In the end, a Bedouin sergeant, Taysir Walid Heib, an Arab who couldn’t read or write Hebrew, was convicted of Tom’s murder and given an eight-year sentence—the longest for a Israeli soldier since the Second Intifada. Jocelyn wrote that “Tom was a victim of a victim.” She believed the policymakers of the war deserved the heaviest recriminations.
Jocelyn wrote a book in memory of Tom, the title of which echoes the words he had tattooed on his wrist: Defy the Stars.
14 January
Martin Niemöller
14 January, 1892—6 March 1984
A Life Changed for Peace
Martin Niemöller’s early career was theologically distant from the Christian pacifism he later advocated. Born in Lippstadt, Germany, the second son of a Lutheran Pastor, Niemöller grew up in a traditional and perhaps anti-Semitic home. Devotion to his country led him to a career in the Kaiser’s navy during World War I. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming captain of a U-boat and receiving the Iron Cross for his success in sinking allied ships.
A religious turning point came in 1918 as he navigated through the Straits of Otranto. Niemöller wondered, “Will peace come to us—or shall we, like the Flying Dutchman, spend year after year without rest or respite?” He felt “instinctively conscious of a further mission of some kind awaiting me. Why, otherwise, should God Himself have directed our helm now?”
After the war, Niemöller resigned his commission and, as he later wrote in his memoir From U-Boat to Pulpit, began the transition from German nationalist to Lutheran pastor. Initially supportive of Hitler’s ideals, Niemöller soon saw the dangerous way the Führer conflated German nationalism with “German” Christianity to further Nazi propaganda. In an attempt to stem the Nazi tyranny over the churches and to “obey God and not men,” Niemöller and other dissenting theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the Confessing Church.
For his activism, Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps as Hitler’s “personal prisoner.” His wife, Else, whom he married in 1919, was left to raise their children alone and was allowed only infrequent visits.
At the end of the war, critics called Niemöller to task for his early anti-Semitic stance, a charge that a repentant Niemöller did not deny. In 1959, he wrote that his years in prison were another religious turning point in his life. He initiated the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, which confessed that the German Protestant churches had not done enough to stem Nazi crimes.
Near the end of his life, Niemöller became a proponent of nuclear disarmament and an ardent pacifist. He visited communist leader Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War, remarking, “One thing is clear: the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, rare in a person of his position.” Niemöller became president of the World Council of Churches in 1961 and earned the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.
Looking back on his career on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Niemöller said he began as “an ultra-conservative who wanted the Kaiser to come back; and now I am a revolutionary. If I live to be one hundred, I shall maybe be an anarchist.”
15 January
Nathan Söderblom
15 January 1866—12 July 1931
Ecumenical Pioneer
Born in the country parish of Trönö, Sweden, Soderblöm, the son of a Lutheran pastor, was destined for a life in Christian ministry. Possessing a keen intellect, he attended the University of Uppsala and graduated in 1883 with honors in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. At the time, the academic fields of the History of Religion and the Origins of Christianity were viewed by many clergy as threats to the Christian faith. But Soderblöm believed otherwise, and as a graduate student learned Old Persian to explore whether the Old and New Testaments had been influenced by the religion of Iran. He earned his BD degree in 1892 and was ordained in March 1893.
That same year, Soderblöm experienced “a direct perception of the holiness of God
. . . , that God was far stricter than anyone could comprehend. God is a consuming fire. This apprehension was so powerful, so shattering, that [I] was unable to stay on [my] feet.” For the rest of his life, Soderblöm’s faith remained unshakable. He was “unable to doubt God in spite of everything.”
Over the next seven years, he served the Swedish Church in Paris, among the members of which were the philanthropist Alfred Nobel and the playwright August Strindberg. Soderblöm returned to Sweden in 1901 to assume a professorship in the University of Uppsala’s School of Theology. The author of several well-received books, Soderblöm was especially influential in making the field of comparative religion respectable in Christian circles. He remained at the university until his 1914 election as Primate and Archbishop of Sweden.
Soderblöm’s work as an academic and pastor led him to the conclusion that Christians “find no difficulty in freely interpreting Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount” but were much less likely “to take the master’s uncomfortable words completely seriously.” He believed the Church must engage with the world in order to bring about the gospel vision of justice that leads to peace.
During the final seventeen years of his life, Soderblöm worked toward that vision through his efforts to found a worldwide ecumenical movement. He sought the intercommunion of all Christian denominations, and in 1925 he worked tirelessly to bring together leaders from Anglican, Reformed, Orthodox, and Lutheran traditions in what came to be known as the Stockholm Conference. The ecumenical conference, motivated in part by the impotence of the divided churches to prevent World War I, advocated “a Christian internationalism equally opposed to a national bigotry and a weak cosmopolitanism” and “affirmed the universal character of the Church and its duty to preach and practice the love of the brethren.”
Soderblöm’s ecumenism earned him election to the Swedish Academy in 1925 and the Nobel Peace Prize the year before his death.
16 January
Ormond Burton
16 January 1893—7 January 1974
Christian Peace without Compromise
In 1923, four years after the end of the “war to end all wars,” Ormond Burton addressed a conference of the New Zealand Student Christian movement. He called his listeners to lives of radical discipleship. For Burton, such devotion required a commitment to the nonviolence preached and practiced by Christ, and he urged the students to put their faith into practice by refusing to join or serve in the military.
No stranger to combat, Burton served as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli, one of the bloodiest and most wasteful standoffs of World War I. When his best friend was killed in action, he volunteered to replace him. Commissioned a lieutenant in the infantry, Burton was decorated for gallantry several times. But the harsh Treaty of Versailles that the Allies forced upon a defeated Germany convinced him that genuine peace could never be won by military conflict. The victors, he concluded, would always demand concessions from the losers that inevitably stirred up resentments and kept old wounds fresh, thereby preparing the way for the next war. As he sadly noted at the end of World War I, “Victory had not brought a new world, and we saw in a flash of illumination that it never could. War is just waste and destruction, solving no problems and creating new and terrible ones.” By
