Social Blind Spot?

The Rev. Martin Niemoeller's speech-making tour of the U.S. officially ended last week. Before 2,600 students and others at Yale's Woolsey Hall, Dachau's most publicized prisoner raised his rich voice and pounded the lectern with his thin hands.

"Jesus Christ is a real political opponent of National Socialism," he declared, "because He is living today. It was a fatal error on the part of Hitler that he did not realize that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead."

New Haven's reaction--like that of most of the 53 cities in which Pastor Niemboeller has spoken during the past 3 1/2 months--was mixed. Most of the younger element left the meeting early enough to find out how the "Hillhouse" (New Haven High) basketball team came out in the state title game two blocks away.

Since he first arrived in the U.S. in December, Pastor Niemoeller has been quoted and misquoted by his defenders and detractors on almost every phase of his relations with Naziism. The feeling against him has focused on the fact that his opposition to Hitler was on religious, rather than on political grounds. Few have understood that for a traditional Lutheran, religious grounds are the only valid ones for opposition to the state.

Shepherds & Executioners. Martin Luther's troublesome teaching on the relations between church & state is largely based on Paul's words in Romans 13: "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil."* Civil authority, however evil or foolish, said Luther, must be opposed only when it encroaches on the spiritual realm: "And you must know that from the beginning of the world there was rarely a prince who was wise and even more rarely one who was pious. They are usually the biggest fools and the worst criminals upon earth. ... It pleases the divine will that we ... be unto them humble subjects, as long as they do not overreach themselves and wish to be shepherds instead of executioners."

According to Professor John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary, Pastor Niemoeller "now admits the social blind spot in his type of Lutheranism." It remains to be seen whether such a change is coming about in German Protestantism as a whole. Like Martin Niemoeller, many another German has now learned that too much separation between church & state can be as unhealthy as too little.

*The German Confessional Church, however, prefers to quote Peter: "We ought to obey God, rather than men" (Acts 5:20).

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