Professor Dean Stroud's 2013 book, Preaching in Hitler's Shadow, runs 204 pages.(1)
The first 25% of his book provides historical background, while the remainder reproduces 13 sermons preached in churches in Nazi Germany, each preceded by introductory notes. I have organized my reaction to the book into two presentations. This is part 1 of 2. Closing comments will be offered at the end of the second presentation.
A sermon, at its best, is a Holy Spirit-illumined message from heaven to the followers of God. It is not Scripture yet it is not merely human communication; it constitutes an actual communication between heaven and earth. And so, we should be interested in the messages given to believers trapped under Nazi oppression. We should learn from their failures and successes in living their faith for today's society is free falling into a new totalitarianism.
The Christian track record is not good. Christians have been sharply criticized for their indifference and complicity with evil in the World War II era. Stroud reminds us:
The churches…sought to act, as institutions tend to do, in their own narrowly defined 'best' interests. There was little desire on the part of the churches for self-sacrifice or heroism, and much emphasis on 'pragmatic' and 'strategic' measures that would supposedly protect their institutional authority.(2)
The charge is that the Christian community failed to be any more of an opposition to Nazism than any other institution in German society, be it the university, the courts, or the military. Sadly, in many cases there was significant truth in the charge.
A vast crisis had suddenly come upon the church and separated members into two groups. One group swallowed the proffered narratives and changes, trusting the national institutions, sleepwalking. The smaller group constituted members who realized their children were being swept into new immoralities and that their own freedoms were being removed while church leaders cooperated with the state in their removal! Most congregations acted as agents of the state.
And yet, preaching was one way that some pastors and members did resist. Some radically proclaimed the gospel against Nazi ideology with little or no thought for personal safety. Their sermons provide historical documentation of Christian opposition to Hitler.
Stroud describes the societal shift in Germany to Nazism:
In this belief system, Nazism had replaced the hallmarks of Christianity with the qualities of a good Nazi: strength rather than weakness; domination rather than humility; hatred rather than love; dependence on Hitler rather than dependence on Christ, not to mention the importance of blood, race, and soil rather than the sacraments, and a sense of eternity. Christianity belonged in the dust bin of ancient history. Daily throughout the Reich the radio, the newspaper, the cinema, the school, the university, and men, women, and children were proclaiming the good news that Hitler had come. The new gospel was modern and scientific, and this gave it a persuasive ring. After the devastation and humiliation of the first world war, Germany was coming back from defeat and shame.(3)
Stroud is on point: "The new faith had all the required elements of a religion: a gospel, a leader, and an eternal nature."(4) He also reminds us,
Every sermon that advocated basic Christian virtues challenged the Nazi way of being. This simple fact, overlooked by critics of the church in this period, is simply remarkable… the most basic of Christian truths—that God is love, that we are to be imitators of Christ whose love for us reaches its pinnacle at Golgotha, that we are to forgive 'seventy times seven,' and that God will judge each of us against His standards rather than the world's—presented a fundamental challenge to everything Hitler and his followers represented.(5)
With the Nazis rise to power a collective experience was imposed. They called it "the synchronization." "Every institution in Germany had to conform to Nazi ideology in a manner that made it structurally clear that all paths lead ultimately to Hitler… everyone and everything in the Third Reich had to conform to Nazi principles or be destroyed."(6) Goebbels' described this process as "nothing less than the radical reorganization of the state and all parties, all interest groups, all associations into one huge whole… in the future [there] can be only one party, one conviction, one Volk. And all the other powers and forces have to subject themselves to this state or be pushed aside without mercy."(7)
On the morning of November 10, 1938, Kristallnacht gave way to sunrise, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened his Bible to Psalm 74 and underscored verse 8b, 'they are burning all the houses of God in the land.' Along the margin of verse nine he drew a long black line: 'we do not see our signs, and no prophet preaches anymore, and there is no one with us, who knows for how long.'(8)
There were exceptions. There were men of God who preached, sometimes with Gestapo seated in the front row taking notes! Hundreds of pastors eventually were arrested but thousands obeyed the decrees of the state. Some were reported to the government by members of their own congregations; some perished in concentration camps. I offer two brief excerpts in this part and four in the concluding part, from these faithful, Holy Spirit-led pastors.
