“‘Together a Step Towards the Messianic Goal’

In Man and God, Dibelius’ essay in Der Jude, Dibelius writes under the same premises.⁴⁶ Here, he first emphasizes developments within Judaism, which led to the disconnect from its Hellenistic branch, and to the dominance of the rabbinical tradition.⁴⁷ After the destruction of the second temple, the law becomes the center of Judaism. According to Dibelius, the law creates a sphere of life which lifts the pious Jew beyond the battles of faith and soul which are crucial elements in the intellectual tradition of the occident. The Jew, he adds, is certain of his God while executing the law. In addition, the connection through blood, family, and community grows in the diaspora, and pharisaic life becomes normalcy.
For the Christian, on the other hand, the relationship between God and man is symbolized by the paradoxical symbol of the cross. For the man who lives out of this relationship, life comes out of the tension between human sin and God. But the Christian’s existence and suffering cannot be traced back to any higher law or justice. Rather, what upholds man is divine grace. “The conviction that there is divine grace beyond any rational measure is what gives the Christian safety.” Dibelius stresses that grace is beyond law, and that God’s greatness is beyond all our ‘correct’ thoughts.
At this point of the essay, Dibelius relates his argument to the new Jewish theology of Weimar. He refers implicitly to Martin Buber’s attempt to connect mystery and morality at the core of Jewish faith, and explicitly to Leo Baeck’s rejection of pure moral activity as the center of modern Judaism. Still, Dibelius insists that these new theological approaches are not what defines Judaism. Instead, he emphasizes that the organizing principle of Judaism is not the mystery of God, but divine commandment. This “Jewish realism”, he notes, is “too easily satisfied with everything worldly.” Jewish realism is mere worldliness based on an engineering attitude of a legalistic life. But, Dibelius finally adds in a critical tone, “God’s kingdom and his business is always different than world and man.”⁴⁸
Gerhard Kittels and Martin Dibelius’ distinction of law and grace, old and new, is reminiscent of the traditional distinction in Lutheran theology between law and gospel. While in Jewish faith and theology the law is a positive means to keep the relationship between God and man in healthy balance, in Lutheran theology the law has a somewhat negative connotation. Martin Luther taught that God’s laws only function is to help man to recognize his existence as sinful. Other theologians like Philipp Melanchthon corrected Luther and taught that God’s law – which is his commandments but not the ceremonial law in the Torah - helps to bring about good works. However, man cannot rely on those good works for his salvation, and sinful man cannot earn God’s grace, but rather, God grants his grace to sinful man.⁴⁹

In any event, this distinction seems to be at the heart of the Protestant’s attitude towards Judaism. And by referring to this traditional theological distinction of law and grace, even Swiss Reformed Hermann Kutter stresses that the core ideas of both religions contradict each other. For him, as for Kittel and Dibelius, law and legalistic attitude towards salvation is at the center of Judaism, whereas grace and forgiveness describe best the center of Christianity. With such general yet classic distinction at hand, Kutter maintains the impossibility to define a mutual basis of dialogue on theological grounds.⁵⁰

