The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life

Siemon-Netto's Center Moving West

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

For budgetary reasons, Concordia Seminary's Board of Regents has voted to terminate its relationship with me, and thus with my Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPB).

This means the end of "German Days at the Sem," an annual two-day event featuring lectures, debates and concerts focusing on Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation whose Quincentenary Lutherans will celebrate in 2017. For this year's "German Days" we had planned a wonderful musical event around Bach's cantata 38 (Aus tiefer Not"). There was to be a master class about this cantata with 16 musicians on stage, and then the cantata's performance by the American Kantorei under Robert Bergt as part of his "Bach at the Sem" concert series. We had already commissioned a jazz suite and a choral piece, and were looking forward to a "dialogue between counterpoint and Blue Note" between pianist Mark Laverty and jazz singer Erin Bode, moderated by Dr. James Voelz, dean of Concordia Seminary's faculty.

Sadly, this is not going to happen, at least not now and not in St. Louis. Equally sadly, I have had to halt preparations for the third in our annual forums on orders of creation titled, "Male and Female He Created Them (Gen. 1:27)." Next March, we intended to turn our attention to abortion within the context of the orders of creation, using as a general theme Dietrich Bonhoeffer's dictum, "The great masquerade of evil has played havoc will all our ethical concepts..." We had eminent Lutheran and Roman Catholic scholars line up to debate abortion  as a masquerade of evil from a variety of biblical  perspectives.

That's the bad news. Now the good news:

1. The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life will be revived this fall. It will have a new home at Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach in California and will therefore be able to receive tax-deductible donations (more about this below). CLTPL will be part of a new umbrella organization called "The League of Faithful Masks," with an office at Concordia University Irvine, Cal.

2. Though the current financial crisis has wreaked havoc with my itinerary, I will resume my lecturing tours in the fall with presentations in Canada, Fort Wayne and at other locations. As always, these presentations will be about the Lutheran doctrines of the two kingdoms and of God's divine calling of every Christian to his or her secular vocations; I am offering these doctrines as antidotes to the contemporary "Me" culture and Christian utopianism, both of which distort and indeed poison the dialogue between church and state, faith and reason, the secular and the spiritual realms in contemporary society.

3. God and generous benefactors willing, we will try to restart our CLTPL  conferences such as "German Days" and "Male and Female He Created Them," albeit at a different venue, hopefully next year.

4. In our plans for the immediate future, top priority will be given to the development of a theology for the media, and of curricula for training journalists based on the Lutheran doctrine of vocation.

4. I feel emboldened to make the above pronouncements thanks to the faithfulness of a strong support group consisting of prominent members of Faith Lutheran at Capistrano Beach.

5. We need your prayers and financial help in order to place the revived Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life on a solid footing. In this connection, please note the following information given to me by David Atkinson, the president of Faith Lutheran at Capistrano Beach:

Mailing address:

Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life CLTPL

c/o Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach

34381 Calle Portola

Capistrano Beach, CA  92624

Telephone 949-496-1901

All contributions for The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPL) should be made out care of “Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach” (FLC), and in the memo portion of the check the monies should be earmarked for “The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life.” 

A designated CLTPL fund is being set-up in the yearly budget for Faith Lutheran Capistranoc Beach for this purpose.  All contributions will be fully tax-deductible, and FLC will send a receipt  to the respective donors at the end of each calendar year for tax purposes.

Finally, Gillian and I will be leaving St. Louis Wednesday to spend the summer at our home in France, where I can be reached by email (uwesiemon@mac.com) and by telephone (011-33-545647200).  Callers from the United States and Canada can reach me at domestic rates on my web-based St. Louis home phone (314862-1099). It also  works in France.

For the time being, my excellent graduate student assistant assistant in St. Louis Chad Lakies (drumforthelord@yahoo.com and center@csl.edu) will continue to hold the fort at my St. Louis office. My St. Louis office number and email address (siemonnettou@csl.edu) will remain in place, though it will be better to send emails to uwesiemon@mac.com.

Killing the Killer was a Blow to Pro-Lifers

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

The murder of abortionist Dr. George Tiller was a blow to American society in general, and to the pro-life movement in particular, for the following reasons:

1. This crime turned one of the worst perpetrators of mass infanticide into a presumed martyr for abortion “rights” just at a time when its supporters were slipping dramatically in public esteem. While Tiller’s killer has done away with a physician who by his own admission took the lives of 100 babies every week, this crime might result in an increase of abortions in months to come. Simple minds will now see abortionists as victims, and not the innocent human babies they slaughter, innocents like the 60,000 Tiller has butchered just before their births. This is a depressing thought for faithful Christians who peacefully pray and fast outside the Planned Parenthood slaughterhouses. In the long run, they stood a good chance of being victorious in the war against the culture of death. Let it be known that Tiller’s killer has become a soldier on the side of death in this conflict.
2. The United States is a democracy. In a free society, the voters are their nation’s sovereigns. They are empowered to fight evil, such as abortion, in the polling booths. This is their divine calling. On the other hand, nobody has a calling to kill other human beings except at the orders of duly instituted authorities, or in self-defense. In a civilized society only the government may instruct soldiers or policemen to use their firearms against human beings.
3. The United States is a nation of law. The law is a gift from God to protect us against anarchy and subsequent chaos, a state that prevailed before God created the universe. Tiller’s killer has committed an act of anarchy and therefore not only violated the Fifth Commandment but also rebelled against the divine order of creation. Those who secretly cheer his dastardly act must be made aware that they are participating in a revolt against the Creator.

