Will the Real Nazis Please Stand Up?!! (Part 2)

Part 2: Is Luther to Blame for Nazism?

Luther and Racism

“Anti-Semitism” often carries two different meanings, and unfortunately people often equivocate between the two. “Anti-Semitism” can refer to being against the race of the Jews. The genetic inheritance of the Jews is blamed for somehow causing the alleged moral failings of Jews. However, “anti-Semitism” is also used against those who reject the Jewish religion, a belief system. But this is no more racist than Aristotle’s rejection of Platonism was racist. That is, it’s not racist. Luther’s opposition to the Jews was because of their beliefs, not their race. He had hoped that, with the burden of Roman Catholic theology and history having been thrown off, Jews would embrace the Protestant beliefs in large numbers. Luther wrote:

I would request and advise that one deal gently with the Jews. . . . If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them, not by Papal Law, but by the Law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, hear our Christian teaching and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either.¹

Fifteen years later, after his hopes of wide-spread conversions among the Jews were not realized, Luther wrote On the Jews and their Lies in which he makes vitriolic demands for the State to persecute Jews as he thinks idolaters were in the Old Testament – by burning down Jewish synagogues and homes, forbidding rabbinic teaching, and forcing them into manual labor. It should be noted that these demands had nothing to do with race and nationality but with belief systems. He was reacting to Rabbinic writings that called Jesus Christ “the bastard Son” of “that whore, Mary” and worse. Luther was as equally vitriolic toward the Roman Catholic Church, which had nothing to do with race.²

Furthermore, Hitler’s beliefs were more pagan than any Jew at Luther’s time ever was, ³ so Luther would have been a stronger opponent to Hitler than he was to the Jews. Hitler misrepresented Luther by taking advantage of the equivocal use of “anti-Semitism” to promote his own diabolical purposes.

Luther’s Two Kingdom Theology

Lutheranism did not so much contribute to Nazi ideology as it did allow Nazism to gain power without significant resistance because of Luther’s view of God’s kingdom, law and the State, namely that the Church did not have a significant role in providing instructive guidance to the State.⁴ Paul Banwell Means lists the following as among the reasons why the Church was so weak in its fight against Hitler:   

1. It never seriously shouldered the task of building the Kingdom of God on earth, tending instead toward a static rather than a dogmatic conception of society.

2. It had a strong tradition of Pietism which theologian Ernest Troeltsch says ’supplies the State with loyal servants, who practice submission as a part of the ascetism of their calling; the only obligation it lays on government is that of patriarchal kindness and care of the commonweal….’

3. It was heavily influenced by modern positivistic thought which ‘too optimistically accepted bourgeois culture as the expression of a rational universe’ and ‘too naively accepted the idea of progress and failed to develop any radical criticism of modern cultural trends.’

4. The German Church was preponderantly influenced ‘by Lutheranism rather than Calvinism which challenged the absolutist claims of the State and the right of the State to govern the church, and emphasized the independent and self-governing nature of the church.’⁵

Means summarized his findings:

A religious institution sows the seeds of its own destruction when it becomes so wrapped up in its own forms and doctrines of worship that it becomes insulated from the real social needs of the people which it is to serve. . . . The National Socialist revolution in the church was a tragic witness of the failure of the church to apply its message to modern life and play a role in the nation vital and significant enough to challenge the claims of conflicting loyalties. The church was not able to offer more effective resistance to the inroads of pagan religious movements because its own life and message had become corrupt and complacent. The fate of German Protestantism may well serve as a warning to the Protestant churches of other countries.⁶

The two kingdom theology was very popular in Germany in the generation leading up to Hitler’s rule. Richard V. Pierard, in his essay “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” explains the historical build up:

In the nineteenth century, however, German Lutherans made a strong bifurcation between the realm of public and private concerns. . . . Religion was the domain of the inner personal life, while the institutional and external, the public, so to speak, belonged to the worldly power. Redemption was exclusively the province of the church, while the law, determinative for the external conduct of human affairs, was solely the province of the state. Although Luther had taught that both realms served one another and were under the same God, the practical effect was that law and gospel were divided and the outer and inner lives of the faithful followed different directives. . . .

