German Christian Research Articles

Martin Buber’s Small Theological–Political Tractate The Question to the Single One as a Call for Intersubjective Action

Abstract Martin Buber saw The Question to the Single One (his small theological–political tractate) as an addition that completed his dialogical work I and Thou by broadening dialogical thought to the theological–political–social level. This article presents new findings regarding the tractate’s composition. Furthermore, it delves into the concealed depth of meaning behind Buber’s argument with Søren Kierkegaard which is revealed from within the historical context of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the work is a brave and daring call to the German Christian as a single one standing before God, rousing him to behave in the intersubjective realm according to his obligation to social–political responsibility in response to God’s command. The ethical meaning deviates here from the historical: it constitutes a timeless call for action and responsible theo-political behavior on the social–political plane, which is relevant to our time; an ethical relationship with every other person, and deciding in favor of truth, even at the cost of opposing one’s own collective.

The Christian Trade Union Movement in the Weimar Republic according to Apostolic Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli’s Assessments

This article focuses on the opinions of Eugenio Pacelli, the Apostolic Nuncio in Germany, regarding the German Christian labor movement in the 1920s. During the Weimar Republic, there were two types of organizations for Catholic workers: the interconfessional Christian Trade Unions and the Catholic Workers’ Associations. In his reports to Rome, Pacelli mainly emphasized the Church’s loss of contact with workers, as well as the spread of «misconceptions» regarding economic theory among them. In comparison to the Catholic Workers’ Associations, the Christian unions seemed more «moderate and reasonable» to the Nuncio, as he believed that the latter were more susceptible to radicalization.

Navigating Interreligious Differences in Spiritual/Pastoral Care: An Empirical Study on Turkish Muslim and German Christian Spiritual/Pastoral Caregivers

As an outgrowth of globalization, religious globalization has significantly transformed the religious landscape worldwide. Contemporary societies exhibit religious pluralism, posing challenges for services such as spiritual or pastoral care. This study aimed to investigate how pastoral/spiritual caregivers of divergent cultural and religious backgrounds navigate religious diversity and how their religious location influences their inter-religious relations. Data were gathered through a standardized open-ended interview protocol. The study sample consisted of German Christian pastoral caregivers and Turkish Muslim spiritual caregivers from Germany and Turkey, respectively (N = 67). Overall, the entire sample expressed a generally positive attitude towards providing spiritual/pastoral care (S/PC) to individuals of other religious affiliations. German participants emphasized a human-centered approach towards individuals from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, whereas Turkish participants placed greater emphasis on the qualifications of the caregiver. Turkish participants exhibited less exposure to other cultures/religions compared to their German counterparts, yet both subsamples responded positively to requests for care from individuals of different faiths. Both subsamples adhered to standard procedures during S/PC visits. German participants were more inclined to incorporate elements from other religions/cultures into their S/PC work compared to Turkish participants. The majority of participants regarded their respective institutions (Church/Diyanet) as responsible for addressing the spiritual needs of others. However, the German subsample displayed greater reluctance towards the employment of pastoral caregivers from different religious backgrounds by their institution, as opposed to the Turkish subsample.

Love Thy Neighbor: Exploring Religious and Social Openness among Prospective Theologians in Germany and Turkey

Amidst increasing globalization and religious diversity, acknowledging and embracing openness towards religious and/or cultural others has become crucial for societal cohesion and international relations. Theological scholars, holding significant potential in mitigating inter-religious and intercultural prejudices, can play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. However, it is acknowledged that theologians themselves may harbor such biases. This study, conducted within the framework of the Religious Openness Hypothesis, employed an online questionnaire among theology students, seen as future multipliers of religiosity, in Germany and Turkey (N = 513) using convenience sampling. The results reveal the consistent relation of religiosity to all forms of prejudice among German Christians, with a linked defense against secularism potentially leading to self-isolation and the protection of their own worldview against religious or cultural outgroups. In contrast, the (generally high) prejudice among Turkish Muslims appears to be rooted not primarily in religiosity or defense against secularism but in fundamentalism and, most likely, in other socio-cultural factors such as politics and education. For both subsamples, religiosity was positively linked with xenosophia, particularly when accounting for fundamentalism. The article concludes by proposing curriculum implications for universities and schools in both cultural contexts.

