The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life

Amish Ascendance in Advent

Unfazed by recession, healthcare issues or pre-Christmas hullabaloo, a faithful German-speaking minority prospers and grows in the U.S.

(From the December 2008 issue of The Atlantic Times)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Every 20 years, the Amish population in the U.S. doubles in size. 250,000 of these fervent Christians speaking a quaint German dialect have settled in 28 U.S. states. Our author visited the Amish in eastern Illinois and found that Christmas trees are as alien to them as cars.

There was a dead doe dangling from a tree next to one of the 20 ponds of Bishop Vernon Raber’s “Shady Lane Fish Farm.” His son, Caleb, had culled it with his bow and arrow early that morning. It might finish on the Rabers’ dinner table at Christmas -- or not. “This is unimportant,” Raber, 48, told me. “We don’t celebrate Christmas the way you do. We have a meal, sing and pray. But we don’t assemble around a tree.” They would not perpetuate a custom rooted in the pagan past of Germanic tribesmen. In Raber’s congregation they don’t even give each other Christmas presents, although one member, Joseph Beachy, crafts such gifts, and one of Raber’s brothers sells them in his store.

It’s not that these descendants of radical Protestants from Germany and Switzerland are “in your face” penny-wise. Miriam Raber served us a copious dinner of venison stew in the family’s gas-lighted and sprawling house; gas-lighted because the Amish prefer to remain free of “the world’s” utility services; and sprawling because each abode must be large enough to accommodate a congregation of more than 100 for Sunday service. The Amish don’t have sanctuaries; their worship rotates from home to home.

I found them to be a cheery group open even to my zany Saxon sense of humor. Raber and I drove past a coreligionist’s place. There too was a dead doe, but this one had been ineptly shot und therefore hung head-up from a bulldozer, with the rope strung around its neck. I quipped, “This is how they execute adulterers in Iran.” The bishop roared with laughter: “You do have some mouth on you!” Of course he had never seen images of hangings in the Middle East; the Amish don’t watch television but receive their news by telephone; this much dependency on utilities is permissible.

This was the hunting season in game-rich Crawford County, Ill., also known as “little Arabia” because of its hundreds of oil wells. Many of these belong to the Amish, who happily use their natural gas to turn their pumps and generators, but have contracted outside companies to exploit the petroleum. Raber owns five such wells. As an aficionado of divinely ordained contradictions, I thought it hilarious that these of all people, these relics of the 16th century who have staunchly shunned our severely troubled petroleum-based modernity, should have emerged as chance oil magnates all of a sudden.

The largely self-sufficient Amish observe modernity’s present economic calamity with calm. Their own larders are full. This fall, Raber’s family had shot 12 does, and his congregation had slaughtered 30 hogs and made more than 1,000 sausages for the winter. Meanwhile their women looking vaguely like the Lutheran deaconesses of my youth were busy bottling pumpkins from their gardens.

It seems, then, that if you are looking for an alternative to the current crisis, go Amish, provided you put up with their ground rules: no tobacco, booze, sex before and outside marriage, dancing, schmoozing or horseless carriages. On the other hand, be prepared for good fellowship, one-hour sermons and spine-chilling hymns written by their forebears in the dungeons of a fortress near Passau on the Danube River. The Amish don’t carry health insurance; they don’t pay into Social Security, for such schemes would fly in the face of the biblical injunction: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

“It works,” said Raber, who like all Amish ministers has had no formal theological training, and whom his church members had elected bishop for life by drawing lots from a hymnal. “Five of our members just underwent surgeries costing a total of $90,000. So a deacon wrote a few letters, and soon most medical bills were paid.” Raber added with a twinkle, “This is cheaper than health insurance isn’t it?” If his fledgling congregation of 36 married couples and 75 children or adolescents cannot cover the cost other Amish groups will chip in.
It’s only a dozen years since Raber’s people settled in Crawford County whose main town, Robinson, has one claim to fame: It is the birthplace of James Jones, the author of “From Here to Eternity.” They came from Ohio as part of an ever-expanding movement to spread across America to be witnesses to their faith by the way they live.

The Amish are part of the Anabaptist branch of Protestantism, which does not christen babies but only adolescents or adults. There are many different types of Anabaptists in the U.S. However, by the standards of Donald Kraybill, a leading expert on this subject, only “the ones with horses and buggies” rate as true Amish, and they are the ones experiencing an astounding growth since the early 20th century – from 10,000 in 1910 to nearly one quarter of a million today.

The main reason for this increase are their large families with seven and more children. Slowly, however, Christians from other traditions join their faith. Vernon Raber’s congregation includes two young women whose parents had converted from Roman Catholicism.

Like other denominations, the Amish are torn by schisms and quarrels. The “Old Order Amish,” chiefly farmers who will not use motorized vehicles, are not in communion with the “New Order Amish,” who pursue a wider variety of vocations and will drive tractors for some chores, such as carting the pews for Sunday services from one home to another. “We are more modern but more moral than the Old Order Amish,” said Raber, a New Order man. “We don’t smoke, we don’t drink alcohol.” Then again, Old Order, New Order, even among these groups there are countless splits, making it hard for outsiders to keep track.

This writer is a dyed-in-the-wool Lutheran. However, as one who once shared classrooms with 80 other boys during and after World War II, and who has witnessed the public education misery in large American cities, I was overcome with envy when Raber took me to his congregation’s school.
There were three bright classrooms with no more than eight kids each. There was Wanita Yoder, a young teacher dressed in a home-sewn light-green dress, moving from desk to desk. She knelt next to children to be at eyelevel with them while explaining intricate points of German, an antiquated version of my mother tongue, in which the Amish still sing, pray and, with English phrases mixed in, communicate.

The Amish keep their kids at school for only eight years to teach them English, German, arithmetic, reading, elegant handwriting, and the Bible; even their teachers have no higher education. But where else have you ever seen teachers kneeling – yes kneeling -- next to a child in class? Nowhere else have I seen happier, trimmer and healthier looking boys and girls. One more thing: having just lived through an election campaign filled with media vulgarity, the apolitical Amish way of life (they do not vote) seemed weirdly attractive to me, even though I could probably never be an Amishman myself.

On Sunday, buggy after buggy pulled up at Bishop Raber’s 140-acre property where fish are bred to be shipped in tanks to places as far away as New York and Toronto to be eventually caught by sports fishermen. Bearded men in black suits with hooks and eyes instead of buttons and holes piled into his basement, “saluting one another with a holy kiss” (Romans 16:16) on the lip. They took their places on benches without backrests to the left facing the makeshift lectern. Then the women and girls came down from the first floor, and sat down on the other side.

A deep male voice intoned the first word of the Anabaptist hymns “O Herre, in deinem Thron” (O Lord, in your throne); the others fell in powerfully a cappella in harmony, slowly, hauntingly, for 22 stanzas. I felt jettisoned back to that Passau dungeon, where early Anabaptists had created these beautiful songs of praise during five years of darkness.

There followed another hymn and then a one-hour sermon, partly in dialectical German, partly in English, on Psalm 107, then yet another hymn; then everybody knelt on the concrete floor for prayer. Another preacher gave a 90-minute homily, entirely in dialectical German, on the Book of Daniel, which I only managed to follow because I held the revised version of Luther’s Bible translation in my hand.

Suddenly, the 16th century met the 21st. Bishop Raber read the 19th chapter of the Gospel of Luke about the Jericho tax collector Zacchaeus. I repeated the last eight verses in High German, causing consternation among the worshipers. Raber’s text spoke of a “den of murderers” (Luke 16:46), mine of a “den of thieves,” though both translations were labeled as Luther’s. In the end we agreed that the Lord’s Temple should be neither; I truth, Luther’s unrevised translation of this verse from Greek was simply flawed.

Bountiful amounts of food were served after the blessing. I left curiously comforted by the certainty that these delightful strangers will continue to be in ascendance. As Raber said in bidding me farewell: “Some of our members are now building homes already wired for electricity, not because they will use it but because they know that one day they must sell their houses to outsiders. That day will come before long when we send them out to form new congregations far away.”

According to Kraybill, the ever-expanding Amish have coined a poignant jest of the paradox that they themselves will not drive cars but happily hire taxis to be driven onward: “If we keep growing at this rate, soon half the world will be Amish, and the other half will be taxi drivers.”

Unfazed by recession, healthcare issues or pre-Christmas hullabaloo, a faithful German-speaking minority prospers and grows in the U.S.

(From the December 2008 issue of The Atlantic Times)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Every 20 years, the Amish population in the U.S. doubles in size. 250,000 of these fervent Christians speaking a quaint German dialect have settled in 28 U.S. states. Our author visited the Amish in eastern Illinois and found that Christmas trees are as alien to them as cars.

There was a dead doe dangling from a tree next to one of the 20 ponds of Bishop Vernon Raber’s “Shady Lane Fish Farm.” His son, Caleb, had culled it with his bow and arrow early that morning. It might finish on the Rabers’ dinner table at Christmas -- or not. “This is unimportant,” Raber, 48, told me. “We don’t celebrate Christmas the way you do. We have a meal, sing and pray. But we don’t assemble around a tree.” They would not perpetuate a custom rooted in the pagan past of Germanic tribesmen. In Raber’s congregation they don’t even give each other Christmas presents, although one member, Joseph Beachy, crafts such gifts, and one of Raber’s brothers sells them in his store.