But we can’t leave matters there. A man has taken the law in his hand because, like many of us, he believed that politics and the courts have warped The Law beyond recognition. Following the French Revolution, many Western democracies, including the United States, have turned against Natural Law, which God himself has written upon every human heart, and replaced it with man-made “positive law.” In this context it is well to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s assessment that the French Revolution “was the laying bare of the emancipated man in his tremendous power and his most terrible perversity.” He was convinced that “the liberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man’s self-destruction.”

The abortion issue is a case in point. Natural law, the universal moral code, must surely tell us that sucking the brains out of a baby’s skull in his or her mother’s womb is wrong, regardless whether you are a Christian or not. Only “man in his most terrible perversity,” to cite Bonhoeffer, can conceive of such an act as a human right. To make this point, though, does not call for a killer’s gun. All that’s required is the voters’ soul-searching reflection about their duties as sovereigns of their own land.

 

 

Let us Create New Journalists

 A Lutheran proposal for a reformation of the media

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

 

The following proposition was forwarded to the Presidents of all Concordia Universities in February 2007. Now I am offering it again because it has become evident that nothing seems to be more important for the survival of a free society than the formation of a new kind of journalist. This proposal is nothing less than an appeal to Lutheran educators on all levels to help reform the media. This should be accomplished by developing revolutionary new ways of training reporters and editors.

 

I believe that the Lutheran doctrine of vocation provides an excellent approach for this project. Journalism, like all other vocations, should be practiced as an act of neighborly love for all citizens (not just Lutherans and other Christians) in a democracy. I have little doubt that media irresponsibility will ultimately lead to the destruction of democracy. This paper does not propose the formation of “Lutheran” journalists propagating their religion; instead it suggests a Lutheran Ansatz to training a new crop of secular reporters and editors eager to serve their neighbors.

 

 

1. The rationale: I attribute the perilous decline of journalism in the in the United States to the closing of the American mind as described by Allan Bloom 20 years ago. The problem is that since the 1960s, journalism has mutated from an honest craft to a pseudo-academic discipline. The most significant prerequisite of a journalist should be an almost unquenchable curiosity. But because of the flaws of liberal arts education in most colleges, fewer and fewer reporters and editors possess this vicarious sense of wonderment. They prefer to give answers rather than ask questions. The consequence is a form of journalism that no longer serves its consumers but attempts to warp their minds. Sensing this, many newspaper readers and television viewers have turned against the media and are trying to satisfy their curiosity by other means, for example blogs, a medium contemporary journalism schools do not even take into account.

 

2. A new strategy. I believe that the dangers resulting from the situation described above can only be met by developing a revolutionary new method of training journalists that endeavors not to close their minds but open them instead. The LCMS with its elaborate educational system is in a unique position to develop a pilot project for such an undertaking. It should involve congregations,

parochial and secondary schools, Concordia universities, the two seminaries and sympathetic local newspapers, Internet publications and radio  stations. Theologically this project should be based on the Lutheran doctrine of calling, which says that God assigns each and every one of us to our secular vocations. If we perform our functions to the best of our abilities out of love for our neighbors we render the highest possible service to God; this makes us members of the universal priesthood of all believers, priests serving in the left-hand kingdom. Seen from this perspective, journalists must perform their duties out of love for their readers and listeners rather than endeavoring to serve themselves. In so doing, they enable the public to perform its priestly secular functions properly, for example as voters.

 

3. The proposed program.

 

a. Pastors, congregational leaders, teachers and parents should keep their eyes open for journalistically talented young people in their care.

The chief criteria must be curiosity, analytical and writing skills, and the ability to work under pressure. Pastors, teachers and congregational leaders should urge parents to encourage such young people at an early age to consider journalism as a career.

 

b. Parochial schools and home-schooling parents should establish hands-on journalism programs. They should include new techniques opening students’ eyes and ears to developments around them, and the creation of realistic publications (perhaps web based) covering external events on al levels: the new stadium in town, local politics, human interest features, exhibitions and the like. Retired journalists living in the neighborhood should be recruited to guide these classes.

 

c. At Lutheran high schools, bona fide journalism classes should be established and given high status. Students should be encouraged to work freelance for local news outlets, and be given academic credit for this. Students should be made to think globally. They should be taught to read international news stories in foreign Internet

publications (this could be combined with foreign language teaching, though some European newspapers and magazines have English-language online editions), and made to write summaries and analyses of world events based on these readings plus additional information.

