I have finished reading Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich Doris L. Bergen, The University of North Carolina Press 1996.
I read many years ago a great saying from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, “Those who try to prove that Plato was a Christian prove themselves to be heathens.” So it is with the German Christian Movement. A movement within German Protestantism that tried to merge Christianity and National Socialism. The German Christian movement abandoned all semblance of Christianity to become a religion of National Socialism.
Bergen’s work is 230 pages plus another 100 pages of endnotes and bibliography. Her writing style is hard to read at first (several subjects in one sentence). She seems to air out her agenda after the first two chapters. The remaining chapters are more precise in their content but lack any logical flow in the book. There are several pictures.
The chapters are
Bergen gives a brief history of the German Christian movement and the theology behind the movement. She states that German higher criticism (the belief that the Bible is flawed with manmade errors) had nothing to do with the movement but then presents scores of German theologians of the higher criticism school who were also involved in the movement.
Her two chapters on Anti-Jewish Church and the Ecclesiastical Final Solution are examples of how the chapters do not flow. Still, she does a very good job of presenting the movements actions of taking the “Jew” out of the Bible, church literature and church music.
She also does a very good job of presenting the “house of cards” which the movement was based upon. The movement was “anti-intellectualism, anticlericalism, and antilegalism” (page173). She shows that it was a church without rules and structure and therefore could not stand for anything. The church lost its moral voice within Germany. Not until the war turn sour did the church rise again as a comfort for the people.
Although Bergen never mentions Goldhagen’s work (she does mention Browning once) she uses the same broad strokes to paint all Germans as being anti-semitic.
I am glad I read the work. She does mention a chaplain who was a German Christian. Her work indirectly and perhaps unknowingly makes several correlations with the state of the church today… anti-intellectualism, anticlericalism, and antilegalism. To understand the theology of the German Christian Movement one must read J. Gresham Machen’s classic work Christianity and Liberalism (1923).
I read many years ago a great saying from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, “Those who try to prove that Plato was a Christian prove themselves to be heathens.” So it is with the German Christian Movement. A movement within German Protestantism that tried to merge Christianity and National Socialism. The German Christian movement abandoned all semblance of Christianity to become a religion of National Socialism.
Bergen’s work is 230 pages plus another 100 pages of endnotes and bibliography. Her writing style is hard to read at first (several subjects in one sentence). She seems to air out her agenda after the first two chapters. The remaining chapters are more precise in their content but lack any logical flow in the book. There are several pictures.
The chapters are
- One Reich, One People, One Church: The German Christians
- The Anti-Jewish Church
- The Antidoctrinal Church
- The Manly Church
- Non-Aryans in the Peoples Church
- Catholics, Protestants, and the Dreams of a Confessional Union
- Women in the Manly Movement
- The Ecclesiastical Final Solution
- The Church without Rules
- The Bride of Christ at War
- Postwar Echoes
Bergen gives a brief history of the German Christian movement and the theology behind the movement. She states that German higher criticism (the belief that the Bible is flawed with manmade errors) had nothing to do with the movement but then presents scores of German theologians of the higher criticism school who were also involved in the movement.
Her two chapters on Anti-Jewish Church and the Ecclesiastical Final Solution are examples of how the chapters do not flow. Still, she does a very good job of presenting the movements actions of taking the “Jew” out of the Bible, church literature and church music.
She also does a very good job of presenting the “house of cards” which the movement was based upon. The movement was “anti-intellectualism, anticlericalism, and antilegalism” (page173). She shows that it was a church without rules and structure and therefore could not stand for anything. The church lost its moral voice within Germany. Not until the war turn sour did the church rise again as a comfort for the people.
Although Bergen never mentions Goldhagen’s work (she does mention Browning once) she uses the same broad strokes to paint all Germans as being anti-semitic.
I am glad I read the work. She does mention a chaplain who was a German Christian. Her work indirectly and perhaps unknowingly makes several correlations with the state of the church today… anti-intellectualism, anticlericalism, and antilegalism. To understand the theology of the German Christian Movement one must read J. Gresham Machen’s classic work Christianity and Liberalism (1923).
Comment