Introduction
There are significant similarities between Lutheran theologians Paul Althaus (1888–1966) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945). Both show an early interest in ecclesiology, publishing works on the ‘communion of saints’ within a year of one another.Footnote 1 Unsurprisingly, Althaus’ work commands greater attention at first, even though Bonhoeffer sought to differentiate his work with respect to the more established theologian.Footnote 2 By the time these books were published at the end of the 1920s, both theologians had worked as pastors to German expatriate communities – Althaus in Poland and Bonhoeffer in Spain. Those experiences, conditioned by the First World War and its aftermath, led to the expression of similar views on the conflictual ‘laws’ operative between nations. Using this framework, both Althaus and Bonhoeffer understand ethno-national communities to be in competition – often violent competition – with one another, both in the pursuit of their respective national interests and in the actualisation of their respective historical destinies. These conflictual laws, which are seen to bind ethical commitments, are disturbingly congruent with militant, expansionist claims for the German Volk.
In this essay we argue that early similarities in the political theologies of Althaus and Bonhoeffer are worth considering in their own right. This is important in order to trouble a binary classification of theologians working in the emergence of the Third Reich as either ‘complicit with’ or ‘resistant to’ the ideology of National Socialism.Footnote 3 One outcome of such judgement is that Althaus’ largely untranslated works are rarely cited at length while he serves as a foil for Bonhoeffer's positions. Althaus’ legacy is far more troubling, however; as Jack Forstman observes, Althaus’ theological work ‘must be frightfully unsettling for moderate and conservative Christians of every time and place’.Footnote 4 Meanwhile, Bonhoeffer's works have been subject to selective and uncritical readings, as Stephen Haynes argues, amounting to a kind of ‘scholarly spin control’.Footnote 5 To counter these tendencies, in the first part we consider Althaus and Bonhoeffer's similar nationalist statements in the 1920s, in which the strong triumph under the Lord of History, even at the cost of other peoples. This shared point of contact blurs the line between ‘complicity’ and ‘resistance’. That is to say, though Bonhoeffer would eventually reject strident völkisch nationalism, both theologians initially traffic in a competitive philosophy of history that would come to form a fundamental element of National Socialist ideology.
The acknowledgement of such commonality between Althaus and Bonhoeffer casts the divergence of their later ecclesiological judgements in sharper relief. In the second part of this essay, we examine their different responses to the 1933 Aryan Paragraph, a law that excluded persons of Jewish descent from German civil service. Given their shared assumptions about the inevitability and utility of conflict, their respective attitudes towards the legislation take a surprising shape. While Althaus recognises the productivity of competition between nations with a clear preference for the strong, he opts for concession to the Aryan Paragraph within the church in order to protect the fragile national identity of the Volk. In contrast, Bonhoeffer maintains the position that the ‘strong’ should prevail in the church against the application of the Aryan Paragraph, contradicting appeals to the scriptural argument for concession to the ‘weak’ in faith. In this ironic turn, Bonhoeffer, who would eventually be inspired by pacifism, prescribes conflict within the church, whereas Althaus, who never relinquished his romanticised theology of struggle, is the one who chooses concession.
While Bonhoeffer's subversion of the language of the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ in the church holds promise for a post-Shoah ecclesiology, he still shares a troubling ambivalence with Althaus, within a long-standing Christian tradition, over the so-called Judenfrage (Jewish Question). Following the emancipation and assimilation of German Jews over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was widespread debate on what place Jewish persons and communities, which many regarded as dangerous, should take in German society. Althaus and Bonhoeffer each weigh in on this debate, and as a result each problematises Jewish existence by posing it as a question to be solved. Their respective views on the implementation of the Aryan Paragraph in the German churches are instructive not only for our understanding of Christian anti-Semitism, but also for our understanding of the nature and aims of the church community.
As a critical response to the complex question posed by Althaus and Bonhoeffer, this essay offers two contributions to the contemporary theological task. First, it provides a historical precedent for how national and ecclesial bodies understand themselves vis-à-vis ‘foreigners’. This is a timely recollection as nations of the European Union relearn the political pressures surrounding the displacement of persons – a ‘crisis’ long endured by national and ecclesial bodies in Africa and the Middle East. However, Althaus and Bonhoeffer's deliberations also go further, revealing the subtle ways in which prejudicial barriers can remain alongside a principle of inclusion. This relates to contemporary discussion insofar as refugees might be given a place within national borders but not seriously considered as bearers of ecclesio-political authority within a host nation.