This must be accompanied by solid and consistent theological instruction in the vocation doctrine.

 

d. After graduation, there should follow two years of on-the-job training at local secular newspapers, internet publications, radio stations etc. High school graduates should work “on the beat” as cub reporters, trainee editors and the like.

 

e. Next, these students should enter Concordia Universities with journalism programs (yet to be created), while maintaining their professional contacts with the news outlets that trained them. This presupposes that Concordia Universities establish theoretical journalism courses tailor-made for this particular media program, teaching theory, journalism ethics, media history and similar subjects. The Concordias would grant students academic credits for on-the-job training, and for continuing journalistic work during summer breaks and spare time. The universities should hire seasoned journalists, perhaps retirees, as instructors. Other faithful Christian colleges and universities should be encouraged to participate in this program on the understanding that it does not envision the formation of “Christian journalists” but the professional training of Christians for service in the secular press.

 

 

The Great Masquerade of Evil

 Address given to the “40 Days for Life” St. Louis celebration Rally, Cardinal Rigali Center, April 5, 209

 By Uwe Siemon-Netto

I am German. And I am 72 years old. When I was a child, my government killed 6 million Jews and millions of others in my name.  The Nazis did not ask me: “Uwe, may we commit a genocide in your name?” Still, in my name this was done, for I was and still am a German citizen, and so I must live with this legacy.

Sixty years ago, Theodor Heuss, the first President of the new, free West Germany, said that those Germans not implicated in the holocaust must not feel collective guilt. But he added that all Germans must have a sense of collective shame. This sense of collective shame has remained with many Germans till this very day.

Today it seems that this will be the fate of Americans, even those who have never harmed a child. They will be plagued by collective shame over the slaughter of 50 million unborn babies – a slaughter committed in their names. 

Perhaps the best-known Christian martyr of the Nazi era was Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Before he was hanged he wrote in his prison cell:

“The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to disguise as light, charity, historical necessity or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethics, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”

In our present reality, which is the fruit of the French Revolution, man claims absolute autonomy from God. Hence this has become a godless world. According to Bonhoeffer, Christians are called to “suffer with God in a godless world.” By coining the phrase, “godless world,” Bonhoeffer clearly did not mean to imply that God did not exist. He used the phrase, “godless world,” in the same sense that we speak of “godless persons.” But he meant more than that: God allowed himself to be driven out of this world, and in so doing gave us our freedom.

Walking with God in a godless world requires standing fast, showing civil courage, risking martyrdom like pastor Walter Hoye whose non-violent pro-life positions have landed him in jail in Oakland, California. Bonhoeffer lamented the dearth of civil courage among most of his fellow Germans.

·       Ah, if only faithful Christians had staged Lenten prayer vigils outside the death camps of Auschwitz or Buchenwald! Of course they too would have been gassed as a consequence or been sent to the Russian front to die.

·       If only the German media had had the guts to report about the gas chambers! But of course they couldn’t. The newspapers then were censored. They were part of a totalitarian system. Such audacious reporters would have surely been hanged, decapitated -- or sent to Russia, and their stories would have been spiked.

Today in America the media are free. What would a reporter risk when writing about late-term abortion procedures where doctor suck the brains out of unborn babies' skulls in order to extract their bodies  through their mothers’ birth canal? Such a reporter would risk no more than the ridicule from his or her colleagues, which is also the reason why Christians praying and fasting outside abortion facilities, thus saving lives, received virtually no media courage.

So “who stands fast?” Bonhoeffer wanted to know. Who is prepared to suffer with God on a godless world, he would surely ask on the is first day of Holy Week? How are we going to answer Bonhoeffer’s haunting question: “Are we still of any use?”

I have been a reporter for 52 years. I can report to you that I have seen the answer with my own eyes – down at the slaughterhouse for unborn babies on Forest Park Avenue.

You are the answer:  you, simple men, women and children praying and fasting, suffering insults and rude signs from passersby, but also being encouraged by honking truck drivers and the janitors of neighboring buildings shouting, “Bless you.”

“I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to resist in times of distress,” wrote Bonhoeffer before facing the scaffold. He added: “I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions.”

This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer ‘s message to you as well, you faithful people who imitated Christ during the last 40 days. You imitated Christ by risking mockery, and media silence at a time when we are once again witnessing a great masquerade of evil disguised as light, charity of social justice, a masquerade compelling all of us to share a sense of collective shame.

Thank you for what you have done and what you will surely continue to do. Remember the words of the doomed Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “I believe that God will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil.”

 

Icy Remedies for Boiling Lutheran Blood

by Uwe Siemon-Netto

Evenings in front of the TV have never been my idea of merriment, but in these trying days they seem unavoidable. So here I sit listening to America’s media stars interviewing each other, an annoying substitute for real journalism.

Watching TV has become a trifle less time-consuming since all liberal presenters kowtow President Obama with such embarrassing conformity that I have found it pointless to listen to them. My dilemma is that those posing as conservatives, for example Lou Dobbs of CNN, make my Lutheran blood boil almost as much.

