edited by Dean G. Stroud
Eerdmanns, Grand Rapids, Mich. 203 pages
REVIEWED BY ROGER J. GENCH
This book, a collection of sermons of resistance preached in German churches during the Third Reich, has haunted me. Dean Stroud provides a fine historical introduction, describing the Nazis’ shrewd co-optation of religion. They embraced it and made their own religion by adopting a version of Christianity shorn of a Jewish Jesus and the virtues that Jesus taught and exemplified in his life — no humility, no love of God and neighbor and no forgiveness. “Nazis scripted important events in family life as well. Marriages and baptisms were given Nazi texts. And when Christmas came, Nazis even had a new text for the most German of Christmas carols. In ‘Silent Night’ Hitler simply replaced Jesus:
Silent Night! Holy Night! All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight
Watches o’er Germany by day and night,
Always caring for us.”
Nazi Christianity glorified violence and Hitler as its savior. Members of the Gestapo regularly attended Christian churches to compel observance of Nazi doctrine, threatening resisters with imprisonment or death. Most Christian churches acquiesced, but some clergy — including Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and notable others — and churches did not.
Paul Schneider was one such minister. He was arrested twice by the Gestapo and eventually exiled from his church. When his parish pleaded for him to return, he did so and preached a sermon for which he was arrested yet again; but this time he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was tortured and killed. His body was so badly beaten that the family did not open the casket, as was the custom, at his funeral. So what was in that sermon that led to his death? He preached from the Old Testament — Psalm 145 — an unapproved lection, for Jewish Scripture was not allowed in worship. Moreover, the sermon was about giving thanks to God for the harvest, the field and the blessings of labor. This contradicted Nazi dogma that benevolence was Hitler’s business rather than God’s. What Schneider died for was reminding his congregation that God, not the Nazi state, was the ultimate benefactor to whom they owed their thanks and their lives.
Other clergy publicly critiqued Nazi racism from the pulpit, like Julius Von Jan who preached against the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. As a result of his sermon, he was severely beaten by 500 Nazis, was thrown in jail and his parsonage was smeared with the words Judenknecht, which means “Jew Servant.”
Such sermons, and Stroud’s helpful commentary on them, can both inspire and goad us. They surely prompt our thanksgiving for democracy and freedom of speech. But living as we do in a politically polarized nation and church, they also prompt reflection on the question of whether or not we fully exercise this freedom in service of the gospel. For example, it might not be easy to preach the biblical imperative of hospitality to the poor, the outcast and the stranger and apply it to the tragedy that is taking place on our southern border where thousands of refugee children are fleeing violence and anarchy. It might be daunting to call for their protection rather than deportation. But reading this book might compel us to say just that and even more.
ROGER J. GENCH is pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.
