For several years, theology has determined my life. In our stormy century, one adventure has followed another. Such cannot be avoided in church and theology. At times we even get embroiled in the political struggle. In any event, I have had to alter my course from time to time, but have always kept faith with my beginnings.
My father fell in Russia as early as 1915. From then on my mother, really isolated in the city of Essen, had to tough it out with her two children. On my arrival at the castle Gymnasium, on the border between the Krupp colony and the more rural suburb, I found no friends. I could only have found them in the inner city where the school was also located.
Even after the war we had to queue up in front of the stores to buy anything. Then, when there was homework, there was little time for play and the outside world. I was left to read my father’s books, thus at thirteen discovering Shakespeare, and in curious succession two years later Karl May (the German author of American Wild West novels) and after a similar interval the German classics and romantics. Put briefly, my youth was lonely and rather joyless.
My life first took on clarity when in my last years at school—in a way I no longer remember—I came to know the Essen youth pastor Wilhelm Weigle and his Jugendhaus situated in the city center, of which I made use twice a week after lunch. This was a preparation for and narrow entry into the study of theology. Weigle was a charismatic person such as I have not known since. Till his last breath, before and after World War I, he took care of us and like a magnet he drew thousands of youth from the working class and, when isolated from them, from the secondary schools. His theme was to bring Jesus to the youth. I venture to say that he succeeded with thousands. He made clear to me what I had unconsciously sought: The Lord, to whom I could give myself and who showed me life’s way and goal.
Prior to all the existentialist theology that later captivated me, and still ignorant of the St. Christopher legend, I came to know that each one’s uniqueness, or in modern parlance, each one’s identity, is experienced only through the Lord or through demons, to whichever one surrenders. No one belongs to him- or herself. In various ways, a person exists only in a participation to be discovered. It is not enough to demythologize texts with Rudolf Bultmann. Before doing such, the world and human beings need to be demythologized, in, say, their self-mastery, their ideology, and in the religious superstition to which they have surrendered. This takes place in the power of the gospel. It was this power that streamed forth from Weigle.
I will never forget Weigle’s funeral. The procession began from the youth center, which the last mourner was leaving as the first arrived at the grave twenty minutes later. Two rows of youths and elderly crowded both sides of the street, to thank once more the one who had helped them to a radical change in life. In a way I’ll never forget, Weigle showed me that German pietism preserved the Reformation heritage, though, of course, not when it was fanatical or egocentric. I have always defended that point of view, even though my theology was often damned by pietists in many countries.
In May 1929, I became a student. Bonn lay nearest, and there also I found the friend most respected in my student years. Coming from Bultmann and Marburg, my friend intended to take his first exams at Coblenz, but still had time to ease my entry into academic life and to see to my beginnings.
His concern was not unjustified. In the university, I had attended all the lectures that piqued my curiosity, even those outside theology. Erik Peterson’s Romans lecture-course fascinated me, so I also took his seminar on Augustine’s Confessions. In addition, I took the one-hour-a-week history of religions course on Hellenism, without realizing how quickly Gnosticism was to become a chief problem of liberal, New Testament exegesis. I sensed that Peterson was resolved to convert to Roman Catholicism when during his lecture six Catholics kept stomping their feet in applause and the six irritated Protestants scraped theirs. From the first moment on, his ecclesiology had me in its spell. I was used to a church that treated youth as if it were a religious club. Now I was confronted with the worldwide body of Christ, concerning which I later took a degree in 1931. Never again, as the leadership of my church pietistically and in its programming actually still does, would I describe the care of souls as the center of theology.
Now, too, Bultmann’s anthropology became problematic for me, an anthropology viewed by both Pietism and the Enlightenment as the obvious exegetical perspective. With Bultmann, however, that anthropology was not a way to psychological mastery. Existentialist theology is what occupied him—naturally, not as a worldview. Today I incline toward the venturesome thesis that the entire Bible must be read and interpreted christologically, thus, not even from a theology of creation. When Bultmann wanted to spoil for me the use of the term “humanity” as abstract, I retorted almost insolently that speaking of the “individual” was just as abstract.
In any event, the central theme of the New Testament is the worldwide lordship of the Crucified. Even the care of souls, which I have never relativized, must make that concrete in pastoral practice.
According to Paul, the task of the particular theologian is to discern the spirits. The pious person is not to become more and more pious, is not obliged to pursue or demonstrate one “religion” among others. What is required is the discipleship of the Nazarene. The individual may be a model in the fellowship. But the priesthood of all believers is not to be replaced by devotional individualism.
