Tag Archives: Reinhold Seeberg

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 2016). Pp. 540. ISBN 9783451328510.

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

The seventeen chapters in this volume are the published version of a lecture series in Marburg (2014/2015) on the impact of the First World War on Christian theology. Collectively, they are global and ecumenical in scope, though there is more emphasis on Europe than other parts of the world, more focus on Germany than other European societies, and more attention given to Protestant than Catholic, Orthodox, or other Christian traditions. They reflect—though in a limited way—broader trends in the historiography of the First World War, which has shifted from a focus on Western and Central Europe toward greater emphasis on international and global dimensions of the war and the experiences and agendas of Asian and African as well as European participants. On the other hand, none of the contributions selected for this volume gives any attention to women who were theologically-trained or pursued religious vocations. Therefore, its assessment of the impact of the war on religious thought remains partial and incomplete.

The book begins with two chapters offering broad surveys of early twentieth-century European culture and German war theology, respectively. Elmar Salmann’s “Der Geist der Avantgarde und der Große Krieg” covers familiar territory as it catalogs challenging and unsettling developments in modern psychology, philosophy, art, music, literature, and the natural sciences. For those contemporaries in despair over the complexity and contradictions of modern life, the Great War was a great simplifier and a welcome relief. Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele’s “Der ‘Deutsche Gott’” follows up with an overview of German war theology—also familiar terrain—but Schäufele generates new insights through his side-by-side analysis of Catholic and Protestant war theologies, his recognition of diverse perspectives among theologians of the same confession, and his cost-benefit analysis of contextual theology. In addition to those theologians of both confessions who saw the war as justified self-defense, an occasion for moral and spiritual renewal, or an experience of the sacred, Schäufele draws our attention to Protestant theologians like Reinhold Seeberg and Ferdinand Kattenbusch who believed war was a means by which God tested the ‘Geschichtsfähigkeit’ of nations, a theme that comes up again in Justus Bernhard’s chapter on Emanuel Hirsch (“’Krieg, du bist von Gott’”). Though most German war theology promoted the “civil-religious ideology of German nationalism” (73), Schäufele does not accept Karl Barth’s demand for a radical separation of theology from religious experience. As an alternative, he points to the more nuanced and critical theological engagement with wartime realities that he finds in the works of Rudolf Otto, Karl Holl, Friedrich Niebergall, and Otto Baumgarten.

Nine of the chapters that follow offer narrower case studies of individuals representing significant trends in wartime or postwar religious thought. The majority were German Protestant theologians (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Emanuel Hirsch), though four German Catholic intellectuals (Erich Przywara, Hugo Ball, Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson) and one Jewish-German philosopher (Franz Rosenzweig) are also represented.

Georg Pfleiderer’s “Kriegszeit und Gottesrreich” challenges some of the origin myths of Dialectical Theology through a close examination of Karl Barth’s “August Experience” (140). Despite Barth’s own claims of an absolute rupture between prewar and postwar theology, Pfleiderer argues that Barth’s intense exchanges with liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Friedrich Naumann should be seen as a family quarrel that included moments of understanding and recognition as well as conflict and alienation. Christoph Markschies (“Revanchismus oder Reue?”) also challenges the notion that Barth and Dialectical Theology simply brushed aside an older generation whose systems of thought collapsed in the wake of the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He does so through an examination of the postwar works of Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, and Adolf von Harnack, assessing the extent to which they broke from their prewar foundations. Markschies finds very little change in Seeberg’s case, noting continuities between his Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion (1902), Grundriss der Dogmatik (1932), and the theology of the German Christian movement—though without fully exploring the final link in that chain. Deissmann remained consistent in the fundamentals of his theology but underwent a significant reorientation in terms of his appraisal of the war and his embrace of the ecumenical movement. Harnack stood somewhere in between, but Markschies argues that Marcion (1920) demonstrates a greater awareness of the distance between Christ and culture in Harnack’s postwar theology than is often recognized.

Joachim Negel’s study of Erich Przywara (“Nichts ist wirklicher als Gott”) and Barbara Nichtweiß’ analysis of Erik Peterson (“’Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers’”) demonstrate that Catholic theologians who lived through the First World War also emphasized the gulf between heaven and earth and between God and humanity. Przywara ultimately concluded that “God, who from beyond this world and its history, entered and vanished into history (kenosis), can only be encountered through its contradictions and catastrophes” (226). Similarly, Peterson’s postwar fable “Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers” (1919) was a scathing indictment of pastors and theologians who, by substituting militarism for the teachings of Jesus, conflated heaven and earth, or divine and human agendas. At the end of the story, the “Son of God” (actually Satan in disguise) proclaims, “Look, now everyone is in heaven, everyone in hell!” (400).

