Tag Archives: John S. Conway

John S. Conway: engaged skeptic and skeptical activist

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

John S. Conway: engaged skeptic and skeptical activist

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This article was originally published in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27 no. 1 (2014), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of that journal. It had its origins as a presentation at the July 2013 “Reassessing Contemporary Church History” Conference held at the University of British Columbia, where members of the CCHQ editorial team and others also took the opportunity to pay tribute to John S. Conway, founder of CCHQ, on the occasion of his 85th birthday.

John Conway is an intellectual leader, an astute and indefatigable historian of the churches, and a trailblazer in the fields of modern German, modern European and international church history. As everyone who knows John is aware, he is also a generous mentor and loyal friend.[1] John Conway has a sharp sense of humour, and it would be fitting to open this essay with a joke or witticism. But the field in which we work does not easily lend itself to jokes, so I will offer only one illustration of Professor Conway’s sometimes irreverent and always unsentimental approach to life and to himself. A few years ago he told me over the telephone about a serious medical procedure he had just undergone. Rather than highlight the severity of the operation or draw attention to his own discomfort, he exclaimed, “They slit my throat!”

As an expert on the churches in National Socialist Germany, Conway has been interviewed for several documentaries. He appears in a widely circulated film entitled Stand Firm: Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault [2], and he also features in Martin Doblmeier’s award-winning 2003 film, Bonhoeffer.[3] These media appearances encapsulate several important qualities of Conway’s work and life and illustrate in a compelling way who he is. Although separated by seventeen years they show some striking similarities. In both interviews Conway emphasizes the importance of the First World War in shaping subsequent events. He also speaks in similar ways about Adolf Hitler and the churches, in both films displaying a combination of distance and proximity, a balance between scholarly detachment and moral engagement that characterizes all of his work. Also notable is Conway’s treatment of antisemitism, where in both cases he moves from a scholarly analysis of the past to a call for action and activism in the present.

The First World War

The importance of the First World War is evident throughout all of John Conway’s work. In his publications, in the books he has chosen to review over the years and in the many academic and public talks he has given, the theme of the war and its dreadful impact on European culture and society and on Christianity around the world recurs over and over again.[4] It was during the First World War, Conway insists, when church leaders on all sides of the conflict preached the jingoist credo of “Gott mit uns!” – “God is on our side!” – that the Christian churches sowed the seeds for the decay of their credibility throughout the twentieth century.[5]

But Conway communicates an even bigger point about the war. The core problem he engages is the violence of the world, the destruction that human beings wreak on one another. Religion has a particular place in this set of issues. As Conway sees it, the role of Christianity and of the churches as moral authorities creates a responsibility to guide people toward what is good and right, but instead during the First World War church leaders egged on the brutality. Rather than healing and strengthening the best potential in people, they were blinded and obstructed the moral vision of their members and followers. They misused their authority and in the process forfeited it. Conway’s anguish at the suffering the war unleashed on the world and the failure of the Christian churches in the face of it is palpable in everything he does. The problem as Conway conceptualizes it is as old as the church and worldwide, and as a result his work, though concentrated on Germany (and the two Germanys)[6], always has a global perspective.

Many details of Conway’s biography connect with this preoccupation with the First World War and the problems of violence and suffering. John Conway was a student at Cambridge University. He started off studying literature, a decision that followed in the footsteps of many famous scholars in his family. His grandfather, R. S. Conway (Robert Seymour Conway, 1863-1933), was a well-known classicist, famed, among other accomplishments, for the vicious reviews he wrote. (The many of us who have had our books reviewed by John over the years can be grateful that he did not inherit this characteristic).

John Conway switched to History apparently because he had a sense that it might be better able to provide tools to respond to the recent past, the Second World War (an opinion in which he differs from his daughter Alison Conway, a professor of literature in Canada).[7] The young John Conway did his compulsory military service in the postwar period when that cataclysmic conflict was still a raw wound. His father, also a Cambridge man, served as captain of the English rugby team and in the trenches during the First World War. It is not surprising that John Conway has an enduring interest in religion and war, including specifically in military chaplains, in all their contexts. For his work Germany has always been a major case to study[8], but the world as a whole is his real stage.

In 1955 Conway faced a major culture shock when he left Cambridge for his first academic position, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He had to return to England to submit and defend his dissertation, and on the boat back he met his future wife, Ann. Evidently Ann had embarked on her own Commonwealth adventure, with plans to go from Canada to India, Australia and other faraway destinations. Instead she married John, which brought other kinds of adventures, though they did include travel. The two of them and their children have always moved internationally: their son David divides his time between Mexico and Canada, and from there he works designing film sets for Hollywood.

John Conway has always been on the move. He was offered his next academic position, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on a train, and one of his gifts to that institution was a travel scholarship for graduate students to go to Germany and Israel. (Historian Steven Schroeder was one of the recipients of this award).[9] Perhaps the most lasting evidence of Conway’s international scope is the newsletter he founded to connect people around the world with an interest in contemporary church history. Several decades and at least two changes in title later, it has thousands of subscribers spread across all continents.[10]

Distance and Moral Engagement

Conway’s most famous work, his book, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches[11],  received considerable praise for its depth of research and clarity of judgment. But it was also criticized by reviewers, some of whom deemed it too harsh, others of whom accused Conway of being too forgiving of the Germans. This divided response brings to mind Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Ivan Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons. Turgenev, Berlin maintained, proved himself to be a genuine moderate and a true liberal because he was attacked from both sides.[12] In Conway’s case, that two-pronged attack offers evidence that he is a genuine scholar whose work combines the proximity of profound engagement with the distance of objectivity or better put, restrained subjectivity.[13]

For Conway the goal is to capture the big picture. His is a perspective that focuses on structures and forces larger than individual manipulation, akin to the Annales view of history. Yet he insists on individual responsibility at the same time, and his statements in this direction are all the more powerful for their sparseness. Conway’s friendships are legendary, and his strong ties to Rudolf Vrba, a survivor and escapee from Auschwitz[14], and to Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, are at the heart of some of his most moving work. Likewise the longstanding bond with Franklin Littell produced extraordinary results, including the Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Church Struggle, a major international venue for presentation of research and the stimulus for a series of important volumes.

Conway’s trademark balance of engagement and distance also reflects aspects of his biography. His mother, Dr. Elsie Conway, was an academic too, a marine botanist, to be precise, with a degree from the University of Glasgow. As a boy, John Conway joined his two brothers in collecting seaweed for their mother to analyze. So of course it has been natural for Conway throughout his career to share the stage with women academics and to mentor women as well as men. His daughter, Jane Lister, is a Dean at Okanagan College in Vernon, Canada. Conway’s interpretations of the past reveal his conviction that history in the end is a gloomy science where big forces are at play. In place of the false pride of the idealist, Conway has the cold eye of a realist. Hence his admiration for William Rubinstein’s iconoclastic book, The Myth of Rescue: Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis.[15] Rubinstein set out to counter the notion that no one “did anything” to help Jews by pointing out that indeed there was a severe limit to what the United States, Britain, and Jews around the world could have done.

Conway has made a similar argument about the Vatican, not to absolve Pius XII of responsibility or to endorse wildly exaggerated claims of papal rescue efforts, but to introduce a reality check into the conversation. His extensive response to Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, published in 1965 [16], is still cited, though sometimes by ardent defenders of the papacy who read it selectively. John Conway is neither an apologist nor a fatalist. For him distance opens space for genuine engagement with the past rather than for judgment. His position is always complex, and although he insists that there is a limit to what could have been done, he is equally clear that much more should have been done by the Vatican, the Allies and Christians inside Germany and all over the world to aid Jews and to stand by them.[17]

Conway’s scholarship always shows his feet on the ground, critically engaging with complex issues. His 1989 essay on Canada and the Holocaust is a case in point: it manages to avoid both the familiar congratulatory stance (Canada the multicultural haven) and the lugubrious ‘we did nothing’ to provide a clear-sighted account that is all the more damning for its understated tone.[18] Never one to take the easy route, Conway also tackled the thorny issue of the Jewish leaders in Hungary and charges that they suppressed the 1944 Vrba-Wetzler report and thereby blocked the possibility of more people managing to evade the Nazi killing machine.[19] In 2006 Yehuda Bauer devoted a lengthy piece in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte to refuting Conway on this point.[20] As Conway’s students at the University of British Columbia could attest, it was always his goal to provide evidence and then let them make up their own minds as to what they thought.

Activism

In Stand Firm, there is a segment where Conway describes the churches’ reaction to Kristallnacht: “So when the ‘Crystal Night’ pogrom takes place in November 1938, that shocking and very visible evidence of Nazi antisemitism, the churches were totally silent.”[21] He bites off the word ‘silent’ with a finality that speaks volumes, and the director or editor had the dramatic sense to end the scene there. Conway himself has been far from silent throughout his career, and although his words have spoken loudly, his actions speak even louder. While searching for some of Conway’s early articles I stumbled across a 1977 publication entitled Visit to the Tibetan Settlements in Northern India.[22] This must have been written by a different John Conway, I assumed, knowing that both “John” and “Conway” are common names in the Anglo-American context. But something made me check to be sure, and indeed, this fascinating report was the work of Professor Conway in his role as Vice Chair of the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society of Canada.

In that capacity Conway made a series of trips to India, during which he met the Dalai Lama and supervised the progress of a series of projects he and his organization had initiated and continued to support. In painstaking detail he described visits to schools, monasteries, and elder care facilities. He also wrote knowledgeably about tractors and toilets and movingly about the people he encountered. This work with Tibetan refugees was part of Conway’s wider involvement with refugee issues, including a major commitment with the people known at the time as ‘boat people’. Alison Conway told me that many times people arrived in Canada with only one telephone number: John Conway’s. In this enterprise Conway worked closely with the well-known anarchist George Woodcock, who moved from England to British Columbia after the Second World War.[23] They did not see eye-to-eye on every political issue but they proved to be a highly effective team in support of people in need.