As a Lutheran I believe that in our diverse vocations, which include journalism, we must serve our neighbors out of love; in so doing we render the highest possible service to God.

Now if I belonged to the tiny minority of TV personalities not in lockstep with the new administration what would I focus on? I suppose I would first and foremost express my concern for my weakest neighbors, unborn children, who since the ascent to power of a relentlessly “pro-choice” new President are in graver danger than ever.

But guess what? The fate of millions of babies is far from being the top hot-button issue of Obama’s opponents in the media. Instead they fluster about endangered Second Amendment rights. I admit that as a foreigner I see this insistence on the right to bear arms as an American idiosyncrasy comparable to the Chinese obsession with sucking ducks’ feet. Thus insensitive to this particular topic, I will not opine about it other than to say that it must surely be secondary to an unborn infant’s right to live.

 

Then there is the media’s recurring whine about how bad everybody else is, particularly Mexico, which is habitually portrayed as being unwilling or incompetent to get its gang violence under control, a menace now spilling across the border into the United States.

Now, I accept that some of these media complaints are valid, but so is surely the Mexican rejoinder that if it weren’t for junkies and narcotics dealers in the U.S., Mexican drug gangs would see little merit in killing innocent people and each other down there. Is America, may I ask, not a market-driven society?

Theologically speaking, it seems to me that an old German axiom I learned in boarding school applies here: “How about first sweeping under your own bed?” Speaking as a Lutheran, this too should actually count as a premier act of neighborly love, and therefore a fulfillment of a divine vocation.

Thinking about drug violence, I always wondered about Singapore, a highly developed state without a narcotics problem. Singapore, you see, hangs drug dealers. Singapore is of course an overwhelmingly Chinese city with exotic tastes. Its people do suck ducks’ feet, and they do hang criminals. Could we not learn something from their strange habits, excepting perhaps the more eccentric features of their diet?

I am not 100 percent in favor of capital punishment, especially when not swiftly and justly applied. So let me posit an alternative, which might sound a little harsh but still might qualify as a Lutheran course of loving action.

Way up to the Northwest of this continent, the United States possesses a chain of islands. They are called the Aleutians, whence nobody will ever be able to swim away from. They could be a perfect choice as a latter-day American Australia where you ship people you do not want to have a near your children.

So here’s the deal: We entice the tiny Aleut population with attractive real estate offers to move to friendlier climes, perhaps even to warm Arizona or New Mexico. Then everybody in possession of more than 5 grams of heroin or cocaine is paid a one-way fare to one or the other of those chilly islands.

There, heavily armed instructors will teach drug pushers how to build igloos, kill seals with bows and arrows, harvest the beasts’ blubber, and raise vegetables hydroponically. Then the new settlers will be left to cope with their new environment. Occasionally a C-130 aircraft will fly overhead, dropping “C” rations for nutritional change and pharmaceuticals to be applied by expatriates with medical degrees, of which there will doubtless be some among the new Aleutian residents.

Here is the charm of my proposal: Once housed in the Aleutian Islands, drug peddlers will never again be able to travel to America’s southern border and trade with Mexican drug lords. There will be peace. And who knows? This arrangement could even produce political benefits of the sort theologians must normally remain silent about:  NAFTA’s salvation could actually come from an icy island where drug dealers and junkies snuggle up in igloos enjoying the blubber of slain seals.

Hawking the Holy Spirit’s Tool

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

“The Holy Spirit dignifies music as an implement for His ministry,” said Martin Luther, who also ranked music next to the Word of God as “the mistress and ruler directing the movements of man’s heart.”

Luther was himself an accomplished musician, and no church body has lived up to the Reformer’s artistic insights more robustly than the one bearing his name.

It is not difficult to recognize music as a tool of the Holy Spirit when we listen, for example, to Bach’s chorales, cantatas and oratorios. Nathan Søderblom, the former Lutheran archbishop of Sweden, called Bach’s St. Matthew Passion the fifth evangelist.

Even more astounding, though, is the faith-building power of Bach’s most abstract works, such as the “Art of the Fugue.” The late Canon Arthur Peacocke, a noted biologist and Anglican clergyman, suggested that the Holy Spirit Himself had dictated this masterpiece directly into Bach’s plume.

Moreover, Bach’s music -- ranging from the most “religious” to the most conceptual – is known to have brought many Japanese and other Asians to Christ. Masaki Yasuda, a former Japanese atheist, first discovered his interest in Christianity when he heard Canadian pianist Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Yasuda is now a Jesuit priest and teaches systematic theology at Tokyo’s Sophia University.

When German and Scandinavian Lutherans found refuge in the United States, they brought with them their knowledge of music’s role as the Holy Spirit’s tool. They trained their young musically at home and in denominational schools and universities quite unlike any other Christian denomination. 

