If you look at the history of the Third Reich, you will quickly come across the so-called church struggle. In the second half of the 1920s, groups of pastors and laypeople in Germany founded church organizations that attempted to combine Protestantism with the ideology of National Socialism under the term German Christians (Deutsche Christen). In the spirit of a “species-specific” (arteigen) Christian faith, Jewish elements were to be removed from Christianity and the Protestant regional churches were to become an integral part of the Third Reich. Supported by many church members, the German Christians in Thuringia, for example, gained a majority in the Thuringian Church Council even before Hitler came to power. In the church council elections held throughout the Reich in the summer of 1933, the German Christians took power in most German regional churches, which illustrates the broad support of church members.
Due to the self-imposed subordination of the German Christians to Nazi rule and the implementation of the “Aryan Paragraph” in the regional churches initiated by the German Christians, a countermovement to the German Christians formed among Protestant pastors in 1933. Initially founded in September 1933 as the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) emerged from this in 1934. Especially in the theologically influenced church historiography, the Confessing Church is still partly interpreted as a resistance organization against National Socialism. Of course, such an apologetic interpretation has long since been refuted, but the narrative of the churches as resistance organizations in the Third Reich persists among theologians and laypeople to this day.
In the vast majority of cases, the assessment of the Confessing Church has so far been based on printed material, internal communication, and autobiographical memories. William Skiles, associate professor at the evangelical Regent University, has chosen a different approach in his doctoral thesis in order to be able to make a substantive assessment of the Confessing Church and their relation to National Socialism. From archives, estates, and publications, he compiled over 900 sermons by pastors from the period between 1933 and 1945 who belonged to the Confessing Church. Skiles himself points out that the sermons are not representative and that there is no direct evidence of how such sermons were received by churchgoers. However, such sermons are very suitable for a more precise assessment of the Confessing Church with regard to anti-Semitism, “resistance,” and the relationship to the Nazi state. As is well known, sermons in Protestantism play a central role within the church service. By analyzing such sermons, we gain an insight into what the individual pastors—and not just the heads of the Confessing Church—actually told their congregations.
Divided into ten chapters, the first two chapters introduce the topic by, among other things, showing the development of racial theory and explaining the importance of preaching in Protestantism.
Chapter three contains the important aspect of the changes that occurred in parts of German-speaking Protestantism in the nineteenth century: In liberal theology, the idea developed that God's will for the German people was revealed through political developments. God's plan for the Germans was also revealed in history and showed the Germans future developments. This way of thinking was in contrast to democratic ideas, as it was not the people who should determine developments but God by choosing the political leaders. In the course of the early twentieth century, the idea was added that race and volk were God-given entities that had to be protected. In view of these developments, it is not surprising that the German Christians became the church movement that saw God's intervention in National Socialism on behalf of the German volk.
In chapter four, Skiles outlines the theological understanding of the Confessing Church. This can be understood as the conservative opposite of liberal theology, in that only the biblical texts were to be used for sermons. The pastor's experiences, opinions, and interests should not be reflected in his sermons; only the Bible should be spoken about. Chapter five analyzes how pastors of the Confessing Church dealt with the National Socialist dictatorship in their sermons. Right at the beginning, Skiles is able to show that it was quite possible to express criticism of the measures taken by the new rulers from the pulpit. Of the more than 900 sermons analyzed, 60 contained clear criticism of the circumstances in Germany. However, Skiles also quite rightly points out that non-conformist statements by pastors did not automatically have to be directed against the entire regime. Rather, it was often individual political measures or statements by actors of the regime that gave rise to criticism. For it was precisely obedience to Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms that ensured that the vast majority of Protestant pastors almost never opposed the ruling political systems.
In the chapter “The Bearers of Unholy Potential,” Skiles attempts to argue why a distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is necessary and why he ultimately opted for the term anti-Judaism to describe the anti-Jewish views in the sermons. Here Skiles makes the fundamental mistake of seeing the two terms as different, since anti-Semitism is supposedly based on racial ideas, whereas anti-Judaism is not. On the one hand, quite a few studies have now shown that as early as the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church, especially in Spain, regarded Jews as a separate race. Even after converting to Christianity, these people did not become true Christians in the eyes of the church, as “the Jewish essence” could still be found in their blood. On the other hand, one wonders what the point of such a distinction is? Is anti-Judaism a kind of “better hatred of Jews” than anti-Semitism? What is really profitable in this chapter, however, is Skiles’ observation that the pastors’ theological arguments against Jews overlapped with anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Nazi propaganda.
In chapter nine, the author analyzes the surveillance reports of the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei) and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). Here, too, it becomes clear that it was perfectly possible to criticize the measures of the Nazi regime in sermons.
In his summary, Skiles first comes to the conclusion that pastors of the Confessing Church expressed little criticism of National Socialism in their sermons. The criticism that was voiced was not directed against the Nazi system as a whole but mainly against Nazi interference in the autonomy of the churches. But why did Skiles not simply finish with this result of his empirical investigation? Instead, he begins to speculate in the final pages:
“While the sermon manuscripts reveal limited opposition from the pulpits of the Confessing Church, it is entirely possible, and perhaps likely, that pastors offered dissent and opposition in various other ways that cannot be documented in the church records” (257).
He then speculates, without any empirical basis, how pastors could have communicated resistance to the regime, for example by emphasizing individual words in various biblical passages. It remains completely incomprehensible why a “resistance” to the Nazi regime should necessarily be invoked here, when the analysis has shown that there were virtually no negative statements by pastors toward the Nazis. Instead of trying to find something that does not exist, a much simpler explanation would be that the vast majority of pastors of the Confessing Church were not in opposition to the Nazi regime.
Due to the large number of sermons analyzed, the book offers very good results, which will certainly find their way into further research into the Confessing Church and the church struggle. Unfortunately, the last pages of the book spoil the good overall impression.