Every Christian exists vis-à-vis an entire world and, even when isolated in one part of it, must resist both idealism and materialism. The Christian must always confess the Lord wherever idols rule on earth, whether under the sign of greed for power or superstition or mammon. From the Christian point of view, the first commandment is personified in Christ. It is this solus Christus that separates the gospel from all religions and worldviews, often even from a bourgeois or proletarian Christianity. On his way to Rome, Peterson laid bare the weakness of an idealistic Protestantism. I have always been grateful to him for that.
My friend was suspicious. In Marburg he witnessed Peterson’s power to attract New Testament Professor Heinrich Schlier, who took Peterson’s route to the end. I was in danger of going that way myself. So, after the first semester, I swallowed Bultmann’s historical criticism as an antidote. I naïvely agreed to go to Marburg, since I was excited about finding in Schlier the best interpreter of my Bonn master, as well as about being able to make a reasoned decision for my future career. So I asked Bultmann to take me into his seminar on “Pauline Anthropology.” He replied that the usual limit had already been reached. On the recommendation of my friend, however, I was to be viewed as an exception if I could justify my acceptance with a sketch on the anthropology in Paul’s letter as gleaned from Peterson’s lecture course. I learned then that when success beckons, risks are not to be avoided. The risk was worth the trouble where Bultmann was concerned, though I am still astonished by it even today. Of course, in the seminar I had to pass a second test when my Christmas vacation was ruined by the requirement that in the New Year I submit a report on Kierkegaard’s influence on Barth’s exposition of Romans 7. When I managed this, I became a recognized member in the circle of the Marburg school. As such, I had daily to master Heidegger’s philosophy as well as Bultmann’s theological criticism.
My labor was rewarded in the early 1960s when the Geneva leadership of the ecumenical movement discussed the problem of whether and if so, what latitude was to be given New Testament criticism. As a representative of the Bultmann school I was asked to give a main address at the next session of Faith and Order in Montreal on the theme: “Is the Unity of the Church Based on the Unity of the Bible?” The General Secretary, Visser ’t Hooft, never forgave me for deriving the variety of confessions from the variety in the biblical message. Thankfully, my thesis was adopted later. The result was obvious: discerning the spirits is a theological necessity, for which historical criticism is indispensable, and with the course of church history more and more urgent. Now, of course, I had to face up to the question as to how I could unite my pietism with radical historical criticism.
In the fifth semester, I changed schools once again, and, unlike most Marburgers, did not go to Barth at Münster, though I had devoured his writings ravenously. I expected greater clarity at Tübingen, above all with Adolph Schlatter, but was disappointed. This story cannot be told here and now in any detail. Schlatter loved to provoke, but was not eager to engage in public dispute. He had functioned the same way at Berlin, when in contrast to Harnack he was to maintain the balance between conservative and liberal. He never let himself be diverted from his own point of view. I profited much from him and regard him as my third teacher in New Testament. Still, he detoured around my problem.
I made use of the free time left to me. The Tübingen faculty chose the present status of Johannine research as the subject for a prize competition. Again, I naïvely plunged into one of the most difficult exegetical themes and, often till midnight and at much too young an age, came to deal with a gigantic flood of literature embroiled in dispute. Still, a semester earlier I had heard Bultmann’s first lectures on the Gospel of John. I received the prize, though with the spiteful comment that I had criticized everything but Bultmann. The comment was justified. When thirty years later I held my own lectures on John, I was well prepared and had been able to give my own view greater depth.
Because my studies had reached their peak, after a year in an area of theology I had neglected till then, I could apply for my first exams at Coblenz. This also turned out happily, aside from an accident: I failed totally when asked about the difference between Reformation and Orthodox ethics. I had never concerned myself with the theme, but shamefacedly made up for it in the years to come.
I’ll not be silent about my conclusions, although, or perhaps just because, they might be provocative. As far as I know, the concept of ethics stems from Hellenistic tradition, and is the basis of the modern idea of performance. A theory of duties makes clear what we must do or avoid, led by reason or conscience or situation and convention. When we do not adhere to that theory, we are guilty. So we are constantly responsible in thought and deed, provided we do not challenge the distinction between good and evil.
