Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Good morning everyone.
I feel like this group is going to have a lot of questions in the Q and A, so I feel like we really need to start on time.
I'm Thais Carter. I'm a member of the Adult Education Committee.
I am so excited to be introducing one of our colleagues from Princeton Theological Seminary, Hannah Reichel, for so many reason.
You know, Hana was supposed to be here in December and got snowed out. But luckily Hana's book, for such a time as this, an emergency Devotional, is just as relevant today as it was going to be when they were going to be here in December. So I feel like that has worked out very well. But we are grateful to Hana for being able to reschedule to come and be with us today. This isn't Hana's first time here at NASA, but for those of you who need a reminder, Hana is the Charles Hodge professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and a ruling elder in the PC USA who serves on the Theology Working Group of the World Communion of Reformed Churches. That is the shortest possible way to describe Hannah Reichschel who is doing, I think, really innovative, exciting ways of getting people to engage with theology.
So whether you are the super nerdy person who read after Method and was like this changed my life or you wanted something a little more accessible and for such a time as this is your jam, Hannah can do it all. And so we are so glad that they are here with us today.
And something that you all may not know about me, I love the book fair. It was one of my favorite things as a child.
So much so that I loved doing the book fair at my kids school when they were in elementary school. And so we have a makeshift book fair for all of you today in
[00:01:54] Speaker B: addition to Hannah's book, for those of
[00:01:57] Speaker A: you who were here earlier in the adult ed season, we have the Just Love Story Bible that's for sale in the back.
And then later in the spring we're going to have a lunch and learn with Jimmy Hawkins. And so we actually have two of Jimmy Hawkins books also available in the back. He serves in the Office of Public Witness for the pcusa. So I highly, highly encourage you to go check those out. We'll talk a little bit at the end about what's coming next in adult ed. But let's turn things over to Hannah and open with a word of prayer.
Creator God, we can feel spring coming.
The sunshine is giving us hope that something new is rising.
God, we are so grateful for this community, for the opportunity to learn together, to process together, to worship together. And we thank you for the gift of witness, what we are able to see in the communities that we are part of, in the ministries that we are part of, and in the work of doctors of the church like Hannah Reichel. God, we pray that you would give us open hearts and open ears for what you have for us this morning. In your name we pray. Amen.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Good morning.
Thank you so much for the very kind introduction and the warm welcome. It's great to be here with you again. Ish. For those who have seen me before, I know that you've been studying Paul's letters to the Philippians a bunch.
I'm not very directly engaging in this text, although maybe there might be a note of joy, hopefully at some point. Right.
But as you've been studying that letter and also the existence and witness of different Christians who were imprisoned in different circumstances, maybe this ties into the kind of question of where do these things hit the ground? Maybe today in one version, although I'm also going to be drawing on a different cloud of witnesses.
But bear with me.
So this is how I came to think, think through these matters, mostly because all the good questions that we as scholars ever engage are pressed upon us by students.
So it's the students who challenge us to not stay in our ivory tower, but think about how our scholarship matters. And these are the questions I've been getting from students over the past in this season, right? Questions like, does theology matter? Should we really be be doing this academic work when the world is burning? Is a question I get a lot more recently.
That was one question that really arrested me last spring after the current president had taken power. And this was a young gay colleague who went on a walk with me to think about his future in this country and asked me the question, to me, seemingly out of the blue, when The Jews in 1930s Germany know that they had to leave the country? And it was very clear, right, that he was not asking for a history lesson. He was not asking for a particular analysis of that time and place. He was asking, where are we now? What's going to happen next? How do we know? How can we be prepared? And do the histories and the theology that we study help us in any way to prepare for that? So that's one voice that I've had in the back of my head for a long time. And another one was a student who literally came into my office and asked, so we've read with you in class, Barthes and Bonhoeffer and the Confessions of Barman and Belhar is this gesturing broadly at the world around us? Is this not what you've been preparing us for?
And this type of response both was so heartening to me to see the seminarians today.
They are connecting these dots. They're thinking deeply about how the things that we study connect to this world. And also this is the work that we must do. It can't remain a history lesson. What do these texts tell us?
