Liberal German Protestantism and the collapse of the churches under Hitler
"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it." Matthew 7
The story of the German churches under Hitler is not an impressive story of bold witness and heroic martyrdom. There were a few exceptions, a few cases of outspoken public opposition to Hitler, but they were rare. For example:
In 1935, one Pastor Kloetzel spoke out in his sermons against “despotism” and “racial insanity.” He was arrested, and a few weeks later died in a concentration camp. A Catholic priest, Provost Lichtenberg, publicly expressed concern for the Jews. He was later arrested and died in captivity. A Protestant pastor named Grueber set up an office to help Christian Jews. He and his assistant, one Dr. Sylten, were both arrested— the latter died in Dachau. [1]
In 1935, hundreds of Lutheran pastors were arrested for reading a Confessing Church statement denying Nazi racial ideology. [2] There are other examples that could be given, including Lutheran pastors Martin Niemoller (who was arrested in 1937 and spent the rest of the Hitler era in concentration camps), and Paul Schneider (who died in Buchenwald in 1939).
Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of the churches and Christians went along with the program. The public support of the churches for Hitler is well-known, and pictures of, as well as quotes from, church dignitaries who embraced National Socialism provide ample ammunition for those who want to denounce Christianity and Christians in general.
There are at least four reasons for this silence on the part of the churches - and the Protestants and the Catholics were both very much in the same boat here, in spite of Hitler’s Catholic upbringing (which he abandoned) and his Concordat with the Vatican (which he violated countless times).
(1) The first of those four reasons would be simple fear. There were many Germans who had never voted for Hitler and did not believe in National Socialism (the Nazis never received a majority in any national election, and Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, not voted into power). Many Germans, Christian or otherwise, did not believe in Hitler or his ideology, but did not want to be sent to a concentration camp either.
Jesus did say, “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” but that is one of those sayings of Christ that are easy to say, but not so easy to do. And how many of us who call ourselves Christians today would be willing to speak out in that situation?
It is commonly observed that the Christians in Germany did not speak up for the Jews – but they did not speak up for the non-Jewish political opponents of Hitler either. In fact, they did not even speak up when their own relatives and loved ones disappeared. The power of Hitler was to a great extent dependent on fear.
(2) A second reason was cultural Christianity – that is, having a religion one is born into but never really thought much about. Many Germans were baptized as infants into the Lutheran or Catholic churches, went to church a few times a year, had some respect for the church, but no real relationship with the Spirit of Christ. But this is not Christianity at all, for as Paul says, “Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.”
(3) A third reason was lifeless orthodoxy. It is possible to adhere to an orthodox creed, to believe in the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and assent to the deity of Christ, and yet have only the outward form of Christianity without having any real vitality, conviction or spiritual power. Faith as the Bible describes it goes far beyond assent to doctrines, and requires, as was said in the previous paragraph, a vital relationship with Christ.
(4) The fourth reason, and the one I would like to discuss in more detail, is the death of the churches as a result of liberal Protestantism – an issue which has since caused a great deal of confusion both within the churches and without. The phenomenon which here requires explanation is that many Christians, including pastors, church dignitaries, and theologians, had abandoned biblical Christianity long before Hitler came to power.
By Hitler’s time, as the result of a process that had been going on for well over a century before 1933, a great number of seminaries and churches were staffed and pastored by people who did not believe in the Bible as the divinely inspired and inerrant word of God. They called themselves “Christians” and were so considered in the eyes of the world, but they had, in effect, invented a new religion which was essentially worldly philosophy in a religious disguise.
At this point, a little historical background is necessary.
The Protestant Reformation had become a distant memory long before 1933. As early as the 1670s, some German Christians were concerned that Lutheranism had stagnated, that it had become merely a matter of ecclesiastical authority and intellectual discussions of doctrine without life, power, light, love or genuine spiritual experience. This led to the emergence of Pietism, an attempt to find a more authentic spiritual experience within the Lutheran Protestant tradition.[3]
Along with (a) a stale orthodoxy, and (b) individual attempts to find a more authentic experience of Christ, a third strand of Protestantism emerged in the nineteenth century (with roots in the 18th). This is generally called theological liberalism, and developed out of the attempts of many Christian leaders to compromise biblical teachings according to the standards of secular philosophy and science.
In his book Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig presents a brief but effective overview of the internal spiritual decay of the German churches. He states:
The flood of Deist thought and literature that poured into eighteenth-century Germany from England and France wrought a crisis in German orthodox theology. [4]
No longer capable of defending biblical doctrines now judged contrary to reason, but unwilling to dispense with Christianity altogether, increasingly Christian leaders were willing to concede that the Bible was full of mistakes, errors, myths, and false teachings, but somehow contained some spiritual and ethical truths nevertheless. Such views quickly became dominant among official German Protestantism.
