Hitler, Holocaust, and Bonhoeffer

April 26th, 2006 · 1 Comment

This past weekend I participated, along with 17 other religious leaders, in a project to produce study materials for a DVD entitled “Theologians Under Hitler.” Was there a connection between Protestant Liberalism and the embrace of Nazism and support of the Holocaust by such theological luminaries as Gerhard Kittle, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch? Does the rejection of Protestant Liberalism by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help explain their resistance to Hitler? I suspect so. Liberal and higher critical thinking had already accustomed the generation of preachers leading up to 1933 to stand above the Bible, making use of it for human purposes rather than standing under it to hear the voice of God. And Hitler did his best, often successfully to co-opt German Christianity for his nationalistic purposes.

Tags: Theology · Bonhoeffer

1 response so far ↓

Gordon Schultz // Aug 15, 2007 at 12:02 pm

I think you are making too easy a judgment. It was hardly “liberal and higher critical thinking” that enabled the majority of Christians, their congregations and pastors to succumb to Hitler. Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s opposition to so-called “liberal theology” was not because they followed a so-called “pre-critical” Biblical scholarship. They didn’t.

Furthermore, when you look at who were the opponents of Hitler among the pastors and theologians , you would be hard-pressed to find many that did not follow the so-called “higher criticism.” And on the other side, among those who succumed to Hitler, you’ll find as many or more who did not adopt “higher criticism.” For example, someone like Paul Althaus was far more “conservative” than either Barth of Bonhoeffer. He rejected DB and KB as radicals who departed from Biblical and Confessional Lutheran theology.

Part of the opposition of DB and KB to liberalism had more to do with liberalism’s tendency to substitute human subjectivity for the Word of God, which for DB and KB was decidedly NOT equivalent to the text of the Scriptures, but was the act and voice of the Lord of the Scriptures. For them, the Word of God speaks in and through and decisively, but not exclusively through the Scriptures.

What both DB and KB (who were not of one mind on “revelation”) opposed was the liberal assumption that culture (and especially German soil and blood) was equal to or greater in authority than the “one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” (Barmen, Art 1)

DB and KB opposed the idea that any cultural or political ideology or institution could demand loyalty and obedience of the Christian and the Church when such ideology, loyalty or institution contradicted the Word of God.

The danger that some American Christians have is to conflate the Bible with the Word of God. For DB and KB, the Word of God is the Living Presence, Act, and Voice of Jesus Christ coming to us through Scripture, Sermon, Eucharist, and fellowship. In all of these there is the transcendent Word of God (Jesus Christ) active in and through, but never limited to or strictly defined, by any one of them. For some American Christians the “Word of God” means without remainder , the Bible. And even for many others of us, we use the “Word of God” when speaking of Scripture, but we never want to identify the human text with the eternal Lord.

I am delighted to learn that DB and KB are no longer enemies or strangers to Southern Baptists. They may not line up with central Southern Baptist practice or doctrines, but they nonetheless still have much to teach us, even today, and even when we cannot always walk the same path.