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7 Confident in Jesus’ Victory Germany’s Protestant Clergy’s Spiritual Guidance during the First World War But since Christianity is now proved impossible as an ethic, or rather, since the ways of European man are now proved impossible in relation to the ethic of Christianity, we are faced with a need and placed before questions which make us think that the difficult asseverations of the Christian dogma of the old style correspond far more closely to the actual situation than does our predecessors’ confident assertion that “following Jesus” is a simple task. –Karl Barth, “The Problem of Ethics Today”1 The Changing Clerical Stance during World War I Beginning in 1730, the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde (better known to English speakers as the Moravians) published a yearly devotional with short excerpts from the Bible for every day of the year. They produced the book so that their members throughout the world could daily read and contemplate the same Bible passages. The regular reading of this little book became a staple of German piety even outside of the small Moravian church, and some began 1. Karl Barth, “The Problem of Ethics Today,” found in Karl Barth, THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 147–48. 221 to read the texts as a sort of Christian horoscope that guided them through their day. Naturally, the importance of this text grew on the national day of repentance on August 9, 1914, the first major Protestant religious holiday after the beginning of the First World War. So when the Moravians’ New Testament text for that day, chosen months earlier, was Rom. 8:31 (“If God is for us, who can be against us?”), many clergy understood it as a clear message for the Christians of Germany that God supported their side in the war.2 Other than a few notable exceptions, Germany’s Protestant theologians and its clergy uniformly supported and advocated the government’s participation in and justification for World War I. In lending their support for the war, the clergy instilled spiritual interpretation, justification, certainty, and purpose into the war effort. Their spiritual pursuits paralleled the imperial government’s temporal goals exactly. As the war moved into a battle of attrition, however, the clergy had few resources available to comfort their churches after their promises of a quick and glorious victory proved false. The sermons at the end of the war bear a markedly different quality from those at the beginning in their understanding of the great suffering involved in such a wearying war. Nevertheless, none of them dared face the possibility of German defeat.3 2. Cf. O. Gruhl, “Gott für uns,” delivered in August 1914, Ein Feste Burg, vol.1, Das Wort Gottes im Kriege: Predigten und geistliche Reden aus der Kriegszeit (Berlin: Schmidt & Co., n.d.), 39; A. Herwig, “Erste Kriegsbetstunde,” delivered on August 9, 1914, Drei Preigten, gehalten bei Ausbruch des Krieges 1914 (Asperg: Karl Wolf, 1915), 17. 3. Karl Hammer’s Deutsche Kriegstheologie, Arlie Hoover’s God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, and Nicholas Hope’s article “Prussian Protestantism” addressed German war jingoism. The first two works drew from published sermons and theological writings from Germany at war. They addressed the convergence of religious fervor with nationalism in the First World War. For Hammer this grew out of the theological teaching and experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when an initial hand-wringing and call for repentance turned into a jubilant feeling of providential blessing. Hoover found that the First World War took on the character of a holy war, which he believed to be an unacceptable perversion of faith. The religious leaders combined their parishioners’ base hatred with holy fervor to drive the nationalistic fighting in the war. These two works added to the general historiography of the era by showing the close relationship between the church and the nationalistic fervor growing in Germany after its unification. The church leaders in general were unable to separate their responsibilities and loyalties to their beliefs from their loyalties to their state. Hammer and Hoover were two rare examples of historians whose work used sermons to shed light on religious moral leadership. Hope’s article drew more on the long-standing traditions of German clergy that made them play such an influential and self-destructive role in the First World War. The German Protestants not only supported the war, but they became the most important mouthpiece of the...

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