7KHRORJLDQVLQ7KHLU2ZQ:RUGVNelson, Derek R.

Published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers

For additional information about this book

Access provided by The Ohio State University (7 Aug 2014 00:14 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781451426403

4They Told What Had Happened onthe Road George W. Forell

Raised in a parsonage in Michelsdorf in Germany, situated in the hills ofSilesiathe son, grandson, and great-grandson of Silesian pastorsI wasimmersed in the Christian faith and its proclamation. My paternal unclesand aunts appeared only rarely in my life. The maternal grandparents wholived in Landeshut, not far from Michelsdorf, were next to my parents themost important influence on me. My grandfather Georg Kretschmar was thesuperintendent of the district. Two of my mothers siblings were importantmembers of my extended family: an aunt, my godmother, married to a pastorin Landeshut; and an uncle who was himself a pastor in the same district.

School in Silesia

In , when my father was called from his rural parish to Breslau, the capitaland largest city of the province, to serve as Sozialpfarrer for Silesia (and asexecutive secretary of the Silesian Frauenhilfe) I spent six months in Landeshutgetting to know my grandparents better and attending a Volksschule. Here Isoon discovered that while being a pastors son in the first grade might havegiven me status in Michelsdorf, it made me subject to hazing and beatings inthe rough-and-tumble environment of this urban school where most of theother children came from what Karl Marx would have called the proletariat.Before I was six I had learned that classand its associated dialectwas aninescapable reality. I learned to speak two languages: the Silesian dialect onthe playground, and the High German expected in school and at home.

After the family moved to Breslau, I finished grade school (i.e., the first fouryears) in a small private school and entered the Knig Wilhelm Gymnasiumto prepare myself to become a pastor. The Gymnasium taught Latin from thefirst to the last year (Sexta to Ober-Prima, nine years) and Greek starting at thethird year. This emphasis on classical languages and literatureone hour forsix days a week for each of these subjectswas eventually very useful to me,though at the time it seemed a meaningless exercise.

53

54 Theologians in Their Own Words

The Nazi Threat

The routine of my education was interrupted in when my father wasforced into retirement (zwangspensioniert) as a result of Hitlers rise to power.At the time forty-four years old, he had opposed the rising Nazi tide and wasforced to pay the consequences. He decided to leave Germany immediately,convinced that the evil Nazi lunacy would quickly pass. He had to find a job.A Swedish mission society concerned with the fate of refugees from Germanyemployed him as pastor and missionary in Vienna. He left Germany in June of. My mother, my younger brother, and I stayed in Breslau until the end ofthe academic yearwhich at that time meant until March of when wetoo moved to Vienna.

The change from the upper-class environment of the Knig WilhelmGymnasium, attended by the children of judges, doctors, lawyers, architects,etc.the Gebildeten, in Schleiermachers phrase, to the Wasa Gymnasium inthe ninth district of Vienna, was an enormous culture shock. Accustomed tobeing part of the majority culture, I was suddenly a member of a very smallminority. In a class of boys and girls who were either Roman Catholic or Jews,the Lutherans had identity problems. (About eighteen were Roman Catholics,seventeen were Jews, and three were Protestants.) Besides that, I was the onlyone who spoke with a foreign accent. I was a Piefke, a boy who spoke adifferent brand of German. As a matter of fact, since I moved to Vienna at theage of thirteen and for the next sixty years, I hardly ever opened my mouth onany subject without people asking, Where are you from? I did make friendsamong both the Jews and the Catholics, but I had to ask myself rather earlyin life what it meant to be Evangelisch, A.B. (a Protestant committed to theAugsburg Confession).

But while the Christian faith was important in my home, and I went tochurch and was confirmed, the overwhelming experience in these years wasViennese culture, which I devoured with enthusiasm: from opera to theater,from Austro-Marxism to psychoanalysis. In the background was always themenace of National Socialism, which had threatened briefly in . In thatsummer, the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated, and the village inStyria where we were on holiday was for a day or so ruled by Austrian Nazistorm troopers.

