The Pastoral Office between Politics and Economics

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The Bethel Confession was formulated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hermann Sasse, and others in August, 1933 to answer from a decidedly Lutheran position some of the most serious theological challenges posed by the “German Christians,” that is, by those Protestants in Germany who sympathized openly with Adolf Hitler, who had risen to power in January, 1933. The following paper seeks to explore this document to provide some helpful insight into the cultural challenges faced by Lutheran pastors at the beginning of the 21st century in America.

Contents 1 The Theology of the German Christians 2 The Bethel Confession on Church and Ministry 3 Applications Then and Now 4 Conclusions 5 Footnotes

[edit] The Theology of the German Christians

At the end of July, 1933, church elections were held in the German Protestant churches. They ended with a landslide victory of the faith movement “German Christians.” This group now controlled the churches’ “parliaments” that were set to put into practice a church governed by leadership principles.^[1] What is the theology of the German Christians?^[2] St. Louis native, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), finds that the “German national religion,” a close relative of the theology of the German Christians, has its roots in medieval mysticism and features many similarities to contemporary Western “Christianity.” Eliot mentions its generally deistic character; its anthropocentric definition of religion; its modernism (new age, new religious forms); its embrace of Nietzsche as the rebel par excellence against traditional Christianity; its rejection of Christian exclusivist claims; its propagation of man’s direct access to God that needs no sacramental mediation; its experiential basis; and its egalitarian appeal to the masses seeking “life.” This is why Eliot characterizes one of this new religion’s leaders – Wilhelm Hauer (1881-1962) – as “the end product of German Liberal Protestantism, a nationalistic Unitarian …, a patriotic Modernist.”^[3]

Understood as a decidedly modern theology, the theology of the German Christians appears closer to us than people care to admit or than it would appear when judged strictly based on the authoritarian and racist policies they supported. In America today, there are certainly also many “nationalistic Unitarians” or “patriotic Modernists” that share many prominent features with what Eliot termed “German national religion.” One need only think of the experiential basis of religion, of tolerance, of deism, of egalitarianism, of modernism, and of proclaiming man’s direct, immediate access to God. – What is more, since National Socialism proved to be especially attractive to the youth, “German national religion” also had to be a youthful religion, striving to win the youth for its religious message, if it wished to survive in the “total state.”^[4]

As to be expected of a modernist movement, the German Christians are anti-biblical; anti-doctrinal; and anti-liturgical. They rejected both the OT and Paul’s letters since they contained what was considered Jewish thinking. They were therefore deemed incompatible with the nature of the German soul. The Confessions are left for the individual’s study, but they lose any normativity. The worship services are renamed (from Gottesdienst, divine service, to Gottesfeier, divine celebration) and purged of all “foreign and oriental,” i.e., Jewish, elements to reflect more closely the German culture of the day. They follow a new pattern, the one established by the celebrations of the time’s youth movement: “Emotionalizing symbolism, … emotion-laden alternations between ‘caller’ and congregation, acclamation-style repetitions of trivial statements and exhortations are characteristic stylistic elements, behind which the content of the words becomes unimportant.”^[5]

Adolf Hitler, the Leader (Führer),^[6] is celebrated in 1933 as the god-sent deliverer from the political and social chaos of the years after 1918. Based on this experience of deliverance, the Third Reich, inaugurated by Hitler, is not only seen as a renewal for Germany as a nation. Led by Hitler, it is also expected to bring the renewal of the church in Germany as a decidedly national church: of the people, for the people, and by the people.^[7] If Hitler’s leadership is such a crucial force of Germany’s resurgence as a nation, then it is not surprising that the principle of leadership is also adopted in the organization of the church following the church elections of July, 1933. Pastors and bishops become local, regional, and national leaders integrated into a unified hierarchy of leaders culminating in Hitler, the Leader and proclaimed incarnation of the eternal Christ himself. The church is now organized regionally in such a way that the confessional distinctions, that separated territorial churches for over 400 years, are eliminated (unionism).^[8] In analogy to the “Aryan law” in the secular realm that since April, 1933 excluded Jews from holding public office, pastors and bishops of Jewish ancestry are excluded from the ministry in the Protestant church and eventually from the church itself.