And finally faithful Lutherans – individuals, not church bureaucrats – gave America a magnificent gift; they added a classical FM station to KFUO, which is globally revered as the world’s oldest Christian radio.

For 61 years KFUO-FM’s Classic99 has brought joy to Christian and non-Christian music lovers alike well beyond the city limits of St. Louis, where it is beloved. It became living proof that the LCMS, in addition to possessing wonderful theological treasures, ranks among the more civilized and cultured church bodies.

Classic99 won awards; it made profit. It would be futile to speculate over its missionary accomplishments. But it is safe to assume that its musical broadcasts have triggered many a nonbeliever’s interest in the Christian faith, just as Bach’s and other Christian composers’ music has done in Japan and other parts of Asia.

It is one of the incomprehensible tragedies of American Lutheranism that many of its practitioners, theologians included, have developed tin ears; that they have turned deaf to music’s function as the Holy Spirit’s device. There even exists one large Lutheran congregation in St. Louis that proudly announces, “In this church you will never hear the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

Now we learn the devastating news that the Board of Directors of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has authorized the sale of KFUO-FM; Luther would shout: “You are hawking the Holy Spirit’s tool!”

Significantly, this decision coincides with deepening LCMS worries over the cost of an evangelization project aimed at reaching 100 million hitherto uncommitted people with the Gospel by the Reformation’s Qincentenary in 2017.

The Christian Church teaches that faith, like life, is a gift from the Holy Spirit.  This means that while having one of His implements hawked away, the Holy Spirit seems to have been assigned a production goal, much like decades ago the workers of the Soviet Union.

The most celebrated among these workers was Alexey Stakhanov, a Soviet miner and jackhammer operator. Joseph Stalin’s propagandists glorified Stakhanov (1906-1977) as a “hero of labor” for constantly exceeding production targets set by the Politburo. Stakhanov’s greatest accomplishment, we were told, was mining single-handedly 227 metric tons of coal in one single shift.

Here we face a troubling question: Has the Holy Spirit suddenly become a Lutheran Stakhanov while being deprived of one of his essential tools? If so, does this not amount to mocking the Third Person of the Trinity?

This brings to mind Christ’s warning: “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (Matthew 12,31).

Christian Charity, the Nazis’ Final Foe

What the Tom Cruise film does not explain – A 1,000-page footnote to “Valkyrie”/By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the Feb. 09 issue of The Atlantic Times, with my original headline)

Bryan Singer’s film “Valkyrie” starring Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who tried to kill Hitler, requires footnotes: What motivated Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, and what was the Nazis’ ultimate goal? A new, definitive biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler provides an answer.

“There’s no doubt about Himmler’s anticommunism and anti-Semitism; he wiped out both groups mercilessly,” writes historian Peter Longerich, “but basically he was much more engrossed with Christianity. The conflict with the Christian world, in which he grew up, was of truly existential significance to him.”

According to Longerich, Himmler considered it his life’s calling to coalesce the fight against Christians with his idea of resurrecting the lost world of (pagan) Germania. While anti-Semitism and anticommunism were core elements of Hitler’s entire National Socialist movement, de-Christianization linked to re-Germanization “was the quintessential task of the SS in Himmler’s mind,” Longerich writes in his 1,000-word tome (Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler, Biographie. Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2008; 275).

Longerich teaches modern German history at London University’s Royal Holloway College, where he also directs the Holocaust Research Center. His spine-chilling and magnificently documented account of the SS leader’s life and worldview – a full quarter of this book consists of endnotes – has so far only been published in German, but will hopefully appear in English before long. This article is not meant to be a review of Longerich’s scholarly masterpiece. It is quoted here merely in support of the assertion that National Socialism’ thrust was aimed against the entire Judeo-Christian culture, a fact much questioned by some contemporary American scholars such as Richard Steigmann-Gall who portrayed Nazism as an outgrowth of Christianity. Himmler saw Christianity as an “alien, Asiatic” imposition on the Germanic world.

By stressing Himmler’s anti-Christian fixation, Longerich, a German citizen, substantiates a key statement by Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig and civilian mastermind of the German resistance. As far back as in 1937, Goerdeler deposited his “political testament” with Friedrich Krause, a Leipzig editor who had fled to New York. In this document, Goerdeler warned that Hitler was determined to destroy first the Jews and then the Christians, as this writer has shown (q.v., Siemon-Netto, Uwe. The Fabricated Luther, Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths, second edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007; 116).

This forewarning was Goerdeler’s essential message as he traveled tirelessly to Western capitals before World War II urging governments not to give in to Hitler’s demands. “Hitler is the incarnation of evil,” he told  British envoy Arthur Primrose Young. “The man who has enunciated the doctrine of the totality of the party … cannot tolerate another God beside him … Judaism has inflamed his hatred with its doctrine of the one God who affects man’s entire life with his laws and commandments. Next, (Hitler’s) hatred will turn on the Christian religion. Humility and charity render him rabid ... To (Hitler) the notion that man as a child of God is directly connected to (God) is a frightening heresy ... To the extent that in his appalling lack of education he knows Christianity at all, Hitler puts himself in the place of Christ.”