Conway’s activism is also linked in myriad ways to his family. His wife Ann, a physiotherapist, has always been literally ‘hands-on’ in her attitude toward others. Deeply involved in her church, she is active in promoting First Nations rights in Canada. In the 1970s, she, her husband, and their children welcomed a Tibetan foster child into their home. The child had cerebral palsy and needed a lot of care and attention. The Conways provided a home until the birth parents were able to do so. Like her parents, the eldest daughter, Jane Lister, is very community oriented and initiated a microloans program to help people in the city of Vernon get on their feet. She is also an expert in corporate social responsibility and global environmental governance.[24] Conway’s great-aunt Katharine (Kitty) Conway (later Glasier) was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party of England.[25] Known for her position of ethical socialism, she too was a classicist by training. Perhaps that long view gave her and gives her great-nephew a sense of the magnitude of human suffering and the massive forces that generate it. For both of them that awareness comes coupled with a powerful drive to do what you can to alleviate suffering.

Reflecting on these themes and John Conway’s treatment of them through his scholarship and activism brings to mind a well-known passage in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, from the part of the book known as ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’ Two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, dispute the meaning of human suffering and the appropriate response. Ivan, the nihilist, skeptic, and genius of reason, rants in despair. Armed with a seemingly endless list of horrific cases of brutal treatment of children that he has found in the newspapers, he delivers a brilliant argument against the existence of God, or at least of a loving, benevolent God who cares about human beings. Alyosha, the monk, remains silent until his brother has ended his diatribe. Then he does two things: he kisses his brother and mutters, “Never mind. I want to suffer too.” Mikhail Bakhtin famously characterized Dostoevsky’s approach as ‘polyphonic’, where the interaction, even clash of multiple opposing opinions generates its own truth.[26] John Conway embodies this kind of dialogue, between clearheaded, skeptical, painful reason with no illusions, and solidarity and activism, not always fully articulated or even able to be put into words, but like Alyosha’s response, full of love. We are grateful to John Conway for his example of engaged skepticism and the quiet model he has provided of skeptical activism.

[1] I would like to thank Steven Schroeder, Mark Ruff, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, and Kyle Jantzen for all they did to organize and host the conference on Reassessing Contemporary Church History in July 2013 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  Robert Ericksen was instrumental in bringing some of the important research presented there to the pages of this journal. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Alison Conway, John Conway’s daughter and a professor at Western University in London, Canada for her generous and indispensable assistance.

[2] Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, New York 1996.

[3] Martin Doblmeier, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Pacifist, Nazi Resister, 2003: winner of the 2004 Religion Communicators Council’s Wilbur Award for best documentary film.

[4] John S. Conway, Bourgeois German Pacifism during the First World War, in: Andrew Bonnell et al. (eds.), Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A. Moses, New York 1996.

[5] See also Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, translated by Richard Aldington, New York 1969, original publication 1928.

[6] John S. Conway, The Political Role of German Protestantism, 1870-1990, in: Journal of Church and State 34, no. 4 (1992): 819-842; Conway, The ‘Stasi’ and the churches: Between Coercion and Compromise in East German Protestantism, 1949-1989, in:  Journal of Church and State 36, no. 4 (1994): 725-745.

[7] Major publications are Alison Conway, The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narratives and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750, Toronto 2010; Alison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791, Toronto 2001.

[8] John S. Conway, Coming to Terms with the Past: Interpreting the German Church Struggles, in: German History 16, no. 3 (1998): 377-96.

[9] Steven Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany 1944-1954, Toronto 2013.

[10] Since Dec. 2012 Contemporary Church History Quarterly, online.

[11] John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, New York 1968.

[12] Isaiah Berlin, Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament, Romanes Lecture, Oxford 1972; reprinted as Introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth 1975.

[13] Saul Friedländer put it this way: “My own work, begun in 1990, was meant to show that no distinction was warranted among historians of various backgrounds in their professional approach to the Third Reich, that all historians dealing with this theme had to be aware of their unavoidably subjective approach, and that all could muster enough self-critical insight to restrain this subjectivity.” Saul Friedländer, “Prologue,” in: Lessons and Legacies IX, Jonathan Petropoulos et al (eds.), Evanston, IL 2010: 3.

[14] See a series of publications on Vrba: John S. Conway, Frühe Augenzeugenberichte aus Auschwitz: Glaubwürdigkeit und Wirkungsgeschichte, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (April 1979): 260-84. Here Conway discusses the Vrba-Wetzler Report at length in an essay framed by remarks on two then-recent efforts to discredit the Holocaust, by David Irving and Arthur Butz. Also Conway, Der Holocaust in Ungarn. Neue Kontroversen und Überlegungen, in: VfZ (1984): 179-212; and for later reflections and reactions, Conway, Flucht aus Auschwitz: Sechzig Jahre danach, in: VfZ 53, no. 4 (2005): 461-475.

[15] William Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, New York 1997.

[16] John S. Conway, The Silence of Pope Pius XII, Review of Politics 27, no. 1 (Jan. 1965): 105-131. Also see John S. Conway, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, in: Yad Vashem Studies 15 (1983): 327-45.

[17] John Conway, Between Apprehension and Indifference: Allied Attitudes to the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, in: Wiener Library Bulletin (1973/4): 37-48.

[18] John S. Conway, Canada and the Holocaust, in: Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda. Vol. 1: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer et al (eds.), Oxford 1989: 296-305.

[19] See translation of the 1944 Vrba-Wetzler Report as: Testimony of Two Escapees from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camps at Oswiecim, Poland, in: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1535 (accessed Jan. 2014). See also Rudolf Vrba, I Cannot Forgive, London 1963, and Alfred Wetzler, Escape from Hell, New York 2007; originally published in 1963. For analysis see Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, Ithaca, NY 2004.

[20] Yehuda Bauer, Rudolf Vrba und die Auschwitz Protokolle. A reply to John S. Conway, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54, no. 4 (2006): 701-710.

[21] Conway quoted in Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault: Study Guide for the Documentary Video, New York 1997: 52.

[22] John S. Conway, Visit to Tibetan Settlements in Northern India, International Project Booklet no. 7, New Westminster, B.C. 1977.

[23] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, Toronto 2004; originally published 1962.

[24] Publications include Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability, Cambridge, MA 2013; and Dauvergne and Lister, Timber, Cambridge, U. K. 2011.

[25] Paul Salveson, “ILP@120: Katharine Bruce Glasier – The ILP’s Spiritual Socialist,” ILP, Independent Labour Publications (25 Nov. 2013), http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2013/11/25/ilp120-katharine-bruce-glasier-%E2%80%93-the-ilp%E2%80%99s-spiritual-socialist/ (accessed 15 Jan. 2014).

[26] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel, Ann Arbor, MI 1973.

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Memories of John Conway (1929-2017)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Memories of John Conway (1929-2017)

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

John Conway is known to all who contribute to or read this online journal as the energetic, knowledgeable, committed, and seemingly indefatigable founder of the project. For fifteen years, John published a monthly online newsletter, filled primarily with his own review of books on German church history. That means something like 180 issues and, though I have not done an actual count, presumably 500 or more books reviewed. At the age of 80, John seemingly “slowed down” by creating the present Contemporary Church History Quarterly (CCHQ), with more than a dozen co-editors and with publication every three months. Until just weeks before his death, he remained the most prolific contributor to this project as well.

Readers of this online journal almost certainly also recognize John’s remarkable contribution to modern German church history, most especially based upon his magnum opus, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). John not only produced the first substantial historical study in English of German churches in Nazi Germany, he also preceded his German counterpart, Klaus Scholder, by almost a decade.[i] Nearly fifty years after its publication, John’s Nazi Persecution of the Churches remains foundational for the field. During those subsequent decades, John lectured around the world; published numerous important articles on German church history as well as the role of Pius XII and the Vatican in the Nazi period; served on editorial boards, including for Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte since its inception in 1988; and provided very important mentoring to junior scholars as they began to work in this field, including most or all of the editors of this online journal.

In 1976 I was one of those junior scholars given a chance to meet John Conway. Christopher Browning, soon to emerge as a Holocaust scholar known worldwide, invited John to drive three hours south to give a lecture at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. I was invited to speak at the same event. Although my doctoral dissertation was far from finished, my first article was about to appear in the Journal of Contemporary History. Thus I could be allowed to appear alongside John and give my first public lecture on Gerhard Kittel. Two years later, Chris and John encouraged me to travel to Stanford to attend the third annual meeting of the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS), the organization now known as the German Studies Association. We three shared a room and, as the junior person, I lay on a cot at the foot of the two beds. We turned out the lights, kept talking, and I remember John Conway commenting sadly about “good Germans” during the Nazi period: “Even the best of them had feet of clay.” Over the next decades, I learned to see this combination of high aspirations for Christian behavior, coupled with an honest recognition of human weakness, as typical of John Conway’s work. Though he entitled his path-breaking book The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, it is also filled with stories of the failure of church leaders, Protestant and Catholic, to confront Nazi policies, or even to dampen their own enthusiasm for many of those policies.

I managed to meet some important figures in this field before I met John, including, for example, Klaus Scholder and the remarkable Bonhoeffer friend and relative by marriage, Eberhard Bethge. But it was through John that I met figures in the Scholars Conference on Churches and the Holocaust, an organization led by Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke, which began in 1970 to host the first annual Holocaust conference in North America. In 1984 John helped plan a fiftieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration in Seattle, with participation by Bethge, but also by John de Gruchy, Wolfgang Gerlach, and Desmond Tutu, among others. Since its origins in 1988, John and I served together as members of the editorial board of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. In more recent years (as I can say as a senior member among John’s junior colleagues), the panel sessions, meetings, and conversations have included such important people as Susannah Heschel, Doris Bergen, and Victoria Barnett. At numerous meetings over forty years, I saw John play his prodigious role as a forceful, knowledgeable, articulate, senior scholar in the world of modern German church history. It was a great privilege, with the additional good fortune for me to spend most of my career just three hours away from John, his home, his wonderful wife Ann, and, not least, the impressive library collection he built at UBC.