Not surprisingly, this adoption of political structures and contents by the Protestant church succeeded: While many had left the church in the years following the end of the monarchy, many, seeing the close alliance between church and political leadership, returned to the church in 1933. Some saw in this movement back to the church a justification for their decisive power grab and the ensuing restructuring of the church: the tight organization of the church as well as the Germanization of the church’s message was to serve the re-evangelization of the German nation: after the struggle for power in the church now the struggle for the soul of the people was to begin. Those who were not of the German Christian party were called to trust the new leadership and to join the missionary struggle for the German soul.^[9]

[edit] The Bethel Confession on Church and Ministry

Clearly, those who desired to be Lutherans in 1933 in Germany had their work cut out for them. The Bethel Confession seeks to meet this challenge early on. Generally speaking, the confession accuses its opponents of holding to a legalistic enthusiasm that finds God’s Spirit at work especially apart from God’s Word in human experiences. When we zero in on its teaching on the pastoral ministry and its context, we see, first of all, that the confession distinguishes the church from God’s orders for this world, such as the family, nation, and the state. The “total state,” as implemented by the Nazis and their ecclesial supporters, is thus rejected. The church is part of a given nation, but its message is for all nations; its biblical confession spans all nations. There is no nation closer to or farther from the gospel. Moreover, church and state are two distinct, but interdependent gifts of God that have different purposes: the church saves souls by the gospel; the state defends and sustains physical life. The church is the communion of believers out of all nations, Jews and Gentiles, called by the pure gospel and sacraments. Never is the church coterminous with any one nation. The OT Israel is replaced by the church, not by another nation. Thus, it is a Judaizing error to establish churches based on racial criteria, e.g., by gathering all Jewish Christians in Jewish churches and all Germans in German churches.

In this ecclesiological context, the Bethel Confession affirms that the ministry is not above God’s word. God’s means of grace do not derive their power from the office holder. They, rather, have the Spirit already in them. Since the office is basically the ministry of reconciliation, it cannot be understood based on secular notions of leadership:

The power of the ministry does not depend either on an historically established institution nor on the powers with which a human soul may be gifted. We therefore also protest against the attempt to apply the modern leadership [Führungs-] principle to the preaching ministry. The preaching ministry is service to the Word of reconciliation, and is therefore the opposite of any magical powers of leadership.

It is clear, therefore, that the true ministry does not receive its content and commission from the nation, from the state, or any other “political or spiritual movement,” but from the scriptures.

[edit] Applications Then and Now

Clearly, the national theology of the German Christians and similar movements in the 1920s and 1930s was a theology that was sensitive to the culture of their addressees. They wanted to win back the German nation to the Protestant religion which they considered to be the most congenial to the German race. (Luther, for them, was the German hero par excellence whose work was first completed by Hitler.) To reach the ambitious goal of a successful nationwide evangelism campaign, they were willing to adapt Christianity in a radical fashion to make it more palatable to de-churched Germans and their specific culture, especially to the young that had experienced a “national awakening” in Hitler’s rise to power.

American Lutherans should be familiar with Samuel Schmucker’s attempt to create a genuinely American form of Lutheranism, set free from what he considered to be artificial impediments to the prospering of the church in American culture, such as a sacramental understanding of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as well as historic Lutheran forms of worship and the Lutheran theology taught thereby. Based on the teachings of Pietists such as Spener, Francke, and Muehlenberg, Schmucker proposed a practical Christianity that left Luther’s Lutheranism and all its “Catholic” elements behind because they, unintelligible to the American mind, were impeding growth. Living in America and enjoying the concrete freedoms it offered, provided Schmucker with the opportunity to improve on the older Lutheranism to forge a more timely form of Christianity. In this way, he attempted the integration of the Lutheran church in the front of American Protestantism against the perceived growing threat of Roman Catholicism in America.^[10]

Schmucker’s theology was thus determined by the culture of a given time and place, and it also had political dimensions. The culture, however, that drove his adaptations of Lutheranism was different from the one that drove his German successors in the 20th century. In Schmucker’s case, there was liberal American democracy, firmly based on the social-contract theory. In Germany, there was German nationalism, firmly based on the experience of Adolf Hitler’s rise to leadership. Both are contextual theologies, and both represent a distortion of Christianity. The German form is discredited by its negative political baggage. But what discredits Schmucker’s sympathetic and tolerant form of American Lutheranism? In other words, is the methodology of culture-driven theology as such discredited (based on sound theological arguments) or just one bad example thereof (based on political-cultural arguments)?