It’s not that these descendants of radical Protestants from Germany and Switzerland are “in your face” penny-wise. Miriam Raber served us a copious dinner of venison stew in the family’s gas-lighted and sprawling house; gas-lighted because the Amish prefer to remain free of “the world’s” utility services; and sprawling because each abode must be large enough to accommodate a congregation of more than 100 for Sunday service. The Amish don’t have sanctuaries; their worship rotates from home to home.

I found them to be a cheery group open even to my zany Saxon sense of humor. Raber and I drove past a coreligionist’s place. There too was a dead doe, but this one had been ineptly shot und therefore hung head-up from a bulldozer, with the rope strung around its neck. I quipped, “This is how they execute adulterers in Iran.” The bishop roared with laughter: “You do have some mouth on you!” Of course he had never seen images of hangings in the Middle East; the Amish don’t watch television but receive their news by telephone; this much dependency on utilities is permissible.

This was the hunting season in game-rich Crawford County, Ill., also known as “little Arabia” because of its hundreds of oil wells. Many of these belong to the Amish, who happily use their natural gas to turn their pumps and generators, but have contracted outside companies to exploit the petroleum. Raber owns five such wells. As an aficionado of divinely ordained contradictions, I thought it hilarious that these of all people, these relics of the 16th century who have staunchly shunned our severely troubled petroleum-based modernity, should have emerged as chance oil magnates all of a sudden.

The largely self-sufficient Amish observe modernity’s present economic calamity with calm. Their own larders are full. This fall, Raber’s family had shot 12 does, and his congregation had slaughtered 30 hogs and made more than 1,000 sausages for the winter. Meanwhile their women looking vaguely like the Lutheran deaconesses of my youth were busy bottling pumpkins from their gardens.

It seems, then, that if you are looking for an alternative to the current crisis, go Amish, provided you put up with their ground rules: no tobacco, booze, sex before and outside marriage, dancing, schmoozing or horseless carriages. On the other hand, be prepared for good fellowship, one-hour sermons and spine-chilling hymns written by their forebears in the dungeons of a fortress near Passau on the Danube River. The Amish don’t carry health insurance; they don’t pay into Social Security, for such schemes would fly in the face of the biblical injunction: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

“It works,” said Raber, who like all Amish ministers has had no formal theological training, and whom his church members had elected bishop for life by drawing lots from a hymnal. “Five of our members just underwent surgeries costing a total of $90,000. So a deacon wrote a few letters, and soon most medical bills were paid.” Raber added with a twinkle, “This is cheaper than health insurance isn’t it?” If his fledgling congregation of 36 married couples and 75 children or adolescents cannot cover the cost other Amish groups will chip in.
It’s only a dozen years since Raber’s people settled in Crawford County whose main town, Robinson, has one claim to fame: It is the birthplace of James Jones, the author of “From Here to Eternity.” They came from Ohio as part of an ever-expanding movement to spread across America to be witnesses to their faith by the way they live.

The Amish are part of the Anabaptist branch of Protestantism, which does not christen babies but only adolescents or adults. There are many different types of Anabaptists in the U.S. However, by the standards of Donald Kraybill, a leading expert on this subject, only “the ones with horses and buggies” rate as true Amish, and they are the ones experiencing an astounding growth since the early 20th century – from 10,000 in 1910 to nearly one quarter of a million today.

The main reason for this increase are their large families with seven and more children. Slowly, however, Christians from other traditions join their faith. Vernon Raber’s congregation includes two young women whose parents had converted from Roman Catholicism.

Like other denominations, the Amish are torn by schisms and quarrels. The “Old Order Amish,” chiefly farmers who will not use motorized vehicles, are not in communion with the “New Order Amish,” who pursue a wider variety of vocations and will drive tractors for some chores, such as carting the pews for Sunday services from one home to another. “We are more modern but more moral than the Old Order Amish,” said Raber, a New Order man. “We don’t smoke, we don’t drink alcohol.” Then again, Old Order, New Order, even among these groups there are countless splits, making it hard for outsiders to keep track.

This writer is a dyed-in-the-wool Lutheran. However, as one who once shared classrooms with 80 other boys during and after World War II, and who has witnessed the public education misery in large American cities, I was overcome with envy when Raber took me to his congregation’s school.
There were three bright classrooms with no more than eight kids each. There was Wanita Yoder, a young teacher dressed in a home-sewn light-green dress, moving from desk to desk. She knelt next to children to be at eyelevel with them while explaining intricate points of German, an antiquated version of my mother tongue, in which the Amish still sing, pray and, with English phrases mixed in, communicate.

The Amish keep their kids at school for only eight years to teach them English, German, arithmetic, reading, elegant handwriting, and the Bible; even their teachers have no higher education. But where else have you ever seen teachers kneeling – yes kneeling -- next to a child in class? Nowhere else have I seen happier, trimmer and healthier looking boys and girls. One more thing: having just lived through an election campaign filled with media vulgarity, the apolitical Amish way of life (they do not vote) seemed weirdly attractive to me, even though I could probably never be an Amishman myself.

On Sunday, buggy after buggy pulled up at Bishop Raber’s 140-acre property where fish are bred to be shipped in tanks to places as far away as New York and Toronto to be eventually caught by sports fishermen. Bearded men in black suits with hooks and eyes instead of buttons and holes piled into his basement, “saluting one another with a holy kiss” (Romans 16:16) on the lip. They took their places on benches without backrests to the left facing the makeshift lectern. Then the women and girls came down from the first floor, and sat down on the other side.

A deep male voice intoned the first word of the Anabaptist hymns “O Herre, in deinem Thron” (O Lord, in your throne); the others fell in powerfully a cappella in harmony, slowly, hauntingly, for 22 stanzas. I felt jettisoned back to that Passau dungeon, where early Anabaptists had created these beautiful songs of praise during five years of darkness.

There followed another hymn and then a one-hour sermon, partly in dialectical German, partly in English, on Psalm 107, then yet another hymn; then everybody knelt on the concrete floor for prayer. Another preacher gave a 90-minute homily, entirely in dialectical German, on the Book of Daniel, which I only managed to follow because I held the revised version of Luther’s Bible translation in my hand.

Suddenly, the 16th century met the 21st. Bishop Raber read the 19th chapter of the Gospel of Luke about the Jericho tax collector Zacchaeus. I repeated the last eight verses in High German, causing consternation among the worshipers. Raber’s text spoke of a “den of murderers” (Luke 16:46), mine of a “den of thieves,” though both translations were labeled as Luther’s. In the end we agreed that the Lord’s Temple should be neither; I truth, Luther’s unrevised translation of this verse from Greek was simply flawed.

Bountiful amounts of food were served after the blessing. I left curiously comforted by the certainty that these delightful strangers will continue to be in ascendance. As Raber said in bidding me farewell: “Some of our members are now building homes already wired for electricity, not because they will use it but because they know that one day they must sell their houses to outsiders. That day will come before long when we send them out to form new congregations far away.”

According to Kraybill, the ever-expanding Amish have coined a poignant jest of the paradox that they themselves will not drive cars but happily hire taxis to be driven onward: “If we keep growing at this rate, soon half the world will be Amish, and the other half will be taxi drivers.”

After the Vote – a Theological Postscript

Is America still Christian? Does it go Europe’s way? Does it matter?

Commentary by Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the Atlantic Times Nov. 08 issue)

Religious rhetoric marked much of this year’s election campaign in the U.S. Faith and politics were often strangely confused. Our correspondent, a Lutheran lay theologian, is taking stock, asking the uncomfortable question: How Christian is America really?

We heard Barack Obama’s former pastor holler, “God damn’ America.” We heard a Republican candidate opine that the U.S. Constitution should be made to conform to the Bible. Religious imagery, often crafted by newsmen devoid of catechetical instruction, bombarded us from television screens, making this Lutheran shudder: Whatever happened to the warning by the father of the Reformation that the devil himself “cooks and brews the two kingdoms together,” meaning the secular and the sacred realms?

To be sure, America is a more “religious” country than Germany. In the U.S., nearly 40 percent of all church members attend divine service every Sunday; in Germany, only about nine percent do so, and among Protestants the figure is even more lamentable – four percent.

But is this the only valid yardstick? As one who has spent on and off more than four decades in America, I wonder about the worth of religious rhetoric if the abortion rate in “Christian” America is almost three times as high as in “post-Christian” Germany?

I was thunderstruck when I read in the pre-election “Faith and Life” poll that even among white evangelicals abortion ranks only seventh among issues they considered “very important” in this year’s poll, well behind the price of gasoline. And as for African-Americans, thought to be the most faithful believers in the nation, they terminate pregnancies at almost three times the rate of their white compatriots. They abort with such a vengeance that demographers predict that by the year 2038 the black vote will no longer be of any relevance because much of the black electorate will have their opportunity to live denied as we speak.

Abortion is no hot-button issue among German voters either, to the sorrow of many traditional Christians. But it is hard to conceive of German doctors resembling remotely Dr. George Tiller who boasts on his own website with having performed 60,000 mainly partial-birth abortions in his own clinic in Wichita, Kansas; he says he is conducting an average 100 more every week.

