“German Christianity” which was presented to those parts of the population which were more or less actively interested in the Church. According to this concept, National Socialism was to be the real “positive Christianity,” in contrast to Judaism and Bolshevism, which were regarded as the embodiments of everything heathen. It was to be a new revelation from God, but one that was identical with that in Jesus Christ, or at least closely related to it! After all, it had been possible in the past to bring into a similar positive relationship to Christianity the bourgeois moralism of rationalism, later the idealistic philosophy of Goethe, then the monarchical nationalism of Bismarck’s day, and still later Marxian Socialism. Why should not the same attempt be made with the Hitler system, which the nation believed was its hope of salvation? It was this fantastic but at the same time cogent proposition with which the Protestant churches had to deal.
The basic question was: Had comprehension of the unique character and independence of the Christian Gospel completely died out, or had it reawakened, and, if so, what would be the reaction to the particular new temptation of 1933? The answer to this question is found in the fact that while the German political parties, German jurisprudence, science, art and philosophy capitulated, the churches formed the first opposition to the current which was sweeping all before it.
Out of the conflict against the National Socialist version of Christianity there arose, under the leadership of Martin Niemöller, first the “Pastors’ Notbund” (Emergency Union), and then, on a wider base, the “Confessional Church” (Bekennende Kirche). They attempted quite simply to defend the basic essentials of Christianity, the preaching of the Word and the order of the Church, against the strange new faith which was being imposed on them but which they could not accept as Christian. This gave their movement an essentially conservative character. That, we see now, was their limitation: they concentrated solely on one specific phase of Nazi religious and church policy.
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