The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  He also noted that the social position of the church affected its attitude toward reform, that at some times church membership overlapped with the political classes more than at other times when, fairly naturally, it was less radical. He foresaw problems with Catholicism, with any church which claimed that Natural Law existed before the state, and therefore before any other forms of law. Troeltsch ended his survey in the eighteenth century, arguably selling himself short, because the nineteenth century saw some epic battles between Catholicism and Protestantism (not least in Germany), between Catholicism and secularism, Catholicism and science. But the specter of a theologian treating the church not as a solely theological entity but as a sociological one was new and was, until World War I, very influential.5

  Harnack concentrated more on the Gospels, which were for him evangelistic rather than historical documents and, whatever historical details did or did not stand up, described the impression Jesus made upon his disciples, an impression they felt the need to transmit and this was the Gospels’ main essence and purpose. In this view, the entire “Life of Jesus” movement was to be seen as a blind alley, which proved an immensely popular interpretation.6 Harnack’s book was translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible, and according to Paul Tillich, “Leipzig railway station was jammed by freight trains carrying Harnack’s book all over the world.”7

  Troeltsch and Harnack’s near contemporary was Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), possibly one of the most indefatigable people who ever lived. Born in Croatia, the son of a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railways, Steiner studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He made his mark so quickly that even before he graduated he was recommended as the editor of a new edition of Goethe’s works. On the strength of this, in 1896 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche asked Steiner to put her brother’s archive in order, and the young man was very moved by his meeting with the now-catatonic philosopher.

  Steiner’s subsequent life was spent trying to bring together the worlds of science, literature, the arts, and religion into one spiritual synthesis. He founded journals and schools and built two “Goethaneums”—auditoria where people could “experience” lectures about the spiritual life among like-minded souls (“ceremonies of the whole” again), and he established a cult.8 He advocated his view of the “Threefold Social Order,” in which he maintained that the economic, political, and cultural aspects of society should be independent but equally important. For this, Steiner was attacked by Hitler himself.9

  Steiner died exhausted at the age of sixty-four, but he left a considerable legacy—900 Waldorf (Steiner) Schools and a number of firms (including banks) and charitable societies operating on his principle that our aim should be “the higher life,” a moral concern for others and an attempt to grasp the spiritual dimension, by which he meant, specifically, the Second Coming of Jesus, which he did not believe would be physical, but “etheric,” only becoming apparent through communal life.10

  Although he was nowhere near as worldly as Steiner and did not have the same kind of practical innovative genius, Karl Barth (1886–1968) is widely regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest since Luther himself.11 Born in Basel, where his father, Fritz, was a minister and professor of New Testament and Early Church History, Barth studied at the universities of Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. At Berlin he attended Harnack’s seminars, and it was there that he first encountered the ideas of liberal theology (mainly the search for the historical Jesus), which he would eventually rebel against.12 After his studies he returned to Switzerland as a pastor.13

  In World War I Barth was much disturbed by the Manifesto of the 93 (“Among whom I was horrified to discover almost all my hitherto revered theological teachers”), which he believed was a betrayal of Christian principles.14 He came to believe that the Higher Criticism in Germany, although it had been responsible for many of the new scholarly techniques, nevertheless missed the point. The concern with Jesus as a historical figure obscured Jesus as the revealed word of God. Mankind no longer consulted the Bible in the way that its compilers intended it to be read.

  In the midst of war, Barth reexamined the scriptures and, in particular, in 1916, began a careful examination of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. This proved of great significance for Barth, and in 1922 he published Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans), the main message of which was, as Paul himself had said, that God saves only those people who “trust not in themselves but solely in God.”15 This led to Barth’s central, seminal view, what he called “the Godness of God,” that God “is wholly other,” totally different from humans.16 It was this idea that brought Barth to the attention of other theologians and many of the faithful. In the year that he published The Epistle to the Romans, he, together with a number of other theologians, including Rudolf Bultmann, who is considered next, started a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times), which formed the main outlet for what became known as “Crisis Theology” (the “crisis” being World War I and the “sinfulness,” the very great distance from God of which it was evidence). Zwischen den Zeiten remained a powerful force until it was closed down in 1933.17

  Barth’s developed view was that the Bible is not a revelation from God but a human record of that revelation. God’s single revelation occurred in Jesus Christ, meaning that we can approach God, or make ourselves available to be approached by Him, only by learning from and emulating Jesus, and we must do this for ourselves.18 Barth was also essentially optimistic for mankind, saying that although individually we may turn away from God (his definition of sin), we are “powerless to undo what Christ has done.”

