Why Did German Protestants Support Hitler?
I am trying to evaluate this article and have many questions.
Thoughts?
Also,
Then
How is the Church to address social issues? How is the Church to be involved in issues of law and government (since social issues are largely moral issues). What is the difference between speaking out on issues of abortions and race, and "politicizing" one's faith?
I am trying to evaluate this article and have many questions.
Thoughts?
Take, for instance, a recent article by Joel McDurmon, resident scholar and Director of Research for The America Vision. McDurmon defines his target as "Radical 2k (R2K)" a version of the two kingdoms doctrine that, he says, claims the church has nothing to say to civil authority, because civil authority operates under the category of law, not gospel. This, in McDurmon's account, was precisely the view of Lutheran churches in Germany under Hitler, and he worries that Horton's two kingdoms theology leads in the same direction.
Also,
McDurmon admits that both Luther and Calvin were two kingdoms theologians
In short, because of their two kingdoms doctrine, German Lutherans surrendered responsibility to teach God's law based on scripture. They tacitly enabled the Nazis to do all that they did. Contemporary two kingdoms theology calls for the same sort of separation between church and politics, McDurmon argues, and should therefore be rejected.
It's a powerful warning based on a sobering story. However, it significantly distorts the history it purports to tell.
Then
So, what really happened?
Despite Luther's early two kingdoms theology, which implied that church and state could be separated (though Luther always insisted that both kingdoms, or governments, are under God and obligated to obey him), Lutheranism followed the reformer's later willingness to give magistrates a prominent 'emergency' role in church governance by developing a system in which church and state had complementary roles. Magistrates were to rule over the church and society, but consistent with the moral and theological instruction of pastors, and according to God's creation order. Early Lutherans would have been surprised to hear that the two kingdoms doctrine implied anything like a separation of church and state, let alone of Christianity and politics.
Leading two kingdoms theologians like Paul Althaus argued that it was the church's obligation to support the state in its attempt to protect the German volk from corruption or defilement.
This is not the sort of "Radical 2k" theology that forbids the church to address politics. While conservative Lutherans recognized that the two kingdoms doctrine forbade the sort of partisanship and Nazification of the church advocated by the "German Christian" movement, their theology committed them to a nearly unconditional solidarity of Volk and Fatherland that called for just the sort of synthesis of church and state, of politics and Christian morality, that Hitler tended to praise in his rhetoric.
But the more poignant warning of this history is surely to avoid conflating our political ideologies with the will of God, thereby rendering ourselves vulnerable to the manipulation of politicians at best, and offering them the positive support of the church at worst. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer's biographer and fellow Confessing Church member Eberhard Bethge reflected, too many Germans had replaced their allegiance to the Christ revealed in Scripture with an allegiance to a German god of their own making. And "when a different god is made out of Christ—a Hellenistic or Teutonic or Jerry Falwell-made American god—then the first commandment is being violated." (Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 131)
In far too many cases in Nazi Germany the problem was not that pastors were being too quiet, but rather, they were being too loud—in their support for Hitler. Beguiled by their nation and its political ideology, they lost all perspective on their proper responsibilities in the pulpit and to the state. That's why Barmen Declaration author Karl Barth insisted, like Michael Horton, not that the church become more involved in politics, but that the church free itself from politicization. Only when the church maintains its allegiance to the word of God, proclaiming Christ consistent with the rule of love, and allowing the chips to fall for or against the state where they may, should pastors take up the prophetic voice.
Horton and contemporary Reformed two kingdoms theologians agree that the church must preach the whole counsel of God, declaring racism to be heretical, marriage to be between a man and a woman, and the life of the unborn to be inviolable. But they insist that the church must distinguish between our politics and God's law to avoid just the sort of politicization of the church that occurred in 1930s Germany. This is in contrast to the project of American Vision, which involves a worked out synthesis between Christianity and a very concrete political ideology. McDurmon reveals his hand at the end of his essay, when he compares those who do not support his brand of conservative politics with those who failed to resist the Nazis.
When the government protects abortions, when the government demands Christian businesses fund abortifacients against Christian conscience, when the government maintains standing armies and unnecessary foreign invasions, oppressive levels of debt and taxation, 70,000 pages of unread new regulations every year, fiat money and monopoly control over it, massive entitlements built on debt secured by the labor of our children and grandchildren . . . the list could go on . . . When the government does these things, it is the job of Christians and of the church to "maintain a prophetic stance" against the civil realm and declare those things as ungodly and tyrannical. To avoid this task, or to condemn others for performing this task, is to be the practical equivalent of the German Evangelicals described above. (emphasis added)
....it is a warning to the church not to allow its witness to be subverted by human political ideologies at all. For politicization reduces the church's moral credibility; it does not strengthen it.
Far too much of the legacy of Christendom is the tragic way in which Christians have used the church and its religion to support their own oppressive politics and misguided ideologies.
How is the Church to address social issues? How is the Church to be involved in issues of law and government (since social issues are largely moral issues). What is the difference between speaking out on issues of abortions and race, and "politicizing" one's faith?
