february-2018

key to saving civilization and making Germany great again.
Hitler and his supporters wasted no time in starting the
work necessary to enliven this vision, including scapegoating
and eventually trying to exterminate all Jews in Europe.
The Nazis were perpetrators.
Hitler pledged to make the Catholic Church in
Germany, as well as the much more populated Protestant
churches, the “cornerstone of the work of national revival,”
according to Thomas Bokenkotter in A Concise History
of the Catholic Church. While the German Protestant
churches were far from unified in their support for Nazism,
officials of the Catholic Church made an agreement with
the new German government in 1933, a concordat between
Hitler’s Reich and the Vatican. It gave the church space to
carry out its sacred affairs without government intrusion,
and offered financial and political support in return, so
long as the church pledged loyalty to the Reich.
In signing this agreement, the Catholic Church, collectively,
became a bystander, complicit in the horrors of
the Nazi regime. (In 1998, Pope John Paul II finally issued
a formal apology for the failure of the Catholic Church to
take action against the Nazis and in support of the Jewish
and other victims of the Holocaust.)
A large segment of the Protestant churches in Germany,
known as Deutsche Christen (German Christians), became
more than bystanders. Their explicit support of Hitler
and National Socialist ideology, and its influence on their
theology, made them perpetrators. They supported the
rampant white nationalism of the Nazis and its extermination
attempt against the Jews. They pledged loyalty to
the Nazi government, making no distinction between the
Führer’s authority over the government and the church.
On Sunday mornings, the pews of the German Christian
churches were filled with Nazi officers, SS guards, and concentration
camp doctors.
Jamming the spokes: The resisters
In opposition to the German Christians, the Confessing
Church movement was animated by pastors and church
members who rejected Hitler as a figure of church authority.
They believed certain matters to be of such importance
as to be considered a status confessionis—that is, a situation
in which only one position is in accord with the confession
of Christ.
Bonhoeffer was a member of the Confessing Church
movement. While many members of this movement
emphasized the separation of church and state as a status
confessionis, Bonhoeffer was more radical than his peers.
He saw Nazi racism in this light, as a Christian problem, a
status confessionis, and a defining moment for the church.
His thinking on this point is explicit in his 1933 essay
“The Church and the Jewish Question,” which he wrote
in response to the government adoption of the so-called
Aryan paragraph, which restricted those with Jewish heritage
from holding public office.
18 sojourners FEBRUARY 2018
sojo.net