Luther on Scripture and Tradition in Light of the Current Ecumenical Context

In addition to speaking at Peace Lutheran Church, Salem, Oregon (on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology of the cross), I have been invited to serve as the teaching theologian at a retreat of the Columbia River Chapter of the Society of the Holy Trinity, a pan-Lutheran ministerium of ordained clergy. That retreat will take place at the Benedictine Monastery at Mt. Angel, Oregon, on March 15-16. Several of the professors from the Catholic seminary and monks from the monastery will be participating in the retreat as well.

I have been asked to present on Luther's engagement with Holy Scripture, focusing especially on his understanding of the relationship between Scripture and tradition.

While the retreat center's overnight lodging is now full, the dean and organizer of the conference has indicated to me that anyone who would like to attend my two 90-minute presentations during the daytime, may do so by making arrangements with him:

The Reverend Dr. Joseph W. Hughes, STS Dean
Columbia River Chapter, Society of the Holy Trinity
Phone/Text: 217-898-9063
email: J_W_Hughes@hotmail.com

My first presentation, on the relationship between Scripture and tradition in the theology of Luther, will be on Thursday, March 15, 4:30-6pm in the Engelberg Room in the guest house of the monastery. My second presentation, on Luther's hermeneutics, will be on Friday, March 16, 9-10:30am, in the same room.

Bonhoeffer's Theology of the Cross

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's

Theology of the Cross

Dr. Matthew L. Becker

Wednesday, March 14,

6:30 PM

Peace Lutheran Church

Salem, Oregon

Dr. Matthew Becker, professor of theology at Valparaiso University and a native of Salem, will be giving a free public lecture at Peace Lutheran Church, 1525 Glen Creek Rd. NW, West Salem, Oregon, on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 6:30 PM. His presentation examines "Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Theology of the Cross," a topic particularly relevant as we are seeing far too much "silence in the face of evil."  

Prisoner, pastor, prophet, theologian, martyr: all these describe Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who voluntarily returned to Nazi Germany to participate in resistance efforts against that regime and who was eventually executed for his actions.

Dr. Becker's presentation will be held in the main sanctuary, which is accessible to all. 

For more information call 503-362-8500 or email office@peacelutheransalem.org.

Pericope of the Week: A Bonhoeffer Moment?

My friend, Gene Brueggemann, a retired Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod pastor in Colorado, recently wrote an article for the online Daystar Journal, which I help to edit. Gene is 92 years old. For 55 of those years he was a campus pastor, most recently at Colorado State University. I have known him since the mid-1990s.

Gene has given me permission to share the first part of his article here. To read the whole piece, just follow the link at the end of the post. This excerpt from Gene's essay will serve as our pericope for this important week.

Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?

by Pr. Eugene Brueggemann

A Bonhoeffer moment is a moment of truth. It is a time of urgent necessity that is calling the church to bear witness to the truth when it is under prolonged and intense attack. Many American Christians, impressed with Bonhoeffer’s role and writings in the Nazi era, see parallels between then and now. The parallels are certainly there, as well as important differences.

The most obvious parallel is the rise to power of two ambitious, aggressive, highly-effective demagogues. Adolf Hitler was a dispirited veteran of the German army, a failure at painting and at staging a coup (the Munich beer hall Putsch) and the successful author of Mein Kampf, a book which inspired the Nazi movement. Donald Trump is a veteran of New York City real estate competition and Hollywood show time and the author of a book, The Art of the Deal¸ which displayed his values and modus operandi. Both candidates lost the majority vote but gained office anyway, Hitler by bullying his way to power against a politically and physically weakened Chancellor Hindenburg, Trump by the vagaries of the electoral college.

The most significant parallel, I believe, is their effective use of the Big Lie to promote the cause of Aryan/white nationalism in a succession of rallies. They had the ability to deliver spell-binding speeches which incited fear and loathing of their enemies. For Hitler, the Big Lie was that the Jews were traitors who had stabbed the German army in the back in the waning days of the Great War. Jewish bankers were disloyal citizens who counseled surrender, and Jews, of course, were behind a militant communism which threatened a weakened Germany. Hitler made centuries-old anti-Semitism not merely respectable, but essential in making Germany great again. The Aryans were the master race, the key to German exceptionalism.

