The Theological Component of World Conflict: The Example of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1914–18

The Church Faces the Future

No. 209, September 2009 (3)

A journal of Christian thought & opinion

St Mark’s

Review

"The Theological Component of World Conflict: The Example of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1914–18"

by John A. Moses

St Mark’s ReviewNo. 209, September 2009 (3)

The Church Faces the Future

Editorial 5Tom Frame

Toward Redemption in Theological Education 9Teaching and Learning Theology

Don Saines

Theology and the Church’s Challenges in Australia and the Pacific 23

Stuart Brooking

The Theological Component of World Conflict 39The Example of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1914–18

John A. Moses

What is Public Theology? 59Scott Cowdell

Religion and Human Rights 69Hilary Charlesworth

Book Reviews 77An Australian resource for pastoral care 77A ministry of word and activism 79Exploring the strangeness of theology 82Justice, law, forgiveness 86Top try, great goal 93‘He is our peace’ (Ephesians 2:14) 95One way to find an absent God 100Book Notes 102

The Rev’d Dr John A. Moses is a Professorial Associate in the School of Theology of Charles Sturt University. This is an edited version of the 2009 St Mark’s Day Address.

The Theological Component of World ConflictThe Example of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1914–18

John A. Moses

In the 2008 St Mark’s Day address, Professor Tony Johns drew attention to one of the main causes of Christian-Muslim antagonism throughout history until the present time. He attributed it to a divergent understand-ing of the nature of Holy Writ. The Muslims do not investigate sacred text in the same way as Christian scholars. For them the text is holy because it is the literal Word of Allah to the prophet Muhammad. The Qu’ran is, then, a book of the utmost sacredness. Consequently, there is no such thing as textual criticism or historical investigation as to how the various writings came into being. Christians, on the other hand, following the pioneering research of such scholars as Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) have been acutely aware of the human mediation of the ‘Word of God’.

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St Mark’s Review, No. 209, September 2009 (3)

Apart, then, from Christian fundamentalists who have a different agenda from mainstream biblical scholars, theologians and historians of the church approach their respective tasks ‘scientifically’, that is to say, they employ historical-critical methods pioneered by such towering scholars as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Friedrich von Savigny (1779–1861) and Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) to name just the most notable ones, all of whom were also German.1 This fact is significant because the later German professors of theology and history in the period prior to the Great War of 1914–18 perceived themselves to be the unchallenged authorities in the world of biblical and historical scholarship. Students from all over the world streamed to German universities to sit at their feet.

As Australian academic historians and popular writers continue to explore the causes and consequences of a conflict that left more than 59,000 Australians dead and many more permanently incapacitated, I want to outline the presuppositions of what was known as ‘German liberal theology’ and the ways in which these presuppositions created a highly nuanced theology of imperialism and war. I will also make a few critical sideways glances at the British theology of imperialism in the same era. Certainly, there were British theologians of empire and war but their agenda was considerably more modest than that of their German counterparts. Hegelian philosophy combined with Rankean method in historiography led to the delusion, pointed out by none other than Karl Barth, that the Germans had tried to do the impossible, namely to know the mind of an inscrutable God and to assert that it was God’s apparent intention that the German empire should, with force of arms, wrest predominance in the world from the other great powers, chiefly Britain, at an opportune time.2 We must bear in mind that this objective was very rigorously theologically justified. So, how did they approach their task and how successful were they in its completion? The short answer is by espousing a methodology called historismus—historicism. My principal objective is to explain why and how it arose and captured the mind of generations of German profes-sors and intellectuals.3

I

Historismus is only thinkable as a consequence of the adoption of the Reformation by most of the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther’s exegesis of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, elevated that piece

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The Theological Component of World Conflict

of scripture to a quasi-foundational constitutional document for the future German empire. Why? Because the powers-that-be are ordained of God, ‘Alle Obrigkeit ist von Gott’. Luther taught quite robustly that the prince was, after the breach with Rome, summus episcopus, in German, ein Notbischof.

