# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1934 masthead not in scan _S355
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

355

of the Evangelical Lutheran Confession and the freedom of the church from the state and from all bondage to men. And our church took up this struggle nearly sixty years ago in what was then the Kingdom of Saxony, a country in which the regional church was called not united but Evangelical Lutheran. For this our fathers were greatly resented. They were therefore branded as separatists and schismatics, that is, as people who without justification cause division in the church. They did not take this reproach lightly, but they knew how to bear it with the Lutheran fathers of the Reformation era and rejected it as unjustified, with the words: "It is hard that one should separate from so many lands and people and maintain a special doctrine; but here stands God's command that everyone should guard himself and not be of one mind with those who propagate false doctrine or intend to maintain it with rage."*)

The reproach of causing division carries still greater weight today, now that we have learned again what Volksgemeinschaft is, with all those who cannot distinguish between state and church, between congregation and people. And for ourselves it is all the harder now that we take a special position in the church sphere. The question presses upon us: Is this special position still justified even today, or has the church situation perhaps also changed so that we can give up our special position, indeed must give it up?

For this reason alone it is necessary that we seek to gain a clear picture of the church situation in our fatherland.

In order to obtain a clear picture and an accurate judgment of the present church situation in Germany, it will be necessary to make clear what the church situation in Germany was before the war and before the National Socialist revolution.

That the condition of the regional or people's churches was not as it should have been is now probably generally admitted. But opinions differ as to what the damage actually consisted of. Here I would like to stress first of all that the damage was not that there were twenty-eight or twenty-nine different regional churches in our fatherland. In itself, seen neither from the völkisch nor from the church point of view, that need not have been a damage. Had these regional or people's churches really been churches, had they been united in the confession of the truth, had they had real congregations, then the division into individual regional churches would have been no misfortune, but could rather have had a promoting and stimulating effect on church life and church work. The actual damage was of an entirely different kind, lay much deeper. It lay in the falling away of the German people's churches from the Word of God and from the Lutheran Confession and in the untruthfulness, resulting from it and bound up with it, which was persistently maintained. They pretended to be churches and were in truth not churches but departments of the state administration; their pastors were trained at state universities, were state officials, and were paid from state funds. They pretended to "stand on the Confession." In truth, however, the Confession for the great majority of pastors and for the great mass of the "church people" was a long-since-overcome standpoint; the Confession counted only as a legal basis, which one held to in order to demonstrate that one was the "legal successor" of the church of the Reformation, which in the Peace of Augsburg of the year 1555 and in the Peace of Westphalia of the year 1648 had been recognized by the Reich and endowed with certain privileges. To be sure, in almost all regional churches there were still pastors who were really concerned about the Confession, as far as they understood it; there were in them still many dear and earnest Christians who held to the Gospel still present and sought their salvation in earnest. But the church governments together with the leading theologians did not hold fast to the Word that is sure and able to teach. As for doctrinal discipline, there was next to none; anyone could teach from pulpit and professorial chair whatever he wanted; and the discipline of life in the congregations lay entirely prostrate. Finally: They pretended to be people's churches; in reality, however, they did not have the people behind them; not only the workers, but also the middle class, the so-called educated, stood far from the church for the most part, did not want to be cared for by it at all, did not want its proclamation, but made use of it at most for decorative purposes at family celebrations, at patriotic and association festivities, and similar occasions. But most of the representatives of the churches did not even use the opportunities offered them to really bring the Word of God, according to Law and Gospel, to the man and among the people, but told the world what it wanted to hear, preaching to what the people's ears itched for. To be sure, here too there were exceptions, faithful preachers and pastors who endeavored to reach hearts publicly and privately with the Word of God; but these were precisely exceptions, who were generally not particularly liked by those who led the churches and found little or no support, indeed hardly any understanding, for their faithful efforts.

That is, in rough outline, a presentation of the condition of the German evangelical regional churches before the war. The most prominent feature is untruthfulness: the churches were not what they pretended to be and did not dare to admit it to themselves.

At the beginning of the war an improvement seemed to be getting under way, in that the people began again to ask about the church. Services and Bible hours were attended again, and the Holy Supper also was desired, especially by those marching out and their relatives. But the upswing was only of short duration and soon proved to be an illusory bloom. The saddest thing was that the servants of the church, the pastors, especially also the field chaplains, for the most part failed, in that instead of biblical-evangelical sermons of repentance and forgiveness of sins they delivered legalistic-national speeches about "holding out," about "German character," by which the world must be healed, and the like, and in place of faith in the vicarious sacrifice of Christ on the cross praised and glorified dying for the fatherland, the sacrificial death of the soldier, as a way to heaven, and on the other hand again did not find the courage, following Luther's example, to show from God's Word that a soldier too can be in a blessed state and with an unwounded conscience bear arms in defense of the fatherland. Thus they were unable to convey to the people under arms and to those left behind at home the strength of soul which alone would have enabled both to bear the terrible burdens and privations which the long war brought upon our whole people.

Then came the bitter end, the collapse and the Marxist (socialist) revolution of 1918. The constitution of the Weimar Republic contained the sentence: "There is no state church." But the German evangelical churches once again missed the opportunity that offered itself to them to constitute themselves, in keeping with their nature, as free confessional churches. They clung to the state and haggled over confessional propositions,

*) Schmalkaldische Artikel, Triglotta, p. 516.