While my Catholic and Jewish friends were mostly apolitical, I was awareof the danger especially to me and my Jewish friends. The Austrian govern-ment of the time was not devoted to democracy. It practiced its own peculiarbrand of Austro-Fascism, claiming to be inspired by the papal encyclicals onsocial justice. Lutherans were second-class citizens. If a Lutheran and RomanCatholic had married and the marriage failed, the Roman Catholic partnercould obtain an annulment from the pope, but since there was no divorce theLutheran partner remained married to a person who soon might be married

They Told What Had Happened on the Road 55

to somebody else. The result of all this was a tendency among Protestants tofavor liberation from this government through Anschluss to the German Reich.They would not believe that the demonic evils of Nazism far outweighed thevery real annoyances of Austro-Fascism.

With the exception of one committed social democrat, my friends hardlyever talked politics. We talked about soccer, art, and music, and went to theopera a couple of times a week in the section for people who were willingto stand, either on the main floor or in the gallery. We visited museums andattended professional soccer games, hiked and skied in the Vienna woods,and actually got along with each other amazingly well. I learned a great dealabout Catholic and Jewish culture and the peculiar mixture of both, whichwas the genius of Vienna between the first and second world wars. In Igraduated from the Gymnasium and began to study theology and philosophyat the University of Vienna. By that time I had decided that in the world inwhich I lived there were only two options.

Nietzsche vs. Christ

One was the Nietzsche option: the radical rejection of Christianity and withit all the sentimental reductionist alternatives of the Enlightenment andliberal Protestantism. God is dead and everything is permitted. I gave it somethought. My academic and political environment made it appear attractive.Nietzsche, too, was a Lutheran pastors son. He wrote better German thanany other philosopher I had ever read. He was free from the cloying religioussentimentality that says all the right things and does nothing about it. ThusSpake Zarathustra was one of my favorite books.

The other option was to serve Jesus, the Christ, whom I had seen as astumbling block and foolishness to Jews and gentiles but who was the onlyperson to whom I could be completely committed. The example of my parents,who were so obviously engaged in such serviceas counseling, feeding, andclothing refugeesmade the first option impossible. God had reached outto me, and my efforts to establish autonomy were doomed from the start.I had seen Christ at work through women and men of faith. Anything butdiscipleship to him would be inconceivable.

From Vienna to Philadelphia

I knew, of course, that I would have to get out of the doomed city of Vienna assoon as possible. The plan was to go to the Lutheran Theological Seminary atPhiladelphia, where a Presbyterian friend of my father had been able to obtaina full scholarship for me. The United Lutheran Church in America still neededpastors who could preach in German and was willing to take a chance on some

56 Theologians in Their Own Words

of us who were trying to escape the Nazi war machine. While the distinguishedNorwegian writer Ronald Fangen, whom I once had given a guided tour ofVienna, had also arranged for a scholarship at Uppsala, Sweden, I decided togo to Philadelphia because my grandfather (who had never been outside theGerman-speaking parts of Europe) had told me, Wolfgang, you can neverbecome a Swede but you may become an American.

But in March of Hitler invaded Austria. My plans for an orderlyjourney to America to begin my studies in the fall of had to be cancelled.I had to get out immediately. Agents of the Gestapo had been at the office ofthe Mission. My father had not been home; he never went home again but leftfor Prague. I followed a day later. From there we made our way to Swedenand I tried to obtain my visa to the U.S. My application made months earlierhad been lost at the embassy in Vienna. After a short stay in England andFrance I eventually secured a visa in January of and began my career asa theological student in Philadelphia.

After Nazi-occupied Vienna, and after London and Paris, Philadelphiarepresented another culture shock. Isolationism was the political mood of thetime. The professor who was most kind to me, Dr. Paul Hoh, later presidentof the seminary, warned me never to make any political comments especiallywhen visiting in congregations with German services. My fellow students, whowere extremely kind and supportive to the greenhorn, amused by the way hehandled knife and fork, had no interest in foreign policy. Those few fellowstudents who were politically engaged were supporters of Roosevelt and theNew Deal. Especially my friend and later roommate Morgan Edwards, the sonof a Johnstown steelworker who had worked as a butcher in a supermarketbefore coming to the seminary, introduced me to American politics. He alsotook me home with him and we visited his father at work in the steel mill.

