Historiography and Theology. Theology in the Weimar Republic and the Beginning of the Third Reich

Historiography and Theology. Theology in the Weimar Republic

and the Beginning of the Third Reich

Arne Rasmusson

One aspect of German twentieth century theology is especially controver-sial, namely its role during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Itis well known that Karl Barth saw a direct connection between mediatingCulture-Protestantism (both conservative and liberal) and the strong sup-port given by much theology to the revolution of 1933.1 He had in mindnot only the German Christians (Deutsche Christen, a Protestant grouphighly supportive of the Nazi revoluion) but also theologians opposing theGerman Christians, yet supporting National Socialism.2 Furthermore, theimportance of Barth’s theology in the early formation of the ConfessingChurch and in the drafting of the Barmen declaration tended to deter-mine the writing of the history of German theology after the war.3 Thismade it difficult for liberal Protestantism. Ernst Troeltsch, perhaps thegreatest of the early twentieth century liberal theologians (he died in1923) and the one most highly regarded in later German Protestant liber-

1 He can describe the German Christians ‘als die letzte, vollendetste und schlimm-ste Ausgeburt des neuprotestantischen Wesens’ of the theological era of Harnack andTroeltsch. See Karl Barth, ‘Abschied (1933)’, in Barth, ‘Der Götze Wackelt’: Zeitkriti-sche Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe von 1930 bis 1960, ed. Karl Kupisch, Berlin 1961,66.

2 ‘The whole proud heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth century proved in-capable of resistance, obviously because it contained nothing that had to resist andcould not give way.’ (Barth, The German church conflict, ed. Ernst Wolf, Richmond1965, 41.) These accusations were not made lightly. During the spring semester 1933he was actually giving his later famous lectures on nineteenth-century Protestantismthat was published after the war (Barth, Protestant theology in the nineteenth centu-ry: Its background and history, Grand Rapids 2002) and he repeats this judgment inhis likewise famous lecture ‘Evangelical theology in the 19th century’ first published1957 (Barth, The humanity of God, Atlanta 1982, 9–33, see esp. 28). For an overviewof Barth’s critique of theological liberalism, see Jan Rohls, ‘Barth und der theologi-sche Liberalismus’, in Michael Beintker, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (eds.),Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921–1935): Aufbruch – Klärung – Widerstand, Zürich2005, 285–312.

3 Cf. Manuel Schilling, Das eine Wort Gottes zwischen den Zeiten: Die Wirkungs-geschichte der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung vom Kirchenkampf bis zum Fall derMauer, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2005.

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alism, was similarly seen in the light of Barth’s criticism. Emanuel Hirsch,arguably the most brilliant German Protestant liberal theologian4 of the1930s, was, publicly at least, totally compromised by his enthusiastic sup-port of the Nazi revolution, although his influence on Göttingen studentscontinued after 1945.5 To be able to rehabilitate and retrieve the traditionof liberal Protestantism, the history of early twentieth century Germantheology had to be rewritten or liberated from the history writing of theConfessing Church. This attempt to rewrite the history is most clearlyseen in the work of the ‘Munich school’ centered around the now-retiredtheologian Trutz Rendtorff and including people like his successorFriedrich Wilhelm Graf, the late Falk Wagner, Klaus Tanner, and others.The conflict between the two theological and ecclesiological programs rep-resented by Barth and Rendtorff is thus in part an historiographical conflict.

Trutz Rendtorff’s account

The story Rendtorff tells is therefore very different from the one offeredby Barth. It goes something like the following.6 The Weimar Republic wasweak and in great need of legitimacy. But it did not find much support inthe Protestant Church and among Protestant theologians. Among sup-porters were liberal theologians such as Troeltsch and Adolf Harnack andthe group around the journal Die Christliche Welt and its editor MartinRade. These people tried to develop a positive, although qualified, recep-tion of the Western liberal political tradition. But the majority were criti-cal, both traditionalists and the leaders of the new theological movementsof the twenties, the Luther renaissance (including Karl Holl, Hirsch, andPaul Althaus, but Friedrich Gogarten may also be counted in this group)and dialectical theology (including Barth and again Gogarten).7 Barth didnot, like Hirsch or Gogarten, criticize the democratic system, butRendtorff seems to argue that Barth’s fundamental criticism of Culture-Protestantism and liberal theology had the function among his students of

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4 Theologically liberal, that is. He was never a political liberal. 5 He was forced to retire, but he continued with private seminars in his home.

Many later prominent German theologians participated in these seminars.6 On this, see e.g. Trutz Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restau-

ration: Politische Wirkungen neuzeitlische Theologie, München 1970, 113–117,Rendtorff, Vielspältiges: Protestantische Beiträge zur ethischen Kultur, Stuttgart1991, 101–120.

7 It is very difficult to define these two movements. On several possible ways ofclassifying the so-called Luther-renaissance, see Heinrich Assel, Der andere Auf-bruch: Die Lutherrenaissance – Ursprünge, Aporien und Wege: Karl Holl, EmanuelHirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910–1935), Göttingen 1994, 17–22.


putting the philosophical legitimacy of liberal democracy in doubt.8 Histheology was part of a general understanding in the Protestant theology ofthe 1920s that ‘die Zeit sei reif für eine tiefgreifende Wende, weg von denTraditionen liberaler, sozialistischer, bürgerlicher und humanistischerEinstellungen und Auffassungen, reif für einen neuen Anfang mit derAufgeschlossenheit für verpflichtende Autorität und klare Eindeutigkeit’.9

Rendtorff argues that this critique of liberal ways of thinking deprived lib-eral structures of the theoretical legitimacy they needed. He even says thatthe theology of Barth’s commentaries on Romans in practice subscribedto the war-aims of the Western nations. The negation of history and thecontrast between God and human culture in dialectical theology corre-spond, so Rendtorff’s argument goes, to the abstract and history-lessWestern understanding of democracy as described by Troeltsch. The out-come was that it became impossible to see democracy as also a result ofthe specific German political and Christian tradition. The effect of thiswas that there was no direct way from dialectical theology to democracy.It opened the way for democracy through its opposition to anti-democrat-ic Protestant theology, but it could not directly support it. It is during the1920s primarily a movement of opposition against German Protestant lib-eralism and its type of mediation between the Enlightenment and Christi-anity, and thereby becomes part of a general anti-liberal culture.10

He sees this analysis confirmed by the way Barth and other theologiansin the Confessing Church drew a continuous line from liberal Protestant-ism to the German Christians. For them the resistance against GermanChristians was just part of the resistance against ‘modern’ theology in gen-eral, and therefore also against the theological acceptance of theEnlightenment. Rendtorff himself sees it, of course, the other way around.

Theology in the Weimar Republic and the Beginning of the Third Reich 157

8 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 114. He here refers to, but seems also to agree with, thetestimony of the historian Karl Dietrich Erdmann.

9 Ibid., 110.10 For similar descriptions, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?

Erste Überlegungen zu Karl Barths Liberalismuskritik’, Evangelische Theologie, 46(1986), 422–441, Klaus Tanner, ‘Protestantische Demokratiekritik in der WeimarerRepublik’, in Richard Ziegert (ed.), Die Kirchen und die Weimarer Republik,Neukirchen-Vluyn 1994, 23–35, Tanner, ‘Antiliberale Harmonie: Zum politischenGrundkonsens in Theologie und Rechtswissenschaft der zwanziger Jahre’, in HorstRenz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (eds.), Umstrittene Moderne: Die Zukunft derNeuzeit im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs, Gütersloh 1987, 193–208. Tannerconcludes the latter article by contrasting Troeltsch: ‘Die große Koalition derLiberalismuskritiker verweigerte sich damit der Aufgabe, vor die Troeltsch gerade die“Jüngeren und die Träger der Zukunft” gestellt sah: die “demokratische Republik imGrundsatz” zu bejahen, sich zu einer “gefühlsmäßigen Entscheidung und Einsetzungfür die Republik” durchzuringen.’ (‘Antiliberale Harmonie’, 207f., the internal cita-tions are from Troeltsch, Die Fehlgeburt einer Republik: Spektator in Berlin 1918 bis1922, Frankfurt am Main 1994, 297, 299).


In its critique of the Enlightenment, in the way it required a new start,and in its understanding of the authority of revelation, dialectical theolo-gy had much in common with the German Christians.