If these figures are staggering so are the trimmings. In Dr. Tiller’s clinic mothers have themselves photographed, with their heads next to their dead offspring. Fathers bring aborted fetuses gifts, such as teddy bears.  Clearly, Dr. Tiller does not consider these fetuses useless clusters of flesh. He baptizes some before incinerating them in his own crematorium, and as a Lutheran he knows that one can only baptize humans, not lumps of cells.

Tiller evidently sees no contradiction between his handiwork and his faith. Excommunicated by one Lutheran congregation as an “unrepentant sinner,” he now receives communion in another Lutheran church.

As they say in New York, go figure…

There is a marked difference between the Lutheran and the prevailing Protestant-utopian views in America concerning the interface between faith and politics. The latter, be they liberal or conservative, often teach that the Gospel can somehow fix this broken world; hence the religious battle of words in political campaigns where they have no place.

The Lutheran position, which is currently receiving a new hearing in churchly circles, is more down-to-earth: It takes practical reason to run this broken world. The Gospel – the good news of the repentant sinner’s salvation by grace through faith in Christ’s work on the cross – can “illume” reason, as Luther said, but it has nothing to say about how to fix a sick economy, or to extricate yourself from a war. To figure out problems like these, requires brains.

Of course there are theological concerns about which the Church must speak up, and Dr. Tiller’s activities surely come under this rubric. It is hard to imagine him following a divine “calling,” which is what defines man’s vocations in the secular realm – vocations such as that of plumbers, parents, professors, students, and, yes, politicians and voters as well.

If the Christian performs those divine assignments in the world out of love for his neighbor, he renders the highest possible service to God, says Luther. This makes him a member of the universal priesthood of all believers. In other words, the altruistic man and woman in the voting booth are in reality priests exercising their ministry not at the altar but out here in our rough daily world.

For a long time, this hands-on doctrine governing the Christian’s daily life has been smothered by the weight of kitschy gobbledygook that has given American religion a bad name. Now, with the “Luther Decade” underway, meaning the 10-year countdown to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, Luther’s outburst against “false clerics and schismatic spirits” trying to tell secular rulers how to run their business, seem strangely topical.
At Concordia Seminary St. Louis, the largest Lutheran divinity school in the U.S., scholars and statesmen from Europe and North America have been comparing notes on precisely these issues last month at a conference titled,  “Faith and Politics in Luther’s Land – and Here.”

The overarching questions discussed were these: Is Germany already a post-Christian society? Are there still glimmers of hope for faith in Germany’s politics, considering that its Basic Law mentions the name of God in the very first sentence of its preamble, while there is no reference to God in the U.S. Constitution?

Finally:  Is America, where at many secular universities hostility to Christianity is more prevalent than in Germany, about to follow the Old World’s anti-religious footsteps?

Former German defense minister Hans Apel, a Social Democrat, described the glass as “half empty,” as far as the interface between faith and politics in Germany are concerned. Christian Meissner, national secretary of the Protestant cause of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said it was “half full.” Taking a pessimistic view of faith among young Christians in Germany, historian Mark Ruff of St. Louis University, described them as “fading embers.”

But in all papers given at this conference, dire warnings were sounded against a “post-Christian void.” Irving Hexham, a religious studies professor of Calgary University in Canada, established the direct lineage of the neo-pagan substitute for Christianity from the rabidly anti-Christian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) to the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, who was hanged as  a war criminal in Nuremberg in 1946.
And Rev. Larry Nichols, one of America’s leading experts on cults, compared this phenomenon with the growing impact of neo-pagan cults, including Satanism, on segments of American society.

While all agreed that the “two kingdoms” – the secular and the spiritual – must never be “cooked and brewed together,” it was hard to argue with Hans Apel’s warning that churches giving up their fundamental theological positions in order to “please their memberships… lose their right to exist.”

“Who else could provide values?” Apel wondered aloud. “A democratic society cannot force its fundamental values by law. If it cannot be based on common fundamental values, our democratic society is in great danger, as demagogues get their chance to overwhelm and change it.”

German Days II

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Remembering Collective Shame

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

This column requires a caveat:  I am not an American citizen and therefore neither a Republican nor a Democrat. But as a German residing permanently in the United States I believe that I have a duty to opine on at least one aspect of the upcoming elections – the question whether years from now Americans will have to wrestle with collective shame, just as I have had to deal with collective shame over what has happened in Germany in my childhood for my entire life.

It was West Germany’s first postwar president, Theodor Heuss, who coined the phrase, “collective shame” contrasting it with the notion of collective guilt, which he rejected. No, I cannot be expected to feel guilty for crimes the Nazis committed while I was still in elementary school. But as a bearer of a German passport I have never ceased feeling ashamed because three years before I was born German voters elected leaders planning the annihilation of millions of innocent people.

I am certain that in 1933 most Germans did not find the Nazis’ anti-Semitic rhetoric particularly attractive. What made them choose Hitler, then? It was the economy, stupid, and presumably injured national pride, and similar issues. This came to mind as I read the latest Faith in Life poll of issues Americans in general and white evangelicals in particular consider “very important” in this year’s elections.

Guess what? For both groups, the economy ranked first, while abortion was way down the list. Among Americans in general abortion took ninth and among white evangelicals seventh place, well below gas prices and health care. Now, it’s true that most evangelicals still believe that abortion should be illegal, which is where they differ from the general public and, astonishingly, from Roman Catholics even though their own church continues to fight valiantly against the ongoing mass destruction of unborn life.  Still, 54 percent of Catholics and 60 percent of young Catholics have declared themselves “pro choice,” according to the Faith in Life researchers.

What I am going to say next is going to make me many enemies, of this I am sure: Yes, there is a parallel  between what has happened in Germany in 1933 and what is happening in America now. The legalized murder of 40 million fetuses since Roe v. Wade in 1973 will one day cause collective shame of huge proportions. So what if this wasn’t a “holocaust?” This term should remain reserved for another horror in history. But a genocide has been happening in the last 35 years, even if no liberators have shocked the world with photographs they snapped of the victims as the Allies did in Germany in 1945. And it has the open support of politicians running for office next month.

If most Americans, and shockingly even a majority of Catholics, think physicians should have the “right” to suck babies’ brains out so that their skulls will collapse making it easy for these abortionists to drag their tiny bodies through the birth canal; if even most white evangelicals think that economic woes are a more important concern (78 percent) than legalized mass murder (57 percent), then surely a moral lobotomy has been performed on this society.

I agree it would be unscholarly to claim that what is happening in America and much of the Western world every day is “another holocaust.” No two historical events are exactly identical. So let’s leave the word “holocaust” where it belongs – next to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. Still there are compelling parallels between today’s genocide and the Nazi crimes, for example:

1. Man presumes to decide which lives are worthy of living and which are not. “Lebensunwertes Leben” (life unworthy of living) was a Nazi “excuse” for killing mentally handicapped children and adults, a crime that preceded the holocaust committed against the Jews. Notice that today fetuses diagnosed with Downs Syndrome are often aborted as a matter of course in America and Europe.

2. In German-occupied territories, Jews and Gypsies were gassed for no other reason than that some people considered it inconvenient to have them around. Today, unborn children are often slaughtered because it is inconvenient for their mothers to bring their pregnancies to term.

3. Murder I is legally defined as killing another human being with malice and aforethought. The Nazis killed Jewish and Gypsies with deliberation – and maliciously. But what are we to think of babies being killed deliberately simply because they would be a nuisance if they were allowed to live? No malice here?

4.  Ordinary Germans of the Nazi era were rightly chastised for not having come to their Jewish neighbors’ rescue when they were rounded up and sent to extermination camps. Ordinary Americans and Western Europeans might find the fad to kill babies disagreeable, but as we see from the Faith in Life poll, most have more pressing concerns.

Some future day Americans and Western Europeans will be asked why they allowed their children to be slaughtered. They would even have less of an excuse than Germans of my grandparents’ and parents’ generation. In Germany, you risked your life if you dared to come to the Jews’ rescue. In today’s democracies the worst that can happen to you is being ridiculed for being “a Christian.”

As a foreigner I have no right to tell Americans whom to elect on Nov. 4. Recently, though, a friend asked me: “If you worked in an office and a colleague asked you at the voter cooler, whom he should vote for what would you tell him?”  Well, I would say: “I am not here to make up your mind for you. But personally I could never give my vote to so-called pro-choice candidates.”

This would doubtless lead to a heated postmodern dialogue. Perhaps the colleague is not a Christian; he might chastise me for mixing politics and religion. “If you as a Christian oppose abortion,” he could say, “then by all means don’t get involved in an abortion, just don’t impose your religious views on the rest of us.” How would I answer that? An evangelical might yank out his Bible and quote passages pertaining to this issue. But to a non-Christian the Bible is meaningless; I am not sure a political debate around the water cooler is a great venue to start individual evangelization.

My Lutheran approach would be different. I would argue natural law, the law God has written upon the hearts of all human beings, including non-believers. Unless they really have undergone a moral lobotomy they should be open to this story: Down in Wichita, Kansas, there is a physician by the name of George Tiller. On his website he boasts that he has already performed 60,000 abortions, mostly late-term, and week after week he is killing 100 more unborn babies.