However, as religious socialist, Kutter is also highly critical of institutional Christianity and its official theologies. It didn’t take much for him to leap towards the mutual notion of the one God beyond all doctrine. Moses’ and Christ’s concern was about God and not about Judaism and Christianity, Kutter notes. Law and grace are only different manifestations of the one God. Yet, accepting Judaism and Christianity as lived religions would turn the Jewish-Christian encounter into real dialogue. Jews and Christians will come closer to each other, Kutter maintained, if they would allow themselves to rediscover this common ground beyond all historical religion, and “if the supreme idea of one God becomes their supreme reality again.” If Jewish-Christian dialogue begins with this common bond, with faith in the one God, and with people who live in the reality of this faith, Kutter prophesied, then Jewish-Christian dialogue will have a good chance to prevail.⁵¹
But Kutter’s approach was just one undercurrent among mainstream Protestants. Of more influence was the third main approach to dialogue, the offspring of the German Awakening theology of mission. This mission approach could rely on the support of the organized church.
This theology of mission is at the core of Leipzig mission director Otto von Harling’s entry Judenmission in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.⁵² In this entry, Otto von Harling, who sharply criticized anti-Semitism at many occasions,⁵³ maintains a strong and renewed interest in the mission to the Jews in the 19^th and 20^th century, although he recognizes that educated Jews increasingly do not convert to Christianity but remain Jewish.
This missionary attitude is the same we recognize in Alfred Jeremias’ essay on Christianity and Judaism in Der Jude.⁵⁴ Naturally, Jewish theologians were appalled by this attitude. Oskar Wolfsberg, for example, called Jeremias tendency to missionize a “disturbing factor” which “prevents Jeremias from objectivity.” As long as Jews are mere objects of mission, Wolfsberg pointed out, dialogue on equal ground is impossible.⁵⁵
In this context, it is important to note that looking at Jews as an object of Protestant mission was not limited to the theologians of the Heilsgeschichte. Rather, it was a common position even among liberal theologians. Karl Ludwig Schmidt, for instance, in his public discourse with Martin Buber in the Stuttgart Lehrhaus upholds this missionary objective in his parting statement.⁵⁶ Hugo Gressmann - who assured his Jewish colleagues at the outset of their lectures at the Institutum Judaicum that his Institute’s only mission is the mission for objective research - deemed it necessary to mention his membership in the Protestant missionary society in his public dispute with Emil Brunner in 1926.⁵⁷
At the center of his essay, Alfred Jeremias propounds a negative view of the process of assimilation, which “has damaged Christianity as well as Judaism.” During assimilation, Jews embraced a religiously diluted occident, and thereby “spoiled their own religion.” Judaism is now no longer true to its oriental essence.⁵⁸ Reform Judaism, Rationalism, and Intellectualism are blamed for Jewish religious “homelessness.” Finally, Jeremias uses the distinction of “true Christianity” versus “true Judaism.” “True Christianity” is based on the acknowledgment of Christ as Messiah for the world. One essential element of true Christianity is its mission to all people including Jews. Without the idea of mission, Christianity would turn into an amoral principle of culture, Jeremias claims. But Christianity as a mere cultural principle wouldn’t be strong enough to keep anti-Semitism in check. Conversely, Jeremias adds, a christianized Jewry would be strong enough to cut off anti-Semitism.
But what is “true Judaism,” Jeremias wonders and immediately points towards biblical prophetism at its core. Yet unlike the old prophets, modern Jews have lost their longing for reconciliation with God. They consider God’s creation of man in his image a permanent state, rather than a final destination. Yet, for Jeremias, sin is the all-encompassing reality of creation, and he expresses his hope for a Jewish return to the biblical prophets away from the Talmud. This religiously renewed Jewry will then search for the Messiah, and will be open for Christian proselytizing.
Obviously, in this mission theology the interpretation of modernity plays a major role in the approach to dialogue. Contrary to Dibelius, who took issue with Judaism not being modern enough, Jeremias wishes for a renewed Judaism under pre-modern premises. Theological basis for his way to enter the inter-religious encounter is a negative anthropology and the focus on a world determined by the reality of sin. Here, Jeremias comes close to theologians who emphasize human struggle and the need for grace in a broken world. However, unlike his colleagues, Jeremias does not explicitly operate with the distinction of law and grace. Instead, his guiding principle of dialogue is a christological universalism which turns Jews into targets of the missionary.