Attempts to determine which parts of the Bible were true and which were false came to be known as “higher criticism” (as opposed to “lower criticism” which only sought to find errors and make corrections in the text itself). This so-called science ( which in fact was not science at all) was based on the principle that the Bible was to be treated as an ordinary book, written by ordinary means, and hence vulnerable to distortions and errors. Theology became merely humanistic re-interpretations and explanations of what were once considered to be the essential foundations of Christianity, and the Bible came to be studied as a merely cultural product of the times in which it was written. A “profound ideological and philosophical shift was taking place,” and liberal theology “tended simply to follow the curve of secular naturalism.” [5]
This theological progressivism came over time to include, among others, the ideas that Jesus did not die on the cross, but only swooned and later revived . . . that the Jews had no divine revelation but invented a fictionalized history . . . that the Gospels were not accurate records of what Christ did and taught . . . that the most important thing was to be sincere (surely that would be good enough for a God of love) . . . that the apostles did not receive their teaching from Christ but made things up as it seemed right to them. All of this, of course, used religious words in a manner that has been confusing to many both inside and outside the churches.
These ideas had their roots in the 18th century. One significant illustration is Herrmann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). This individual wrote a lengthy critique of Christianity, published after his death by the famed humanist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). This Deistic work denied the resurrection of Christ, the biblical miracles, and the Old Testament narratives. Reimarus claimed that Jesus failed in his earthly mission and was executed, after which the disciples stole his body and fabricated a story about a resurrection.
In the first half of the nineteenth century David Friedrich Strauss wrote a book, The Life of Jesus (Leben Jesu) (1835). He did not want to dismiss Christianity outright as a mere apostolic fraud like Reimarus did, so he invented the theory that the myths and legends of Christianity developed slowly and naturally over time. The resurrection of Christ never occurred, but it did have spiritual significance – as other myths also contained deeper meanings. According to William Lane Craig, Strauss‘s work had a huge influence on German theology. Now German theologians did not have to worry about the mistakes, errors, contradictions, and seemingly unscientific parts of the Bible. They could concede all of that, and still speak about the Bible‘s religious and spiritual significance .
Unfortunately, with the Christ of faith detached from the Christ of history and of Scripture, theology entered a never-never land of speculation grounded solidly on thin air. This led to “faith” in some idea of Christ without the certainty of a literal, factual, historical Bible, a Christ that was merely a human invention.
The alleged rationalism of Kant (1724-1804) was also deeply influential. He asserted (based solely on his own authority) that we cannot have direct experience of God or of the supernatural; that supposedly miraculous events all had natural causes, and that we can accept no miraculous event until those natural causes have been found; that the Bible must be treated like any other ancient book; and that a real knowledge of the divine is forbidden to us. Thus it was explained by one of Kant’s disciples that there was no miracle of Jesus turning water into wine at Cana. The wine was a gift which Jesus had secretly brought, and the legend of the miracle was based on a misunderstanding.
Brian Magee wrote of Kant that “he wrought more destruction against established religious ways of thinking than any other philosopher has ever done”.[6] This seemingly extravagant statement is probably true, given Kant‘s deep influence on liberal Protestantism in Germany, which then spread to America and to England. That empirical reality is the only reality, while the spiritual world is off-limits to reason – such beliefs of the “Enlightenment,” as exemplified by Kant‘s misguided faith in the power of his own intelligence, did immense damage to the German church. Not that we can blame the churches’ problems all on modern attempts at philosophy. The blame lies primarily with people within the church who chose to accept such ideas, or at least passively tolerated those who did.
Personally, I think Kant’s fake philosophy is a deception, delusion, and vanity, a complete waste of time. If someone seeking to really understand the meaning of life spent five years diligently studying Kant, at the end of that time he would be farther from his goal than when he started.
But what about church discipline against teachers of new and false doctrines? When the church cannot maintain a credible Christian witness even within the confines of its own sanctuary, what possible relevance can it have to the outside world?
At any rate, people with these clever new ideas stood in the pulpits and talked about the Gospel, Christ, and salvation. The end result was church-fulls of nominal Christians who spoke of faith and the Word of God, celebrated Christmas and Easter, took communion, and sang hymns – but it was all emptiness. These deceptions ate out the very heart of many churches and made any biblical and spiritual opposition to the lies of National Socialism impossible. Who is going to suffer martyrdom for a Christ we do not know much about, but who was not born of a virgin and did not rise from the dead? Who is going to suffer for a book of myths and legends?