The Erlangen church historian Hermann Jordan declared in 1917 that the state, the natural order of God, followed its own autonomous laws while the Kingdom of God was concerned with the soul and operated solely on the basis of the morality of the gospel.⁷

Pierard writes that the two kingdom theology continued to be promoted immediately prior to Hitler’s rule, resulting in God’s law being separated from its biblical content and redefined nationally and racially:

These ideas where developed further by a group of theologians in the 1920s and 1930s . . . men who became identified with the pro-Nazi “German Christian” faction in 1932–33. They argued that there is a two-fold revelation of God, law and gospel. Law is God’s original revelation in creation, and it suffices to teach man to serve God and order his life morally. . . .

[B]y cutting law loose from its traditional biblical and Christian moorings, it opens the way for God’s law to be redefined along nationalistic and racial lines. What happens is that the Volk becomes the ultimate source of law and the church simply shares the ethos of the Volk. The Nazis could be welcomed as a manifestation of God’s law at work. . . .⁸

Hitler made explicit use of Luther’s two kingdom theology in order to deflect moral criticism from the Bible. In response to Nazi racial laws and Hitler’s demand that churches support these laws or leave the country, the Vatican issued a Papal Encyclical, “With Burning Concern,” which condemned the racial policies of the Nazis and Nazi rejection of God’s law in the Old Testament. The Encyclical was read in Catholic Churches on March 21, 1937. Hitler responded in a speech on May 1 with a demand for churches to comply with two kingdom theology:

Bend or Break! We cannot permit that this authority, which is the authority of the German people, shall be attacked by any other power whatever. That applies also for all Churches. So long as they concern themselves with their religious problems the State does not concern itself with them. But so soon as the attempt by any means whatsoever—by letters, Encyclica, or otherwise—to arrogate themselves rights which belong to the state alone we shall force them back into their proper spiritual, pastoral activity. They have no title to criticize the morals of a State when they have more than enough reason to concern themselves with their own morals. For the morals of the German State and the German people the leaders of the German State will be responsible—of that we can assure all anxious folk both within and without Germany.⁹

Piertard concludes with this solemn warning:

Christians in the United States particularly need to take to heart the historical experience of their brethren in pre-1933 Germany. .  . . Just as the horrors of World War II constituted a judgment upon the German church, so Christians in other lands that do not maintain a prophetic stance toward their respective secular states are served notice that they, too, will be judged.¹⁰

Whereas Calvinists would say that “the Law is King,”¹¹ with absolute authority over the ruler, Luther says that reason is “the head of all things.”¹² Reason can justify the ruler in setting aside the law, even God’s law in the Bible. Luther says, “reason remains the ruler at all times, the supreme law and master of all the laws.”¹³ Luther appeals to the wisdom of Solomon to prove that reason rules even over the law of Moses: “And because Solomon knew it, he despaired of all the laws, even though God had laid them down for him through Moses, and of all his princes and counsellors [sic], and turned to God himself, asking him for a wise heart to rule the people.”¹⁴ Uwe Siemon-Netto says that, although Luther taught that rulers were ordained by God in accordance with Romans 13:1, Luther “said over and over again that [the State] is not the realm of God, Christ or the Gospel, and secular rulers need not be saints. ‘It is sufficient for the emperor to possess reason,’ Luther writes.”¹⁵ Luther is said to have remarked that he would rather have a “competent Turk rule than an incompetent Christian.”¹⁶ This quote may be bogus, but it does reflect the thinking of Luther and Lutheranism. Siemon-Netto quotes Luther as saying, “We have to . . . learn that the spiritual and the secular governments are as far apart as heaven and earth.”¹⁷ Because the ruler has reason to guide him in the affairs of State, he does not need grace, God’s written word, or the advice of bishops to guide him in how to rule: “In short, I know nothing about what laws to recommend to a prince; I want only to instruct him how to dispose his heart with regard to whatever laws, counsels, verdicts and cases he has to deal with.” This lack of a concrete conception of political justice in Luther’s theology is one element in the criticism that Lutheranism allowed the rise of the Nazi totalitarian regime.