This theme was most bluntly developed by Falk Wagner, who tried toshow the close kinship between Barthian theology and socialistic and fa-scist totalitarian ideologies. Wagner claimed that ‘die inhaltliche Strukturder Bartschen Theologie nicht nur dem Sozialismus, sondern auch demFaschismus und seiner Theoriebildung verwandt ist’. With socialism hemeant the ‘‘hard-ware-Sozialismus” eines Lenin, Stalin und Genossen’.He gave the article the telling title ‘Theologische Gleichschaltung’, whichis the word used for the Nazi attempt to totally control and coordinate allaspects of society, which included the attempt to eliminate alternative in-fluences. Wagner concluded that ‘das Defizit der Barthschen Theologie inihrem Zwang zur Gleichschaltung besteht’.11

Rendtorff is somewhat more careful, but he stresses that Barth does notdeny the totalitarian nature of his Christological concentration.12 The at-tack on liberal pluralism by the National Socialist state was answered bythe Confessing Church through its own absolute confessions that exclud-ed Christian pluralism. Instead of a free discourse of a free church therewere binding confessions and declarations.13

Heinz Eduard Tödt once asked Rendtorff whether he agreed with theFascism-thesis of Wagner (that Tödt thinks is followed by Graf). In his an-swer Rendtorff denied that any such thesis has been promulgated.Wagner, Graf, and he himself had only tried to understand Barth’s cri-tique of the liberal understanding of freedom in the light of the contem-porary political and philosophical discourses during the interwar period.The result is that Barth’s critique of liberal theology can be understood as

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11 Falk Wagner, ‘Theologische Gleichschaltung: Zur Christologie bei Karl Barth’,in Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit: Beiträge zur Kritik der TheologieKarl Barths, Gütersloh 1975, 10–43, at 41f. See also Graf, ‘Die Freiheit der Entspre-chung zu Gott: Bemerkungen zum theozentrischen Ansatz der Anthropologie KarlBarths’, in Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit, 76–118, at 116f. Cf. alsoFalk Wagner, ‘Politische Theorie des Nationalsozialismus als politische Theologie’,Theologische Existenz Heute, 175 (1973), 29–51, and Wagner’s critique of Barth’sdiscussions of democracy after 1945 in Wagner, Zur gegenwärtigen Lage des Prote-stantismus, Gütersloh 1995, 169–171.

12 Rendtorff, Theologie in der Moderne: Über Religion im Prozess der Aufklärung,Gütersloh 1991, 142.

13 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 107. Cf. Wolfgang Trillhaas’s statement: ‘Die Beken-nende Kirche gilt nicht ohne Grund als eine hauptsächliche Trägerin des Wider-standes. Aber sie hat im Kampf gegen den Liberalismus fast die gleichen Formelngebraucht wie der Gegner, und auch in ihren Disziplinforderungen (“Unterstellungunter die Brüderräte”) hat sie oft das Modell des Systems, das sie bekämpfte, widerge-spiegelt.’ Aufgehobene Vergangenheit: Aus meinem Leben, Göttingen 1976, 173f.


part of a common cultural critique during the time. However, it does notsay that Barth’s theology in general is fascist. This analysis of Barth is on-ly a way of situating him in historical context.14 It is difficult to find thisanswer convincing, at least in the case of Wagner.

However, Rendtorff’s evaluation of the Confessing Church is not sim-ply negative. He stresses that its resistance was not a direct political re-sistance, but an ecclesial and theological resistance. It fought for the in-dependence of the church. Rendtorff does think this was important. Inpractice this struggle defended the independence of the church that was aresult of the Weimar constitution, and thereby it defended also indirectlya pluralistic society, and thus created a free space open for dissent. Soeven if the resistance was not directly political, that is, directed against thenational socialist state, it did have indirect political functions.15

The Politics of Historiography

It is obvious that Rendtorff’s research program (followed up by many ofhis colleagues and students) suggests a very different way of describingand understanding the role of theology in the Weimar Republic and inthe early Third Reich than that of Barth and his followers. Not infre-


14 See Heinz Eduard Tödt, ‘Karl Barth, der Liberalismus und der Nationalsozialis-mus: Gegendarstellung zu Friedrich Wilhelm Grafs Behandlung dieses Thema’,Evangelische Theologie, 46 (1986), 536–551, esp. 550f, and Rendtorff, ‘Zur Krise undKritik des neuzeitlichen Liberalismus: Eine Anmerkung’, Evangelische Theologie, 47(1987), 567–569. Cf. also Graf, ‘Die Freiheit der Entsprechung zu Gott’, esp. 116f.

15 Rendtorff, Vielspältiges, 102–106. As support for this view, he also refers to theexperiences of his own childhood in the family of a pastor of the Confessing Church(106). Cf. ‘Trutz Rendtorff’, in Christian Henning and Karsten Lehmkühler (eds.),Systematische Theologie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, Tübingen 1998,58–77, at 60. He was born in 1931. His father Heinrich Rendtorff was bishop inMecklenburg, but he was more or less forced to step down as bishop in 1934 and be-came minister in a church closely related to the Confessing Church, after having beenan early supporter of National Socialism. Earlier, as bishop, Heinrich Rendtorff had,both before and after the Nazis’ assumption of power, partly and with some enthusi-asm supported the National Socialist movement and also applied for party member-ship. Cf. his strongly supportive statement on the Nazi movement from 1931 cited byGerhard Besier, Die evangelische Kirche in den Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts:Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1994, 63. Scholder says that this wasthe ‘the first official statement by a leading member of the clergy’ on the Nazi move-ment. (Klaus Scholder, The churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, Philadelphia 1988,140.) He was also an important player in church politics during the upheavals of1933. See Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, passim. On his resignationas bishop, see Niklot Beste, Der Kirchenkampf in Mecklenburg von 1933 bis 1945:Geschichte, Dokumente, Erinnerungen, Göttingen 1975, 50–55. This volume in-cludes also several declarations by bishop Rendtorff from 1933. See 235ff.


quently is this polemically described as a turn away from a moralistic andhagiographic approach internal to the discipline of theology to a morestrict historicization where theology is put into a wider and non-theologi-cal historical and theoretical context. For example, Graf, in what may bethe most systematic analysis of Barth’s relationship to the political liber-alism of the Weimar-republic from this school of thought, pleads for ‘eineHistorisierung der Barth-Interpretation’.16 He says that he uses the meth-ods of the sociology of knowledge, social history, and political culture ina general modernization-theoretical approach. He contrasts his own ap-proach with the theological and moralistic approach of his critic Tödt: ‘H.E. Tödt vertritt ein von unmittelbar Zeitgenossenschaft geprägtes, starkmoralisches Geschichtsbild, das wesentlichen an Werturteilen aus derZeit des Kirchenkampfes orientiert ist.’17 This type of rhetoric is, ofcourse, common in the academy. I do history, you do politics, theology,and so on. But it is quite disingenuous, especially so in this case. The his-tory writing of the Rendtorff-Graf type is so obviously embedded in a the-ological program. This is no problem in itself. It is quite unavoidable.What is question-begging is the description of one’s own approach as rig-orously historical and the opponents’ as moralistic and theological.18

This is, of course, not a specifically theological problem. The same is-sues are raised in any writing of history, and especially so when the histo-ry dealt with is related to contemporary interests and identities. The un-derstanding of German history is just as controversial in secular historicalresearch as in church history and theology. German historiography, justlike theology, was deeply implicated in German nationalism. It was an im-portant part of the national project and closely interconnected with a lib-eral Protestant theology of history. However, post-1945 German historiog-raphy is also embedded in the political, social, and historical currents andconflicts of the post-1945 German society.19 The well-known ‘Historiker-

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16 Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 422.17 Graf, ‘Der Weimarer Barth – ein linker Liberaler?’, Evangelische Theologie, 47

(1987), 555–566, at 555f. The citation is found on 555. 18 One finds the same type of struggle over history inside ‘Barthianism’. Some

have, for example, tried to minimize Barth’s relativization of politics, others maxi-mize it. Before 1989 much of the discussion concerned his degree of commitment to‘democratic socialism’. After 1989 we have found an increasing interest in defendingBarth’s commitment to ‘democracy’.