Looking around today, a couple of applications of the Bethel Confession and its rejection of cultural overkill in theology and church seem to be apparent. There is, first of all, a loss of the distinction between person and office that can be observed in the political as well as in the churchly realms. Many think that, since all are equal in a democracy, no one person may claim a special authority that is peculiar to a certain office. As the government’s laws are respected only insofar as they agree with one’s own notions of right and wrong, so the authority of pastors is often limited to “what we all can agree on,” not by what the bible actually teaches. After all, as already Schmucker believed, everybody’s reasonable interpretation of the bible is equal.

Ecclesiologically, this means that the church ceases to be a communion of disciples, that is, of those fully committed to the whole counsel of God in life and faith, including church discipline (e.g., by practicing the doctrine of closed communion). It becomes then either a theologically vague and open “(confessing) movement” with its leaders. Or it becomes, on the congregational level, a free association of consumers, that is, of individuals who – based on the idea of what we could call an “ecclesial contract” – only cede just enough of their religious liberties to the whole in order to qualify for certain benefits, such as human care (entertainment, day care, youth activities, acquaintances in a new place of residence) and pastoral care in times of need (baptisms, weddings, illness, funerals). Pastors cease to be shepherds with authority; they become religious service providers, or enablers, without authority in a competitive market place where the customer is king. On the regional and national levels, the Willow Creek Association might then serve as a model for an organization with membership dues and optional resources prepared by the association as a whole.^[11]

This leads us to the second observation: While Germany in the 1930s and early 40s witnessed the primate of politics, we today live in a time and place of the primate of economics, also known as consumerism. The economy or the market place, and not politics, provides the decisive patterns of cultural behavior that are often unconsciously brought into the church. Thus, while we today are also bombarded with leadership-rhetoric as the solution for the challenges of the pastoral ministry and the church in the 21st century, the leadership models in mind here are not those of Nazi-Germany but of corporate America. Psychology, the favorite science of Romanticism as the age of introspection and feelings, is an important tool for both models of leadership to achieve mass appeal. The importance of psychology is seen in both the carefully staged party conventions of the Nazis in Germany^[12] and the latest Willow Creek study.^[13]

Yet here, as in the case of a transformation of the church into a political organization, one needs to ask, with the Bethel Confession of 1933, are not church and economy two distinct realms that cannot and must not be governed according to the same or similar principles? Is not any trust in seemingly “magical powers of leadership” definitely misplaced, and does it not always come at the expense of trust in God’s presence and work in and through his word in law and gospel? To paraphrase John Pless,^[14] the pastor sure isn’t your manager that should be fired if the “business” underperforms. Yet let’s also add that, even though we live in a democracy, the elders and church council also aren’t “the leadership” in charge of the pastor.^[15]

To be sure, operating a congregation based on economic models of marketing, leadership, and success evaluation makes the church more compatible with general American culture. People are by training picky consumers, and they know how their work places function. These folks will feel right at home in the market-driven church without much catechesis and acculturation. Yet at what price? Is not an economy-driven church in the same predicament as a politics-driven church? In other words, will it not also be as anti-biblical, anti-dogmatic, and anti-liturgical as the German Christians 75 years ago? Will not the dynamic, bold “vision of the leader,” perhaps carefully fuelling or manipulating the “dreams” of the people, again override God’s word? Will this kind of church not also ultimately fall prey to dividing the church based on worldly criteria witnessed in the German Christian attempt to establish a racially pure German church?

In America today, we might not discriminate so much based on race like once in Germany. But, taking our clues from worldly marketing strategists, we do discriminate based on such worldly criteria as age, jobs, education, hobbies, and income. This discrimination comes to the fore most explicitly in the worship service. The “contemporary” services are both emotionalizing and light on actual content like the 1930s services in Germany.^[16] They are usually held at venues that look like concert halls; they are scheduled at times convenient for the young worshipers for whom they are specially devised. The “traditional,” “classic,” or “blended” services devised for “old white guys” are held when the young folks are still sleeping.

