The church in two world wars

A war in which everyone called on God

In August 1914 the nations of Europe, which thought of themselves as Christian, went to war with one another. German soldiers wore belt buckles stamped Gott mit uns, God with us, and pulpits in Germany, Britain, France and Russia each blessed their own nation's fight as a holy cause. Christians who prayed the same prayers killed one another from opposite trenches. Pope Benedict XV pleaded again and again for peace and in August 1917 put forward a peace plan that neither side accepted; Quakers, Mennonites and other Christians who refused to bear arms were sometimes imprisoned. What the war did to theology is in the Theology course's Barth and neo-orthodoxy.

Then He will judge between many peoples and arbitrate for strong nations far and wide. Then they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer take up the sword against nation, nor will they train anymore for war.

Micah 4:3

Matthew Henry admits before this promise that "The nations have not yet so submitted to the Prince of Peace, as to beat their swords into ploughshares, nor has war ceased" Matthew Henry. Yet he holds that it will be more and more fulfilled, for the One who promised is faithful.

On 24 April 1915 the Ottoman government arrested the Armenian leaders of Constantinople, and then drove the Armenians of Anatolia toward the Syrian desert. A great many were massacred or died of hunger on the marches, and Syriac Orthodox, Church of the East and Greek Orthodox Christians suffered in the same way. Most historians call it a genocide, the attempt to destroy a people; the Turkish government rejects the name. Survivors tell of Muslims who hid their neighbours at the risk of their own lives. In 2015 the Armenian Apostolic Church, of the Oriental Orthodox family, canonised all who died as martyrs.

The German churches tested

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the ‘German Christians’ movement sought to bind the church to Nazi nationalism and drive pastors of Jewish descent out of its ministry. Martin Niemöller, a pastor in Berlin, formed the Pastors' Emergency League against them, and in May 1934 Lutheran, Reformed and United delegates met at Barmen. They confessed that the church has no other revelation or lord than Jesus Christ as Scripture bears witness to him, and rejected the state's claim on the church The Theological Declaration of Barmen. Among Catholics, Pope Pius XI had an encyclical condemning the regime's wrongs read from German pulpits in 1937. Niemöller was arrested that year and held in the camps until the war ended.

The young Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) stood with the Confessing Church from the start. In Discipleship (Nachfolge) he warned against cheap grace, grace without the cross and without following Christ; he joined the resistance to Hitler, was arrested in 1943, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945. His teaching and the Confessing Church's theology are in Barth and neo-orthodoxy.

Silence, and those who rescued

When synagogues were burned and Jewish shops smashed across Germany in November 1938, most church leaders said nothing. Julius von Jan, a village pastor in Württemberg, called it sin in his sermon on the Day of Repentance a few days later; a mob beat him and he was imprisoned. During the war Nazi Germany murdered millions of Jews. Many Christians in Europe kept silent, and some took part. Whether Pope Pius XII should have spoken more plainly is still debated among historians.

Yet some rescued their neighbours. In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Reformed village in southern France, Pastor André Trocmé, his wife Magda and the villagers hid hunted Jews, many of them children. In Haarlem in the Netherlands the family of the watchmaker's daughter Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) hid Jews in their home until they were arrested in 1944; her father and her sister Betsie died in captivity. In 1943 the bishops of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church protested against the deportation of Jews, and that year many religious houses in Rome hid Jews. They did as Scripture says:

Rescue those being led away to death, and restrain those stumbling toward the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know about this,” does not He who weighs hearts consider it?

Proverbs 24:11-12

Matthew Henry writes on these verses: "If a man know that his neighbour is in danger by any unjust proceeding, he is bound to do all in his power to deliver him" Matthew Henry.

Confession and a new beginning

In October 1945 the leaders of the German Protestant church received representatives of the world church at Stuttgart and confessed that under Nazism their witness had been too weak and their prayer, faith and love too small, taking the blame on themselves Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. The declaration, which Niemöller also signed, did not speak of the Jews by name; in 1950 the synod of the German Protestant church confessed separately its guilt toward the Jews by its silence. The Catholic Church, at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, declared in Nostra Aetate that the death of Christ cannot be charged against all Jews, and deplored antisemitism. In 1998 the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, in We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, looked back on the failures of Catholics in the face of the Shoah and called for repentance. Paul says, "God did not reject His people, whom He foreknew" (Romans 11:2).

In August 1948, at Amsterdam, churches from nations that had been fighting each other a few years before founded the World Council of Churches together. It stood as a fellowship of churches confessing Jesus Christ as God and Saviour The Basis of the World Council of Churches, and at its first assembly the churches together held war to be against the will of God, while granting that they differed on whether a Christian may bear arms. The movement's story is in The ecumenical movement and the Second Vatican Council.

The two wars show how easily a church goes blind when it mistakes its nation's flag for the will of God. Before a neighbour in danger we cannot say that we did not know, and the church's work is to reconcile enemies. Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matthew 5:9), and Chrysostom explains why they are called sons of God: "this was the chief employment of the Only-begotten Son, to reconcile things separated, to give peace to things at war" Chrysostom. The next lesson, War, division and growth, follows the Korean church through liberation and war.

Practice