Strange Glory by Charles Marsh

Author:Charles Marsh [Marsh, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35169-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

When, two years earlier, in June of 1935, Barth had been removed from his post at the University of Bonn, he’d lashed out not only at Hitler but also against the Confessing Church leadership, which had shown, in his opinion, “no heart for the millions who are suffering unjustly” and had “nothing to say about the simplest questions of public honesty.” Neither had the Confessing Church “spoken out on the most simple matters of public integrity. And if and when it does speak, it is always on its own behalf.”80

It was a harsh criticism, especially from an academic theologian who had been willing to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler—though with a caveat: “as long as I can be responsible as a Christian.” Whether this addition had been proclaimed in a whisper, a shout, or alone in his chamber, Barth would not say. But no qualification of any kind was acceptable to the Reich Church; Barth was soon dismissed. By the fall of 1936, he was safely ensconced in the chair of Reformed Theology at the University of Basel, from which he proceeded to issue a steady stream of suggestions, rarely solicited, to his beleaguered colleagues mired in the trenches of the church struggle. Barth would pass the remainder of his career in Switzerland, attended by his exceedingly loyal wife, Nelly, and his strikingly beautiful assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who came to occupy a room in the professor’s home. That she would remain the theologian’s lover until his death in 1968 is perhaps a final testament to his ardent embrace of Trinitarian thought.”

Still, Bonhoeffer received Barth’s every communication appreciatively, both those addressed to the plenitude of the dissident pastorate and to him personally; he bravely breasted the pontifical certitudes and the occasional reprimand—ever grateful for Barth’s attention, genuinely convinced that the master’s most important contribution to the resistance was his tireless work on the magisterial Church Dogmatics.

As the Gestapo moved on Hitler’s orders to quash all remaining activities of the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer chose a psalm of vengeance as the biblical text for one of his final sermons at Finkenwalde. It is significant that he “did not reject the Psalms of vengeance, as Christians have sometimes done, on the grounds that they reflected an earlier stage in God’s relationship to humanity and contradicted the love-ethic of the gospel.”81 As a student of the Psalter he would never take such a view. He hoped rather that Christians would learn to read the so-called “imprecatory” songs—those of judgment and condemnation—as accusations in the voice of Jesus the Jew against injustice and innocent sufferings, the anguished utterances of the “crucified Lord.”

“No, we sinners are not praying this song of vengeance,” Bonhoeffer explained in condemnation of Hitler. “[I]nnocence itself is praying it.”

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