19 On German historiography, see Stefan Berger, ‘The German tradition of histo-riography, 1800–1995’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German history since 1800, London1997, 477–492. German Church history is similarly a very conflict-filled field of re-search. For overviews by one who himself is a highly involved and controversial his-torian, see Gerhard Besier, Religion, Nation, Kultur: Die Geschichte der christlichenKirchen in den gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, 171–218, and Besier, Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im 20. Jahrhun-dert, München 2000, 59–126.


streit’ is just one example of this. Should history be written from, for ex-ample, a national, social, structural, everyday, or gender perspective?Should one describe the politics of the nation or a politics of emancipa-tion? How do international systems, social structures, mentalities, humanagents, internal meanings, and so on, relate? Even if one works inside atradition of political history, how one interprets the First World War, forexample, will have immense effects on how the rest of twentieth-centuryhistory is told (cf. the bitter ‘Fischer-controversy’20). After 1945 Catholichistorians reassessed the national history approach. In the 1980s the vari-ous schools of social history were convinced that the nation-state periodof Germany was over and that Germany had reached a post-national stagecharacterized by ‘constitutional patriotism’. But after 1989 the ‘nationalhistory’ approach has again been revitalized, both in conservative and rad-ical versions. This is, of course, in no way unique for the writing of Ger-man history. We find similar controversies concerning the writing of thehistory of the United States, France, or Sweden. It is simply the nature ofthe writing of history.

The writing of history and theological background convictions

So, how one writes and judges this history has to do with the perspectivesfrom which it is seen. If we start with the broadest level, one can say thatBarth and Rendtorff tell very different ‘salvation histories’. For Rendtorffit is the realization of Christianity in modernity, and specifically in mod-ern liberal Germany, that is at the center of the story. He shows how theReformation, the German Christian Enlightenment, and the formation ofa free Christianity outside the churches contributed to the formation ofthe modern secular, liberal, and democratic German welfare state.21 It isthus the nation-state of Germany, not the church, that constitutes the pri-mary context for doing theology and ethics. And this context determinesthe content. Rendtorff’s own ethics therefore reads like a description ofcontemporary Germany, though dressed in a universal language wherecurrent Germany implicitly tends to represent the forefront of Westerncivilization and, thereby, universal values.22 He would, of course, objectthat he presents actual universal values, though mediated throughWestern civilization and German history. Yet, the narrow German-cen-


20 Berger, ‘The German tradition of historiography’, 486. 21 See, e.g., Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration,

München 1970.22 Rendtorff, Ethik: Grundelemente, Methodologie und Konkretionen einer ethis-

chen Theologie, vol. 1–2, Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln 1990. An earlier edition of this workis translated into English, Ethics, vol. 1–2, Philadelphia 1986.


tered approach of Rendtorff and his allies is certainly striking for a non-German.23

For Barth it is Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church that are at the cen-ter. The state and even more the nation are relativized, though not madeunimportant. If Rendtorff’s theology is in service of Germany, Barth’s the-ology is in service of the church. Thus the importance of the independ-ence of theology from the national perspective. Its primary base is thechurch. According to Barth the church is for the world, but the world isnot identified with such contingent phenomena as specific nation-states.24

Nations exist but they are relativized by many other factors. The intimaterelationship between church and theology was, of course, one of the deepdilemmas for Barth. The actual German Protestant church did not havethe independence from the German political and cultural system thatBarth’s theology presupposed, and it is difficult to see how it could haveeven on Barth’s own grounds as developed, for example, in his ethics lec-tures.25 It is only later that he starts to develop a more adequate ecclesi-ology given his theology.26

Another way of putting the difference is that these two theological tra-ditions represent different views of the nature of reality. Barth reads theworld theologically in terms of a Trinitarian theology, which can incorpo-rate any form of knowledge of the world, but read through a Christiangrammar.27 According to Rendtorff, modern theology has reached its eth-ical, political, or world-historical stage, in which Christianity is realized in

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23 It is interesting and illuminative to compare Rendtorff’s account with the simi-lar story told by the Reformed American theologian Max Stackhouse. Both arestrongly influenced by Troeltsch. However, Stackhouse gives a more negative pictureof the German Reformation and the political role of the Lutheran tradition inGerman history. Instead he tells a story in which America early on becomes the cen-tre partly as mediator, partly as discoverer and explorer of a universal ethos in whichhuman rights play a principal role. This American tradition is, he thinks, founded ona synthesis of Free-Church Calvinism and Lockean liberalism. See Stackhouse,Creeds, society, and human rights: A study in three cultures, Grand Rapids 1984.

24 See Barth, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, New York 1981, 191–196 (this is hisethics lectures from 1928/29 and 1930/31). He develops the same theme at muchgreater length in Church Dogmatics III:4, Edinburgh 1961, 285–323.

25 Barth, Ethics, 440–451.26 I have tried to show this in Rasmusson, ‘The politics of diaspora: The post-chris-

tendom theologies of Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder’, in L. Gregory Jones, Reinhard Hütter, and Rosalee Velloso Ewell, (eds.), God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, Grand Rapids 2005, 88–111.

27 See again Rasmusson, ‘The Politics of Diaspora’. This theme has been empha-sized and developed especially by John Webster in Barth’s ethics of reconcilia-tion, Cambridge 1995, esp. 214–230 (cf. also his Barth’s moral theology: Human ac-tion in Barth’s thought, Grand Rapids 1998) and by Stanley Hauerwas in With thegrain of the universe: The church’s witness and natural theology, Grand Rapids 2001,141–204.


liberal modernity. This makes sociology crucial for him, because sociolo-gy (in a sort of Hegelian form) can be seen as the self-description ofmodernity; one might say, the theology of modernity. Any intelligibleChristian theology therefore has to be mediated through the sociologicalperspective.28 But on this level, which is the most important and determi-native one, it is extremely difficult to know how even to start a conversa-tion between Barth and Rendtorff.29

‘1914’ or ‘1918’: On Nationalism and Liberalism

It is somewhat easier if we move to a less ambitious level and confine our-selves to the interpretation of theology’s role in German history of the firsthalf of the twentieth history. When Rendtorff describes liberal Protestant-ism as providing legitimation for the liberal democracy of the WeimarRepublic, he begins in 1918. For Barth the important year is 1914 and thetheological legitimation of nationalism and militarism that contributed to‘1914’.30 Rendtorff, however, does not seem to see the role of churchesand theologians before and during the war as especially problematic. They


28 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 128–133. Cf.Rendtorff, Ethik, vol. 2, 74. Rendtorff and his allies therefore confront Barth in twoquite different ways. On one level, his theology is described as part of an anti-liberalbacklash. It is this which is described in this article. But on another level, Barth’s the-ology (and dialectical theology in general) is described, not as antimodern, but as onemoment of the realization of modernity. Barth recapitulates, inside the Christian dog-matic system itself, in a radical way the Enlightenment process, and thereby gives“die dogmatische Legitimation für den Eintritt der neuzeitlichen Autonomie insZentrum von Theologie und Kirche selbst”. Rendtorff, Theorie des Christentums:Historisch-theologische Studien zu seiner neuzeitlichen Verfassung, Gütersloh 1972,179. See further ch. 9, and Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit.

29 Rendtorff is, of course, critical of what he considers the biblicist reductionismin dialectical theology shown in the way Barth formulates his Trinitarian theology.On the other hand, Rendtorff’s way of showing the meaningfulness of the Trinitarianstructure of the Christian ‘God-language’ would for Barth be an example of the an-thropological reductionism his whole theology was a reaction against. Rendtorff cansay that to talk about God as Creator is to say that there is wholeness to life which im-plies participation in a reality that goes beyond my own life. Christological languageexpresses the fact that this life is a gift in the sense that we are dependent on a hu-man and social context we have not ourselves created and therefore that this life is al-so a task to realize possibilities thus received. Finally, the talk about God as Spirit isa way of saying there is unity in the diversity of experiences we make, that there is anessential unity of the human race and that therefore history has become a task for hu-manity as a whole. See Rendtorff, Gott – ein Wort unserer Sprache? Ein theologis-cher Essay, München 1972.

30 I have discussed Barth’s early theology from this perspective in Rasmusson,‘Church and Nation-State: Karl Barth and German Public Theology in the Early 20thCentury’, Ned Geref Teologiese Tydskrif, 46 (2005), 511–524.


were time-bound in their reactions. One may ask why it is so easy to un-derstand 1914 in this way, but not 1933. Today we know that 1914 turnedout to be much more fateful for the twentieth century than anyone couldhave guessed at the time.