In a sense quite different from medieval thinking about the relation-ship between monarchs and the Papacy, Luther allocated to the prince the dual function of secular ruler and chief overseer of the church. In his numerous writings Luther had produced a new version of the doctrine of the two kingdoms, die Zwei-Reiche-Lehre, secular and spiritual, in which the role of the prince was to guarantee security and Godly order, that is to secure the secular sphere, while the pastors were responsible solely for the cure of souls, the spiritual realm, the preaching of the Word.4

In a very real sense, then, the oversight of the secular world by the prince was a vocation from God to whom only the absolute ruler was responsible. The prince was God’s chief minister on earth because it was his responsibility to maintain order in both the domestic as well as the foreign policy spheres so that Christian people could go about their business unmolested, either by criminals internally, or by the forces of the Antichrist, or any other foreign powers. For Luther the world was the ‘Devil’s beer house’, des Teufels Wirtshaus, where thieves, cut-throats and prostitutes lurked to waylay all God-fearing subjects. In maintaining law and order, the prince was ensuring that the ‘economy of God’ was sus-tained on earth, bearing in mind that everybody has a function in society that serves the good of the whole, from the milkmaid to the squire, to the merchant, to the artisan, to the public servant, to the soldier and finally to the prince. It was all one organic whole, and the most important individu-als in the ‘economy of God’ were the soldiers and their officers, under the prince. 5 Why? Because they ensured the security of the realm from external attack. The world that Luther inhabited was a very Machiavellian place; not much has changed, really. If the realm is not secure then the livelihood of the subjects is jeopardised. In a country like Germany, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbours, this was readily and well understood.

In this situation the concerns of the military were always prioritised, and they are the main reason why, in contrast to Britain, an island, no suc-cessful movements arose to challenge the authority of the prince. Especially in principalities like Prussia from the seventeenth century when the

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Hohenzollern dynasty became ascendant, the entire administration, and the economy in general, was geared to maintaining a standing army. And that is the definition of militarism, namely that the priorities of the military determine the constitution of the country. Under such conditions it is easy to see that there was little space for the evolution of grass roots democratic institutions. Everything was directed from the centre of authority in Berlin or Potsdam. It should be noted, too, that every man of military age was subject to call-up with the exceptions of pastors. They were needed to inculcate personal piety as well as obedience to civil authority. So we can see how the ‘economy of God’ worked in Prussia-Germany.

Franz Schnabel, professor of history in Munich after 1945, was a liberal Roman Catholic and no friend of Prussian militarism. He taught that German history was characterised by the following structures de longue durée: first, the Judeo-Roman heritage of western Europe; secondly, the petty state particularism of the Holy Roman Empire, the so-called Kleinstaaterei, (when there had been over 300 principalities within the empire); and, thirdly, the rise of Prussia which enforced the federal union of all the Germanic principalities except Roman Catholic Austria, which was the policy objective of the Prussian Minister President and later, Reich Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck in 1871. Consequently, the greatest single fact of modern German history was the rise of Protestant Prussia.6

Prussia sustained its predominance in Germany even after the 1848 revolution which took a peculiarly Germanic course. Instead of guil-lotining the princes and nobles, as in revolutionary France in 1789, the revolutionary delegates of the Frankfurt National Assembly had graciously offered the throne of a united Germany to the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. But he had ungraciously refused because the constitution that the revolutionaries had devised was one in which, as in England, the monarch would be bound by parliamentary decisions. This flew in the face of the doctrine of Königtum durch Gottes Gnaden, essentially the German version of the ‘divine right of kings.’ Indeed, none of the then princes would compromise on this. And those more radical revolutionaries at Frankfurt who continued to demand constitutional government were forcibly driven out of town and some arrested and shot by Prussian troops, providentially some would say, under the command of an officer destined to become the future German Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in 1871.

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As a consequence, Prussia remained essentially a ‘military monarchy’ as it had always been although there had been considerable debate between 1850 and 1862 instigated by stubborn liberals who continued to agitate for a modern constitution where the monarch would be responsible to parlia-ment not to Almighty God. The young king, Wilhelm I, then appointed a forceful Prussian diplomat, Otto von Bismarck, whom he made Minister President with a brief to stamp out liberal agitation for a sovereign par-liament and to retain the prerogatives of the monarchy responsible only to God. In fulfilling this task, the East Elbian Junker, Bismarck, was so brilliantly successful that the historical profession developed the doctrine of Borussismus which simply meant that Almighty God, since the Middle Ages, had bestowed the vocation on Brandenburg-Prussia to unite Germany under the Hohenzollern Protestant absolutist dynasty. This was the essential core of the system of historical thinking that took root hence-forth in Germany, namely, historicism. God was certainly the major player in German history. A school of historians arose that practically took over at all German universities, namely the Prussian school, which maintained its historicism over the profession until after World War II by which time the victorious Allies had decided to expunge Prussia as a political entity from the map of Europe having attributed the excesses of German milita-rism to the Prussian heritage. This was a commentary on the virulence of the ideology of Borussismus in Western eyes.

