What Would Jesus Say?

Nancy Lukens: Many people who are aware of the holocaust in Europe during World War II are increasingly concerned about developments which could mean nuclear holocaust in our generation. You have said that you see a similarity between the silence, apathy, and blindness of clergy and church-people in the Third Reich and that of Christians today in the face of the expanding arms race and the danger of nuclear war. Would you elaborate on this for us? In particular, could you help us understand the phenomenon of the church in Nazi Germany acquiescing to Hitler's foreign policies, which made a religion of German nationalism?

Martin Niemoeller: When the Lutheran church was formed at the time of the Reformation, the Lutherans placed themselves under the protection of the secular ruler and designated him as their highest lay member, and at the same time, as their bishop. In my own generation, few people realized that the king of Prussia was in fact also the supreme authority, the bishop, of our Protestant church in Prussia.

Lukens: So your generation accepted this "throne and altar" connection?

Niemoeller: We lived with that connection--until some of us saw that it had to lead to conflicts between what secular authority--the state--demanded and what the church teaches about what God asks of us. Then we began to make a separation between "throne" and "altar," in concept and in practice--one that still holds today.

Church authority and state authority are very different entities. The state, and the Christian within the state, can behave differently in the realm of politics than the gospel or conscience dictates. I once put it this way, and I've said it over and over in the last twenty years (although not until fifteen years after the end of World War II, I might add): "Bismarck was a good Christian. Not only did he want to appear to be one, but he sincerely wanted to be one. But on his office door, the same office in which I met Hitler in 1934, one could read an invisible sign: 'Jesus Christ not allowed to enter here.' "

That's what Bismarck's mentality said. Anyone could approach Hitler and Bismarck and all the figures in authority, but you had to leave Jesus Christ outside. There was no room there for the truth the church is called to preach: that Jesus is the Lord not only in heaven, in his kingdom, but here on earth in his church and in the world. According to the mentality behind Bismarck's invisible sign, there was a basic separation of one's existence as a citizen and one's life as a Christian.

But in 1933 it was different. Under Hitler, the church never tried to take over the role of the state. It was the other way around. When the state tried to dictate every detail of our life, including taking over the Protestant church, it should have been the urgent task of the church to shut its doors so that Mr. Hitler could not come in. But there was the whole business with the German Christians. Their belief degenerated into a heathen, and then a Germanic, religion.

For the individual, then, the question became: "What do I do when the state tells me something different than what Jesus Christ, or my Christian conscience, tells me is just?" In the face of this conflict, some gave the political demands of the day priority, and others said, "No, as a Christian I will not do that."

This was basically the conflict in the Third Reich. The issue was whether one saw Jesus as the highest authority, or Hitler. Few people understood this, and people today still have not caught on to the fact that this was the real issue in the church struggle: the committed conscience of the Christian asking, "Lord, what would you have that I do? " versus the obvious and all-pervading demands of Hitler's state.

To whom am I ultimately accountable? As a Christian, to Christ; as an idealist, to my ideal. Everyone has some higher authority. It is a grave mistake today to think one can attain true ends without a true authority. Today, that is the ultimate question.

I have always said that a pious Christian can be essentially atheist in ultimate commitment. The decisive factor is whether I live the consequences of my faith. Is God my authority? Which God?

As a Christian, I say that God comes to me in Jesus Christ and in the spirit of love. That is the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity. I cannot know God at all; rather, I have some idea or other about God. But when I know Jesus, I no longer flounder with ideas about God, but I ask Jesus--who tells me I can say "My Father," or "Our Father" to God--I ask how Jesus relates to this Father and how I can know the Father through Jesus. When I place myself under this authority, then I can only act in the spirit of Jesus Christ.

I do not believe in any dogma; I can't any longer, because it is full of expressions that must be understood and lived differently today than when they were first formulated. For me, the authority of the living God is expressed in Jesus' teaching us to pray "Our Father." If I live in this authority, I live in the Holy Spirit.

Lukens: And then you are free to live totally in the world, and there, too, God is Lord.

Niemoeller: No, I don't live in the world; rather, I live as a Christian whose calling it is to live in the world. Of course, that means there is no area of life where I could say, "This is where Jesus' authority stops." Jesus' claim is "All authority is given unto me in heaven and on earth." The separation between politics on the one hand and being a Christian on the other--there just cannot be such a separation.

Lukens: How did you get from this personal realization of the consequences of Christian discipleship to your current involvements in the European and worldwide peace movement? Last fall you joined a diverse spectrum of public figures in calling for resistance to new rounds of atomic weapons systems, especially to stationing American middle-range nuclear missiles in West Germany by 1983. What is it about the arguments for more and more armaments in the name of national security that have appeal over the plea that you and others have formulated again and again in recent years? Is it fear?

Niemoeller: I must make a personal confession on that point. I have often been asked what one can do against fear. I have to say, "What is fear?" I don't really know fear. We have been told, "Fear not--all the fear you conjure up in your minds I have been through for you and overcome."

It was in my encounter with Hitler in 1934 [Niemoeller was accused of criticizing the fuehrer in a tapped phone conversation] that this came over me: "Good grief, this man is scared!" He was much more scared than I was--that is what horrified me.

When he addressed me in front of all the others, I was the only ordinary pastor there among all the bishops that day. He thundered away at me, saying, "Every time I drive out of the gate of the Reich Chancellery, I have to be prepared in case somebody has a revolver and is planning to shoot me." At this point I was aware of being free of fear, and was glad. The fuehrer was more afraid than I was.