Christian Democrats in Germany on Ensuring Environmental Security Through International Cooperation

The aim of the article is to present the position of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) on ensuring environmental security through international cooperation within the European Union and the United Nations. The election platforms published by the German Christian Democratic parties from 1990 to 2021 for the elections to the Bundestag and the European Parliament are analyzed.

Mendelssohn’s Upending of Canonical Appropriation

Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism cites a passage from the Psalms as prooftext to demonstrate that one of the key canonical texts—the literary corpus serving as the repository for the church songs every German Christian of the period would know by heart and sing in church—supports his central philosophical argument. Mendelssohn does so by offering his own translation of the opening of Psalm 19. With the inclusion of his translation he counteracts the assimilatory force of Luther’s canonical rendering. Inserting his own translation that recovers a canonical text as a voice of difference—in this case that of King David—Mendelssohn highlights the dynamics of canonical pressures and liberates an otherwise domesticated voice as that of political emancipation.

The Intersectional Logic of “Bad Religion”

Using an example of German Christian development cooperation, this paper examines strengths and weaknesses of an intersectional analysis in relation to “religion.” I will make a twofold argument. First, I will argue that the rhetoric of “bad religion” present in development cooperation is based on an intersectional logic and reproduces marginalization. Second, I will present that intersectional approaches often conceptualize “religion” in an essentialist way. By doing so, I will explore the common features of “development” and “intersectionality,” referred to here as the intersectional logic of development, describe the role of “religion” within it and demonstrate a dualistic logic of reading positions as hegemonic and non-hegemonic within this intersectional logic of development. Drawing on the concept of assemblage developed by Jasbir Puar (2007), this essay concludes by proposing some programmatic considerations that allow addressing these challenges and further developing intersectional studies as well as the critical study of religion.

Power struggles in the German Christian Democrats. The dynamics of three consecutive leadership contests

In 2021, the German Christian Democrats held three leadership contests. First, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had to find a new party leader. While the members tended toward the more conservative candidate, Friedrich Merz, the party elite increasingly spoke out in favor of the more moderate Armin Laschet, who prevailed at a digital party conference. Just a few months later, he was challenged by his counterpart in the CDU's Bavarian sister party (CSU), Markus Söder, over who would be the joint chancellor candidate in the upcoming federal election. Söder was clearly favored by voters as well as the party on the ground, but Laschet found powerful and decisive support in the CDU's party elite. Yet the Christian Democrats surprisingly lost the federal election, mainly because of the unpopularity of its frontrunner. After Laschet announced his retirement, the party prepared the third leadership contest. This time, the party headquarter declared a membership ballot as the mode of decision-making, in which Merz triumphed. As this study clearly points out, each of the three selection modes developed its own dynamic in the matter of influencing factors, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Process-tracing shows that the various selection processes are interrelated in terms of their dynamics and decision modes.

Chastening Germany: Graetz’s Lusty Jew And Asexual Jewess As Semitic Saviors

Abstract Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), the famous historian and biblical exegete, penned his commentary to the Song of Songs in 1871 to counter rising antisemitism fueled by racialized fantasies of Jewish gender and sexuality. Graetz contested antisemitic tropes of Jewish masculinity and femininity by reconfiguring the Song of Songs, this most blatantly erotic book of scripture, as a testament to and celebration of Jewish chastity. Against the lascivious femme fatal, Graetz introduced the tender Sulamit, whose paradigmatic chastity renders romantic ardor into asexual, sisterly affection. In contrast to the effeminate Jew, Graetz introduced the Friend, a brawny adventurer whose masculine attempt at chastity only reveals his sexual potency. Graetz leverages the co-constitutive relationships among gender, class, and race to bestow on these figures not only the bourgeois virtues connoted by their chastity, but also associations of whiteness and middle-class belonging. Graetz’s exegetical construction of new models of Jewish femininity and masculinity was no mere theoretical exercise, but a response to matters of life and death as the rise of sexually transmitted diseases coalesced into a public health crisis. With the specter of syphilis in the background, Graetz’s commentary to the Song of Songs proffered German Jews—and German Christians—a Semitic path to redemption from the immorality crippling fin-de-siècle Germany.