Second, our study presents different courses of theological and exegetical deliberation for conflicts that arise between the consciences of church members. This can apply to Christians’ differing political convictions about persons deemed foreign to the nation, and so the place of church advocacy and sponsorship of asylum claims. More searchingly, Bonhoeffer's challenge to biblical injunctions of deference to the weak might call into question the practice of ‘conscience clauses’ through which church members exempt themselves from a minister's authority for reason of the ‘offence’ he or she embodies. Our historical investigation offers no direct application to such questions, which are beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, such contemporary dynamics are noted to indicate that Althaus and Bonhoeffer's opinions are not alone in being subject to judgement about degrees of ‘complicity’ in the theological task.
Law of the nations: expatriate theologies of the 1920s
Though Althaus and Bonhoeffer share similar theologies of conflict during the 1920s, it is worth noting that Althaus, nearly twenty years Bonhoeffer's senior, had already established a reputation as one of the leading theologians in Germany by the time Bonhoeffer began his own career. Their brief correspondence in 1931 is indicative of each theologian's scholarly position: Bonhoeffer writes to Althaus in January for publication advice, and again in September to thank him for recommending Akt und Sein to a publisher. The two are not of equal standing and their comments should be weighted accordingly.
Progress through the Konfliktgesetz: Althaus’ theology of struggle
The rudiments of Althaus’ theology of the Volk lay within the classical Lutheran doctrine of the orders of creation (Schöpfungsordnungenslehre).Footnote 6 But during the First World War Althaus begins to develop a particularly aggressive permutation of the doctrine that would eventually impact drastically his theology of the Judenfrage. Althaus interpreters are faced with the task of accounting for the origins of this völkisch turn. Recent studies have isolated Althaus’ tenure as a military chaplain in Łódź, Poland, from 1915 to 1918 as the decisive period in which his doctrine of creation began to take its nationalist shape.Footnote 7
Reflecting in 1942, Althaus himself points to his pastoral work among German expatriates in Poland as the critical breakthrough – it was there that he ‘discovered Germanness’.Footnote 8 His experiences among expatriate Germans catalysed his Schöpfungsordnungenslehre to create a parochial theology of the Volk. One byproduct of this development is Althaus’ concept of the Konfliktgesetz (law of conflict), a competitive philosophy of history rooted at once in the militarism of his personal experience and a strong theology of providence. Unlike the Volk, however, the Konfliktgesetz is not itself an ordinance of creation. The terrible violence that characterises national relations in the world's fallen state is indeed a curse, but it is at the same time the means by which God continues the work of creation. For Althaus creation and evil are indissoluble.Footnote 9
Althaus first uses the Konfliktgesetz to reason about Germanness – about the nature and limits of ethnic belonging – during the Weimar Republic (1918–33). In these writings, Althaus develops a theological system in which conflict between ethnic groups and nations is productive, moving history forward according to the design of the Lord of History. This framework forms the grid through which Althaus interprets the question of ethnic loyalty: who is German? His 1927 address Kirche und Volkstum reveals his fear that Germanness is dying – both through loss of national identity in expatriate communities and through the alienation of the Volk on its own soil. In the face of this threat, Germany now stands in its ‘hour of destiny’, a moment of ‘new consciousness of our national type and responsibility, passionate desire for the rebirth of our Volk out of the procreative power of our own Volkstum’.Footnote 10
This Volkstum – that is, the shared ‘spiritual vitality’ and the ‘primordial givenness’ manifest in German blood, language, and culture – is disintegrating under the pressure of the twin dangers of ‘civilisation’ and ‘foreigners’ (die Fremde):
Our Volk, so we hear, has lost itself. Lost itself to civilisation, lost itself to the foreigner. To civilisation: this means rational organisation instead of a growing organism; the corruption of the masses instead of membership in the people's body; a ‘society’ of unconnected individuals instead of an organic community; rootlessness and homelessness, both inward and outward, instead of inward and outward rootedness in our own soil; disinheritance instead of life in the heritage of our fathers. . .Footnote 11
Althaus complains that ‘the foreigner is a force even in our homeland’, exerting dominance through the ‘foreign infiltration (Überfremdung) of our literature, theaters, our art, our fashion and festivities, the party system and public affairs’.Footnote 12 This xenophobic völkisch vision had been developing since the mid-1920s, when he had warned that an influx of foreign influence had already made Germans ‘foreigners in our own land’.Footnote 13