As a person who. I'm originally German, I grew up in broad post war Germany with generations of people who has been implicated in all kinds of different ways in that history.
And then also as a person who has studied figures in the Confessing Church and their theologies. Significantly, I want to make all kinds of big or nuanced theological and historical statements that this is not exactly like that and these contexts are very different. But then also to kind of pick up this challenge on. But where does it hit the ground? Is there anything that we can take away? And this is kind of what I've been trying to do here.
So. And maybe this is something that is a good practice, right? Throughout our scriptures, throughout our traditions of faith, is something that we can lean into and say we're actually not alone. There are many people who have gone through moments of history that are not exactly like this, but questions of power and pride and hubris and how we disidentify our faith from any of the iterations of the historical moments and how it's been held capture right by different political ideologies is something that people have had to do in many, many times and in many, many places. And so there's a great. That can seem very frustrating, that can seem overwhelming. But I want to think of this as actually a big cloud of witnesses that we can tap into and that can let us know we're not alone. There's wisdom to be found in our tradition of faith, in the stories of Scripture and in different histories that we can study.
And the use of history in particular. I want to make a couple of cautionary remarks.
Obviously, especially the comparison to. To Nazi Germany and to the Confessing Church is one that's culturally widely available.
It's one that people use a lot. There are different ways that that comparison can function.
I think there's often a kind of rhetorical framing function that it can fulfill where we identify things that are happening with this is just like the Nazis. Right. And I think we should be really cautious of that use.
For one, we see that functioning across the political spectrum. And I think there's often the primary thing that it does, right? It positions whoever we already know to be the opponent as the epitome of evil. And it positions us in a kind of posture of moral righteousness that then in extremity, even legitimates use of violence against whoever that other camp is.
So it doesn't allow for a lot of nuanced engagement. It doesn't allow for a lot of discernment. And actually it aggravates a kind of us versus them polarization. Right. I think that is one of the things that we're really suffering under in this country, in this political moment a lot. And it is a dynamic, right? The us versus them dynamic is a dynamic that actual scholars of fascism say is kind of an animating core fascist logics. And so for even. Right. If you don't want to be fascist, where we should not compare other people to Nazis, it's kind of a takeaway, initial takeaway.
But at the same time, history, including the history of actual fascist regimes and resistance against them, I think can do two important things. There's actual political analysis, right, that we can do on these in these contexts.
And then there's hopefully also still practical wisdom to be found in terms of the political analysis, right? There are terms like authoritarianism and totalitarianism and fascism that are not just rhetorical tropes. There are actual histories where we can study how certain dynamics coalesce and what strengthens them and what weakens them.
One of the terms that I think that gets used a lot today, and I think for good reason in our context here, is authoritarianism. And sometimes people think so. Authoritarianism broadly is right. When power gets concentrated in the executive in a way that starts eroding checks and balances, they may still be functioning formally, but both kind of. They get systemically undermined. And there can be a tendency for either a ruling group or a specific figure or a party to concentrate the power so that disagreement becomes subject to forms of punishment that are overt or covert. So there's a kind of conscription into politics of loyalty and even deference that need to be demonstrated sometimes through particular mechanisms, some of which have legitimate functions in the system, some of which may seem even petty. Right? And.
But they contribute to this further accumulation of power.
And this is, I think, another important thing to note, that in regimes that get characterized as authoritarianism, rights can continue to exist. Most of us will continue to enjoy significant personal and political liberties, but they find their kind of boundary when the overall distribution of power gets questioned and challenged. So this also means that the effects of authoritarianism may be very uneasy, evenly felt. For some people, life continues as normal, right?
For others, especially those who by that regime become kind of the paradigmatic sites where that power has, where unification of the people against a certain construed enemy has to be exercised.
Some people are made to bear the brunt of that. And those people will feel the effects of authoritarianism much more directly than others. So even if we feel that we might still be able to live our lives as normal, that does not delude ourselves that there are not severe effects for other people. At the same time, I just very briefly want to say sometimes people talk about fascism. Those who actually study the phenomenon say it's as hard to define as nailing jelly to open wall.
