1945 May Holtschneider, H. German Protestants and the Holocaust September Klempa, L. and Doran, R. Certain women amazed us March Kohlbrugge,H. Mein unberechenbares Leben November Krell,M. Intersecting pathways: Jewish and Christians theologians June
Krieg, R. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany December Linn, Ruth Escaping Auschwitz November Napolitano, M Il papa che salvo gli ebrei July/August Nehring, A. Orientalismus und Mission May Ostmeyer, I. Evangelische Kirche und Juden in der DDR September Roseman, M. The Past in Hiding April Schmidt, H. Hilde Schneider January Weitensteiner, H. Catholic parishes in Frankfurt October Williams,A. Holy Spy May Zasloff, T. A Rescuer’s Story (Vichy France) March Ziefle, H. One woman against the Reich September

Dear Friends,
A Prayer for the Christmas Season

Living God,
Through your incarnation you fill us with new hope.
which we have known in word and sacrament,
in the life of the church,
and in the witness of saints and martyrs
May the power of your love,
continue your saving work among us,
and bring us to the joy you promise for all your holy creation.

Contents:

1) Book Reviews: a) Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany
2) H-German debate: The Rosenstrasse film
3) Journal articles:

a) Lawson, The Anglican Understanding of Nazism
b) Ederer, Propaganda wars
c) articles in Religion,State and Society, June 2004

4) Conference report: Hastings, Munich Catholics in the 1920s
5) Book notes: Simon Phipps: A Portrait
6) Research in progress: Slater, John Nelson Darby
1a) Robert A.Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany, New York/London: Continuum 2004. ix + 234 pp.
ISBN 0-5264-1576-8.

Professor Robert Krieg of Notre Dame University, Indiana, has given us a valuable addition to the English-language studies of German Catholicism during the Third Reich. Together with the work of some younger scholars, such as Kevin Spicer, Mark Ruff, Derek Hastings and Oded Heilbronner, we now have a much more balanced picture than in Gunter Lewy’s initial survey forty years ago. And in contrast to many of the German-language accounts, Krieg has the merit of both clarity and brevity. This will be an excellent work for undergraduates.

These studies have all begun with the inherent question: why did the Catholic Church not forestall or resist more forcefully the tide of Nazi totalitarianism? Or put more sceptically, why did the Church compromise and capitulate so fatefully to the Nazi menace?

Krieg’s answer looks carefully both at the history of the Catholic milieu, and at the theological leaders, five of whom he examines at greater length, while placing them very ably in their context. He points out that German Catholicism was in a unique situation, and, as others have already done, he stresses as major factors the lasting impact of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and the hierarchy’s search for stability and security thereafter. At the same time, he shows that the prevailing trend in Catholic theological teaching concentrated on the somewhat abstract ideas of Thomas Aquinas, and seemed to give little guidance to the faithful for their political stance in everyday politics. Krieg could possibly have made more of the impact of the loss of the first world war, which in the 1920s disconcerted both Catholics and Protestants alike, resulting in confused and conflicting responses to the challenge of the secular world.

Three of the five theologians whom Krieg analyses, Eschweiler, Lortz and Adam, achieved later notoriety for their open support for the new Nazi regime, at least to begin with. Together with lesser-known figures whom Krieg discusses, their motives were extremely varied. In fact, as he points out, none of these men can be seen as representative of the whole Catholic milieu. Despite the prestige of these professors, their affirmations were matched by the opposing views held by their colleagues and bishops. Karl Eschweiler would seem to have been a firm authoritarian. Hitler’s leadership against modernity and especially against the Bolshevik danger was the main attraction. Joseph Lortz however had a much grander vision. He looked for the renewal of Western civilization, whereby Hitler’s political energies could be united with Catholic spirituality. Such co-operation, as Mussolini had shown, could be beneficial in rebuilding a spiritually vibrant society along organic lines. It was, as Victor Conzemius pointed out, “idealism separated from reality”.

To be fair, Lortz soon enough began to recognize that the Nazi movement contained other and more dangerous elements. His subsequent withdrawal was sufficient to enable him to resume a long and fruitful academic career after the war.

The most noteworthy of these scholars was Karl Adam, professor of systematic theology at Tübingen University, who already in the 1920s had gained a world-wide audience, and indeed may be considered one of the most creative theologians of the early twentieth century. But, in Krieg’s view, he was also most naive in his assessment of National Socialism. As a result, in 1933, he enthusiastically endorsed Hitler’s new regime, believing that here was a leader of messianic capabilities, who would rebuild the national community and revive Catholicism in the process. To his credit, he
recognized the need for a new start, and the spiritual hunger caused by the confusions and uncertainties of political affairs. He agreed with Lortz and Oswald Spengler that the West was suffering a spiritual and cultural breakdown. His answer was to reject the corrosive influences of modernity and individualism, and return to the authority of the church. Faith and culture should find a new synthesis.