Thus, a close reading of some texts by Protestant thinkers in this Jewish-Christian encounter in Weimar has shown that on theological grounds these Protestant theologians were unable to welcome their Jewish colleagues. However liberal, modern, historical, or even philo-Semitic they might have considered themselves, they all operated with an exclusivist theological distinction, which made it impossible to fully embrace a dialogue on theological ground. But if these Protestant theologians weren’t able to endorse the dialogue on theological grounds, what made up for theology as a basis of dialogue? The answer is obvious. All Protestant participants also vehemently fought anti-Semitism, and all the racial ideologies which had crept into Christianity, and which soon were beginning to dominate the political and cultural discourse in Weimar. Thus, these Protestant thinkers found their mutual basis for Jewish-Christian dialogue first of all in their fight against anti-Semitism. The increasing dangers of anti-Semitism, apparent in Weimar everyday life, as well as the fight against anti-Semitism and the ideologies of blood and race became a common denominator for Protestants in their relation to their Jewish fellow citizen. The spread of anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany has been noted many times.⁵⁹ It also has been noted before that we see a good number of “Protestant leaders” in Weimar Germany fighting anti-Semitism “energetically.”⁶⁰ Many efforts were taken by Protestants between 1918 and 1933 in defense of their Jewish fellow citizens.⁶¹ Taking clear sides in the culture wars of Weimar on this issue indicates the full cultural acceptance of German Jews by the Protestant mainstream.
Among the many Protestant examples for the strife with anti-Semitism, some need to be mentioned. Eduard Lamparter’s Evangelische Kirche und Judentum (1928) for example was written specifically for Protestant clergy and laity. The small book was an outcome of Lamparter’s activities as a board member of the Association of Defense against Anti-Semitism. It was published with a preface signed by theologians of very different affiliation, among them the liberal theologians Martin Rade and Otto Baumgarten, dialectical theologian Karl Barth, and religious socialists Hermann Schafft and Paul Tillich. This preface pointed at the “uncertain and broken position of the Protestant clergy to the anti-Semitic movement” which will do “great damage to the peaceful relations of the confessions in our fatherland.” Naturally, Judaism was considered to be part of the confessions of the fatherland, and the clergy were asked to proclaim publicly that “banning any race or religious confession is sin against Christ.”⁶²
Another outspoken public figure against anti-Semitism was Otto Baumgarten, professor of theology at the University of Kiel, who had become a board member of the Association of Defense against Anti-Semitism in December 1924. At many public appearances, in speeches, essays and pamphlets, Baumgarten took a stand against anti-Semitism. Within a few years he was labeled a philo-Semite, a republican and unpatriotic. Things escalated around the Bachfest in Kiel in October 1930, where Baumgarten delivered the sermon in a festive worship service. Nazi students rallied in Kiel’s market square against Baumgarten’s participation. A few days after the Bachfest, following a torch march, these students assembled at the house of Baumgarten mocking him.⁶³
Also, Hugo Gressmann, the director of the Institutum Judaicum referred in his introductory remarks to the lecture series by Jewish scholars explicitly to anti-Semitism in Weimar. Gressmann considered these lectures in the face of Weimar anti-Semitism of enormous importance. According to Gressmann, Jewish scholarship needs academic recognition “especially today where a strong wave of anti-Semitism is going through our people, and where the image of Judaism is distorted.”⁶⁴ More examples could be added.
However, by fighting anti-Semitism, the Protestant mainstream also had to define the Jewish-Christian relationship under the new ground rules of Weimar. The arguments used by anti-Semites, often targeted the Christian foundations of German culture. While Germanizing every sphere of life, Jews were rejected as the racially other, and, in the same breath, the legitimacy of the Old Testament as a sacred Christian document was disputed, and theories were out to proof the Arian descent of Jesus of Nazareth. How then did the theologians of the Protestant mainstream deal with the acceptance of Jews not just in a cultural, but in a religious sense? How did they acknowledge the religious component of anti-Semitism which aimed at the very heart of the Jewish-Christian encounter?