Himmler too loathed the Christian virtue of neighborly love, Longerich reports: “The principle of Christian compassion stands in the way of his (Himmler’s) insistence on an uncompromising treatment of ‘sub-humans.’” Himmler strove to “replace Christian principles with Germanic virtues, such as toughness, as a precondition to persevere in the struggle against sub-humans and win the future.” He added, “We live in the era of the ultimate showdown with Christianity” (280).

Carl Goerdeler (1884-1945) would have become chancellor of post-Nazi Germany had the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 succeeded. Instead he was hanged on Feb. 2, 1944. Goerdeler’s opposition against the Nazis began well before Hitler took over Germany in 1933. In the film, “Valkyrie,” Goerdeler’s was the least truthfully developed character, as scriptwriter Christopher McQuarrie admitted in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading national daily.

The reason for Goerdeler’s portrayal as Stauffenberg’s antagonist within the resistance was chiefly dramaturgic, McQuarrie explained: “Without conflict you have no drama.” For theological, philosophical, and practical reasons Goerdeler was initially opposed to this and all previous schemes to kill Hitler. He wanted the military to arrest the dictator instead and have him tried for treason before a German court; this way, he thought, the Nazis’ crimes would be laid bare before a horrified German public.

Interviewed by The Atlantic Times, Goerdeler’s daughter Marianne Meyer-Krahmer related, “My father counseled the generals not to be duped by Germany’s early victories in the war. He told them: ‘What good is your victory if the vanquished nations are being treated so shamelessly?’”

A film is arguably not the right medium for a theological and moral discourse concerning the legitimacy of tyrannicide, which is really what the disagreement between Goerdeler and the anti-Nazi military men was all about. But like Goerdeler, senior officers felt shame over their nation’s war crimes, as Bryan Singer’s film shows. And it was this sense of shame that led them to plot against Hitler’s life not just towards the end of the war but also on several previous occasions.

“It was in reaction to reports about the mass murder of Jews… that Stauffenberg first mentioned the need for Hitler’s overthrow, that was in April of 1942,” historian Peter Hoffmann of McGill University in Montreal told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; at about the same time, Gen. Henning von Tresckow argued that unless the military killed Hitler, “we ourselves will become accomplices” (in the murder of the Jews). Hoffmann, the premier specialist on the German Resistance, counseled “Valkyrie” scriptwriters McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander free of charge.

Given these historical facts it seems scandalous that in their reviews of “Valkyrie” some prominent U.S. film critics labeled Stauffenberg and his co-plotters “Nazi” officers, and mocked these men who ended their lives before a firing squad or on meat hooks for having done too little too late –and too incompetently. “Stauffenberg was never a Nazi!” Hoffmann insisted, pointing out that as a career officer, he was formally prohibited to engage in any kind of political activity under the Weimar Republic’s 1921 national defense act (which is not to say that members of the Wehrmacht had not also participated in war crimes).

“Most of the men involved in the 1944 plot were committed Christians,” Smith College historian Klemens von Klemperer, another leading expert on the German resistance, told this writer more than two decades ago. Some were ardent Roman Catholics like Stauffenberg, others Protestants like Carl Goerdeler, whose self-proclaimed motto was “omnia restaurare in Christo” (restoring everything in Christ).

Over half a century ago, historian Gerhard Ritter wrote a stirring account of Goerdeler’s inner turmoil over how to depose Hitler in a manner commensurate with his Christian beliefs and his political philosophy rooted in the thought of Baron Karl vom und zum Stein, the celebrated 18^th and 19^th-century Prussian statesman, whom Goerdeler and many of his co-conspirators endeavored to emulate. Like vom Stein, Goerdeler was motivated by a “high degree of faith in the … power of reason, chiefly moral reason,” Ritter wrote (Ritter, Gerhard. The German Resistance: Carl Goerdeler’s Struggle against Tyranny. New York: Praeger, 1958; 357 pp.).

In “Vakyrie” and in some historical accounts, Goerdeler was ridiculed for his “mania for drawing up … lists for a post-Hitler Germany, (which) proved his undoing” (q.v., Wistrich, Robert. Who’s Who in Nazi Germany. New York: MacMillan, 1982; 101). But this was very much in line with Lutheran thought. Martin Luther’s said, “When the coachman has lost his mind he must be removed from the driver’s seat.” But before that, he cautioned, a qualified replacement must be found lest chaos ensue.

With this mind, Goerdeler began already early in the Nazi era to compile elaborate lists of men and women qualified to assume power immediately after Hitler’s removal; they included the names of potential candidates for chief of state all the way down to the level of county executive and local police chief.

A sophisticated stage play rather than a feature film would probably be the most appropriate artistic forum to explain the complex historical figure of Carl Goerdeler. Still, Bryan Singer managed drive home one significant point made by one of the plotters early in his film. In the book of Genesis, God promised to spare Sodom if ten righteous men were to be found in that depraved place (Genesis 1:32). Sodom could not come up with those ten righteous men; Germany did. This, to Singer’s credit, “Operation Valkyrie” has made abundantly clear.