For our purpose it is of central importance to know that during the period 1870–1945, German historiography was founded on the assump-tion that Prussia (and then Germany) had a vocation from God to achieve European mastery and then world dominance. This historiography was underpinned by the philosophy of GWF Hegel (1770–1831) who was known as the ‘Royal Prussian state philosopher’ because his ideas endorsed the power of the monarch and the role of force in world history. Immanuel Kant (1724–1802), the German philosopher of universal peace, enjoyed no status in the profession at all. Consequently, the God whom most Germans worshipped was a God of war. ‘War’, Leopold von Ranke re-affirmed by précising the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, ‘was the father of all things’. What Heraclitus had reportedly said was that ‘all things come into being by the conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (ta hola, the whole) flows like a stream’. So the ancient Greeks have had a considerable influence on nineteenth century Germany.

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Von Ranke’s schema of history had been spelled out already in an influential essay from 1833 called ‘The Great Powers’ which his epigones characterised as having distilled the sum of modern history. In this essay he followed Gottfried Herder’s organic imagery of the State. The underlying assumption here was that the State is an organism continually expanding and, as such, is bound to collide with neigbouring states. Each state wants to establish its culture over all others in a bid for hegemony. Naturally, the other states resist this and form coalitions with one another in order to prevent the one exerting the claim to hegemony from achiev-ing it. Consequently, European history presented the image of constantly shifting of alliances among the nations in order to maintain the balance of power. This was made clear to the young Ranke by the manner in which the Napoleonic wars had been fought and concluded. For him European history was the account of how the so-called Great Powers of Russia, Austria, Prussia, France and England negotiated their treaties. Although there were wars, he contended, it was a good thing that none of the Great Powers succeeded in their desire for hegemony.

This relatively modest schema was displaced, however, as a result of the historical profession’s preference for Hegelian philosophy. From his chair in Berlin, Hegel argued—one could almost say proved—that it was the will of God that one power should emerge, ‘the world historical nation’, which would impose its hegemony over all the rest in stark contrast to Ranke’s schema. In short, Hegel advanced a philosophy of world history that sanctified the imperialistic struggle and final triumph of one great power over the others as the norm. Although this was strongly militaristic, it would eventually mean world peace albeit purchased at the price of suppressing all other nations. Nevertheless, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, this was the philosophy that took root to the exclusion of all others, largely due to the work of a disappointed delegate at the Frankfurt Parliament, namely Johann Gustav Droysen, son of an army chaplain, who had dearly wished for a united Germany under Prussian rule. Between 1855 and 1863, Droysen produced a seven volume study titled die Geschichte der preussischen Politik in which he demonstrated that Prussia was called by God to unite all Germany in accordance with her own existing political culture. No ideas imported from France or England would help; Prussia must do it by imposing her military monarchy on all other Germanic states. This commitment to ‘organic’ notions is paramount. And when Bismarck

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had accomplished the unification by ‘blood and iron’ in 1871 it was seen as a confirmation of the doctrine of Borussismus.

The key element in this development was its theological foundation. Beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), theologians estab-lished that God indeed manifested His will for humanity via the Volk, the national community. It was a convincing concept that took root at the time of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany in 1806 when a Prusso-German nationalism was being fostered by leading theological figures such as Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Gradually, the idea took root that God was on the side of Germans and this was made abundantly clear when Prussia finally united Germany in 1871 by defeating the decadent and papist French. Clearly, the God of Luther and Hegel had guided the German sword.7

II

From then until 1914, parallel with the extension of Prusso-German power, industrially, militarily and in colonial acquisitions, there developed a strident German imperial and war theology. This was expressed in count-less sermons and lectures by scholars of international repute that have become the subject of numerous monographs mostly by German church historians. Their work shows the emergence of an unshakable conviction that God was calling Prusso-Germany to become His hammer in the world. God is a God of battles. War, as we have seen, is an instrument of God and in the self-perception of most German theologians the time was approaching when those states that stood in the way of German expansion would have to be dealt with in the name of God.

This mind-set was endorsed both by all so-called liberal theologians as well as the ‘orthodox’ ones: Germany’s pre-ordained place in the sun had to be claimed and without delay. The idea that there could be eternal peace was ridiculed. The few German theologians who were pacifist-inclined were effectively marginalised. Foreign observers could not under-stand this behavior and attributed expressions of German belligerence to spirited eccentrics. In Britain, for example, the writings of Heinrich von Treitschke were available to only a few aficionados who had gone to Berlin and attended his lectures. The case of the voluminous writings of General Friedrich von Bernhardi, who never tired of preaching about war as a biological necessity, illuminates my point. He was never really taken seri-ously as representing the mind of the German government. Nevertheless,

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there was widespread nervousness in the decades prior to 1914 among the peoples of Europe and in the British Dominions that was generated by real fear that a European-wide conflagration involving the British Empire might be imminent. The alliance arrangements of the Powers suggested this, as well as the ominous naval shipbuilding race between Germany and Britain.

