This is the conclusion of my reaction to Dean G. Stroud, Preaching in Hitler's Shadow.(1) I share excerpts from several sermons preached in and during Nazi Germany, closing with my reaction comments.
Paul Schneider, A Sermon about Giving Thanks in the Third Reich
We begin part two with one more sermon from Pastor Paul Schneider, this time from 1937. You'll remember from part one I mentioned that members of his own congregation turned him in to the Gestapo who arrested, jailed, and transported him to Buchenwald. There he was tortured and finally murdered by the state.
Holy and just are all the ways of God even with the gift of his word. Let us not forget that on this day of Thanksgiving, and let us consider it well! Worse than the rising cost of food for a people is the rising cost of God's word. The truth that we have to fear this rising cost of hearing God's word in Germany could dampen our joy and gratefulness now that so many evangelical pastors are suffering jail and persecution simply because they proclaimed God's word and God's will boldly and purely and without fear of displeasing the governing authorities. This was also the case in Israel's time, of which we read that God's word was costly in the land. In the time of Elijah there was besides him no prophet of God in the country because the godless queen Jezebel and her equally godless husband Ahab had liquidated all the prophets in the country. Those were not blessed or good times for Israel. They brought godless government, devastating war, poverty, and rising expenses. But it is always the nation and its people who are to blame when such an expensive time of hearing God's word comes. Certainly we too have brought this period of the church's crisis in Germany upon ourselves with our indifference and contempt of God's word. But woe to us if we are forbidden to plant and harvest God's Word among the old and the young in our villages and congregations! What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and thereby does great damage to his soul! Therefore, O land, O land, O land—hear the Word of the Lord! …. Woe to those seducers who seduce a people, a nation, and our young people to fall away from the living God and His word that alone nourishes the soul for eternal life! Woe to those who allow themselves to be seduced—parents and children—because earthly needs were more important to them than eternal and divine bread of heaven. Woe to that generation of whom nothing better can be said than was said to the generation of Noah's time: they ate, they drank, they celebrated and made Merry! Over them now rests the judicial authority of God's final and eternal judgment. He who has ears, let him hear! You indifferent and secure and self-justified sinner, get up and seek your Savior! (2)
This was the last sermon pastor Schneider preached in a church. The same day he was taken to prison he was first held in a jail where he wrote out the entire sermon he had preached. His wife Margarete smuggled it out in a bag of dirty laundry, duplicated the text, and the message was distributed to members of the other church in Schneider's district.
Schneider places blame on believers for not doing all that they could have. He points out that the reason it costs so much to hear God's word preached is because of what the people have allowed. Through implication he suggests Nazi leaders are godless murderers by referring to Ahab and Jezebel who in their day had liquidated all the prophets. High on Schneider's list of evildoers comes the state as seducers of the church's youth. Previous to this the German government had closed church youth study groups and forced participation in Hitler Youth.
Julius von Jan, O Land, Land, Land, Hear the Word of the Lord!
Julius von Jan preached the message from which the following excerpt is drawn in 1938.
In these days there is a questioning running through our people: 'Where is the prophet in Germany who is being sent into the King's house to speak the word of God to him? Where is the man who calls out like Jeremiah: 'Do Justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place'?
God has sent us such men! They are today either in concentration camps or muzzled. But those who come to the houses of princes and there are able to do holy deeds are preachers of lies, as were the national enthusiasts in Jeremiah's day, and can only call out salvation and victory but cannot proclaim the word of the Lord. The men of the church leadership, whom the newspapers have been writing about this past week, did speak the command of the Lord in a worship service clearly and did bow before God for our church and our people because of the terrible and horrifying violation of God's Commandments. Everyone knows how they have been ridiculed as traitors to our nation and have lost their income—and painfully our bishops have not recognized their duty to side with these who have spoken the word of God. (3)
Von Jan warns that many of the preachers who remain are shills for the state. He boldly calls out the gutless blending of church leadership with the state. Meanwhile, he points to those faithful preachers condemned, banned from preaching, whom church leadership has thrown under the bus. Leaders are needed in times of crisis who will boldly support true workers of the Lord against the predatory powers of church and state.
