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CHAPTER I

The Churches of Europe in the Face of the War

WHAT have the Protestant churches of Europe learned, suffered and achieved in the world crisis? What may be expected—for them, and from them—in the days to come?

I

The present world crisis began when the National Socialists came to power in Germany in the year 1933. It found most of the Protestant Churches of Europe in the initial stages of a process of internal and external rebuilding and consolidation on the basis of a renewed consciousness of their peculiar nature and mission.

The catastrophe of the World War of 1914–1918 was widely felt to have been a serious indictment of the Church and of the Christianity of that day, still strongly under the influence of the intellectual and political developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only shallow detractors held this conviction, but also many enlightened exponents of the Protestant tradition and mission. The effect, however, had not been to produce discouragement but rather to lead many to ask themselves, with new emphasis, the question: What is the basic principle and function of the Church in a human society which obviously is sick almost to death? As was the case during the Renaissance, the return to the Church’s historic origins played a decisive role in the posing and answering of this question. It did not produce either a new religious philosophy and orientation or a new program of religious activity, but it did lead to a rediscovery of the unique content of the Bible and of the significance of the Reformation era and the still older Church—a rediscovery which all of us would have thought most unlikely before the present catastrophe.

The diluted bourgeois religion and ethics of the early twentieth century became “the dead past” while the message of the Old and New Testament, as we found it for the most part rightly interpreted by Luther and Calvin, became “the living present.” We did not become orthodox (“fundamentalist”) in the sense of the repetition of some historical dogmas, but we tried, freely and in our own present-day way, to think again biblically and evangelically and to give back to the preaching and life of our churches their biblical and evangelical Protestant conformation. This conformation they had pretty well lost at the time of the First World War, so that actually they were no longer that “salt of the earth” which they should and could be. We felt obliged to restore to its rightful position the elements of objective truth which must ever be the secret of a living Church and which must be given recognition if the Church is to be differentiated from an inspirational conventicle and if its message is to have meaning for the life and living of human beings.

I say “we,” for I am thinking of a whole generation of responsible persons in all the Protestant churches of Europe. Partly in agreement with each other, partly without such agreement or even in opposition to one another, without organization of any kind but nevertheless in an unmistakable objective solidarity, we entered upon this way. I note explicitly that the so-called “dialectic theology,” often associated with my name, was only one phenomenon among others. There were, and are, many and various ways to walk on this road.

Protest and reaction of all sorts made themselves felt, and, of course, unintelligent and undesirable henchmen were not lacking. Above all, indifference was for a time invincible. It is nevertheless true to say that, by and large, this beginning of an inward renewal springing from the living foundations of the Church of Jesus Christ was the answer given by European Protestantism to the question posed by the First World War. The majority of our theological students and of young men interested in things Christian began to seek progress along these lines.

Theology necessarily had to give recognition, favorable or critical, to this transformation. Roman Catholicism and contemporary philosophy took notice of it as they had never previously noticed developments within Protestantism. A Berlin churchman who tried to claim that the twentieth century was the “century of the Church” was, of course, going too far. But it remains a fact that interest in and understanding of Protestant ecclesiastical doctrine and order increased in comparison to what they had been in the second half of the nineteenth century, often in unexpected ways and places. For example, the prestige of the Protestant churches, and to a certain extent their popularity also, grew in government circles in a number of countries. And a certain wholesome Christian self-consciousness again became a fact in Europe.

True enough, it was only a beginning. Many of the new positions were (and still remain) unclarified, vulnerable and even self-contradictory. There were too many problems to be mastered or even surveyed in the course of a few years. It was too much to hope that the Protestant peoples would be permeated by the new conception at once, that prejudices and misunderstandings firmly rooted for centuries among both the educated and the uneducated could be removed immediately. We must be under no self-deception concerning the tentative character of the preliminary gains, especially in those countries where the transformation appeared most spontaneously and vigorously—Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In France, in Scandinavia, among the Hungarian and Italian Protestants, only relatively small groups had begun to work. Fifteen years after the First World War, all those who were seriously participating in the movement and were well-informed about it were aware that the time had come to start really intensive and extensive work.

The Protestant churches in Europe, then, were not wholly unprepared when the first shocks of the earthquake came in 1933, heralding the world catastrophe of today. In so far as the churches had participated in the renewal of which I have spoken, they had, after all, at least a slight start on the Nazi. It is hard to say what would have become of them if it had not been for this, if the sudden assault of 1933 had found them as they were, for example, in 1910.

II

It must not be forgotten that opposition to the anti-Semitic, aggressive, totalitarian, national state was not at first so general as it has become since the outbreak of the present war. At the outset, the attitude of “Western Civilization” to that state was not certain. It is not fair to accuse the German intellectuals and the German Democrats and Social Democrats of weakness and disloyalty without mentioning the many Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans who allowed themselves to be deceived at a distance just as those nearer by were deceived. As late as 1938, some of these foreigners permitted themselves to be received as honored guests in Berlin, and recorded a reverential and even somewhat envious admiration of what they saw there.

For a time it was uncertain whether one might not see in Hitler’s spirit, method and enterprise something like an apotheosis of the movement of emancipation which began with the Renaissance. Was not this the true face of the absolutely self-sufficient man, who had long since become the ideal not only of Germans but of all modern culture as it is related to economic and technical progress? If human affairs could develop as logically as they do in theory, it might easily have happened that not only Germany and Europe, but the entire modern world, apparently long detached from its Christian roots, would have welcomed the Hitlerian system as the kingdom of the superman toward which it had always secretly aspired.