Theologically I marched to a different drummer from any of my teachersor fellow students. After reading Karl Barth in Europe and especially hissmall book on the Apostles Creed, Credo, I had become a Barthian. Thetheological conflicts at the seminaryand there were very fewwere betweenthe orthodox and the liberals, symbolized by Dr. Emil Fischer, who taughtsystematic theology, and Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, who taught religious educa-tion. Both positions seemed irrelevant to me. The emphasis on higher criticismin the interpretation of the Bible, which seemed daring and progressive tosome, appeared obvious and obsolete to one who had been influenced byBarths commentary on Romans. I had read the Old Testament commentariesbased on Wellhausenbut they seemed to say nothing to the world that wasabout to burst into flames. While I had little patience with the question-and-answer orthodoxy of some of my textbooks, I found even that more to the pointthan the talk about progress and progressive revelation by the very decent andwell-meaning Dr. Nolde. The war was starting in Europe and America was

They Told What Had Happened on the Road 57

going to be part of it, and progress seemed not to be the category that helpedexplain the situation during my seminary years.

Even before I graduated from Mt. Airy in my parents, after havingbeen briefly interned in French concentration camps, had managed to escapeto America with the help of the Second Presbyterian Church in New York,and arrived in that city in October of . My brother John Gotthold, whohad been shipped on the notorious Dunera from England to Australia, waseventually allowed to join the Australian army and later studied theology inSydney. He came to America after end of the war and served a number ofEpiscopal churches in New Jersey until his untimely death in .

Upon my ordination I was called to serve two congregations in NewJersey (Wenonah and Woodbury) of the old Ministerium of Pennsylvania andAdjacent States and to preach every Sunday twice in English and once inGerman. The people in my congregations were very good to me and tolerantof my mistakes. They seemed to like my preachingat least they liked me.They also allowed me to take one day a weekMondayto drive to PrincetonTheological Seminary to do graduate work.

From Barth to Luther

The two most important teachers for me were Otto Pieper and Josef Hromadka.Both were refugees. Pieper had been Barths successor at the University ofMnster, and Hromadka, a Christian socialist, had been the Czech interpreterof Barths theology in Prague. To him, Barth had written his famous letterindicating that the Czechs had the duty to resist the Nazis militarily becauseof the resurrection of Christ. He allowed me to work with him on Luthers doc-trine of the church. I had begun my study of the doctrine of the church at Mt.Airy and had written my B.D. thesisstill required in those dayson Paulsunderstanding of the church as the people of God, the true Israel. It seemeda good idea to pursue this idea in Luther. This effort produced eventually myTh.M. thesis for Princeton called The Reality of the Church as the Communionof Saints. I claimed that Luther, far from being an individualist, believed thatGod saves us into a community in which we are baked together like thebread in Holy Communion. Here we share all we own and hold everything incommon and do not need the services of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy to sell usshares in salvation. Luther rejected the capitalist notion that undergirded thetreasure of merits at the disposal of the papacy. All Christians had free accessto this treasure because of the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus it washis doctrine of the church, developed very early in his career, which enabledhim to stand up against what he considered the pretensions of the papacy. Ipublished this dissertation myself in . But the importance of this studywas that it had forced me to read a lot of Luther. The more I read him the more

58 Theologians in Their Own Words

I liked him. It was the reading of Luther that slowly weaned me from KarlBarth.

Union, Niebuhr, and Faith Active in Love

In , the United States was at war with Hitlers Germany. The most elo-quent theological spokesman for this involvement had been Reinhold Niebuhr.I had volunteered for the chaplaincy, but as an enemy alien I did not qualify.I decided to continue my theological studies with Reinhold Niebuhr at UnionTheological Seminary. In this was a daring move, frowned upon by thepresident of my synod, Dr. Emil Fischer of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania,who had moved from the seminary to this position. But I was not discouragedand began my studies at Union in the fall of . I received an assistantshipin church history and had the honor of working with Robert Hastings Nicholsand John T. McNeill, men of faith and great scholarly achievement.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a controversial figure. Some of my best friendswould not take courses from him, considering him a traitor to the pacifistcause. I admired him as a lecturer and as a theologian who had applied histheology to the gigantic problems of the day. I thought his interpretation ofLuther was wrongheaded and not based on the sources but on Ernst Troeltsch.I wrote my Th.D. dissertation under him, which dealt with Luthers socialethics and was later published as Faith Active in Love. I received much helpfrom John Bennett and John T. McNeill, who served on my committee. FromPaul Tillich, I took every course he offered and argued with him from myBarthian perspective, to his amusement and my education. He reported to myfather, with whom he was associated in anti-Nazi activities, that I questionedhis Christianity, but this did not keep him from befriending me especially inlater years when we taught simultaneously in Hamburg and still later whenwe both taught in Chicago in the early sixties.