Althaus’ solution to the threat of ‘foreign infiltration’ is conflict. ‘Like all genuine love’, he writes, ‘patriotism carries within itself wrath and hate against all threats to the life of the fatherland – from within or from without – against the degeneration, enfeeblement and distortion of the state’.Footnote 14 Though Althaus recognises that patriotism, like all historical bonds, will be transcended in the coming Kingdom of God, he nevertheless argues that God has instituted ordinances like ethnic kinship to regulate historical existence in its postlapsarian state. God, through the Konfliktgesetz, decrees that each Volk is to remain segregated from – and opposed to – every other Volk.Footnote 15 Therefore, German expatriates and German nationals are actually charged with the same twofold task: ‘to grasp the particularity and the special mission with which it has been entrusted and to hold its ground in defence against all foreign infiltration (Überfremdung)’.Footnote 16
This will inevitably result in conflict – indeed violent conflict – between peoples as each pursues its unique commission within the same historical space. But this conflict is productive: it drives history onward through the ‘dreadful’ mandates of the ‘law of struggle’ (Kampfgesetz) and the competitive ‘law of displacement’ (Verdrängungsgesetz), by which one Volk may overtake and replace another.Footnote 17 Struggle and providence are bound inextricably in Althaus’ philosophy of history: ‘Wherever blood flows, the depths of history come to light. Thus the way of our humanity is marked with blood! No Volk can ever achieve greatness and freedom without spilling blood!’Footnote 18
The elemental laws of violence – Konfliktgesetz, Kampfgesetz, Verdrängungsgesetz – also remind humanity that each new generation must reckon with the ever-looming threat of the extinction of the Volk.Footnote 19 The living nature of history is such that two peoples may be pitted against one another in the pursuit of their respective interests. In this fallen world, peaceful coexistence is simply not a permanent possibility:
The races are wandering, crowding one another out. The jumbled living situation of the peoples creates difficult ethnic and governmental questions. The peoples are forced together, on their way to constant confrontation with each other. There is, at the moment, enough space for peaceful demarcation from each other. But this space has its limits.Footnote 20
Where two national destinies are at loggerheads, Althaus envisions adjudication not through natural law or an international forum, but only through the primal struggle of competition. Disregard for the lives of other peoples is therefore an inevitable consequence of Althaus’ völkisch political ethics. Indeed, in the face of these ‘ethnic laws of life, the enlightened (aufklärische) appeal to the concepts of tolerance, equal rights, and universal human dignity makes no sense’.Footnote 21
In his anxiety over ‘foreign infiltration’, Althaus targets ‘the Jews’ in particular as the prime symbols of ‘the powers that again and again hinder our Volk in its self-determination and purification’.Footnote 22 Thus, in Althaus’ formulation of the Schöpfungsordnungenslehre, the Jews appear as agents of anti-creation – a threat to the structures of society and dangerous foil against which Germans must struggle not only to survive, but to fulfil their destiny as a Volk.Footnote 23 Yet Althaus thinks that the Judenfrage will always remain unsolvable; theologically and logistically, the expulsion of the Jews would never be an acceptable solution.Footnote 24 Germans would have to live with Jews, though they could take actions to restrict Jewish influence. Soon, however, the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph would test Althaus’ abstract theology of the Judenfrage with legislation that took the first of many drastic measures to exclude Jewish persons from German life.
Bound to the Weltgesetzen: Bonhoeffer's 1929 Barcelona lecture
The völkisch mentality of Bonhoeffer's early expatriate period is most clearly expressed in a set of lectures given at the end of his year in Barcelona.Footnote 25 The series is an attempt to introduce his congregation to the ‘struggle and crisis of contemporary intellectual movements’, particularly in light of the war.Footnote 26 In the third lecture, the 23-year-old pastor emphasises commitment to the Volk, that primal responsibility which binds one's ethical commitments in history. Such recognition is to observe ‘the divine order (göttliche Ordnung) of things, for God created the peoples’.Footnote 27 This statement comes as part of a broadside against an ethic of ‘norms and principles’, as reflected in the manner Christian pacifism codifies the Sermon on the Mount.Footnote 28 Rather, as Bonhoeffer's opening assertion makes clear, ‘ethics is a matter of blood and a matter of history’.Footnote 29 He therefore argues that, when one's blood relations come under threat, ‘the situation seems clear to me’.Footnote 30
The initial clarity of the choice to defend one's people through force becomes clouded by the guilt incurred through violence. The decision between good and evil is not clear-cut; rather, ‘regardless of which decision I make, that decision will soil (beschmutzen) me with the world and its laws (Gesetzen)’.Footnote 31 Bonhoeffer adapts tones of tragic necessity, equivocating between the dreadfulness of the action and the love that motivates it:
I will take up arms with the terrible knowledge of doing something horrible, and yet knowing I can do no other. I will defend my brother, my mother, my people, and yet I know that I can do so only by spilling blood; but love for my Volk will sanctify (heiligen) murder, will sanctify war.Footnote 32
Bonhoeffer's language strains to incorporate both the denunciatory language of ‘murder’ and the alleged ‘sanctity’ of the act. However, what might be defensible as a response to threats against a blood relative takes a disturbing turn as Bonhoeffer speaks of national expansion.