Karl Adam saw himself as a mediator between the church and the Nazi state. This led him to approve the Nazis’ antisemitic policies because each nation has a duty to strengthen its racial identity. But Catholics should relate to individual Jews with justice and love. In Krieg’s view, Adam’s fault lay in not recognizing that Nazism’s goals were incompatible with Christianity, despite overlapping terminologies.
But there were others. Romano Guardini was professor of theology in Berlin until dismissed by the Nazis in 1939. He early on recognized the “barbaric” character of the movement and wrote books implicitly criticizing the Nazi manipulation of the public through their invasive propaganda. But Guardini’s upholding of Christian tradition was muted during the war and only flourished afterwards in rebuilding the Bonn republic on good Christian lines.

A lesser-known figure was the Freiburg dogmatic theologian, Engelbert Krebs, whose broader vision of the church’s mission separated him from those colleagues searching for a political leader who would somehow restore Christendom. Krebs was singular in writing and speaking in favour of Judaism, and thus challenged both the Nazis’ antisemitism and the church’s theological anti-Judaism. But he paid the price of being removed from his professorship in 1937. Like Guardini he was silenced for the rest of the Nazi era.

The variety of these theologians’ responses to the Nazi regime reflected views prevalent throughout German Catholicism. The leading bishops sought to preserve its institutional autonomy, and on the whole succeeded. The result was an absence of any strong prophetic witness on behalf of the suffering and oppressed. Catholics had not been armed by their theologians with the moral fervour or compelling arguments which would have been required for such a stance. None of the German bishops or theologians supported an overthrow of the regime, even when its tyranny became clear. But the limited ecclesiology they espoused did inoculate them against Nazi infiltration or subversion. Their passive resistance saved the pastoral life and ensured institutional survival. However, as Krieg notes, their moral authority was eroded by their silence over Nazi atrocities. Subsequent commentators have rightly criticized this model for the church, and the failure to equip the laity for a more active role in defending freedom and justice.
Krieg is ready to acknowledge the inadequacy of the Catholic ecclesiology adopted during the Nazi era, and blames the popes and theologians who suppressed any more relevant stance. Indeed he goes so far as to affirm that the majority of theologians of the 1920s and 1930s failed to understand the real consequences of the first world war. Not until after the Nazi onslaught did younger theologians like Karl Rahner begin to forge a newer more appropriate response to the secular challenges of political radicalism and modernity. It was only then that the lessons of the church’s struggles with Hitler were learnt.

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2) H-German debate: Rosenstrasse

The recently released film Rosenstrasse, made by the veteran German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotha, describes the events which took place in early 1943 in a shabby back street in east Berlin. The Gestapo summoned to a dilapidated Jewish community centre there nearly two thousand Jewish men, who had not been included in the earlier round-ups and deportations to death camps. They and their wives, most of whom were not Jewish, were of course terrified. But on this occasion, these wives, partners in what the Nazis called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages), took action to protest their husbands’ detention. For several days they organized a clamorous stand-off outside the building, even though the guards were armed and menacing. At the end of a week, the husbands were released and sent home.

This film is based largely on the book by Nathan Stoltzfus of Florida State University, – Resistance of the Heart. Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest in Nazi Germany (1996). His interpretation makes a heroic tale out of these womens’ defiance of the mobilized might of the Gestapo. He claims that this singular demonstration of public protest on behalf of the victimized Jews was a success in preventing the Nazis from sending these men to their deaths in Auschwitz. The Nazi hierarchy was forced to recognize the likely consequences if they violated the feelings of the majority of non-Jews, especially those with connections to the Christian churches. The courage of these valiant, but mostly unknown, women is therefore to be celebrated and honoured. The Rosenstrasse protest could have set an precedent if only its message could have been heard and the example followed elsewhere.
This interpretation has however been challenged by a noted German historian, Wolf Gruner, most recently on H-German, 14 September 2004. In Gruner’s opinion, there was never any question of this particular group of Jewish partners in these “mixed marriages” being deported. Heroic as the women’s’ behaviour undoubtedly was, it should not be seen as a victory for popular protest, let alone a sign that the Nazi totalitarian grip could be successfully challenged.

Gruner bases his case on a close reading of numerous Gestapo documents. For example, he quotes a circular from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt issued on 20 February 1943, i.e. a few days before these men were ordered to appear in the Rosenstrasse, which specifically excluded Jews living in mixed marriages from any further deportation measures. The same exemption was ordered a month earlier in January by Eichmann personally for Jews in France. To be sure, these moves were all part of a monstrous and grandiose campaign to get rid of all other Jews as soon as possible.
Gruner pertinently points out that, had the Gestapo really intended to deport these men, they would have been told to report to some much less accessible railway station – as had happened to earlier contingents of such victims. Nor would some have been released even before the women mounted their watchful protest. Gruner suggests that this group of men was called in for more pragmatic reasons. The Gestapo wanted to find out which of them could be employed to fill the vacancies in various institutions and firms, left open by the deportation of the “full Jews”. These men were repeatedly interrogated about their qualifications, especially if they were fitted to work, for example, in a Jewish hospital. In the end, some 200 were told to report for employment as replacements for “full Jews” ruthlessly deported to Theresienstadt in mid-March.