If there is any comic (or tragi-comic) relief in this book, it is in Bernd Wacker’s account of the complicated relationship between Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt (“’Die Revolution tagt in Versailles’”). Along with his role in the Dada movement, Ball’s editorship of the anti-war journal Freie Zeitung and his critique of German militarism and authoritarianism in Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (1919) were anathema to conservative nationalists like Schmitt, who would eventually be known as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” (304). However, Schmitt was pleasantly surprised by Ball’s Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), which he took as an indication of Ball’s religious and political conversion (he was only half right). Around the same time, Ball wrote a series of relatively positive essays on Schmitt’s political theology for the journal Hochland, but Schmitt began to fear for his own reputation when he learned that Ball planned to release a slightly-revised version of Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz under the new title Die Folgen der Reformation. Ball’s own illusions were shattered when an associate of Schmitt’s who reviewed the book accused him of having spent the war in exile working alongside of other “paid traitors” (341). The relationship ended with each convinced that his own ideas about Germany, the war, and democracy were rooted in Catholic traditions.

Although over half of the chapters focus on individual German intellectuals, several explore international dimensions of the war’s impact on Christian theology. Jörg Ernesti’s “Der Vatikan im Ersten Weltkrieg” argues that Benedict XV’s “peace note” was a watershed in the history of the papacy. In the face of almost complete political marginalization, and widely ignored or disparaged by Catholics on both sides, Benedict XV tried to use his moral authority to bend world affairs in the direction of peace and reconciliation, signaling a greater humanitarian agenda and openness to the world on the part of the Vatican. Karl Pinggéra’s chapter on Orthodox theology (“Alte und Neue Wege”) also sees the war as a watershed, through its destructive impact on Christian theology within the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Churches, seminaries, ancient manuscripts, unique forms of religious education, and a majority of the theologians themselves were annihilated in the context of war, genocide, revolution, and civil war in these regions. Liberal reform movements influenced by German Protestant theology and steps toward greater lay leadership were cut off abruptly within the Armenian and Russian Orthodox Churches. Though Orthodox theology continued among émigré theologians in cities like Paris, they tended to define themselves in opposition to “the West,” by which they meant not only the Catholic and Protestant traditions but also centuries of pre-war Orthodox theology they believed had been corrupted by Western influences.

Hannelore Müller’s chapter on the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (“Jenseits von Konfession und Nation”) focuses on the small subset of European and North American Christians who promoted international understanding and the protection of religious and national minorities in the new postwar world order. Yet even here there was ambiguity, as members of the World Alliance occasionally used issues like the rights of religious minorities to advance their own national and religious interests and to bring “civilization through law” to “backward” peoples in the “orient” and other parts of the world (451).

The only chapter to fully engage theological developments outside of Europe and North America is Frieder Ludwig’s “Das also ist Christentum?”, which addresses the impact of the European war on churches and missions in Africa and Asia. Even here, the author gives substantial attention to European perspectives before considering Asians and Africans as subjects in their own right. The second half of the chapter offers cross-regional comparisons of anti-colonial resistance led by prophets representing or embodying indigenous gods but influenced by Christian millenarianism (in Uganda and Kenya) as well as Christian resistance leaders like John Chilembwe (Nyasaland) and Garrick Braide (Nigeria). In addition to those who rebelled, there were African Christians who continued to work with European missionaries even as they criticized European political and religious leadership and demanded greater equality. Following a brief nod to Asian elites and theologians (Rabindrath Tagore in India and Liang Qichao and Yu Rizhang in China), Ludwig concludes that the global nature of the war challenged European claims regarding peace, community and Christianity and made contradictions between missionary work and colonial policies more apparent than ever. As a result, it called into question not only the Christian character of Europe, but also the European character of Christianity (511-512).

Two other chapters offer reflections on the fate of the Christian churches in light of the catastrophic failures of the early twentieth century. Thomas Ruster (“Krieg gegen die Glaubensbrüder”) poses the question: “Can one still believe a single word from the churches, given their endorsement and affirmation of this war?” (102). After all, “the whole community of the faithful went astray … from the bishops down to the last believing lay persons—and especially the theologians” (105). According to Ruster, the only way forward is to identify the theological errors that led to the churches’ capitulation a century ago, and to develop a more sophisticated theological understanding of ‘principalities and powers’ in the present, in order to avoid aligning the church with systems that bring death rather than life. Roman Siebenrock (“’Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes!’”) revisits the same problems in the final chapter, arguing that when Christians of different countries pray to the same God for victory in war, they not only destroy the unity of the church, but the Christian proclamation as well. Siebenroth wants “Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes” to be an article of faith against which all affairs of the church are measured. If God’s all-powerful nature means not an infinite extension of power in human terms, but something qualitatively different (Incarnation, kenosis), then the church must also renounce power, privilege, and triumphalism.

Such prescriptions are appropriate for churches and believers who have placed themselves in the service of destructive institutions and ideologies. On the other hand, they also assume that white, male, European Christianity stood for (and still stands for?) the whole church. How might a theology of “principalities and powers” or concepts like Incarnation and kenosis be understood within a global and more inclusive framework, with our gaze directed toward individuals like Sister Margit Slachta, Pastor John Chilembwe and Dorothy Day as well as Reinhold Seeberg and Emanuel Hirsch?