Wintertime in European Theology

Third in a Series

The broken grip of both Barth and Brunner on the theological mood of many German ministers and divinity students is due only in part to Bultmann’s neoliberal counterthrust. The stress and sting of World War II created a distinctive religious atmosphere, one which indelibly marked the spirit of the younger clergy.

Between the appearance of Barth’s Roemerbrief (1919) and the 1960s stand two generations of Protestant ministers. Those of the first generation, who were steeped and submerged in liberalism, heard Barth’s plea for special divine revelation sounding like a thunderbolt from above. Soon divinity students and young pastors told of their revolt against liberalism. “Barth saved us for the ministry,” they confessed, and they dedicated themselves to proclaim “the theology of the Word of God.”

When the second ministerial generation arose, in an era soon to be differentiated by its own peculiar outlook, the theological complex of the Continent had already largely embraced the “theology of crisis.” The tense struggle with National Socialism and the tragic events of World War II secretly shaped a harsh fate for Gennan Protestantism. Nazi antipathy toward outspokenly critical churchmen soon mounted to persecution and punishment of those who resisted government policy. The long tradition of a German Church enjoying special state privilege and public prestige was shattered. A national Lutheran and Reformed mind-set reaching back to the days of the Protestant Reformation was interrupted. These extraordinary developments distinctly colored the heritage and outlook of this later generation of German Protestant leaders in the twentieth century.

THE SHADOW OF HITLER

The “second generation” vividly recalls the anxious decades of Nazi hostility. When Hitler assumed power in 1933, National Socialist propaganda helped the “German Christians” (a scattering of extremists who were both theologically liberal and anti-Semitic) to control a number of churches in the newly-formed German Evangelical Church. Besides distorting the Gospel, these pro-Nazi leaders sought to make the Church a political instrument. Hitler Youth groups soon alienated young people from the churches. Faithful pastors were suspended from office, being reinstated only after congregational pressures. Martin Niemoeller, who had entered the ministry after a submarine command in World War I, sparked the resistance. Leading the newly-formed Pastors’ Emergency Fellowship, he helped to create and then presided over the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church was not only Lutheran. Many of its great leaders were Reformed (among them Karl Barth, Herman Hesse, Paul Humburg, and Ludwig Steil who later died in concentration camp), while others like Otto Dibelius represented a unionist theology. In the face of threats by National Socialists and the “German Christians,” the Confessing Church’s first Synod met in a Reformed church in Barmen in May, 1934, and in a theological declaration rejected any other source than divine revelation for church proclamation. When the subordination of the territorial churches to the German Evangelical Church was attempted, the protest of territorial bishops against subjection to an imperial bishop led to temporary arrest of Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg and Bishop Hans Meiser of Bavaria for opposition to the “German Christians.” Deposed by an illegally-called Synod, Bishop Wurm was interned in his home by police until Hitler several weeks later was persuaded to restore him to office.

By 1935 the National Socialist State was intervening more directly in church affairs, exercising greater financial control, and bringing ecclesiastical cases under government determination. Anti-ecclesiastical propaganda became sharper in 1936. The Gestapo prevented leading churchmen from preaching, and forbade dispatching of delegates to ecumenical conferences. Niemoeller was arrested in July, 1937, remaining until 1945 a personal prisoner of Hitler in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. The National Socialist State now was determined to harass and then to destroy the Church. Arrests, deportations, and attacks followed in 1938 and 1939. Training divinity students and collecting offerings became increasingly difficult. When World War II began, about 45 per cent of the clergy were called to military service, leaving parish work only to the old and weak. After 1940, no paper was allotted for Bibles, and after 1941 most religious publications ceased and the work of chaplains in the armed forces was impeded and systematically sabotaged.

A BROKEN STATUS

In West Germany, persecution of the Church is, of course, now a thing of the past. The 1950 census disclosed that 96.3 per cent of the Germany people, despite the methodical Nazi hostility to Christianity, still regard themselves as Christians. But Protestantism at mid-century held remarkably different status than it held earlier in the century. No longer did it exist in the favored form of a State Church. Almost everywhere it was confronted with indifference on the part of the multitudes whose acknowledged membership in the churches now meant astonishingly little. In Hamburg on Pentecost Sunday, 1960, a pastor preached a moving sermon on Acts 2 and the work of the Holy Spirit. Then, turning to the scant 75 worshipers present at one of the church’s high festivals in a city where multitudes have been baptized and confirmed, he remarked: “Ich bin ratlos!” (“I’m at the end of my rope!”).