 

Whining your way to the White House

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

So now Vicki Gene Robinson, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, has finally managed to whine his way into some role at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. For the sake of an argument, let’s forget, if only one could, that he is openly homosexual; let’s forget, of only one could, that he is the cause of a tragic schism in the world’s Anglican community; let’s forget, if only one could, that he had dumped his wife and later went to  live with a male lover, whom he “married” in a civil ceremony.

Let’s forget, if only one could, that three months ago he led a retreat for homosexual Catholic priests urging them to push for the ordination of women in the Church of Rome, thus meddling in its affairs and offending the members of the largest Christian Church body in the United States, as the Catholic League’s feisty president Bill Donohue has rightly pointed out.

Let’s forget all that and argue, if only one could, that we are all sinners; so why not let this particular sinner give the invocation at the opening event of the Inaugural Week activities?

Well, by whining over President-elect Obama’s choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the actual inaugural invocation Robinson made it clear why one should be appalled by the fact that this “bishop” should play any spiritual part in these events. "It's important for any minority to see themselves represented in some way," he told an interviewer of the Concord Monitor. "Whether it be a racial minority, an ethnic minority or, in our case, a sexual minority. Just seeing someone like you up front matters."

So it’s the “Me” that matters here, or, if you will, the “We,” or, more precisely, the recognition of people’s desires is important, regardless of whether or not they are an abomination in God’s eyes.

It just shows the deplorable confusion over the relationship between the secular and the spiritual realms in this country that no nationwide outcry, even among Lutherans, followed this cleric’s disgraceful comportment.

Robinson is a bishop, an “overseer” in the Episcopal Church. Yet he seems to be oblivious of the fact that in an inaugural prayer a minister must spare his listeners vile speculations about the inner workings of his cassock; no, his sole task is to ask for God’s blessing on the new President who, like all rulers, owes his authority to God.

Atlantic Times Feature Jan. 2009

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Bliss before they Blitzed us Kids

An Anglo-German couple's childhood memories of the last balmy moments of peace – and of the war that followed

 By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the January 2009 issue of The Atlantic Times)

 Threescore plus ten years ago, World War II broke out in Europe. Our correspondent, a German, and his English wife have retained memories of the start of this cataclysmic event that destroyed their homes and brought turmoil to their childhoods. Some of their experiences were amazingly similar.

  On the balmy day the war began, I was barely three years old, a toddler dressed in a white suit and shirt with a frilly collar, the "Sunday best" of some bourgeois kids in Leipzig at that time. Our summer holidays at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast (now Świnoujście in Poland) lay behind us. I remember riding along the beach on the shoulders of a Baptist minister from London, Revd. William A. Ashby, who had befriended my family while on a last-minute goodwill mission through Germany.

 In the afternoon of September 3, 1939, coffee and cheesecake were served on the loggia of our apartment in the center of Leipzig. Grimfaced, my father emerged from his study announcing, "We are at war -- I just heard it on the BBC." My mother, 18 years younger than he, pointed to the vase in front of her and chirped, "Ach, Karl-Heinz, as long as we still have such beautiful flowers…"

 My father shook his head gravely. He could not see the flowers. He was blind. As an 18-year old officer cadet he had lost his eyesight in combat during World War I in France but managed to study law and earn his doctorate after his release from military hospital.

  I was sent off to change into street clothes and go downstairs with my nanny to play with my pedal car. It was as red as a fire engine. Honking my horn, I stared at the sky wondering when the British airplanes might show up. They came four years later.

 At about the same time, Gillian Mary Ackers, a brown-haired English girl, honked the horn of her burgundy-red pedal car on the sidewalks of Brownell Avenue in Southampton, 750 miles to the west of Leipzig. Much later we found out that we had more in common than our favorite toys. My mother was a professional singer with a preference for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Gillian's mother too loved Bach; she was a piano teacher.

  Suddenly, Gillian's mother, Ethel, came storming out of the house. "War!" she shouted and yanked her weeping girl inside. Unlike my mother, the Ackers they did not take comfort at the sight of flowers. Gillian's father, Sidney, was the catering manager at the nearby Folland's Aicraft plant. He knew what was coming. His employers had long been preparing for war; they built flying ships and later "Folland's Frightful," a monoplane, for the military.

  When I went upstairs Mother had the bathtub filled to the rim with water, just in case English bombers might come that night. Over in Southampton, meanwhile, the Ackers family also prepared for the foe's arrival. Shortly after war had been declared, an air raid shelter was dug in their garden. "It was a hole in the ground, with bunk beds on a dank floor, and covered by corrugated iron," Gillian says today.

 In Leipzig's city center, we too had bunk beds waiting for us -- were in the basement, halfway between the potato and coal compartments. It was there that I spent my last hours on Sophienplatz 6, before green flames caused by phosphor bombs consumed this birthplace of mine; but that was much later.