Dr. Tiller does not think of these fetuses as clusters of cancerous cells. He knows they are human because he baptizes some of them before he incinerates them in his own crematorium. You don’t baptize non-humans. Dr. Tiller knows that. He is a practicing Lutheran. His former congregation, Holy Cross of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, excommunicated him as an unrepentant sinner. But the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, which belongs to the ELCA, communes him. Did I mention that he kills 100 human beings every week and has already done away with 60.000? Sixty thousand! In Nuremberg they hanged some fiends for murdering less than 60 -- zero point one percent of Tiller’s toll.

Perhaps this little tale will give even non-believers pause if they have not discarded their conscience, known to Christians as the law God has written upon every man’s heart. One day, of this I am certain, this will indeed result in collective shame – and God knows what other horrible consequences.

Priests in Voting Booths

(From the October 2008 issue of the Lutheran Witness)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Next month Americans will elect a new government that could face the most dangerous period in US history, primarily because of the global oil crisis that can affect every aspect of public life for decades and centuries to come: war and peace, civil order, foreign affairs, health and medicine, the economy, agriculture, food, possibly even the unity of the nation.

Are we “waiting for the lights to go out,” as Bryan Appleyard titled a scary essay in the conservative London newspaper, The Sunday Times, four years ago? Appleyard’s point merits serious contemplation even if some pundits consider as overly alarmist the prediction of Sweden’s Uppsala University that the world will start running out of petroleum in ten years’ time. The prospects of wars over the last barrels of oil, of food riots at home, of a shortage of basic petroleum-based medicines in pharmacies and hospitals, and of surgeries being performed on patients under hypnosis because of a lack of anesthetics might not appear all that immediate but seem real enough in our lifetime.

In this situation the Church must remind Christians of the responsibility God has given them as they vote on Nov. 3. This responsibility can be summed up in four short sentences:

1.    Christian voters will follow nothing less than a divine calling to be a special kind of priest.
2.     As voter-priests they will not preach the Gospel.
3.    Instead, as in all worldly pursuits, Christians serve God in the voting booth by serving their fellow man.
4.    If they do so with love and circumspection rather than for selfish ends they rank as members of the universal priesthood of all believers.

This is in a nutshell the Lutheran contribution to the debate about faith and politics. It provides a healthy alternative to this campaign season’s jabber by “false clerics and schismatic spirits,” as Martin Luther called churchmen lecturing government on how to handle its business. Seen from the Lutheran perspective, Christians act as God’s masks when they cast their votes. Through them He bestows power on political leaders, and the voters then serve God by holding leaders’ feet to the fire. “Throwing the bums out” might well be a divine assignment.

Church-owned publications cannot endorse political candidates. Of course we have a clear position on issues of theological concern, such as the sanctity of life and of marriage as the union between one man and one woman. But the Lutheran Witness would be wrong to tell Washington how to fight wars in the Middle East, end the immigration quagmire or salvage Social Security. Such problems cannot be resolved by faith but only by reason, a gift from God to help us function in this world.  The Church ought to tell secular rulers to use this gift wisely, but not promote specific policies.

However, the Lutheran Church has to remind Christian voters of this fact: They are the divinely appointed sovereigns of a democracy and as such compelled to exercise their office by virtue of good sense. In these dangerous times they must have the courage to ask candidates to be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how they intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures. Should voters base their decision on prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” rather than informed logic and neighborly love, they neglect their priestly duties.

Playing ostrich under these circumstances is not a Christian option. A Christian failing to vote resembles the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him laid away in a napkin (Luke 19:20). The same applies to Christians deaf to the calling to run for public office. Some sects tell their followers to shun this fallen world. The Lutheran Church teaches the opposite: Christians must engage the world. Never mind that as fallible human beings they are bound to make mistakes; God will ultimately correct those, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the dark days of Nazi rule.

God’s charge to voters in a democracy has chilling implications. They can’t just say, “It wasn’t me,” when things go wrong as a result of their choice. Germans who elected Hitler in 1933 didn’t get away with this excuse. Biblically speaking, they had received their authority from God (Romans 13:1) but squandered it by handing power to the wrong rulers. In today’s terms, the divine assignment to the voters precludes copouts such as, “I didn’t realize that the world is running out of oil, and that antihistamines, antiseptics, artificial limbs, aspirin, cortisone and heart valves are all made from oil,” or,  “I had no idea that the infrastructure in America was rotten.”

The voters’ priestly rank in the secular “left-hand kingdom” involves noblesse oblige; it comes with responsibility. Their first responsibility is to ask questions, to inform themselves and reflect on the most significant issues the next government will have to handle. The information is all around – in national and international publications, radio and television programs, and the Internet. It follows that Christians in the media also have a calling to work altruistically and serve their customers as neighbors. No other church body is theologically better equipped than the Lutheran to keep hammering in this verity:  Priestly service in a democracy consists of an interlocking chain of divine assignments of love.

Thus in Lutheran eyes the view of some liberal and evangelical theologians that the Gospel transforms culture seems utopian. It has caused Christian idealists of the right and the left to see their own country or Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as precursors of the Kingdom of God. But Christ did not die to make society nicer or fairer; he suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.

If Christian voters are priests in the left-hand kingdom, so are Christians as rulers. All secular authorities are ministers of God, according to Romans 13:6. Paul used the Greek term, “leitourgoi,” which is the root of the English word, liturgists. This suggests that secular rulers and the celebrants in church have parallel assignment in their respective realms. One of their many assignments is to proclaim truth – the eternal truth, which is Christ, in the case of pastors, and the truth about the state of the world in the case of politicians.

This is particularly important to remember in a situation as explosive as the present one with a nuclear war between Iran and Israel looking more and more plausible, with genocidal wars being fought for decades in Africa and new armed conflicts shaking the former Soviet Union, with radical Islamists bent on defeating the West in Afghanistan, and gaining power in other parts of the Muslim world, with booming India and China competing with the United States and Europe over the world’s depleting oil supplies.

Which brings us back to oil. In the mid-nineteen seventies, when this writer was managing editor of a Hamburg newspaper, the world received its first warning that this fabulous gift to humanity was nearing its depletion. There were long lines at the gas stations. Politicians, corporations, shipping magnates, scientists, inventors and private citizens were busy finding alternatives.

New locomotives fueled with pellets from woodchips and coal dusts were designed on drawing bards, as were freighters with massive, fuel-saving sails and Zeppelin-like airships carrying passengers and freight cheaply, albeit slowly, from continent to continent. Back then, one man in upstate New York even collected waste grease from fast food restaurants and converted it to fuel for the diesel engine of his Volkswagen Rabbit, an innovation of that period.

But then came another oil glut, and for three decades all these necessary ideas – necessary because petroleum was still running out – were discarded. America allowed its railroads and public transport systems to degenerate to Third-World levels. Passenger vessels stopped taking people from point A to point B but served instead as floating malls, called cruise ships. While the rest of the world developed fuel-efficient cars, Detroit built the Hummer. All this has occurred in bipartisan harmony under the less than watchful eyes of legislators more interested in pork than the wellbeing of future Americans. And the voters, the nation’s sovereigns, allowed this to happen.

Erich Kaestner (1899-1974), a brilliant German author with a fiendish sense of irony, coined the aphorism, “Whom God assigns power he first deprives of his mind.” Kaestner did not mean this blasphemously; he just wanted wake people up. Next month, America’s sovereigns cannot afford to be act mindlessly, they cannot afford to elect leaders without good sense.

The situation is desperate and requires outspoken and daring statesmen willing to acknowledge this and join forces with responsible people from all walks of life – especially industry, finance and science – in order to end the demented oil addiction that has brought the world to the brink. “The best solution is to pray,” Bryan Appleyard quoted energy financier Matthew Simmons, ad advisory to President George W. Bush, was saying.

If he were Lutheran he might have added, “And let’s pray that American voters do see themselves as priests in the world and elect leaders who know themselves as ministers of God.”

Priests in Voting Booths

(Lecture given to the LCMS Florida-Georgia District president's convocation in Daytona, Sept. 24, 2008, and at Village Lutheran Church in Ladue, MO, Oct. 5, 2008)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

In our Lutheran hymn, Praise the Almighty, my Soul, Adore Him, we sing in the second stanza.

“Trust not in princes, they are but mortal;
Earth-born they are and soon decay.”

This makes you wonder if there is any point in my speaking to you about us as sovereigns in a free land. Why waste your time thinking about the leaders you will elect next month if these leaders face the grim prospect of rotting away?

It takes a Lutheran sense of the paradox to make sense of this -- to square the concept of political priesthood in our secular reality with the hymn’s stark appraisal of the worth of rulers we elect:

Naught are their counsels at life's last portal,
When the dark grave doth claim its prey.

Here is my point. At -- life’s -- last –portals the counsel of secular leaders is indeed worthless. They are doomed like this whole dying world. It will disappear.  It cannot be fixed  -- never mind of what loudmouthed utopians on the left and right of America’s religious spectrum will tell you.

On the other hand, next month you will not elect leaders to exercise power beyond life’s last portals. They choose men and women to manage this world while it is dying – to rule the left-hand kingdom, as we Lutherans say. And that God wants this dying world to be managed while it is still around we know from Romans 13. So rule they must.

This year we face elections that could turn out to be the most crucial in American history. You will elect managers for a world in a calamitous economic crisis, which threatens our freedoms, possibly even democracy.

