23. Theological Ferment: Twentieth-Century Protestants and Catholics

Albert is not welcome in my church. He’s there every Sunday, but to most people he is either invisible or ignored—or dismissed outright—by everyone except my husband and me, though we’ve never actually conversed with him. We give him a nod or perhaps an inconspicuous salute. He is a big man. Indeed, with the exception of Jesus, he is the largest full-bodied figure in the wall of stained glass that towers behind the pulpits and choir loft in the front of the sanctuary.

Albert Schweitzer, the great missionary medical doctor to Africa—and “heretic”—found his way into our church, not by invitation but by artistic license. The artist commissioned to create this spectacular set of images took the liberty of giving him a place alongside other recognizable “saints,” including Martin Luther and John Calvin.

But Schweitzer, unlike the others, is considered less than orthodox. He challenged liberal interpretations of the gospel accounts of Jesus in his well-known book, Quest for the Historical Jesus, but was himself outside the realm of historic orthodoxy. So what was La Grave Avenue Christian Reformed Church to do? Could this big man be taken out of the glass? Yes and No. No, short of firing a cannon ball through the glass, he is there to stay. Yes, we can rid ourselves of him, as we have done, if we simply deny he is who he is. We can say the figures in the glass are generic representations of generic people and that one of them may appear to look like a generic Schweitzer.

Schweitzer’s less-than-orthodox doctrine was balanced by his passion to follow Jesus in sacrificial service. It seems to me that he ought to get credit for that. How many Christians who are fully orthodox in church dogma, I ask, fail to follow Jesus as he commanded? “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another…. But … it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood.

ANAND SINGH

The twentieth century was a time when wonderful ideas were carried forward from one race to another—but always, it seems, soaked in blood. It was a century of war. The national revolutions and civil wars that marked the mid-nineteenth century pale in comparison to the carnage of the world wars of the twentieth century and the accompanying holocausts that spanned the globe, beginning with that perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazis, followed by Joseph Stalin’s bloodbath in Russia. And before the century was over, millions more would be slaughtered by the likes of Idi Amin in Uganda and Pol Pot in Cambodia as well as in civil wars from El Salvador to Rwanda and Sudan.

War, genocide, racism, tyranny, and terror in all its guises formed an incongruous backdrop for the unparalleled twentieth-century expansion of Christianity around the world. This was the century of evangelicals—earnest Christians populating chapels and churches and Bible institutes of every kind—from Plymouth Brethren and Baptist to Methodist and Presbyterian. Alongside of—and often in opposition to—the evangelicals were liberals (and those accused of being liberal) of every stripe, both Protestant and Catholic. Social outreach was certainly not confined to the liberal camp, but many of the more progressive church leaders sought to infuse theology with social concern. Among those speaking out against totalitarianism and for the marginalized were Abraham Kuyper, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, and Oscar Romero.

Severely bruised by the Enlightenment and by evolution and other scientific and technological revolutions, many European churches responded either by moving with the times and abandoning historic orthodoxy or by reacting to the liberalizing trends by tightening the reins. Protestant denominations, following the lead of their respective seminaries and schools of religion, were swayed by biblical criticism and a corresponding diminished authority of Scripture. Such moves, however, often resulted in church splits and the formation of new denominations that claimed to be the rightful heirs of the original founders.

PARADE OF HISTORY

As Hitler reviews goose-stepping SS guards parading before the Reichstag in Berlin, the procession of church history moves onward. There are those who seek to rain on his parade, but far too many professing Christians cheer him on. They applaud during his boisterous birthday parade on April 18, 1939. “We celebrate in exultant joy the fiftieth birthday of our Fuhrer,” reads a greeting from the German Protestant Church. “In him, God has given the German people a true man of wonders.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer is in town that day, vowing to stand strong against the tyrant. His own parade will end at dawn on April 9, 1945, at the gallows.

RELIGION IN DENMARK, CIRCA 1855

We have what one might call a complete inventory of churches, bells, organs, benches, alms-boxes, foot-warmers, tables, hearses, etc. But when Christianity does not exist, the existence of this inventory, so far from being … an advantage, is far rather a peril, because it is so infinitely likely to give rise to a false impression and the false inference that when we have a complete Christian inventory we must of course have Christianity, too.

Sîren Kierkegaard

Fearing similar liberalizing trends, the Catholic Church reacted by tightening its own reins. Pope Pius IX, who reigned for more than thirty years (1846–1878), stands above other nineteenth-century religious leaders in seeking to stem the tide of modernism. Initially a social liberal who cared about the concerns of those living under the oppressive regime of the Papal States, he quickly reversed his position in the face of revolution. Having earlier fled for his life, he later returned to the Vatican in 1849, his political power significantly weakened.

In this atmosphere, he directed his influence to strengthening the spiritual authority of the Church. Catholicism, he vowed, would not cave in to cultural trends. “Tradition—I am tradition!” was reportedly his dictum. With a heavy hand he brought Catholics in line with official church teaching, including the teaching on the Virgin Mary. Although Mary had long been revered in the church, he decreed in 1854 (with the support of bishops) that she was conceived without “any taint of sin”—the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Some years later he reaffirmed Unam Sanctam, specifying that for anyone outside the Roman Catholic Church there is no salvation. Fearing heretical teachings outside narrow church boundaries, he issued the Syllabus of Errors, which censured what he considered profane movements and ideas—from Bible societies and secular education to religious toleration and civil marriages.

For those who challenged his power, his response was straightforward—papal infallibility ex cathedra (by virtue of office). The first Vatican Council affirmed this doctrine in 1870. Thus, when the pope is speaking officially as head of the church on faith and morals, his word must be accepted as gospel truth. Opponents argued that such a decree elevated the pope above councils, thus making councils unnecessary. One year later, in 1871, dissenting bishops who claimed to be true heirs of apostolic succession formed the Old Catholic Church.