In approaching the question of a war begun by one's own nation, Bonhoeffer notes the broader complexity of relating history, people, and growth to God. Within the unique life cycles of the peoples, the question of ‘growth is bound to expansion’, which entails the displacement of others.Footnote 33 Such claims to expansion must be understood against the background of the Versailles settlement, the harsh reparations of which Bonhoeffer saw as a threatening constriction on the life of his nation.Footnote 34 Bearing such an open historical wound, a nation receives its divine calling: ‘Every Volk, however, has within itself a call from God to create its history, to enter into the struggle that is the life of Völker.’Footnote 35 Bonhoeffer's identification of the call ‘within’ (in sich) every people marks a shift away from the dynamism of direct address by God that has been central to the lecture. Although he opposes setting up a principle such as pacifism in favour of the freedom of the present moment's decision before God, he nevertheless allows a divine call-become-law when it comes to national struggle.
Predictably, interpreters contest Bonhoeffer's ownership of these remarks. One of the influences on Bonhoeffer's lecture is theologian and politician Friedrich Naumann, whom he names explicitly in discussing economic competition.Footnote 36 In light of such sources, Eberhard Bethge claims that Bonhoeffer ‘was not yet speaking his own language here’.Footnote 37 This concession to Bonhoeffer's youth should be compared, however, with the way in which Bethge credits the young theologian with a ‘spirit of independence’ years earlier in his choice of Reinhold Seeberg as a dissertation supervisor.Footnote 38 Such selectivity reveals the way in which many critics want it both ways, praising Bonhoeffer's precociousness while exonerating him from views similar to ‘complicit’ theologians like Althaus on account of his naïveté.
The struggle between peoples is clearly for the strong, as Bonhoeffer proceeds to list characteristics of the history of the people in question. Claiming the eternal youth and strength of the divine life, he states that ‘God calls a people to diversity, to struggle and victory’.Footnote 39 With these words his lecture builds momentum towards a terrible question:
Now, should a people experiencing God's call in its own life, in its own youth, and in its own strength, should not such a people also be allowed to follow that call even if it disregards the lives of other peoples? God is the Lord of history; and if a people bends in humility to this holy will guiding history, then with God in its youth and strength it can overcome the weak and disheartened.Footnote 40
Astonishingly, Bonhoeffer not only leaves the acquisitiveness of national expansion unchallenged, he in fact claims such victory as a manner of surrendering a people's ‘selfish will to the divine will that guides world history [Weltgeschichte]’.Footnote 41
Bonhoeffer's linkage of military and economic competition among peoples and the order of history shows his conceptual proximity to Althaus.Footnote 42 Although Bonhoeffer does not use the term Konfliktgesetz, these comments show clear similarity to his contemporary's depiction of law between the nations. Moreover, neither shies away from harsh language in describing the actions of a nation: Bonhoeffer speaks of ‘murder’ (Mord), while Althaus speaks of ‘rape’ (Vergewaltigung). The difference is mainly to be found in Bonhoeffer's claim to the ‘entire dreadfulness’ of acts compelled by the Weltgesetzen, whereas Althaus is more willing to speak of the ‘glory’ of conflict alongside its tragedy. Bonhoeffer elaborates on his angst that the ethical is found only within the ‘bonds of history’, which provokes a crisis for ethical thought:
[Christians] must remain bound to the earth if they are intent on attaining a relationship with God; they must partake of the entire anxiety before the world's laws [Weltgesetzen] . . . they must experience the crass contradiction between how they want to act and how they must act; they must mature through this crisis . . .Footnote 43
The maturation in question involves acquiescence to the will of God, so Bonhoeffer ends his lecture with the prayers ‘your kingdom come, your will be done’.Footnote 44 Thus the contest of wills among nations is surrendered to the more powerful will, that of the Lord of History, but Bonhoeffer will soon show himself dissatisfied with this hasty resolution.