Lutherans should know from Luther: where there’s a difference in worship, there soon will be a difference in belief, if there’s not one already. Lutheran worship is not about cementing or celebrating cultural divisions that are, in one way or another, all the results of the fall. Lutheran worship is about overcoming these divisions in a genuine spirit of humility and love that is a fruit of faith in the one Gospel of Jesus Christ.^[17]

Further steps are being taken towards the marketing-driven slicing and dicing of the church that makes sense to the world and pleases the devil: Now there seems to be a trend to establish new congregations that specifically aim at the young and de-churched. After trying to incorporate these folks into existing congregations by offering a variety of worship services, now even the most superficial integration of old and young in one congregation is given up. If this is no longer attempted on a local level, how will it function on a regional or national level?

Let us remember that we live in an aggressive youth culture that rejects responsibility, tradition, boundaries, and adulthood in principle and instead promises the “forever-young” life of unrestricted access to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.^[18] It is not anti-authoritarian per se; it is just against the established, traditional authority it wishes to overthrow. Evidently, competing with this culture on its own terms must destroy Christianity, as seen in the German Christians who sought to compete with their youth culture that was Nazism by becoming Nazis themselves.

[edit] Conclusions

If we take our historic confessions as sure guides in these important questions, then we can simply conclude by saying that pastors are not your typical corporate leaders now engaged in the business of selling religion. Instead, they are ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As persons, in relation to God, they are equal to all Christians. Yet as office holders, in relation to their neighbors, they are placed in authority over the Lord’s flock to preach God’s word as Christ’s representatives. As office holders, pastors share in God’s majesty with parents and government officials. They too are protected by the Fourth Commandment. Along with the family and the state, the church is one of the three distinct hierarchies instituted by God. This is the church’s timeless and trans-cultural way of being ordered and governed by God himself through his word. The church, after all, is neither a political organization nor a business. The church, simply, is the communion of believers, called out of all nations at all times, among whom the gospel is rightly preached and where the sacraments are administered according to God’s word. For it is by these means that the Lord wishes to create saving faith in Christ when and where it pleases him. To do that, he does not need leaders with magical gifts. He needs only stewards of the mysteries that are faithful in the discharge of their duties.

According to T. S. Eliot, any given culture – constituting a certain comprehensive “way of life” – is an “incarnation” of a certain religion.^[19] With Luther, we could say that culture is the sum total of individual expressions of love formed by faith (AE 27:29). The truth of a culture then depends on the truth of the faith it embodies.^[20] This means, first of all, that individual cultural forms or comprehensive “ways of life” are never theologically neutral. This means, secondly, that Lutherans in North America are surrounded by a culture that is the incarnation of a religion that has less and less in common with authentic Christianity. Without a corresponding, fitting “pantomime or mask” in the affairs of this world, the gospel cannot be understood.^[21] In this, our situation is no better, but also no worse, than that of the confessors of 1933 in Germany. It would be fatal in this situation to change our theology and practice so as to conform to the dominant culture of our day. This would, to be sure, make us more successful in communicating “our message” to this culture, but it would also mean the end of the universal message we inherited from the church of the prophets and apostles.

