Tag Archives: David A. R. Clark

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71, no. 3 (2018): 253–266.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s complex relationship to Jews and Judaism continues to preoccupy both historians and theologians. To give just one example, although Bonhoeffer has been lauded for his concern for Jews and calls for ecclesiastical resistance against the state on their behalf in his famous 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” scholars have also criticized other aspects of that same writing, including expressions of theological anti-Judaism and Bonhoeffer’s use of “Jewish Christianity” as a term of derision for a kind of legalism practiced by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement.

In this article, Ph.D. candidate David A.R. Clark revisits Bonhoeffer’s response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. Clark begins by noting that Bonhoeffer had no pulpit from which to respond to the pogrom, nor did he make a public comment. Bonhoeffer did react, though, and the evidence is in the margin of his Bible, where he wrote the date of the pogrom (November 9, 1938) beside Psalm 74:8, underlined the text, “They burn all the houses of God in the land.”[1] Clark notes that Bonhoeffer friend and scholar Eberhard Bethge described this reference to a contemporary event is unique in the marginalia of Bonhoeffer’s Bible. He adds that Bonhoeffer wrote his Finkenwalde students about a week later, explaining that he had been pondering and praying about Psalm 74, Zechariah 2:8, Romans 9:4-5, and Romans 11:11-15 in the previous few days—all passages relating to God’s special relationship to the Jews.

While other scholars have noted the political importance of Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 marginalia, Clark aims “to examine this annotation more thoroughly in the context of Bonhoeffer’s then-burgeoning commitment to figural interpretation of the Psalter” (255).[2] By 1935 at least, he argues, Bonhoeffer was open to drawing allegorical or symbolic meanings from biblical texts, not least because of Bonhoeffer’s conviction that the whole of Scripture was a witness to Christ and also on account of his particular interest in the relationship of Christ to the Psalms.

Clark develops Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ in the Psalms from two of Bonhoeffer’s writings: Life Together (September/October 1938) and Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms (1940). He finds that Bonhoeffer argued that the Psalms essentially expressed the voice of Christ, and that it was most important to understand the Psalms as the prayers of the suffering and dying Christ (259). As Clark puts it, quoting Bonhoeffer, “‘No single human being can pray the psalms of lamentation out of his or her own experience.’ Rather, Bonhoeffer advocates hearing these psalms as the prayers of Christ, who ‘has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we have’” (260). Importantly, as Clark argues, Bonhoeffer then went further, “claiming additionally that the voice of Christ in psalms of suffering discloses the presence of Christ in human suffering today: ‘psalms of lament’, [Bonhoeffer] states, ‘proclaim Jesus Christ as the only help in suffering, for in Christ God is with us’” (260).

Based on this analysis of Bonhoeffer’s interest in figural interpretation, then, Clark reinterprets Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht annotation next to Psalm 74:8 not merely as an expression of sympathy based the similarity of contemporary and ancient cases of the abandonment of Jews, à la Eberhard Bethge, but as something more. Moving from the level of historical to christological interpretation, Clark argues “that our understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation will be enriched by attending more closely to Bonhoeffer’s figural work, which reveals the deeper theological resonance of connecting Kristallnacht with Psalm 74. As David McI. Gracie states in his brief discussion of the annotation: ‘It is important to note at the outset that Bonhoeffer taught that the psalms were to be prayed, prayed with Christ, whose prayers he believed they really were – in this case with the Christ who was being driven out of Germany when the Jews were driven out.’” (262). Clark also draws on the work of Geoffrey B. Kelly to make the point that it was as if historical distance had collapsed and Christ suffered anew in the brutalization of the German Jews.

With this Clark concludes that Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 annotation “entails christological presence: Bonhoeffer heard the voice of Christ praying in despair in Psalm 74:8, and – in keeping with the revelatory simultaneity of figural interpretation – he heard this voice not in the distant past of Israelite history but in the contemporary persecution of present-day Jews” (263). He closes by reminding us not to make too much of one marginal notation—it was not a public protest—but adds that it “introduces added complexities” to our understanding of Bonhoeffer’s personal solidarity with Jews (265).

Notes:

[1] Bonhoeffer also placed a vertical line and bold exclamation point alongside the following verse, Psalm 74:9, which reads: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.” (ESV), but as Clark notes, the date of the Kristallnacht pogrom is written only beside verse 8, and specifically beside the underlined words, “They burn all the houses of God in the land,” so that we cannot be sure that the marginalia pertaining to verse 9 relate to the events of November 1938.

[2] German-Jewish literary scholar Eric Auerbach defined the term in his work Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 73: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933,” Canadian-American Theological Review 7 (2018): 124-137.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

David A.R. Clark, a PhD candidate at Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, has written a compact overview and theological assessment of Reinhold Krause’s famous Sportpalast speech of November 1933, in which the Berlin leader of the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen) “demanded the elimination of Jewish influences from the Protestant church, calling for the deletion of Hebraisms from hymnody, the rejection of the theology of ‘rabbi Paul,’ and the erasure of the Old Testament itself. Ominously, Krause also endorsed excluding Christians of Jewish descent from the churches” (124). Drawing on the speech itself and several English-language historical analyses, Clark highlights what he calls a “conflation of hostilities” in which the “German Christian Movement targeted the Old Testament for exclusion and destruction even as Nazi leadership targeted Jews for exclusion and destruction.” He argues that “the parallels were not incidental; rather, invective against the Old Testament, in the context of Nazi Germany, yielded violent implications” (125).