In the years between the Barcelona lecture and the 1933 Berlin debate over the Aryan Paragraph, Bonhoeffer's ecumenical relationships challenged his thinking about both war and race. At Union Seminary in New York, the French exchange student Jean Lassere was influential in his turn towards a strident pacifism.Footnote 45 Further, his colleague Albert Franklin Fisher introduced Bonhoeffer to the effects of racial division in the churches, which Bonhoeffer would later convey in W. E. B. Du Bois’ term, ‘the color-line’. His ecumenical work had also grown in the intervening years, strengthening Bonhoeffer's sense of the transnational implications of his early Hegel-inspired refrain ‘Christ existing as community’. These influences would come together in Bonhoeffer's bold polemic at the 1934 ecumenical conference in Fanø, Denmark that for a Christian to take up arms against another nation is effectively, when seen in light of international ecumenism, to take up arms against Christ.
Law of the pastorate? Homeland debates over the 1933 Aryan Paragraph
The surprising fragility of German identity: the Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph
Althaus interprets the debate over the church's implementation of the Aryan Paragraph within the framework of the Konfliktgesetz. In isolating Jewish pastors as a drain on the spiritual vitality of the Volk, the Erlangen Opinion maps the conflict between peoples and nations onto the concrete controversy over the fitness of Jewish ministerial candidates for German congregations. Significantly, however, in the final analysis Althaus applies the Konfliktgesetz selectively, ultimately surrendering his theology of struggle due to the fragility of the German identity within the church.
The National Socialist seizure of power triggered the fragmentation of the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (DEK). In particular, the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April 1933 sparked widespread deliberation within the churches. The Prussian General Synod concluded that, absent military service to the Volk, Jewish pastors should be removed from office. The Erlangen Opinion, composed by Althaus and colleague Werner Elert, is the Erlangen theology faculty's response to the Synod's petition for ‘solemn and responsible instruction’ regarding the new legislation.Footnote 46 Produced by two of the leading voices in German Lutheranism, the Opinion was influential in its time, and it has proven infamous since. The document is an important part of the record of Protestantism's complex relationship with National Socialism and its legislation. Its enduring significance, moreover, lies in its unique manifestation of Christian anti-Semitism, which deploys the doctrine of creation to envision an ecclesial community segregated according to a völkisch taxonomy, even while making theoretical space for outsiders. While adding important qualifications, the Opinion generally supports the findings of the Synod by affirming ‘the requirement of Aryan ancestry’ as a legitimate criterion for qualifying a ministerial candidate, no different than ‘age, gender, and physical fitness’.Footnote 47 In so doing, the Opinion accepts uncritically the anti-Semitic vocabulary of the Aryan Paragraph. Like Bonhoeffer, Althaus and Elert engage the Judenfrage on the terms of an already prejudiced form of discourse.
The Erlangen professors address the larger question of ethnic belonging and national loyalty, this time in an ecclesial context: can Jewish pastors – bound by providence to a foreign Volk – be trusted? From the start, the Opinion anticipates the objection that the ethnic difference between Jew and German is overcome in the spiritual communion of the church on the basis of Galatians 3:28. Althaus and Elert equivocate: ‘No person, let alone an entire Volk, is to be excluded from the universal application of the Gospel, [but] the common community that all Christians share as children of God does not abolish biological and societal differences.’Footnote 48
In this way, Althaus’ orders of creation theology divides the ecclesial body along völkisch lines. The Volk, rooted elementally in creation, is the primordial reality to which the church must accommodate itself, rather than vice versa:
The national churches which emerged from the Wittenberg Reformation, according to these fundamental principles, have adapted themselves to the boundaries between different Völker, and have preserved those boundaries not only in the vernacular language used in worship and in the shape of each national particularity, but have also contributed essentially to the cultivation and maintenance of those boundaries.Footnote 49
Because the ‘biological bond to one's particular Volk [is] a destiny that cannot be escaped’, the church must conform itself to natural ethnic differences. German congregations, then, require German pastors who are connected organically to the life of the Volk.Footnote 50 By this logic, the ministry of Jewish pastors over German communities distorts the order of creation – it is fundamentally unnatural, even within the supra-natural community of the church. Should Jewish pastors remain in the DEK, Althaus and Elert anticipate the ‘breakdown of the relationship of trust between the pastor and congregation’.Footnote 51 Within the framework of the Konfliktgesetz, the Jewish and German ‘ethnic types’ are inherently alien and incompatible.Footnote 52