There are people who say it is actually not a political ideology at all. It's mostly an aesthetic, a style, a kind of affective draw to a kind of politics of spectacle and to a rhetorics of grandiosity and this kind of us versus them dynamic that can create and leverage a politics of emotion, right? It taps into fear, it taps into anxiety and resentment, but also creates feelings of loyalty and love towards a construed, often a nation or even a figure, right, that exemplifies it.
Others say fascism is a kind of extreme form of nationalism. It's a hyper nationalist type of regime that can develop an anxiety with purity in several different ways, one of which is this, right? It's a nationalism that construes the people through forms of purity that can either be. They can be ideological, they can be historical, they can even be biological. And then there's a lot of politics that can turn violent quickly in order to excise what is seen as impurities either within the body of the people or also violence that get exercised towards the outside to strengthen that nation or even expand it. So the violence attends both the kind of construal of that regime towards the inside and towards the outside.
So there would be a lot to do in terms of actual political analysis and if and how these terms apply in contemporary America. But I think take it that way. What we're here for is primarily for this question of the practical wisdom that we might draw from Christians and other good people that have lived under regimes that have seen these developments. And just to note. So again, if I draw primarily on Christians and primarily on those who have lived and attempted to resist in some way or another Under Fascism in 20th century Germany, it is because that is the history I know best, right? There are plenty of exemplars in other faith traditions. There are plenty of cases and historical contexts that I think we should be studying, not least of all the histories of illiberalism in this country. Right. Where there's also plenty of that afoot. And we should be turning to the communities also in this country that have long experienced the general political system and the general cultural system to not be in their favor. Right. So there's a lot of wisdom to be found here. Communities of color, immigrant communities, queer and trans communities, and others.
I am turning to Nazi Germany because that is a history that I know best.
And one of the things that often gets kind of elevated, right, and rightly so in that context is the emergence of a confessing church that literally issued a new statement of faith, contested as it was at the time, to kind of push back against the encroachment of the increasingly totalitarian state on the space of the church and the freedom of the church.
And one of the things that I want us to immediately take away is that this was not the majority church. It was a small church, a small faction within the church. And even there, right, Many of the people who were in the room for the Nazi, for the attempt to kind of rally against or discern if and were to draw the line against the increasing totalitarian power grab, were actually members of the National Socialist Party. There was not a lot of unity around politics, political issues. They did not understand what they were doing as a political statement. They were trying to articulate their faith. And then to discern, even if we don't agree on anything politically, is there anything that based on our faith, we can take a stance on? Right? And this is one of the things that they came to, was to say, and this is the famous first thesis, which is now also in our book of confessions in the PC usa.
Jesus Christ, as testified to us in Holy Scripture, is the one word of God that we must hear, trust and obey in life and in death. Those of you raised with the Heidelberg Catechism might hear some resonances in the background. So it's a very. It's a faith statement, right. It's not political on the. On the surface of things.
It just attests, affirms what it is that we believe as Christians, and then it draws the consequences, right? That if this is what we believe, where do we need to start drawing the line? And it comes to the conclusion we reject the false doctrine, as if the church can and must recognize as a source of her proclamation other events and powers, figures and truths as God's revelation. Apart from, and besides this one word of God, this is still not a political statement. But you may overhear some overtones of well, who are these other figures and powers who are claiming in this context that God's revelation is happening in the national movement, in the figure of the Fuhrer who has been providentially protected from assassination attempts. All of these things were happening at the time, right?
And to lead the nation to great strength as the Creator had intended.
This is the doctrine, right, that they reject. And broadly by saying Jesus Christ is the one word of God, Jesus Christ is Lord. Therefore no other figures, no other events can claim that type of status of authority for us. And therefore we also have to draw the line more concretely around proclamation around who gets to serve as a minister. So these are very church specific things, right? Ecclesial policy type of thing things that they drew.
And this is by and large right within the German Protestant churches at the time. Kind of the extent to which so called resistance got There are individuals who drew much wider ranging consequences.
But by and large the Confessing Church tried to protect this constitutionally granted special that the church was which did a lot right. It afforded a kind of different kind of space within an increasingly totalitarian regime. But it did for example not more openly push back against increase in discrimination against their Jewish fellow citizens, against other groups that were starting to be targeted.