Identity, Belonging, and Christian Community in Protestant Responses to the Aryan Paragraph in Nazi Germany

Examining Christianity and its representative denominations and groups in Nazi Germany has led scholars to try to construct how these Christian groups interacted with a government which institutionalized the death of millions. The focus of past scholarship has centered on debates over the extent to which institutional Protestant Christianity and individual Protestants opposed Adolf Hitler’s regime and Nazism. The focus of this thesis examines how four Protestants or Protestant groups employed definitions of what made one a Jewish Christian, what being Jewish meant, and who was included within the larger Christian community in their 1933 responses to the Aryan paragraph. These responses originated from the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the General Synod of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union, the faculty of theology at the University of Marburg, and the German Christian movement. Though each response to the Aryan paragraph utilized a unique definition of Jewish Christians and Christian community, they all reveal a Protestant church unprepared to answer the questions of belonging and identity posed by its society. In their search for a unified answer to the question of whether a baptized Jew belongs in the Protestant church, Protestants displayed that they had no unified answer. The consequences of not belonging in Nazi Germany could and did lead to discrimination, persecution, and genocide.

A German Christian Jew in Rome: Ernst Bernhard and the First Years of Analytical Psychology in Italy

A German Christian Jew in Rome: Ernst Bernhard and the First Years of Analytical Psychology in Italy

The Function of “Spirit” in German Christian Theology and the Volkstestament

Abstract The German Christians (Deutsche Christen) were a factional group within the German Evangelical Church who incorporated völkisch and National Socialist ideology into theology and Church life. Throughout the 1930s until the close of the Second World War, German Christian leaders would express a robust theological agenda in a plethora of monographs, policy statements, and speeches. Much of this theology has a strongly Christological emphasis, especially as this concerned the crafting of Germanic Jesus. Accompanying this was a frequent evocation of the “Spirit” as a way of imbuing the National Socialist revolution with religious significance. The following article traces such uses of Spirit language within German Christian proclamation and explores how this had distinct implications for the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

서독의 대한(對韓) 개발원조와 1970-1980년대 보건의료지원의 성격

This study aims to elucidate the attributes of West German health and medical assistance provided to Korea in the 1970s and 1980s by analyzing the characteristics of governmental and private aid of religious development aid organizations. Starting in the 1970s, West German aid institutions began to expand assistance for social development in the name of “social justice,” thereby increasing financial and technical assistance for health and medical projects through both government and private aid agencies. In the field of health and medicine, “social justice” translated to resolving healthcare disparities between regions and social classes.
 The significant increase in health and medical assistance was primarily driven by Korean medical experts who actively established hospitals for the underprivileged and carried out community health projects in rural areas. By utilizing faith networks that existed between West Germany and Korea, they successfully obtained aid from several West German Christian development aid organizations. The Korean government cooperated with these internationally-funded health and medical projects as long as they did not develop into political resistance movements.
 The West German government provided private medical institutions in Korea with financial loans and technical assistance to construct hospitals and develop health interventions. The intended results envisioned by West German official aid was similar to those of private Christian development aid organizations. However, the West German government's medical support was implemented to solve their own domestic problems rather than to promote social justice. Throughout this period, the Korean government minimized its responsibility for resolving the local population's health care problems. Although the motto of “social justice” surrounding health and medical assistance was tied to the ideal of “publicness” of healthcare, the Korean government's passive approach to handling the country's health and medical challenges led to persistent social conflicts over healthcare, made more evident during the acceleration of medical marketization.

Karl Barth on election and nationhood: Christological reflections from 1936

AbstractThis article probes into Karl Barth's theology of nationhood set forth in Gottes Gnadenwahl, a volume on the doctrine of election published in November 1936. I will attend to his use of Hegelian terms and concepts to demonstrate his refutation of secularist and immanentist reinterpretations of the Christian doctrines of election and providence under the Enlightenment principle of historical progress by modern German thinkers, most notably Hegel. As Barth sees it, Hegel was largely at fault for having provided theological and philosophical justifications for the rise of Germany's mystical nationalism in the name of German Christianity. Using Hegelian language, Barth insists against Hegel that election is God's predetermination of human existence in Christo. Rather than negating nationhood altogether, Barth's repudiation of nationalism is intended to stress that nationhood is an external basis of the communion of the elect, and that the election of the community is the internal basis of nationhood.

Zur Ambiguität von Religion und Politik in Deutschland: die Evangelische Kirche in der NS-Zeit

During the Nazi era, the Protestant Church in Germany was challenged by the so-called church struggle between the German Christian Movement and the Confessing Church. This article interprets the church struggle in a new way by taking up concepts from Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and ambiguity research. It becomes clear that the church struggle was ultimately about the fundamental problem of the relationship between the religious and political system.