In Althaus’ view Jews are dangerous and incapable of authentic loyalty to the German Volk.Footnote 53 For Althaus Jewish existence is intrinsically pathological, meaning that Jews can be trusted neither politically nor theologically. Theologically, the Jews remain the strange ‘salvation-historical Volk in its election and curse’.Footnote 54 Suspended between election and reprobation, the ‘eternal Jew’ now wanders the earth disrupting the peace of others because he himself can find no peace.Footnote 55 Staggering beneath the weight of the curse, the Jews have become a political and social menace: ‘Today more than ever the German Volk perceives the Jews in their midst as an alien Volkstum. It has recognised the threat to its own life posed by emancipated Jewry and has defended itself against this danger with legal clauses excluding Jews [from civil service].’Footnote 56 In the end, Althaus and Elert do resist a universal application of the Aryan Paragraph in the church, concluding that, though Christians of Jewish descent are to be disqualified from leadership as a rule, their membership in the DEK should not be denied or otherwise restricted. One significant exception is participation in the struggle of war – ‘a willingness to offer their lives for Germany’ – which can make a German out of a Jew.Footnote 57
Beneath this ostensible ambivalence, however, is a deeply xenophobic structural logic. The Erlangen Opinion, and the Althausian theology of Volk in which it is rooted, is characterised by its scepticism that Jewish pastors can commune with ethnic Germans on an organic level. Althaus and Elert interpret the pastoral question through the lens of the Konfliktgesetz insofar as they call the allegiance of Jewish pastors into question. Paradoxically, however, Althaus now surrenders his theology of conflict because Jews represent a unique opponent:
In the present situation, to have men of Jewish stock occupy the church's offices would mean a severe strain on and inhibition of (eine schwerer Belastung und Hemmung) the church's position in the life of the Volk and for the fulfillment of its tasks. Therefore the church must require that its Jewish Christians be restricted from pastoral office.Footnote 58
The Opinion assumes that Jewish and German interests are in competition. But the Jewish pastor in particular is a Belastung who must not even be engaged in struggle: a contagion that will only ‘pollute’ the life of the Volkskirche and undermine the pursuit of the German destiny.Footnote 59 Because of the risk of infection, Althaus and Elert, paradoxically, resolve the conflict not by working through the ‘strain’ posed by a foreign element in their midst, but through a quarantine of Christians of Jewish descent.
In his ambivalent application of the Konfliktgesetz to the pastoral question, Althaus condemns the Jews to a tenuous ecclesial existence that mirrors the destiny of Jewish existence generally: to wander perpetually on the fringes of every society. Yet most significant for our study is the way in which Althaus ultimately surrenders the glorified theology of violence that he finds so productive in the arena of history, on account of the unique danger posed by Jewish persons. Ironically, the identity of the German Volk – hardened through a history struggle and conflict – is too fragile to bear the strain of a Jewish pastor.
The strong bear the church: Bonhoeffer's 1933 essays
Bonhoeffer's essay ‘The Church and the Jewish Question’ offers a swift, critical riposte to legal developments. It should be noted, however, that the very terms with which he poses the Judenfrage are problematic. He writes, for instance, that ‘[w]ithout doubt one of the historical problems that must be dealt with by our state is the Judenfrage, and without doubt the state is entitled to strike new paths in doing so’.Footnote 60 This is a similar legitimation as that offered in the Erlangen Opinion in that neither response challenges the construction of ‘the Jews’ as a social problem.Footnote 61 Bonhoeffer thus joins Althaus in leaving the prejudicial frame of the Judenfrage untouched, showing ‘tacit acceptance of a discursive economy surrounding Jewish difference’, in the words of Stephen Ray.Footnote 62
Bonhoeffer is also deeply ambivalent about the ongoing role of the Jewish Volk, noting that God's preservation is tied to a reprobationary role. He states that ‘[t]he church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the “chosen people,” which hung the Redeemer of the world on the cross, must endure the curse (Fluch) of its action in a long suffering-history (Leidengeschichte)’.Footnote 63 Taken alone, Bonhoeffer's ambivalence about the Jews as a people both cursed and preserved might have led to a similar settlement as Althaus’ quarantine. Bonhoeffer resists such a settlement, however, in a surprising application of scriptural counsel concerning the relation between the strong and weak in faith.