The same year that papal infallibility was defined, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) enlisted in the military and was on his way to fight against France. He watched with pride as the German cavalry passed through Frankfurt. “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life,” he later wrote, is in a “Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower.” Born into a family of Lutheran preachers, he had read the Bible with passion as a boy and was referred to as “the little minister.” But in 1864, as a university student he, like many of his fellow students, abandoned the faith. In the years that followed, he became known as an evangelist of unbelief and the founding philosopher of the “death of God” movement. He was the poster child for religion gone awry.

Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out … “Where is God gone? … We have killed him,—you and I! We are all murderers! … Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God?” … At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come too early,” he then said, “I am not yet at the right time.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

When Nietzsche died in 1900, Paul Tillich (1886–1965), another son of a German minister was coming of age. Though sometimes wrongly associated with death-of-God theology, he identified his perspective as the “theology of doubt.” Escaping Hitler’s Germany in 1933, he became a professor of religion at Union Theological Seminary and later at Harvard, all the while pushing Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith to its outer limits: “Not only he who is in sin but also he who is in doubt is justified through faith. There is faith in every serious doubt … even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth.” Thus, according to Tillich, “there is no possible atheism.” Although most Protestants were not comfortable with such a position, Tillich was widely viewed as America’s leading theologian.

In the midst of this decades-long reign of liberalism, Karl Barth emerged with his theology or crisis, more commonly known as neo-ortho-doxy. In his train were a host of young scholars also seeking to stem the tide of modernism. But many of them, including Rudolf Bultmann, went far beyond Barth. In his New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Message, Bultmann, taking form criticism to its logical end, challenged the historical value of the Gospels.

American theologians in the mid-twentieth century were among those who looked to Barth in their efforts to hold on to historic orthodox beliefs. Among them were the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and Richard, both born in Missouri and both following their father into ministry. After seminary studies, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) took a call to a small mission church in Detroit. When he left more than a dozen years later, the largely working-class congregation had grown to nearly seven hundred. Though leaving the pastorate behind to become professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary, his concern remained with workers and the negative effects of industrialization.

Reinhold’s younger brother, Helmut Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), served in a church in St. Louis before going into a teaching career that culminated in a post at Yale. His specialty was Christian ethics, and he was best known for his seminal work, Christ and Culture, in which he sought to explain historically how Christianity has responded to various cultures: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture.

As Christianity moved into the early decades of the twentieth century, the three branches of Christianity all confronted grave obstacles, and they responded in very different ways. As the Catholic Church turned inward and tightened restrictions on clerics and scholars and laypeople alike, mainline Protestant churches largely accommodated themselves to culture. For Orthodox Christians—especially Russian Orthodox—the enemy was a totalitarian communistic regime. More than one generation of children was schooled in an educational system that did not allow for God. In many respects the twentieth century, with its world wars, Nazism, communism, and liberal theologies was not a warm environment for Christianity. Yet even in the midst of all this, the church continued to play a significant and often positive role in society.

EVERYDAY LIFE

Male Perspectives on Women in Ministry

Evangelical women in ministry found their role models in such dedicated pioneers as Phoebe Palmer and Catherine Booth as well as in the women serving with Jesus and Paul. Nor were they without male cheerleaders. “There is no prohibition in the Bible against women’s public work,” wrote Frederik Franson, founder of The Evangelical Alliance Mission, “and we face the circumstance that the devil, fortunately for him, has been able to exclude nearly two-thirds of the number of Christians from participation in the Lord’s service through evangelization.”

Presbyterian minister ?. T. Pierson, also called for expanded roles for women in ministry. The argument was simple. More, not fewer, workers are needed in the vineyard of the Lord. The world will never be evangelized if women are excluded. Such an argument had been voiced in the early stages of sectarian movements throughout history. From Moravians and Quakers to Methodists and Pentecostals, women fought in the trenches alongside men and often rose through the ranks—but not in the status-conscious institutionalized churches.

Though it is often assumed that “liberals” support a more feminist agenda and “conservatives” do not, that was not true during much of the twentieth century. Mainline Protestant churches, like Roman Catholicism, were deeply entrenched in an institutionalized corporate system that encouraged competition and defense of one’s turf. Opening the doors to women was seen as an unnecessary move that would only threaten male status and position.

Nor were women welcomed by liberal theologians of the twentieth century. Indeed, they are noticeably absent, except for behind-the-scenes involvement as in the case of Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum, his often-unrecognized female researcher and coauthor. Similar circumstances were present in the scholarship of Paul Tillich. Liberal and neo-orthodox theologies were part of a larger intellectual realm where women’s voices were rarely heard. Even in the Social Gospel movement, women were less likely to hold prominent positions than in humanitarian outreach programs spawned by evangelicals. Largely intellectuals and lobbyists, the leading lights of the American Social Gospel movement were Richard Ely, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch.

KARL BARTH AND THE WOMEN’S ISSUE

Barth’s views on women were traditional. He affirmed a distinction between men and women both “physiologically and biblically.” Barth’s concept of the “l-Thou” encounter is discernible here. Man has strength, woman has weakness, but she is not inferior. There is “super- and subordination.” God has established an order, with man having headship over woman.

Ruth A. Tucker and Walter L. Liefeld, Daughters of the Church

Such a separation of the sexes and the assumption that women were not fit for intellectual and leadership positions was more of an old world European tradition than an American one. The received tradition was an assumption that women were basically inferior to men. In reflecting on the Samaritan woman in the gospel of John, Abraham Kuyper denigrates her despite her lively interaction with Jesus and her subsequent key role as an evangelist. He describes her not only as “positively uncouth” but also as “superficial, mundane, and gullible.” Such language had a profound effect on the generations of Reformed Christians who followed him.