By 1907 Europe had become divided into two armed camps, the Entente Cordiale with France, Britain and Russia and the Triple Entente of Germany Austria-Hungary and Italy. In January 1907, a senior official in the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe, a man who had been born and educated in Germany, had circulated to his colleagues a secret memorandum that analysed German policy and concluded that its objective was war on a large scale. The naval shipbuilding race was being further accelerated. Then came the Hague Peace Convention in 1907, and here a remarkable side-show was enacted that was to have long-term historic consequences for the ecumenical movement.8 As the result of a meeting of an ardent British pacifist liberal member of the House of Commons, a Canadian by birth, Joseph Allen Baker, a Quaker, with the German nobleman, Baron Eduard de Neufville, also a pacifist who was personally acquainted with the Kaiser, a visit to Britain by some 150 high profile German churchmen of all denominations was hastily organised. This ecumenical condition was laid down by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. It was not meant to be a pan-Protestant event, even though it was initiated and largely paid for by the Quakers. It took place from 26 May to 3 June 1908 and blossomed into a major diplomatic event during which leading theologians from Germany, such as the eminent scholar Adolf von Harnack, spoke on the theme of peace. There was even a reception hosted by the King. All this was happening at a time of acute Anglo-German hostility. The German churchmen were fully aware of this and none more so than Harnack. He was the leading champion of German ‘liberal theology’ for whom the great power rivalry was essentially a spiri-tual struggle, nations being, as von Ranke had taught, ‘ideas of God’. For Harnack, war was an essential element in the divine plan. Was it possible for war to be averted between German and Britain? In Harnack’s mind it might just be possible if the Anglo-Saxons made common cause with their Germanic cousins. The racial dimension in Harnack’s thinking was crucial at this point. There could only be eternal peace between peoples of the one

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ancestry but Harnack was baffled by the apparent English preference for the effete papist French and the barbaric Orthodox Slavic Russians. His thinking about peace was determined by the racial affinity thought to exist between the Teutonic cousins. Why did not the British make common cause with the Germans against obstructive lesser powers?

It was this question that was behind everything von Harnack said. In his way he tried to be conciliatory towards his English hosts. Indeed, the speeches from both sides were excruciatingly fraternal. One wonders whether the Germans really went home convinced that Anglo-German relations had improved. But as one who knows German hospitality first-hand, it came as no surprise to me when I found that the German churches decided to invite a large delegation of British churchmen for a recipro-cal visit in the summer of 1909. The Primate, Davidson, was not exactly thrilled with the invitation because it would clash with the Pan-Anglican Congress. But he was urged to consider going by the German-speaking Bishop of Ripon, William Boyd Carpenter. Davidson had pressing com-mitments at home but was anxious to accept as he explained to Carpenter in April 1909:

I merely write because I feel so strongly that it would be disastrous were it to appear as if the Nonconformists were anxious for friendliness with Germany, while we Churchmen were only anxious to build more dread-noughts [armour-plated battleships and the post powerful naval vessels then being built]. Such a notion is ludicrous, but it would probably not be easy for Germans to under-stand the difficulties of English bishops in getting away from England during the summer, even for a few days, and misrepresentation might arise.9

Davidson recruited a respectable assortment of prelates, deans and lesser clergy to swell the ranks of the British ecumenical delegation to tour the mysterious ‘land of poets and thinkers’ and an increasing number of state-of-the-art ‘Dreadnoughts’ in June 1909. Lifting the cloud of ignorance and suspicion of the Germans had not been so seriously tried since Edward Bouverie Pusey sojourned in Göttingen and Berlin in the 1820s to unravel the secrets of German biblical scholarship. This new delegation of over one hundred British clergymen embarked full of hope, but not much else,

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as they could hardly decipher the full implications of the many sermons and speeches to which they were subjected. All they knew was that they heard many words about world peace and international friendship but they unable to penetrate the philosophical assumptions on which they were based.

A vivid example of this built-in spiritual-intellectual blockage was the preparatory visit to Germany of the Quaker instigator of this tour for peace, the parliamentarian Joseph Allen Baker. Baron de Neufville arranged for Baker to make a personal visit to the Kaiser on 20 February 1909. The liberal Quaker politician naturally abhorred the German constitution but cultivated the illusion that the great war lord, who was also the summus episcopus of the state church, could be won over to the cause of peace. Baker confronted the Kaiser, who was accompanied by his court chaplain, Ernst Dryander, with a direct appeal to ‘turn their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into ploughshares’. The Kaiser was subjected to a lecture on how he should act to preserve world peace. Indeed, he was told, a ‘League of Peace’ needed to be formed and the Kaiser, as a man of faith committed as he must be to the ethics of the Gospel, should take the initiative. Presumably by virtue of his almost absolutist powers, Baker thought the Kaiser could do almost anything. The Christian emperor of Germany should heed the prophecy that ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’.