Clark begins with the background to Krause’s speech, outlining the rise of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic German Christian Movement in 1932 and noting its attempt to fuse Protestant Christianity and Nazi ideology through a racialist ecclesiology in which a German national church would unite Aryan German Protestants (and Catholics) and exclude Christians of Jewish descent. Given its rapid growth through 1933, the German Christians hoped a large rally in the Berlin Sportpalast would launch a massive new propaganda campaign and prove their indispensability to the Nazi regime. On November 13, 1933, some 20,000 supporters of the German Christian Movement filled the arena, which was decorated with swastikas and other Nazi material. They came to hear a series of speakers, headlined by local high school religion teacher and German Christian leader Dr. Reinhold Krause.

Clark describes the speech itself as crude and abusive—an attack against the Old Testament and other fundamentals of Christianity derived from Jewish influences. Analyzing Krause’s “anti-Jewish and anti-Old Testament rhetoric” (127), Clark finds that Krause connected the supposed unity of the German people (Volk) under Adolf Hitler with the idea of a powerful people’s church (Volkskirche) which would mirror the Nazi state and support the remolding of Germans into National Socialists. Clark quotes some of the lowlights of the speech:

Krause denounced “rabbi Paul,” whose “scapegoat- and inferiority-theology” had led to an “un-National Socialist” desire “to cling to a kind of salvation egotism.” Similarly, Krause condemned Jewish traces in hymnody and liturgy, decrying the intrusion of Hebrew words into German worship. “We want to sing songs that are free from any Israelite-isms,” he demanded, adding: “We want to free ourselves from the language of Canaan.” … In what became a notorious section of his speech, Krause demanded “liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish reward-and-punishment morality, with its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps” (128, 129).

Clark goes on to argue that Krause conflated invective against the Old Testament and hostility towards contemporary Jews. Even Krause he scorned elements of Judaism within German Protestantism, he also lashed out against Jews themselves, advocating the expulsion of Christians of Jewish ancestry from the church. Just as Nazis rejected purchasing goods and services from Jews, he reasoned, so too should Christians reject receiving spiritual goods from Jews—whether biblical content from ancient Jews or spiritual ministry from contemporary Jewish Christians.

As for the effect of the Sportpalast speech, Clark observes that its contents were widely reported in both the German and international press and adds that the speech was published as a pamphlet and distributed by German Christians in Berlin and beyond. But the speech was widely criticized by Protestant clergy, especially for its radical rejection of the Old Testament as Scripture. The ensuing controversy led to a mass of clerical resignations from the German Christian camp and sparked an ecclesiastical opposition movement that grew into the Confessing Church. For the German Christian base, however, Krause’s antisemitic attacks against the Bible, Jewish language, and Jewish Christians became programmatic.

Finally, Clark turns to the violent impact of the Sportpalast speech. Drawing on an incident reported in Doris Bergen’s definitive study Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), in which a German Christian writer urged the burning of Jewish parts of the Bible as well as “that which threatens our people” (presumably meaning the Jews themselves), Clark notes the connection between antisemitic rhetoric within German Protestantism and the genocidal campaign of the Hitler regime.

Reflecting theologically, Clark observes that Krause’s speech involved “violent rhetoric targeting Jewish Scriptures in the context of violent rhetoric—and murderous action—targeting Jewish people” (134). Asking “how should the implications of anti-Old Testament invective be defined in the genocidal context of Nazi Germany?” (134), Clark affirms that the German Christians helped create the conditions in which genocide could occur, on the basis that they “effectively weaponized specific aspects of the Christian tradition for antisemitic purposes” (135). While Clark acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust would have unfolded much the way it did with or without these German Christian contributions, he concludes that the German Christians “participated in the broader framework of complicity that made the destruction of Jews a conceivable and convincing option for Christian Europe” (136).

Clark’s essay won the Jack and Phyllis Middleton Memorial Award for Excellence in Bible and Theology, awarded to the best paper by a graduate student or non-tenured professor given at the interdisciplinary theology conference on “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology,” sponsored by the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA) at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, October 20, 2018.

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

By David A. R. Clark, University of Toronto

From time to time, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly invite a young scholar to profile his or her work. Here we are pleased to introduce you to David A. R. Clark, a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology.

Broadly, my research examines the intersection between theology, biblical interpretation, and Christian responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. More specifically, my dissertation, “Jewish Scriptures in Nazi Germany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Old Testament, 1932-1945,” examines Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Old Testament during the Nazi period, particularly in the context of antisemitic efforts by the “German Christian” movement to discredit and decanonize these Jewish Scriptures. Centrally, this three-part dissertation considers whether Bonhoeffer’s exegesis presented a theological alternative or protest to the claims of the “German Christian” movement.

Part I of the dissertation builds on historiographical research by Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel in order to analyze the place of the Old Testament in Nazi Germany. I recently presented on this research area at the Canadian-American Theological Association interdisciplinary conference, “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology”: my paper received the conference prize, and is now a forthcoming article in the Canadian-American Theological Review entitled “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933.” Part II of the dissertation examines the significance of Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of the Old Testament in the political and theological context of the Nazi period, focusing especially on Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Psalms. My article in this research area, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in Its Interpretive Context,” was recently published in the peer-reviewed Scottish Journal of Theology, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. (For readers without institutional access to the journal, a read-only version can be accessed here.) Part III of the dissertation considers the implications for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations of Bonhoeffer’s Nazi-era exegesis. Within the scope of the dissertation, I can only begin to trace these wide-ranging implications; accordingly, I intend a fuller treatment of this topic as a postdoctoral project.

My research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Additionally, in 2017, I was a Seminary Fellow with Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. For more information or to contact me, readers can visit www.davidarclark.ca.