This is why I will now jump ahead of myself for a moment. Let me tell you right tout that this might be a kairos for the Lutheran Church, its God-given moment in history.

Now is not the moment to hide behind our two kingdoms doctrine. We have important things to say about this crisis without doing harm to our own theology.

Of course theologians are not called to opine on how to resolve this crisis.

But they do have the duty to say loudly and clearly that this situation was brought about by people acting exactly contrary to the ethos this presentation is really all about -- the Christian’ vocation in the secular realm.

This crisis was caused by greed and selfish desires. Greed is the very opposite of the neighborly love that is the foundation of all Christian action in the world.

I shall explore this aspect of the Christian’s role in the world more deeply in a few minutes.

But I would like to stress that you should not be fooled by a temporary drop in gas prices or by people telling you that America is swimming in oil and that there will be plenty of oil around for the next sixty year.

Maybe there is. But from the perspective of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation we must ask: “And after sixty years – then what?  The global oil emergency will remain to be a grim reality that cannot be talked away.  It is might bring major wars, civil disorder, starvation, a health care calamity of unthinkable proportions, and perhaps the disintegration of this nation we love.

“Waiting for the lights to go out,” ran the title of a terrifying essay in the Sunday Times of London four years ago. Its author, Bryan Appleyard, based his article on the prediction of Sweden’s Uppsala University that the world would start running out of petroleum within a decade.

Then he painted a tableau of stark prospects of wars over the last barrels of oil, of food riots, of a shortage of basic petroleum-based medicines and of surgery being performed on patients under hypnosis because without oil we cannot produce anesthetics.

Does this sound like scaremongering? Perhaps. Perhaps the situation is not as dire as Appleyard will have us believe – at least not yet. But then scaremongering is not a characteristic of the Sunday Times, a venerable and responsible newspaper.

I believe our Church with its twin doctrines of the two kingdoms and of the Christian’s divine vocation in the secular realm must take these warnings extremely seriously. More than ever it must remind Christians forcefully of the responsibility God has given them as they vote on November.

I won’t endorse any candidate. It would be improper for me as a foreigner and a Lutheran theologian to give endorsements. But as a Lutheran theologian I want to make three points.

. We are living in a democracy. In democracies, the citizens are the sovereigns. They are the conduits through which the rulers of a nation receive their authority from God, if I may adapt Romans 13 to our political system. This places a frightening responsibility on the shoulders of voters. And we in the Church must tell them that.

. Going to the polls is therefore a vocation. It is a divine assignment, just as being a parent, a spouse, a plumber, student, a congressman or the President of the United States are divine assignments. Lutheran theology teaches that in our various vocations we are called to serve our neighbors out of love. And let me remind you that the term, neighbor, includes all the generations that will follow us. This is the most powerful argument against those who say we needn’t worry because there was enough oil around for the next 60 years.

. In fulfilling this divine assignment faithfully, we render the highest possible service to God. This makes us members of the universal priesthood of all believers. Thus the altruistic Christian voter is a real priest – but a priest officiating not at the altar or in the pulpit but in managing our decaying world.

This in a nutshell should be the Lutheran contribution to the debate about faith and politics. It provides a healthy alternative to this campaign season’s endless jabber by “false clerics and schismatic spirits” as Luther called churchmen lecturing government on how to handle their business.

Seen from the Lutheran perspective, Christians act as God’s mask when they cast their votes – masks behind which God plays a curious kind of mummery, as Luther called it. Acting through these masks, He bestows power on political leaders. And as God’s masks the electorate serves Him by holding the politicians feet to the fire.

Yes, my friends, “throwing the bums out” is also a divine assignment.

The Church has no right to opine on political topics, unless they coincide with of theological concerns. We must stand up for the sanctity of life and make clear that as an order of creation marriage can never been anything other as the union between one man and one woman.

I applaud those 55 Roman Catholic bishops who this year de facto excommunicated political candidates running on an abortion rights platform. I am proud of the Missouri-Lutheran Church of the Holy Cross in Wichita, Kansas, for excommunicating Dr. George Tiller, who has performed 60,000 late-term abortions and is killing 100 unborn babies week after week. And I find it shameful that a neighboring ELCA congregation accepted this unrepentent mass murderer as a communicant member forgetting Luther's warning that it was dangerous for unrepentant sinners to receive the Lord’s true body and blood.

Excommunication of pro-choice leaders is a theological necessity and not meant to be a political move. But if it results in political fallout, so be it. This is not something the Church should do undercover. The Christian congregation is no secret society.

Beyond this the Church must not “interfere with the rulers’ craft,” as Luther said. As Church we cannot tell Washington how to fight or end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or how to solve the immigration quagmire or salvage social security.
Such problems cannot be resolved by faith but only by reason, a gift from God to help us manage this dying world. Luther called reason the empress of all things in the left-hand kingdom. The Church has the right to admonish secular rulers to use this gift wisely. But it must stop there. It does not have the right to promote specific policies.
The Church must also advise the voters to exercise their office by virtue of good sense.
Especially in Times as dangerous as these the nation’s sovereigns – the voters -- must ask candidates to be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how these candidates intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures.
Voters would fail in their priestly duties if they based their decision on superficiality, prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out.”
Their vocation is to exercise their priesthood in the world based on informed logic and neighborly love. This is no time to be fluffy. Pastors would do well to tell their congregants that.
There is a tendency among some Christian groups to play ostrich, sticking their heads in the sand. I have even noticed this among some confessional Lutherans who sometimes act like Amishmen without horses.
Playing ostrich is not a Christian option. A Christian failing to vote acts like the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him hidden away in a napkin (Luke 19:20).
The same is true for Christians deaf to God’s calling to run for public office. Unlike some sects that make their followers shun our fallen world the Lutheran Church teaches the opposite: Christians must engage the world. Never mind that as fallible human beings they are bound to make mistakes; God will ultimately correct those, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the dark days of Nazi rule.
No doubt, God’s charge to the electorate in a democracy has chilling implications. In a democracy, voters do not have the excuse to say, “It wasn’t me,” when things go wrong as a result of their choice. Germans who elected Hitler in 1933 didn’t get away with this excuse either.
Biblically speaking, these German voters had received their authority from God (Romans 13:1) but squandered it by handing power to the wrong rulers who had never made any bones about their evil intentions.
In today’s terms, the divine assignment to the voters precludes copouts such as, “I didn’t realize that the world is running out of oil, and that antihistamines, antiseptics, artificial limbs, aspirin, cortisone and heart valves are all made from oil.”
Or: “Nobody has ever told me that the president of oil-rich Venezuela is currently scheming militarily with the Russians against our country, which is buying his oil.”
Or: “How was I to know that most of the world’s oil supplies are in the hands of quite unfriendly people pursuing political ends that are starkly different from ours?”
The voters’ priestly rank in the secular “left-hand kingdom” involves noblesse oblige; this rank comes with responsibility. Their first responsibility is to ask questions, to inform themselves about the most significant issues the next government will have to handle.

This information is all around – in national and international publications, radio and television programs, and the Internet. It follows that Christians in the media also have a calling to work altruistically and serve their customers as neighbors.

No other church body is theologically better equipped than the Lutheran to keep hammering in this verity:  Priestly service in a democracy consists of an interlocking chain of divine assignments of love. And one important link in this chain has to be the work of journalists.

This should be evident to everyone, which makes you wonder why most of the ten universities owned by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod are not making the training of journalists their top priority – journalists endowed with a priestly understanding of their vocation, priestly in the sense that I described before.

And it is incomprehensible to me why the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is not using one of its most valuable assets, KFUO, the world’s oldest radio station, as an instrument of this priestly service to the world.

The Church is not only the property of Christ’s right-hand realm. It is also anchored in the left-hand kingdom as a corporate citizen.

Like all citizens, corporate citizens have divine assignments in the world. It would be the logical and gratifying vocation of the corporate citizen LCMS to turn KFUO into a priestly gift of love to the world – not as a pulpit, but by transforming it into an unbiased news medium covering regional, national and world events fairly – without any spin, not even a Lutheran spin.

At this point allow me to explain where I am coming from. I am extremely passionate about my vocation as an international journalist who has covered major world events for the last 52 years – the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, and I have tried to be as non-ideological as humanly possible.

Today I am horrified by the decline of my beloved craft with many of whose contemporary practitioners I have little in common. Rare are secular truth-seekers of the type we used to be in my days on the beat.

If we had more time I would describe to you from my own experiences how exactly forty years ago media mischief transformed the American victory in the Communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam into a military defeat. I was there when it happened, spending weeks in heavy combat and standing by mass graves filled with the bodies of South Vietnamese civilians murdered by the communists.

Later I worked as chaplain intern with Vietnam veterans who have never recovered from the rejection by their fellow citizens, including pastors who had expelled from their churches during services. Let me leave it at that except to say that these has been haunting me ever since.

So now you know why I an emphasizing the need for a Lutheran, priestly approach to journalism so strongly. In journalism as in politics the sense of vocation often conflicts with the desire for self-gratification.

Moreover, the realism inherent in Lutheran doctrine provides an answer to one of the worst fallacies in post-Reformation church history -- the fallacy of liberal and evangelical theologians that the Gospel transforms culture.

Such beliefs are schwaermerisch – they are utopian. They have caused Christian idealists of the right and the left to glorify their own country or even the Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as precursors of the Kingdom of God.