[i] Klaus Scholder, Die Kirche und das Dritten Reich. Bd. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen, 1918-1934 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1977).

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Letter from the Editors (June 2017)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Letter from the Editors (June 2017)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

While the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to release our newest issue, we are also deeply saddened to announce the passing of our founding editor, John S. Conway, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia. As most readers will know, CCHQ began as John’s monthly e-mail newsletter, which ran from 1995, when he entered mandatory retirement, until 2009. Like clockwork, John would send his newsletter of book reviews and other notes relating (for the most part) to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich to over 500 recipients from universities and religious communities around the globe. When he was about to turn 80 years old, he engaged various members of the current editorial team in a discussion about the future of his newsletter–a discussion which resulted in the founding of this journal. John was gracious in allowing us to transform his monthly e-mail newsletter into an online quarterly, and remained our most active contributor up until the last six months of his life.

I had the privilege of visiting John and his wife Ann one last time in mid-June. As we talked about work, family, and faith, John was at his most energetic when chiding me and my fellow editors for the times when we failed to release the new issue of CCHQ at the beginning of the month. As ever, John combined generous support and high scholarly expectations, something many of us benefitted from and greatly admired. Indeed, until now, John has been the driving force behind CCHQ. The editors will have more to say about John Conway’s scholarly legacy in future issues. For now, we will mourn his loss, give thanks for his life and work, and pray for his family.

On behalf of my fellow editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2015), 351 pages, ISBN 9783421047113.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Hans von Dohnanyi was one of the most prominent men in the group of high-ranking German military officers and leading civilians who conspired in the course of the Second World War to overthrow Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. The failure of the attempted assassination plot in July 1944 led to Hitler’s orders to the Gestapo to round up and execute all those suspected of being involved, including Dohnanyi, his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and two other brothers-in-law who were all put to death in April 1945.

Dohnanyi had been trained as a constitutional lawyer and had held significant posts in the Ministry of Justice. But he had early on become dismayed at the illegal activities and political violence of the Nazi extremists and had in fact drawn up a dossier which documented these misdeeds in full detail. Continue reading

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Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence, Parts 1 and 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-4438-8006-0 and 978-1-4438-8011-4.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Bishop George Bell was the stalwart champion in the Church of England promoting ecumenical relations with the other churches of Europe and North America throughout the nearly thirty years of his episcopate from 1929-1958. He held leading positions in innumerable committees, councils and conferences, and in 1937, during the world meeting in Oxford of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, was a strong advocate for joining with Faith and Order, in order to found a World Council of Churches, which took place in 1938. At the same time it was agreed that this new Council (still in process of formation) should be established in Geneva, and that a young Dutch theologian W.A.Visser ‘t Hooft (Vim), who had served for several years in the Geneva scene as General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, should be appointed as General Secretary. Visser ‘t Hooft was far more of a General than a Secretary—I knew him personally—and brought unrivalled resourcefulness and a resolute determination to see his ideas realized, for the best part of thirty years. This was the beginning of a partnership between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, who early on struck up a strong and harmonious relationship. They are rightly described in the book’s title as being “intimately associated for many years”.

The exchanges by post or telegrams recorded in these volumes are largely drawn from the Geneva archives of the World Council of Churches or from the voluminous Bell papers, now deposited in the Lambeth Palace library in London. The first volume covers the period up to 1949, and the second the final years of Bell’s life up to 1958. The editing by Gerhard Besier is very helpful, since his footnotes give the biographical details of all persons mentioned, as well as bibliographical references to the many scholarly books relating to their endeavors. (There are, however, aggravating lapses in the proof-reading and printing of the English text.) Besier’s introduction is reproduced from the chapter he contributed to The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958 (p. 169-194), edited in 2012 by Andrew Chandler.

Many of these exchanges have to do with the plans for the various meetings of World Council bodies, and discussions about the membership, the place and date, as well as the content. These documents are however not too informative about the results. Obviously when the two men met at such meetings, they had intense verbal discussions and made significant decisions about the World Council’s operations. But these were not recorded in their correspondence at the time, and so are missing from these volumes. This is particularly noticeable with regard to such highly significant meetings as the First Constituent Assembly held in Amsterdam in 1948, when Bell became Chairman of the WCC’s Central Committee. While these documents discuss at length the preparations for this Assembly in August 1948 (p. 365-428), they provide no indication of the important deliberations and decisions taken on that occasion. The same is true for the Second Assembly, held in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois. Equally regrettable is the absence of documents relating to the important meeting in Stuttgart in October 1945, at which both Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft were present, and at which the famous Declaration of Guilt was issued (p. 287-94). Obviously both Bell and Vim played an active part and had extensive discussions with the German leaders, including Martin Niemöller, for whom they had been praying ever since his first incarceration in 1937. But they left no further record of their deliberations or their conclusions about this conference or its historic significance in their correspondence. An equally striking omission is the exchange between Bell and Vim about Bell’s journey to Sweden in May 1942, his meeting there with Bonhoeffer, and the information he gained about the German resistance, which the Bishop then passed on to the British Foreign Secretary, asking for some public gesture of support be given to the anti-Nazi forces in Germany. Eden’s refusal was conveyed to Visser ‘t Hooft in the notable telegram sent by Bell on July 23, 1942: “Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible”. (Bell’s message is discussed on p. 158 of W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973).) But this calamitous blow to Bell’s hopes for some gesture of support for the German resistance is not mentioned in Besier’s work. In fact, this first volume is silent for the whole period of November 1941 to August 1942.

It would have been helpful if the editor could have inserted short passages to fill such gaps. He could also have directed the reader to look at both of the biographies of Bell by Canon Jasper (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press,1967)) and Andrew Chandler (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), also Visser ‘t Hooft’s Memoirs (1973), as well as such comprehensive histories as A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (London: SPCK, 1954), edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neil, and its sequel The Ecumenical Advance: A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1948-1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1986), edited by Harold Fey. Unless these more complete sources are available to be consulted, the usefulness of these two volumes alone will be limited. Libraries may well consider whether the expense is justified.

However, the value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture. This refusal meant that the vision of a united Christendom, strongly urged by Bell, was thwarted, and still remains incomplete. Not until the Second Vatican Council, i.e. several years after Bell’s death, did the Roman Catholic authorities show a more tolerant and cooperative attitude. But the World Council has yet to overcome the barrier of Rome’s reluctance to belong to this wider ecumenical fraternity.

Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, during the period from 1938 to 1958, i.e. during the fruitful years of cooperation between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, the World Council moved from a tentative and provisional beginning to becoming the acknowledged chief instrument and channel of the ecumenical movement. The correspondence contained in the second volume spells out the contexts of these years from 1950 to 1958, including the preparations for the second Assembly meeting in the United States in 1954, at which point Bell resigned his position as Chairman of the Central Committee, and was promoted to Honorary President of the Council. But, as this correspondence shows, he continued to be very actively engaged in the affairs of the Council, even after his retirement in 1958 from the Chichester diocese. In fact he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee in Denmark, and preached a self-critical sermon there only two months before his untimely death in October 1958. The volume concludes with two moving tributes to Bell’s achievements written by Visser ‘t Hooft shortly after Bell’s funeral.

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Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis. Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts fur Totalitarismusforschung, 41 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 457 Pp., ISBN 9783525369173.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a Protestant millenarian sect, who look forward in anticipation to the last days, which they expect will take place very shortly in a catastrophic conflict between good and evil. Founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, a small number had already come to Germany before the First World War. But the turbulent, revolutionary political upheavals which took place in Germany after 1918 seemed to confirm their expectations. The Witnesses grew in number, and were reckoned by 1933 to count some 20,000 adherents, who were active as door-to-door preachers in many parts of the country.

Much of the scholarly literature about the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been conditioned by the harassment and persecution which this sect endured during the period of Nazi rule after 1933. Most of the authors have displayed sympathy with the Witnesses’ sufferings and pay tribute to their enduring loyalty to their faith. Gerald Hacke, however, is principally interested in the actions of the state authorities, and the organization of the various methods of repression which took such a toll. Furthermore he has noted that the same kind of repression was carried out in the post-1945 years in what became known at the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under the aegis of the Communist rulers of that part of Germany for the next 40 years. His large-scale account is therefore mainly a comparison of the similarities as well as the differences in the treatment of this minority religious group by the two ideologically opposed dictatorships. In so doing he has delved in to the vast amount of state documentation left behind by both regimes, particularly in their police and judicial records and the files of the various government ministries who attempted to bring the Jehovah’s Witnesses to heel.

Hacke divides his account chronologically, with 200 pages dealing with the Nazi period and the same for the decades of repression in the GDR. These surveys are accompanied by an extensive list of the files consulted and a forty page bibliography. He completes his study with a close examination of the parallels and differences in the forms of repression put in place by the two regimes. In both cases he notes the stubborn refusal of the Witnesses to conform to the states’ requirement of political loyalty. But the subsequent banning of their organizations and activities stirred up a sense of victimization which in fact only strengthened the community. The increasing number of legal challenges, as well as pressure from the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Witnesses, for example in 1934, showed that such repressive policies had disadvantages, even though the wider public, including the mainline churches, showed little or no sympathy. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 led to the arrest and imprisonment of numerous younger male members of this sect. The same feature was to follow the identical measure taken in the early 1950s in the GDR. But in neither case did the Witnesses abandon their faithful and stubborn commitment to refuse any form of military activity. The Nazi and Communist officials were therefore both forced to recognize the ineffectiveness of such punitive actions, but were adamant in regarding the Witnesses as a political and ideological danger which required drastic treatment.