  Such was the impact of Barth’s theology that, by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was a public figure. He then emerged as one of the leaders—if not the leader—of church opposition to the National Socialists, expressed in the so-called Barmen Declaration of 1934.19 In the previous April, the “Evangelical Church of the German Nation” (Deutsche Christen) had been created under Nazi influence and published its guiding principles, which made anti-Semitism a central plank of this new religion and forbade marriage between “Germans and Jews.”20 In reply, Barth was one of those founding the so-called Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), which rejected the attempt to set up an exclusively German church. In May 1934 representatives of the Confessing Church met at Barmen and delivered a declaration, based on a draft that Barth had prepared, in which they rejected the “false doctrine” that “there could be areas of our life in which we would belong not to Jesus Christ but to other lords.” Barth himself refused to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to Hitler, was dismissed, and returned to Basel where he continued to speak out in support of the Jews.21

  Much influenced by Karl Barth, and a member of the Confessing Church, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) also shared a profound belief in the importance of the New Testament as witness to the hope God gave to the world—to us—in the person of Jesus Christ.22 This, for him, made Christianity the form of faith that God intended for us. Born in Wiefelstede, the son of a pastor, Bultmann grew up in Oldenburg and studied at Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg. He then lectured at Breslau and Giessen before returning to Marburg as a full professor in 1921, remaining there until he retired in 1951.

  Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (The History of the Synoptic Tradition), published in 1921, reflected his fascination with the Higher Criticism but also his belief that by clearing away all the historical accretions, we are better able to know the real Jesus, what Bultmann called the kerygmatic Jesus, the Jesus as revealed in his teaching, which is what matters more than historical details about his life.23 Besides Barth, Bultmann was much influenced by his friend and Marburg colleague, Martin Heidegger, whose brand of existentialism, then being worked out in Being and Time (1927), was a secular, philosophical equivalent of what the philosopher was trying to say—namely, that there are four main categories of huma
n existence: first, man has a relationship to himself (in the way that we say someone is “at one” or “at odds” with himself); second, man is a possibility, rather than a predetermined actuality; third, every man’s experience is unique and defies classification; and four, man exists in the world, is caught up in it.24 Bultmann saw about him the anxieties of the modern world—especially strong in the wake of World War I—and he observed what he described as a “flight” into business, money-making, social status-seeking, and the enjoyment of ephemera, what amounted to him as a world without God.25

  In Das Evangelium des Johannes (The Gospel of John; 1941)—which proved to be a best seller—his argument was that a close reading between the lines revealed that John’s Gospel was very different from the other three (now generally accepted) and that there was within it a series of signs that help us to know how to live once we have stripped away accretions derived from Jewish apocalyptic traditions and Gnostic redemption myths. This was what became famous as Bultmann’s “demythologizing” of the Bible. He thought that the Gospel of St. John was intended for a largely gentile audience (not the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, which other scholars claimed in regard to the other gospels) and that the Gospels were less books to be read than preached as sermons, to be heard and fired up by. Bultmann thought that the Resurrection was a metaphor, for the fact is that faith will always rise up again, however dead the world may seem. The German repudiation of the “Quest of the historical Jesus” reached its zenith in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann.26 He never amended his views to accommodate the Nazis, but he steered clear of politics and kept out of the Führer’s sights.

  The third man in this renaissance of theology was Paul Tillich, born in 1886 in Brandenburg in eastern Germany and the son of yet another Lutheran pastor. He served as a chaplain in the German army throughout World War I, then taught theology at Berlin, Marburg (where he met both Bultmann and Heidegger), Dresden, Leipzig, and finally Frankfurt, where he became part of the Frankfurt school.27

  As the 1920s passed, Tillich became an increasingly outspoken socialist, publishing Die sozialistische Entscheidung (The Socialist Decision), an examination of the relationship between religion and politics. Unfortunately, it was released in 1933, was quickly suppressed, with copies confiscated and burned by the newly appointed Nazis. Tillich himself was dismissed (his name was on the first list of those suspended from university teaching, dated April 13, 1933, along with Max Horkheimer, Paul Klee, and Alfred Weber), but as luck would have it Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent socialist and a professor of practical theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and himself the son of an emigrant German pastor, was in Germany just then, and he and the seminary’s president, Henry Sloane Coffin, invited Tillich to join the Seminary. Tillich and his family emigrated soon after.

  THE DEFINING EDGE OF EVIL

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45), in fact almost the entire Bonhoeffer family, must rank among the most courageous people in all Germany, a reproach to those who say there was no chance of resistance in the Third Reich, and to those who say that there were no good Germans.

  Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, he and his twin sister, Sabine, being two of eight children born to Karl and Paula (von Hase) Bonhoeffer. Karl was a leading psychiatrist, a professor at the University of Berlin, though an empiricist, not a Freudian.28 Dietrich’s brother, Karl, was killed in World War I; his sister Christel married Hans von Dohnanyi and became the mother of Christoph von Dohnanyi, the conductor, and Klaus von Dohnanyi, a mayor of Hamburg. Although his father was a psychiatrist, Dietrich was drawn to the church and studied at Tübingen and then Berlin. He took his doctorate when he was only twenty-one but was forced to wait until he was twenty-five before being ordained.29 He spent the intervening years at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, during which time he formed an enviable collection of African-American spirituals.30