Abraham Kuyper: Dutch Reformed Pastor and Prime Minister

Many nineteenth-century European Christians, like their eighteenth-century Pietist forebearers, felt as though they were being swept away in the torrent of liberalism. The confessions and catechisms of their youth were giving way to revolutionary ideas from the universities. Where would it end? Would their children and grandchildren be able to swim against the raging liberal theological current? Some succumbed to fear; others, like Pietje Balthus, took it upon themselves to do whatever they could to stem the tide. A pious young peasant woman, she confessed her simple faith to her scholarly minister. Through her testimony, the pastoral ministry of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) was transformed.

Kuyper, the son of a Dutch Reformed minister who had sought to straddle confessional orthodoxy and modernism, had the advantage of the best education of his day, receiving his doctorate in theology in 1862. The following year he accepted a call to a small village church and married Johanna, with whom he would have eight children. Before entering the ministry he had gravitated toward liberalism, but not without painful struggles. “The inherited faith lost its root in my heart,” he confessed. “It shriveled under the withering heat of unbelief. Of the old treasures I retained nothing … robbed of my childhood faith.”

Abraham Kuyper

But among his uneducated parishioners, Kuyper reclaimed his childhood faith, recognizing his own deficiencies: “I could not measure my impoverished Bible knowledge, the fruit of university study, with that of these plain people.” As he met with them, his perspective slowly began to change: “What drew me most to them was that here the heart spoke—there was inner experience.” He was torn: “I found myself ever at the fork of the way. Either must I take sharp position against them or go with them without conditions, putting myself under sovereign grace.”

RICHARD MOUW DISCOVERS KUYPER

I discovered Kuyper in the 1960s when I was struggling with fundamental tensions between my evangelical pietism and what I had come to see as the non-negotiable biblical mandate to work actively for justice and peace in the larger human community. Kuyper helped me, more than any other thinker, to see the profound connection between the atoning work of the loving Saviour who is my “only comfort in life and death” and that Saviour’s kingly rule over all spheres of human interaction.

Richard Mouw, “MINE! Kuyper for A New Century.”

While visiting the Balthus home, he listened for two hours to Pietje’s message of faith and hope. She was outspoken in the presence of her minister, warning him that unless he also believed through simple faith, he would have no hope for eternal life. He might have been offended by her audacious confrontation, but instead he returned time and again to her family home. Indeed, she became his teacher. So influential was she in his spiritual life that he kept her picture on his desk in the following years, ever reminding him of the commitment he had made.

Pietistic renewal had arisen earlier in the Dutch churches, but such movements had spread primarily among the lower classes and were either ignored or scorned by most religious scholars. With Kuyper behind the renewal, however, other scholarly ministers came on board. He published articles in journals, and in 1867 he accepted a call to Utrecht to minister in a church with thousands of members and several ministers. Three years later he moved on to Amsterdam to serve in an even larger church, the most prestigious congregation in the Netherlands.

Regarded by many as the most eloquent and engaging preacher in the Dutch language, Kuyper spured renewal with his biblical teaching. Soon a majority of the ministers and members in the Amsterdam congregation are in his camp. But those who are of a liberal persuasion mount strong opposition. As part of a state church, their views are protected. Nor are there only two sides; the state church includes several factions. Later in 1886 Kuyper and his followers split to form what in 1892 became the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (Reformed Churches in the Netherlands).

Kuyper’s interests extend far beyond biblical and theological studies and pastoral ministry. His worldview is summed up in his most oft-quoted aphorism: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’“ God’s grace, he argues, is not active in matters of salvation only but in every area of life. This “common grace,” associated with what is called Neo-Calvinism, is evident in all that is good, whether initiated by the followers of Christ or by others. This perspective was forcefully articulated and widely disseminated in 1898, when Kuyper visited North America to deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. Opposition, however, was strong. Critics argued vehemently against common grace, insisting that God’s special grace reigned—that Jesus died to save sinners, not sinners and the environment or sinners and political parties.

Kuyper, a renaissance man of his times, had left the pastoral ministry in 1874 to become a member of parliament. In the years that followed, he became a labor activist, a newspaper publisher, an educator (founder of the Free University, where he taught theology and literature), and then from 1901–1905, prime minister of the Netherlands. At the same time, he is a husband and the father of eight children. But the hectic schedule takes an emotional toll. On two occasions he succumbs to severe depression, his recovery aided by retreats to the Swiss Alps. He nevertheless continues to be politically active in his later years.

Kuyper died in 1920, before the rise of Hitler’s Nationalism Socialism. During that era, the Kuyperian perspective on common grace—”grace that curbs the destructive power of sin”—was sorely tested by the horrors of Nazism—and not just on a grand scale. Indeed, his son, H. H. Kuyper, was a Nazi collaborator and his grandson Willem fought with the Waffen SS and died fighting on the eastern front. A granddaughter, however, risked her life to save Jews. Johtje Vos later recalled that she and her husband “did what any human being would have done.” Their efforts were unplanned. “You started off storing a suitcase for a friend, and before you knew it, you were in over your head.” By the end of the war they had hidden twenty-seven Jewish children. Nothing extraordinary. “When you see a person in need, you help them.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor and Protester Against Nazism

In the late summer of 1943, nineteen-year-old Maria von Wedemeyer received a letter from cell 92 of the military prison at Berlin-Tegel. Beginning “My dearest Maria,” it continues with the mundane routine of confinement: “I’ve just had some hot gruel for supper.” But it quickly becomes personal: “I’m sitting at the desk with my sleeves rolled up and my collar open, thinking longingly of you. I’d like to drive through the woods with you to the lakeside, go swimming and lie in some shady spot with you, listening to you for ages without saying a word.” The letter ends on an optimistic note: “Goodbye for now, dear, good Maria. Wait a little while longer, and all will be well. I’m waiting with you. Ever Your Dietrich.” She is his fiancée.

