[Dialogue] 7/14/11, Spong: The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part I: Background and Content

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The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part I: Background and Content
Earlier this summer as part of a European lecture tour, Christine and I went to Germany for three public lectures in three cities and two press interviews.  The invitation to include Germany on this trip came from a retired Lutheran pastor named Gerhard Klein, who has translated four of my books into German, which have now been published there by Patmos Press in cooperation with my publisher HarperCollins.  Through these books and these lectures, I am able to enter the theological conversation now taking place in Germany, primarily in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, but also touching the issues roiling within German Roman Catholicism, which are fueled in part by the response to the German Pope, Benedict XVI.  The story of how Gerhard Klein became aware of me and of my work reveals the power of chance happenings.
For a number of years Gerhard Klein served as the founding pastor of an Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Melbourne, Australia.  There he perfected his English and pursued his own ever-questing theological journey.  This man had grown up in Germany under the Hitler regime. He was eight years old when World War II began with the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939.  Gerhard was torn, as many Germans were, by the inner conflict between his love for his homeland and his vigorous opposition to Nazism and, in particular, his revulsion over the treatment of the Jews.  He felt deeply compromised by either the unwillingness or the inability of the two primary Christian bodies in Germany to stand up to Hitler’s abuse of power.  His own Lutheran Church was essentially co-opted by the Nazis, while the Roman Catholic Church, under the primacy of Pope Pius XII was, depending on which version of history one reads, either an active supporter of Hitler or one who turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Nazi regime.  The fact that the Roman Catholic Church is today still pressing forward with the process that leads ultimately to the beatification of Pius XII is deeply disturbing to many Germans who know of the role this man played in the rise of Nazi atrocities.  For Gerhard it was the presence of a single ordained Lutheran leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who made the crucial difference.  Bonhoeffer, as a pastor, became publicly involved in the resistance movement and thus was for Gerhard the sole witness that Christianity still had integrity.  Bonhoeffer had written a book entitled “The Cost of Discipleship” and he had paid that cost.  Following Jesus for Bonhoeffer ultimately meant a willingness to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  When the plot failed, he was captured, arrested, convicted and ultimately hanged by the Nazis in 1945 at a prison camp in Flossenburg just two weeks before that camp was overtaken by the Allied army.
Before his execution Bonhoeffer engaged in an extensive correspondence with a friend named Eberhard Bethge, who preserved his letters and published them after the war under the title Letters and Papers from Prison. In these letters Bonhoeffer spelled out his vision of a post-war Christian future.  It was thus through those letters that Gerhard Klein felt his own call, not only to ordained ministry in general, but to the stance of giving birth to the radically-reformed Christianity that Bonhoeffer had envisioned.  In one of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, he had speculated on what Christianity might look like once it had separated itself from the confines of organized religion, which in his opinion had been mortally wounded by the rise of scientific knowledge and morally compromised by its failure to stand up for the Jews.  It was Bonhoeffer who coined the phrase “Religionless Christianity” and began to talk about the God beyond religion.  Those were the things that had inspired Gerhard, just as they had inspired me.
Near the end of Gerhard’s service with his church in Australia he happened to be watching the news on television when I was being interviewed.  It was in 2003 and I was on a book tour of Australia with my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die. I have always received maximum media attention in Australia because the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Sydney is dominated by the most out of date fundamentalist mentality one can imagine.  Not only do they refuse to ordain women, they will not ordain an unmarried man for fear that he might be gay! These prejudices are regularly supported by appeals to the literally understood Bible. Whenever I travel to Australia the Sydney Anglicans denounce my arrival as if the Anti-Christ were about to land.  The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jenson, states publicly that I am not welcome in any of the Anglican churches in his diocese as if I actually wanted to go to one of them.  Their diocesan newspaper, “The Southern Cross,” runs articles designed to arm its readers to be able to resist the appeal of this American infidel.  In the past they have even appointed a “Truth Squad” to follow me around New South Wales in order to straighten out the people who might be “confused” by my words!  With that kind of free publicity, Harper-Collins, Australia, has no trouble getting extensive media coverage for my visits.  So it was that an Archdiocese of Sydney-inspired television interview was the catalyst for bringing me and my work to the attention of Gerhard Klein.
On this television interview, Gerhard heard me articulating thoughts he himself held, but had not yet publicly expressed.  He felt an intense need to learn more about this American bishop, who was at that time unknown to him. He began to read my books and that in turn led him to the determination to translate these books into his native German.  Returning to his homeland, Gerhard has over the last decade or so done that on four separate volumes.
Five years ago, while we were lecturing in the United Kingdom and France, we accepted Gerhard’s invitation to spend a few days with him in private conversation at his home in Grebenstein.   It was a wonderful meeting and the beginning of a very deep friendship.  He became almost like a brother to me and was certainly a theological partner in our common effort to call the Christianity, to which we were both committed, into a new reformation.  As a direct result of that visit, this year’s lecture tour of Germany was organized.
Germany’s role in the development of Christianity in the Western World has always intrigued me.  This is the country, above all others, that has given us critical biblical scholarship and relevant theological thinking.  It was a German biblical scholar named David Friedrich Strauss whose book, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, published in 1835, that first introduced critical biblical scholarship to the Western World.  Strauss, a professor at the University of Tubingen, was 27 years old when he wrote this monumental book.  For his efforts he was fired from the faculty at Tubingen and banished from the academy across Europe.  Later, in that same century, it was two German scripture scholars, Julian Wellhausen and Karl Heinrich Graf, who cracked the code to the source theory of the Torah that is still today the basis for the study of the Old Testament.  Germany was clearly the leader in developing modern biblical scholarship.
That was also true in the field of Theology.  It was a German named Karl Barth, who first called Christianity out of its 19th century liberalism, which had been best articulated by another German, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Barth became the father of what came to be called Neo-Orthodoxy that dominated Protestantism during the first half of the 20th century. That emphasis was then succeeded by a series of German scholars, who wrestled with re-stating the Christian faith in the light of the knowledge of today’s world.  One thinks of such names as Emil Bruner, Rudolf Bultman, Paul Tillich and the aforementioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
My own theological debt to German scholarship is immense.  Paul Tillich who escaped Nazi Germany to enjoy a spectacular career at both Union Theological Seminary in New York City and Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shaped my thinking more substantially than any other theologian.  Rudolf Bultman, probably the 20th century’s leading New Testament scholar, shaped my biblical understanding more than any other.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught me, as few others could have done, that standing for truth has consequences and if you are not willing to pay that price or run that risk, nothing you do will ever be worthwhile.  Finally there were the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and Richard, who, while being American, were the children of German immigrants, who shaped my understanding of the social demands for justice that must be part of the Christian faith.  My own mentor and friend, John A. T. Robinson, who sounded the clarion call for post-religious Christianity in a ground breaking book entitled Honest to God was primarily popularizing the thought of Tillich, Bultman and Bonhoeffer, and in that process, he initiated a new debate in the Christian world.  So, I felt an enormous indebtedness to German scholarship and was filled with gratitude for this opportunity.
The tour began in Grebenstein where Gerhard lives.  The first lecture was attended primarily by friends specifically invited by Gerhard.  They were generally professional people not clergy or theologians.  They gave me a sense of the current state of German Church life. God for most educated Germans, not unlike their counterparts in other Western nations, is still an external being, equipped with supernatural power and able to invade this world to answer prayers or impose the divine will.  That deity has become not only irrelevant in modern life but also unbelievable for modern minds. So to analyze why “Christianity must Change or Die” or to spell out what a “New Christianity for a New World” might look like became my agenda on this tour. I laid the groundwork for that task with this gathering of Gerhard’s friends and professional colleagues.  It was a good place to begin.
In Parts II and III of this series, I will describe the tour in detail and the reaction to it.  So stay tuned.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Betsy and Mary Stewart, via the Internet, write:
Question:
My mother and I had the honor of meeting you at the National Cathedral some five years ago and the reason I am writing to you now is that we are watching a special on John Wycliffe and we really rely on your knowledge.  What is your view on him?  What to believe or not?  I think though he had gone through a lot of courage trying to translate the Bible into English, in the 1500’s if I am not mistaken.  This book sure does get a lot of attention no matter what one’s beliefs are.  Thank you for your time.  I hope this finds you well.
Answer:
Dear Betsy and Mary, 