At the same time the Gestapo could do a double-check on these men’s actual marital status and weed out impostors.
Far from the Rosenstrasse episode leading to any amelioration in Nazi policy, the evidence is that the ferocity of their antisemitic campaign was stepped up. Rumours had been circulating that the Nazi leaders planned to pass a law compulsorily “divorcing” all Jews from their non-Jewish spouses – hence enabling their deportation without repercussions in the civilian population. Not surprisingly this proposal aroused vigorous opposition amongst the churches. Cardinal Bertram, the Presiding Catholic bishop, made it clear to the government in November 1942 that any such move would endanger the whole structure of matrimony and the family, and would be morally disastrous. Millions of Germans would be involved – and that was certainly a factor the Nazis did not want to risk at that juncture of the war. The measure was not implemented, but the threat remained.

One of the most determined activists for justice for the oppressed Jews , not only for those converted to Christianity, was Margarethe Sommer, who worked for the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, von Preysing. She has rightly earned a place of honour in the tributes paid to her later, most recently by Michael Phayer. She resolutely compiled information about the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews, and regularly sought to get Cardinal Bertram’s intervention on their behalf. Equally regularly, the Cardinal refused, and in the end forbade her to visit him in Breslau with her importunate petitions.
In the case of the earlier deportations, Margarethe Sommer had diligently prepared lists of the Catholic families affected, organized local parish workers to visit where possible, and if needed helped to make preparations and packing for those who would not likely return. So she was ready to do the same for those summoned to the Rosenstrasse. On 2 March she again traveled to Breslau to call for energetic steps to be taken. She asked for a national declaration by the Catholic bishops to be issued on the following Sunday, 7 March, and recommended that the Pope be requested to send out a pastoral letter over the Vatican radio.

Despite the fact that her advice was not adopted by her superiors in the Catholic hierarchy, she could still draw the conclusion that the vigorous protests that were made, not only by the wives on the spot, but also by their supporters elsewhere, were effective in securing these men’s release. She recorded this opinion in a memorandum to the German bishops in August 1943, later published in the large-scale documentation of the German Catholic bishops’ papers, produced in the 1980s.

Another valiant fighter in the same cause was Gertrud Luckner of Freiburg, whose tireless efforts on behalf of Catholic Jewish families led her to travel across Germany contacting, warning, encouraging, inspiring, sympathizing and helping where she could. But she too was chased down by the Gestapo and shortly after the Rosenstrasse incident was sent to Ravensbrück where she remained until 1945. But her hope that her fate and that of those she sought to protect would arouse the general Catholic population to make vigorous and vocal protests against their rulers’ injustices was to be disappointed. For the majority of German Catholics, including their Presiding Bishop, the Jews lay outside their circle of obligation. The churches’ record of lack of support for the persecuted Jews remains a shocking and regrettable failure.

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3) Journal articles:

a) Tom Lawson’s article on “The Anglican Understanding of Nazism 1933-1945: Placing the Church of England’s Response to the Holocaust in Context” in Twentieth Century British History, Vol 14, No.2, 2003, pp.112-37 deals in fact only with the leading personalities of the Church of England. The rest of the world-wide Anglican communion is ignored. And Lawson’s purpose is more narrowly to take issue with the generally favourable opinion expressed by such reputable historians as Sir Ian Kershaw, Richard Gutteridge, Andrew Chandler, R.C.D.Jasper and Marcus Braybrooke, as to the extent to which the Church of England was aware of and took steps to protest the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
He claims instead that these church leaders failed to recognize the centrality of the Nazis’ campaign to eradicate Judaism, and so interpreted its antisemitic atrocities as significant only as a sign of its totalitarian character. He seeks to explain this failure as resulting from both theological and social factors, even though some of these would seem to be mutually exclusive.

Lawson knows well enough, and has researched thoroughly enough, to realize that the Church of England contained – and contains – a very broad range of opinions which make his generalizations suspect. Nevertheless he asserts that the Church of England’s response to Nazism was far too churchly, arousing sympathy for all those persecuted by the Nazis, to be sure, but stressing particularly such well-known church cases as Pastor Martin Niemöller. These were all seen as the victims of totalitarianism. After 1939, the war was to be waged to overcome this ideological and political threat to Christian civilization. Such an interpretation, he claims, obscured the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which could not be interpreted with any consistency of purpose as important for its own sake.

Thus he ignores the fact that the only two public letters of protest which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang, wrote about internal German affairs between 1933 and Sept 1939 were not about the Christians or the Socialists or pacifists, but the Jews. And here he did not mean ‘Non-Aryan Christians’ but Jews altogether. So too Lawson is led to downplay the notable proclamations by Lang’s successor, Archbishop William Temple, and by the united bishops of England and Wales, who in January 1943 published a collective statement of protest at both the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and at their government’s refusal to accommodate more refugees.