Hacke avoids drawing any direct link between the repressive forces mobilized by Himmler, allegedly in order to follow Hitler’s call for ”the eradication of this venomous brood”, and those followed twenty years later in the GDR by the Ministry of Security, commonly known as the Stasi. The similarity of tactics is however clear. Both dictatorships sought to imprison the sect’s leading figures, imposing employment bans, and even removing children from their families. During the Nazi period some 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, including 2000 sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by wearing purple triangles on their clothes. Moreover, 240 were executed, while up to 1200 lost their lives while incarcerated. No other group of religious prisoners was exposed to the sadism of the Nazis in such a brutal fashion.

To be sure, the Gestapo offered to release these prisoners if they would sign a paper declaring their renunciation of their former views and promise not to associate with their fellow Witnesses. Hacke does not make it clear whether this project was designed to sow dissension in the Witnesses’ ranks, or to relieve the prison and concentration camp system of these unwanted and uncooperative inmates. In any case the tactic failed.

After 1945 and the collapse of the Nazi regime, the surviving Witnesses began to regroup and to resume their activities, though mainly in hiding from the successor authorities. Soon enough they were to meet vehement opposition from the newly-established Communist authorities in the eastern sector of the country, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. This campaign made much of the fact that the Witnesses were founded in the United States, and were therefore seen as agents of American anti-Communist imperialism. The Stasi was characterized by the same fanatical zeal as the Gestapo, and in fact extended their intrusive surveillance to even wider sections of the population. But right up to 1989, the Communist regime justified its repression of the Witnesses with very similar accusations of disloyalty and failure to support the national goals of the Communist party.

Hacke rightly points out that both regimes, despite their different propagandistic justifications, were deliberately seeking to suppress any supposedly deviant groups by very similar methods. The Witnesses, however, were able to mount an effective resistance in part because they had arrived in Germany with the expectation that their dissident beliefs would create conditions in which they would be persecuted. Their long experience of victimization gave them an intense sense of group solidarity, and the faithful adherence to their beliefs was thus built in and maintained throughout the more than fifty years of repression.

After 1989, with the overthrow of the Stasi and its political masters, the Witnesses were no longer subjected to government-sponsored suspicion and surveillance. But as Hacke points out, the decades of defamation and discrimination had left an almost indelible pejorative reputation in the minds of the general public. The Witnesses then campaigned successfully to gain recognition as a public corporation in German law, but the wider issue of prejudice still remains, as can be seen in the active hostility by some of the more established church groups against the proselytizing undertaken by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The search for a new identity in a new Germany still continues.

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Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (London: Penguin Books, 2015), Pp. 593, ISBN: 9780713990898.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Kershaw-HellDespite its theologically-sounding title, this latest work by Ian Kershaw, who is one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary historians, is a masterly synoptic history of Europe, designed for the general reader. In this work, Kershaw expands on his previous interest in Nazi Germany to cover what he calls Europe’s “era of self-destruction,” which places Nazi Germany in its wider context of a continent-wide series of disasters in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless he also includes a short but valuable section on “Christian Churches, Challenge and Continuity”, placing emphasis on the political and social developments affecting the Christian churches within the wider European setting.

Kershaw begins this section by describing how, on the outbreak of the 1914 war, both sides indulged in claims of divine approval for their nationalistic goals. These mutually contradictory and incompatible assertions did little to enhance the morale of the combatants, and in the long run discredited both their advocates and the Christian gospel of peace and brotherly love. In the aftermath, paradoxically, the churches in Britain and France led the movement against militarism and were in favour of reconciliation through such agencies as the League of Nations. But in defeated Germany, the clergy were leaders in maintaining that they should have been victorious, that their nation had been stabbed in the back by disloyal elements, particularly Jews, and that they were being humiliated by the vindictive and oppressive Treaty of Versailles. Such reactionary attitudes did much to prepare the ground for Hitler’s rise to power.

As Kershaw argues, in 1933 one wing of German Protestantism sought to bring the church up to date by jumping on the Nazi bandwagon. But this evoked a backlash from the more conservative wing known as the Confessing Church, which opposed any state interference in church affairs. However, many of these pastors had sympathy with Nazism’s political and military aims. For their part, the German Catholics invoked the aid of the Vatican in 1933, seeking a treaty or Concordat to secure their position in the new Third Reich. But, as Kershaw points out, this Concordat from the beginning was a dead letter, due to the Nazis’ dynamic ideological and nationalistic plans and the anticlerical attitudes of the party leadership. In practice, in both churches, despite attempts to oppose Nazi encroachments, there was general compliance with other spheres of government policy, including the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The author goes on to explain that similar attitudes prevailed in other countries, such as the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia, where the president happened to be a Catholic priest. Criticisms from the pope were ignored, so that a leading Vatican official could comment in 1942: “Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest?” In other parts of Europe, the fate of the Jews was largely greeted by churchmen with indifference. Arguments have continued ever since whether more forceful condemnations of Nazi atrocities by the churches would have saved lives, or have led to making the situation in Germany and the occupied territories even worse. In Kershaw’s view the silence of Pope Pius XII on this issue irredeemably harmed his reputation. After the Nazi regime was overthrown, little was done to regret the churches’ support for totalitarian rule or to extend sympathy to its victims. In 1945 only a few voices, such as that of Pastor Niemõller, were found to support a declaration of guilt, while too many churchmen had to come to terms with their previous support of Nazi goals.

In Kershaw’s opinion, apart from the regions that fell under Soviet domination in 1945, the wartime experiences of the churches in Europe did little to impair their standing. Soon afterwards they took energetic steps to reorganize and revitalize themselves. Significant changes would only come about in the 1960s. In his conclusion, Kershaw reverts to his theological interests by asking both about the churches’ responses to the disastrous atrocities of this half-century and about a God who could allow such evils to prevail. In his view such vital questions would only grow, not diminish, as the Second World War receded further into history.

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Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Pp. 486. ISBN 9781451464726.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Since 1945, Nazism has been universally condemned. Historians have written extensively, but always pejoratively, about its personalities, its politics, its ideology, and particularly its crimes, which culminated in the Holocaust. As a result, less research has been carried out, and always negatively, into the reasons why Nazism gained support from an overwhelming majority of Germans, including many Protestant churchmen and women. Particularly vocal in Nazism’s cause was the minority group pf Protestants known as the German Christian Faith Movement, whose members very actively sought to introduce and popularize Nazi ideas into the liturgical and practical life of their parishes. Mary Solberg has now selected and translated into English a useful collection of this group’s writings, which provide an English-speaking readership with the full range of their ideas. Presumably she feels that the time is not yet ripe, or the audience not yet ready, for any extended analysis of these sources.

Solberg-ChurchDespite the excellent contributions of such authors as James Zabel, Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen, Solberg feels that “far too few people in or out of the academy know far too little“ about the conduct of the churches In Hitler’s Germany. But her extended introduction clearly indicates her approach to answering the questions posed by her documents: specifically what role did this German Christian Faith Movement play in the wider picture; how successful or significant were its supporters in the rise and maintenance of Nazism, at least up to 1940; and how should Christians and churches today learn from this example of a church undone? Her skillful translations of the writings of several prominent members of this movement will be of considerable value to those who do not read German, but it would have been helpful to have a biographical note or appendix outlining the careers of these authors. Her conclusion is that this was not a unique episode, that the conflation of political, racist and nationalist ideas with theological witness is a constant temptation, and therefore that the German experience in the 1930s deserves further study by both theologians and historians.

The opening chapter provides us with the original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, written in 1932 by Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, who went on to become Bishop of Brandenburg in September 1933. He shared the views of many younger clergymen who regarded the leaders of the various provincial Protestant churches as outdated conservatives. They had failed to catch the spirit of renewal needed to bring Protestant witness up-to-date. By contrast, the Nazi Party had caught the imagination of the people and had already affirmed in its platform through its support for “Positive Christianity”. The church could not afford to be left behind, but should rally its supporters behind the values of the German race, ethnicity, and nation, following the lead given by Adolf Hitler. Armed with this kind of “heroic piety”, the German Christian Movement would be ready to take up the struggle against godless Marxism.

The Nazi take-over of power in January 1933 was naturally enthusiastically greeted by the members of the German Christian Movement. They applauded the Nazis’ initial measures against the Jews, such as the law passed in April debarring Jews from public office with the application of the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”. During the summer, church elections saw the supporters of the movement installed in high positions in many church bodies, such as the Synod of the Old Prussian Union Church, which in September resolved to apply the “Aryan Paragraph” to its clergy. But this move aroused vigorous opposition, such as that expressed by Karl Barth, then a professor in Bonn, whose 15-page pamphlet is here reproduced in full.

Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose shorter protest is also given, these forceful objections in defence of Protestant orthodoxy stressed the fact that all Christians were joined in a common baptism, and could not be separated on the basis of racial origin. However, they limited these protests on behalf of those converted Jews who had become Christians and did not raise questions about the wider scope of Nazi persecutions. The members of the German Christian Movement were not so reticent. They called for a more complete renunciation of all things Jewish in both church membership and liturgical practice. In a notably violent speech before a large audience of 20,000 supporters in November 1933, one of the radical German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for a complete alignment of the church with National Socialism, in particular by “liberating itself from the Old Testament with its Jewish rewards and punishment morality and its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps”. German Christians instead must “return to the heroic Jesus” as a “fearless combatant” against the pernicious influence of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees. But this speech went too far for the majority of Protestant loyalists who then left the movement, and transferred their allegiance to the nucleus demanding church independence, which later coalesced into the Confessing Church.