Utopian error caused those foolish American clergymen I mentioned a minute ago to follow political ends in the Vietnam era and disown their own parishioners when they returned from the war wounded in body and soul.

The Lutheran position, by contrast, is clear and biblical: Christ did not die to make society nicer or fairer; He suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.

If Christian voters are priests in the left-hand kingdom, so are Christians as rulers. All secular authorities are ministers of God, according to Romans 13:6. Paul used the Greek term, “leitourgoi,” which is the root of the English word, liturgists.

This suggests that secular rulers and the celebrants in church have parallel assignment in their respective realms. One of their many assignments is to proclaim truth – the eternal truth, which is Christ, in the case of pastors, and the truth about the state of the world in the case of politicians.

Earlier I spoke of the interlocking chain of divine assignments of love. Here again you have this chain. The priestly task to seek and proclaim the truth about the state of the world links voters, journalists and political officials if they are Christians – and of course many others.

This is particularly important to remember in a situation as explosive as the present one with a nuclear war between Iran and Israel looking more and more plausible, with genocidal wars being fought for decades in Africa and new armed conflicts shaking the former Soviet Union, with radical Islamists bent on defeating the West in Afghanistan, and gaining power in other parts of the Muslim world, notably Pakistan, with booming India and China competing with the United States and Europe over the world’s depleting oil supplies.

Which brings us back to oil. In the mid-nineteen seventies, when this writer was managing editor of a Hamburg newspaper, the world received its first warning that this fabulous gift to humanity was nearing its depletion. There were long lines at the gas stations. Politicians, corporations, shipping magnates, scientists, inventors and private citizens were busy finding alternatives.

New locomotives fueled with pellets from woodchips and coal dusts were designed on drawing bards, as were freighters with massive, fuel-saving sails and Zeppelin-like airships carrying passengers and freight cheaply, albeit slowly, from continent to continent. Back then, one man in upstate New York even collected waste grease from fast food restaurants and converted it to fuel for the diesel engine of his Volkswagen Rabbit, an innovation of that period.

But then came another oil glut, and for three decades all these necessary ideas – necessary because petroleum was still running out – were discarded. America allowed its railroads and public transport systems to degenerate to Third-World levels.

Passenger vessels stopped taking people from point A to point B but served instead as floating malls, called cruise ships. While the rest of the world developed fuel-efficient cars, Detroit built the Hummer. All this has occurred in bipartisan harmony under the less than watchful eyes of legislators more interested in pork than the wellbeing of future Americans. And the voters, the nation’s sovereigns, allowed this to happen.

Erich Kaestner (1899-1974), a brilliant German author with a fiendish sense of irony, coined the aphorism, “Whom God assigns power he first deprives of his mind.” Kaestner did not mean this blasphemously; he just wanted wake people up.

On November 3, America’s sovereigns cannot afford to be act senselessly. They cannot afford to elect leaders without good sense.

The situation is dire and requires outspoken and daring statesmen willing to acknowledge this and join forces with responsible people from all walks of life – especially industry, finance and science – in order to end the demented oil addiction that has brought the world to the brink.

“The best solution is to pray,” Bryan Appleyard quoted energy financier Matthew Simmons, ad advisory to President George W. Bush.

If he were Lutheran he might have added, “And let’s pray that American voters do see themselves as priests in the world and elect leaders who know themselves as ministers of God.”

Yes, their counsel will be naught at life’s last portal. But until then they must be made to understand that they have the priestly mission to manage this dying world out of love for their neighbors – neighbors alive today and neighbors following us decades and centuries from now.

Leipzig Meets Leipzig in St. Louis

Comparing notes with Max Beckmann in one of the world’s most splendid art museums

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Times)

The St. Louis Art Museum owns 993 works by German-speaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nearly half of these are paintings, drawings and prints by Max Beckmann (1884-1950), the Leipzig-born “monster of vitality,” as French critics described him. Some Americans find his tough honesty hard to stomach. Not so our correspondent, a fellow Leipziger, who often spends hours in quiet dialogue with him in the museum’s Beckmann room.

Perhaps it is unseemly for an elderly expatriate from Leipzig to be jealous of a young lady from Detroit. But I am. I envy Lynette Roth for her post-doctoral Mellon fellowship, which begins this June in St. Louis. Her three-year assignment is to produce a publication making Max Beckmann, one of Germany’s most significant expressionists, more accessible to the general public. It’s about time, too. Fifty-eight years have passed since he died of a heart attack on the corner of 61st Street and Central Park West in New York and still no such publication exists of the Beckmann collection in the St. Louis Art Museum, according to Charlotte N. Eyerman, its curator for modern and contemporary art. This collection has no rival anywhere in the world, except for the works still owned by the artist’s descendants in Germany.

I live nearby and often sit on a banquette in the room dedicated to my dead compatriot’s masterpieces, and I keep wondering: Is there really a need for them to be made accessible? What is so obscure about this man who painted, drew and etched in a manner faithful to his dictum, “The greatest mystery of all is reality?” Why was a recent display of his work in New York “not particularly successful,” to quote Sabine Eckmann, the German-born director of Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, another bastion of contemporary art in St. Louis?

Americans are “still skeptical of German expressionist art,” Eckmann explains. But why? Why do they prefer Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso on the one hand to Beckmann and his German contemporaries on the other, whose art the Nazis had banned as decadent? Indeed, why give preference at all to one over the other of these two traditions in modern art that cross-fertilized each other so vigorously a century ago that they should never be separated, a mistake the St. Louis Art Museum has thankfully always avoided?

I turn my head from Beckmann’s disconcerting 1921 masterpiece, “Dream,” with its monstrous depictions of World War I cripples. Looking through the generous opening to the next room I am at once soothed by the sight there of Matisse’s enchanting “Bathers with Turtle” (1908). Eyerman knows how to hang pictures! “Look at all the toys I have to play with,” she said good-humoredly. I envy her, too.

“Americans often find German expressionists too brutal,” said Eckmann. Even the late St. Louis department store tycoon and philanthropist Morton D. May who ended up bequeathing this museum 5,100 works or art – one-fifth of its entire collection – said of German expressionists that they were “sensational but extremely difficult to look at.” It didn’t stop him from becoming the first American to start collecting Beckmann’s works after World War II but he clearly wrestled with the artist’s genius. Why is it then that I can’t take my eyes off his paintings and prints?

The answer must lie in the difference in life experiences. It’s not just that Beckmann and I were born in the same town; I sense kinship between us because we have lived through similar nightmares, albeit a generation apart. “Like all Germans of his generation, Beckmann was deeply affected by the horrors of World War I,” his Frankfurt friend Stephan Lackner once wrote. “It is a matter of record that he was both stimulated and psychologically wounded by the horrors he witnessed while serving as a member of the German army field hospital corps in 1914-15.”

I was not around then but the intense dreadfulness he recorded artistically I experienced three decades later as a child in World War II. In “Dream,” he confronts the viewer with a handless man precariously climbing a ladder and a blind veteran playing a hurdy-gurdy and carrying a sign saying, “Thank God for the light of your eyes.”

Indeed, this picture is brutal but to me, it is also attractive in its truthfulness. That blind man could have been my father who lost his eyesight in combat in 1917. I stared at “Dream” and was jettisoned back to Dec. 4, 1943, when we were bombed out in downtown Leipzig and I, at age 7, had to guide my father to my grandmother’s home. In my mind, I still see the two of us – his left hand gripping my right upper arm – leapfrogging ludicrously over puddles of green flames covering the entire length of the street; they were green because what burned here was phosphor brought to us from the sky.

Incongruously, I asked Eckmann, Eyerman and Francesca Herndon Consagra, curator of prints, drawings and photographs, whether they can discern any form of humor in Beckmann’s grotesque depiction of horror. They rejected this notion out of hand. Given that they are of a different generation, it would be unnatural if they responded otherwise.

Yet grinning grimly, I savor some of these images because I do see humor in them – no gaiety of course but a sardonic outlook that puts to canvas and paper Beckmann’s maxim: “Life is awful, so is art.” I mean sardonic in the original sense of this word – laughter unto death. There were American critics who rejected Beckmann after 1945. One St. Louis pundit even termed his work “outhouse art” because he was no abstract painter and abstraction was en vogue. “I hardly need to abstract things,” Beckmann explained in a 1938 lecture in London. “For each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.”

“It is, of course, the great thing about art that one can appreciate it with one’s own history and prejudices and learn about oneself,” said Consagra as we discussed Beckmann’s worldview, which she sees as “bleak.” She guides me to plate 7 from his “Portfolio of Hell” (1919). It is titled “Night” and describes, reportage-style, one of the many depraved, callous acts of civil violence that racked Germany after the lost war.

It shows marauding soldiers who had broken at night into the attic room of a bourgeois home. One soldier hangs the father of the house on a beam. Another intruder twists the man’s arm. His wife, having apparently been raped, is being tied to a pole while the family’s frightened daughter watches her parents’ torment.

It is strange how differently viewers with different life histories receive such images. Those fortunate enough not to have seen depravity like this probably turn away at first. On the other hand, as a former street Leipzig urchin who “played house” in the smoldering ruins of bombed-out apartment buildings whose rubble might still have covered the mangled bodies of its tenants, I nodded knowingly: Yes, such were our lives, and may you never have to go through anything like this.