[Under the Weimar Republic in 1919, Church and State were first separated in Germany, thus bringing the State Church to an end. From 1919–1924 the churches adopted new constitutions providing self-government. But in 1922 the German Evangelical Church Federation was formed by the territorial churches (the indigenous “peoples’ church”) which represented 62.7 per cent of the population. During the Nazi era, the Confessing Church was organized on an emergency basis. After World War II, German religious leaders passed up an opportunity to shape a genuinely free church situation. (Already in the second half of the nineteenth century, there had emerged Lutheran free churches as a protest movement against the “Prussian Union,” and Reformed free churches influenced by trends in the Netherlands in 1834 and later.) The territorial churches were no longer a State Church, under state controls such as still exist in Sweden; yet neither were they wholly free, the state continuing to appoint theological professors along with other faculty members at the state universities, and still collecting taxes to support these churches (even from citizens who are not members). The German Evangelical Church was abandoned in 1945, and a new Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) replaced the emergency government of the Confessing Church. In its 1948 constitution, EKD declared itself a federation of Lutheran, Reformed, and Union “territorial churches.” In more recent years VELKD (United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany) has emerged as a somewhat more tightly knit organization of territorial churches of confessional emphasis.

[In 1950, the Evangelical Churches (EKD) embraced 51 per cent of the population in West Germany, 80 per cent in East Germany. The independent (free) churches in Germany represent less than one per cent of the population. Some 70,000 members of Lutheran Free Churches came into this movement from territorial churches without any confessional change, as did 8,000 members of Reformed Free Churches. But American evangelization was mostly responsible for other related religious bodies: 62,000 Baptists, 60,000 Methodists, 12,000 Evangelical United Brethren. (Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses also had made German cities an evangelistic objective.)

[In 1933, Roman Catholics had represented only 32.5 per cent of the German population. But the partitioning of Germany bulked the Catholic population largely in West Germany: in 1950, Catholics represented 45 per cent of the population in West Germany, 17 per cent in East Germany. One third of the total German population is Catholic, and there is doubtless more Protestant-Catholic dialogue and liaison than in America. But Roman Catholic concentration in West Germany forces Protestantism to contend disadvantageously against an aggressive Catholic thrust for power.]

The speculative deformities of liberalism and the modern spirit of secularism had already encouraged much of the public’s disregard and disrespect for the Church as a unique divine organism. Despite enthusiasm at the elite professional level over a “springtime in theology,” the Protestant pulpit seemed to the masses to be mostly engaged in private intellectual dialogue with itself. When pagan rulers openly defied and demeaned, and privately restrained and repressed the Church, attendance sagged to new depths. Subtle Nazi indoctrination of youth additionally widened the chasm between the younger generation and the churches.

Although remaining Germany’s territorial church (or “people’s” church), Lutheranism has seen attendance at services slip (except at Christmas and Easter) to as low as one per cent of the membership in many cities in West Germany. This spiritual decline is all the more conspicuous alongside the nation’s remarkable industrial and economic recovery.

A SPARK OF HOPE

Something more than anxiety and sympathy is involved, however, in the standing West German awareness of the ongoing Communist repression, if not persecution, of believers still in the East Zone (both in Lutheran and in Union churches as the Church of Saxony West [Magdeburg] and the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg and Pommeranis), and of the Christian task force elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. For the post-war inheritance of the “second generation” of German ministers includes a firm conviction that the Church in the East Zone in some local situations has become spiritually stronger through trial and persecution. Small fellowships of believers meeting in many homes have found a new theological and evangelistic earnestness, and they refuse to be cowed by fear of Communist tyrants. Nor are they discouraged by the defection of nominal church members. In Saxony, the churches lost 600,000 members in a single year, yet this detachment of those of nominal affiliation gave the Christian remnant a dedication and vitality that shames the indifferent church memberships in large West German cities where multitudes of adults, once confirmed, are seldom seen again in church between their wedding and funeral ceremonies. In the East Zone some dedicated Christian leaders are exhorting others: “Don’t just stay with your people, but stay with them to witness. The Communists can be converted!” The temper of this bold witness is described in Johannes Hamel’s A Christian in East Germany.