Having been arrested for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) is sometimes presented as a saint who stoically endures prison and deprivation as a privilege of radical discipleship. But Bonhoeffer loves life, and when he writes about the cost of discipleship, he knows from experience what that cost entails. Born into a nominally Lutheran family, he is the son of a university professor. He enrolls at Tübingen University at seventeen and then goes on to Berlin University the following year to study theology. A brilliant scholar, he is invited to return to the university as a lecturer in systematic theology at age twenty-four.

But before he takes the position, he spends a year in America for further study. At Union Theological Seminary he is exasperated by the atmosphere: “Union students … intoxicate themselves with liberal and humanistic expressions, laugh at the fundamentalists, and basically they are not even a match for them…. I never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ … of the cross, of sin and forgiveness, of death and life [while] in New York … only an ethical and social idealism which pins its faith to progress.”

Even churches fit that description, with the exception of a black church in Harlem that profoundly influenced his future ministry. He had become a friend of Frank Fisher, an African American student. Together they attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church, taking turns teaching a boy’s Sunday school class and working with the neighborhood boys’ club. In this black church he finds a sense of community where joy and suffering mingle. Here he finds people who sing their suffering, and he takes their spirituals back to Germany.

Returning to Berlin, he assumes his prestigious assignment as a theology professor in the ivory tower of academia, but not as a stuffy intellectual. In a series of lectures on Christology—delivered the very year Hitler comes to power—he asks penetrating questions: “Who is Jesus in the world of 1933? Where is he to be found?” Jesus, he is convinced, would be identifying with “the persecuted Jew and the imprisoned dissenter in the church struggle.” It might have been tempting for him to lie low and take the safe course during the turmoil of the 1930s, following other church leaders in their support of Hitler or at least not voicing opposition. Indeed, many of his fellow students and colleagues do just that. They remain silent when German Lutheran bishops declare: “We German Protestant Christians accept the saving of our nation by our leader Adolf Hitler as a gift from God’s hand.”

But Bonhoeffer is convinced that one cannot be a follower of Christ and a follower of Hitler at the same time. He abhors the ways of Hitler and the complicity of German Christians. Hermann Grüner, a Lutheran minister, speaks for many German people: “The time is fulfilled for the German people in Hitler. It is because of Hitler that Christ, God the helper and redeemer, has become effective among us. Therefore National Socialism is positive Christianity in action…. Hitler is the way of the Spirit and the will of God for the German people to enter the Church of Christ.”

Bonhoeffer’s own Lutheran Church finds its place in Nazism with little apparent twinge of conscience. In fact, the clergy conference in September of 1933 is dubbed the “Brown Synod” because many of the ministers wear the brown Nazi uniform and give the Heil Hitler salute. Bonheoffer is distraught, particularly after anti-Jewish legislation becomes publicly associated with Nazism. He demands that the church stand against such laws and implores those who call themselves Christians to “jam the spokes of the wheel” of the state unless the laws are repealed. As time passes he is more and more uncomfortable in his teaching position at the University of Berlin. Much of the university administration, faculty, and student body have joined the tidal wave of popular support for Hitler. In late 1933 he leaves his prestigious post and takes a pastorate in London, where he continues to speak against Hitler and to rally the ecumenical community outside Germany against Nazism.

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIAN

Our church, which has been fighting in these years for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action…. It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when men will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming—as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

THE TEN BOOMS AND THE DUTCH UNDERGROUND

Recognized by Israel and by individual Jewish groups, the Ten Boom family has been repeatedly honored for saving some eight hundred Jews during the Holocaust. Devout Dutch Christians, the family sheltered those who sought refuge. When Nazi SS troops searched the home and arrested family members in 1944, four Jewish refugees and two members of the Dutch Underground escaped by hiding behind a fake bedroom wall. When the family patriarch, Casper ten Boom, was told by his captors that hiding Jews was a capital offence, he responded: “It would be an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people.” He died in prison shortly after he was captured. His daughters, Elizabeth and Corrie, were incarcerated at Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Elizabeth died and Corrie, due to a clerical error, was released in December 1944. She went on to write her bestseller The Hiding Place and to travel in a speaking ministry.

Then, in 1935, he accepts an invitation to head an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church near the Baltic Sea. This is a daring move, but the school is closed by the Gestapo less than two years later. The Confessing Church initially stands against policies of the Third Reich, but it too loses nerve. Bonhoeffer, however, is determined to stand firm against evil—to follow Jesus as a disciple, a worldview of “costly grace” that his testimony laid bare in The Cost of Discipleship (1937):

Such grace is costly … because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us…. God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

In an effort to avoid military service and arrest by the Gestapo, he sails for America in 1939. By this time his opposition to Hitler and Nazism has taken a new turn. He has not only spoken against the regime but is secretly conspiring to overthrow it, having been part of a close inner circle that includes his brother-in-law, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and others. Shortly after his arrival, however, he realizes he is in the wrong place. “I have made a mistake in coming to America,” he writes to Reinhold Niebuhr. “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”

Back in Germany he is prohibited from teaching, but he continues writing until his arrest on April 5, 1943. Prison is a terrible setback, but here he writes some of his most enduring works, including his prison letters. One of these letters, smuggled from prison, further clarifies his theme on discipleship:

If we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow him. But if we lose our lives in his service and carry our cross, we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ. The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ and his cross and all the offense which the cross brings in its train.

Discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ, and it is therefore not at all surprising that Christians should be called upon to suffer.

He is later transferred to Buchenwald and from there to the death camp at Flossenbürg. On April 9, 1945—just days before Flossenbürg is liberated by the allies—he is hanged.

Albert Schweitzer: Missionary Medical Doctor and Theologian

Whether he was the greatest missionary of the twentieth century or a liberal theologian who wreaked havoc on the Gospels, Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was one of the most fascinating figures of the last hundred years. His sacrificial mission outreach and his challenge to Christian orthodoxy were both driven by his obsession with Jesus, spurred in part by his passion for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his keen interest in the writings of Emmanuel Kant. The son and grandson of ministers, Schweitzer grew up in Gunsbach in Alsace, on the border of France and Germany. His nationality was both French and German, and the church building where his father served was shared by both Protestants and Catholics, who held separate services. Indeed, he grew up with a spirit of toleration that remained with him for the rest of his life. Philosophical and religious ideas permeated his world, but his passion was music. Both sides of the family were known not only in the academic world but also in the world of Bach and organ playing.

By his mid-twenties, Schweitzer was an ordained Lutheran minister, recognized for his scholarly work on Bach as well as on Kant and Jesus. He was also a highly acclaimed organist. But his obsession is his calling to follow Jesus. Having made a vow that at age thirty he would pursue a humanitarian ministry, he shocked family and friends when he submitted his name to a Paris mission society in 1905. Although there are serious questions about his doctrinal views, he is accepted to serve as a medical doctor on the Ogooue River at Lambaréné (in present-day Gabon). Only then does he begin his medical studies.

In 1906, his landmark controversial book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, appears. Here, as in prior works of biblical scholarship, he emphasizes the eschatological nature of Jesus’ mission—arguing that Jesus went to his death fully expecting to bring to fruition the kingdom of God and not merely a spiritualized kingdom. Jesus, Schweitzer argues, failed to accomplish his mission but gave his very life to serve others, that alone making him worthy of devotion and discipleship.

While in medical training, Schweitzer continues his theological studies and organ concerts. In fact, the concerts are part of his fund-raising activities—his quest to equip a hospital in Africa. In 1912, having published more studies on Bach and Jesus as well as on the apostle Paul, he marries his longtime friend and confidant, Helene Bresslau, daughter of a Jewish historian. The following spring they sail for Port Gentil on the coast of French Equatorial Africa and then make a two-week journey upriver by raft. They set up their medical center in a shed and begin work. Word quickly spreads, and thousands of sickly and injured Africans make their way to Lambaréné as workers begin construction of a hospital.

If the Schweitzers had imagined they would be able to settle into a routine medical ministry, they were rudely shaken by the onset of World War I. Lambaréné is not spared. The Schweitzers and the staff are placed under house arrest, initially not even permitted to continue treating patients. In this French colony, German missionaries are apparently considered a risk, even though Schweitzer considers himself more French than German. Realizing that closing the medical work is not accomplishing their purpose, however, the troops soon relent. But in 1917 the Schweitzers are taken to France and incarcerated with other prisoners, despite outrage from Schweitzer’s French relatives and friends.

When they are finally freed near the end of the war, both are in ill health and Helene is pregnant with their first and only child. For the next several years they remain in Europe seeking to regain their health. Added to the physical problems are the postwar economic realities of the devastated Alsace and surrounding regions. Coping with anxiety and depression, Schweitzer repairs organs to make ends meet, imagining that his years as a scholar, musician, and missionary are over. But an invitation to present lectures in Sweden revives his optimism. Following his lecture series, he is invited to present fund-raising organ concerts in some of the most prestigious churches in Europe.

In 1924, after some seven years of absence, he returns to his mission hospital, finding it in serious disrepair. Because of health issues Helene remains in Europe with their young daughter, but others—including doctors and nurses—volunteer to serve with him. In the years that follow, he periodically returns to Europe for family and fund raising, but his home is Lambaréné. During the late 1930s, with Hitler’s rise to power, Helene, with daughter Rhena, moved to New York and from there made fund-raising tours that helped keep the work financially sound. During World War II, and again prior to her death in 1957, she joined her husband in Africa.

Schweitzer’s greatest work, in his own estimation, was not his philosophical writings but his missionary work. “We must all die, but when I can save a life from days of torture—that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege,” he writes. “The greatest reward I know is when a patient takes my hand after awakening from an operation and says: ‘I feel no pain.’“ His work in Africa is largely an act of atonement. Outraged with the conduct of European colonial regimes, he writes:

Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the Africans] have suffered at the hands of Europeans? … If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the coloured races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible.

Schweitzer traces such ethical deficiencies and accompanying ideas of racial superiority to Enlightenment philosophers as well as to the more recent popularity of Fredrick Nietzsche, who regards pity as weakness and celebrates the superman. Nietzsche and the missionary doctor are diametric opposites in both preaching and practice. As a man of his times, however, Schweitzer himself is criticized by some for treating Africans as less than equals. His own sacrifice trumps such censure, however, and in 1952 he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

For Schweitzer life is serious, but his light-hearted self-deprecation is evident in personal encounters as well as in his writing. An example is found in his children’s book, The Story of My Pelican. The little pelican gives an account of being brought to the hospital with its two brothers and gives more than a nod to the kindly doctor. But there is also a reference to the doctor’s impatience when he was first preparing a cage in which to house the new guests: “He busied himself all afternoon under the house, crawling about and making no attempt to hide the bad temper these extraordinary activities put him in. I never had any experience of man and I found it very strange that such a good man could grumble such a lot.”