However, this issue goes deeper. In Rendtorff’s history nationalism andespecially war play subordinate roles for the formation of modernity andthe modern nation-state. He describes modernity not in relation to the na-tion-state, but as the emergence of liberalism or of the constitutional lib-eral welfare state. He describes positively the connections betweenProtestant liberalism and the early liberal nationalism, but he separatesthis sharply from the later conservative nationalism. War and nationalismseem therefore incidental or part of reactionary counter-movements andare not part of his main plot. 31 At no point is the difference betweenTroeltsch and Rendtorff greater than here. For Troeltsch the nation-statetogether with capitalism is at the center of modernity. Nationalism is theprimary moral principle of the modern state and war is an inevitable in-gredient in the modern international system.32 This Troeltsch is almost in-visible in Rendtorff’s writings. Rendtorff’s Troeltsch is, besides being themost important liberal theologian at the time, mainly an ardent defenderof and active participator in the early Weimar Republic. He describes oth-er leading liberal theologians in similar ways.

On this point the Barth of the 1920s is, in a way, closer to Troeltschthan Rendtorff is. The combination of, on the one hand, nation-state, na-tionalism, and militarism, expressed in the 1920s in the growing völkischideology, and, on the other hand, capitalism, tended to dominate Barth’sdescriptions of the current society as well. The difference is, of course,that while Troeltsch saw these phenomena as unavoidable, Barth wasdeeply critical.33

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31 See, e.g., Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration.32 See my account of Troeltsch in Rasmusson, ‘Historicizing the historicist: Ernst

Troeltsch and recent Mennonite theology’, in Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner,Harry J. Huebner, and Mark Thiessen Nation (eds.), The wisdom of the cross: Essaysin honor of John Howard Yoder, Grand Rapids 1999, 213–248.

33 Graf’s analysis in ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 428f., of Barth’s critique of the ‘‘lib-eralen’ Kultur und Gesellschaftsordnung’ (Barth, Der Römerbrief [Erste Fassung],1919, ed. Hermann Schmidt, Zürich 1985, 242) in the first edition of his Romanscommentary also ignores this context. It is, Barth says, this ‘liberal’ (note the quotes)order that led to the catastrophe of the World War. Graf’s description is here in gen-eral exceptionally tendentious in its use of Barth-quotes and of Ulrich Danne-mann, Theologie und Politik im Denken Karl Barths, München 1977. This is not tosay that Barth here, or elsewhere, would say that the Christian understanding of free-dom is the same as Graf’s liberal concept of freedom. In the passage discussed byGraf Barth is commenting on Romans 6 and 7 (Barth, Der Römerbrief, 1919,242–253) and I think it would be difficult for anyone to square what Paul says herewith dominant current liberal worldviews.


I have elsewhere tried to demonstrate that the sort of theology (and so-ciology) Troeltsch represented actively participated in the shaping of thecultural imagination that contributed to the disastrous developments inEuropean history during the early twentieth century.34 The description ofsocial and political reality became itself a social and political reality. Thenecessity of war was a central part of this cultural imagination, shapingthe elites in Germany as well as in many other countries. This war-culturewas to a large extent responsible for World War I. The leading war histo-rian John Keegan has written: ‘Politics played no part in the conduct ofthe First World War worth mentioning. The First World War was, on thecontrary, an extraordinary, a monstrous cultural aberration, the outcomeof an unwitting decision by Europeans in the century of Clausewitz ¼ toturn Europe into a warrior society.’35 The result of this nationalistic war-culture was not only the catastrophe we call the First World War, but al-so its many direct or indirect historical consequences. The Third Reichand the Second World War were direct results or continuations of theFirst World War. The second war was then followed by the Cold War,which was not especially cold for millions in the Third World, and whichwas a result of both World Wars. The Russian Revolution was, after all, adirect result of the First World War. Without that war Russian history andworld history would have been very different.

If European history is thus described, Barth’s understanding of it, andthe role of theology in shaping it, appear quite plausible. ModernProtestantism, both in its conservative and its liberal forms, was deeplyimplicated in the formation of the modern nation-state, and very much soin Germany. These developments have of course many different sourcesfar back in history (the ‘Constantinian turn’, theological and political de-velopments during the Middle Ages, the close connections between theReformation and the rise of the modern state, and so on). But in recentGerman history there is a close relationship, partly described byRendtorff, between liberal Protestantism and German nationalism fromSchleiermacher on.36 Liberal Protestantism was national more than it waschurchly, or rather its church critique was to a large extent a function of


34 Rasmusson, ‘Historicizing the historicist’. He was, of course, not alone. Germanuniversities were in general crucial agents in this development. However, we shouldremember that 12 percent of all German university professors in 1903 were theolo-gians (Mark D. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and liberal theology: Religion and cultur-al synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany, Oxford 2001, 3). They were doing the sort of in-fluential public theology that theologians today often dream of.

35 John Keegan, A history of warfare, New York 1993,, 21. 36 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration. For a short de-

scription of this development by a leading historian, see Thomas Nipperdey, Religionim Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918, München 1988, 92–106. For a longer discus-sion of the roots of German nationalism in Pietism and Romanticism, seeLiah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five roads to modernity, Cambridge 1992, 275–395.


its nationalistic character. It saw the idea of the nation as the embodimentof the principle of freedom, and thus the unification of Germany as the re-alization of the Protestant Reformation.37 German culture and theReformation were combined in a nationalistic theology of history inwhich the nation slowly became more important than the state. Con-servative Protestantism and the established church were initially more re-served toward this new nationalism. It was more directed towards local dy-nasties or territories or the idea of a Great German federation. But afterthe victory in the German-French war of 1871, the nationalist perspectivealso took over most conservative theology. The völkisch ideology did notplay an important role until the interwar period, but these earlier devel-opments created a discourse world open to such developments.

The type of theology and sociology Troeltsch and other liberal theolo-gians represented not only positively legitimated German nationalism andmilitarism, it also actively subverted any forms of theology and churchpractice that would have made resistance intelligible and possible, even ifthey seemed moderate in relation to conservatives like Reinhold Seeberg.People like Troeltsch and Harnack were very close to the political powerand thought that democracy was a necessity in 1918. Hirsch interpretedthe historical developments differently and took another road.38 But histheological strategy is not that different. Not without justification didHirsch understand his own theology – and more so after 1933 than before– as standing in critical continuity with the era of Harnack andTroeltsch.39 He took up and developed both the way Troeltsch stated theproblems and his suggestions of solutions.

Eilert Herms has, for example, argued that Hirsch’s concept‘Geschichtswende’ is a constructive development of Troeltsch’s idea of‘Kultursynthese’.40 This was a basic concept in Hirsch’s interpretation ofthe German crisis of 1918 in Deutschlands Schicksal and again in his analy-sis of the national solution of this crisis in the National Socialist Revo-lution in the book Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage from 1934.41 Troeltschand Hirsch did not agree about the Weimar Republic, but Herms doesargue that the agreement between Hirsch and Troeltsch is not only aboutthe philosophy of history. He thinks it is more substantial than that.

166 Arne Rasmusson

37 Rendtorff, Christentum zwischen Revolution und Restauration, 78.38 Hirsch, Deutschlands Schicksal: Staat, Volk und Menschheit im Lichte einer

ethischen Geschichtsansicht, Göttingen 1922.39 Hirsch, Christliche Rechenschaft, vol. 1, Tübingen 1989, 8.40 Eilert Herms, ‘‘‘Kultursynthese” und “Geschichtswende”: Zum Troeltsch-Erbe

in der Geschichtsphilosophie Emanuel Hirschs’, in Hans Martin Müller, Kultur-protestantismus: Beiträge zu einer Gestalt des modernen Christentums, Gütersloh1992, 339-388.

41 Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theolo-gischer Besinnung: Akademische Vorlesungen zum Verständnis des deutschen Jahrs1933, Göttingen 1934.


Troeltsch’s idea of cultural synthesis was an attempt to find a way of over-coming historical relativism, and thereby to make society into one subjectable to shape its own future. Cultural synthesis or unity is thus also a po-litical program. This is, so goes Herms’s argument, very similar to Hirsch’sconception.

Saying this is not, of course, to say that Troeltsch would have support-ed the revolution of 1933 had he lived so long. But it does say thatHirsch’s historical and political interpretations were one possible way ofapplying Troeltsch’s theological strategy. That is precisely what Barththought. Moreover, Hirsch’s own analysis and critique in the 1930s and1940s of Barth is basically the same as Rendtorff’s (unscientific, anti-Enlightenment, ahistorical, apolitical, narrowly churchly and authoritari-an, understandable in terms of the national and spiritual crisis of the1920s but impossible after the resolution of this crisis in the great nation-al revolution – Rendtorff would say after the creation of a democraticGermany – and so on).42 So it is not difficult to understand that FalkWagner can say that German liberal theology has to continue whereHirsch left off, and that includes Hirsch’s critique of Barth.43

Barth and Liberal Democracy

However, according to Rendtorff the tragedy was that so few theologiansand church leaders followed people like Troeltsch, Harnack, Rade, andother liberals in actively supporting and theologically legitimatingWeimar’s liberal democracy. Most theologians were deeply critical. It is,as we have seen, Rendtorff’s thesis that Barth’s theology and the move-ment of dialectical theology in general also participated in the subversionof the Weimar democracy, although he recognizes that Barth himself sup-ported democracy.