Lawson is led on to suggest that these utterances made only a superficial change in Anglican attitudes. The British government’s refusal to listen led to an abandonment of church protests, and so, Lawson asserts, to a lack of lasting understanding of the real nature of Nazism.
Indeed, he believes, these church leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the need for post-war reconstruction, including the “re-Christianization of Europe”, in order to guard against the rebirth of Nazism. In his view, such a post-war world would not have been one in which a Jew could safely be a Jew.

Tom Lawson evidently belongs to that group of historians – especially Holocaust historians – who are busy rewriting history as it should have happened. By indulging their wishful thinking in large measure, they can impose their own interpretation on what was said and done, or not said and done, and thus chide their elders severely for their presumed failures. At the same time, there is considerable grinding of axes, when politically-loaded points are scored which can be useful in more current controversies.

The result is that a distorted view of the actual past is presented. Those of us who can recall the circumstances of that time can only deplore the misreading of people’s attitudes and arguments. In fact, the whole story of British attitudes towards Nazism, and church attitudes in particular, is much more complex than Lawson suggests. His one-sided approach may stir up debate, but it should be seen as a provocative rather than as a definitive contribution.

b) M.F.Ederer, Propaganda wars: Stimmen der Zeit and the Nazis, 1933-1935 in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90 no. 3, (2004) pp. 456-72.
Ederer examines how the prominent Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit reacted to, or mostly against, the new Nazi regime in its early years. The editors were careful not to engage in open polemics, since they were certainly aware of the Nazis’ open antipathy. But in more subtle ways, they conducted a campaign to keep Catholic ideas unspotted from Nazi associations, and in particular to oppose any form of syncretism. The issues of the journal in these early years reflect a growing alarm at the Nazis’ anti-clerical and indeed anti-Christian, let alone anti-Jewish, policies. Rosenberg’s myths were especially attacked. Ederer follows the evolution of these ideas through the three years under his microscope.

c) Two notable articles in the recent issue of Religion, State and Society, Vol. 32 no.2, June 2004
Serge Flere, Slovenia. Not a perfect religious market, pp 151-7.

Christian Romocea, Reconciliation in the ethnic conflict in Transylvania. Theological, Political and Social Aspects, pp 159-76.

4) German Studies Association Conference report:

D.Hastings, Nursemaid or Nemesis: The Catholic-Nazi Relationship revisited.

Derek Hastings seeks to show the extent to which Catholicism in Munich can be said to have acted as a sort of “nursemaid” to the early Nazi movement, helping it to attain an important degree of viability in its earliest and most vulnerable years. Contrary to the view taken by many scholars that the early Nazi movement comprised either outright opponents of Christianity, lapsed Catholics, or bemused Protestants, Hastings shows that a number of Catholics, even priests, gave hearty support to the fledgling political party. One prominent Bavarian politician wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber in October 1923 to lament that “even Catholic priests are being caught up with National Socialist ideas and are allowing themselves to be misused as Nazi agitators”. Some of them, like the Abbot Schachleiter, quite willingly gave their services to the new movement. It was he who conducted a funeral mass for the Nazi thug and terrorist Albert Schlageter, whose brutal exploits were framed as the embodiment of a heroic Catholic-Nazi synthesis. Many young Munich Catholics, including Heinrich Himmler, were “literally transported by Schachleiter into a holy rapture”.

However, in the following year, most of these converts were lost after a wave of anti-Catholic venom was launched by the völkisch activists led by Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde. Relationships were never the same again, though many Catholics still deluded themselves that agreement was possible and so eagerly supported the 1933 Concordat. And the readiness of so many Catholics during the whole Nazi era to believe they could be both good Catholics and good Nazis owes something to this initial period when Munich Catholics acted as the “nursemaid” of the Party.
(precis by JSC)

5) Book Notes:

Simon Phipps: A Portrait, ed. David Machin, London: Continuum 2003 ISBN 0-8264-7138-2 144pp.

Bishops and biographies belong together, especially if they were bland, blameless and boring. How to steer between open hagiography or critical assessment is the issue in most such episcopal obituaries. This tribute to Simon Phipps, Bishop of Lincoln 1974-1986, certainly leans more towards the former formula, but is of help in depicting an Anglican leader who responded effectively, and not at all boringly, to the challenges of his office. Particularly Phipps was known to have given leadership on social issues, as an industrial chaplain in Coventry, where his left-wing politics were appropriately relevant. It was therefore paradoxical that he should then have served as bishop in two rural dioceses, first in Horsham in Sussex, and then in Lincoln, still a largely agricultural county, full of ancient churches but few parishioners. This ministry called out all his pastoral skills, first deployed as Chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the words of one contributor, Simon Phipps was a gracious and courteous God-fearing radical. The sketches in this small book bring the various chapters of his career to life with affection, but also lead on to consideration of the wider task of how to exercise episcopal leadership in the late twentieth century.