And later on people challenged the Confessing Church on these grounds. And particular should they not have taken a stronger and different kind of stance that was not just about self protection of their own space, but did more.
One of the statements that or yeah takeaways that for me is always in the back of my mind is one that Theodore Adorno, the philosopher in the Frankfurt School drew. After the.
After the Third Reich there is no right life and the wrong one right in a system that is deeply compromised morally, systemically, institutionally. It is often very difficult to discern when you're in the midst of things how and what to do. And there are lots of different competing loyalties.
And it's much easier to say in hindsight what any group should have done. And if we think about where we are today, maybe this is part of the grace that we can also extend to recognize this is an ongoing discernment that we have to do. But then also there's an actual demand here. Just because we are in the middle of a wrong life in so many ways, that cannot be the point where we throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do just because we are not going to be the shining hero who doesn't have Any ties and any attachments, we're not off the hook. What is it that we can do? And this is where maybe the story of Esther could also help inspire us. I know that in the final series of the study guide, you tapped into Esther, even as this is not Philippians anymore. And Esther, the story of Esther is also the one from which I took the title for such a time as this, right? You know the story.
This is in the Persian Jaspera. Esther, who's part of the people of Israel, has become the wife of King Ahasuerus. This is not a romantic, very close type of marriage, but she's part of the court, right? And through her presence at the court learns this plot to kill all the Jews. And the question is, what to do, right? What to do in these circumstances?
And as scary things happen all around, maybe sometimes we also ask ourselves what to do. And in her context, her cousin ends up advising her, right? Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise from the Jews from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows, perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.
So, right. It's not clear. There's just one right choice. Esther could maybe leave the courts, be with her. People say, I want to have no part of what's going on there.
She could maybe save herself, or in this case, and this is what she ends up doing is she does approach the king, even though that is punishable by death in this context, and tells him of the plot. She ends up saving her people, but we did not know that this would happen.
But maybe one of the things that can guide this discernment is this question. What is the particular dignity? What is the. The particular status? What is the particular position that we have or resources that we have at our availability, where we are, and how can we make use of them in the time that we find ourselves in?
It cannot be about not being compromised, but what is the best type of use that we can put what we have to.
From the story of Esther, I want to look briefly at two figures that have often been celebrated in the Confessing Church. One of them is Martin Niemoller and the other is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both figures following on your study of Philippians, who were in some way imprisoned and were trying to discern the kind of witness that they had to give.
And both, in their own way, did a lot and also both were ambivalent figures in many ways. Martin Niemoller was a pastor who was a staunch nationalist, fought in the First World War, highly decorated.
And then just slowly kind of started to come to the conclusion that was going on here was horrible. And after the Third Reich issued this famous poem that I see often in these days cited, right? And if the font is very small, I'm sorry, I will read it.
Niemoller reflects later on, and he says, first they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then I came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
There are historical debates whether the line about the Jews was actually in that poem, right? His widow insists that, yes, there are different sources that we have available.
But regardless of whether he drew that consequence or even then didn't draw it as firmly as he later wanted to be presented, I think this poem shows us several things, right? It shows us one of the really playbook authoritarian strategies, right? It is the kind of peeling away of solidarity from the margins, the targeting of groups that are marginal and that will first feel kind of their rights being slipped, their privileges being taken away, both to create the unity inside, right? And then also because there's a kind of test run that is happening. These politics get exercised in spaces or on bodies that have fewer ways of protecting themselves, so. So that they can then be rolled out more broadly on the population. And so you see kind of here the circle of that coming closer, right, to whatever is the core group here. And the white Protestant male pastor is pretty much in the core group of previously privileged, free kind of person.
The communists get targeted, the socialists get targeted, the trade unions get targeted.
He did not speak out, right? So there's also a peeling away of solidarity, right? If I'm not one of them, why should I do something here? And I think this is the other dynamic that this poem really showcases is while even for reasons of just self protection, right, the speaker here should have may be spoken out earlier.