I cannot derive such a discipline, and this its watchword, from the Bible. The Bible knows of no one responsible for salvation or independent within it. Pauline theology announces the justification of the godless and in place of “ethics” sets its doctrine of the charisms, which in turn reflects the first commandment. God is the Lord who commands, but he is such as the one who delivers from Egypt and forbids giving his place to other lords and gods. In this prohibition promise is dominant. One need no longer serve other lords and gods, and like Israel which had once served in Egypt, is freed from all idolatry. Just this is at issue when Paul speaks of the charism. It is the concretion of the charis that favors us.
At the outset of our worship, then, stands the God who serves, who sets us free. When he commands that we serve him, he wants us to remain in the freedom he has given us, free from ideologies and illusions. Now the recipient of charis becomes at the same time the bearer of charis and its being let loose in the world. In the individual instance and always, this service becomes a witness to and realization of the divine power of human liberation—a charismatic activity.
The first commandment is truly a gospel. It calls to us to hand on what was given to us, that is, the freedom of grace. But the first commandment is made concrete in the Nazarene, and in the discipleship of the Crucified it preserves the divine power of liberation in a world beset by demons. Reason, conscience, and understanding of the situation have to play a role. In this respect, we approximate the ethics of paganism, but we are distanced from it by the fact that our freedom is expressed first of all and in flatly revolutionary ways in our resistance to the world’s insanities. This was the fundamental experience of my generation. In the radical German Confessing Church we were stigmatized, because as disciples of Jesus we had to become partisans of the gospel, risking death from tyrants for the sake of Protestant freedom.
I will omit the period of my education in the church, in order as briefly as possible to report the church struggle in my congregation at Gelsenkirchen-Rotthausen, organized through a territorial exchange among the mines from the Rhineland toward Westphalia. I have admitted earlier that from 1930 to 1933 I too voted for Hitler. My work in the congregation and for my dissertation left me little time for involvement in politics. Every night, for an entire year-and-a-half, while synodical vicar in Barmen, I was forced to experience the civil war at my very door. I eagerly longed for order. In family and at school we constantly heard that the Versailles treaty shamefully humiliated us Germans. Finally, the war left behind six million unemployed in our country. So my friends and I agreed that only a strong government could help us. I came to mistrust Hitler after his intervention on behalf of a criminal storm trooper in Silesia. But I was naïve enough to suppose that we could get rid of him at the next election in four years.
In the meantime, the party of the German Christians was formed. In the summer of 1933, its number grew from four to forty-five members among the representatives of my congregation. Then, when the so-called Reichsbischof incorporated the evangelical youth groups into the Hitler youth, and the Röhm-Putsch eliminated disputes within the Nazi leadership through mass murder, we could no longer ignore our having been handed over to criminals who unflinchingly demonstrated force and would yield only to force.
The founding of the Confessing Church at Wuppertal led to political opposition. As early as the fall of 1933, I declared that the Reichsbishof was a traitor to the evangelical church. From then on, I was hated by the Nazis; later I was denounced at the market place as a national traitor by the Gauleiter in Gelsenkirchen, and recommended to the higher authorities for assignment to a concentration camp. The chairman of our congregation lent support in an appeal to headquarters at Berlin. For either side there was no turning back. This became clear in sessions of the congregational representatives. As president of the congregation, I denied that those sessions had any authority in the church and assigned them a merely secular importance.
In the fall of 1934, I secretly learned that the Confessing Church was thinking of separating itself officially from the German Christians. With two colleagues and twelve members of the Confessing Church, we now resolved immediately to go on the offensive, and on the Day of Repentance and Prayer of November 15, 1934, would dismiss the forty-five German Christians from church service. In accord with church protocol, the announcement was made public at worship on the three Sundays prior, and was carried out in a solemn service on the Day of Repentance and Prayer. Before the altar forty-five members of the Confessing Church were presented as substitutes for the discharged German Christians. We were in fact the first congregation in Germany to dare such action.
What we dared to do would of course never have succeeded if what seemed miraculous to us had not happened. On the Day of Repentance and Prayer a riot was about to occur on the plaza in front of the church, and the worship service discontinued. Many women from our Ladies’ Aid, the backbone of our congregation, formed the opposition. They did not threaten the men with brooms, of course, but promised to participate aggressively. Curiosity seekers of all ages and levels bordered the battle arena. Then Graf Stosch, advocate for church affairs in the district of Westphalia-North, suddenly appeared with about fifty policemen, and ordered the place cleared in the name of the state. He himself took part in the worship, which now proceeded as planned.