Despite explicit appeals to princes to enforce the letter of the law of Moses against heretics later in his life, in earlier years Luther denied the continuing authority of the law of Moses: “Therefore let Moses be to the Jews what the Saxon Mirror is to us; we of the Gentiles have nothing to do with it any longer. By the same token the French pay no heed to our Saxon Mirror, yet in matters of natural law they do agree with us.”¹⁸ Luther was adamant that the two kingdoms – church and state – should be kept completely separate:

Constantly I must pound in and squeeze in and drive in and wedge in this difference between the two kingdoms, even though it is written and said so often that it becomes tedious. The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms into each other. In the devil’s name the secular leaders always want to be Christ’s masters and teach Him how He should run His church and spiritual government. Similarly, the false governments and schismatic spirits always want to be masters, though not in God’s name, and to teach people how to organize the secular government. Thus the devil is indeed very busy on both sides, and he has much to do. May God hinder him, amen, if we deserve it!¹⁹

Luther said that the secular realm of the State is the realm of the “Deus absconditus,” the hidden God. In the State God never reveals Himself.²⁰ Franz Lau writes: “It is obvious that God conducts a curious masquerade in one of these two worlds [the secular one]; but that is a genuinely Lutheran thought. Luther has made it clear enough to us that God knows and uses ample means to make sure that his rule in the earthly world does not slip away from him.”²¹ God controls the earthly world by hidden means not only in the sense that a ruler can properly exercise reason without knowing God, but also in the sense that God is hidden by the hierarchy of authority that rules the masses. Natural reason, informed by wisdom and equity, directs the ruler, who in turn enforces laws that will control the unruly masses. In the Church, God is not hidden behind natural reason, hierarchal authority and laws in his control over people. Rather, God rules believers directly by His Spirit; there is a “priesthood of all believers.”²²

Harold J. Berman observes how the willingness of Lutherans to allow the law to be secularized while maintaining that the law still had hidden godly character was made plausible by the previous centuries in which Biblical law had directly shaped the law of the State:

Therefore it is not true to say that Lutheranism placed no limits on the political power of the absolute monarchs who ruled Europe in the sixteenth century. The development of positive law was conceived to rest ultimately on the prince alone, but it was presupposed that in exercising his will he would respect the individual consciousness of his subjects, and that meant respecting also their property rights. This presupposition rested – precariously, to be sure – upon four centuries of history in which the church had succeeded in Christianizing law to a remarkable extent, given the level of cultural life of the Germanic peoples in the beginning. Thus a Lutheran positivism which separates law from morals, denies the lawmaking role of the church, and finds the ultimate sanction of law in political coercion nevertheless assumes the existence of a Christian conscience among the people and a state governed by Christian rulers.²³

But, of course, into the first decades of the twentieth century, Christian consciousness in the state had all but disappeared. Trust in the Bible had been destroyed by a long history of German higher criticism. The existence of God himself, especially one who acted in the “secular” area of the state, had been rejected by German philosophy and made irrelevant by Darwinian evolution. By the time of Hitler’s rise to power, much of the Christian character of the law had been self-consciously reformed according to anti-Christian philosophies, leaving the will of the ruler with little of the previous divine restraint.

What Lutherans referred to as “natural law” was really to a great extent an inheritance of positive revelation, the Bible, influencing the law. There is divine natural law to which those who have never been confronted with Biblical revelation sometimes conform: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts . . . ” (Romans 2:14-15). But as Calvinists have emphasized, because these people are sinners, they also suppress God’s revelation through nature. As the Apostle Paul puts it, they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). And as sinners persist in their rebellion against God, God gives them up to practice and approve further lawless behavior (Romans 1:24-32). Therefore a non-Christian ruler cannot be trusted to rule according to godly reason to any significant degree when God’s positive law is removed as an influence. Since God rules over every area of life, rebellion against God manifests in every area life, so redemption must involve every area of life. God’s written, redemptive revelation in the Bible presents more clearly the law of God that sinners suppress in nature.

Luther on the Hierarchy of Church and State

Despite Luther’s insistence on many occasions that Church and State not be joined, from the beginning as a reformer he also insisted that the prince of the territory establish the Lutheran Church so as to provide it protection and aid.²⁴ In To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Luther argued that the princes as individual Christians had a duty to aid the Church in whatever manner was under their power, although in matters of doctrine they were to act as a humble Church member. Nevertheless, Luther also said that Christian princes were to act as bishops when the need arose, and the need Luther perceived at the time was the convening of a council to inaugurate reforms that the Church would subsequently carry out. Luther emphasized that they were to be mere “emergency bishops,” but inevitably the spiritual affairs were ultimately left to the princes’ care, and the distinction between the princes’ role as a Christian and his role as a civil ruler was dissolved. The territorial princes came to control not only Church administration, but also doctrine. This dependence on the State severely dampened the energies of the Lutheran Reformation.²⁵