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6) Research in progress:

Jonathan Slater, University of Toronto, writes:

The area of interest for my doctoral dissertation is the reconstruction of Christian understandings of God, Christ and Salvation in nineteenth-century England. I plan to focus on F.D.Maurice, Thomas Erskine and John Nelson Darby. Darby was a prolific writer whose influence upon nineteenth and twentieth century religion extends far beyond the exclusive sect that still claims to hold to his teachings. If, as some argue, Maurice and Erskine represent the birth of certain trends in liberal theology, Darby lays claim to representing the birth of the most significant trend in conservative theology, i.e. dispensationalism. Darby’s novel proposal regarding divine providence, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and, in particular, his apocalyptic eschatology, has had a significantly formative influence upon the development of conservative theology in North America. At the centre of this relationship was a debate concerning the suffering humanity of Christ, a topic which would reappear in numerous forms throughout Darby’s writings.

Darby’s understanding of the suffering Christ provides a point of comparison with Maurice and Erskine, as an example of a significantly different response to a common historical and cultural context. I am especially interested in how these men reacted to the growing historical understanding associated with German biblical criticism and the search for a historical Jesus on the one hand, and the increased appeal to experience and feeling associated with nineteenth century Romanticism and the post-Kantian turn to the subject on the other.

Best wishes to you all,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Kohlbrugge, Mein unberechenbares Leben
b) B-Rubinstein, Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy
c) Linn, Escaping Auschwitz

2) Journal articles

a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
b) Zucotti, Pius XII and rescue of Jews
c) Sun, Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus: Montgomery, The Last Heathen in Melanesia
1a) Hebe Kohlbrugge, Zweimal zwei ist fünf. Mein unberechenbares Leben seit 1914. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2003. ISBN 3-374-02051-6 380pp. Eur.12.80

Hebe Kohlbrugge is clearly one of those indomitable Dutchwomen whose staunch Calvinist background makes it impossible for her to tolerate injustice or compromise with evil. Equally clearly these glimpses of her life story can’t do justice to her vibrant personality, but they do illustrate her resolute commitment to her faith in a succession of conflictual situations.

As a student in the 1930s she was sent to Berlin to learn household management and there sat in on Martin Niemöller’s bible classes and later assisted Günther Harder, one of the champions of the Confessing Church. Here she learnt about the evils of Nazism at first hand, and the need for the church to stand fast in Christian witness.

Returning to Holland, she hoped to study theology with Karl Barth in Basle. But the outbreak of war and the later
German occupation of her homeland instead drew her into a variety of perilous resistance activities. She even managed to undertake a highly dangerous journey to Switzerland, where she took messages from the Dutch church leaders to the officers of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical bodies in Geneva. But for this and other acts of defiance, she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her fellow Dutchwoman Corrie ten Boom was already incarcerated.

After the war, she was equally determined to play her part in reconstruction efforts, and served the Dutch Reformed Church in a number of enterprising activities in witness of reconciliation, peace and justice. In the 1950s she was mainly involved in establishing links to fellow Christians in East Germany, but later took on wider assignments in Mississippi, Soweto and Israel. One of the agencies she got involved with was the Christian Peace Conference, organized in Prague by the Czech Professor Hromadka. This attempt to build Christian bridges across the Iron Curtain was a brave endeavour but too full of wishful thinking to succeed. In any case, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 broke Hromadka’s heart and destroyed what little credibility the Conference had left. As one of the survivors, her report is interesting on this ill-fated undertaking and the failure of its peace moves. It showed her the limits of Christian idealism in a world of ruthless power politics and official hypocrisy.

Nevertheless Hebe Kohlbrugge’s commitment to finding ways to express her Christian political witness kept her going. Numerous visits to Germany, Czechoslovakia and other eastern European countries, as a Dutch guest, gave her the opportunity to see the dangers of compromise with the Communist state, but also to support the church in pursuit of its and her nobler aims. She helped to organize student exchanges, seminars and house groups, even in illegal circumstances, in order to keep the lines of Christian communication open. Her reports on the tyrannical surveillance and the nerve-wracking oppression of dissident churches by the Communist authorities in Roumania and Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s are a valuable witness to the conditions then prevailing.

Naturally she rejoiced to be present in November 1989 to bring ecumenical greetings to the East German and Czech churches in the aftermath of the downfall of the Communist system. And she was delighted when in 1990 she was awarded an honourary degree from the Charles University in Prague, acknowledging her services in promoting international friendship and intellectual dialogue between East and West.
Hebe Kohlbrugge stands in a long and honourable tradition of Protestant social activists, whose determination to follow the faith’s commands leads to speaking the truth uncompromisingly and unflinchingly. Her witness, against both Nazism and Communism, will be an encouragement to her successors along the on-going path of Christian discipleship in the coming century.
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1b) Emanuela Barrasch-Rubinstein, The Devil, the Saints, and the Church. Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy.
New York etc: Peter Lang 2003 xi,124 pp ISBN 0-8204-6358-2 U.S. $53.95

Forty years ago, Rolf Hochhuth, a young Swiss-German author, wrote his play Der Stellvertreter (in English The Deputy or The Representative). It caused tremendous controversy because of the defamatory depiction of Pope Pius XII, whose cynical indifference to and silence about the fate of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust was caustically attacked. The dramatic confrontation between the frigid ecclesiastical statesman and a young idealist Jesuit priest was one of the highlights of the play. So too was the depiction of the sinister German medical doctor, Mengele, responsible for horrendous cruelties and mass death in Auschwitz.