Paul Schneider, Christ Crossing the Stormy Lake and Jesus' Glory
First, an excerpt from a 1934 sermon by pastor Paul Schneider. Schneider was arrested several times, betrayed to the Gestapo by members of his own congregation, finally tortured and killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
I am certain no thinking and alert Cristian has failed to notice that we in the Evangelical Church are being challenged to struggle and to witness and to confess our faith… To be sure, many people are still asleep and have not recognized that it is the hour to rise up. They still think that since all around us things have changed, certainly in the church, of all places, things must remain exactly as they were before. Or perhaps they just want to subject the church to the political authority of the state and shape the life of the church to fit the current political views as the German Christians are currently doing…. In our church a blazing fire has broken out over these matters, and there can be no peace until those who have betrayed the pure teaching and those wolves who have come into the sheepfold in sheep's clothing have vacated their bishops' chairs and their seats as our representatives—or at least until the Confessing Christians have abandoned this falsified church of Christ. But these people are still in power and would like to silence those who oppose them, and even render them harmless with the help of the political powers by denouncing them as reactionaries and enemies of our fatherland—which they are not…. Let us say it bluntly: we Evangelical Christians can never say that we agree with these things that many leading figures of the new Germany are voicing and declaring in speeches…. We, as evangelical parents, want to know that our children are unequivocally being raised in our evangelical faith and taught its content, and we want to be sure that they have not been contaminated with the current racist religious spirit… We want the state to stay in its political sphere and not intrude into the sphere of faith and our worldview. We want the state to be humble enough to listen to God's word that comes to it through the service of the church. We rely on Hitler's word that he will use the powers of Christianity to construct the national life. We are ready to help, but only in the freedom that obeys only God.(9)
The "German Christians" Schneider refers to were a group of Nazified church members, people who had embraced the Nazi ideology and were determined to integrate the church fully with the policies of National Socialism. Pastor Schneider warns that there can be no peace until the compromised leaders of the church are replaced, or, until the church is purified. He makes clear that "synchronization" with the Nazi government is impossible. Pastor Schneider had a clarity urgently needed today.
Martin Niemoller, A Sermon about the Relevance of Christianity in Nazi Germany
Next, we have an excerpt from a message by Martin Niemoller in 1936,
And now the question is whether we have a right to see God in the manner we see Him to be or to dispense with Him altogether. The world in which we are living no longer knows God. It proclaims God only where it seems fitting and useful. It proclaims godlessness where that appears more pious and better. But the world remains—whether it proclaims God or godlessness—true to itself and its convictions. 'I am the Lord, my own God! And where there are other gods, they live because of my grace and die from my wrath.' This human-secular self-glorification, this insistence that 'I am the Lord, my own God,' stands in opposition to the one fact that we cannot avoid—that no one can avoid—on which all human self-glorification shatters, no matter how powerful it acts, and that is the law under which we all stand and which no violence can control, the law 'thou shalt! and thou shalt not!' Which brings to naught all self-glorification and self-worship. A law that a foreign voice speaks: 'I am the Lord! I am your God!'
We would like to deny that such a will that is not our own will stands over us. A prisoner can indeed dream that he is free, but the chain remains and the dream comes ultimately to an end. The wages of sin is death, and that is the final word. Thus must this myth arise that romanticizes death as passing into the nation's life. But the nation has no eternal life—even when they proclaim it a thousand times—and one cannot run away from death.(10)
Niemoller points out the existence of two mutually exclusive spheres: God is God or we are god. The nation-state can promise you whatever it wants to promise you, but you don't have to believe its promises. In the end it has no power, no lasting existence. It can never defeat death. Hitler claimed his Germany would last a thousand years, but it turned out to be only about a dozen.
(Concluded in part 2…)
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes:
1. Dean G. Stroud, Preaching in Hitler's Shadow, (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 204 pp.
2. Ibid., op. cit. Victoria J. Barnett, p. 3.
3. Ibid., p. 11.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 20.
6. Ibid., p. 27
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 38.