More effective support for the German Christian Movement came from the theological professors, such as Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen or Gerhard Kittel of Tübingen, both of whom had distinguished publication records. Hirsch became and remained a “true believer” in National Socialism, even after 1945, since, as he claimed, “God speaks in and to the particular historical situation in which people find themselves – in this case National Socialist Germany”. The church should not isolate itself on the remains of Reformation theology, as did Barth, but instead the church is called to be engaged with the new spirit of national regeneration, and reflect and contribute to the drive for racial purity, which left no room for Jewish Christians. Kittel, the author of the most widely used biblical dictionary, was even more prolific in addressing large audiences up and down the country. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and shortly afterwards wrote a major piece on the Jewish issue, which was a central one for all the members of the German Christian Movement. His purpose, according to one source, was to raise the discussion of the Jewish question above the level of slogans and vulgar racism and give it a moral Christian basis. He claimed that there were four solutions to the Jewish issue: extermination, expulsion, assimilation or a guest status, where Jews would be tolerated so long as they kept to separate ways. He judged the first three solutions to be impractical, so argued fiercely for the fourth. After the war, when he was put on trial for his Nazi sympathies, Kittel tried to argue he had been only a moderate campaigner, but the forcefulness of the extracts printed here suggests otherwise.

Solberg also provides a number of extracts from the speeches or writings of leading members of the German Christian Movement, such as Joachim Hossenfelder, Julius Leutheuser, Siegfried Leffler, and the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, all written in the early years of Nazi rule. In addition, she provides a thoughtful critique of these views by Professor Paul Althaus of Erlangen, who argued that the conflation of German nationalism, admiration for Hitler, and Christian tradition went far too far by asserting that God’s salvation was being played out in Germany’s history. This, he claimed, was a “bald-faced theological heresy”. But Althaus’ own variant of the “orders of creation” included a positive enthusiasm for National Socialism as a political movement and for an ethno-national Christianity. He utterly rejected any idea that the combination of Nazi politics and the Faith Movement’s version of religion could turn Germany into a world-savior.

It is clear that these divisions within the Protestant churches led to Hitler abandoning any hopes he had held that they would combine under his authority. Instead he increasingly supported the anti-clerical and anti-Christian elements in the Nazi leadership, such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, who were to institute increasingly severe measures of persecution and repression on the churches. These doomed any chances of the German Christian Movement’s hopes for success. Its leaders made one final bid to win back support in their notable Godesberg Declaration of March 1939, in which they indicated their strong support for the regime’s hostile antisemitic policies and established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The final document in this collection is by Walter Grundmann, the first academic director of the Institute, whose career continue into the German Democratic Republic, where he served for many years as a pastor, publishing widely-used commentaries on the gospels but also working as an informant for the Stasi. There is little evidence that he changed his view that “the content of Jesus’ preaching shapes and determines his work. In Jesus of Nazareth something utterly un-Jewish appears”.

Solberg does not attempt any evaluation of these sources, but her careful and viable translations will be of help to English-speaking students who will now be able to trace the vagaries of this section of German Protestantism during its short but vibrant and mistaken career. It remains to be seen whether the temptations to which these authors gave expression will be repeated in churches elsewhere. She has given us a useful cautionary tale.

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Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. 286. ISBN 9780198714569.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lucian Leustean, who teaches Political Science at Aston University, Birmingham, England, begins his study with the distinctly odd claim that two events are at the core of the relationship between the ecumenical movement and the European Community. He asserts, firstly, that a member of the German resistance movement, Adam von Trott, who was executed by the Nazis in August 1944 a month after the failure of the plot to assassinate Hitler, left a legacy indicating that not all prominent Germans backed the Nazi regime, that his Christian faith inspired churchmen to resist occupation, and that he had a vision of a federal post-war Europe with close relations between East and West. Very much the same role was played by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is mentioned by Leustean only in passing. But in fact, Trott is now virtually forgotten whereas Bonhoeffer’s theology has steadily grown in influence. It is dubious, however, that either of them had much influence on the making of the European Community.

Leustean’s second claim is even more doubtful. He suggests that the creation of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), established in 1946, was of significance to the making of the European Community. This highly elitist body was led by an Englishman, Kenneth Grubb, and an American, Frederick Nolde, and was designed to draw the American churches into the debates about the post-war world, and subsequently about the Cold War. But Grubb was skeptical about Britain’s association with any European political reconstruction, since he saw Britain’s future in terms of its overseas possessions in the Commonwealth. And as Leustean admits, the CCIA failed to give any lead or engage in the process of European integration. It was thus years before the Protestant and Anglican churches adopted a coherent position towards the European Community, or even agreed what Europe was.

Leustean-EcumenicalTo be sure the tasks of European reconstruction and reconciliation were formidable for politicians and churchmen alike. Priority had to be given to the immense task of caring for the vast millions of bombed-out, brutalized, and displaced populations. Most churches were still tied to their own national affairs and regarded plans for European integration as lying outside their spiritual domain. However a few of the survivors of the pre-war ecumenical bodies, led by the valiant and dynamic personality of the Dutch Calvinist, Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recognized the importance of seeking closer relations with those politicians involved in European reconstruction. The World Council, which achieved its long-delayed inauguration in 1948, almost immediately suffered a grievous, if not unexpected, blow by the rejection of its invitation to the Vatican to have Roman Catholics as full members. The initiative in European affairs was therefore left to the Anglicans, the Protestant leaders of northern Europe, and a handful of Orthodox churchmen in Eastern Europe. So too, those politicians who had expected that the legacy of unbridled nationalism under Hitler would lead to a willingness to cooperate more closely in pan-European revival were soon to be disappointed by the brusque refusal of the Soviet government to entertain any such measures for the areas of Eastern Europe under its military control. In both the political and religious fields, therefore, expectations had to be cut down, and prognoses for European integration modified, often drastically.

Leustean’s account examines the role of political and religious contacts with a direct impact on European institutions. He records how a number of Protestant churchmen saw their duty as Christians to go beyond furthering the local piety of their congregations. These men of vision believed that European cooperation was a mission for the wider Christian constituency. This witness became especially relevant in 1948, when the Berlin blockade made the threat of Soviet military power all too evident, and seemingly doomed the hopes for a peaceful cooperation throughout the continent. Leustean pays particular attention to the Ecumenical Commission on European Cooperation, founded in 1950, since some of its members went on to fulfill high administrative positions in the European Community’s structures. These included Gustav Heinemann, later President of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and Jean Rey, who became President of the European Commission. These men were not dreamy idealists, but practical executives, who believed that their project could and should deserve the moral guidance of the churches.

However, since most of the western European countries who founded the European Community had large Catholic populations, and since its founding leaders came from Catholic backgrounds, it was hardly surprising that relations with the Protestant ecumenists were at first marked by tensions. Later, however, after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a new spirit of interdenominational cooperation was to be seen.

The European Community can be said to begin in 1950 with the plan put forward by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, for the amalgamation of industrial resources in the European Coal and Steel Community. But this initial success was overshadowed by the tensions resulting from the Cold War, by the proposals to rearm West Germans to play their part in defending their homeland, and by the reluctance of some idealists to encourage any step which would divide the nations of Western and Eastern Europe from each other. Many leading German churchmen campaigned for a unified and neutral Germany. Many British churchmen still adhered to their former attachment to the Commonwealth and were skeptical about any form of European cooperation. Many others adopted the traditional view that politics and religion should act in separate spheres. The cause of European unity therefore faced an uphill battle. The most that could be hoped for was “unity in diversity” which was finally acknowledged as the motto of the European Union in May 2000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Common Market among the six western European nations was founded in 1960. However the attention of the ecumenical fraternity was more attuned to the project for a pan-European Conference of European Churches, which held its first meeting in 1959. But the obvious Soviet propaganda and control of the churches in Eastern Europe meant that the CEC was a rather dubious venture. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the British Government had a change of heart and applied to join the Common Market. But when its application was rejected by De Gaulle in 1963, this paradoxically stirred up interest among the British churches, and eventually led to a more positive approach to western European cooperation. Yet, at the same time the same French government’s refusal to accept the proposal, put forward by the Vatican, to appoint a diplomatic envoy to the European Commission in Brussels, delayed the establishment of formal relations with Europe’s largest religious community until 1970.

In the 1970s the economic successes of the Common Market were notable. With the Soviet military threat contained behind the Iron Curtain, the western European economies flourished. Living standards rose rapidly. New integrative measures were started such as the European Parliament, the adoption of a single currency, and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the abolition of border controls and customs offices in many parts of Europe. These developments owed little to any church initiatives, nor even to representatives of the Ecumenical Movement. As one observer commented, this lack of ecumenical mobilization was in part due to the European Community being regarded as a purely economic and political project in which religious communities could not find a theological basis for participation. Also national churches, which saw themselves as the preservers of their country’s past, were unwilling to take up the cause of others with whom they had no common heritage or language.

In fact, the Ecumenical Movement concentrated more on the personal and pastoral witness amongst the ever growing number of international bureaucrats at the European Community’s offices in Brussels. The hopes of some leading Eurocrats that the churches would take a lead in calling the young and creative forces in Europe to unite behind a common vision were never realized. British churchmen, for instance, remained skeptical about the influence of supra-national technocrats, who were not directly responsible to any national government. The ideal of political integration between different parts of Western Europe therefore remained a nonstarter, since it threatened to curtail relations with Eastern Europe or the developing world outside Europe.. As a result, no common ‘European’ consciousness appeared, transcending national loyalties.

Leustean takes his account up to 1978, but in a concluding chapter is obliged to note the dramatic changes in later years, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. Many churchmen have since sought to engage in dialogue in order to understand the role of religion in the new Europe. Over these years countless committees, councils, conferences, and gatherings have been established or re-established with a bewildering array of alphabetical abbreviations, for which there is fortunately an appended index. But essentially the complex scale and scope of what is now the European Union defies easy or synoptic description.. It was left up to a retiring President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to call in 1990 for an attempt to give Europe a soul through a spiritual and intellectual debate in which the Churches should participate actively. It was a brave but mistaken view that the Churches, or other faith communities, could find enough common ground to overcome their mutual and historic differences, which are likely to remain prevailing in the foreseeable future.

Leustean’s conclusion is therefore that a fragmented, interrupted vision of Europe at both the political and religious levels, which had impacted the attempts to bring unity and integration to at least Western Europe, was the major factor why the dreams of idealists such as his hero von Trott were never realized.