It is good, though, that Morton D. May, perceiving still undervalued ingenuity in artwork like this in the late 1940s, bought such gems created by men who, while victims of Nazi prosecution themselves, were nonetheless Germans and therefore not the preferred flavor in New York’s artsy circles. It is still St. Louis’ gain that it brought Beckmann over from his exile in a large tobacco storeroom in Amsterdam and made him artist-in-residence and guest professor at Washington University.

Beckmann loved his two years in this then-lively metropolis, whose vibrancy reminded him much of prewar Frankfurt where, before Hitler’s rise, this giant of a man spent some brief years being the center of adulation by high society. “For a party well ‘composed’ for him, it had to contain one old-fashioned debonair aristocrat, two or three spectacularly beautiful women, some businesslike, energetic bourgeois, a vivacious, swarthy and somewhat mysterious art dealer and several slim, intellectual, adoring youngsters,” as his friend Lackner described those days.

In St. Louis, too, Beckmann “painted masterpieces and plunged into a dazzling world of champagne parties and masked balls,” according to the New York Times. Thrilled to be a celebrity again, the artist marveled, “Oh God, people clapped when Herr Beckmann stood up.” Beckmann liked all that − he was after all someone “who took himself very seriously,” said Eckmann. No other famous artist painted himself as often as this one.

St. Louis still follows the grand tradition of enormously wealthy collectors such as May, the Pulitzer family, Betsy and Earl Millard and Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, who turned this town into a treasure trove of modern and contemporary art, German and otherwise. This is a place with substantial homes filled with incredible and still growing collections, Consagra marvels.

And it is also a place where old and new money supports three spectacular art museums open for free to the public. Consagra says she gets immense satisfaction as she watches classes of kids from the ghettos of East St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi wander starry-eyed through her Study Room for Prints, Drawings and Photographs − it is one of the many wonders of the palatial St. Louis Art Museum guarded by a statue of the sainted French King Louis IX after whom this city is named.

Not much is left of St. Louis’ past German character – except its wealth of German art. At the end of June, an exhibition titled, “The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis collections, 1946-2007,” showing 120 important works of German-speaking artists will open in the St. Louis Art Museum.

And Beckmann? For once the museum’s collection of his paintings and drawings is complete again after it had lent some of its most significant pieces to faraway Beckmann sites, such as Munich and Amsterdam. And it is complete just at the right moment. In the arts, dead geniuses seem to spike once every 20 years, says Eyerman, a descendent of 19th-century immigrants from Leipzig. Right now is such a moment for Beckmann.

While we stand in his room, she keeps eyeing its neighbors gleefully. “Look at this Matisse,” she said pointing in one direction. “Look at this Max Pechstein,” she added repeatedly, pointing in another direction to a warm pre-World War I painting called, “The Big Indian.” Both make us smile because they provide a much-needed relief from Beckmann’s troubling images.

Did I mention that I envied her?

She does know how to hang pictures.

400 Years On: German-Americans with Pride

A physician in Jamestown was the first. He arrived and died in 1608. A new pursuit of roots

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Precisely four centuries ago, Dr. Johannes Fleischer became the first German to arrive in North America. Millions of his countrymen followed him, making German-Americans the largest ethnic group in the USA. After two world wars, their descendants often concealed their national roots. But among their offspring it has now become the rage to reconnect with their roots.

The first German ever to set foot on North American soil was the prototype of the learned, venturesome and high-minded Germans who came to be admired around the world in subsequent centuries. Johannes Fleischer, Jr. was a “Herr Doktor Doktor,” a scholar with two advanced degrees at age 26, one in medicine and the other in philosophy. Fleischer was also the first Lutheran on these shores; his late father had been “superintendent,” or regional bishop, of Breslau, which is now part of Poland. Moreover, Fleischer was English-speaking America’s first immigrant with a university education.

Unlike other colonists at Jamestown, Va., Fleischer had not come as a fortune seeker but in order to study the healing potential of “exotic” American plants, a goal he never accomplished, though: A few months after his arrival on board the tiny vessel “Phoenix” on April 20, 1608, the salt poisoning caused by the brackish drinking water from the James River, the heat, malnutrition and disease transmitted by the mosquitoes from the surrounding swamps claimed his life and the lives of most early Jamestown residents.

At the quad centenary of Fleischer’s arrival, German ambassador Klaus Scharioth unveiled a new National Park Service historic marker at the Jamestown Glasshouse honoring this harbinger of all German-Americans who today constitute the largest ethnic group in the United States; in the 1990 U.S. census, 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry. That this should happen at this point in history is no isolated event. All over the country, a new German-American pride is resurfacing after it had vanished for three generations since the end of World War I. Memorials celebrating German contributions to German history are springing up around the country, but that’s not all, says historian Joachim “Yogi” Reppmann.

“When I hitchhiked around the U.S. as a student in the 1970s, I met many warm-hearted people, but none would admit to German ancestry,” remembers Reppmann, perhaps the leading specialist on the veterans of the 1848 democratic revolution in Germany who fled to America after that rebellion’s failure. “Now all around me folks are scrambling to find German roots almost as a kind of apotheosis of German virtues. Genealogical research is en vogue among Americans with German family background; everybody seems to want to trace his family history back to Luther.”

Reppmann is not exaggerating. Traveling around the Midwest, California, the East Coast and the South, this writer is often bombarded with questions particularly from young Americans about Germany, its history, language and culture. In St. Louis, membership in a “German Special Interest Group” dedicated to lineage research has jumped from three individuals to 500 families in less than three years. “Germany’s reunification has been an important contributor to this development,” explains Gerald Perschbacher, the group’s leader. “Now it’s much easier to travel to the towns and villages our forebears had left in the 19th century or even before that.”

There is also a possible link between this phenomenon and the results of a new international survey conducted for the BBC World Service, which astounded Germans. The poll showed that their country had suddenly become the most respected nation of earth. Three out of five people see Germany’s influence on word affairs as “mainly positive.” Thus Germany came out ahead of 23 other countries, winning a 56 percent positive assessment by the 17,000 people surveyed.

The London-based GlobeScan polling firm credited Chanceller Angela Merkel’s leadership in Europe for this international popularity. “Germany’s reputation as a political and economic stalwart was most strongly reflected in the opinion of its neighbors,” the BBC reports. Lingering memories of the friendly and light-hearted atmosphere during the 2006 Soccer World Cup games, which Germany hosted, might also have contributed to her enduring esteem, as has the fact that for the first time in 1,000 years, a German has ascended to St. Peter’s throne in Rome.

But when Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, visited America in April, a close look at how he was received lends weight to Reppmann’s warning  not to underestimate how “thin the ice is,” meaning how fragile Germany’s popularity in the U.S. might well be. On the one hand, jubilant masses cheered the pontiff. On the other hand, he was massively vilified via the internet in the basest way. Type “Nazi Pope” into the Google search engine, and you will get nearly 20,000 thoroughly unpleasant results; “Nazi Pope” is also the term even comedian Bill Maher used to slander the visiting Benedict XVI on camera, never mind that Joseph Ratzinger’s anti-Nazi convictions and actions as a young man during World War II are well documented.

Richard M. Smyser, a senior retired diplomat now teaching German studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, attributes such nauseating blogs to “crackpots who have no sense of identity except in the negative,” and it is true that America is by no means the only country where blog sites have become cesspools for hateful streams of consciousness usually devoid of orthography or grammar. The same blight mars the readers’ columns in the online editions versions even of Germany’s most prestigious newspapers.

Still, the new display of German-American pride only nine years after scores of America Online readers rejoiced ghoulishly over what they called a “German barbecue” when an Air France Concorde jetliner crashed on takeoff in Paris killing more than 100 German passengers on board is nothing short of remarkable, especially as elite publications are not above sudden outbursts of Germanophobia.

Earlier this year, an article in the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the idiotic treatment of an American scholar at the hands of German bureaucrats drew 133 responses of which “one of the kindest stated simply, ‘Germany is crap,’” Gerald R. Kleinfeld, a retired German studies professor, reports with horror. The matter was so ridiculous that it should have been laughed off, especially as the education ministers of Germany’s 16 states immediately rectified the problem that had caused this flap, a problem concerning the recognition of the U.S. scholar’s academic title. But in America as in Germany humor is not necessarily the mark of every academic, and as Reppmann says, “the ice is thin.”

Reppmann has good reason to be mindful of how quickly the public mood can change. He is working on a biography of Henry Christian Finnern, one of the most prominent of the 1848 revolutionaries from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost region, who had settled in Iowa. On Oct. 6, 1918, at the height of the anti-German hysteria during World War I, an ugly mob threatened to lynch Finnern, the editor and publisher of the quality German-language newspaper, “Der Denison Herold.”
Finnern escaped this fate by promising to rename his paper “The Denison Herald,” and publishing it exclusively in English as of the following day.

At the same time a massive stone monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Schleswig-Holstein war of liberation and surrounding communities disappeared from Washington Square Park in Davonport, Iowa. Reppmann suspects that an anti-German rabble had thrown it into the Mississippi. Ninety years later things have changed radically for German-Americans in Iowa as elsewhere in the U.S.A. Almost contemporaneously with the unveiling of the Jamestown marker honoring Johannes Fleischer, America’s first German immigrant, a 24,000-pound memorial to the Schleswig-Holstein 48ers was placed near the banks of the Mississippi. It bears the German engraving, “Schleswig-Holstein Kampfgenossen” (Veterans of the Schleswig-Holstein War).