Paris, Stadt der Liebe – seit den 1930er Jahren „Fluchtort“, „Paradies“ und „Heimat“-Ersatz

Heinrich Heine (born in Düsseldorf in 1797 – died in Paris in 1856) had not only many places of residence during his years in Germany, but he also made numerous journeys throughout Europe. Thus, during his time in France, he got to know the country substantially better and furthermore he would have liked to undertake a detour to Spain. Since his student days, Spain was for him as a German Jew the epitome of a Jewish- Christian-Islamic symbiosis despite many differences and difficulties. He slipped into the role of the Moors to express his own outsider role within the German Christian majority society. Heine admired the great Jewish achievements and remained critical of Christian claims, although he had become a Protestant after being baptized at the end of his law studies. His tragedy Almansor (1823), poems from the Buch der Lieder (1827), texts in prose and epic poems from the Parisian years as well as in his literary bequest and above all the last collection of poems called Romanzero (1851) with their moving “Spanish” texts, namely the stories about Jews, Christians and Muslims, are the most important poetic evidences of religious coexistence and its problems.

The Sermon on the Mount and Christian Ethics in the Nazi Bible

In 1939, scholars associated with the pro-Nazi Thüringian German Christian movement founded a research institute dedicated to the task of removing the legacy of Judaism from Christianity. The mission of the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was to render Christianity acceptable within the antisemitic and militarized climate of National Socialism. This task required purging Christian theology of Jewish influence, a feature evident in the Institute's version of the New Testament titled The Message of God. This publication aimed to transform the religious experience of ordinary German believers and would eventually sell over 200,000 copies. This article examines material in this text as it relates to the Sermon on the Mount and concludes that, despite the apparent incongruity between Nazi ideology and New Testament ethics, the editors of the so-called ‘Nazi Bible’ believed their task to be guided by Christian ethical principles.

From Contestation to Cooperation: The German Orthodox Church, Neo-Pietism and the Quest for an Alternative Ideal of the Nation

The emergence of German neo-Pietism after the Napoleonic Wars appeared to contest the dominance of orthodox Protestantism, mainly in Prussia, but also in other German lands. However, nineteenth-century neo-Pietists forged a different kind of relationship with the orthodox than that of the early Pietists and the orthodox about two centuries earlier. Although challenging each other during the 1820s, from the 1830s onwards, neo-Pietists and the orthodox joined forces to confront rational theology, liberalism, and modern nationalism. This article departs from the existing scholarly discussion about these developments in arguing that the Pietist–orthodox alliance, which merged with political conservatism, did not necessarily apply a reactionary policy. Acknowledging the impact of the new liberal trends, these Christian devotees introduced an alternative national ideal that was based on their religious and political views. Invoking the ideal of a German Christian State, the rival Christian strands became woven into a modernized force which fostered a specific German national identity. This was characterized by ecumenical Christianity, a specific understanding of religion, a deep devotion to the German people, and nationalization of Judaism. Theirs was not a democratic nation-state, but an amalgamated model which combined a historic relation to Christianity with new efforts to redefine collective identity in a national age.

Squaring the feminist circle. Feminist labels vs. feminist behavior in the German Christian Democratic Union

ABSTRACT The German Christian Democratic Party has emerged as a new feminist space within German politics, characterized by a strong backing of feminist claims and a simultaneous rejection of the feminist label. Instead, Frauen Union members refer to feminist issues in a variety of different terms such as Querschnittsaufgabe (cross-cutting policy issue) and express long-standing stereotypes of feminists such as man hating or bra-burning women, while simultaneously promoting feminist policies such as electoral and corporate board quotas.

Freiheit heißt Leben

Liberty means to live. That is what Christian Jasper is convinced about regarding the understanding of liberty in German law and Christian faith. The author introduces the reader in the letter Samaritanus bonus on the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life which the roman catholic Congregation for the doctrine of the faith published on 14th July 2020. Therefore, the author compares theological and legal understandings of the idea of liberty. Whereas the German Constitutional Court puts much emphasis on the defence of autonomy the author highlights that human dignity implies more than the individual right to act arbitrarily. Modern societies require individuals who behave moral. The challenge is to avoid misunderstandings between the different faculties and to find wise compromises between moral expectations and legal rules in a liberal society. The lecture of Samaritanus bonus may help to improve the public discussion.