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and set us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

Albert Schweitzer

Despite his own claims to be merely a man, the story of his saintliness persisted. Even his detractors—both colleagues and theological critics—could not quell the myth of the missionary. In some ways he was the epitome of Nietzsche’s superman: “Dr. Schweitzer still performs as many as eight hundred operations a year,” wrote an observer. “Halfway through his eighties, he has been known to go seventy-two hours without sleep when one of his patients has been in danger. He has kept up his writing—twenty-four major works of philosophy, religion, ethics, and a survey of world problems are to his credit. An organ given him by those who loved him also claims his attention.” Upon his death at the mission hospital in 1965, Schweitzer was buried alongside the remains of his wife, Helene.

Karl Barth: Leading Theologian of the Twentieth Century

In 1911, when Schweitzer, in his thirties, was making his final preparations to serve as a missionary doctor in Africa, another minister, also engaged to be married, was settling into his first parish in the Swiss industrial town of Safenwil. The parsonage in the small village was in disrepair, hardly a showpiece for his fiancée, Nelly Hoffmann, yet Karl Barth (1886–1968) was convinced that this was where God wanted him.

Here in this economically depressed and seemingly God-forsaken place, Barth got his start in pastoral ministry, though he was surely not unfamiliar with the task. Born in Basel, Switzerland, he was, like Schweitzer, the son and grandson of ministers. Family connections, however, had not paved the way for a prestigious parish. “I am not speaking to you of God because I am a pastor,” he tells his listeners in his inaugural sermon. “I am a pastor because I must speak to you of God.” But despite his sense of mission, the people are stone-faced—if they attend church at all. “I always seemed to be beating my head against a brick wall,” he later confessed, concluding that “going to church is contrary to the nature of the people.”

Part of his difficulty lies in the fact that the congregation is deeply divided: the affluent factory owners and managers expect religion to sustain their lifestyle and ideals of progress, while the poor seek consolation and assistance. “I was sorry for everything that my congregation had to put up with,” he later wrote. “I am tormented by the memory of how greatly … in the end I failed as a pastor of Safenwil.” But amid his failure he is convinced that he has grown in his understanding of pastoral ministry: “It was there that I first began at least to become aware of the full scope of the task of a Reformed preacher, teacher and pastor.” Despite pressure from the most prosperous in his congregation, Barth stands alongside the poor. Realizing how impoverished most of the people are due to long hours, ill health, and low wages, he organizes a Workers’ Association: “I regard socialist demands as an important part of the application of the gospel.”

Karl Barth

It is during his early ministry that he begins to recognize the weakness of the liberal theology that has long been in vogue in European universities. Of what relevance are such teachings to his parishioners or to the wider militaristic European culture that is deeply embroiled in an arms race? He digs into Scripture for answers, focusing heavily on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Here he is confronted with the sovereignty of God—not a domesticated god of the liberals, but an awesome “divine incognito” beyond the comprehension of human beings. The only hope of knowing God is through Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection.

Barth’s commentary on Romans appears in 1919, and the following year he begins teaching at the University of Göttingen in the field of Reformed theology. Considering his later celebrity as a theologian, his confession to a friend about his “dreadful theological ignorance” combined with a “quite miserable memory” is surprising. But with the help of student assistants and colleagues, he presses on in his challenge to liberal theology.

Although the first edition of his commentary on Romans gets off to a slow start, the timing is right. Liberal theology is bankrupt. Students, ministers, and laity alike are seeking something more substantial for their spiritual diet. He insists on the absolute primacy of Christ—that Christ is the very Word of God and therefore is the foundation of theology. The Bible is foundational for all of his studies, particularly in pointing to Christ, but it is only secondarily the word of God. No book—not even the Bible—can challenge the primacy of Christ. The publication of his first volume of Church Dogmatics in 1932 further solidifies his place as a leading biblical scholar and theologian, though never without heated exchanges with both liberals and conservative.

PASTORAL REFLECTIONS ON “UNION WITH CHRIST”

That Christ links Himself with the Christian settles the fact that the latter, too, does not go alone. To do justice to Christ as his Counterpart he is not directed to believe in Him and to obey and confess Him on his own initiative or resources. He is certainly summoned to believe, obey and confess. And both as a whole and in detail this will always be the venture of a free decision and leap. It will always be a venture in which no man can wait for or rely on others, as though they could represent him or make the leap for him. Even in the community and therefore with other Christians, he can believe, obey and confess only in his own person and on his own responsibility. But does this mean on his own initiative and resources? No, for the act of the Christian is not to be described as a leap into the dark or a kind of adventure…. The Christian undertakes these things as through the Spirit he is called to do so by the risen One in whom he believes and whom he obeys and confesses.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Part 3.2.

EXACTLY WHEN WAS BARTH SAVED?

In 1962 when Barth was visiting the United States on a lecture tour, he was challenged by a questioner about his salvation and whether he could point to the moment he was saved. Nonplussed, he responded: “It happened one afternoon in A.D. 34 when Jesus died on the cross.”

Challenging any form of religion aligned with national interest, Barth insists that Christians must look to the cross of Christ in seeking to live out their lives in a perilous world. And indeed, world affairs are very perilous as Hitler is coming to power. From his first teaching position in Göttingen, he has moved on to the universities in Münster and Bonn; but in 1935, after refusing to take an oath to Hitler, he returns to Switzerland to teach in Basel. He had been part of the founding of the Confessing Church, but it failed to rally the majority of German Christians against the Führer.

Barth’s theological teaching and writing are more contextualized and practical than systematic. Indeed, Church Dogmatics grows out of his lectures and the questions students raise. He challenges not only theological liberalism but also the Reformed teaching of Calvin. He argues that any theoretical dogma that seeks to balance election with reprobation would trump the very sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Yet his own “dialectical theology” balances grace with judgment as well as other biblical paradoxes.

