Facs
Transcript
the idea of suffering obedience – since anyhow the world is in the power of the Devil – was the attitude of almost all Germans who were influenced by this Lutheran attitude. Authority was God-sent. If the authority is bad, you have to pray for a better one, but there is no right of resistance or revolution except if they command something which is, in your personal situation, against the law of God: then you have to suffer. This point of view never was out, in Germany, and you cannot understand Nazism, for instance, without this point of view – not the content of Nazism (this has nothing to do with Lutheranism or, as some people think, Hegelianism), but the authoritarian acceptance of it without a serious resistance and revolt in the beginning, before it came to power – later on, it was impossible anyhow. – This is historical guilt, tragic guilt, connected with the German history.
In Karl Barth, there was in these days a theologian who himself came from religious socialism, who was a member of the Swiss religious socialist movement, but who turned transcenden- talist in the beginning of the twenties; who gave up the combination of the religious principle with the socialist principle, and was, as l once told him, largely responsible for the fact that the theology students who in the beginning of the twenties, after the First World War, were still in sympathy for religious socialism and able to resist the coming of Hitlerism, were not able any more because the relationship to the history, to the historical responsibility of a theologian, was undercut by Barth's transcendentalism.
Now this was the one position: Lutheranism, pessimistic about changing history,