Thursday, March 16, 2023

Barth

I heard decades ago that there had been a kind of reconciliation between the Confessing Church and -- either the silent rest of the church or the German Church (the ones that were all in for Mein Kampf on the altar). It sounded powerful, and a few days ago I started looking around for descriptions of this event/process.

Um. So far I haven't turned up much that matches that description, but I did find this about Karl Barth:

"in April 1940, at the age of 53, Barth enlisted as a soldier in the Swiss armed auxiliary; he refused office duty because he desired to serve his nation as any ordinary Swiss soldier, not as a protected, famous theologian, and he volunteered to stand watch along the Rhine in defense of Switzerland"

He lived in Germany during the Nazi years, and wrote against it from the start. After the war, trying to justify not reacting to Communism with equal strength, he wrote this about Nazism:

what made it interesting from the Christian point of view was that it was a spell which notoriously revealed its power to overwhelm our souls, to persuade us to believe in its lies and to join in its evil-doings. It could and would take us captive with ‘strong mail of craft and power.’ We were hypnotized by it as a rabbit by a giant snake. We were in danger of bringing, first incense, and then the complete sacrifice to it as to a false god.

Some of my readers will see parallels to modern Christian Nationalism (No doubt it is around somewhere, but I haven't seen it myself. Maybe I just hang out with a different crowd-- Rushdoony is not on our radar.) and others with those preachers revising morals and paradigms to match the elite culture.

I'm wondering about that reconciliation. Did it really happen?

1 comment:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

When I was a Lutheran in the 70s and 80s I recall hearing a pastor speak about such a thing as if it had definitely been happening at the conferences he had been going to in Germany. But after he had finished and left the room some pastors muttered furiously about how stupid young pastors and seminarians were for believing this.

So I don't know the answer, but that would suggest a data point that said "no." OTOH, I don't know that German Lutherans believe anything other than modern politics and centuries-old history now, so the whole controversy might just be swept under the rug.