Throughout his career, Barth accuses liberal colleagues of allowing philosophical constructs to usurp the message of Christ. But he is likewise critical of those who argue for the inerrancy of Scripture, thus putting the written word above Christ. The supreme role of Scripture in his mind is that of revealing Christ. Neither philosophical nor theological constructs, nor the text of Scripture itself, he insists, must ever be presumed to be one and the same with God’s revealed wisdom.

After the first volume of Church Dogmatics appeared, many more volumes followed—a work in progress still being revised at the time of his death in 1968. How could one man accomplish so much? Barth acknowledged colleagues’ input in his writings, and one name rose above all others as a behind-the-scenes collaborator in his academic life. Beginning in the 1920s, before the first volume of Church Dogmatics was published, he began working closely with Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who served as far more than a secretary and editor. In fact, so dependent is he on her that in 1929 she moves into his home so that she can be awakened during the night when he needs her assistance. She reads widely in theological fields (learning additional languages in order to keep up), attends lectures, and keeps copious notes. Whether their relationship went beyond theological pursuits has been debated over the decades. But it is true that they traveled together, sometimes sharing the same room, and her presence in the Barth household created tension in the marriage and with the children.

CASTING AGENCY’S PROFESSOR

Barth looked like a casting agency’s idea of a German professor, with his shock of wavy gray hair, high forehead and cheekbones, craggy eyebrows. His owlish eyes peered occasionally over his horn-rimmed glasses, which often sat at the tip of his nose. He was known for his geniality, modesty, patience and sympathy, and above all a pixyish sense of humor.

Thomas Oden, The Promise of Barth

Charlotte von Kirschbaum

In 1962 Barth was featured on the cover of Time magazine, and in the years after his death he was regarded as the greatest theologian of the twentieth century—perhaps even since Aquinas, as Pope Pius XII suggested. He was heralded as the father of neo-orthodoxy, a term he himself rejected.

In many ways Barth’s work represents a finale to the German—or European—supremacy in theological studies (though Rudolf Bultmann and others would carry on with this most German pursuit). But by the 1970s theologians outside Europe were coming to the fore, including ones hailing from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

As I look back upon my course, I seem to myself as one who, ascending the dark staircase of a church tower and trying to steady himself, reached for the banister, but got hold of the bell rope instead. To his horror he had then to listen to what the great bell had sounded over him and not over him alone.

Karl Barth

DOROTHY DAY

A writer, social activist, and spiritual sage, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was the most well-known American Catholic social activist in the twentieth century. She was born in Brooklyn, but her family soon moved to San Francisco, where her father was on the road to success as a journalist. The earthquake of 1907, however, overturned their lives. Having lost both home and income, the family moved to Chicago, where they lived in a rundown tenement building. Her mother was so ill that she could barely function at times. After her father found work as a sport’s editor, the family fortunes improved considerably, but Day would never forget the shame and struggle of poverty. Setting up shop in New York City, she went on to become a lightening rod on social issues. As co-founder of The Catholic Worker, a newspaper published by the Catholic Worker Movement, she was accused by Catholics and capitalists alike of being a communist sympathizer. Her writing combined with her various humanitarian outreach endeavors profoundly influenced succeeding generations of Catholics.

Oscar A. Romero: Latin American Martyr for the Poor

Three years after he was named archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, Oscar A. Romero (1917–1980) was gunned down while he was officiating at Mass. His name is often linked with liberation theology, and rightly so, but his path to that way of thinking was based on circumstances as much as on theological scrutiny. One of seven children, he was born into a poor family in a village near the border of Honduras. He attended a local school and then became a carpenter’s apprentice. But he was determined to enter the priesthood. At thirteen he began the twenty-year process, completing his studies in Rome, where he was ordained in 1942. His plan to pursue doctoral studies was thwarted, however, when he was called to El Salvador to serve in the Diocese of San Miguel.

Oscar A. Romero

Except for his flair for radio ministry, Romero did not stand out among his fellow priests. “Strong-willed and seemingly born to lead,” a colleague wrote, “yet he submitted unquestioningly to a structure that encourages conformity.” A loyal church bureaucrat, he was a staunch supporter of the Catholic hierarchy and a social and theological conservative. Yet he demonstrated deep concern for the poor. While serving as bishop of Santiago de Maria, he traveled on horseback to outlying villages. Here he encounters dire poverty and often digs into his own pocket to provide medicine and food.

He recognizes, however, that such acts of charity will never solve the underlying societal problems. “The world of the poor teaches us that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of handouts from the government or from churches,” he writes, “but when they themselves are the masters and protagonists of their own struggle for liberation.” His thinking is slowly evolving as he listens to his priests and as he acknowledges the growing chasm between the wealthy and the impoverished. In a 1976 pastoral letter, he writes of the destitution of workers, particularly those on the vast coffee plantations:

POPE JOHN XXIII

One of thirteen children born into a poor Italian peasant family, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (1881–1963) was seventy-seven and relatively obscure when he was crowned Pope John XXIII. When “the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church chose me,” he wrote, “everyone was convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional pope. Yet here I am, already on the eve of the fourth year of my pontificate, with an immense program of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is watching and waiting.” The event that caused the eyes of the world to watch and wait was Vatican II. With his unmistakable imprint, the Council purposed to seek how best to engage the modern world as well as other religions and Christian bodies outside the Catholic Church. In his opening address, he piqued the interest of Protestants: “The Catholic Church, raising the torch of religious truth by means of this Ecumenical Council desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness toward the brethren who are separated from her.” But the most far-reaching change was the option to say Mass in the vernacular rather than in Latin only. It was, in the words of an American archbishop, “a vote against old ideas.” At eighty-one, two years before the Council is concluded, Pope John dies of stomach cancer.