For Trump, the Big Lie was of the same order but more subtle: he vilified immigrants early and often, those already within our borders, both legal and illegal, and those swarming the Southern border looking for jobs and asylum. Immigrants, he asserted, weakened the true American identity and were responsible for a crime wave. To shouts of approval, Trump demanded a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and the exclusion of immigrants (especially Muslims) from entering the country. The easy entrance of these immigrants was a threat to American exceptionalism. Barack Obama, the Kenyan outlier, and Hillary Clinton, the elite insider, were prime examples of Democrats who were responsible for the decline of American greatness into bland multiculturalism.

Trump did not campaign openly as a racist, and he did make gestures of reaching out for support from blacks. But he viewed Barack Obama with contempt, and for years he gained notoriety by vilifying him as an illegitimate president, who was born in Kenya and a secret Muslim.  The audiences that he roused most effectively at his rallies were insecure, socially displaced white citizens, many of whom held the common prejudices against blacks as people who stole jobs and committed crimes, while accepting hand-outs from the government. Trump’s rhetoric contained enough “dog whistles” to his audiences to betray the racist streak in his movement. With Steve Bannon as campaign director and adviser, Trump had access to those whom Hillary Clinton had privately identified as “deplorables,” the KKK, the Neo-Nazis, and white supremacists.

Trump demeaned whoever stood in his way, beginning with the other Republican presidential candidates. A single word functioned as a Big Lie to define his opponents. This made him a most unconventional and entertaining candidate. Politics as show business never had such a star. He successfully demonized Hillary Clinton as a felon who should be locked up for using an insecure email server while Secretary of State. Hillary stood for the enemy within, the globalist elites who had hollowed out middle America with trade policies that shipped American jobs and factories to China, Mexico and Canada, a theme of Bernie Sanders’ campaign as well.

As effective as Trump was and is as an American demagogue wielding the Big Lie, he is not in the same league as Hitler and his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who perfected the Big Lie strategy with Teutonic thoroughness and backed it up with the threat and use of violence by the brown-shirted thugs of the SA. Trump’s attacks on the press, his shout-outs to harass reporters and dissidents and his welcoming the support of the KKK and right-wing militias are pale imitations of the Nazi campaign (but nevertheless frightening reminders of the power of hate and fear in politics).

The relation of religion to the National-Socialist agenda was the occasion for the first Bonhoeffer moment. In Germany, the Nazis entered into a concordat with Rome, which effectively muffled criticism or resistance from the Catholic Church, and they worked hard to make the Protestant state churches over in their image. They promoted a national union of the Evangelical Churches (Lutheran, Reformed, United), which was supported by the so-called Deutsche Christen (those German Christians who welcomed the inroads of Nazi ideology into the churches) and was headed by Nazi-appointed Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller. The churches in the German states voted for or against the proposed agenda of the Deutsche Christen.  Bonhoeffer was a member of the United Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union, the largest state church in Germany at that time, which had been taken over by leaders in the Deutsche Christen movement, who implemented Nazi goals. Other state churches, such as the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover, and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg, did not.

A strong resistance movement known as the Confessing Church emerged, which was headed by prominent German churchmen like Karl Barth, Martin Niemőller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Their goal was to rally support for the continued independence and confessional integrity of the Protestant churches. One hundred thirty-nine official delegates from eighteen of the state churches (along with some 200 guests) met and issued the Barmen Declaration in May 1934. In subsequent months, many thousands of additional pastors and church leaders would sign it as well. In this document, they stated that their intention was to stand “in opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the Protestant territorial churches by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices.” They insisted “that the unity of the Evangelical Churches in Germany can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit,” not through the Deutsche Christen, who sought to make the church into an “organ of the state.”