The churches based on the sand of false philosophies of the world rather than on the rock of Christ were shallow and weak. Hitler (and many others) sensed this weakness. These churches were also irrelevant. They had nothing to offer to lost and confused people seething with resentment, fear, hatred, pride, and desire for revenge. Given that so many church leaders had already abandoned the essentials of the faith, how could they withstand Hitler? Their hearts were in the world, they had been following the world for a long time, and there was no reason why they should not continue to follow it – especially in the beginning, when Hitler‘s true nature was completely unknown.
The malleable, flexible and merely human God of liberal so-called Protestantism is easily accommodated to any and every worldly philosophy, as we can see not merely in Germany, but in America today. There is no need to be puzzled by the collapse of the German churches before Hitler. Their imposing edifices, their seminaries and church buildings were for the most part whitewashed tombs.
Prof. Gene Veith, speaking specifically of Germany, says:
The attack on the Bible within Protestantism was the work of both textual scholars and theologians. By the 20th century, the “higher criticism” of the Old Testament, which undercut traditional ideas about the authorship and composition of the Bible, had already weakened the doctrine of biblical authority. By assuming that the biblical text and the events it describes are to be explained in naturalistic, scientific terms, historical-critical scholarship vitiated the Bible‘s status as supernatural revelation. [7]
Nineteenth-century church historian Philip Schaff wrote that Germany‘s renowned Tuebingen school of theology, a fountainhead of new ideas in Christianity,
proceeds from disbelief in the supernatural and miraculous as a philosophical impossibility, and tries to explain the gospel history and the apostolic history from purely natural causes like every other history. [8]
To quote another source on this highly important aspect of Christianity in the Third Reich and in the preceding decades:
Because of the influence of modern philosophy and modern science, and particularly because of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his followers, modern Protestantism rejects traditional Protestantism. [9]
It is incredible to non-Christians that someone could be a pastor, a bishop, or a theologian, and speak of “God . . . Christ . . . faith . . . salvation,” yet nevertheless be very far removed from the teachings of Christ and in fact be presenting a new religion using familiar Christian vocabulary for different ends. J. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism (first published in 1923) is a profound study of how the theological liberals have borrowed Christian terminology for the use of what is in fact a completely different religion, a new faith that is in essence secular philosophy and wishful thinking dressed up in religious language.
This new religion was based not on divine revelation but on human reason, and was nothing but humanistic philosophy using religious words and still trying to cling to some sort of groundless hope. In this new religious system, Christ was merely a great moral teacher with a “sublime” ethical system, nothing more. He did not die on the cross for the sins of the world, was not born of a virgin, and was not literally God in human form. The biblical Heaven and Hell and the Day of Judgment were dismissed as pre-scientific myths. If there was such a thing as heaven, surely all that was needed to get there was sincerity. Feeling, a vague sense of the infinite, was more important than doctrine, and “faith” was limited to what might seem plausible to an unbelieving world.
The buildings, hymns, vestments and ceremonies remained, but much of the German church was lifeless and dead long before 1900. Catholicism, which was anchored in the Vatican, was more traditionally orthodox at that time, but is now riddled with many modern values and attitudes, and is by no means immune to modern secular influences, as the current Pope is showing.
This is not merely a question of understanding German history, but has a great deal of relevance for us today. Germany’s descent into dictatorship was unpredictable a mere five years earlier, when Hitler was still on the lunatic fringe and the Nazi Party did not have a significant role. Yet, the unexpected came – and who can say what unexpected things might happen to us in the next five or ten years? No one can safely predict what the USA might be like in 2034 – and what if by that time we do have a government that is overtly hostile to Christianity? Will we who have the name of Bible-believing Christians be able to stand?
Thomas Oden‘s book Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements gives a striking picture of seminaries and church bureaucracies in the USA that have already, with no persecution to drive them, abandoned biblical Christianity and embraced the world. He speaks of “unprecedented mutations” in the church; of mockery of the Trinity and dismissal of the need for Christ‘s sacrificial death; of “overt advocacy of lesbianism as an acceptable and commended practice for Christian women”; of a communion service dedicated to the feminist goddess Sophia. [10] Does anyone imagine these people will stand for Christ in times of persecution? If we want to understand the strange silence of the German churches under Hitler we need only to look around us.
[1] See Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich, trans.Krishna Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 59. And John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945 (Vancouver: Regent, 1968), p. 262
[2] Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, p. 122.
[3] Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), pp. 45-47.
[4] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), p. 342.
[5] Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Wheaton IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 110-111.
[6] Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 160.
[7] Gene Edward Veith Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (St. Louis: Concordia, 1993), p. 53.
[8] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 1: Apostolic Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Death of St John A.D. 1-100 (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2011), p. 208.
[9] Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and Modern Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company 1980), p. 106.
[10] Thomas Oden, Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 109, 48, 27.