Luther’s advocacy of a territorial Church, or people’s Church (Volkskirche), was used to further Hitler’s regime in the 1930’s as a rationale for racist nationalism. But like other accusations that Luther’s teachings lead to Nazism, it may be true that Luther’s teachings here lead Lutherans too far in acquiescing to Nazism before they were stirred to protest, but Luther cannot be fairly charged with the extremes that German Nazis took his ideas.²⁶ The modern concept of a nation did not exist in Luther’s time. Luther loved the German culture, but that extended beyond the political boundaries of the princes. Luther had misgivings about the extent that the Lutheran Church became dependent on the State in his own day, and even advocated a completely voluntary Church model at times.²⁷

Civil Disobedience

Some have believed that Luther required complete silence and obedience of citizens regarding any actions that the State might take, because the State had nothing to do with the Church, and that this lead to acquiescence of the German people to Hitler’s totalitarian regime. That a number of German Lutherans during the Nazi era did in fact hold this view is testified to by the well-known German Lutheran theologian of that era, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said, “On the Protestant side, Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms was misinterpreted as implying the emancipation and sanctification of the world and of the natural. Government, reason, economics, and culture arrogate to themselves a right of autonomy, but do not in any way understand this autonomy as bringing them into opposition to Christianity.”²⁸

Although Luther could be said to allow a repressive regime to gain great power before significant protest is made, it is incorrect to say that Luther prohibited all resistance to unjust rulers. In his earlier years, Luther advocated verbal rebuke in opposition to political injustice. In his later years he supported armed resistance when oppression became destructive of human life and true religion.

In these earlier years Luther taught that people are not obligated to follow rulers in their unjust actions. They can only resist passively. Insurrection is not an option. He allowed for the removal of a ruler only when the ruler had lost his mind, because, he said, one without reason is no longer human.²⁹ In 1520 he said, “I will side always with him, however unjust, who endures rebellion and against him who rebels, however justly.”³⁰

Luther based his teaching that resistance to the State could take the form of verbal rebuke but not physical resistance on Christ’s words to the officer in John 18:23: “‘If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong’ must be understood this way: There is a great difference between offering the other cheek, and punishing with words the one who hit us. Christ must suffer. But the word has been put into his mouth so that he may speak and punish what is unjust.”³¹ In the same vein he also said, “Let your mouth be the mouth of Christ’s Spirit.”³² Preachers who fail to serve God by telling rulers their sins are, says Luther, “lazy,” “worthless” and “swine.”³³

But what exactly are the sins that rulers should be rebuked for? After all, he has said, “I know nothing about what laws to recommend to a prince.”³⁴ He did endorse a few laws from the Bible as the source of State authority, like the authority to use the sword against murderers.³⁵ But since he did not recognize the need for the civil ruler to consciously follow God, he offered little else. One must conclude that the sins the ruler would be rebuked for would mainly be of a personal nature rather than sins related to State actions. Since Luther wanted to keep religion and civil government separate, about the only political sin the ruler could be rebuked for is violating that separation and encroaching on the Church’s preaching of the Gospel. Helmut Thielicke affirms this, saying of Luther’s secular conception of the State, “The totalitarian state alone departs from this pattern, and in so doing shows that theologically it is no longer a state but a pseudo church.”³⁶ Likewise Kenneth Barnes says even of those Christians who openly opposed Hitler, “most of the rebel Confessing Christians opposed totalitarianism only when total control extend to the church.”³⁷ Therefore, while it is incorrect to say that Luther taught quiet obedience to a totalitarian regime, Luther’s view of the State means that the Church should say very little about how the State operates until it becomes totalitarian. At that stage, any resistance, either by word or by sword, will most likely prove futile, as Bonhoeffer and other Confessing Christians discovered. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an inspiring Christian martyr, but his Lutheran theology led him and others to oppose the direction of the state only when it was far too late.

Luther’s understanding of “the theology of the cross” requires that the Christian resistance to State oppression go no further than verbal rebuke. The Christian is to follow his Lord and accept suffering, and only in heaven will he receive glory and be triumphant over the ungodly. Based on Christ’s example and His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Luther taught that the Christian should not be his own judge and jury. If everyone took the law into his own hands, society would crumble.³⁸ While one could fight on behalf of his neighbor so as to “act in accordance with the [command to] love and . . . tolerate no injustice against him,” he could not fight for his own cause.³⁹ Fighting against injustice requires a concept of political justice, which Luther’s political philosophy could not provide in any well-developed form. Therefore, in practice, a Lutheran is much more likely to silently suffer injustice than try to end injustice by reforming the legal system.