As Baker warmed to his mission, he gripped the Kaiser by his lapels with both hands and with eyes widened with Quaker fervour, exclaimed, ‘It is my deepest conviction that the voice of God is saying even now: “Thou art the man!” At this unwanted embrace, the Kaiser threw an agitated glance to his chaplain and complained (in German) that the man obviously had no idea of how international politics worked. The Kaiser thought it courteous, however, to humour his ardent English petitioner by agreeing with the sentiment of peace. But he expressed his reservations, saying, ‘I am afraid that neither you or I will live to see our swords turned into ploughshares; and I am sure you overestimate my influence’.

While this was certainly true, Baker would not be put off. He replied that ‘if we followed the teachings of Christ, our weapons would be the sword of the Spirit’. He then reiterated his conviction that the Kaiser should take up the challenge. Ernst Dryander reported that the Kaiser was deeply moved, even to tears. But in the few words the Kaiser spoke in

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German to his chaplain it was quite clear that he understood that rivalry between states and empires must, sooner or later, end in armed conflict. Regrettably, that was how God had ordered the world, at least according to Hegel, von Ranke and von Treitschke. Resorts to war fulfilled ‘scientific’ truth. There were forces beyond the wit and control of mere men that held sway and had their way.10

There were, of course, a few English Hegelians as well but they never determined British religious-political culture. Indeed, nothing could have illustrated better the divergent character of the two theological and political worlds of ideas inhabited by the summus episcopus of the Prussian state church on the one hand and the President of the Federation of Metropolitan Free Churches of England, Joseph Allen Baker, on the other. This divergence was apparent among the majority of thinkers in the other British churches. While Baker certainly believed that genuinely Christian-inspired intervention could negate the effects of what he called the ‘futile arms race’, the Kaiser and his theologians were locked into the Lutheran-Hegelian view that the behaviour of nations moved according to the will of the Creator. And they believed that they had worked out how to discern that will by the application of their most prized possession of Historismus.

Ever optimistic, Baker and his Anglican co-worker and party friend, Willoughby Dickinson, set up a ‘Provisional After-Work Committee’ after the 1909 meetings to ensure that the apparent goodwill which they thought had been established would not dissipate. Their efforts inspired some German friends to set up a counterpart body. The two bodies then coalesced to form the ‘Associated Councils of the Churches of the British and German Empires for the fostering of friendly Relations between the two Peoples’. Significantly, much of the financial support for the new ecu-menical agency came from the Carnegie Foundation in the United States which enabled the publication of two journals, the one in English called The Peacemaker, and the one in German called, significantly, Die Eiche, the oak tree. The Germans considered it most unlikely that a journal entitled Der Friedensstifter would command much of a following as pacifism was largely considered to be Gefühlsdüselei, meaning flabby, emotional senti-mentalism. So it was better to have the good German symbol of the mighty oak.

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The inaugural meeting of the ‘Associated Councils’ was held at London on 6 February 1911. The presidents were Archbishop Davidson and two distinguished German guests, one of whom was the renowned Adolf von Harnack. Davidson opened the proceedings by stating that the association comprised those who believed in the power of the Holy Spirit to vivify in them the spirit of Christian brotherhood. The Primate then went on to elaborate using imagery from medicine. Their task was to inoculate the body corporate with something that would make it immune from attack, meaning attack from the ignorant and prejudiced on both sides who poisoned relations between the two empires. The keynote speaker was Professor Harnack who delivered in German a powerful homily on ‘Peace as a fruit of the Spirit’. He insisted that peace was a fruit of true culture. Indeed, the higher mental level of a people the keener it would be in guarding the interests of peace. Every people had precious possessions which it had to defend, and for which life had to be sacrificed; but only the smallest fraction of wars concerned these hallowed possessions. On the other hand if one disregarded the wars waged out of covetousness and envy, ambition and pride, one would see how much occasion and material for war and bloodshed would still be left. He continued:

If the conviction that we are brothers has indeed perme-ated our peoples, and they labour in fraternal rivalry, we may be content to wait and see whether the natural and calm course of things will really affect any people so evilly that it is compelled to draw the sword! I will tell you what would really happen—the case of a people sinking into the depths will only occur when the people no longer work it will be no longer able to draw the sword! If this people has not cooperated by enlisting all its forces in the up-building of its own and the common civilisation, it will gradually effect its own obliteration, as an independent entity, from the society of the nations. No stroke of the sword will be necessary, no drop of blood will be shed! But who among us would desire such a fate for any of the European peoples? Rather we would look on them as brothers alongside ourselves, rejoice in their special endowments and service, and even amid the stress and

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competition of the world still regard them as brothers … [And] among all these brothers, none in Europe stands nearer to us than the English people.11

Harnack’s address was no less mystifying when it was translated into English. He had drawn on the well springs of Herder, Hegel and von Ranke—a realm of ideas rarely traversed by the English. But whatever his address really said it was clear that there were very few pacifists in Germany. Nevertheless, its thrust was an encouragement to peaceful Anglo-German relations because it was unthinkable that peoples of essentially the same culture could go to war against each other. Harnack concluded his address by again quoting St Paul: ‘If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk. Let us not be vainglorious provoking one another.’ He went on,

we cannot immediately attain our goal, but the distant goal should inspire us and teach us the next steps. And the first of all steps is this, no longer to tolerate ill-will among us, and to stop the mouths of the provocateurs … To suppress their mischief will be the most important service of your Committee and our Committee in our own land.12

The most obvious way to achieve this goal was to use the two new journals to keep people of goodwill in both countries informed of the work of the Associated Councils. And so in the inaugural edition of The Peacemaker, the noted German theologian Friedrich Lahusen echoed Harnack’s admo-nition, writing:

Friendly relations in the unity of the Spirit and in the deepest sense of the divine Spirit, can they do other than the work of peace? We set up no theory of the possibility of an enduring world-peace; we do not philosophise as to whether they must come as purifying storms; but we are able to say to our English friends that we Germans cherish a resolute purpose of peace, as out history for forty years has clearly indicated.13

Such reasoning illustrates the dilemma of the German liberal theologians. Their intellectual tradition, their ‘unspoken assumptions’, made it impos-sible for them unequivocally to endorse a pacifist stance that would have

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won Anglo-Saxon understanding. They were nevertheless striving to be ‘honest men’. Clearly, they would have preferred peace with England but if ‘perfidious Albion’ persisted in acts of perfidy which obstructed Germany’s legitimate expansionist aims they could not find it in their hearts to forgive, at least not easily, as the dangerous diplomatic tensions that arose over Morocco in 1911–12 were to prove. Germany had tried clumsily to chal-lenge French hegemony in Morocco in order to secure for herself a base there for her navy, thus precipitating ‘the Agadir crisis’.

At that time Britain had opted demonstrably for France, and the indig-nation of the German committee members of the ‘Associated Councils’ almost brought its work to a standstill. In the third issue of The Peacemaker, Harnack angrily appealed to his British counterparts to be more energetic in influencing their government to be friendlier to Germany. Indeed, he could not restrain the reproach that, ‘England finds it intolerable that this [German] Empire should develop in accordance with its mental and material resources’ (emphasis added).14 Clearly, this statement would have been incomprehensible to the British. What, indeed, were ‘mental and material resources’? One would have to be familiar with the writings of German intellectuals, especially von Ranke, to make any sense of these sentiments. States were concentrations of ‘moral energy’, and each had the right to expand into any power vacuum if they so chose. As Harnack seethed, ‘Britain allows herself to incorporate any coast or island, be it Egypt or Cyprus, or any extra-European land, which she thinks is neces-sary; but the peaceful conquests of our commerce and trade she regards as already an unseemly phenomenon’.15

Given their assumptions about ‘common culture’, Harnack and his colleagues were embittered with the British for siding with the ‘decadent’ French. Never was English pragmatism more contemptible in German eyes. The German ‘liberal’ theologians’, nevertheless, continued to support the ‘Associated Councils’ as it afforded them the opportunity to put the German Christian view before their English readers. They demanded, in effect, Britain’s endorsement of German Weltpolitik instead of her repeated denial to Germany of her legitimate ‘place in the sun’. The theological sticking point was, of course, that the Germans were utterly convinced that God was on the side of their upwardly striving Kultur. They were the Almighty’s chosen agents but who understood this Kulturprotestantismus? The British theologians, for their part, were convinced that their imperialism was also

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in accordance with God’s will, but there was a crucial difference here. The British sense of mission—as expressed by leading thinkers such as Bishop J.B. Lightfoot, William Ewart Gladstone and Sir John Robert Seeley, and later by the Round Table movement—was to bestow gradually the benefits of parliamentary democracy, and then withdraw to allow the colonised to govern themselves. Anglo-Saxon political culture was regarded as the goal towards which all subject peoples should be educated. They were not only to be exploited economically.

