nazis and the church--8/27/24

27 Aug 2024

nazis and the church--8/27/24

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Today's selection--from A Church Undone by Mary M. Solberg. Through time, the German church increasingly embraced the views of the Nazi Party:

“In their time and place, German Christians understood their mission as Christians to involve the cooperation of ‘the new church’ (reformed from within by German Christians) with the National Socialist government, whose declared mission was the renewal of the whole German society. The German Christians' efforts to actualize this cooperation included, among other things, their proposal to implement within the church the Aryan paragraph, the law that excluded Jews from the German civil service. Those opposed to the German Christians argued that ‘the mission of the church is not political,’ and the German Christians' position on the Aryan paragraph ‘puts [pastors] in danger of subordinating their personal responsibility to the pressures of the subjective and time-bound political or church-political views of those in superior offices, church groups, or entities outside the church.’ Making ‘church members of non-Aryan descent into church members with fewer rights and less worth’ was not acceptable, and even if the state limited the civil rights of Jews, the church would not accept such limitations—at least, not those the state imposed on baptized Jews.

“In this and almost every other case, the totalitarian claims of Nazism made neutrality impossible. For the German Christians, this was not a problem, since their dedication to the Nazi program, on the one hand, and their commitment to Christ, on the other, were both heartfelt and fully compatible. Their opponents were, for the most part, most deeply exercised by what they saw as the German Christians' eagerness to politicize the church, aligning the church's priorities with those of the government. In the process, few identified or condemned the ways in which a nazified Christianity—a Christianity that understood itself in terms of Germany's national priorities defined by race and blood and soil—threatened the theological and spiritual foundations of the church itself.

“It is surely tempting to believe that if we had been there, things would have been different—that in 1933, we would have seen what Germans (almost all of them Christians) did not see, and that we would have made other choices, and things would not have turned out as terribly as they actually did. Or even to believe that if they—those Germans, who were after all Christians—had only seen through Hitler's demented plans for Germany's future, they would have stopped cheering and started resisting. But in the interest of humility and truthfulness, we must resist these temptations. And for the sake of the church—more than that, for the sake of the world—we must take quite seriously the likelihood that, Christians or no, we would have thought and spoken and acted in similar ways.

German Christians celebrating Luther Day in Berlin in 1933

“When I asked several of my German interlocutors what they thought we could learn from studying the conduct of the church during the 1930s, they responded, ‘das Versagen der Kirche’: the failure of the church. Responding in 1933 to the German Christians, Karl Barth wrote that his deepest concern was the Protestant churches' failure to resist them. The church community is determined by the Holy Spirit and baptism, he wrote, not by blood and race, as the German Christians seemed to think: what was at stake was the crucial question of Christian truth. In 1935 the Nazis ran Barth out of Germany, forcing him to resign from his position as professor at the University of Bonn. Even theologian Paul Althaus, who in 1933 welcomed Hitler's accession to power and argued that the Volk was a divinely-given ‘order of creation,’ wrote in 1935 that the German Christians' identification of German history with salvation history was ‘an embarrassing piece of religious presumption,’ and ‘[t]he attempt to appoint the German people as the people of God of the new covenant is a bald-faced theological heresy.’ These were surely not the only public expressions of distress coming Irom Christian churchmen, but such statements were very few and far-between, and increasingly rare as the decade advanced.

“Most egregious of all, of course, was the church's failure to act on behalf of the Jews. Ideologically, the German Christians outdid the Nazis. They married the racial antisemitism of the Nazis to the religious and theological anti-Judaism that had threaded its way through the Christian tradition for centuries. In this overwhelmingly Lutheran land, recruiting ‘the German prophet’ Martin Luther for their purposes was not difficult; his 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, with its hateful and violent suggestions for how to treat the Jews in sixteenth-century Germany, seemed tailor-made for Nazi purposes in twentieth-century Germany. Perusing the documents in this volume, it appears that German Christians found it both convenient and compelling to embrace Luther, even to bracket him with Hitler as the two greatest Germans who ever lived.

“German church historian Kurt Scholder argues that the church, in claiming the ‘divine order of Volkstmn’—which excluded and devalued the Jews—made antisemitism a respectable topic. In doing so, he observes, ‘the church lost its claim to speak for the simple truth of the Christian command to love.’ After chiding the German Christians because they conflated the eternal kingdom [Reich] of God with the German Reich, Paul Althaus could write that ‘the kingdom [of God] that is already here is present in our national, political history to the extent that people serve their brothers, their people, in the peace of Jesus Christ ....’ One could hardly imagine, however, that he would have included the Jews among ‘their brothers’ or ‘their people,’ or that he would even have given the matter a second thought. German Christian leader Julius Leutheuser could write in 1935, ‘Our love for our fellow Germans is the confirmation of our faith in the fact that we are all children of God.’ No self-respecting Christian would object. To declare that Jews are no longer ‘fellow Germans’—after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated (in 1935), they were no longer German citizens—is only a short step away from excluding them in thought, word, and deed, from the larger circle formed by all of us ‘children of God.’ Once that happens, all moral and ethical bets are off.”