John Wycliffe is one of my heroes.  He was born in 1328 and died in 1384 at the age of 56.  He was a philosopher, theologian and lay preacher.  What later came to be called the Protestant Reformation was stirring in him a couple of centuries before Luther and Calvin. 

He translated the Latin version of the Bible, called the Vulgate, into the vernacular English in 1382.  That was thought to be a dangerous thing to do in that day since lay people, armed with a knowledge of the scriptures, might be led to challenge the ordained hierarchy of the church.  Wycliffe appears to have been responsible for the translation of the New Testament and his associates translated the Old Testament.  Almost 40 years after his death, he was condemned by the Council of Constance and declared a heretic by the Pope.  They went so far as to dig up his bones and burn them at the stake! 

When the King James Bible was translated in 1611, the work of John Wycliffe was a major force in that translation. He died in Lutterworth, near Leicester and was later called the “Morning Star of the Reformation.” 

I have always admired him as one whose pursuit of truth could not be stifled by the self-appointed “defenders of God.” 

The western Christian world has indeed vested much energy in the Bible, though not all of it is positive.  Wycliffe illustrates the religious maxim that truth can be pointed to but it cannot be captured in any human form, not in either the scriptures or the creeds.  It is a lesson we need to be reminded of eternally. 

~John Shelby Spong





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