Barth did not, theologically or otherwise, write much about ‘politics’ af-ter he moved to Germany and before 1928, and he was not personally po-


42 See, e.g., Hirsch’s short account from 1940 of the development of twentieth cen-tury theology in Christliche Rechenschaft, vol. 1, 8f.

43 Wagner, ‘Geht die Umformungskrise des deutschsprachigen modernenProtestantismus weiter?’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 2 (1995),225–254. Wagner stresses the continuity between Troeltsch and Hirsch and says thatHirsch more than any other German theologian has described and systematically as-sessed the ‘Umformungsprozeß’ of modern Protestantism. On Hirsch, see esp.225–231, and for Barth, 245–250. It should be noted that Rendtorff does not dealwith Hirsch in this positive way. Cf. Rendtorff, ‘Das Wissenschaftsverständnis derTheologie im “Dritten Reich”’, in Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and CarstenNicolaisen (eds.), Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, Göttingen 1993,19–43, at 41–43.


litically active, which he had been in Switzerland. He was a Swiss workingin Germany, he concentrated on his teaching and the development of histheology, and his critique of his earlier religious socialism required newthinking about which way to go for church and theology. However, in hisethics lectures first given in 1928/29 he dealt with these issues extensive-ly.44 The tone is very different from his more critical accounts of state andpolitics in the two Romans commentaries, being much more positivehere. He does not theologically legitimize a specific political constitution,but what he describes is something like a modern liberal or social demo-cratic constitutional state. It is a state under the law (that should be trueeven for a non-democratic state), with clear separation of legislative, ex-ecutive and judicial powers, based on the consent and participation of thepopulation, that protects the freedom of the ‘civil society’, and that leadsto something like a social democratic economic policy. Timothy Gorringethinks that the difference from the perspective in the Romans commen-taries should be understood as Barth’s response to the context of theyoung democratic republic. ‘These lectures, in the Weimar Republic, giveus a political ethic which supports neither reaction nor revolution but re-sponsible, critical participation in the democratic process.’45 He adds:‘The message that students took away from Barth’s packed lecture hallswas quite unequivocal: of course Weimar is not the kingdom, for that istrue of no state, but our task is to engage in all the duties of society in or-der to forge something more human, more open, more just.’46

The way Rendtorff and Graf downplay this is odd.47 One of Graf’sproblems with Barth’s account seems to be that Barth does not make lib-eral democracy the overarching concept and that Barth can say that non-democratic governments might be legitimate. For Barth it would havebeen strange to say that all non-liberal governments are necessarily ille-gitimate, in other words most governments throughout history, and mostgovernments before the last war. He clearly prefers a democratic ‘Rechts-staat’, but he refuses to sacralize any political form.

The reader should also remember that both the state and the churchare dealt with under the heading of ‘humility’. If one compares Barth’s ac-count with the current Protestant political theology at the time, for exam-ple with Hirsch or Gogarten, one will appreciate the vast difference. In

168 Arne Rasmusson

44 Barth, Ethics, 440–451, see also 363–390.45 Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth against hegemony, Oxford 1999, 91.46 Gorringe, Karl Barth, 93.47 See the criticisms and alternative accounts by Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Zum Verhältnis

von Kirche und Staat nach Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Beiheft6 (1986), 76–135, esp. 118f, Günther van Norden, Die Weltverantwortung derChristen neu begreifen: Karl Barth als homo politicus, Gütersloh 1997, 24–45, FrankJehle, Lieber unangenehm laut als angenehm leise: Der Theologe Karl Barth und diePolitik, 1906–1968, Zürich 1999, 61–90, and Besier, Die Evangelische Kirche, 252–259.


these lectures there is an ongoing polemic against what he sees as the cur-rent one-sided criticism of the Weimar-democracy from people like Hirschand Gogarten, with their criticism of its ‘mechanical individualism’ and‘universalism’ and its lack of institutionalized understanding for the or-ganic and historical aspects of society, such as the Volk, authority, andwar. The sharp contrast to the dominant conservative nationalistic viewsis seen not least in his nuanced discussion of people- and nationhood.48

He does not deny their ethical relevance, but they are radically relativizedand qualified by many other loyalties such as marriage, family, state,church, and humanity. The concept of humanity is more foundationalthan that of people or nation. In his 1925 discussion of a possibleReformed confession, he even argues that one should make the issues ofvölkisch nationalism, anti-Semitism, and militarism into confessionalissues.49

Leading advocates of völkisch, non-democratic, and militaristic viewssuch as Paul Althaus, Wilhelm Stapel, and Hirsch also understood Barthas an opponent representing Western rationalistic views of democracy, so-cialism, and pacifism.50 These early criticisms of Barth are interesting al-so because the Barth they deal with is partly the Barth of the Romanscommentaries, and one might say, as does Graf, that the anti-liberal, anti-political, and anti-state views of the commentaries, for which Barth wasknown during the early 1920s, support the view that Barth’s theology wasnot supporting the Weimar democracy. Graf says that Barth’s early radi-cal socialism, which entailed sharp criticism of capitalism and the bour-geois ethos, was part of a general search for harmony that characterizedboth the right and the left at this time. He developed no constructive ap-proach. His goal was something more radical than Leninism. It finallyends up in a totally unpolitical theology at a time when the young Weimardemocracy needed all the support it could get.51

There may be more to this criticism than to the one directed to hiswork in Germany. But it does represent a very distorting undialectical


48 Barth, Ethics, 191–196 (later developed in Barth, Church dogmatics, III:4,285–323). In Rasmusson, ‘The Politics of Diaspora’, I have tried to show why I thinkhis discussion of peoplehood and nationhood is more satisfying than his discussionof the state. This article is also, more generally, a critical discussion of Barth’s chang-ing views on church, state, and politics.

49 Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922–1925, ed. Holger Finze, Zürich1990, pp. 604–643.

50 See e.g. Paul Althaus, Religiöser Sozialismus: Grundfragen der christlichenSozialethik, Gütersloh 1921, Hirsch, Deutschlands Schicksal, 155–166, and, forStapel’s text, see Karl Barth, Offene Briefe 1909–1935, ed. Dieter Koch, Zürich 2001,98–105. These are only very early examples. The confrontations between these peo-ple and Barth will become much more extensive in the 1930s.

51 Graf, ‘“Der Götze wackelt”?’, 422–432.


reading of Barth. He is not critical of political activity as such, but of the-ological legitimation of politics or the state. Moreover, the commentarieswere written when he was pastor in the more ‘western’ and more demo-cratic Switzerland. At the time he was very active in the Social Demo-cratic Party, worked hard against the bolshevization of the party, anddefended democratic politics.52 His critique of the state was not only afunction of his socialism, but also of his critique of the militarism andnationalism (so strongly supported by theologians, including Graf’s he-roes) that had created the recent catastrophe, and his theological convic-tion that the state is not the primary carrier of God’s historical action.

But it may be that when his theology was transplanted to the Germancontext and discourse world it could be read differently.53 He was, more-over, not read for himself but as part of a movement, where people likeGogarten could be understood quite differently. Barth did not do muchpublicly to differentiate himself from Gogarten. Although he was skepti-cal from early on about Gogarten (after some initial enthusiasm),54 itseems that only later, when he saw how Gogarten’s theology developed,did he recognize how far away from each other they really were. Gogartenmay fit Rendtorff’s description of a crisis theology in a way Barth does notduring the 1920s. Gogarten’s well-known programmatic article ‘Betweenthe Times’ from 1920 begins with the following lines: ‘It is the destiny ofour generation to stand between the times. We never belonged to the pe-riod presently coming to an end; it is doubtful whether we shall ever be-long to the period which is to come, and, if through our own efforts wecould be a part of the future, whether it would come as soon.’55 Gogartenwas, it seems, doing theology in the context of the German political, cul-tural, and spiritual crisis brought about by the loss in the war and thedemocratic revolution. Barth did not, though he could use the language ofcrisis, but with a very different meaning. He was, after all, not Germanand was not traumatized by the loss of the war or the fall of the empire.But contemporary German readers may not have seen this sharp differ-

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52 Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s critically realistic dialectical theology: Its gen-esis and development 1909–1936, Oxford 1995, 184–203.