Helmut Gollwitzer, A sermon about Kristallnacht
Next, an excerpt from a 1938 message delivered by pastor Helmut Gollwitzer,
If John the Baptist were to raise the same cry today, he would most likely be denounced as a notorious traitor of the nation. Surely he would find himself condemned by a unity front of the Evangelical Church as a shameful public enemy of the people, and all church connections to him would be severed. Maybe even in his day people were so outraged by John that they cried out: 'How can a person today talk like old Jeremiah did hundreds of years ago? Maybe it was the right thing to do back then, but not today because we are a renewed people. What then does this old language about repentance have to do with us! It was a special grace of God for the people that He did not allow Jeremiah's fate to befall John the Baptist. The whole nation submitted to John's call, and they went out to him in the desert and were baptized. I am sure John's call for repentance seemed uninteresting to many in his day. It is so in every age to the person who exchanges the serious confession of sin and prayer for the national propaganda! Whoever considers himself a Christian and yet shares the outrage over this call to repentance should at least know that he has exchanged God's standard for the standard of the current political propaganda and has replaced the altar of divine justice with the altar of his own nation's self-justification. (4)
Who is your authority? Pastor Gollwitzer warns that if you are condemning your own pastors alongside the state's condemnations or the party's' condemnations, or the media's condemnations, it is because you have made the current political propaganda your standard. Certainly, the loud repetition of single black-and-white narratives which have become so normalized to us is nothing new. As Christians we need to be readers of the Bible and view the events of our world through a Bible lens rather than a propaganda lens. It is important that from the pulpit the pastor warn the flock how great danger attends us when we listen to lies. We would like to think our governments are virtuous and tell us only the truth but this is an unlikely expectation for this time. Let God's Word be your source for narrative therapy, and replace the current narrative, whatever it is when you view this, with the Bible narrative.
Helmut Gollwitzer, A Sermon about Faith as the War Begins
World War II did not begin until September 1939. On Friday, Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland. Sunday, September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Gollwitzer preached the message from which the following is excerpted to his church on Sunday, September 3.
In the coming days there will be a lot of cheap faith in God offered up, and there will be much pagan faith in God even in our Christian churches. But truly the only person who can trust completely in God is the person who can bow before Him. The only person who may make the fourth petition of the Lord's prayer—the request for daily bread that includes peace as well—is the person who acknowledges at the same time: We have not earned this day's bread but rather this war with all its horrors. We have each and every one of us brought all this upon ourselves and we richly, richly deserve the consequences. Only that person may make the fourth petition who in the same breath makes the fifth: 'And forgive us our guilt!' If I may name but one sin, we have become very hard-hearted. We all must accuse ourselves of having brought so much misery upon ourselves by allowing so much evil to happen while we watched and now this evil threatens us. (5)
Gollwitzer is unsparing in his admission that the evils of war had been brought upon Germany by the German people themselves. Gollwitzer links the morality of the people with the morality of the government. He wants his people to trust completely in God. People who are not bowing before God are bowing before something else as their god. Not all supported Hitler, but many were indifferent and felt there was little they could do. Now there would be very great suffering. Are any among us today worshiping the god of indifference?
My Reaction to Preaching in Hitler's Shadow
Stroud's book is unintentionally timely. Across the Western representative democracies laws are being selectively enforced; we are no longer under the rule of law.
As social transformation increases in velocity, churches holy and pure become degenerate. Movements, now institutionalized, seek validation from the external culture. Unless utmost vigilance is exercised a church will be tested and found wanting. As spiritual life declines, the converted, now a minority in their own group, have often found themselves transmitting their faith via new constellations parallel but distinct from what had formerly been the main church.
While church organization helps protect against more specific theological heresies, it also facilitates state control. The seeking of societal acceptance brings co-optation. In exchange for recognition and an appearance of legitimacy, in practice, coopted leadership acts to minimize the influence of "true believers." Members that are the most earnest and serious are marginalized.
Now in the 2020s the Church in the West remains largely asleep to the parade of totalitarian trends. Germans in the 1930s were caught off guard. Finding themselves trapped in a totalitarian situation, they were unsure what to do. We should assess where and when we are and be alive to the danger of this hour and necessities which sooner than we desire we may find thrust upon us. We should anticipate a testing, and the necessity of being faithful in the face of a convergence of factors not unlike those which confronted faithful Christians in Germany ninety years ago.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes:
1. Dean G. Stroud, Preaching in Hitler's Shadow, (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 204 pp.
2. Ibid., pp. 101-102, 104-105.
3. Ibid., p. 111.
4. Ibid., pp. 121-122.
5. Ibid., p. 132.
