From: b645zaw@utarlg.uta.edu (Stephen Tice)
Subject: Re: Churches and Hitler.   (Bonhoeffer & Barth resist)
Summary: Another Voice 
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Keywords: christian anarchy 
Organization: The University of Texas at Arlington
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 07:23:00 GMT

In article <C0IC93.DMF@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU>, 
sschaff@roc.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Stephen F. Schaffner) writes...

>1938-1945: The "church struggle" fizzled.  With the church organization 
>effectively taken over by the state, and lacking any theological 
>tradition of opposing the state, the vast majority of clergymen did not 
>make the transition to active resistence to the state.  The one notable 
>exception was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the well-known young theologian who had 
>returned to Germany from abroad in order to work against the Nazis.  He was
>eventually executed by the Gestapo for his part in the attempt on Hitler's 
>life.

>	Within the Confessing Church movement, again only Dietrich 
>Bonhoeffer seems to have recognized early the magnitude of the evil 
>involved.  In an earlier post, someone asked about confessions of guilt 
>on the part of the church.  There were a number of such official 
>statements after the war, but I will quote Bonhoeffer's words, written 
>in 1940:

[many confessions in the name of The Church for failing to resist]


Let me add another notable voice, Karl Barth  (a swiss theologian)

From Vernard Eller's _Christian Anarchy_ p.139..

	The Nazis Bust the Professor

	Hitler's take-over of January 30, 1933, caught Barth
	in bed with the flu; but he knew immediately "where
	I stood and what I could not do. In the last resort,
	this was simply because I saw my dear German people
	beginning to worship a false god." Barth realized
	that the quick and easy capitulation of the German
	people -- including many even of his faculty col-
	leagues and former students -- was owing to the fact
	that the church had for so long been buying into 
	whatever cultural and political arky ...

	["arky" is a term coined by VE to refer to governments,
	churchs, hierarchies, media, academia, and such /Sdt] 

	...made messianic noises that it saw this as just
	one more instance of the same. "It transpired that
	`over the centuries the Protestant Church had in fact
	been "assimilated" as a result of all kinds of other
	less ostentatious and aggressive alien pressures to
	such a degree that it simply could not repudiate,
	promptly and confidently, the crude assumption that
	the church, its message, and its life could be
	"assimilated" into the National Socialist State.'"
	Notice, then, that Barth's own "resistance" to the
	State is not all an "attack" upon it but simply the 
	refusal to "assimilate" or "legitimize."

	But what, then, is Barth (or any Christian) to do in
	the face of such monstrous evil? He speaks as a true
	Christian anarchist: "His `first priority' ... [was]
	`to urge the students for whom I was responsible to
	keep on working as normally as possible in the midst
	of the general uproar,... to maintain the biblical
	gospel in the face of the new regime and the ideology
	which had now become predominant." The theological
	task of preserving the biblical gospel from ideologi-
	cal take-over is much more important to the course of
	history that is the political effort to destroy Hitler's
	regime. 

	Barth's first eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with 
	that regime came with the directive that all univer-
	sity classes were to open with the Hitler salute.
	Barth's never did. As he explained to the administra-
	tion, he had understood it as being a "recommendation"
	rather than an "order." Besides, it was his custom
	to open class with a hymn and a prayer -- and the
	Hitler salute didn't seem to quite fit. The admini-
	stration decided not to make an issue of the matter,
	and Barth carried the day on that one.

	On the next go-around, Barth was not so fortunate.
	The university prescribed an "oath of loyalty to
	the Fuhrer." And was our professor so defiant as
	to refuse? Of course not! "Granted I did not refuse
	to give the official oath, but stipulated an addition
	to the effect that I could be loyal to the Fuhrer
	only within my responsibilities as an Evangelical
	Christian'". However, apparently Der Fuhrer didn't
	find this loyalty quite enough. Immediately suspended
	from teaching, by 1935 Barth was permanently "busted"
	from the university and had moved (he would hardly 
	say "fled") back to Switzerland to finish his career
	there.

	With neither the salute nor the loyalty oath can 
	Barth be said to have practiced "civil disobedience."
	He did not stage his disobedience as a calculated
	political power-play. He made no effort to organize
	his own ideological bloc to contest that of the evil
	regime. He did not play up to the media as a form
	of public demonstration, protest, or witness. He
	exhibited no rage toward nor condemnation of his
	adversary. He refused to treat the State as "enemy."
	He was intent only to give to God what belongs to
	God. And in doing that, he was careful to tread
	the fine, anarchical line between legitimizing the
	establishment on the one hand and legitimizing the
	revolution against it on the other. 

There's more on Barth, and especially where he slips in urging
Czech soldiers to "stand and fall not only for Europe but for
the Christian Church" (1938), which is interesting in counterpoint.

	Yet, by 1942 Barth is back on the right track. In
	a message to the American churches he warned against
	
	   any "crusading ideology": the church must not
	   ...provide "the necessary religious accompani-
	   ment" to the "terrible sounds of war." Nor 
	   should the war be understood as "an instrument
	   of divine vengeance" instead of "the last 
	   terrible instrument for restoring the public
	   order which has been damaged and destroyed by
	   common guilt." It was only possible to have 
	   "a good conscience" if the war against the
	   Germans was "in fact also being carried on
	   for them." [Eller italicizes the `for'] 	
	
	Welcome home, Professor! The war is to be understood
	as a tragic necessity brought about by the constric-
	tedness of the political horizon of human arky. Al-
	though it may have been fully justified politically,
	there shouldn't have been even the thought of trying
	to justify it theologically.
	
Moreso, Chapter 6 of Eller's book is on Bonhoeffer, but I haven't
gotten that far along yet.

The point is that the Church is just another typically corruptible
human institution. But then that's pretty clear from the epistles, 
and Revelations in the Bible. Best to love GOD directly, then 
trying to breath life into the church at least has a chance.

   |
-- J --
   |
   |  Stephen