How can we change the hostile culture that surrounds us and finds its way into our church? Culture is not something that one purposely creates or changes; as love without faith, that would be a very hollow thing. Culture certainly is also not something that one simply imports from a different time and place. Rather, by teaching what God has given us to teach and by being aware that cultural forms are not neutral, we may, by God’s grace, succeed in establishing a Lutheran culture that embodies and supports Lutheran teaching and faith in America. Even if we don’t succeed in building a new Christian culture, the unchanging task of pastors is clear: preach the word in season and out of season. We are saved by faith alone, not by faith and culture.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ Cf. K. Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich (Frankfurt, Berlin: Ullstein, 1986), I:566-572. The German Christians were openly supported by Hitler for this election; soon, however, his support was withdrawn again, which meant the end for the German Christians.
2. ↑ For a general survey of unity and diversity in the thinking of German national Christians, cf. H.-J. Sonne, Die politische Theologie der Deutschen Christen: Einheit und Vielfalt deutsch-christlichen Denkens, dargestellt anhand des Bundes für deutsche Kirche, der Thüringischen Kirchenbewegung “Deutsche Christen” und der christlich-deutschen Bewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982).
3. ↑ T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society” (1939), in Christianity and Culture (San Diego, etc: Harcourt, n.d.), 15-16, 55-56. Comparing his brief characterization with Sonne’s detailed study, one realizes that Eliot had an accurate grasp of what was going on theologically in German Protestantism in the 1930s. Cf. K. Scholder, Kirchen, I:573-575, who characterizes Hauer’s writings as “new and Nordic-national articulation of the religion of the learned in 19th-century Germany.”
4. ↑ Cf. Scholder, Kirchen, I:166, 665. Already in early 1934, however, the Protestant youth organization was handed over to the Hitler Youth, the Nazi youth organization.
5. ↑ Sonne, Theologie, 71.
6. ↑ The notion of “leader,” at the time was derived from the youth movement. The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) also portrayed itself as embodying a popular “movement,” rather than simply being one of the typical “parties” of the Weimar Republic which were painted as being as corrupt as the republican political system. E.g., the NSDAP’s official paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, is subtitled: Kampfblatt der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung Großdeutschlands (fighting paper of the national socialist movement of Greater Germany). Munich, due to the foundation of the party there in 1920, was called the “Capital of the Movement.”
7. ↑ The name of the new political entity, Drittes Reich (third kingdom / empire), expresses well the blend of political and spiritual aspirations of many at the time. It goes back to eschatological speculations by Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202), who spoke of a succession of three kingdoms corresponding to the persons of the Trinity, culminating in the millennial, peaceful kingdom of the Holy Spirit. These ideas were politically charged in view of German nationalism in the 1923 book by A. Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich ((Berlin: Ring), English: Empire Germany’s Third Empire (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934)): here, a mighty, millennial Germany, governed according to a mix of nationalism and socialism (inspired by Russian writer F. Dostoevsky), would succeed the Holy Roman Empire (it was ended in 1806 by Napoleon) and the Second German Empire (Small Germany, 1871-1918). Later, the name Drittes Reich fell into official disfavor; “Greater German Empire” was used instead, beginning in about 1943. See here.
8. ↑ A similar proposal was made in 2006 by the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), characteristically for economic reasons, see Kirche der Freiheit: Perspektiven für die Evangelische Kirche im 21. Jahrhundert, 93-95. See the review in Logia XVI, 1 (Epiphany 2007): 51-55. Coincidentally (or not), 70 years prior to the publication of this latest reform proposal in Germany, a leading protagonist of the German Christians, Wolf Meyer-Erlach (cf. on him Sonne, Theologie, 98-100), delivered five radio sermons titled Die Kirche der Freiheit. After all, the rise of Hitler to power was perceived by nationalistic Christians as liberation (cf. Sonne, Theologie, 81, 112-113). Then and now, political liberty is confused with Christian liberty, something that is also characteristic of contemporary worship debates; see here.
9. ↑ Cf. Scholder, Kirchen, I:623, 626, 663-667.
10. ↑ Cf. D. A. Gustafson, Lutherans in Crisis: The Question of Identity in the American Republic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 62-89, 146-148.
11. ↑ See here.
12. ↑ They did impress church leaders and others, as was their purpose, cf. Scholder, Kirchen, I:596, 601.
13. ↑ G. L. Hawkins, C. Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? (Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Resources, 2007), esp. 79-90. The two lead authors are, not surprisingly, former business leaders now in the employ of Willow Creek. See this review.
14. ↑ See his 2000 paper on private confession.
15. ↑ See this study.
16. ↑ Cf. R. Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2000), 64-67, 86, 90-92, points out that this type of services is congenial to ad-driven consumerism; but, not unlike Nazi party rallies, it is also kitsch, that is, a sentimental substitute for real faith and religion that triggers the kind of feelings that, because they are self-referentially had for their own sakes, need no real object but can do with products of man’s fantasy, such as an unbiblical and therefore fake image of god or an awesome political leader. First when religion is sentimentalized, it can be sold by means of advertising campaigns and marketing strategies.
17. ↑ See especially this treatment.
18. ↑ Cf. the analysis of the phenomenon of “yoofanasia” by Scruton, Guide, 112-122.
19. ↑ Cf. his “Notes towards the Definition of Culture” (1948), in Christianity and Culture (San Diego etc.: Harcourt, n.d.), 100-106.
20. ↑ Cf. for more details the theses on faith, love, and culture.
21. ↑ See Luther in AE 13:197: “God wants the government of the world to be a symbol [example] of true salvation and of His kingdom of heaven, like a pantomime or a mask."