The Church Under and Against Hitler (CH9809T)

Content

This unit will expose students to the conflict that arose between the Nazi regime and the German Protestant and Catholic Churches (the Kirchenkampf - ‘Church Struggle’) in the early 1930s. Commencing with the ecclesial histories emerging from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, students will explore both the theological and political causes of the Church Struggle, the differing ways in which the Nazi government dealt with Protestants and Catholics, and the divisions that emerged within German Protestantism itself. By analyzing texts from, on the one hand, the German Christian movement and, on the other, the Confessing Church, students will assess theologically the ways in which both sides sought to justify their responses to and attitudes towards Nazism.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

1 unit in CT or CH as prerequisite

Pedagogy

Weekly lectures, seminars, online forum discussion, interaction with textual and visual artifacts

Indicative Bibliography

• V. Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, (Oxford: OUP, 1992).
• K. Barth, Theological Existence Today: A plea for theological freedom trans. R. Birch Hoyle, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933).
• D. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
• D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, DBWE 4, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
• J.S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968; repr. Regent College Publishing, 1997).
• S. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
• K. Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, 2 vols, (Fortress Press, 1988).
• R. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; repr. 2005).
• ‘The Barmen Declaration’, (1934).

Assessment