Lukens: The fear I see in many Americans, including many Christians, is psychologically the same as what you saw in Hitler: the obsessive need for security, which eventually sees a potential enemy in everything that threatens our self-righteous interests. And the more we see this force at work, the more we become fearful.

Niemoeller: Yes, certainly, if you put yourself in Christ's place and think you or your country must save the world--as if God weren't enough. For me it is sufficient that God gave his only son, in whom he was well pleased, and let him die, in order to show us what he meant: "Fear not death, but die. That is what life is." The cross and the resurrection go together, and that is the way of discipleship. What difference does it make how long I live or when I die--my life can be over at any moment.

My hope, the hope that has kept me going the past twenty years and for which I have taken a lot of beatings, is that there is always the next generation that has its own vision and goes on. The worst thing I see today is the loss of faith in the good news that we have to share with the world--that we are well taken care of in the hands of God, that he is our Father, that this fact redeems our human community and can be its security and its guideline, day by day; this is what history is about.

I have never hated anyone in my life. That is crucial. I can be very angry, and have I ever! With the Lutheran bishops during the church struggle, for example, when things got rough between 1935 and 1937. I could get abysmally angry at them.

Or in the concentration camp after 1937. But I am so glad that at the end of seven years I was not released from the camp but kept prisoner almost eight years--minus a week. For it wasn't until the last three months of my imprisonment that I began to understand what it means, existentially, to love one's enemy.

There were our SS-men in Dachau; they were the people who were hanging my fellow prisoners. We were forced to watch, and despised the whole mess, until it suddenly became clear: "These poor devils--how on earth can human beings become so depraved and sadistic? What have we come to? These are the people we should pray for, not only for the prisoners."

Lukens: It is so easy to become cynical and forget the power of Christ's love. How can the church today rediscover the power of "love your enemies" in the face of potential nuclear holocaust?

Niemoeller: They say there are now several tons of nuclear explosives for every human being alive on earth.

A tiny bit sufficed to destroy the population of Hiroshima, and we now have many times that much for every man, woman, and child alive. How will we get rid of it, even if it were decided today to stop the arms race altogether and destroy all nuclear arms stockpiles? And yet more and more are produced.

I think the arms race on the level of nuclear weaponry is sheer insanity. I can only say, "Stop the insanity. But whether you stop or not, you have in effect laid the groundwork for your suicide."

I thank God every evening that the day has come and gone, and pray every morning that we might live another day.

Lukens: How do we live? How can the church offer hope in the face of this impending second holocaust?

Niemoeller: We live in faith. And faith can only be lived out of love and compassion. Sometimes that is expressed as faith, sometimes as hope.

By hope I mean avoiding despair. Faith is the same thing, except that it is only by faith, grounded in the knowledge of Jesus, that we have the chance to live in love, to look beyond ourselves to the welfare of others.

In Place of Yourself
I remember a seminar of old Professor Smend in Muenster where I studied theology. One day he asked a rather sleepy fellow student of mine to recite the greatest commandment, whereupon the student rattled it off absent-mindedly: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."

Smend responded, "Say it again!" So he did, after which Smend came down with his point: "Don't you ever say it that way again--as yourself!"

Today's translations make the commandment sound like a "fifty-fifty" proposition. Today's psychology (I started out studying psychology, by the way, until Barth came along, thank goodness!)--today's psychology makes us think as if we had to divide up the available love like a pie. Luther translated the Greek in one place in a way that makes sense for us today: Love your neighbor in place of, instead of, yourself. In other words, change places with your neighbor.

Lukens: What does it imply in the Greek?

It's just as ambiguous there. It does not become unambiguous until we look at the cross. That's the point, isn't it? Not to think of yourself, but of the other, of what is important for him or her. Let the other one enter the space where your love is, with all its inclinations, needs, desires. You show you care for a person by putting your life on the line, not by asking what will happen to you for defending the other person's interests.

Where there is no love of this kind, there can't be any hope either. The anchorpoint of the Trinity is my fellow human being, whose well-being becomes my only point in living.

And what is the Christian church preaching, really? I mistrust churches today in what they claim to be preaching, and must say I prefer small groups of committed folks who try to live what the New Testament calls agape, which is centered in the person of Jesus.

Lukens: Can you tell us more about how you became a pacifist?

I really haven't learned anything new in my understanding of Christian ethics since I was eight years old. My father was a pastor in the Prussian Church of the Union in Lippstadt, Westphalia. I started school at Eastertime, 1898, when Bismarck was still alive. I was the oldest of four after my older brother died; the fifth came along a year later, and all five of us are still alive, amazingly enough--God knows how often I've skated by the edge of death. We hope to celebrate my youngest sister's eightieth in November and my ninetieth two months later.

In any case, I was a schoolboy of eight when my father often took me along in the afternoons when he went around to visit the sick. One day we went to see a weaver who was dying of tuberculosis. Downstairs was his loom, and my father parked me there while he went upstairs to the sick man's bedroom. I took in the bare room with nothing but the loom and whitewashed walls.

In one corner, I noticed something framed and under glass which was embroidered in pearls--nothing but the question, "What would Jesus say?" I've never forgotten it--never. And that's the sum of Christian ethics.

This interview took place in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in March 1981. It was conducted for Sojourners by Nancy Lukens, an associate professor of German at Wooster College, Ohio, who had spent the previous two years in West Berlin researching a book on resistance to Hitler when this article appeared.