53 So Norden, Die Weltverantwortung der Christen, 41–43.54 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 314f. For the

early enthusiasm, see e.g. Karl Barth – Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: Band 1,1913–1921, ed. Eduard Thurneysen, Zürich 1973, 399, 431, 435 from 1920, and forhis scepticism see e.g. Karl Barth – Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: Band 2,1921–1930, ed. Eduard Thurneysen, Zürich 1974, 47 and 97f from 1922 (in the latter– a letter to George Merz – he asks if Gogarten does not represent ‘eine überstiegeneromantische Neuauflage von Stock-Luthertum’).

55 Friedrich Gogarten, ‘Between the times’, in James Robinson (ed.), The Begin-nings of Dialectic Theology, vol. 1, Richmond 1968, 277–282, at 277.


ence.56 The total public break did not come until 1933.57 However, wehave already noted how sharply he criticized Gogarten’s political ethics inhis ethics lectures.58

A related argument is that Barth’s intense critique of the tradition oftheological liberalism, and therefore also of the Enlightenment heritageand the bourgeois and individualistic ethos it represented, is in practice,if not in intention, a critique of the basis of modern democracy. The oth-er side of this argument is that Barth’s theology is inherently authoritari-an or even totalitarian because of its understanding of the authority ofScripture and the church’s confessions. No other word could be put be-side the Word of God. Such criticism is, of course, very basic. It is partlybuilt on a caricature of Barth’s theology, but it also signifies a radical dif-ference between these two theologies. A treatment of it would require dis-cussions of, among other things, the nature of knowledge, truth, and au-thority. However, it is empirically false to say that a liberal democracyrequires subcommunities (that is of course not how Barth would describethe church) that themselves are liberal in the sense of Rendtorff. Manytheorists would instead argue that liberal democracy is, in fact, dependenton moral and cultural sources it cannot itself create.

This leads to a closely related issue mentioned by Rendtorff. We haveseen that he argued that the defense of the independence of church andtheology in the Confessing Church was important as an indirect supportof a pluralistic society. It created a space for dissent. Compare this with


56 See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 209–216.McCormack thinks that during 1914 and 1915, but not later, Barth could be describedas a crisis theologian in Gogarten’s meaning, seeing the war as itself a divine judg-ment (214f). Barth could, however, even in 1919, discussing socialism, talk about ‘dasGebot des Stunde’ (Barth, ‘Das was nicht geschehen soll’, Neuer Freier Aargauer,15 Aug. 1919, 1–2, at 1) and ‘die Notwendigkeit der geschichtlichen Stunde’, which‘die Gehorsam von uns verlangt’ (Barth, ‘Vom Rechthaben und Unrechthaben: Rede,gehalten zu einer socialdemokratischen Volkversammlung’, Das Neue Werk: DerChrist Im Volkstaat, 1 (1920), col. 635–641, at col. 639 and 640). This is notGogarten’s crisis-theology, but history ‘speaks’. He also greeted the mentioned articleby Gogarten positively. See Barth – Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1913–1921, 399, andalso his positive comments on Gogarten’s later article from 1920 ‘The Crisis of ourCulture’ (printed in Robinson [ed], The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, vol 1,283–300) in Barth – Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1913–1921, 431.

57 See Barth, ‘Abschied (1933)’, and also Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His lifefrom letters and autobiographical texts, Philadelphia 1976, 191f. For an overview ofthe development of Gogarten’s political theology, see L. E. Shiner, The secularizationof history: An introduction to the theology of Friedrich Gogarten, Nashville 1966,191–221.

58 He similarly criticized Gogarten in his 1927 Dogmatics, although without nam-ing him. See the editorial notes to Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf. ErsterBand: Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes: Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik, ed.Gerhard Sauter, Zürich 1982, 91–93 and 524f.


Troeltsch’s, Hirsch’s, and Rade’s ideas of cultural unity, which in the caseof a liberal like Rade could lead to the acceptance of separate laws for theJews. This idea of cultural unity is also one reason behind the strong de-fense of the Volk-church against a Confessing Church. So in this sense,Barth’s theology was more in congruence with a certain understanding ofliberalism than Troeltsch and Rade. It also shows that political liberalismand the attempt to create cultural unity have often gone together. As not-ed earlier, German liberal Protestantism was an integral part of the grow-ing nationalism of the nineteenth century.

Barth and Theological Liberalism in 1933

Another argument is that Barth’s theology, as it was developed in the1920s and early 1930s, was basically apolitical. Again that was, of course,also what Hirsch and Stapel thought. This becomes especially clear, it issaid, in 1933. Barth’s theological interest was only the independence ofthe church. He was not, as theologian, concerned with politics. For peo-ple like Hirsch or Rendtorff the nation of Germany is the primary contextand the church’s role is seen in this light. However, for Barth the churchis much more important than Germany. And both world and church aregreater than Germany. In his ethics lectures he had said, discussingRichard Rothe, that in liberal Protestantism the church gradually tendedto disappear into the state, and therefore ethics tended to swallow dog-matics. Without the church as the main context for ethics, the nation-statewill (in the modern period) explicitly or implicitly become the main con-text for doing ethics.59 Hirsch was an example of what the consequencescould be.

I will not here discuss Barth’s activity 1933–1935, but I think the criti-cism for being apolitical is to a large extent misdirected as a general state-ment.60 However, even if one thinks in terms of the more narrow politicalrole of the church in Germany, its independence was crucial for its abili-ty to resist. This is something Rendtorff also recognizes. In 1933 theProtestant church faced the threat of being completely taken over by theGerman Christians. At that point Barth’s theological protest was crucial.

It is often said, especially by the critics of Barth and the ConfessingChurch, that one cannot deduce the positions of theologians in the face ofthe Nazi state from their theological positions. There were liberal, conser-vative, and dialectical theologians both among German Christians and

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59 Barth, Ethics, 8.60 See Rasmusson, ‘Church and Nation-State’, and especially Rasmusson, ‘“De-

prive them of their pathos”: Karl Barth and the Nazi Revolution Revisited’, ModernTheology 23 (2007), 369–391.


among its opponents.61 But it was hardly an accident that a theology ofBarth’s sort was the one that gave theological leadership to the resistance,although he did not have many close theological allies. In many respects,he was an outsider also in the Confessing Church. Protestant liberalismdid not by itself provide theological or institutional leadership for resist-ance. It was true both for the more radical dissent Barth represented andthe more mediating groups he was critical of. There were important andvery active liberal theologians in the Confessing Church, but they workedunder premises of a nonliberal Confessing Church. The Marburg NewTestament scholar and church historian Hans von Soden is a well knownexample. Other liberals could not for theological and political reasons par-ticipate in the Confessing Church. Many resisted in various ways on a per-sonal level, but liberal Protestant institutions did not provide any relevantresistance.62

And it is difficult to think that the sort of individualistic freeChristianity or Volk-church Christianity supported by Rendtorff couldhave created a strong resistance, even if the Troeltsch-Harnack-Rade tra-dition of theology had continued to dominate German theology.Rendtorff might of course say that in such a situation the whole culturalclimate would have been different and Hitler would have never succeed-ed. It would also have been different if Barthian theology had dominated.But in 1933, as it actually turned out, what should a politically responsi-ble liberal theology do? Direct political resistance might seem futile in asituation where one represents a tiny minority. The dominant politicalforce will increasingly shape the political discourse and the formulation ofthe problems and thereby even to an increasing extent shape the politicalimagination of the responsible political opposition. In addition, politicalcriticism was quickly silenced. It may be better to say something, ratherthan opposing outright and then being silenced. So a critical but accom-modating position may seem the most responsible.

Of the usually mentioned liberal heroes from the Weimar period, theonly ones who lived through the 1930s were Martin Rade and HermanMulert.63 Both are quite typical of this development. Barth had once been


61 Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus und Kir-chenkampf’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 87 (1976), 298–320, at 298–301, Graf,‘‘‘Wir konnten dem Rad nicht in die Speichen fallen”: Liberaler Protestantismus und“Judenfrage” nach 1933’, in Jochen-Christoph Kaiser and Martin Greschat (eds.), DerHolocaust und die Protestanten: Analysen einer Verstrickung, Frankfurt am Main1988, 151–185, at 151–153. Cf. Barth’s comment in Theological existence today!A plea for theological freedom, London 1933, 47, and Stoevesandt’s notes to thiscomment in Barth, Theologische Existenz heute! (1933), ed. Hinrich Stoevesandt,München 1984, 126–128.