In the debate over whether to ‘restrain’ the involvement of Jewish pastors in the German church, appeals were made to Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8. These texts primarily address the strong in faith, counselling abstention from their freedoms to eat certain foods that would prove an offence to the weak. The ‘strong’ in this construal are those who recognise transnational catholicity as more determinative than a völkisch claim and so would submit to the authority of a Jewish pastor. The ‘weak’, meanwhile, are those Germans with a fragile sense of national identity – not, it should be noted, referring to the vulnerability of the small number of Jewish pastors under threat of removal. Martin Niemöller offers an intuitive application of such logic by counselling deference to those who would take offence at a pastor of Jewish descent by practising ‘restraint’ over setting persons with such lineage in high-ranking positions.Footnote 64
Althaus does not engage these texts directly in his opinion on the Aryan Paragraph. Although we have shown his case for concession to fragile nationalist sentiment, he would not accept the pejorative connotations of this posture as ‘weak’. In contrast, there is little hesitation in drawing this likeness for Niemöller, Bonhoeffer and other members of the emerging Bekennende Kirche, for whom ‘confession’ is the response of the strong, even if it eventually sets them on the margins of ecclesiastical legitimacy. Perhaps more significantly, Althaus’ deep commitment to the Volk as constitutive of the church would not suit the implication that those who imperil nationalist feeling are somehow stronger in faith.
Bonhoeffer's polemical response departs from both the mollifying proposal of Niemöller and the concessions offered by Althaus by maintaining a key role for conflict in gospel relations. Indeed, his appeal to such texts takes up the strong–weak distinction only to override the apostolic counsel to deference. In an important university meeting titled ‘The Struggle for the Church’ held in June 1933, Bonhoeffer is recorded as stating: ‘Those who were weak in faith, who wanted to set up a law like the Aryan clause before the doorway to the church, had to be borne by those who were strong in faith, as stated in Romans 14.’Footnote 65 In contrast to Niemöller, Bonhoeffer allows no curtailment of the believer's freedom in this instance.
There are two reasons for Bonhoeffer's reversal of the biblical counsel to concession. First, he is motivated by the deep sense that the exclusion of Jewish pastors should not to be treated as a ‘matter of indifference’, in contrast to the sphere of the apostle's concern in Romans 14. Bonhoeffer tackles the claim of adiaphoron directly, noting that while Paul might submit to the weak in issues to do with food or days, ‘he does not want to submit to false apostles’.Footnote 66 Bonhoeffer's will to conflict is thus rooted in his conviction that the very ‘substance’ of the church is under threat by the demotion of Jewish pastors. He argues that applications of the Aryan Paragraph threaten to reverse the work of the gospel in Ephesians 2:14, that is, the breaking down of the ‘dividing wall of hostility’ between Jew and Gentile. As a result, Bonhoeffer adopts the distinction between the strong and weak in faith but disregards the appeal that the former concede their liberties.
Bonhoeffer thus explicitly resists the prioritisation, by theologians such as Althaus, of an order of race. In his ‘Theses on the Aryan Paragraph in the Church’,Footnote 67 Bonhoeffer states, ‘The church is not a community of people who are all the same but precisely one of people foreign [fremden] to one another who are called by God's Word. The Volk of God is an order over and above all other orders.’Footnote 68 The act of baptism, a constitutive part of the ‘Word’ in Lutheran tradition, inaugurates this order, binding members with ‘indissoluble ties’ (unauflöslich verbunden).Footnote 69 These ties appear stronger than those that bind the Völker together in Bonhoeffer's Barcelona lecture; in the Berlin theses, water proves thicker than blood.Footnote 70
Bonhoeffer's resurgent ecclesial conviction also leads him to oppose a logic that prioritises the vitality, even the salvation, of his Volk over and against an allegedly foreign element. This is seen in his response to the argument that a thousand Jewish Christians could be excluded, indeed ‘sacrificed’, in light of a greater concern for the millions of fellow citizens who are ‘estranged’ (entfremden) from God.Footnote 71 Insofar as the larger nation is in view, Bonhoeffer turns against his earlier expatriate ‘disregard’ for the lives of threatening foreigners with a decisive reply: ‘the church does not sacrifice a single one of its members’.Footnote 72 His reason is that such a logic of exclusion has the consequence of vocational self-negation: sacrificing love for a single member, ‘the church would no longer be the church’.Footnote 73 A bold polemic ensues, namely that the demotion of Jewish persons places the church in a situation in which its core identity is at stake, a status confessionis.Footnote 74
The second reason for counter-reading the apostolic counsel to concession is that Bonhoeffer seeks to uncover the imperious motives of the so-called weak, a dynamic not broached in either Romans 8 or 1 Corinthians 14. Bonhoeffer argues that creating an ‘offence’ (Anstoß) to the patriotic sentiments of the church could be necessary so as not ‘to allow the demands of the weak to be made the ruling law [herrschenden Gesetz] of the church’.Footnote 75 In Bethge's rendition of the event, Bonhoeffer thus unmasks the argument for deference to nationalists ‘as a trick of the “weak” who had not yet succeeded in making their wish become the heretical law of the “strong”’.Footnote 76
The criticism of this particular form of ‘weakness’ calls to mind Nietzsche's characterisation of ressentiment, in which the weak create moral values in order to hamstring the strong.Footnote 77 Bonhoeffer does not make a direct allusion to Nietzsche here, although the invocation is tellingly made in his Barcelona lecture. Bonhoeffer's 1929 articulation of Christian freedom – the position of the ‘strong’ in the Aryan Paragraph debates – is earlier expressed with reference to Nietzsche's ‘beyond good and evil’.Footnote 78 A similar claim to strength endures in the Berlin disputations, even if he has left behind aspects of bellicose nationalism.