The Barmen confessors also stood in opposition to the enforcement of the Nazis’ racist ideology in the churches. For example, one daring aim of some Deutsche Christen was to remove Jewish elements from all Protestant hymnals and worship services. A few from the Deutsche Christen even sought to remove the Old Testament from the Christian Bible! With the passage of the Aryan Articles—which legalized the purging of Jews from Germany—Nazi church leaders insisted on removing from church offices all pastors who were of Jewish descent. They used the Aryan Paragraph (a law that blocked “non-Aryans” [Jews] from serving in all public offices) to force “non-Aryans” out of the ministry. Against these actions, the Barmen confessors held that Aryan supremacy was a false doctrine which adversely affected the churches’ mission of proclaiming the gospel.  The Barmen Declaration thus states against the Deutsche Christen: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions,” that is, to interpret the Bible to support the introduction of the racist agenda of a totalitarian state into the church. The Barmen Declaration also reminded the churches that God has placed limits on all secular government, including the Nazi regime: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special [biblical] commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life.”

Bonhoeffer became very active in the Confessing Church movement which emerged from the Barmen Declaration. He later led and taught at one of its seminaries, the one in Finkenwalde, and continued to do so “underground,” when that seminary was officially closed by the Gestapo. His resistance to the evils of Nazism included his participation in a political-military conspiracy, organized in part by his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, which sought “to throw a spoke in the wheel” of the government in a number of ways, including the smuggling of Jews out of Germany. As a member of this conspiracy, Bonhoeffer also supported its attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Arrested for his activities in helping Jews to escape to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for almost two years. He was eventually executed on the orders of Hitler.

The introduction of the Aryan Paragraph into the church was condemned as false doctrine by the Barmen Declaration. The American parallel is the racial denigration of immigrants in America, both past and present. It was consistent with Trump’s leadership of “the birther movement,” which appealed to the widespread prejudice against blacks and immigrants lurking beneath the surface of everyday life. The Big Lie holds that this growing number of (mostly criminal) “others” are responsible for America losing its greatness. Donald Trump was making racism respectable again. The incident at Charlottesville last year exposed this reality–and also the strong resistance to it.

Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church held that Nazi ideology of the Aryan master race was a false doctrine that had no place in the churches’ teaching and public life. Facing the reality of the success of the Big Lie in American politics, this question arises: Are Protestant leaders advocating or resisting the false doctrine associated with the rise of Donald Trump, namely, that a white Christian nationalist America can and should be restored?

(To read the rest of Pr. Brueggemann's article, go here.)

After One Year

One year is normally not such a long time in the life of an adult American, but given how quickly the tempo of the national news cycle has increased over the past eleven months and eleven days and how turbulent and perplexing the reported content therein has been, 2017 has seemed more like a decade than a mere annum. There has been just too much to ponder and remember from one day to the next, let alone from one week to the next or from one month to another. The most recent moment of presidential shock and disgust has frequently overshadowed all such previous moments, and stories of disturbing gravitas (e.g., Mr. Trump’s feud with a Gold-Star widow, the Las Vegas massacre, the hurricanes and Puerto Rico’s ongoing crisis, the president’s repeated accusations against President Obama, the president’s defense of white nationalists, etc.) have faded. Mr. Trump’s “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events—of his creation or otherwise—disappear from the collective consciousness and public view” (Matt Blegenheimer, NYT, Dec. 30, 2017, A16).

At some point this past year—I don’t remember exactly when—I gave up on Twitter. It got to be too distracting and disruptive, although I still got bits and pieces of it (what else does one receive?) via mainstream sources, which was more than sufficient. I also stopped the daily visits to Facebook. Weekly peering, or even fortnightly, was enough—and then only to see the latest photos from family and friends. In view of the administration’s attacks against “the media,” I was motivated instead to renew my print and digital subscription to “the failing New York Times” and to take out digital subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. These publications seem to be supervised by adults, have more stable content (which thus helps to form longer-lasting memories), rely on vigorous fact-checking, and correct their errors. So my morning devotions continue to include praying while reading these newspapers. On weekends, when there’s a little more time for such petitioning, the meditation expands to include the Economist, The New Yorker, and Der Spiegel.