III

There was, indeed, a great cultural-theological gap in thinking, and the work of the Associated Councils slumped until help came from a most unexpected source, Harnack’s protégé Dr Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (1885–1969). He had laboured valiantly as business secretary of the German committee and also as editor of Die Eiche in the cause of Anglo-German friendship. This man stands out because he appears to have been the only ‘liberal’ German theologian who was capable of transcending the Neo-Rankean paradigm of cultural Protestantism in order to build bridges to the Anglo-Saxon pacifists.

In their heartfelt enthusiasm for peace both Siegmund-Schultze and Joseph Allen Baker organised a conference of the Associated Councils to be held on Lake Constance from 2–5 August 1914 at which fewer than 90 of the 153 registered delegates from North America and the various European countries managed to arrive. The venue was indeed historical ground. It was where the Council of Constance had been held in 1414, exactly 500 years earlier and in the same building. The God of battles had apparently decreed that it was time for Germany to execute her ‘Schlieffen Plan’. She declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France two days later. On the next day, Britain was at war against Germany because of the violation of Belgian neutrality, a minor impediment to those charged with implementing the Schlieffen Plan. The other supreme irony was that the Roman Catholic bishops had planned a similar peace conference to be held in the Belgian town of Liége on 10 August. How could they know that the first object of the Schlieffen Plan of attack was to invade that city because it was the regional hub of the crucial rail network?16

Meanwhile back at Hotel Insel on Lake Constance, the Protestant peacemakers began their deliberations in an atmosphere of unimaginable

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gloom. Prayers for peace were held immediately and pledges exchanged to continue their work as soon as the international situation would permit. Next, preparations had to be made to get back home as quickly as possible. Through the good offices of Siegmund-Schultze, papers were issued for the British and American delegates at the Kaiser’s orders. This would allow them to pass by train through to the front line, standing in the corridor of a sealed carriage in a packed German troop train, accompanied by Siegmund Schultze, but without their packed lunches or luggage. The delegates eventually made it back to London unscathed, crossing the German-Dutch border at Goch. Miraculously, their bags were duly deliv-ered some days later and apparently intact. It was a remarkable episode, all the more so because Siegmund-Schultze, in contrast to von Harnack, who had just been knighted by the Kaiser, never gave in to the wave of hatred of the English that at the time swept over Germany. As indicated, there were numerous manifestos by leading churchmen and scholars on both sides of the Channel that sought to establish who was really guilty of causing the war. These tracts have been the subject of several detailed monographs in recent years. What they show is the significance of the religious-intellectual formation of the personalities involved on both sides. One’s image of God is, in the end, what determines one’s view of the world. When one’s God is a ‘warrior God’ the consequences can be catastrophic, if we needed a reminder in the present era of Muslim terrorism.

Finally, what became of the Associated Councils? Adolf von Harnack washed his hands of the whole exercise and waged a spiritual war against ‘perfidious Albion’ and all things Anglo-Saxon, a campaign in which he enjoyed the support of many high profile academic colleagues. But the sworn enemy of German ‘liberal theology’, Karl Barth, revised his com-mentary on the epistle to the Romans and continued his formidable campaign against the arrogant claim of these theologians to be able to read the mind of the God of history. Siegmund-Schultze doggedly persisted in maintaining contact with his British colleagues in the face of an almost united block of bitter German theological opposition to all ecumenical enterprise. Tirelessly seeking to implement the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, the few German pacifist pastors ministered to the 500 British civilian internees concentrated in Ruheleben near Berlin, as well as to British prisoners of war in their captivity. With the cessation of hostilities in 1918, the ‘Associated Councils’ concept re-emerged thanks to the earnest endeavours and

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personal persistence of Siegmund-Schultze and his English pacifist friends who re-invented themselves as the ‘World Alliance for Peace through the Churches’. The Alliance became a major strand in the growing inter-war ecumenical movement anticipating the Life and Work and the Faith and Order Movements which ultimately coalesced to form the World Council of Churches.