 First, though, it was Gillian's turn to be blitzed. War to us in Leipzig meant the disappearance of neighbors for the time being. I was too young to have witnessed the flight or arrest of Jewish friends or relatives. Other than learning that the fathers and older brothers of my playmates were wounded or killed at the front, World War II still seemed at first far away.

  Not so for Gillian. In June of 1940, she and her father, by now a Territorial Army captain, walked along the hilly banks above the Solent, a stretch of sea separating Southampton from the Isle of Wight. "We watched hundreds of vessels, ranging from yachts and trawlers to large Naval craft, clogging the Solent. They brought British soldiers home after they were driven from the Continent in the Battle of Dunkirk," she recalls.

 Soon the port city of Southampton became the first target of the German blitzkrieg. In one of the first of altogether 1,500 alarms in Southampton, the Ackers' home on Brownell Avenue was hit. They decided to evacuate Gillian to relatives in the United States.

  This plan proved short-lived, according to Gillian: "Dressed in my navy blue school uniform, I stood with other kids on the platform of Southampton Station waiting for the boat train to take us to the docks. Around our necks we wore little folders containing our documents. Suddenly, my father raced up to me, grabbed my by my arm and said, 'No, I will not let you go. We'll either live together or die together.'"

  Had he not prevented her departure, Gillian and I would have never met. A German torpedo hit the steamer that was meant to take her to America. All children on board drowned.

"We'll either live together or die together" – I heard the same words later when it was my turn to be evacuated at the height of the Allied air war on Leipzig. I was sent to a parsonage in the countryside, where my host was a fanatical Nazi who beat me up daily for using "unpatriotic jargon," such as "trottoir" for sidewalk or "serviette" for napkin, as was the bourgeois custom in Leipzig, a cosmopolitan city. The Nazis had invented new, Germanic words for such things. For example, a napkin transmuted into the ludicrous "Mundtuch," meaning mouth-cloth.

"We'll live together or die together," decreed my grandmother in her outrage when, during a visit to her Leipzig apartment, I told her of my parsonage experiences. She was the family's matriarch; my parents had moved in with her after losing our home on Sophienplatz 6 during a massive British bombardment on December 4, 1943.

  I remember this attack so well as if it had happened yesterday. No sooner did the sirens stop wailing than the bombs fell. We grabbed the suitcases waiting in our corridor for this event, and sought refuge among our potatoes and coals. Next the house was in flames. My mother told me to guide my blind father to Granny's home while she herself tried to douse the fire, a futile exercise given that you can't fight phosphor with water.

 Outside, the streets were covered with puddles of burning phosphor. Many neighboring apartment houses were burning, their windows literally spitting fire up into the night sky.

  I was seven then, a kid with a warped mind perhaps, because I remember laughing dementedly as I hopped, with my eyeless father grasping my right upper arm, over phosphor-green fires that seemed everywhere. "Spring', Vati, spring' weit (jump, Daddy, jump far!)," I would instruct him as we ran past my burning school and his burning courthouse to my grandmother's safe kitchen where she fixed us potato pancakes whose taste my palate would never forget.

  That afternoon, incongruously, four Frenchmen carried my unconscious mother and our family Bible to Granny's home. They were forced laborers allowed to move freely through the city. Why did these men risk their lives running up our burning staircase to rescue an "enemy woman" -- my mother -- whom they discovered sitting under her Blüthner grand piano with the Bible in her lap? How come they knew my grandmother's address? And what made them return the following day to make sure my mother was well?

 I could speculate about the answers, but this would be a story for another day. 

Implausible things happen in times of war, including to children, as Gillian and I are here to report. We met in London and married in New York 46 years ago, long after the war began and ended. Now that we are in our seventies, we often reflect on our amazing survival, and laugh at some of our recollections, especially Sidney Ackers' first words when Gillian introduced me to him.

  "The only good German is a dead German," he jested. Then he embraced me, and from that moment on treated me like a true father. In truth, Sidney Ackers was incapable of malice. "Throughout the war," Gillian remembered, "no spiteful word was ever spoken in our family about Germans as people." In the same spirit, my father consistently praised Winston Churchill in the privacy of our home as the greatest living statesman, despite the daily allied bombing. Like Gillian, I was explicitly taught not to hate "the enemy."

  We children witnessing a fratricidal war imposed on us learned to perceive it much more subtly than many "experts" of later birth. Sidney Ackers, my father-in-law, was once a merchant mariner. Before he died, this wonderful man asked to have his ashes deposited in his favorite body of water, the North Sea, halfway between England and Germany. And this is where we scattered his remains, from the lower deck of the Harwich-Hamburg ferry.

 

Bonhoeffer paraphrased after the slaughter of 48 million babies

Only he who cries out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chants

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Only he who cries out for unborn babies may also sing Amazing Grace

(Uwe Siemon-Netto's contemporary paraphrase)