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein’s short book successfully analyses the character of the play and Hochhuth’s reasons for making use of this form. She points out that it appeared twenty years after the events it sought to portray, at a time when the Nazi atrocities had been extensively researched, and one of the perpetrators, Adolf Eichmann, had just been on trial in Israel. Hochhuth was not old enough to have been involved himself in these events in all their complexity, but young enough to want to find some idealistic explanation. Like many of the survivors, he engaged in the wishful thinking that some more positive response to the Nazi crimes could have saved many more lives or even prevented the Holocaust from happening. Pope Pius XII became a scapegoat, who could be blamed for his refusal to take a more forceful, and therefore more appropriate, stand.
But Hochhuth’s awareness that the conventional explanations for the Holocaust, based on political, military or social factors, were inadequate led him to recast the narrative as a mediaeval morality play. He placed the well-known historical events within a transcendental framework in a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil. The overtones of Goethe are obvious. Auschwitz is represented as the Kingdom of Evil where all the moral traditions and restrictions of Christian civilisation have been overthrown. Here Dr Mengele operates as the devil incarnate, and the young Jesuit who identifies with the Jewish victims and is prepared to share their fate in Auschwitz, is portrayed as a saint. So too, as a saintly figure, we have a Protestant SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who seeks to prevent further loss of life by informing his church superiors of what is happening, and indirectly loses his life as a result. By contrast, Pope Pius XII’s cold-hearted selfishness represents the defeat of the church at the hands of evil and hence the victory of death and destruction. God fails in his ancient battle with the devil.

In recent decades, the moral issues raise by Hochhuth have not gone away. No more satisfactory explanation of the Holocaust’s extreme destructiveness has emerged. The renewed debate about Pius XII’s actions or inactions has once more stirred up controversy about the role of the church. The distortions of wishful thinking about what might have happened, if only . . . . have again become apparent. But Hochhuth’s attempt to portray the historical record in a transcendental dimension as part of a continuing spiritual conflict has remained a one-time occurrence. It stemmed from the ambivalences of the 1960s which saw both imaginative schemes for reforming the Christian church and at the same time theologians proclaiming that “God is dead”.

It was to Hochhuth’s credit that he was the first to challenge the comfortable amnesia of received orthodoxy about the Nazis’ crimes, as well as pointing an accusatory finger at Pius XII and the Vatican for their policies during the second world war. The impact of the play was such that it popularized a pejorative view of the pope which has been widely prevalent ever since. Despite all the conscientious attempts by historians to correct the errors in history contained in the play, its success rested on compelling the audiences to face the moral issues presented.
We are indebted to Ms Barasch-Rubinstein for this insightful, if belated, anaysis of this unique literary-political experiment.

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1c) Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. 154pp. ISBN 0-8014-4130-7
(The following is not a book about ecclesiastical history, but its relevance to the subject of the previous review is obvious, and so I believe it will be of interest to many of our list-members.)

Sixty years ago, in April 1944, Fred Wetzler and Rudi Vrba escaped from Auschwitz. They were two of the only five Jews who succeeded in doing so and survived. A few days later they managed to cross the border to their homeland, Slovakia, and quickly contacted representatives of the Jewish Council. Their dramatic feat was made all the significant by the momentous information they brought with them, comprising details of the mass murder procedures in Auschwitz, the record of numerous transports arriving from countries all over German-held Europe, sketches of the annihilation facilities, and an overall estimate of the total number of Jews murdered in the gas chambers during the previous two years. Their eye-witness account, they insisted, should be shared at once with the Jews of Hungary, for whose arrival in the camp and subsequent murder, preparations were being actively speeded up. But in fact, this information, later referred to as the Vrba-Wetzler Report or the Auschwitz Protocols, never reached its intended audience. A month later, nearly half a million Jews were deported to their deaths. None of them knew what was in store for them. As a result, Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their information had been suppressed. Vrba, for one, remains convinced that if the intended victims had been warned, they would have resisted or hid or fled. The tragedy of the Hungarian Jewry would have taken a very different course.

Ruth Linn, now Dean of the Faculty of Education at Haifa University, had never heard of Vrba’s exploits. Despite the centrality of Holocaust remembrance in Israel’s national consciousness, she only learnt about this escape while viewing Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Several years later, however, she had an opportunity to meet Vrba personally and to read his autobiographical memoirs, written in English in 1963. This made her all the more curious as to why, fifty years after the Holocaust, the unique actions and memories of these Auschwitz escapees had remained completely unfamiliar to the average Hebrew reader.