I preached on Jeremiah 7:1-15, an unusually compressed attack on the house of Israel, and then introduced the new Confessing Church replacements. We could see the older people weeping there. Graf Stosch had informed us the previous day that he would be commissioned by Berlin to arrest the pastors and prevent the service. When we answered “yes” to his query whether we would still keep to our resolve, he assured us of his protection. He had informed Berlin that he would guarantee order. I do not know what motivated him. Family tradition in the Silesian nobility may have prevented him from using force against the church. Perhaps he had learned from the Röhm-Putsch and the Silesian storm troopers’ crimes to distance himself from tyranny. He was removed from district leadership, and became president of the Minden administrative district. I must always remember him. For me the climax of our struggle is always bound up with him.
The struggle continued, of course. Not even our synod in Westphalia regarded us as its vanguard. They wanted first to wait and see how our experiment would turn out, or so they wrote to me. Our action really isolated us. There should be no talk today of an ethics of resistance in the church of that period. We were partisans. Even after the war our inheritance was buried at Treysa (where the Evangelical Church of Germany was constituted in 1945) for the sake of the national church of the previous century. Reconciliation, in the religious sphere as well, became the watchword worldwide. Such ideology was expelled from me when in 1937 Martin Niemöller had to enter a concentration camp and seven hundred evangelical pastors also had to go to prison. At that time I had to preach at a service of intercession on Isaiah 26:13: “O Lord, our God, other lords besides thee have ruled over us, but thy name alone we acknowledge.” Angry and in pain, I determined then that God’s reconciliation could not be accomplished by compromising with our enemies. In the church the obverse side of freedom is and remains resistance to idolaters. On the following day, the Gestapo came and got me. The officers were very cautious and went thirty steps ahead of me. Miners can still be violent; they can deny authorities respect that the average citizen will never refuse.
I clearly recall 1937, because on Good Friday I had to hold out for seven hours in four worship services, as well as give communion on Easter week to the children and grandchildren of members of the East Prussian Prayer League. But in 1937, no less than one-third of my congregation voted for the Social Democratic Party, a communist front. At that time I did not detect any “reconciliation,” but rather a fellowship of Christians and proletarians that had not existed before in Germany. Some came to worship because the pastor had visited them; others came out of curiosity, to see if my neck would finally be on the line. Night after night, for three long years before the war, we knew nothing of the security that existed only for citizens who played along. But with the exception of one co-rector who would not let me into his house, I was secure among my communist Masurians, and I will not forget what they did.
The approximately twenty-five days before being amnestied without a hearing were actually restful. I did not have to rush daily from one house to the other, or at night give communion to the dying. No one said an evil word to me. The prison inspector got me a box of Brazilian cigars, and allowed books, excerpts, and paper to be sent to me, so that I could finish my study on Hebrews, “The Wandering People of God.” Now and then a guard visited me in the evening, to ask how a pastor could get himself behind bars, and how I happened to be the first in the history of Gelsenkirchen. On Sunday morning the brass choir from the hospital opposite blew, “Wake, wake, O German land; you’ve been long enough a-bed,” and other rousing stuff. Only the fish bones in the herring soup on Wednesdays, and the anxiety at perhaps being arrested by the Gestapo on the prison steps after my release, disturbed my peace.
Up to the war, and finally with the visit of six nice women and six hardy miners to the High Consistory at Berlin, the congregation refused to be put on the defensive. When the visitors were not admitted, they sat on the steps and held out till the president, vice-president, and consistory council had only to leave their rooms to be informed about the people of Rotthausen, gently by the women, roughly by the men. We succeeded in having our records displaced till the end of the war. How that would turn out I never doubted, not even for a moment.
I would like to break off here. If I should tell how I had to be a soldier for three years, perhaps to get out of reach of the area command and seizure by the Nazis, how I finally survived the Allied camp at [Bad] Kreuznach, in which 70,000 prisoners starved, then returned to a heavily bombed congregation, and at once learned that I had been chosen as a New Testament scholar for Münster, but due to a denunciation landed at Mainz instead, would lead too far toward a biography. My students and my writings can describe the theological problems that arose at Mainz, Göttingen, and for thirty-seven years at Tübingen. I would gladly give each of them my hand and my thanks, though I cannot. Age hinders signs of friendship maintained. As a last word and as my bequest, let me call to you in Huguenot style: “Résistez!” For the discipleship of the Crucified leads necessarily to resistance to idolatry on every front. This resistance is and must be the most important mark of Christian Freedom.