Kirchentag 1967

After five days of whooping at the thirteenth annual German Protestant “Church Day,” I made a solemn vow over my Wienerschnilzel: never would I attend another ecumenical clambake (to change the gastronomic figure). Naturally this was a precipitous vow, and as the effect of the Kirchentag wears off in a few months, I shall doubtless find myself panting at a registration booth for the next extravaganza.

For the time being, however, the Kirchentag has given me more than I can take. During the multitudinous sessions in Hannover from June 21 to 25 (for news coverage, see the July 21 issue), I kept recalling Alice’s experience with the Cheshire cat who gave her advice and then faded away except for a smile. “I have often seen a cat without a grin,” mused Alice, “but a grin without a cat! That’s surely the strangest thing I’ve ever seen!” The Kirchentag was precisely such a phenomenon, and it well represented the German theological scene: a reassuring smile of piety and churchiness without any substantive biblical or theological foundations.

My negative response was not based on externals, though these certainly helped. Participants were engulfed by an appalling circus-like atmosphere in which venders hawked badges, buttons, souvenirs, books by the speakers, and food. Everywhere there were banners, flags, and uniforms (members of youth organizations directed the human traffic—some 30,000 people in attendance each day), uncomfortably suggesting the mass rallies of the National Socialist era and the classic line in the film version of Is Paris Burning?: “Les allemands aiment beaucoup les uniformes.” And there was the lack of foresight that put Friday evening’s boring “Social World Peace” session (with Niemöller and Visser’t Hooft) into much too large an auditorium, while numerous eager people were turned away from simultaneous musical sessions (Negro spirituals, gospel songs) and Helmut Thielicke’s preaching.

All this I could tolerate. What I could not take was the ideological atmosphere—the heart-rending contrast between spiritually hungry laymen (many brought up in centers of dynamic evangelical piety) and Olympian theologians (whose mini-beliefs leave the German church without any substantial biblical or confessional underpinnings).

It was precisely this ideological tone that led to the (unsuccessful) boycotting of this year’s Kirchentag by the two major conservative “protest” movements in Germany: the broadly evangelical “No Other Gospel” group and the more distinctively Lutheran Kirchliche Sammlung. For pastors and laymen in these loosely organized movements, participation in the union activities of the Kirchentag, which included ecumenical communion services, was tacit admission that the liberal and radical theologians offer a legitimate option in German church life.

Perhaps the protest movements were at fault for not actively defending historic Christianity at the Kirchentag. But they were right in predicting the character of the Church Day. True, there were some stellar speakers, such as distinguished physicist C. F. von Weizsacker (author of History of Nature) and U. N. leader Ralph Bunche. But the strictly theological presentations were at best mediating and at worst out-and-out heretical. It was quite significant that the most orthodox systematician on the program, Wolfhart Pannenberg of Mainz (see Time, July 14), who, in spite of his critical approach to the Bible, holds to a fully historical resurrection of Christ and has struck decisive blows at Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian existentializing of the Gospel, was scheduled late in the afternoon and drew weak and sporadic clapping from a relatively small audience.

In sharp contrast, the prime-time morning lecture by Ernest Käsemann pulled in a gigantic crowd, including many young people (over half the fulltime Kirchentag registrants were 17-to 35-year-olds) whose frenetic clapping demonstrated that, even if they didn’t understand Kasemann, they regarded him as a hero-radical. Käsemann, who in Kirchentag discussions categorically refused to commit himself on the question whether the empty tomb was in fact empty, is one of Bultmann’s most prominent disciples. Although he wishes to go beyond Bultmann’s minimal “thatness” of the historical Jesus, he accepts Bultmann’s enmeshing of biblical event with the interpreter’s situation (the “hermeneutical circle”), castigates the fundamental tenet of confessional orthodoxy that the Gospel is nothing less than objective truth, and encourages Christians to “test the spirits even within Scripture itself” (Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen, I2 [1960], 232 f.; see my just published Crisis in Lutheran Theology, Vol. I).

Morning Bible studies, led for example by post-Bultmannian popularizer Heinz Zahrnt (Es begann mit Jesus von Nazareth), were largely a farce—and drew minuscule attendance in comparison with the “Politics” sessions (significantly, the only sessions with simultaneous translation into French and English). The study I attended was incredible. We began by singing “We Shall Overcome.” The text—Ephesians 1, with its stress on remission of sins through Christ’s blood (v. 7), appropriation of this by faith in him (v. 15), and his glorious resurrection and ascension (v. 20)—became nothing but a pretext for asking the question: In our time, what are the liberating events for which we give thanks, and the liberating tasks which we face? Not a single participant mentioned the proclamation of the Gospel or its effects (e.g., on the Aucas); we were treated to such examples as black power, potential reconciliation with Red China (leading a wild-eyed Canadian to rant about the “murdering” of North Vietnamese by the United States), and (I kid you not) the increased use of fertilizer by uncivilized peoples who previously resisted its introduction!

The final Kirchentag assembly, attended by 75,000, featured WCC General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake. In a simplistic message translated sentence by sentence into German, Blake well summed up the entire week. He obliquely slapped the confessional movements (“it is a scandal that in Germany one confession is so uncharitable to another”)—drawing applause for it—and reiterated ad nauseam his theme: “You cannot hear the Word of God without your brother.” True, said he, the Word and belief in it are at the heart of the Church; but you cannot even understand the Word unless you are in ecumenical relationship with other Christians. The proof-text given for this ghastly inversion of biblical teaching (the community has priority over the Word) was “where two or three are gathered, I am in the midst”!

The sign of the Kirchentag was the Crusader’s cross, representing the spread of the Gospel to the four corners of the earth. Speakers frequently appealed to Luther’s name and to the grand tradition of the Reformation. The hymnody of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, used in juxtaposition with tasteful and striking contemporary musical settings, provided a stirring reminder of the theological resources of the historic Christian faith. What a pity that all this lay on the surface. What a tragedy to see the smile without the cat.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

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