62 Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 319.63 For the following, see especially Anne Christine Nagel, Martin Rade – Theologe

und Politiker des Sozialen Liberalismus: Eine politische Biographie, Gütersloh 1996,


Rade’s editorial assistant on the liberal flagship Die Christliche Welt, andBarth’s brother Peter was married to Rade’s daughter Helene. Barth andRade kept up an ongoing correspondence until Rade’s death in 1940.64 In1914 they had their first major conflict, when (the near pacifist) Rade, tothe great disappointment of Barth, publicly celebrated the war. Rade, pro-fessor in Marburg until his retirement in1924, continued as editor of DieChristliche Welt until 1931. He was a leader in the Free Protestant move-ment, a very active liberal politician strongly supporting the WeimarRepublic, and had often worked together with Troeltsch. He is one of themost cited examples of the support given by liberal theologians to theWeimar Republic and to the resistance against National Socialism.65

Personally he also suffered from the Nazi takeover. Because of his earlierpolitical activities, he was in November 1933 removed from his professor-ship (though he was emeritus) and his state pension was reduced.

Before 1933 Rade was a long-time critic of National Socialism. And af-ter 1933 his criticisms continued, especially against the GermanChristians and the application of the Aryan-paragraph to the church, buthe argued for a more accommodating attitude to the Nazi state than Barthdid. He did not become a member of the Confessing Church because as aliberal he was critical of binding confessions and because he supportedthe idea of a broad Volk-church.66 He could therefore write as criticallyabout the Confessing Church as about the German Christians. For a longtime he had been more interested in a dialog with Barth than other liber-al theologians, for example his successor as editor of Die Christliche WeltHerman Mulert, who argued that dialectical theology, German Christians,and the National Socialists were rooted in the same understanding of au-thority and orthodoxy.67 That Rade was more interested in dialog and mu-tual understanding with Barth is, I suppose, partly explained by the factof their close personal relationship. In a letter to Barth he wrote positive-

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esp. 233–260, Franz G. M. Feige, The varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany:Five theopolitical positions, Lewiston 1990, 340–394, Graf, ‘“Wir konnten dem Radnicht in die Speichen fallen”’, and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalis-mus’. The major theological analysis of Rade is Christoph Schwöbel, Martin Rade:Das Verhältnis von Geschichte, Religion und Moral als Grundproblem seiner Theo-logie, Gütersloh 1980, though one cannot from his account gather the picture I willgive in the following. See 216–220. Both Feige, The Varieties of Protestantism inNazi Germany and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’ deal exten-sively with Mulert.

64 Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Christoph Schwöbel, Gütersloh 1981.65 See, e.g., Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Gottes Stimme und die Demokratie: Theologi-

sche Unterstützung für das neue demokratische System’, in Ziegert (ed.), Die Kir-chen und die Weimarer Republik, 37–68, and Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischerLiberalismus’.

66 But cf. Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, 274.67 Feige, The Varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany, 389.


ly about Barth’s Theological Existence Today, though he had reservationsespecially about the status of the Bible and Barth’s ecclesiology. Interest-ingly enough, he also recognized that Barth’s theology gave the latter acritical distance lacking in German Lutheranism. This cannot, he said,just be explained by the fact that Barth was Swiss.68

However, the picture is more mixed than this, although one would nev-er guess that from some of the secondary literature. What is most oftenmentioned is his rather open liberal attitude to Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’sGerman Faith Movement. ‘Innerhalb des religiösen Individualismus, derdank der Reformation für uns Deutsche selbstverständlich ist … soll auchdiese Entdeckung und Botschaft willkommen sein, und wir wollen von ihrlernen.’69 This might be compared to Troeltsch’s similarly somewhat sym-pathetic attitude towards Paul de Lagarde’s German Religion as an ex-ample of a religious awakening outside the churches.70 Lagarde was anineteenth century Orientalist, who besides being a strong defender of thenecessity of a national religion based on a form of völkisch thinking, alsowas an advocate of a German European colonial empire, and a stronglyanti-Jewish thinker. He is usually considered as an inspiration to later fas-cist/nazist thinking (his writings were extensively and repeatedly repub-lished during the Third Reich).71 Also Mulert was influenced by Lagarde.He even published a Lagarde Reader in 1913, in which Lagarde was posi-tively presented as a representative of anti-Catholicism, anti-clericalism,and anti-dogmatism.72 So it is not surprising that Mulert too could expresshimself quite positively about the German Faith Movement. He was verycritical of the German Christians, but he stressed that the conflict did notconcern the issue of whether Volk and race should be honored as creationorders. This, he said, all Protestants agree about, which, of course, was notexactly true. The problem with the German Christians, he continued, isthe way they glorify martial values and the struggle against external andinternal enemies (especially the Jews), to the exclusion of humility, love,and peace. Their search for a ‘heroic piety’ is positive, but not the un-christian form it takes.73

But often ignored is a startling article written by Rade in March 1933titled ‘Ein neuer Anfang’.74 Here he says that he finds the declaration of


68 Barth and Rade, Ein Briefwechsel, 265–267. 69 Cited in Kantzenbach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 309.70 Troeltsch, Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik (Gesammelte

Schriften. Bd 2), Tübingen 1913, 20–21.71 Paul de Lagarde, Schriften für das deutsche Volk, 2 vol., ed. Paul Fischer, Mün-

chen 1924. On Lagarde, see Fritz Stern, The politics of cultural despair: A study inthe rise of the Germanic ideology, Berkeley 1961, 1–94.

72 Paul de Lagarde, ed. Hermann Mulert, Berlin-Schöneberg 1913. Cf. Kantzen-bach, ‘Kirchlich-theologischer Liberalismus’, 312.

73 Mulert, ‘Ethische “Irrlehren”’, Die christliche Welt, 48 (1934), 108–111. 74 Rade, ‘Ein Neuer Anfang’, Die christliche Welt, 47 (1933), 377–378.


the National Socialists that 1933 represents a revolution an Erlösung. If itis a revolution one does not need to judge what happens with old criteria.It is a New Beginning, which means that the new wine needs new wine-skins. The old is gone. Although in the future one may have to judge thisrevolution negatively, it is now meaningless to resist it. Instead he calledfor participation in the new building of the nation. Moreover, because itwas a revolution, violence and terror against opponents were legitimate.That is simply the way of revolutions. In her political biography of Rade,Anne Christine Nagel compares Rade’s reaction 1933 with his strong andenthusiastic support of the German war policy of 1914.75 In both cases hetook positions in contrast to earlier stands, although in 1914 with an en-thusiasm wholly lacking in 1933. In both cases, he saw what happened asa way out of an impasse, 1914 in the foreign policy, in 1933 in domesticpolicy. Central for him in both cases was the interest of the nation. Nagelwrites: ‘Im Sommer 1914 wie im März 1933 argumentierte der PatriotRade bei der Beurteilung der Ereignisse vor dem Hintergrund der Nationals eines Letztwertes.’76

Also significant is his views of the laws against the Jews. Although longcritical of anti-Semitism, he did not think that one should try to resist thenew laws against Jews, except in so far they applied to the church. As lateas September 1935 he wrote an article discussing the Nuremberg laws inwhich he basically accepted separate laws for the Jews, while discussingtheir details. Actually, already in 1932 he had himself shown some sym-pathy for separate laws for Jews.77 In other words, he partly accepted thedominant description, outside and inside National Socialism, of the Jewsas ‘a problem’. Personally, however, he supported Jews in various ways, in-cluding helping Jews to flee from Germany. One should also, of course,remember that Rade and his contemporaries thought in pre-Holocaustterms. While we think of the Jewish policy in light of the Holocaust, theydid not expect something like that. One might compare it to segregationlaws for blacks in USA. Even if someone like Reinhold Niebuhr wasagainst these laws, it was never a central concern for him.78

176 Arne Rasmusson

75 See Nagel, Martin Rade, 134–156.76 Ibid., 250. The problem with Nagel’s description is that her concentration on

this article and the one we will discuss in the following paragraph gives a somewhatone-sided view of Rade’s stance. But it is no less one-sided than other major descrip-tions that ignore this side of Rade’s public stance.