It is also precisely because the sentiment here does not actually extend beyond self protection that he actually wasn't able to do that, right? So if I am watching the margins and what is happening there, because I'm worried that at Some point this will happen to me if we do the logic. Oh well, if there. And these logics are correct, right, if they can snatch brown people off the streets, at some point they will be able to snatch white people off the street. If they can take health care away from trans people, at some point they will take them away from broader swaths of the population and so forth. This is true.
But if that is the logic with which we think we will also keep silent because we're only trying to protect ourselves, and the other who is now targeted is an extension of that self that we're trying to protect.
And if we're silent out of this logic of extended self preservation, we will usually also be silent because of out of self preservation or until it's too late.
So this is for me, one of the maybe inadvertent takeaways from Niemoller's poem, right, Striking as it is that it actually doesn't get beyond this logic of extended self preservation, which I think is politically, strategically speaking, a trap and theologically speaking a temptation, because maybe self preservation is not what we're called to as Christians at the end of the day.
For me, Bonhoeffer's poem, it's titled Christian and Heathens, presents a different kind of approach.
And I'm going to read it to you. And this was translated with the help of Martin. Tell people turn to God when they are sore be stead, Pray for help, ask for peace and for bread, Seek release from being ill, guilty and dead.
So do they all, All Christians and heathens.
People turn to God when he is sore be stead, Find him poor, scorned, without roof and bread, devoured by weakness and sin, near dead Christians stand by God in God's grief.
God turns to all people when they are sore, be said, feeds their souls and bodies with God's bread.
For Christians and heathens at the cross, God meets death and gives both of them relief.
The language here is one of Christians and heathens. It's just one another iteration of the us versus them type of logic that has historically been a strong one. We are the Christians, other people are not.
But you see that precisely out of this commitment of the Christian faith here that logic is broken through. The point of being Christian is not that we are this and other people are something else. The point of being Christian is not that God belongs to us and safety and protection belongs to us and that we should protect those who are like us. The point is everyone needs God. All people need God's grace. And God's grace is there for all of them. And Christians, I would write, we might want to say, are those who, following that sentiment, are then able to stand with God and be there for other people as well, regardless of group affiliation.
This is, for me, one of the sentiments in this poem. It is one of the sentiments that in, I think in the logic of Borman did not carry, did not win the day, right? There was a. The logic of Barman, much as it did, mostly tried to protect the space of usness, right? The space of the church against the encroachment, which again, in a totalitarian takeover. That is a lot. That took a lot of courage. Many people died for trying to do this.
But this logic is a different kind of logic. And as the Confessing Church notably stayed silent, right? When then increasingly Jews were started to get taken away and eventually genocided in another time, in another place, other people, drawing on Barman, extended the logic, I think, in the sense that Bonhoeffer is calling us here to which is right. If, if it's at the cross that we find God, then this is also where we should stand and we should keep our eyes and our loyalties to the people who are getting crucified in any historical moment. This is the consequence that the church, the black church in South Africa, drew a few decades later, drawing on Bonhoeffer, drawing on Bormann, but taking a stance that Bormann and even Bonhoeffer didn't take, take which was this?
God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and wronged. And they drew the consequence that therefore right the church as possession of God, not God belongs to us, but we belong to God. The church as possession of God, must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged.
So what does that mean in a time such as this? I think there's a lot of discernment. I think there might be some ways where that can be very directly applied. There might be some discernment necessary in any concrete situation.
One of the things that we can, I think, hopefully continue to learn from the history of the Confessing Church is that most evil can actually be quite banal. We have overt forms of evil happening in the world. But when we think of our own lives and lives of our families, lives of our communities, the things that we can and cannot do, it is often much more difficult to say what is the right choice and what is in the end contributing to the proliferation of evil or trying to stop, stop it.
One of the very insightful observers of the logics at work in Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt, after the war, when she observed the Eichmann trial, right, Eichmann, Adolf Eichmann, who was a high ranking Nazi official who was responsible for organizing the logistical apparatus that was necessary. Necessary to make possible, right, the transport of Jews across occupied Europe to death camps.
And she observed these trials and said what really struck her was not so much that this person who was maybe personally responsible for the death of millions of people, he was not the only person responsible for that, right, but he was personally just responsible for that to become possible, was not a villain, was not like a person who was teeming with hate against this group. He was by and large a person who took pride in doing his job well, following the orders that he had been given, and refused to think beyond that. He refused to think, if I just do my thing, if I do this well, this is the best I can do, what effects does that have in the long run on the lives of other people?
Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil in this context.
Just like most evil is banal, which means we can and are constantly in very banal ways, complicit in a lot of evil that is happening around us. Also, a lot of resistance is not very heroic. The Confessing Church, we're not the heroes, heroes that we want to make them out to be.
And yet that doesn't mean that we can't do anything. There's a lot of things that can happen in these spaces between atrocious evil and heroic resistance. So you're not off the hook if you're not either of them.
At the end of the day, anything, any specific thing that you do matters more than the hundreds of things that you have in your head. And think about that. This is the principle that should be exercised in that situation of extremity. What is the specific thing that you do right where you are with the things that you have been given that matters more than the question of abstract principles.
As in all historical situations, there's a need for specific discernment, right? In the specific situation that you're in. And sometimes the discernment of what is the specific thing that I can do overrides even personal integrity. I think this is one of the other things that I take specifically from the study of Bonhoeffer, that sometimes even integrity can be a temptation of trying to stay out of the messiness of life. Sometimes we can't afford personal. There can be, don't get me wrong, there can be Wonderful ways to display personal integrity in the choices that we make, in the advocacy that we do in.
In living up to principles. But sometimes even integrity might be not the thing that we can afford. For example, right. We stay in jobs that participate, that are part of institutions that are compromised. We stay in relationships with people who we don't agree with. And yet. Right. These are spaces of ongoing negotiations where there might be things that we can do in all of that.
This is one of the comforts. I also take from this idea that as Christians, we are part of a larger body, we're part of a body of Christ where there can be a division of labor. Not everyone has to be I. Not everyone has to be hand. There are different kinds of gifts. There are different kinds of positions. There are different kinds of vulnerabilities. Right. Some things might be dangerous for me that someone else can do and vice versa.
And we can lean into that division of labor. We will get overwhelmed if everyone thinks we have to do all the things.
We will tear each other apart if we think everyone has to come to the exact same conclusion of what is the one thing that has to be done in this moment. If you are, for whatever reason, not in a position to feel comfortable going to a rally, you can call your representative. If you do not want to engage in politics, you can create safe spaces for trans youth.
There are lots of things that you can do that can carry different kinds of names, that can make a difference, even if it's not the one big heroic saving of the day. And in that sense, I would also encourage us to prioritize solidarity over any sense of purity in politics and community.
And maybe this is the one connection I can draw back to the letter to the Philippians that we need to lean into. Joy.
Why is my voice breaking right here?
That there is a lot to fear. There's a lot of reasons to feel overwhelmed. And also this is part of the authoritarian playbook. We know this.
And this is how actually totalitarianism encroaches on all areas of life, including our emotions, including our family, including our friendship. So don't let them carry that victory. Right? Lean in those pockets of joy in your personal life, in your relationships, in the fellowship we have in Christian community. Because if there should be a life worth protecting, we actually also have to live it. And in that sense, the joy in the Lord is our strength. Thank you for your attention.
And there are lots of things that you can read around all these things, but also I hope that we can get into conversation, put that back up yeah.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: Questions for Hannah.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: Thank you very much for the talk.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: It's beautiful.
[00:39:29] Speaker C: So much of contemporary.
[00:39:33] Speaker B: In the contemporary situation, so many claim
[00:39:37] Speaker C: to be part of the Christian tradition.
Was that true in Nazi Germany? And how do you respond to that?
[00:39:45] Speaker B: Could you repeat that?
Yeah, so many, if I understand you correctly, right? In the contemporary situation and in Nazi Germany, so many claim to be part of the Christian tradition.
This is. I mean, this is true in our country today, I would say, right? Like, there are many people who identify as Christians and there are lots of wars being fought around who gets to claim that. And to be honest, while I firmly, you know, I mean, my faith has kind of determined most of my life choices, I find it very easy in this time and place place to say that it matters. And I find it very hard to publicly identify as a Christian sometimes in a country where the dominant expressions of that are so, for me, in contradiction to the things that I think they are about.