It saddens and concerns us to see the selfishness with which means and dispositions are found to nullify the just wage of the harvesters. How we would wish that the joy of this rain of rubies and all the harvests of the earth would not be darkened by the tragic sentence of the Bible: “Behold, the day wage of laborers that cut your fields defrauded by you is crying out, and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord” [James 5:4].

Yet Romero is wary of social activism, including that of his superior, Archbishop Luis Chavez. His sympathies are with government law and order—government controlled by what was known as the “fourteen families.” Power and wealth were in the hands of these aristocrats, and those who fought for change were labeled Marxists and imprisoned. His appointment to the office of archbishop of San Salvador is a disappointment to many priests, who had hoped for someone more attuned to the needs of the poor. But government officials are pleased—though not for long. Only weeks after Romero’s consecration, Rutilio Grande, a friend and Jesuit priest is gunned down, along with two other social activists.

The porch (west entrance) to Westminster Abbey with statues of 20th-century martyrs. From left to right: Maximilian Kolbe of Poland, Manche Masemola of South Africa, Janani Luwum of Uganda, Elizabeth Fyodorovna of Russia, Martin Luther King Jr, of the United States, and Oscar A. Romero of San Salvador

Rutilio had been involved in establishing Christian base communities (CEBs), considered by officials to be camps for radicalizing the poor. He had refused to be intimidated and fearlessly preached a provocative sermon after government officials had expelled a Colombian priest: “Very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border,” he warned. “All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive…. So that if Jesus crosses the border … they will not allow him to enter.” In the eyes of officials he was a troublemaker. In the eyes of Romero, a friend.

With Rutilio’s death, Romero’s worldview comes full circle. It is a defining moment. “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead, I thought ‘if they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.’“ Now in his radio programs he is unwavering in demanding justice for the poor. He calls on Catholics to come to the cathedral for a national Mass where justice for the poor becomes a rallying cry, much to the chagrin of government officials and most of the country’s bishops, who remain loyal to the ruling party.

In 1979, when the Revolutionary Government Junta takes control, violence escalates. Times are desperate. Visiting Rome, Romero pleads with Pope John Paul II to intervene—anything to stop the bloodshed. He likewise sends a message to President Jimmy Carter imploring him to suspend American military assistance to the new government, but without success. He fears the worst and desperately appeals to military leaders: “We are your people. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters…. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you, stop the repression.” The day after this message is sent, he is assassinated. He is not marching in the streets but is simply saying Mass at the Carmelite Sisters’ medical complex where he resides. The bullet strikes his heart, and he is dead at the altar.

The prophetic words of his homily minutes earlier saw no immediate fulfillment: “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies…. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies.” As tens of thousands crowded around the cathedral to mourn, gunfire broke out. What followed was all-out civil war that lasted a dozen years and cost tens of thousands of lives, with countless thousands fleeing the country.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY

From the beginning, the theology of liberation posited that the first act is involvement in the liberation process, and that theology comes afterward, as a second act. The theological moment is one of critical reflection from within, and upon, concrete historical praxis, in confrontation with the world of the Lord as lived and accepted in faith.

Gustavo Gutierrez,

The Power of the Poor in History

Though not canonized as a saint, Romero is the patron saint of the poor in El Salvador—and in all of Latin America. His words ring in their ears: “The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being … a defender of the rights of the poor.”

The systemic evil manifested in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes severed the sheep from the goats as no other circumstance in history had done. Some too easily hid behind the pretext of patriotism and the depraved decrees of dictators. Not so Dietrick Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, the ten Booms, and countless others. For them, Jesus’ words, “Come, follow me,” meant literally taking up the cross.

What if …

What if Pietje Balthus had been too intimidated to challenge her highly educated minister on spiritual matters? Would Abraham Kuyper have gone on to become known as a liberal theologian? How would contemporary Christianity be different without his profound influence?

What if young, unmarried Maria Anna Schickelgruber had gotten an abortion in 1836 and never given birth to Alois, the father of Adolf Hitler? How would world history and church history be different today had Hitler not been born?

What if Albert Schweitzer had taken an easier route to fame as an organist and theologian and not given his life to serve in Africa? Would he be remembered today? Would he be encased in stained glass alongside Luther and Calvin?

What if Angelo Roncalli had not been elected pope? How would the Roman Catholic Church look today without his influence and without Vatican II?

23. Theological Ferment: Twentieth-Century Protestants and Catholics

23. Theological Ferment: Twentieth-Century Protestants and Catholics

CHAPTER 23

Theological Ferment

Twentieth-Century Protestants and Catholics

PARADE OF HISTORY

RELIGION IN DENMARK, CIRCA 1855

EVERYDAY LIFE

KARL BARTH AND THE WOMEN’S ISSUE

Abraham Kuyper: Dutch Reformed Pastor and Prime Minister

RICHARD MOUW DISCOVERS KUYPER

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor and Protester Against Nazism

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIAN

THE TEN BOOMS AND THE DUTCH UNDERGROUND

Albert Schweitzer: Missionary Medical Doctor and Theologian

Karl Barth: Leading Theologian of the Twentieth Century

PASTORAL REFLECTIONS ON “UNION WITH CHRIST”

EXACTLY WHEN WAS BARTH SAVED?

CASTING AGENCY’S PROFESSOR

DOROTHY DAY

Oscar A. Romero: Latin American Martyr for the Poor

POPE JOHN XXIII

LIBERATION THEOLOGY

What if …

Further Reading