THEOLOGY AND FIRE

After World War II, the divinity student-mind was gripped by the “living theology” represented in a professor like Peter Brunner of Heidelberg, who lost his position at the university and suffered persecution by the Gestapo; or Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg, who was forbidden to teach theology and deprived of his university post through political pressures; or Hermann Sasse (now of North Adelaide, Australia), who, while on the faculty at Erlangen, was thrown into prison by the Nazis and rescued by American troops. Divinity scholars eagerly read the literary fragments of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Letters and Papers from Prison), and of Paul Schneider, put to death by political persecutors. Bishop Johannes Lilje, then general secretary of the Lutheran World Convention, was arrested in 1944 for “defeatism” because he anticipated the conquest of Germany, and when rescued by American troops in 1945 he had already penned the manuscript Luther, Anbruch und Krisis der Neuzeit (English translation, Luther Now) in expectation of execution. Writings of churchmen who had endured suffering at the hands of the tyrants now took top place on the study desks of the clergy. Americans are only now being introduced to the sermons of Helmut Gollwitzer (now professor at Bonn) in the Berlin suburbs as Niemoeller’s successor at Dahlem where, until the Gestapo removed him from his pulpit and expelled him, Gollwitzer interpreted the congregation’s conflict with Nazism through powerful messages on the trial, passion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (English translation, The Dying and Living Lord). Niemoeller’s influence has been compromised in recent years because of disappointment over his doctrinal laxity and a feeling that he tends to underestimate political perils in East Germany. To this day in Hamburg, where church attendance generally dips as low as in other German cities, Thielicke’s presence in the pulpit fills St. Michaelis Church with 2500 worshippers who come early for a seat, many being university students. Some leaders trace this following in part to public discernment that Thielicke, as shown by his resistance of the Nazis, is obviously not also a pulpit “voice for the state.” And some of these church leaders ask privately whether perchance the evasion of a wholly free church in Germany may not have compromised Christian opportunities. The German masses today think more readily of the Beast-State than of the God-State, and they seem more open to the voice of God that obviously lacks a government accent.

While this later generation saw plainly that the old liberalism lacked power to stand against National Socialism and was itself rooted theologically in crisis-theology, it drew inspiration mainly from thinkers who belonged to the era after Barth. The resistance of the German Confessional Church to Hitler’s anti-Semitism was in part a consequence of the renewed interest in biblical theology stirred up by Barth’s teaching, which nourished spiritual resources to oppose totalitarian forces. Barth himself became a symbol of resistance to National Socialism and was a leader in the church struggle against Hitler. He influenced the Confessing Church’s theological formulations expressed in the Barmen Confession. But the loss of his chair at Bonn, through his expulsion by Hitler in 1935, meant his removal to Basel, Switzerland, where the Protestant world followed at greater distance his contributions to dogmatics. Bultmann, too, although drastically redefining the content of the Gospel, nonetheless strenuously resisted the pagan frontal attack against the Gospel as such, and throughout the Third Reich maintained his open identification with the Church alongside his professorship at the state-supported university. Bultmann’s co-worker, Von Sodon, went still further; at the beginning of World War II he confessed the unorthodoxy of his theological beliefs to both colleagues and students and took higher ground.

A CHANGED ROLE

More and more this new generation of ministers measured the fortunes of Christianity in the modern world in apostolic dimensions. They saw a Church without worldly prestige and, worse yet, downgraded by many of her own members. The real Christian task force was a remnant, an ignored if not despised minority. A specially formative influence was this changed role of the German Church—no longer a State Church although the people’s church; no longer a majority influence in national life but supported only by a scant minority of its own members; its plight in a totalitarian age dramatized by imprisoned or exiled theologians and by pastors who suffered at the whim of dictators. The “second generation” has a desire to prepare the laity to meet the Communistic dialectic, a concern for the renewal of the Church, and an eagerness to reflect the Christian witness in a socially hostile age. This special outlook, however, is determined by ecclesiastical reaction to historical factors and by existential awareness of the Church’s actual situation in life, somewhat more than by conscious reorientation in terms of biblical theology. Nor has it broken through the limitations of contemporary theology in a rededication to biblical evangelism.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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