A very good summary of the arguments made by Protestant theologians in this regard can be found in Heinrich Frick’s encyclopedia entry Antisemitismus in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. In this short entry we find all the major issues raised by Protestants in their strife with anti-Semitism. The entry also displayed the Protestant agenda for inter-religious dialogue, and it thus helps to further explain the reluctance with which Protestant theologians entered this dialogue.⁶⁵

Frick begins his encyclopedia article by pointing out that modern emancipation, which, according to Frick, is based on Protestant freedom of conscience and enlightened tolerance, has overcome traditional anti-Semitism and led to general acceptance.
A new situation has been reached with the racial ideologies of the 19^th century. Here, as Frick points out, traditional anti-Semitic arguments are mixed with pseudo-science, anti-Semitism becomes a modern political force, and Christian theology is challenged to respond. Race has been made a key component in the history of men, race theorists claim that all life of mind and religion is supposedly based on racial instincts, and mixture of races makes life less valuable. At the core of this thinking, Frick observes, is the “materialistic idea that blood is the decisive factor of human existence.”
After this summary of the ideologies of race, Frick responds to three widely discussed issues in Germany at that time. First, he rejects the distinction between Arian and Semitic religion, which sketches Judaism as materialistic, self-centered, and legalistic. Comparative study of religion has shown that all religions move from primitive beginnings to higher forms, and thus, Judaism can be looked at as a step by step development of ethical monotheism. Christianity, though distinct and different from Judaism, is based on Judaism and has to be viewed as completion of the prophetic religion of the Old Testament. Secondly, based on biblical sources, Frick rejects the opinion that Jesus is no Jew. Thirdly, he rejects the claim of anti-Semites to ban the Old Testament in the Christian church. The Christian needs the Old Testament because it was the bible of Jesus and of early Christianity. To abandon the Old Testament means to rid oneself of a sense for the historical development of Christianity and of the New Testament’s idea of salvation.
Frick finally summarizes the Protestant mainstream position towards the Judenfrage.⁶⁶ In regard to the Judenfrage, he makes a distinction between morality and ethics versus religion. In a moral sense, Jews have to be considered fellow Germans (Volksgenossen) and politics needs to abstain from anti-Semitism. In a religious sense then, he continues, the Christian has to “reject any degradation of mind and faith to functions of the blood,” and to “declare himself to the rule of the mind.” And therefore the Christian has to “advocate the ideas of tolerance, equality, and human dignity for his Jewish fellow citizen.” Moreover, the Christian has to “work together with religious and philosophic Jewish groups to fight together false religion and immorality.” Frick could not have reminded his fellow Protestants about their obligations in their fight against anti-Semitism in more precise and stark words.

Frick, however, adds a crucial final clause to this mainstream position. The Christian has to do all that, Frick adds, by “actively proselytizing among Jews, and by doing so he [the Christian] replaces the blurry racial distinctions and fosters intellectual encounters.” Consequently, the Christian can consider “the religious decision against all superstition of the blood a free action of the human mind.”⁶⁷

In other words, what Frick encourages Protestants to do is to fight anti-Semitism, and to support their Jewish fellow citizen. While Protestant Christians fight anti-Semitism, they can be assured of their religious superiority. Though they are modern, they do not need to abandon their mission to the Jews, because Christianity is a religion beyond ethnicity, which Judaism is not. This difference needs to be communicated in the Jewish-Christian encounter, so that Jews, like any citizen in a modern state, can freely choose Christianity – obviously in their modern Protestant version - as an intellectual choice of a religion beyond race.
In conclusion, Frick’s entry on anti-Semitism is a summary of the positions in the Protestant mainstream. In this entry in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Frick suggests to culturally accept Jews as fellow citizen, while still keeping distance to the Jewish faith, which he, like most of his fellow Protestants, still views as an outmoded pre-modern, race based and historically inferior faith. Thus, mainstream Protestants went into the culture war against anti-Semitism, but they did not reach out to their Jewish fellow fighters on the basis of faith and religion. By doing so, they did not fully acknowledge the religious component of anti-Semitism, and they did not overcome their traditional theological approach to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Adhering to tolerance, equality, and human dignity did not change the theological attitude with which these thinkers entered the Jewish-Christian encounter in Weimar. Protestant theologians went into this encounter already ‘limping’,⁶⁸ and they did not comprehend Judaism as a lived religion. In regard to Jewish-Christian dialogue, Protestant theologians failed to fully accept the challenges Weimar modernity presented. They did not take, as Rabbi Max Dienemann had wished for, “a step together towards the messianic goal.”

1^ Max Dienemann, “Judentum und Urchristentum im Spiegel der neuesten Literatur,” in Monatsschrift fuer Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 71 (1927), 401-416. Dienemann reviews several books of New Testament scholars. Among them are two books by Gerhard Kittel, Die Probleme des palaestinensischen Spaetjudentums und des Urchristentums (Stuttgart, 1926); and Jesus und die Juden (Berlin, 1926). The first book is dedicated to his Jewish teacher and friend Israel Issar Kahan. The second one was part of a series of books for Christian Students, and is a distillation of the first. See Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft vor der Judenfrage (Muenchen, 1980), 54-56.