In the context of Nazi Germany, it was a, by and large, much more institutionally Christian country than we are, right. There was a kind of state church system that was where kind of the. Both the Protestant mainline church and the Catholic Church had a much more stronger institutional visibility and embeddedness in public life and even politics.
And for many people, that was the go. Like, that was a clear identification for the majority. That was a clear identification that there were Christians, right? Jews. Jews were a small part of the. Of the population. People who don't. Didn't, you know, belong to other faith traditions.
Very, very small. Like, it was a much less pluralistic country than the contemporary America.
And also, just to be clear, right, Most Jews in Germany at that time were actually Christians, right? They were. I mean, as the Nazis kind of did this weird thing where they racialized Jewish existence and.
Yeah. So where kind of faith and questions of ethnicity and family lines and origin kind of started to overlay each other in different ways than they had hitherto done.
I am less interested in asking who is a true Christian, right. For me, this is one of the things that for me resounds in this poem by Bonhoeffer, like policing that boundary cannot be my primary concern. My primary concern has to be, who's that God that I see at the cross? And what does that mean for my life? And how can I and the community that I'm a part of embody that faith more visibly?
Not because it depends on us, but because that is what is demanded of us.
So, I mean, there are obviously sociologically and politically and in all kinds of ways we can can start distinguishing and drawing lines. I'm less interested in that. Maybe the only thing that I would be interested in in that sense is to say, right, if you also call yourself a Christian, I want to hold you to that account of what I see, who I see, God be at the cross. And if you still resonate with that language, then I want to. This is one of the hooks that, that I want to grab you by. But nothing depends for other kinds of solidarity, allyship and working together on the fact whether other people profess their faith or non faith in these same terms. I don't know. But I don't know if that was where your question was headed.
[00:43:29] Speaker C: What is systematic theology?
[00:43:38] Speaker B: I think it is part of the division of labor in the Church that we entrust some people with special time and bandwidth to think about what the things that the Church believe mean. And to do so systematically means to employ the best that reason and study in other disciplines allow us to get to do that in a nuanced, responsible, articulate type of way. I take it to be part of the offices of the Church.
[00:44:14] Speaker C: Thank you so much.
That was incredible.
I think it was the first slide where you said your students are asking a lot of questions. Like the one that was most interesting to me was that why didn't people who were Jewish leave Germany and Austria when they might say, the handwriting is on the wall.
And I can't imagine trying to decide, well, let me think, I'm one quarter Jewish or I'm one half Jewish. Does that mean I have to leave? Does that mean I have to pick up and leave all of my friends who I assume are still going to be here?
How would you possibly be able to make that decision?
I must admit I've thought of that too. Well, I mean, look at Kristallnacht. It's time to get the heck out of this, out of Poland.
But how could someone possibly be able to make that decision at the right time? And yet we read about people who did leave and therefore survived.
It just. I think that's a great question to ask and I thank you for the student who brought that up. And you bring that up to us.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to add to your reflection. Right. I mean, obviously we always interpret history in hindsight. So in 1930, 1932, 1933, for even nine. Right. It's not the same as 1942.
We don't.
I see people around me ask that question today and we don't know. Right. Are they overreacting in a year from now? Everything will be dissolved into peace and solidarity. Unlikely, right? I mean, I think we're living in a time where even if particular figures or particular elections go different, there is an erosion of the political system. There is an erosion of the social fabric, of the trust in institutions, of their ability and willingness to protect all people in this country in the same way.
All these. The Nazis, too, right? Like, they. Yeah, they're.
I don't. There may be different ways that the precise history can go. I'm personally not very optimistic that, you know, we will get to a place of peace and harmony and in the next anything. But.
I do see people around me, like my trans and queer friends, all of them are asking this question now. Almost all of them. And also there are good reasons to say this is our country too.
To not leave, to not end. But the other thing is the ability to do so is also only available to very privileged elite. Where do you go to? Even if you can just pack up and leave everything behind, that requires means, that requires connections, that requires access in another country to at least some sort of status that is usually available to a specific elite more than to others. And so this is one of the ways that the effects are typically unevenly distributed.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: Can we get another round of applause for Han? I'm so sorry. It's after 10.