In New York I met my wife, Elizabeth Rossing, a St. Olaf graduate who wasthen a graduate student at Columbia, and was very intelligent, beautiful, andkind, and shared my religious and political concerns. We met in January andwere married in June .

It is apparent to me now that Niebuhr exerted a great influence onme. My tendency to combine an orthodox Lutheran theology with a liberalpolitical stance was clearly influenced by him. At the time it was a peculiarcombination. When, after two years as pastor at a bilingual congregation inthe Bronx, I began my teaching career at Gustavus Adolphus College in ,this combination struck my colleagues and students as very odd. At the timethe Lutheran Church in Minnesota was pretty much the Republican partyat prayer. To be an active Democrat was peculiar and to combine this withserious questions concerning the agenda of theological liberalism was unheard

They Told What Had Happened on the Road 59

of. I became active in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, hada public controversy with Senator Joseph McCarthy on the campus of thecollege, and served as an alternate delegate to the Democratic conventionin . After seven years of teaching philosophy and religion at GustavusAdolphus College, I moved to the School of Religion at the University of Iowain the fall of .

It was the year Faith Active in Love was published. In this book I triedto show that Luther was a social activist from the indulgence controversy inWittenberg to his involvement with the Counts of Mansfeld at the end of hislife. The book was well received, especially by Lutherans.

My new position at Iowa meant that I no longer dealt with philosophy butwith religion and the teaching of religion in the secular university. Iowahad pioneered in this effort and from the beginning had approached it in amultireligious manner. This was a new experience for me and involved mein the valuable study of non-Christian religions. For years I taught a largecourse in cooperation with authorities on Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, andBuddhism that opened my eyes to the pluralistic world. While I eventuallyrelinquished this course in order to concentrate on the course dealing withJudaism and Christianity taught jointly with my friend Rabbi Jay Holstein, theIowa experience gave me a much broader context than my days in the parishand at Gustavus Adolphus College.

But while most of my students heard me in these large introductorycourses, I continued to teach undergraduate and graduate students in the areaof my graduate workChristian ethics and Reformation studies. I believe itwas this combination that involved me in the efforts of the Lutheran Churchto develop an ethical stance in the controversies of the times flowing fromconfessional authorities of the church of the Reformation.

Lutheran Theology in American Culture

It seemed apparent to me that the maintenance of a Lutheran church in NorthAmerica could not be justified on the same grounds as in Scandinavia orGermany. In those countries the Lutheran Church was an aspect of nationalidentity. Practically everybody including most atheists would agree that thecultural expressions of the church, the ancient church buildings, the classicalmusic, the rituals marking the stages on lifes way from birth to death, were aninescapable component of being a Swede or German. A similar claim cannotbe made in this country. Many aspects of Lutheran culture interfere with theacceptance of the Lutheran Church as part of our civil religion. Thus effortsare being made to create a Lutheran church more acceptable to the Americanreligious sensibility, to drop the depressing emphasis on the importance of sin

60 Theologians in Their Own Words

and to omit hymns that talk about Jesus wounded head and the devil as theprince of this world and other gloomy subjects.

But while a Lutheran church without a Lutheran theology may be sociolog-ically viable in Germany or Scandinavia, it is doomed in America. Withouta distinctive theology, there is no reason to maintain a separate Lutheranchurch; its disappearance within the mainstream of culture-protestantism ofthe right or the left is unavoidable and by no means deplorable. There is noneed for another version of the UCC or the Episcopal Church. For that matter,a Southern Baptist church with a slightly German accent is redundant.