2^ In fact, Kittel later turned out to be one of the most ardent anti-Semitic Protestant theologians, who, as William F. Albright already noted in 1947, together with Emanuel Hirsch “must bear the guilt of having contributed more, perhaps, than any other Christian theologian to the mass murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis.” See William F. Albright, “The War in Europe and the Future of Biblical Studies,” in Harold R. Willoughby, The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow (Chicago, 1947), 162-174 (165). The work of Robert P. Erickson has shed much light on Kittel’s thought and activities. See, i.e., Robert P. Erickson, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven, 1985).

3^ This lecture series was planned as just the first of many more to come, but it was stopped short because of Gressmann’s sudden death. Hugo Gressmann (ed.), Entwicklungsstufen der Juedischen Religion (Giessen, 1927); Ralf Golling/Peter von der Osten-Sacken (eds.), Hermann L. Strack und das Institutum Judaicum in Berlin (Berlin, 1996).

4^ Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, “Das Verhaeltnis von protestantischer Theologie und Wissenschaft des Judentum waehrend der Weimarer Republik,” in Walter Grab/Julius H. Schoeps (eds.), Juden in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart/Bonn, 1986), 153-178; Ulrich Oelschlaeger, Judentum und evangelische Theologie 1909-1965. Das Bild des Judentums im Spiegel der ersten drei Auflagen des Handwoerterbuchs ‘Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart’ (Stuttgart, 2005).

5^ Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (I). From its Beginnings to the First World War,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXVIII (1983), 205-239; Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (II). From the First World War to its Dissolution in 1933,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXX (1985), 67-103; Rita R. Thalmann, “Die Schwaeche des Kulturprotestantismus bei der Bekaempfung des Antisemitism,” in Kurt Nowak/Gerard Raulet (eds.), Protestantismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/M., 1994), 147-165.

6^ Franz-Heinrich Philipp, “Protestantismus nach 1848,” in Karl Heinrich Rengstorf/Siegfried von Kortzfleisch (eds.), Kirche und Synagoge. Handbuch zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, Band 2 (Stuttgart, 1970), 280-357 (349); Martin Buber, “Die Brennpunkte der juedischen Seele,” in Robert Raphael Geis/Hans-Joachim Kraus (eds.), Versuche des Verstehens, Dokumente juedisch-christlicher Begegnung aus den Jahren 1918-1933 (Muenchen, 1966), 146-155.

7^ Die Kreatur was published quarterly in Berlin by Lambert Schneider from 1926 to 1930. Editors were Jewish Martin Buber, Protestant Viktor von Weizsaecker, and Catholic Joseph Wittig.

8^ Der Jude. Sonderheft: Judentum und Christentum, (Berlin, 1927). This special edition brought together four essays by Protestant theologians, and seven essays by Jewish intellectuals and theologians.

9^ Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Martin Buber, “Kirche, Staat, Volk, Judentum. Zwiegespraech im juedischen Lehrhaus in Stuttgart am 14. Januar 1933,” in Theologische Blaetter 12 (1933), 257-274.

10^ The recent summary in the Theologische Realenzyklopaedie, for example, though written by one of the most erudite experts of the field, completely omits the Weimar debates. See John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, “Judentum und Christentum,” in TRE 17 (1988), 386-403.

11^ Wolfgang E. Heinrichs, Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Kaiserreichs (Giessen, ²2004); Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und der protestantischen Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tuebingen, 1999); Marikje Smid, Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933 (Muenchen, 1990); Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen. Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin, ²1993); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “‘Wir konnten dem Rad nicht in die Speichen fallen’. Liberaler Protestantismus und ‘Judenfrage’ nach 1933,” in Jochen-Christoph Kaiser/Martin Greschat (eds.), Der Holocaust und die Protestanten. Analysen einer Verstrickung (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 151-185. Kurt Nowak, however, emphasizes in his scholarship the Weimar era: See Kurt Nowak, “Protestantismus und Judentum in der Weimarer Republik,” in Theologische Literaturzeitung, 113 (1988), 561-578; and Kurt Nowak, Kulturprotestantismus und Judentum in der Weimarer Republik (Goettingen, 1991).