77 See ibid., 239–244.78 One understands how unproblematic anti-Jewish sentiments were perceived to

be, when one sees how, in 1928, such a prominent church leader as the GeneralSuperintendent Otto Dibelius could flatly describe himself as an anti-Semite (al-though recognizing that the word had, as he said, an unpleasant ring). SeeHans-Ulrich Thamer ‘Protestantismus und “Judenfrage” in der Geschichte des Dritten Reiches’, in Kaiser and Greschat (eds.), Der Holocaust und die Protestanten, 216–240, at 228.


Graf thinks Rade’s stand is understandable in terms of the tradition ofGerman Culture-Protestantism. In the late nineteenth and the early twen-tieth centuries there existed a strong value consensus between Protestantliberal ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ and the Jewish bourgeoisie. However, the for-mer also often thought that assimilation into a Christian culture was a re-quirement for equal citizenship in the civil society. Behind this was a viewof culture and society that strongly emphasized the need for cultural ho-mogeneity. And the state, understood as a culture state, was seen as the‘wichtigsten Agenten sozial-kultureller Integration’.79 This view made itdifficult to criticize the state in terms of concrete human rights.80 This un-derstanding of the need of cultural homogeneity for creating unified po-litical action is also the one Herms ascribes to Troeltsch and Hirsch. Onthis point Rendtorff and Graf think that a contemporary liberalism has toaccept value pluralism as constitutive of the modern state. How far theirtype of liberalism actually is able to do that is, of course, a much debatedissue in contemporary political philosophy.

Barth was critical of the lack of resistance of Die Christliche Welt. Radewrites in a letter to Mulert (1 February 1934) that Barth has asked him:‘Warum leistet Ihr keinen Widerstand? Warum versagt die “ChristlicheWelt”?’ Rade answered, among other things, that it was no church politi-cal body, its time for resistance had not yet come, their ecclesiology wasnot Reformed, and one could still preach the Gospel everywhere.81

Rade and Mulert are particular instances, though very prominent ones,often used as examples of liberal resistance to National Socialism. My ac-count does not prove anything in itself. But it does indicate some of theweaknesses of theological liberalism. It also indicates that it was no acci-dent that people like Barth and Bonhoeffer provided the most decisivetheological leadership for the resisting Church.

Conclusion

History writing is controversial, because it impinges on current political,cultural, and religious identities and practices. The intense interest in therole of church and theology during the Weimar republic and the ThirdReich has very much to do with the current debate about the nature androle of church and theology, both in and outside Germany. And the in-


79 Graf, “’Wir konnten dem Rad nicht in die Speichen fallen’”, 175.80 Ibid., 154, 173-178.81 The letter is cited in Johannes Rathje, Die Welt des freien Protestantismus: Ein

Beitrag zur deutsch-evangelischen Geistesgeschichte, dargestellt an Leben und Werkvon Martin Rade, Stuttgart 1952, 461, and followed by Mulert’s answer.


fluence goes both ways. The way one understands history affects the wayone reads current realities. And current political and theological concep-tions influence how history is written. The case described in this article isan obvious example. And it is, of course, also true of my discussion.

This does not mean that history writing is arbitrary. The writing of his-tory depends on available evidence (records of events, statements, and soon), interpretative contexts, the methods used, basic assumptions, and soon. The evidence is limited and in the production of an historical text on-ly a portion of the known evidences can actually be directly used. Whatwe do not know and what is not said may be as important for under-standing as what we know and what is said. Moreover, the pieces of evi-dence we have can be used, combined, and interpreted in countless ways.Isolated historical ‘facts’ separate from interpretative contexts and the his-torical methods used do not exist. The same piece of evidence used in dif-ferent interpretative contexts may look very different and can be used foreven opposite purposes. It is thus possible to write very diverse, but co-herent and plausible, narratives about the same historical topic.

However, although different plausible accounts can be produced, noteverything can be claimed, otherwise communication would be impossi-ble. It is not possible to say that Barth was politically a Nazi or Hirsch aliberal democrat. But there is no sharp line separating the ‘possible’ fromthe ‘impossible’. The debate seldom concerns what most of us think is ob-viously wrong (such as the denial of the Holocaust). We discuss the se-lection and interpretation of acts, statements, and structures that in them-selves are not in question. Although final consensus is often unlikely, thehistorical debate is still meaningful and important. It may not lead toagreement, but both sides in a debate may change in the process.

In this article I have tried to show why I think that the main plot in thereconstruction of the role of Barth’s theology during the 1920s and 1930sprovided by the ‘Munich-school’ is implausible. I have argued, for exam-ple, that Graf’s reading of Barth-texts sometimes is exceedingly tenden-tious, that Rendtorff’s reading of Troeltsch is one-sided, that the way‘1914’ (and the history shaping ‘1914’) is placed in the background or nor-malized is a serious error, and that there is some plausibility to Barth’s un-derstanding of the role of liberal Protestantism. Insofar as these (and oth-er similar) judgments are accepted it not only problematizes Rendtorff’sand his allies’ reading of history, it also poses some serious questions totheir theological project as a whole, as this is so closely intertwined with aspecific reading of history. This type of liberal theology has to ask moreself-critical questions about the failures of Liberal Protestantism in ‘1914’and ‘1933’. It also makes it more difficult not to take Barth’s position se-riously.

However, to make this challenge more generally effective, I would haveto call into question some of the fundamental theological, ecclesiological,

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and sociological convictions that, for many, make the reading ofRendtorff, Graf, and others plausible. That, of course, is not possible here.These theologians represent a classical liberal theological perspective anda Volk-church ecclesiology inserted into a form of a broad modernization-theoretical perspective (often in a nineteenth century German idealistmould which is quite peculiar for someone outside of this tradition). Theyseem to assume that a secular and sociological modernization theory ismore ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ than a theological perspective, that the lat-ter represents an ideological intrusion into a more ‘objective’ secular so-ciological or historical discourse. This was a common view in the middleof the twentieth century when Rendtorff formed his theology, but there islittle reason to accept this assumption and certainly not without argu-ment. The basic institutional context and carrier of ‘modernization’ hasbeen the nation-state in conjunction with the market economy and this isalso the self-evident context for Rendtorff’s theology. Economics and so-ciology (in more complicated ways) have thus functioned as the theolo-gies of modernity. They have not only described it, they have functionedas purveyors of certain ways of seeing reality and certain moral perspec-tives and practices.82 But there is nothing necessary about ‘modernity’,‘liberalism’, or the ‘nation-state’. Neither is a ‘natural’ outcome or realiza-tion of this or that historical process; rather, each represents contingentsocial formations and ideologies that are no more necessary or universalthan churches.

If one does not, as I do not, accept the specific theological, ecclesio-logical, political, and sociological assumptions behind the work ofRendtorff and his allies, it will inevitably influence one’s description ofhistory.83 Conversely, one’s reading of history may confirm, contribute to,or require changes in one’s wider theological (or sociological and political)


82 This has been shown in countless studies. Some prominent examples especiallyrelevant for theologians are from a theological perspective John Milbank, Theologyand social theory: Beyond secular reason, Oxford 1991, from the perspective of eco-nomics Robert H. Nelson, Economics as religion: From Samuelson to Chicago andbeyond, University Park, Pa. 2001, from a sociological perspective Christian Smith,Moral, believing animals: Human personhood and culture, New York 2003, ChristianSmith (ed.), The secular revolution: Power, interests, and conflict in the seculariza-tion of American public life, Berkeley 2003 (see esp. Smith’s long theoretical intro-duction, pp. 1–96), and Randall Collins, The sociology of philosophies: A global the-ory of intellectual change, Cambridge, Mass. 1998 (esp. ch. 12 is a fascinatingaccount of the German intellectual cultural developments basic to Rendtorff’s ac-count), from a moral philosophical perspective Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After virtue: Astudy in moral theory, Notre Dame 1984, and from the view of a political philosopherPierre Manent, An intellectual history of liberalism, Princeton 1994.

83 In addition to articles mentioned in earlier notes, see also e.g. Rasmusson, TheChurch as polis: From political theology to theological politics as exemplified byJürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas, Notre Dame 1995.


perspective. It is an ongoing and reciprocal process. Historiography can-not be separated from theology, and theology cannot be separated fromhistoriography.

Arne Rasmusson, Department of Religious Studies, Umeå University, SE-90187 Umeå

180 Arne Rasmusson


Historiography and Theology. Theology in the Weimar Republic and the Beginning of the Third Reich

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