It was only when she realized that the silence about Vrba’s life and writings was no accident that her curiosity turned to dismay and then to indignation. She made it her mission to break a thirty-five year silence by encouraging the publication of a Hebrew version of Vrba’s autobiography, and to urge Haifa University to grant him an honorary degree. These endeavors were opposed by Israeli scholars. But with this short book, she now seeks to restore Vrba’s name by probing the mystery of his disappearance not only from Auschwitz but from the Israeli textbooks and the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

This is not, as she admits, a balanced account. But her succinct and hard-hitting chapters seek to trace how Israeli historians have conspired to remove these participants from the Holocaust story by misnaming, misreporting, miscrediting and misrepresenting the secretive tale of their escape from Auschwitz.

The reason is simple. Vrba’s belief was and is that the information about Auschwitz was suppressed in order that leading members of the Slovakian and Hungarian Jewish Councils, could do a deal with Eichmann and his henchmen. In return for their silence, these men purchased survival for themselves, their relatives, a coterie of Zionists, and a number of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs. In June 1944 these fortunate individuals boarded a train which eventually carried them to freedom in Switzerland. Many went on, subsequently, to hold prominent positions in the newly-established state of Israel. They were also responsible for the formulation of the heroic myth of Zionist resistance and rescue from their Nazi persecutors. Official Israeli historiography had no place for alternative interpretations of what had happened in Hungary, or for any analysis of the role of the Judenrat and their collaboration with the Nazis.

Ruth Linn incisively analyses how unwelcome critics, such as Vrba, have been silenced, and how the process of repressing, denying, or avoiding the charges they make has been put in place.

In the first place, the escapees from Auschwitz were reduced to anonymity and their names were never mentioned. As late as 1994, more than half a century after they fled from Auschwitz, Israel TV in a commemorative programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust did not give their true identity. To be sure, a version of their Report is displayed in the entrance hall of the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, but the names of its authors are not provided, and the Hebrew label on the wall refers only to “two young Slovak Jews”. The Report itself is not available in Hebrew to visitors, since the Museum only has a version in German or Hungarian.

Secondly, the credibility of the Report is challenged, and its factual accuracy disputed. Particularly the carefully-calculated total number of Jewish victims is considered by many Israeli historians as greatly inflated, though they have failed to provide convincing evidence of this contention.. Above all, Vrba’s legitimate questioning as to whether widespread distribution of the information about Auschwitz could have disrupted the deportations is dismissed as unrealistic. And his accusation that the Hungarian Zionist leaders’ failure to warn the Jews in the provinces made them complicit in the subsequent mass murders is dismissed as an outrageous calumny. For these reasons, energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew.

Ruth Linn’s work is a long overdue act of reparation to rectify a historiographical injustice. But she also raises the wider issue of how to evaluate the rival interpretations, on the one hand of expert historians, or on the other of survivors whose testimony was derived from being eye-witnesses to the Nazis’ crimes in Auschwitz. She equally and rightly questions how the Israeli historical establishment has built up its own layers of national myths and explanations. They have succeeded in laying stress on certain events and individuals, but also have created a culture of forgetting others, like Vrba, whose witness they find not to be convenient. She seeks to pay tribute to an intrepid participant in the whole tragedy of the Hungarian Holocaust. At the same time, we can surely agree that her book is, as Professor Stephen Feinstein, Director of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, commented, “a first-rate treatment of a crucially important event that might be called an emerging black hole: Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz and the aftermath within the context of Holocaust history. The book is exceptionally important in its discussion of how a country can engage in critical thinking about a morally problematic past and its analysis of the political forces that try to control that past”. This still remains one of the most controversial chapters in the traumatic history of the Nazis’ war against the Jews.

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2) Journal articles: a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 17, no 1.

This journal, now being edited from Dresden by Prof. G.Besier, is the “founder father” of our enterprise. This latest issue is devoted to a comparative study of the national uprisings in Eastern Europe against Communist rule, namely, Berlin 1953, Budapest, 1956 and Prague 1968. Accounts, written in German, of the secular developments are matched by essays on the religious dimensions and consequences felt in and by the churches in these areas, which will be particularly illuminating for western scholars. Andrea Strubind shows that in East Germany the churches deliberately abstained from participating in the uprising, while in Hungary, as Jozsef Fuisz notes, the churches were seen as victims of Communist aggression. But in Prague, as described by Ladislav Benes, their spokesmen gave active support to the reform movement, and were consequently disciplined, but sought to preserve traditional Christian values for as long as possible. Only in the 1980s did the churches gain enough space to be able to play a more active role in combatting totalitarianism

2b) Susan Zucotti, Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 18 no 2, Fall 2004. Susan Zucotti still believes, as she wrote earlier her book on the subject, that Pope Pius XII never issued directives to save Jews. She is now prepared to acknowledge that many Jews were indeed hidden and thus saved in church institutions, but affirms that this was likely due to individual initiatives. Since no piece of paper for a papal directive has been found, she concludes that none existed, even though other scholars have produced at least second-hand evidence that various priests claimed to have received such instructions

2c) Ray Sun, “Hammer Blows”: Work, the Workplace and the Culture of Masculinity among Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic in Central European History, Vol. 37 no 2, Summer 2004, p245 ff.