  He returned to Germany in 1934 where, together with 2,000 Lutheran pastors, he helped organize the Pastors’ Emergency League in opposition to the state church controlled by the Nazis. This was the organization that evolved into the Confessing Church under Barth’s leadership. At the outbreak of World War II, Bonhoeffer joined the Resistance, in particular a small group of senior officers in the Abwehr, Military Intelligence, intent on assassinating Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. He was tried and hanged (naked) on April 9, 1945. His brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher, both of whom had been active in the Resistance, were shot elsewhere later that month.31

  Before his arrest, Bonhoeffer composed his most important book, Ethik (Ethics), a profound work but one that shows the scars of the time and may be seen as a cross between Pietism and existentialism.32 For Bonhoeffer, the task in life is to become a responsible person, modeled on the example of Jesus Christ, but always realizing that it is action that counts, that it is how we participate in life in regard to good and evil that determines who we are and how Christian we may regard ourselves. Bonhoeffer thought that what really matters is how we confront evil on those occasions in our life when it really matters. Moral choices only matter when they are real and immediate—their reality and immediacy are their defining attributes, “urgency is invariably the defining edge of evil.” In any given situation, Bonhoeffer says, there is a right thing to do. We can recognize this in two ways—by asking what Jesus would do and by asking if our immediate concern is with the other person or with ourselves. There are risks in this approach—no outcome is ever guaranteed, either in the short run or the long run, but once we start thinking in terms other than the immediate, we are rationalizing our behavior to avoid feeling bad about ourselves and are potentially aligning ourselves with evil. To act responsibly is to act against evil without thought of the consequences.

  Albert Schweitzer was not “just” a theologian. He was a philosopher, a doctor, a musician, and a missionary. He won the Goethe Prize for his writings and the Nobel Peace Prize for the activity, achievement, and example of his whole life.

  Born in 1875 in Kaisersberg, he was brought up in the village of Güns-bach, in Alsace, when it was German (the village became French after World War I). Schweitzer’s father was a pastor, but the whole family seems to have been musicians and he was taught to play the organ at home. He studied in Paris and at Tübingen, writing his PhD thesis on Kant’s religious views before becoming a pastor at a church in Strasbourg.33 In 1905 he answered an invitation from a missionary society in Paris that was looking for a doctor. He studied medicine and eventually left for the Gabon in West Africa, where he ran a hospital. Later in life Schweitzer achieved fame in equal measure as a medical missionary and as an organist, but theologically he is best known for two things—his examination of The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Von Reimarus zu Wrede) and his philosophy/theology of “reverence for life,” most notable perhaps because he practiced so well what he preached.34

  In The Quest (1906) he did two things. He brought to an end (for a time at least) the great desire by historians to winnow the historical accretions away from the record of Jesus; Schweitzer argued that these exercises tell us more about the historians than about Jesus, and he made a convincing case that the actual Jesus, the historical Jesus if you like, was a figure who expected the imminent end of the world. Schweitzer’s scholarship was convincing and, together with a later book, Mystik des Apostels Paulus (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle; 1930), which ascribed much of the biblical view to Paul, his argument is still that subscribed to by many theologians and biblical historians.

  Since Gabon was French, Schweitzer was interned in France during World War I, and afterward traveled across Europe, becoming better known, before returning to his hospital in Lambaréné which, over time, became celebrated. Like one or two others, Schweitzer, now equally well known for his music as for his missionary work and his theology, widened his interests and, after the invention of the atomic bomb, camp
aigned against it. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize (in 1953) in recognition of his “reverence for life.”35

  Martin Buber (1878–1965) was born in Vienna but brought up in Lvov, the grandson of a renowned Jewish scholar who was also a successful investor in mines and banking. Martin underwent a religious crisis as a young man and came under the influence of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. At the University of Vienna he studied philosophy, art history, philology, and German studies, then went on to Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich, coming under the successive influence of Stefan George, Wilhelm Wundt, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Wilhelm Dilthey.36 Regaining his belief, he joined the Zionist movement and, in 1902, took up the editorship of Die Welt, the main journal of the Zionists. Unlike Theodor Herzl, who was a friend, he valued a return to the Holy Land more for its spiritual possibilities than for its political advantages and later withdrew to devote himself to his writing, later still cooperating with Franz Rosenzweig in the House of Jewish Learning and on a new German translation of the Bible.

  Buber’s greatest book, published in 1923, was Ich und Du (I and Thou), in which he argued that there are two modes of being, the dialogue and the monologue, and that the central element in life, the “premise of existence,” is the encounter. He argued that the relationship between people is the central fact of life, that mutuality, exchange, meeting, is the central aspect of experience, in which satisfaction and meaning are to be found. He felt that modernity had induced more Ich-Es (“I-It”) relations, basically monologues, and he went on to argue that “I-Thou” relations were needed in order to help people know how to have a relationship with God. This led him to favor the Hasidic tradition, where life was lived as a community.

  Buber was given an honorary professorship at Frankfurt in 1930 but resigned when Hitler came to power. The Nazis banned him from teaching, and he left Germany in 1938 for Jerusalem, where he eventually became a professor at the Hebrew University. After the war he was awarded the Goethe Prize, the Erasmus Prize, and the Israel Prize.