After holding many conferences during the 1920 and 1930s, the ‘World Alliance’ was finally disbanded. Siegmund-Schultze had been forced, in any case, to flee Nazi Germany to live in Switzerland. When one looks for a basic cause for the Alliance’s collapse in the face of the virulent national-ism, it must lie in the fact that it was trying to reconcile the irreconcil-able. In spite of the historical affinities of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, the dynastic and blood ties as well as their related Protestant confessions, the political-religious cultures of England and Germany were just too divergent. Consequently, despite the heroic efforts of a few highly committed individuals on each side to apply the ethics of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ to international relations, the bridging of the gulf separating them proved to be insurmountable. The essential reason is to be found in the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that under lay Anglo-Saxon ideas of ecumenism which the vast majority of German theologians believed they had to reject because they could not, with but a few well-known exceptions, overcome the Hegelian-Neo-Rankean idea that God expressed His will for humanity though the Power State. In order for this to change, both the political and religious culture of the German Reich had to be reconstructed. The precondition for this necessary reconstruction was achieved with the final destruction of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in 1945. Only then was the resumption on a broad front of Ecumenical dialogue made possible. The origins and growth of this post-1945 movement is, however, another story for another time.

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Notes

1 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Geist und Geschichte. Vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, Verlag F. Bruckmann, München, 1950, vol. I. pp. 167–292, passim.

2 Karl Barth was deeply appalled at the attitude of his German professors to the Great War. As a Swiss social democrat he observed that his great mentors, such as Adolf von Harnack and most of the German professors of history and theology, had allowed their political ambitions for Germany to distort their scholarly insights. They were deluded into thinking that the history of states and empires was integral to the ‘history of salvation’. See his Epistle to the Romans translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C Hoskyns, Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 1968. pp. 57; 133–34; 276.

3 This address is based on many years of research on the ‘peculiarity’ of German history (David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley). Post-1945 the German historical profession felt itself called upon to deliver an explanation for the German Catastrophe (Friedrich Meinecke). One of their then younger members, Professor Fritz Fischer of Hamburg, ventured to offer an explana-tion as to why Prusso-German political culture became so divergent from the liberal, parliamentary West. It was essentially because of the legacy of Martin Luther’s Reformation. His exegesis of the thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which affirmed that all authority was derived from almighty God, had shaped the absolutism of the German princes, particularly that of Protestant Prussia, a state created for the army. Prussia was militaristic from the beginning because of the Hohenzollern dynasty’s perceived need to maintain a standing army to ensure national security both domestically and in foreign relations. The consequence was that civilian government and liberal institutions never really developed in Prussia. After the Bismarckian enforced unification, the entire country was subjected to a rigorous ‘Prussification’. That meant, essentially, the army developed as a ‘state within a state’. Policy continued to be formulated predominantly in accordance with the priorities of the army to the detriment of democratic institutions. The Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Empire was consequently a very internally polar-ised, and hence politically unstable and volatile state. In a word, the world’s problems in the twentieth century were basically the consequence of the failure of the Germans to resolve their constitutional issues.

4 Ernst Weymar, ‘Martin Luther: Obrigkeit, Gehorsam und Widerstand’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, vol. 13, no. 3, March, 1962, pp. 133–51.

5 I have provided a concise analysis of this theme in my book, Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso-German History, Berghahn Books, New York, 2009. See pages 5–22 and passim; 32–33.

6 Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Verlag Herder, Freiburg 1959. In volume I, page 95 Schnabel wrote incisively:

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‘The foundation of the Prussian state is the greatest political achievement in German history—one that is all the more impressive and overwhelming because the geographical pre-conditions were absent. It was established over five parallel river systems; its existence secured north Germany and consequently protected the German west against France and it secured the German east against Slavic inundation. However, the rise of the north German great power accentuated the rivalry between north and south that manifested itself in the differences of regional character and brought them to historical effect. Nowhere else was the foundation of a state so much the result of human will-power and determination. Nowhere else were the con-stitutive elements so fragmented and lacking any inner cohesion; here indeed the most urgent requirement was rational calculated political planning. The [Hohenzollern] dynasty produced a series of skilled statesmen who responded to the challenge and so here the type of the mechanistically con-structed princedom was most sharply exemplified.’

7 See the work of Arlie J. Hoover, The Gospel of Nationalism, Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, 1986. In a number of additional articles Professor Hoover has made very clear for an English-speaking readership just how much Protestant theology in Prusso-Germany was used to justify politi-cal aggression and expansionism.

8 For a full account of this remarkable course of events, see, John A. Moses, ‘The British and German Churches and the Perception of War, 1908–1914’, War and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1987, pp. 23–44.

9 Moses, War and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1987, pp. 29–30.10 War and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1987, pp. 30–31 where the remarkable

episode of the encounter between the Kaiser and Joseph Allen Baker is recounted. See also Julian Jenkins, Christian Pacifism Confronts German Nationalism, pp. 97–98.

11 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p. 32.12 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p. 33.13 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p. 33.14 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p. 33.15 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p. 33.16 Moses, ‘The British and German Churches’, p.3 7 See also Jenkins, Christian

Pacifism, pp. 122–30.

The Theological Component of World Conflict: The Example of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1914–18

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