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Public Lecture: On the Side of the Disenfranchised and the Weak: The Office of Pastor Grüber (1938-1940)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Public Lecture: On the Side of the Disenfranchised and the Weak:  The Office of Pastor Grüber (1938-1940)

By Hartmut Ludwig, Humboldt University, Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Historians are now largely agreed that during the twelve years of Nazi rule there were four distinct and successive stages to the discrimination, persecution and eventual expulsion of Germany’s Jewish citizens. Each of these stages saw an escalation in the severity of the measures taken earlier, and eventually led to the decision to eliminate almost everybody of Jewish origins in the areas of Europe under Nazi control.

The first phase from 1933 to 1935 can be described as the period of discrimination and disenfranchisement. In 1933 there were approximately 500,000 persons belonging to the Jewish communities, as well as approximately 400,000 Christians or non-believers who were of Jewish descent and were included in the Nazi categories of those to be discriminated against. The first measures were implemented only two months after the Nazis came to power in January 1933, when on 1 April a nation-wide boycott of Jewish shops and businesses was carried out. This was followed a week later by the passing of a new Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which covered all appointments to major institutions, such as hospitals and universities. (The title of this Law was entirely misleading since it was chiefly concerned to apply the discriminatory code of the so-called Aryan paragraph, banning Jews from public offices, along with supposed political opponents, in order to extinguish the idea of any independence in the civil service.)

This law did not apply to Germany’s religious bodies, but nevertheless the pro-Nazi sections of the Protestant Church, known as the “Deutsche Christen”, demanded that the same “Aryan paragraph” should be applied to their church. This suggestion was heavily contested, and led in fact to the establishment of the Confessing Church, and a ginger group calling itself the Pastors’ Emergency League.

Their protest was based on their view that the “Aryan paragraph” introduced racial considerations instead of loyalty to the church’s doctrines. On the other hand, these churchmen did not raise any objections to the law’s application to the wider society. Only a few protested it on these grounds, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who frequently quoted the verse taken from Proverbs 31.8: “Open Thy mouth for the Dumb”, and at the same time asked: “Who recognizes that this is the Bible’s least demand in such a time as today?” And as Karl Barth wrote two years later when the Confessing Church had also suffered persecution: “The Church has not found adequate expressions to counter the million-fold injustices being perpetrated. She speaks – if she speaks – only on behalf of her own members. She still clings to the fiction that we are living in a state which upholds the law as envisaged in Romans 13.”

The second stage from 1935 to 1938 can be seen as a period of isolation and exclusion. This began with the decree embodying the Nuremberg Racial Laws of September 1935, which was followed by an unprecedented campaign of vilification against the Confessing Church because it allegedly was trying to counteract and silence the Nazis’ campaign against the evil influences of the Jews. But this was a grossly exaggerated propaganda attack. In fact, when a staff member, Marga Meusel, had put forward the request that the Confessing Church create an office to help those affected by the Nuremberg Laws, she was ignored, as was the elaborate protest written by the Berlin girls high school teacher, Elisabeth Schmitz, which she presented in vain to the Confessing Church Synod in September 1935. “How should we answer all the despairing and bitter questions and complaints? Why is the Church doing nothing? Why does it allow these countless acts of injustice to happen? Why does it continue to make these joyful acclamations of the Nazi state, which are really political declarations, when the lives of a section of its membership are being endangered?”

Renewed calls for some practical steps to assist these Christians of Jewish extraction came from the Heidelberg Pastor Hermann Maas, as well as from the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, which had already in January 1936, at a meeting in London, set up an “International Relief Committee for Refugees from Germany”. In addition, the English Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, who was much engaged in ecumenical activities, had sent his sister-in-law, Laura Livingstone, to Berlin to help arrange and intensify such international collaboration. But it was only after five and a half years of Nazi rule that the Confessing Church finally recognized that it had a responsibility to assist the Christians of Jewish origin. So began the work later known as the so-called Office of Pastor Grüber.

The third phase from 1938 to 1941 began with the violent pogrom and the burning of synagogues on November 9 and 10, 1938, commonly known as the Kristallnacht, and led to the enforced expulsion of numerous Jewish citizens from Germany in order to make the country as quickly as possible “free from Jews”. During this pogrom some 30,000 men were dispatched to a concentration camp, from which they were released only when they could produce a paper showing that they were emigrating from Germany as soon as possible. A number of pastors were included in this repressive action. The Churches were silent. Out of the approximately 18,000 Protestant pastors only a small handful brought the subject up in their sermons. The chief of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, then organized the “Reich Association of Jews” in order to speed up the process of their expulsion. Devotedly the Nazi members and their supporters in the Protestant ranks, the “Deutsche Christen”, followed this lead. Six “Deutsche Christen” provincial churches in Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia. Mecklenburg, Lubeck and Schleswig-Holstein then expelled any Christians of Jewish extraction out of their congregations. In May 1939, a new Institute, called the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” was founded in Eisenach. Its staff members then undertook a project called “God’s Message” which produced a New Testament from which all mention of Jesus’ Jewish origin had been removed.

The fourth phase from 1941 to 1945 began in October 1941 with the first mass deportation of Jews from Germany to the ghetto in Litzmannstadt in Poland. This was preceded by a police edict of September 1, 1941, ordering all Jews over the age of six to wear a Jewish star on their clothing. By this means they were openly stigmatized and eventually excluded from German society. In Breslau, Katharina Staritz, who was vicar of the main church, called on all her colleagues in her diocese to give particular pastoral care to any Christians of Jewish origin, since, in her view, they held the same rights in the church as other parishioners. She was then arrested and deported to the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück and was held there until May 1943. Only in a few parishes were Christians wearing the Jewish star allowed to take part in the church services. In other parishes, a poster was put up stating “Jews are unwanted here”. In addition, on December 22, 1941, the vice-chairman of Church House in Berlin sent out a circular to all churches advising them that Christians of Jewish origin should absent themselves from participation in church life. And on January 20, 1942, the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, informed leading members of the Reich government, at a conference held at the Wannsee, near Berlin, about the measures to be taken to deport all remaining Jews in order to make Germany “free from Jews”. Many of those affected still continued to believe that they were only being resettled in Eastern Europe. For that reason, various parishes organized “Farewell Services”. But it became ever clearer that these people were not being resettled, but instead murdered. So some of them tried to go underground, and adopt a false identity in order to survive. In March 1943, representatives of a Bible study group in Munich wrote to their bishop, Hans Meiser, and requested him to break the church’s silence on this issue of Jewish persecution. In their letter they wrote: “We are driven by the simple requirement of loving your neighbor. . . Every “non-Aryan” whether Jewish or Christian today in Germany has fallen into the hands of murderers. We have to ask ourselves whether we are going to behave like the priest or the Levite, or like the Samaritan.” Bishop Meiser refused their request.

The Establishment and History of Pastor Grüber’s Office, 1938-1940

We can distinguish between three phases: 1) the creation of this relief office in 1938; 2) the extension and consolidation of the relief efforts in 1939, and 3) the restrictions and final closure of the Office in 1940.

The various relief efforts for Christians of Jewish origin which had been created since 1933 had nevertheless failed. Already in May 1933 the Berlin ecumenical leader Professor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze had proposed a plan for a joint ecumenical service for German emigrants, whether Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. The idea was to establish a counselling service for all those forced to leave Germany because of Nazi persecution, which would operate to give advice about job opportunities and some financial assistance in order to help them create new lives abroad. But in June 1933 Siegmund-Schultze was arrested and obliged to leave Germany. So this plan came to nothing. Only in 1935 was the same effort started from Switzerland by Pastor Hermannn Maas.

But in July 1933 some Christians of Jewish origin founded in Berlin a self-help organization with a grandiose title of “National Association of Christians with German Citizenship, Who Are Non-Aryans or Only Partly Non-Aryans”. The object was to persuade the government that these Christians of Jewish origin were just as good Germans as others, and in order to persuade the churches to treat them as fully entitled to the same rights as others. But the church leadership was dominated by “Deutsche Christen” who agreed with the Nazi policy of seeking to expel these Christians of Jewish origin from the church. So this plan also came to nothing. This National Association was obliged to rename itself in September 1935, and adopt the name of the “Paulusbund” In March 1937 all those who were fully Jewish were forced out. So the remaining structure was meaningless.

In August 1934, the plight and shattering experiences of these Christians of Jewish origin led Marga Meusel, the director of the Protestant Welfare Agency in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf and her colleague Charlotte Friedenthal to recommend a central church advisory center. They turned to Martin Albertz, the Church Superintendent for the Spandau region of Berlin, who sought to gain the support of Friedrich Bodelschwingh and Theodor Wenzel, both leading personalities in the church’s Inner Mission. But both refused. And in June 1935 the Confessing Church leaders made it clear that they were not prepared to join such a venture, so Marga Meusel was able to help only a very few persons out of her office in Zehlendorf.

Phase One: The Creation of the Church Relief Agency for Protestant Non-Aryans (Pastor Grüber’s Office)

The Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938, and the consequent campaign led by Adolf Eichmann to drive out Austrian Jews in a particularly violent manner, led to a new wave of refugees. At the end of May, Pastor Hermann Maas came from Heidelberg to Berlin in order to try and persuade the leadership of the Confessing Church finally to become more active on behalf of these Christians of Jewish origin. Together with Martin Albertz, who was a member of the Provisional Leadership team in the Confessing Church, he openly complained about the lack of any Relief Agency. They then managed to persuade the pastor of the church in Kaulsdorf, a suburb on the east side of Berlin, Heinrich Grüber, to accept the challenge. According to a report by Laura Livingstone, he immediately threw himself into this task with great energy and enthusiasm. Because he recognized that this Relief Agency should not be undertaken solely by the Confessing Church, he sought to gain increased legitimacy from the whole of the German Protestant Church. He then hired Ingeborg Jacobson as his secretary, working out of his manse in Kaulsdorf.