Moreover, the manner with which the ‘strong’ align themselves politically reveals Bonhoeffer's divergence from Nietzsche. Once the outcome of the Aryan Paragraph becomes clear, Bonhoeffer argues that the remaining pastors ‘should prefer to stand by those with lesser rights rather than to benefit from the privileged status in the church. They must see their own true service, which they can still perform for their church, in resigning from this office of pastor as a privilege’.Footnote 79 In contrast to Althaus’ segregated settlement, Bonhoeffer's claim is that the final service of the pastor is to join those unjustly ‘quarantined’. Bethge refers to this argument as characteristic of Bonhoeffer's claim to a ‘fatal privilege’.Footnote 80 This is not merely a preferential option, however; Bonhoeffer states the binding force of ministerial ‘orders’ thus: ‘With exclusion of the Jewish Christians from the communion of worship, he who realizes the nature of the Church must feel himself to be excluded also.’Footnote 81
Bonhoeffer follows through on his argument by crossing several borders in subsequent years. Following the publication of the Bethel Confession, Bonhoeffer begins another expatriate period, this time in London, making plans to split the new salary with his friend Franz Hildebrandt, a pastor of Jewish descent also intent on leaving.Footnote 82 Several years later, in 1939, Bonhoeffer lives briefly as a refugee in America. In an essay written during his stay, he shows a newly appreciative tone for the nation's denominations given his current plight. As Bethge observes, ‘this time the refugee and person turning back home could appreciate the nation of refugees’.Footnote 83
Even as a refugee, however, newly appreciative of national and ecclesial difference, Bonhoeffer carries problematic terms from his homeland struggle. His criticism of American racial segregation and approving characterisation of the black church is treated as a consideration of the Rassenfrage, ‘the race question’, invoking the disturbing implications of the Judenfrage.Footnote 84 This is one way in which Bonhoeffer's works maintain terms that treat others as objects of deliberation rather than theological subjects in their own right. Just as the faith confession of African Americans challenged Bonhoeffer's framework, further work is required in exposing the ‘diseased Christian imagination’ that causes national and ecclesial spaces to remain segregated.Footnote 85 To this end, our inquiry opens towards a fuller interrogation of the linguistic and political structures that impede a genuinely transnational pastorate.
Conclusion
As we have shown, Althaus and Bonhoeffer have more in common than their Lutheran tradition. On the eve of National Socialism's rise, both theologians feel bound by a competitive philosophy of history – Althaus’ Konfliktgesetz and Bonhoeffer's Weltgesetzen – through which acts of aggression can be sanctified as the Volk pursues its divine commission. They also share a deep awareness of the moral ambiguity of all human action in world history, while expressing ambivalence about the unique vocation of ‘the Jews’ in their midst. Such substantial correspondence between them troubles a binary resistance/complicity narrative.
Given that at one point in time Althaus and Bonhoeffer both exhibit expansionist völkisch feeling cultivated in the common soil of German expatriate communities, their positions on struggle in the church do not unfold as one might have expected. The Judenfrage represents a status confessionis for Bonhoeffer: the church will self-negate if it sacrifices even one of its members. But the nature of the church is also at stake for Althaus, though for him the church will fail to fulfil its mission if it does not sacrifice its Jewish pastors. In an ironic turn, the militant Althaus, for whom struggle is so productive outside the church's walls, ultimately refuses struggle in this case, in order to avoid any risk to fragile German identity. Meanwhile, it is the pacifist-inspired Bonhoeffer who testifies to the durability of the church as a community that must maintain the conflict for its manifestation as a supra-ethnic reality.