After all, even in his utterly insane reconstruction of history, Hitler is not entirely wrong when he keeps referring to the Jew as the obstacle which has thus far prevented this logical development of events. The existence of the Jew probably is the symbol of the objective metaphysical fact, independent of all intellectual counter-movements, that the Christian root of Western culture is still alive. Without credit to him, and even against his will, the Jew is witness to the continuing vitality of the Old and New Testament revelation, by virtue of which Western culture, despite the degree of its present and possible future apostasy, is separated as by an abyss from the inherent Godlessness of National Socialism. This revelation can be misconstrued, but never wholly overlooked or forgotten. Hitler knows what he wants better than he may be aware when he selects the Jew as the world’s Public Enemy No. 1. Wherever the Christian revelation, whose actual witness is the Jew, is recognized and understood, the struggle against National Socialism ceases to be accidental and superficial and becomes fundamental and essential.

Western civilization failed to confront National Socialism firmly because the realization of the Christian revelation among the civilized people of the West (not only among the Germans!) had become dim. Men did not see the inherent atheism of the Hitlerian system. Hence, they could not be sure whether the antithesis between a legitimate state and a robber state, between democracy and absolute dictatorship, might not simply be a difference in taste, evaluation or political technique. Thinking in that way, how could people have been capable of a serene faith in Western culture and of firm resistance to that which threatened it? How could they think otherwise than they did, blind and deaf as they had become to the revelation of the Old and New Testament?

There was resistance to Hitler from the very first on the part of those who were on their way back to a conscious realization of the Christian presupposition of Western culture. In these circles it was not easy to mistake a human authority, however powerful, for that of God; a community of “race, blood and soil” for the Communion of Saints; the might of brutality for the power of truth. This group could not accept or treat the Jewish problem as a “racial question.” The first serious protest against Hitlerism necessarily had to come, and did in fact come, from the ranks of the Protestant churches that had been touched by the “renewal.” They were the first to grasp the essential impossibility of the totalitarian state, the negation of life inherent in the Hitlerian doctrine of unfreedom, the impudent denial of the intellect by the National Socialist cult of physical force. They saw through the intolerable implication of the neo-German anti-Semitism. Inevitably, it was in this quarter that alert and resolute wardens were found for Western culture, for freedom of conscience and speech, for the democratic state.

III

It was inevitable that the Christian “substance” of the churches should prove intolerable to National Socialism. Rauschning was right when he defined the actual content of National Socialism as pure, logical and therefore wholly destructive and anti-spiritual nihilism. In no other way is it possible to explain either the peculiar character of its leading personalities, the inherently inhuman nature of all its modes of behavior or the demonically fascinating influence which emanates from it. It is easy to see where such a system might expect to find its most dangerous enemy. From the outset, its religious policy could only be directed toward the extirpation of the Christian faith and creed.

This goal, however, like other goals of National Socialism, could be approached only step by step, indirectly and under all sorts of disguises. In its naked form, National Socialism is a secret cult which is probably proclaimed openly only in the cloister-like training camps of the élite. Outside of this group were those educated or half-educated persons who were estranged from the Church but who still required a certain religiosity and religious ideology. They were offered a “German Faith,” based on the old German paganism. In this cult the mystical personage “Germany” took the place of the Godhead, Führer Adolf Hitler became the prophet, and the church services were replaced by more or less appropriate rites exalting the German national character. There was never any seriously intended religious movement back of this neo-paganism which attracted so much attention in other countries. Like many other things in the Third Reich, it was “window-dressing” for overgrown children; but as such it has been by no means ineffective.

This is even more true of the artificial structure of a “German Christianity” which was presented to those parts of the population which were more or less actively interested in the Church. According to this concept, National Socialism was to be the real “positive Christianity,” in contrast to Judaism and Bolshevism, which were regarded as the embodiments of everything heathen. It was to be a new revelation from God, but one that was identical with that in Jesus Christ, or at least closely related to it! After all, it had been possible in the past to bring into a similar positive relationship to Christianity the bourgeois moralism of rationalism, later the idealistic philosophy of Goethe, then the monarchical nationalism of Bismarck’s day, and still later Marxian Socialism. Why should not the same attempt be made with the Hitler system, which the nation believed was its hope of salvation? It was this fantastic but at the same time cogent proposition with which the Protestant churches had to deal.

The basic question was: Had comprehension of the unique character and independence of the Christian Gospel completely died out, or had it reawakened, and, if so, what would be the reaction to the particular new temptation of 1933? The answer to this question is found in the fact that while the German political parties, German jurisprudence, science, art and philosophy capitulated, the churches formed the first opposition to the current which was sweeping all before it.

Out of the conflict against the National Socialist version of Christianity there arose, under the leadership of Martin Niemöller, first the “Pastors’ Notbund” (Emergency Union), and then, on a wider base, the “Confessional Church” (Bekennende Kirche). They attempted quite simply to defend the basic essentials of Christianity, the preaching of the Word and the order of the Church, against the strange new faith which was being imposed on them but which they could not accept as Christian. This gave their movement an essentially conservative character. That, we see now, was their limitation: they concentrated solely on one specific phase of Nazi religious and church policy.