On June 22, 1938, Grüber was able to enlist the support of Thomas Breit, the chairman of the Council of Berlin’s Protestant Churches. This opened the way to approach other churches in the rest of the country. In the following months, and through a massive correspondence campaign, Grüber was able to build up a network of twenty-two sponsors and colleagues in Germany’s major cities.

This new refugee situation compelled President Roosevelt to invite representatives from various countries to meet at Evian on Lake Constance from June 8 to 15 in order to consider how best to respond to this wave of emigrants or refugees from Germany and Austria. Naturally those persons affected by the Nazi persecutions placed great hopes on this meeting. But the assembled governments and their delegates seemed not to recognize the dangers. One after another each country announced that it was unwilling to open its doors to these refugees. The main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ironically commented: “No one wants to accept these mongrels. Most of the delegates rightly refused to take in these scoundrels who were seeking to bring about Germany’s ruin”.

Despite this discouraging situation, Grüber sought to set up a Relief Agency for emigrants. But for it to succeed, he needed official permission. In August he paid a call on the German Foreign Ministry, and discussed his plans with one of the officials there. Naturally he took care to describe his efforts as being fully in line with the Nazi government’s aims. As he later wrote: “If the state now believes that these non-Aryans are no longer acceptable for the growth of Germany’s national well-being, it should still recognize the desirability of their being allowed to emigrate in order to find some other refuge elsewhere. In other words, it is in the state’s interests that this flood of emigrants should not leave with hatred and resentment in their hearts. We particularly see this danger in the young people who have grown up without any future or hope of advancement, because they have been largely chucked out of every opportunity of employment. Such young people have nothing to lose, so they may well turn to anarchism or bolshevism.”

Grüber waited four months for an answer from the Foreign Ministry, but in vain. So on November 30 he turned instead to the Office for Emigration set up by the Ministry of the Interior, which he knew was not yet fully infiltrated by ardent Nazis. From this office he received permission to contact foreign states to discuss their reception from Germany of Christians of Jewish origin.

In the middle of October he convened his colleagues from various parts of the country to a meeting in Eisenach, and again at the end of November, when they met in the Quakers’ International Office in Berlin. Paul Braune, the head of the Hoffnungstaler Hospital in Lobetal later reported to Bodelschwingh about this meeting. “Ninety per cent of the discussion revolved around emigration, while my questions about the provision of welfare for those who were remaining here did not find as much interest. One had to recognize that for these beleaguered persons only one goal was uppermost: how to get out of Germany”. Grüber was tireless in beseeching Bodelschwingh to come to Berlin to give him support, and to intervene with the various ministries in protest against the anti-Semitic measures being perpetrated throughout the country. Two days after the notorious November 9, 1938, pogrom he wrote to Bodelschwingh to say: “We cannot and must not leave these people in the lurch…. Matthew 25 is still our guideline.” We can only surmise why Bodelschwingh never replied. But Grüber and Braune collaborated with a rough division of labor, under which Grüber concentrated on emigration and Braune looked after the social welfare needs of these Christians of Jewish origin.

One of those who tried to leave Berlin as quickly as possible after the November pogrom was Heinrich Poms, who was in charge of the house in the Oranienburg Street operated by the British Mission to the Jews. This house was only a few hundred meters from the New Synagogue, in the middle of the Jewish quarter of Berlin. Poms arranged for Grüber to take over the lease of the Mission House, which then became the Church Relief Agency for Protestant Non-Aryans. Also close by was the Catholic Agency engaged in the same work for Catholic non-Aryans, led by Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg. On December 7, Grüber wrote to all his colleagues to announce that his agency was now opening its office in Oranienburg Street 20. And in a circular sent out on December 19, he gave the names of his immediate colleagues: Margarete Draeger, Paul Heiritz, Will Oelsner, Heinrich Hirschwald and Ingeborg Jacobson.

Phase Two: Extension and Consolidation of the Service in 1939

It soon became clear that the space in Oranienburg Street 20 was inadequate. Pastor Werner Sylten, who had volunteered his services and was taken on by Grüber as his deputy, had found an old and stately building, An der Stechbahn 3-4, across the street from the Berlin Castle, which had a very suitable second-story suite of rooms. This house which had previously belonged to Arnold Panofsky, who was Jewish, had recently been “confiscated”. So in January 1939 Grüber’s office for emigration took over six of the rooms, while for the time being the other departments which dealt with welfare, child evacuation and spiritual counselling remained in the Oranienburg Street house until the autumn of 1939. Some 20 colleagues worked as counsellors or secretaries, seeing between 100 and 120 clients every day, and providing advice as best they could. In the beginning of February 1939 Laura Livingstone moved her office to the same address, and by the end of March the two offices had recruited 30 co-workers. They also established contacts abroad, such as Pastor Adolf Freudenberg who represented Grüber’s office in London. After he paid a visit to Berlin, he reported: “The staff in the Stechbahn offices, who were all themselves members of the persecuted group of non-Aryans, did not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the flood of enquirers, all of whom now felt the sword of Damacles hanging over their heads. Instead, they cheerfully sought to provide advice and help as best they could. This was a small candle of comfort in the surrounding darkness”.

By May 1939, besides the central office, there were 22 sub-offices throughout the country, led by contact persons who in many cases were themselves Christians of Jewish origin. Circulars to these contacts were sent out from time to time reporting on the regulations for emigration to various countries abroad, or where complications had been encountered. For example, a circular issued in March stated: “There are reasons to repeat our instructions, which should be closely observed, that we are strictly to confine our services to Protestant non-Aryans. In no case should we provide advice to those still belonging to the Jewish community”. And another circular asked that the addresses of those who had received advice and already left the country should be put in a card index and forwarded to Berlin.

Margaret Draeger was in charge if the section dealing with children and their evacuation. After the November pogrom, both Holland and Great Britain opened their doors to receive several thousand children between the ages of six and 17 who were being persecuted because of their racial origin. Difficulties however arose because the organization of these child transports had been undertaken by the Jewish agencies in Germany, leaving little room for Christian children to join them. Sylvia Woolf organized several such transports of children to Sweden.

In this third phase of the Nazi persecution from 1938 to 1941, the aim was to drive all remaining Jews out of the country. But since all previous efforts seemed inadequate and hadn’t produced the desired results, the head of the Gestapo, Heydrich, resolved to step up the process by instituting a central office for forcible emigration. The result was the Reich Office for Jewish emigration. All Jews, including the Christians, were to be included so that they could be better controlled, and financially plundered. The Nazis did not see the merging of Christians of Jewish origins along with other Jewish agencies as a problem, since they wanted to get rid of them all. But these Christians saw the issue in a quite different light. Would the Jewish agencies provide the same help, or would they be doubly discriminated against?

On February 14 Grüber and his Catholic counterpart Fr. Max Grösser, the General Secretary of St Raphael’s Society wrote to the specialist for Jewish affairs in the Gestapo headquarters to say: “It is a heavy burden for Christians of Jewish origin to be lumped together with full Jews, particularly when their financial affairs are being discussed”. In fact, the division between the two groups was only heightened by the Nazi persecution. They therefore requested a separate arrangement for Christians of Jewish origin so that the existing Christian agencies could work independently from Heydrich’s office.

A compromise was eventually reached, whereby the Christian agencies were allowed to continue their work, but were only tolerated and not seen as partners in the Nazi plans. This so-called collaboration meant that they were unable to prevent the financial plundering of Jewish property, but in fact received a monthly subsidy of 5000 Marks to cover their administration costs.

After the November pogrom, the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, forbade Jewish children to attend public schools. But since school attendance was still compulsory, this meant that Christian pupils had to go to Jewish schools. In order to avoid this situation, the Confessing Church leaders in Berlin established a private school arrangement of their own. Pastor Adolf Kurtz and his curate Klara Hunsche created a special school class in January 1939, at first in the parish house of the Apostles’ Church on Nollendorf Square. But after the Emigration Office had moved to the house An der Stechbahn, three or four rooms became available in the Oranienburg Street offices, so that the Protestant children were able to move in. The Gestapo allowed this arrangement for these Christian children. Klara Hunsche directed the teaching, while Pastor Kurtz dealt with outside bodies. By October 1939 the school had 42 pupils in four classes. This family school actually managed to survive after the Gestapo closed down Grüber’s office in December 1940. In February 1941 more than 1000 children and youth were attending but it clearly remained a thorn in the Gestapo’s flesh. They demanded that it should be merged with a Jewish school, and in August 1941, the Ministry of Education withdrew the school’s operating permit. Subsequent negotiations between Eichmann and Pastor Kurtz and the Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Wienken resulted in a compromise solution. The family school had to be abandoned, but instruction for Christian children of Jewish origin was to be continued in two separate classrooms in the Jewish elementary school on the Kaiser Street in central Berlin. But on June 30, 1942, the entire provision of education for Jews was forbidden.

Phase Three: Restriction on the Service and Final Closure of the Office, 1940-41

In November 1939 another restructuring of the Office took place, when Grüber announced that he would have to limit his engagement in this work. Pastor Werner Sylten, as his deputy, would take on the leadership position. But in order to ensure continuity and a broader support base, Grüber proposed setting up an advisory board, which would involve persons not as yet directly engaged in the work of the Office but who understood what was being attempted, such as Superintendent Martin Albertz, the lawyer Fritz Werner Arnold, Pastor Paul Braune and Heinrich Spiero, who had been the chairman of the Paulusbund.

With the outbreak of war, most states around Germany closed their borders. So organizing emigration plans also decreased. Some of Grüber’s staff had been able to emigrate shortly before war began, but at the end of 1939 there still remained 27 staff members in four sections. Thanks to a special permit given by Eichmann, Grüber was allowed to travel to Switzerland in March 1940 to investigate what the possibilities of emigration there might be. He wrote to Visser ’t Hooft, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation) to say that he had managed to arrange for several people to get to Shanghai. But his attempt to obtain money from the USA was in vain.