That raises the question as to the nature of Lutheran theological identityand its significance for the life of the Christian church in this country. Foryears I have claimed, in season and out of seasonin Lutheran theologicaljournals and Funk and Wagnalls supermarket encyclopediathat there arecertain distinctive aspects of Lutheran theology which if lost would weakenand impoverish the Christian message in our world. Here I shall mentionthem only as slogans: () the distinction of law and gospel; () the Christian asrighteous and sinner at the same time; () the finite as bearer of the infinite(with its implications for sacrament, scripture, and vocation); and () thetheology of the cross versus the theology of glory.

Everything I have ever written has been an attempt to elucidate one or theother aspect of this message, convinced that it might help all Christians tounderstand their election and the resulting obligation. This proclamation is adebt Lutherans owe to the ecumenical church. It is not a sign of superiorityor a reason for isolation, but rather a vocation that should contribute to thewholeness of the people of God. It would be my claim that Quakers and Jesuits,the Salvation Army and the Coptic Church may likewise have obligations tothe people of God that, while not equally apparent to me, may be very obviousto them and important to all of us.

The Protestant FaithA Post-Denominational Book

This understanding of the Lutheran tradition within the ecumenical contexthas been the result of my experience as a teacher of theology not only at Iowabut in Tanzania (), Japan (), India (), Hong Kong (), andTaiwan (), and three years as advisor to the Department of Studies of theLWF (). I have learned that the theological insights so dear to meand clearly identified with Luther and the church of the Reformation are, iffreed from the denominational label, of value to people who have no rootsin the Europe of the sixteenth century. In Taiwan, my book The ProtestantFaith has been translated into Chinese, given another title more appropriateto the Chinese setting (Biblical Systematic Theology), and published withoutmy knowledge or permission by a non-Lutheran publisher. I understand it is

They Told What Had Happened on the Road 61

in the third printing and used by Christians of various backgrounds. When,while teaching at the China Evangelical Seminary at Taipei in , I askedfor the reason for the books apparent popularity in a setting so very differentfrom the Iowa students for whom it was originally written, I was told thatit summarizes evangelical theology for a post-denominational Christianityin a manner they consider appropriate to their situation. It may be of somesignificance that while only one of my books is still in print in the USA, threeare in print in Chinese.

We are, indeed, in a post-denominational age. But this does not imply thatwe live in a post-theological age. It is our task to express the Christian faith inwords that reach people at the turn of the millennium. It is my conviction thatthe theology developed in the sixteenth century, briefly characterized above,supplies basic resources that can be used for the articulation of the Christianfaith in our time. This task should be undertaken in the church for its membersas well as for all the people on the outside who are questioning the nature anddestiny of humanity.

People inside and outside the church are surrounded by innumerable ide-ologies soliciting their attention and demanding their loyalty. This situationis inescapable. It was always thus: as Luther observed in the Large Catechism,we trust either God or an idol; for human beings, atheism is an impossibility.Thus no other investigation is more significant than that which examines whatpeople believe, which makes theology the queen of the sciences.

But the church is not the only place where this inquiry can be pursued.At the end of my career at Iowa I was invited to give the annual PresidentialLecture, which gave me the opportunity to explain what I had been up to forthe last thirty-five years. I called it The Sacred and the Secular: Religion inthe State University, and claimed that () the university is a major resource tothe study of religion and () the study of religion is a valuable resource to theacademic task of the university. This is what I had tried to demonstrate whileteaching the forty thousand students that had been enrolled in my classes from to .

Having been brought to America more than half a century ago to preachthe gospel in German, I am now apprehensive that the gospel may not bepreached at all. If the church abandons its responsibility to theology to devoteitself entirely to entertainment, pop-psychology, and social work, the taskof helping people with the big questions will be assumed by others. If thathappens, somebody will eventually write a book with the title: The Treason ofthe Church. It was at that point in a very similar condition almost five hundredyears ago that Luther entered the picture. At the end of my pilgrimage I amconvinced that his relevance to our situation is enormous.

62 Theologians in Their Own Words

NotesF. Schleiermacher, On Religion, Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper

Torchbook, ). The term cultured is a somewhat inadequate translation of the German wordgebildet.

George Wolfgang Forell, Faith Active in Love (New York: The American Press, ).George W. Forell, The Protestant Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, ).