Luther’s Defeatist Eschatology

Luther’s theology of the cross is also said to be a factor in allowing the rise of Nazism in terms of eschatology. Luther’s eschatology was amillennial, meaning there will be no earthly triumph of righteousness in society before the Last Judgment. The Church will always suffer and be persecuted by those in established authority in the world, always a voice crying in the wilderness, even as Christ was while He was on the earth. Since God ordains this, efforts to transform the State into a Christian institution will be futile. As modern Dispensationalists have said, “You don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.” Lutherans criticize Calvinists, who are often postmillennial, for having “an undo hope for history.”⁴⁰ This they say confuses law and gospel by teaching a salvation (of society) by law.⁴¹

Barnes writes that among Lutherans in the 1930’s both for and against Hitler, amillennialism was a prominent influence in their political philosophy: “Even the more outspoken Confessing Christian circle around Bonhoeffer agreed that the community of true Christians would not be able to ‘restore this fallen and destroyed creation’ but only bear witness to the will of God.”⁴² Bonhoeffer’s circle showed that they recognized that eschatology and ethics are logically distinct; it is logically possible for one’s efforts to establish justice in the world to be doomed to failure while still having a duty to proclaim a just standard to the world. However, Luther’s lack of a standard of social justice and his eschatological pessimism combined to incapacitate the Lutheran Church in the face of encroaching Nazi totalitarianism.

As Luther’s frustration with disruptive heretics led him to change his position on civil sanctions against them, in a similar way Luther’s frustration with disruptive rulers led him to change his position on the morality of armed resistance against them. In October 1530 Luther signed, with other Wittenberg theologians and jurists, the Torgau Disputation. This document justified resistance to tyrannical rulers in self-defense on legal grounds. Based on a review of feudal, Roman, canon, and Germanic laws, Luther and the others concluded that the authority they are required to obey itself allows for a right of resistance. This was what could be characterized as a contractual right to armed resistance.

Luther’s views of changed in favor of civil disobedience in June 1530 when the Roman Catholic Church ordered Lutherans to submit within six months to its demands, which included a ban on proselytizing and religious publishing in Lutheran domains. In response Luther issued the Warning to His Dear German People, which warned people that they must obey God rather than men when the Gospel is at stake. In the Warning Luther says that if war breaks out, those who defend themselves will be justified in terms of self-defense. Luther described the individual as a magistrate when family and neighbors are attacked without constitutional authority.⁴³

In 1538 Luther, with other reformers, Jonas, Bucer, and Melanchthon, went even further and justified armed resistance against civil rulers regardless of the existence of a positive legal contract. They argued that the Bible and natural law teach that when a public officer commits violent injustice he should no more be obeyed than a common murderer. The Biblical support they cited was 1 Tim. 1:9: “ . . . the law is not laid down for the just.” Natural law, they said, contains the principle that “official violence dissolves all obligations between subjects and rulers.”⁴⁴

In 1549 those who called themselves the gnesio (true) Lutherans at Magdeburg defended themselves in a war that threatened to defeat Protestantism in Germany. In 1550 Magdeburg theologians, led by Matthias Flacius, signed the Magdeburg Confession. This document outlined the four degrees of injustice and the correct responses to each. It says that a lesser magistrate who is innocent of violations against his duties and the law can resist the violent attacks of another ruler to defend the life and property of him and the inhabitants. The lesser magistrate also can forcibly resist a higher authority if the higher authority forces him to commit certain intolerable sins. All Christians can resist by force a superior authority that is so mad so as to attack the most fundamental rights of man and of God himself.

This last provision was based on an earlier experience. In 1538 Lutherans at Wittenberg had agreed to a truce with Catholics in which the Lutherans agreed to return to Catholic liturgical practices. They claimed these were matters of indifference. Flacius had condemned the Wittenberg Lutherans, saying that when the confession is at stake, nothing is indifferent. Dietrich Bonhoeffer later adopted this view from Flacius when the Nazis ordered all Jews removed from clergy positions in the Lutheran church.⁴⁵

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