Tonight I am grateful for memory, the capacity to learn from the past and to recall lessons from the past, both one’s own past and that of others (i.e., “history”). Santayana’s aphorism still rings mostly true: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Kurt Vonnegut’s cynical response: “We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.”) As a qualification to the Harvard professor's bon mot and as an outright criticism of Vonnegut’s rejoinder, on this night I want to carry forward Reinhold Niebuhr’s more hopeful, if also realistic view:  God is “a divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” History, I believe, does not repeat itself in endless cycles, one damn thing after another, so to speak. It may echo itself more or less, especially given the evident inevitability of humans to sin and be destructive, the instances of which do indeed share striking resemblances to one another, but it doesn’t form a never-ending circle, thank God, even if people regularly fail to learn from their past mistakes and those of others. Despite human destructiveness, human creativity blossoms, even (especially?) in times of political turmoil and crisis. American political satire and comedy seem to be doing pretty well these days. 

Since, as the Christian believes, God has entered time and space in a very particular way through the enfleshment of God’s Word in Jesus of Nazareth, God has graciously disrupted the flow of history itself. There is thus the summons to hold sober hope for the future, to trust that in the long run God's promise of ultimate justice and peace, of perfect mercy and love, will be fulfilled. God is in Christ reconciling the world to God! And that makes a difference for one’s present and one’s future. “Be reconciled to God!” God does not despise humanity; the divine Word became human for the sake of humankind. That promise makes all the difference in the world--and in the presence of God. “Go, and sin no more….”

There is freedom and responsibility in these gracious imperatives: “Be reconciled to God” “Go, and sin no more.”

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” That is the first line from Timothy Snyder’s important little book On Tyranny, published this past year by Tim Duggan Books. Snyder’s twenty imperatives echo several lessons I have tried to impart in my course on “Christians in Nazi Germany.” Snyder stresses the need to defend institutions (e.g., mainstream press, the justice system, public schools); to watch one’s language (words have implications); to believe in truth; to criticize lies and propaganda; to investigate (“Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you…. Take responsibility for what you communicate with others” [I would add: make regular use of fact-checking by more than one reputable, self-correcting news organization]); to establish and maintain a private life; to support charities and non-governmental organizations; to keep calm in times of national crisis since tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency” (James Madison). 

In my course we also wrestle with the questions: why did so many Christians support and defend Hitler? Why did so few Christians resist him and his policies? Why have evangelical Christians supported tyrants and wanna-be tyrants?

Another important book from 2017 is One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (St. Martin’s Press), by E. J. Dionne, Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann. Not only does it provide perceptive insights into “the perils of Trumpism,” but it does summon one to active engagement. Some of the same lessons that Snyder sets forth appear here, too: the need to support mainstream print media (investigative, accountable, self-correcting journalism); to practice and defend moral norms in our civic life (character counts; virtue matters); to criticize authoritarianism and the fascist politics of the far right; to renew democracy; to reform the American marketplace to provide opportunity and justice for all.

And lest you think that tyranny and fascism cannot take root in the US, may I encourage you to read or re-read Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 prophetic novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

Tonight I am also grateful for the capacity to forget. Such an ability is a gift of divine grace. While we may not and should not forget the past, that is, to dis-remember it intentionally or to trivialize it or ignore its terrible aspects or refuse to learn from it, God promises to forgive and forget our sinful past--and this should have consequences for how we treat our past and that of others. God’s own forgiveness of our sins is connected with God’s promise to forget our sins and remember them no more. “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isa. 43.25). In the New Testament, too, God promises to be merciful toward sinners’ iniquities. “I will remember their sins no more” (Heb. 8.12). That God promises to forgive and forget our past sins should have a bearing on how we treat the past, both our own and that of others. There is a kind of gracious forgetting involved in receiving God's forgiveness. In this way, we do not allow the past to dominate our present. We do now allow the past to overcome us and paralyze us. There is thus something promising about giving up one’s past to God, of letting it go in repentance and faith, of letting the past—all of it—go under, of letting it be buried under God’s grace and mercy, of letting it become forgotten by grace. As dangerous and irresponsible as this notion could be, there is a kind of grace wrapped up in "forgetting" the past. 