The Gestapo continued to demand that all successful emigration activities should be reported to them. And after they closed down the Office, they confiscated and destroyed all the files and card indexes. So we now have only sketchy and insufficient evidence about these emigration projects. In a report prepared by Adolf Freudenberg in London, he stated that up to the end of August 1939, 1138 persons had successfully emigrated. In a later circular issued in November 1940 he was able to name a further 580 persons, bringing the total to 1718. But this figure was only for those who were serviced by the Berlin office, and did not include the partner offices in other cities. We only have the numbers supplied by the Munich office, which had assisted 48 persons to emigrate before the outbreak of war. So we can reckon that approximately 1800 to 2000 persons were able to reach safety abroad through the services of Grüber’s Office.

In 1940 the hindrances imposed by the Gestapo only increased. The scope of the Office’s activities was even more reduced. It was clear that, for the Gestapo, their only interest in Grüber’s office was to ensure the emigration, or more properly the flight, of Jewish refugees out of Germany. In February 1940 for the first time Jews from Germany were deported from Stettin to Lublin in former Poland. Grüber was beseeched to protest this outrageous action. But when he did so, he was summoned to the Gestapo headquarters in the Alexander Square and told in no uncertain terms not to criticize the measures taken by the Nazi Party and government. Grüber replied: “As long as I can speak, I will do so, and as long as I can work, I will work”. In October 1940, 6504 Jews were deported from the Saar region in western Germany and sent to the Gurs camp in southern France. Grüber only learnt about this from Pastor Hermann Maas in Heidelberg, and then considered how he might alleviate their plight in Gurs. But unfortunately his plans came to nothing.

In December 1940 the Gestapo took steps to stop Grüber in his tracks. They accused him of overstepping his allowed authority, and ordered the Office to be closed. The staff was dismissed and Grüber himself arrested. He was first taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Alexander Square and later transported to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. On December 20 Pastor Werner Sylten was ordered to appear at the Gestapo headquarters. He was told that the Office was now closed and all further work was forbidden. He should dissolve the office entirely, and transfer its furniture to its Jewish counterpart. He was given permission to have three or four former staff members help him. The welfare files should be transferred to the Jewish agency. A month later he was informed that the files dealing with emigration should be handed over to the Jewish agency’s division, i.e. Protestant members of Jewish origin. But this arrangement only lasted until November 1941, when the final phase of deportation and mass murder of Jews and Christians of Jewish origin began.

Sylten’s hoped that at least pastoral counselling for his charges could continue. But this was not allowed. On February 1, 1942 he informed the Gestapo office that he had fulfilled all their requirements, but on February 27 he was arrested and after several months in solitary confinement sent to Dachau Concentration Camp where he was later murdered.

Ingeborg Jacobson, who had been Grüber’s secretary, gave the names and addresses of several former clients to Helene Jacobs, one of the Confessing Church parish members in Berlin-Dahlem, in the hopes that she might be able to help them. And in fact a small group led by Franz Kaufmann did manage to assist a few persons who attempted to “take a leap into the dark” that is to go underground and live illegally. These persons were equipped with false identities and false papers. But of course they were constantly in danger. They had frequently to change their quarters whenever nosy neighbors or the police began enquiries. But several Protestant pastors in Württemberg, East Prussia and Pomerania made hiding places in their parish houses and established a chain of refuges where these Christians of Jewish origin were able to find sanctuary. It was of course a highly dangerous undertaking, but in some sense can be seen to be carrying on the work which Pastor Grüber and his Office had attempted to do.

Fortunately Grüber himself survived the war, and later returned to his parish in East Berlin, where he continued his efforts to assist the few remaining Christians of Jewish origin. He became renowned as the Provost of Berlin, and for nine years served as the chief negotiator with the Communist government. But his lasting memorial is the dedication and compassion shown to the Nazis’ victims when he constantly strove to follow the role of the Good Samaritan and thereby to atone for the scandalous derelictions of the wider church. He died in 1975.

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Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Pp. 272. ISBN: 9781783270514.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Colchester, fifty two miles north-east of London, has been a garrison town since the days of the Romans. During the First World War its military establishment was vastly expanded, including four major army hospitals where the casualties from the battlefields in France were treated. The impact of the war was immediate and very visible. Colchester’s Church of England parishes were quickly and significantly involved, as is described in Beaken’s insightful and well researched account of these critical years.

Beaken-ChurchColchester’s social elite, which was well represented in the Church of England parishes, was conservative, nationalist and hierarchical. Its members supported the British government’s decision to go to war in August 1914 for moral as well as political reasons. They joined in the widespread campaign urging young men to join the armed forces, until conscription was introduced in 1916, rendering such appeals superfluous. Thereafter the leading men set an example by supporting campaigns for contributions to the War Savings Bonds, while the church ladies were very active in ministering to the troops training in Colchester and to the wounded. Church people were assiduous in providing hospitality to the troops, and at least thirty five social clubs were established where recreational facilities and food were supplied, often at little cost. In part such provision was seen as a Christian virtue, but, as Beaken notes, in part it was inspired by the desire to keep the soldiers out of public houses, and so to keep prostitution and its attendant problems at bay.

The clergy’s position was more problematic. At first many of the younger clergy had felt drawn to join their parishioners by volunteering to serve in the ranks, which they believed would be a means of getting to know their fellow men better. But the bishops soon asserted that such notions were incompatible with their ordination vows. Instead they were to remain in their parishes where their services, because of the shortage of army chaplains and the extra requirements caused by the war, would be all the more demanding. In fact, in Colchester, both clergy and laity soon recognized the need for extra pastoral witness to the many thousands of young men passing through the garrison on their way to the western front, or to those returned to Colchester for treatment in the hospitals. They were also called to officiate at the funerals of those who died from their wounds, and to comfort their surviving families. After the initial euphoria of the early months was replaced by the grim horror of the devastating and depressing stalemate of the Flanders trench-warfare, the clergy’s often self-imposed role in support of the war effort became more dubious, and even counter-productive. Since it was they who often had to bring the dreaded news to the families of men killed in action, their pastoral skills were increasingly honed to the presence of disaster and death.

In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the 1930s, there was a widespread revulsion against all those, including a few prominent clergymen, who had so eagerly preached militant sermons in favour of the war effort. And inevitably such skepticism and resentment was turned against the religion these clergymen were upholding. The contradiction between the slaughter of so many of “the flower of the nation’s youth”, and the message of love and peace as contained in the Christian gospels was too glaring to be easily overcome. Understandably, Beaken does not try to answer the question posed by almost everyone at some point during the war: “Why does the Christian God allow such a devastating catastrophe to take place?” Instead he takes issue with some of the post-war writers, particularly those who misrepresented what actually happened and instead promoted their own interpretations for anti-war or pacifist reasons. For example, he dismisses the view that the ordinary workingman, who had volunteered for army service, had been seduced by bloodthirsty clergymen and subsequently was misled by glory-seeking and incompetent army leaders. So too the charge that the Church of England chaplains were too cowardly to go up to the front line needs to be refuted by the fact that such postings were forbidden by the military leaders. It is certainly true, as Beaken admits, that, despite the almost universal support of the war effort at the time, in later years many people came to feel that the senseless and degrading conflict in the Flanders mud had made the proclamation of the Christian gospel irrelevant. But the evidence here produced for the war-time conditions in Colchester would seem to prove the opposite. Church attendance remained almost the same throughout the war years, as did the number of confirmations. The overwhelming support given to the erection of war memorials, and the sincere participation at Armistice or Remembrance Day services for the remainder of the century and beyond, would seem to disprove the contention that the Church of England had a ‘bad’ First World War. Beaken disputes the myth that things were never the same after 1918. He points to the fact that in the vast majority of parishes the Church’s witness with its emphasis on Mattins on Sunday morning remained unchanged for a further fifty years. But he agrees that, in Colchester, as elsewhere, when the fabric if the city’s close-knit, inter-dependent society came apart, so the Church of England came to occupy a peripheral position. But this does not contradict Beaken’s central argument that the Church of England fared significantly better during the First World War than has been understood or acknowledged for much of the past century.

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Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews: The Story of Christians whom the Nazi racial laws classified as Jews, and of the Good Samaritans who came to their aid (the Bureau Grüber), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Berkeley: Duplex Press, 2015). ISBN: 1517109914.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This translation of Ludwig’s larger account An der Seite der Entrechteten und Schwachen, reviewed in CCHQ in June 2013, now makes more easily available in an English translation the same story of a small and heroic group of German Protestants, mainly of Jewish origin, who managed to rescue a tiny proportion of those caught up in the Nazi Holocaust. It has been capably translated, but omits all the footnotes and the bibliography, presumably in order to reach a much wider constituency of English-speaking readers.

Ludwig-SuddenlyWhen Hitler came to power in 1933, the majority of German Protestants loyally supported him, believing his promises to restore Germany’s place in the world, and to save them from the danger of Communist revolution. His rabble-rousing attacks on the Jews were dismissed as mere propaganda, which would be abandoned once the regime settled into power. But in fact the Nazis only increased their anti-Semitic campaigns, both by executive decree and by legislation, leading to the vicious outbursts of November 1938, known as the Kristallnacht. Grievously affected were those in the Protestant churches who now found they were classified as Jews on racial grounds, regardless of the fact that they or their parents had converted to Christianity in earlier years. They could expect no help from the pro-Nazi authorities in the majority of Protestant churches. Only in the minority Confessing Church were to be found some men and women who rallied to their support. In the crucial circumstances in later 1938, the Provisional Leadership of the Confessing Church selected a Berlin pastor, Heinrich Grüber, to organize relief efforts for these Protestants of Jewish origin throughout the country. He set up his own independent office, and immediately began to search out opportunities for those affected to emigrate. At the same time, he sought to provide assistance to those who could not or were not willing to leave the country. But in 1940 this assistance was halted by the Gestapo. Grüber’s chief assistant was murdered, along with fourteen other helpers deported to extermination camps. Fortunately, Grüber himself survived and continued his ministry in post-war Berlin.

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Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-DietrichIn fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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