Guess which two
Christian movements in modern history I am thinking of?
Both have names
which identify them with a particular nationality. Both aspire to be truly
national churches, despite large parts of their respective nations rejecting
those claims. Both cling to the notion of legal establishment, even though the
state has no great affection for them. As a result, you will search long and
hard in the liturgies, hymn-books and formularies of either movement before you
find any critical (let alone prophetic) distance from their national
governments: both are suffused with the assumption that the state is an
unproblematic force for good, and both make a particular point of praying for
the head of state.
Moreover, both,
in the interests of pursuing national religious unity, have been willing to
abandon doctrinal precision, and indeed to make a virtue of their
comprehensiveness and their refusal to impose confessional tests. Indeed, many
ministers in both groups are avowedly impatient with inherited rules restricting
(for example) whom they might baptise, marry or otherwise provide with the
church’s services, and under what circumstances – to the point of boldly
defying regulations in the name of national inclusion. They are ready to see
their external critics as fundamentalists or foot-dragging legalists, out of
step with modernity. Indeed, both stir up opposition from conservative
Protestants by attempting reconciliation or alignment with Catholicism, even
though Catholics generally rebuff their advances. But for all this inclusiveness,
these are movements which stick very strictly to their own internal rules, in
particular to rules about precisely who can and who cannot be recognised as a
valid minister. And, it should be said, that neither movement is conspicuous by
its success in winning large numbers of converts.
Yes, you’re
right. My two movements are Anglicanism; and the German Christian movement of
the Nazi era.
I have been
reading about the German Christians*, and had expected to be horrified by
their crazed racism and perverse
distortions of core Christian ideas. Which I am. But I am also discomfited by
the parallels above. The German Christians provided active moral cover for
appalling crimes, without which – to be conservative – many, many thousand
fewer people would have been murdered. And yet … they said, and believed, that
they were just churches which trying to keep pace with the times, to work with
the national mood and to remain relevant in a fast-changing society. It was the
classic liberal theological enterprise.
Now the Nazi-era
Confessing Church, supposedly the anti-Nazi church, was in practice not much
better: often just as anti-semitic, simply more insistent on its theological
traditions, sometimes mulishly so. But that did at least give it something
solid to hold onto.
Is the comparison
with Anglicanism fair? No. Does it mean anything? Not much – the Nazi era was,
mercifully, truly exceptional, and attempts to read off general lessons from it
are usually polemical and opportunistic. But I will say this much. It does
remind us that liberal theological methods do not by any means necessarily imply
liberal politics (in either the European or the American sense). And it reminds
us that, when liberal theologians are led to question or jettison parts of
their tradition, it is a good idea always to remain in dialogue with that
tradition, and to listen even to shrill and hectoring voices coming from it. Naturally Christians want to move from spiritual milk to meat and to grow into the full stature
of Jesus Christ. But just sometimes, when you let go of Nurse, you really do
find something worse.
*Doris L. Bergen, Twisted
Cross: the German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susannah Heschel, The
Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008).
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