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Election 08's 'False Clerics and Schismatic Spirits'

Speaking Out

The ubiquity of religion in this campaign season is distinctly un-Lutheran.

Uwe Siemon-Netto | posted 4/02/2008 09:56AM

The campaign season has brought many news stories and analysis pieces on religion's role in the presidential election. Beyond questions of whether Democrats can win more evangelicals' votes or whose health-care plan is most just, however, are deeper questions of how God has called Christians to act in society. In the coming months before the election, Christianity Today will be publishing a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the proper role of Christianity in electoral politics. Here, Uwe Siemon-Netto offers his Lutheran perspective.

The religious aspect of the 2008 election leaves this confessional Lutheran once again mystified. First there was the kerfuffle over whether Christians could elect a Mormon to the White House, a dispute making no sense to followers of Martin Luther, who said, "The emperor need not be a Christian so long as he possesses reason." Meanwhile, the amiable Mike Huckabee mused inexplicably about an alleged need to conform the Constitution more to the Bible. Then John McCain got in hot water for accepting the endorsement of Texas pastor John Hagee, a vituperative critic of the Roman Catholic Church.

The latest uproar is over the church Sen. Barack Obama has affiliated himself with, and whether he should have fled Jeremiah Wright after the pastor offered such hideous political pronouncements as "God damn America."

All this makes a staunch Lutheran groan in desperation. Did not Christ tell Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36)? Which of these seven words is so hard to understand?

Hearing Wright's unsettling videos (and Obama's elucidations) made me think fondly of my own congregation. I belong to Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in downtown Washington, D.C. This is an all-black parish, just like Obama's. My wife and I, along with another congregant and the organist, are the only white members. We did not join Mount Olivet to make a political statement, however; we did so simply because it was closest to our home, and because it was liturgical and faithful to Scripture and the confessional writings of the Lutheran Church. That was all we needed.

No doubt our pastor, John F. Johnson, and many congregants have experienced just as many frustrations as Wright on account of their race. But I have never heard about it from the pulpit or in committees and voters' meetings. Johnson preaches every Sunday on the prescribed readings for that day. That's the beauty of lectionaries in liturgical churches; they are meant to shield homilists from the hubris of their urge to be "original." Therefore our pastor is a much more convincing preacher than Wright. As a confessional Lutheran, he knows, as do his listeners, that personal gripes have no place in divine service. They have learned from childhood to distinguish properly between the spiritual and the secular realms, between law and gospel, between the "two kingdoms," as we Lutherans call the two realities constituting every Christian's paradoxical existence - kingdoms in which every Christian holds dual citizenship.

There is the "right-hand" kingdom that will ultimately be glorified in the kingdom of God. It is infinite, and the church is part of this realm. Here God has revealed himself in Christ. Here Christ rules by grace. Here all are equals, all forgiven sinners, all members of Christ's body. And then there is the temporal "left-hand kingdom," where God conducts a strange mummery and never reveals himself. "Through good and bad princes God governs the terrestrial world," Luther said. In a democracy, these "princes" include all of us, the voters. We make mistakes, of course, but God will ultimately correct those. This is the realm of the law and of practical reason, both under sin, yet gifts from God to operate in this world.

The kingdoms are not antagonistic toward one another. Both are God's, and their dialectic is "one of the most valuable and enduring treasures of Luther's theology," wrote German theologian Paul Althaus. It is a treasure because of the liberating message proclaimed by Luther "that society need not be run by the Church in order to be ruled by God," according to William Lazareth, the former Lutheran bishop of New York. Yet too many Protestants have a hard time grasping the breathtaking implication of this insight, which reminds me of Luther's grumble in his commentary on Psalm 101:

    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 clerics and schismatic spirits always want to be the masters, though not in God's name, and to teach people how to organize the secular government.

This is not to say that every Lutheran is immune to the disease we see in this year's electoral battles; all too many Lutheran pastors in Nazi Germany hailed Hitler as a redeemer. But if Lutherans stick to their theology, they are more likely than others to eschew social gospel heresies that made Christian idealists welcome the United States, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and even Pol Pot's Cambodia as precursors of the kingdom of God. Lutheran theology teaches that transforming culture is precisely not what the gospel is all about. Christ made himself small not for "the culture" but "for me." He did not die at the cross to make our society nicer or fairer; no, he suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.

In the 1930s, Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was later martyred for his resistance against Hitler, observed during his stays in America:

   

One of the characteristic features of church life in Anglo-Saxon countries, and one from which Lutheranism has almost entirely freed itself, is the organized struggle of the Church against some particular worldly evil. ... It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking, which sets out from human problems and which asks for solutions on this basis. Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ, and therefore the way of all Christian thinking, leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems, and that the solution of human problems cannot be the essential task of the Church.

Nine years from now, in 2017, Protestants will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. This is a good time to remember its theological treasures, which differ from earthly treasures in that they multiply when shared. Where the world is concerned, Lutherans have perhaps the soberest message of all Protestant traditions. Like Paul and Augustine, Lutherans know that our secular reality cannot be fixed. They know that it is finite. It will disappear. Until that happens, though, we must roll up our sleeves and manage our fallen world as well as we can, preventing chaos and lovingly serving each other - not by the gospel, which would be impossible, but by natural reason. We are free to act rationally in this world thanks to our knowledge of our redemption in the kingdom of grace. But the gospel has nothing to say about traffic rules, illegal immigration, the price of gasoline, or the deployment or withdrawal of forces to or from the Middle East. The gospel cannot really be associated with any worldly cause. The gospel will illume the Christians' good sense, we hope, and affect their personal comportment to the extent that it makes others curious about their faith. But the gospel is no instrument of secular power.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a lifelong journalist, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

Copyright (c) 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Cooking and Brewing Two Kingdoms Together

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Some Protestant denominations are already preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation less than a decade from now, on Oct. 31, 2017. Given the religious issues in this American election year, this might be a good time to return to one of his most perceptive insights. “The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms together,” Luther wrote, meaning the spiritual and the secular realms.

With these words in mind, traditional Lutherans shake their heads over the misuse of Scripture in American politics on both sides of the political divide, to wit Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor thundering in a sermon, “God damn America,” or Mike Huckabee’s musings about an alleged need to conform the U.S. Constitution more to the Bible.

To adherents of the oldest major Protestant tradition, it seems counterproductive to constantly invoke the Bible, when fighting politically over human concerns. In the Lutheran understanding, natural law should be the appropriate tool for dealing with worldly matters, including the mass slaughter of unborn life and “marriages” of members of the same sex.

Citing Paul, Luther reminded Christians that natural law is “written by the finger of God” on everybody’s heart, and that the conscience of all people, including non-Christians, bears witness to this verity. So if you want to stop abortions, why not team up with the likes of the “Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League,” whose conscience tells them that it is wrong to kill the innocents, instead of clobbering these people over their heads with the Bible?

Except in Roman Catholic theology, natural law thinking became unfashionable -- sadly even among many Lutherans -- in the two centuries since Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution, extolled man-made “positive law” as freedom from internal obstacles that limit vice.

In this context it is worth noting how the martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer judged the French Revolution whose utopian dream was the liberation of man. To Bonhoeffer, this Revolution was “the laying bare of the emancipated man in his tremendous power and most horrible perversity.” He warned that “the liberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man’s self-destruction,” and he saw both Communism and Nazism as the French Revolution’s heirs.

The law – Mosaic for Christians and Jews, natural for all others – is the “operating system” in what Luther called the “left-hand kingdom,” where God reigns in a hidden way “through good and bad princes,” who in a democracy include the voters. In this secular realm “reason is the empress,” Luther said, describing reason as a gift from God that enables humanity to manage this temporal world.

However, if reason presumes to speak about God’s nature it becomes, in Luther’s words, “the devil’s whore.” Only by faith does the Christian know what God is like; faith is reason’s equivalent in the “right-hand kingdom,” where God has revealed himself in Christ, and where the Church has its place.

In Lutheran parlance, this is the kingdom of the Gospel, but the Gospel cannot fix the temporal realm, as Christ told Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:38). The Gospel hopefully illumes the believer’s comportment in his relations with others; yet it offers no solution to secular concerns such as illegal immigration, the economy or the war in Iraq. Those have to be dealt with by virtue of reason, and according to the law.

Bonhoeffer considered the inability to distinguish between these two kingdoms a major flaw of American theologies featuring constantly organized struggles of the Church against some particular worldly evil. He would doubtless have placed the homiletics of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, in this category.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking, which sets out from human problems… Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ and therefore the way of all Christian thinking leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems.”

In the light of these compelling observations, Lutherans might be forgiven for asking their fellow Christians why they keep exposing their highest good – the good news of their redemption by Christ’s vicarious suffering and resurrection – to public derision by using it for the wrong purpose.

Half a millennium after Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg it would make sense to ponder his down-to-earth comment that in politics as in all other aspects of secular life Christians must act reasonably according to the law. The Gospel has freed them to do just that; it must not be perverted into a weapon to be slapped around other people’s heads.