Remembering and forgetting are both essential aspects of responsible Christian living.

Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Post-WWII Debates over the Roman Catholic Church in Nazi Germany

Earlier this week the NYT reported a story about the sentencing of twenty-nine former officials from Argentina who were convicted of murdering civilians by throwing them from aircraft. These crimes took place during the military dictatorship there from the mid-'70s to the early '80s. Part of the story is the apparent complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the junta’s crimes. According to the Times, while "no member of the clergy was accused in the trial, ...prosecutors alleged that church officials were complicit in hiding detainees from international human rights inspectors." For more on this story, go to:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/americas/argentina-death-flights-trial-dictatorship.html

In the same week, Pope Francis was criticized by human rights officials for not referring by name to the Rohingya people during his visit to Myanmar. It was widely thought that the pope needed to tread carefully regarding what he said about Myanmar's persecuted Muslim minority while in that country, at least partly out of concern for his own Catholic flock there. Only yesterday, on the eve of his departure from Bangladesh to Rome, did he publicly state, "The presence of God today is also called Rohingya."

These stories brought to mind a recently published book by Mark Ruff, a professor of history at St. Louis University. His 394-page book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany 1945-1980 (Cambridge, 2017), explores the public post-war debates in Germany about the Roman Catholic Church's actions during the Nazi regime. Ruff's well-written and carefully researched study sheds a light on the very acrimonious exchanges in the German media during those years when Roman Church critics and Roman Church defenders waged their struggles against each other. To explain the intensity of these conflicts Ruff reconstructs the political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual networks in which this particular "culture war" occurred. These networks "controlled levers of funding, regulated access to historical documents and served as a gateway to the international media at a time when most documents lay under lock and key and a modern scholarly infrastructure with its ubiquitous conferences and research centers was in its infancy."

Ruff shows that the range of participants in these public arguments crossed national boundaries and German political parties and included professors, public intellectuals, international journalists, Communist propagandists, and leaders from multiple religions (including Vatican officials and also Pope Paul VI). The book opens a window to many of these personalities. In the end, the reader will have a better understanding of the less savory aspects of these public disputes--the involvement of the East German government, the actions of Vatican officials against church critics at Catholic universities and religious institutions, the course of lawsuits (and "the court of public opinion" about them), efforts at press censorship in Germany and other countries. Still, the book also provides a very insightful investigation into intellectual history, with aspects of political, social, and cultural history serving as the larger framework.

I definitely plan to assign portions of the book near the end of my undergraduate course on Christians in Nazi Germany, when we examine how Christians and others in the post-war period sought to come to grips with what Christians had done (and not done) during the Third Reich.

In the interest of full disclosure I need to mention that Mark Ruff is a dear friend. I have known many members of his extended family since 1986, when I lived in the home of one of his great aunts, Dorothy Ruff, who was a member of Emanuel Lutheran Church, Lancaster, Ohio, where I did my year-long pastoral internship (vicarage). Later, for nearly a decade, Mark and I were close colleagues at Concordia University, Portland, where he taught history. (Mark is also an excellent organist. He played the organ at my father's funeral.) My wife played matchmaker for Mark and his future bride, Lynnae. I was best man in their wedding. Mark's father, a retired LCMS pastor, is also a good friend, as are another aunt and uncle. (They recently participated in my Reformation tour to Germany.)

Still, I think I'm a fair judge of quality scholarship when I see it, and Mark's book is certainly of very high quality! I learned a lot from reading it.