A stimulating examination of the Catholic propaganda towards young workers, especially in the Rhineland, following the disasters of the first world war. Finding themselves in direct competition with the Marxist parties, Catholic writers tried to adapt suitable themes for their specific audiences. The elements of struggle, strength and physical achievement were common to both groups, but Sun shows how Catholic writers gave a deliberate Christian slant to this literature. He quotes a number of poems, posters and songs used for this purpose.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus

C .Montgomery, The Last Heathen. Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 2004. $24.95 CAN.

The Vancouver writer Charles Montgomery’s great-grandfather was a missionary bishop. Over a hundred years ago he was sent out to Melanesia, a corner of the south-west Pacific Ocean, encompassing the area now known as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. He was due to carry on the work of his predecessor, Bishop Patteson, who had been brutally murdered by the pagan inhabitants of a remote corral-reefed island. When the news of the Bishop’s martyrdom reached England, it resulted in a wave of support for the Melanesian Mission, and a demand that the British Navy intervene. Both actions were seen as part of the British imperial destiny to spread Christianity and civilization to the uttermost parts of the earth.

A hundred years later, Charles Montgomery shares none of these values. But the memory of an impressive family portrait, the finding of an envelope filled with sand from the beach where the bishop was killed, and his own talent for travel writing, all impelled him to seek out these far-away islands. Principally he hoped to find in Melanesia an exotic, primitive but enticing paradise, unspoiled by western commerce or religion. Where were the last heathen to be found?

This romantic image of the noble Melanesian savage was soon enough disabused. But he did find plenty of evidence of surviving traditions derived from the islanders’ ancestors, and incorporated into their “kastom” notions of tribal law, politics, magic and myth, which gave meaning to both their identity and behaviour. A century of Christian mission, to be sure, had overlaid this traditional world-view, but not entirely. Many of the islanders he met held both together, ambivalently but dualistically covering all bases.

The Christian missionaries themselves were ambivalent about such entrenched beliefs. The Anglicans, drawn from some of England’s best families and Oxford-educated, were remarkably tolerant about “kastom”. They have been described as “God’s gentlemen”. But Presbyterians, Methodists and Seventh Day Adventists took a stricter tone. All too often the result was a clash of discordant cosmologies which still remains unresolved.
Overall, Montgomery affirms, the central struggle in Melanesia is no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God has pretty well won the battle. Paganism is on its last legs. But the old way of thinking still remains and indeed flourishes within the Christian community. The rejection of sorcery and magic in favour of New Testament ways of living is far from complete.

It was basically the magic of the last heathen that Montgomery had hoped to find. But his search led to the realization that proof was not to be procured. Instead he needed to cultivate his imagination and to recognize the validity of myth. Melanesia is still filled with myths, both Christian and pagan. As one wise observer told him, miracles certainly happen, but the measure of their truth lies not in the accuracy of the event so much as in the quality of the faith they inspire.

To Montgomery, perhaps the most impressive witness to the newly-planted Christian faith was to be found among the Melanesian Brotherhood, a community of young Christian laymen, first founded some eighty years ago and still thriving.

These young Anglicans have a strong missionary impulse, are credited with the power of driving out evil spirits, and are highly regarded for their holiness So much so that their spiritual authority stands higher than any other source of moral influence.

In the last decade, the Solomon Islands have been in great need of such affective forces. The indigenous government virtually collapsed, corruption was rife, tribal rivalries between different groups of islanders produced a state of endemic civil war. But the reputation of the Melanesian Brotherhood and their efforts for disarmament and peacemaking proved to have a remarkably calming effect.

Until, that is, 2002, when a party set out for Guadacanal’s weather coast, the hangout of a particularly vicious war-lord. Seven of the Brothers were murdered there. But their martyrdom, as many Melanesian Christians now believe, was truly a witness to the power of suffering and rebirth, as testified in the New Testament. The war-lord gave himself up, the brothers collected guns from both sides, the Australians sent a peacekeeping force of efficient administrators. And Montgomery recasts the story of one of the murdered men, Brother Francis, to be the modern equivalent of Bishop Patteson’s sacrifice so long ago, to be remembered in the prayers of the Melanesians and passed down in stories told by firelight from one remote reef-protected island to the next.

As the Brotherhood’s chaplain testified, with their death the curse of violence has been lifted from the nation. And the Brotherhood itself had been allowed a glimpse through the mystery of things to the promise of the eternal. It is Montgomery’s hope that this example of transcendental love will become more powerful and more illuminating as the years go by. That is the way martyrdom works. Imagination can fill the expanse between the shores of historical fact and the truths of the soul. And this was the truth which Charles Montgomery, as a sometime unbeliever and sceptic in need of rescue, learnt on that far-away Melanesian shore.
With best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca