Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Both the common assault of National Socialism and the church against communism and their common reassertion of the "claim of the Whole" brought Lortz to emphasize a theme with potentially the most damaging significance for German Catholicism. Lortz saw in National Socialism the renewed possibility for a cultural and religious synthesis, a unity of state and church that would return Germania to the supposed glories of the High Middle Ages and restored Christendom that had been long lost. For Lortz this would not only provide a social consensus essential for a moral and stable society; it would also presuppose social integration on the basis of a common religion, which, of course, would be Christianity understood in Catholic terms.

  The common foundation in Catholic Christianity thus became the basis for both consensus in moral values and for unifying state policy. The place and role of non-Christians, even minority Christian expressions, was clearly problematic in such a view. These people, most notably in 1933 the Jews, lay outside the synthesis, incompatible with majority values and might. They became liabilities to social unity and harmony, yet this is the very social unity that Lortz perceived as essential to the church. In fact, this social-religious unity was, for Lortz, at the core of the church's mission of promoting the gospel and fulfilling the will of Christ:

  [T]he newly emphasized national life of Germany could serve the Church as a blessing instead of being harmful, as feared by all too many people of little faith. For a thorough consideration of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the Church shows in the basic teaching from the sacred realm that the growth of the Church is tightly bound to the cultural community [Volkstum] of those ethnic groups [Stamme] and peoples in which the Church to a singular degree performs its work. This cultural entity [Volkstum] operates as the mother-source of the Church's growth. Indeed, in it we can perceive with the greatest certainty the governance of providence, which has enabled the fulfillment of the gospel in particular times and among a particular people and thereby enhanced its growth."

  This is not pure racism. The ground for Lortz's synthesis of Catholic Christianity and national culture is found in his neoscholastic theology, with its consistent claim of the inseparability of nature and grace. It rests in the understanding that God is revealed not simply in Scripture but through interventions in history and nature as well, in the naturally designed realities of our community and cultural experience as well as in the course of historical events. There is an "inner correlation" between God's design in nature and history and the particular characteristics of distinctive communities and cultures. Thus, it is an axiom of such a theology of grace that faithfulness requires support and enhancement of whatever is naturally distinctive in the peculiar strength and talent of a particular group, for example, ethnic German culture."

  This is not an explicit claim of superiority or an appeal for uniformity, but rather a complex theological basis for seeing God's will in the pursuance of particularity, in the very integrity of a "special culture." Yet, at the same time, it is easy to realize how potentially damaging this could be in any association with the Nazis, which, intentionally or not, would be an association with Nazi racism. When Lortz used words like Volkstum and Stiimnu', he was attaching his neoscholastic arguments to the Nazi catchwords of the day. Thus, the argument for a correlation of grace and nature could be perceived as an argument for exclusion of alien characteristics, namely, Jews, from such a distinctive culture. The elimination of any threats or distractions to the divinely ordered German culture could be perceived as a measure of Catholic faithfulness.

  Lortz never dealt directly with the question of minority religious expression or the "problem" of other religious groups, except perhaps in his discussion of the division between Protestants and Catholics, which he also expected to be overcome in the unifying incentives of National Socialism. Yet it is quite clear that there was no integrated place in such a renewed German culture for those who were outside the Christian community. Lortz did not deal explicitly in this treatise or elsewhere with Jews or Judaism in his contemporary situation, but it is fair to say that he did not need to do so; his concept spoke loudly and clearly to his contemporaries. One cannot leap thereby to any certainty that Lortz, therefore, also explicitly supported the suppression of Jews or the Aryan legislation in the period from 1933 to 1937. But it is nevertheless obvious that his language and thinking lent support, at least in the minds of some, to policies of "political coordination" [Gleichschaltung] and comprehensive harmonization, that is, to the Nazi policies of racial exclusion.

  This call to a higher, destined unity was for Lortz nothing less than a divine mission. It was a call to a grand and great cause, and he sought to inspire Catholics to see in National Socialism a divinely appointed moment for restoration and renewal. They needed only to achieve the necessary attitude of commitment and sacrifice that he already saw in the Nazis themselves: "We know only too well that for a great many National Socialists the state creed and the readiness to sacrifice for it completely surpasses the commitment of those in the Church for its mission. Yet it still remains the case that National Socialism in a most profound sense prepares the way to faithfulness and even encourages the concept of the Church to live

  Conclusion

  From this brief examination of Joseph Lortz's work, several conclusions seem quite clear. First, the unifying element in his thought was the development of a political theology based on mainstream, normative Catholic theological viewpoints. No innovative theological construction was introduced here; rather it was an appeal to elements common to a German Catholic consensus. Lortz attempted to create a distinctively Catholic alternative to the kind of partisan political response that Catholics had used since the cultural conflicts of the late nineteenth century, in particular, an alternative to support for a Catholic political party such as the Center Party. Lortz saw in true Catholicism a spiritual-religious emphasis that in an ideal way complements the political dimension of the state. Thus, he argued for a Catholic acceptance of the Nazis because he thought their aims compatible with Catholic aims. Although he saw this political-religious conjunction as a rejection of "political theology," in the sense of formal political participation, his whole effort was an exercise in the development of a very political theology, based on the assumption of Church and Party correlation, rooted in a synthesis of intellectual orientation and social purpose.

  This revised political theology, it can be shown, was directly exploited by the Nazis in achieving an even greater hold on German society. Lortz gave German Catholics a respectable, traditional theological rationale for participation in or at least acquiescence toward National Socialism. He related this to the mission of the whole church, a view that could be especially appealing to the priests and bishops. The leadership was under enormous pressure in the critical middle months of 1933, both from the Nazi party and from lay Catholics, to sanction a more positive attitude toward the Nazis. The teaching offices of the church could make convenient and widespread use of Lortz's views and his stature.

  Catholic theologians such as Lortz gave a theological and intellectual legitimacy to National Socialism precisely at a time when the question of popular acceptance of the Nazis hung in delicate balance. In making a case for the compatibility of Catholicism with National Socialism, these theologians built upon the prestige and intellectual authority that Church academic figures had in the minds of Catholic laity. They thereby played an influential role in creating total political control for the Nazis and a total social and spiritual disaster for the church.

  ri few countries has the relationship of Christian churches to Judaism been transformed so radically as in Germany after the Second World War, particularly in the West. There the increased willingness of Christians, especially Protestants, to deal with their traditional anti-Judaism has resulted from shock at their human and moral failure toward Jews under National Socialism. Yet it would be a profound misunderstanding to see these transformed attitudes as only one possible expression of Christian belief, as seve
ral Third World churches have done in the ecumenical context. By attributing these altered attitudes merely to a sense of guilt, outsiders have diminished the theological significance of these changes for Christian faith as a whole. Even if some of the denominations involved, such as the German Lutherans, were specific to Germany, the reality is that the Christian churches in National Socialist Germany failed the Jews because of a tradition they shared, to a great extent, with all churches everywhere.

  Appreciation for the altered Christian perspective toward Judaism must not be naive. Changes in academic theology and in attitudes found among the more educated, activist laity are not the same as widespread changes in thinking among churchgoers. There is no proof that these changes-as expressed in revised Protestant church regulations and Catholic bishops' declarationshave become an accepted part of the beliefs held by the majority. In addition, it should be noted that the theologians whose work is outlined here remain a minority, still outnumbered by their conventionally minded colleagues. Furthermore, a distinct new form of anti-Judaism has developed within progressive church circles and on the margins of the political left.

  This essay will trace these developments and related changes within the institutional church. It will focus on the thinking of prominent individual theologians in order to highlight key political and theological conflicts. The rela tionship between Jews and Christians in postwar Germany will be described, mainly from the perspective of the Christian churches. Since the focus will be upon development in church attitudes, the contributions of Jewish thinkers such as Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, Robert Raphael Geiss, Pinchas Lapide, Bernd Gunter Ginzel, Peter Levinson, and Pnina Naveh Levinson will be mentioned only in passing.'

  This emphasis reflects also the diminished Jewish presence in postwar Germany, comprising now approximately sixty thousand people in contrast to the half million residents there prior to 1933. With a few exceptions, rabbis in Germany tend to be uninterested in this debate, some due to their Orthodox perspective, others because their education and background (mainly Israeli) do not provide the necessary impulse. The attitude of most rabbis only mirrors that of their congregants, the vast majority of whom lack interest in or understanding of Christian-Jewish activities. This, too, is a consequence of the Holocaust. Members of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaften fiir christlich-judische Zusammeiarbeit), which were initiated after the war by groups from the United States, can often count on more mockery than supportive cooperation.

  The Confessing Church and Its Legacy

  After World War II, the apparent triumph of the Confessing Church provided the theological starting point for an examination of the Holocaust in the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD). Early resistance by the Pastors' Emergency League, based upon Barthian theology, was seen to have preserved the character of Protestant faith, preventing its appropriation by the state. Likewise, the Confessing Church and its Councils of Brethren, in a position based upon the Barmen Declaration, had opposed the z'olkisch transformation of the gospel attempted by the German Christian Movement. Following good Lutheran tradition, however, this church resistance had not challenged the right of the National Socialist state to exercise authority in its own sphere. The resulting limits on the church's position became evident in the Confessing Church's attitude toward the Jews. Even today, assumptions about this issue are shaped more by myth than by objective knowledge of the facts.

  We can begin with the debate about implementing the Aryan Paragraph in the church, a debate instigated by enthusiastically cooperative church leaders, not the Nazi state. Dialectical and liberal theologians from Marburg, including Rudolf Bultmann and Hans von Soden, cited Pauline theology and the work of Karl Barth to oppose the Aryan Paragraph, arguing that people who had been born Jewish and baptized into Christianity should not be excluded from the ministry, nor should there be mandatory establishment of separate parishes for Christians of Jewish descent. These Marburgers were opposed by theologians at Erlangen, especially Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, who referred to the Old Testament "orders of creation" as natural arrangements for human societies, established for all time according to God's will. The German Volk must be considered one such order of creation. In an unconventional interpretation of Lutheran theology, they then claimed that this concept allowed the formation of a specifically German, zviilkisch Christianity in which Christians of Jewish descent had no claim to an equal place.

  The dialectical theology that opposed such interpretations found its clearest articulation in the Barmen Declaration, inspired by Barth. The main theme of the Barmen Declaration emphasized the exclusive role of Christ as God's Word. This Christomonic and Christocentric theology insisted upon the Johannine assumption that belief in Jesus as the Christ is the only way to God and provides the only true knowledge about God. Thus, Barmen sharply rejected all other sources of religious experience and knowledge, including the cultural or historical.

  On the one hand, such a narrow interpretation effectively ruled out all aolkisch interpretations of Christianity from the standpoint of German history. On the other hand, however, it prevented any positive reference to Jews and their faith. Bultmann's dialectical theology, based upon Paul and Luther, did not distance him very far from the theology of Emanuel Hirsch and the German Christians, rooted in German idealism. They shared a basic premise: the insistence on the conflict, overshadowing all else, between law and gospel. In exegesis and sermons about the Old and the New Testaments, this premise allowed for no other conclusion than to attribute to Jews a legalism inimical to freedom and subjectivity. Such an emphasis reserved the message of liberation for the Christian point of view alone.

  Thus, the focal point of the debate was the singularly Christian concept of freedom, a theme put on the agenda in the early modern era by Martin Luther, who drew upon the tradition of Paul. The subsequent philosophy of German idealism and, ultimately, the emergence of the linguistic humanities offered a theoretical extension of this perspective. This debate pinpoints an allegedly substantial difference between Judaism and Christianity. In the ancient church, with its apologetics and scholasticism, Christians had insisted that their New Testament, added to the Old, gave them an advantage over the Jews. Now Christians began to argue that they possessed not only an advantage but something essentially different: a New Testament that does not so much fulfill the Hebrew Bible as supersede it and, perhaps, contradict it. This perspective tests the relationship between the two Testaments as well as the relationship of Jesus to Judaism. Even the ancient church had assumed a radical discontinuity between Jesus and the Judaism of his time. This new direction, however, assumed a radical discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments. Such an approach can hardly avoid being antiJewish and anti-semitic, and it united both the Confessing Church and the German Christian side of the theological debate in Germany.

  Clearly there were no thoughts of Christian theological solidarity with Judaism during the Third Reich. An additional factor in the church's indifference was the prevalence of an antiliberal political attitude. In the decades before Hitler came to power, the great majority of educated Germans (including Protestant theologians) held little regard for the values of democracy, including cultural pluralism, and they viewed modern Jews as the advocates and representatives of an uprooted, disconnected Zeitgeist in the service of mammon.' Whatever the achievements of the Confessing Church, almost no one fought on behalf of practicing Jews (exceptions include Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Barth's theoretical reflections). Anti-Jewish preconceptions continued to shape judgments about mass murder even after the war, but gradually recognition of the horrors inflicted upon Jews forced a debate about Christian failure and its theological roots. That in turn led to a renewal of the relationship between Christians and Jews in postwar Germany.

  Theologically, the revision of Christian attitudes toward Judaism had several stages, moving from the wartime theorems of the German Christians to the central principles of Confessing Church theology. Barthian theology
initially formed the basis for this rethinking process, which was increasingly fueled by the arguments of liberal theology and, finally, by new concepts that emerged from the encounter with Judaism itself. In the process, Christian theologians dissolved the purported singularity and uniqueness of Christianity from within, leading it back into Judaism, but this proved to be a process that many other Christians perceived as threatening.

  Postwar aystenatic and Institutional Developments

  There are four systematic stages of renewal in the postwar Jewish-Christian relationship, which arose in response to the four central arguments of the German Christians. The latter had distinguished themselves from Judaism, first, in the separation between law and gospel. Second, this separation was impelled by a concept of religious history that made the Israelite and Jewish religion contingent, above all, upon the Old Testament. Third, this historiography became tied to systematic arguments based upon modern subjective philosophy, arguments which, fourth, otherwise agreed with socially conservative, nationalistic, and volkisch goals.

  In response to these German Christian claims, the critique based upon Barthian theology first underscored the unity of law and gospel. Second, it emphasized the irrevocable unity of New and Old Testament, and third, it thereby introduced a purely biblical exegesis no longer dependent upon outside philosophies or sources of knowledge. Fourth, without actually approaching a liberal understanding of politics, this critique replaced the old volkisch and nationalist content with socially progressive, leftist ideals. Finally, it also became self-evident that the unbiblical myths most closely tied to antisemitism had to be eradicated, exegetically and systematically. These included the belief in an "Aryan" Jesus, the claim that Jews were Christkillers, and the notion that Jews lost their role in salvation history because they were blind and bedazzled deniers of the Messiah.