[1] Raised in a parsonage in Michelsdorf in Germany, situated in
the hills of Silesia - the son, grandson, and great-grandson of
Silesian pastors, I was immersed in the Christian faith and its
proclamation. My paternal, non-theological grandparents had died
before I was born. My paternal uncles and aunts appeared only
rarely in my life. The maternal grandparents who lived in
Landeshut, not far from Michelsdorf, were next to my parents the
most important influence on me. My grandfather Georg Kretschmar was
the superintendent of the district. Two of my mother's siblings
were important members of my extended family: an aunt, my
god-mother, married to a pastor in Landeshut, and an uncle who was
himself a pastor in the same district.
School in Silesia
[2] In 1925, when my father was called from his rural
parish to Breslau, the capital and largest city of the province, to
serve as Sozialpfarrer for Silesia (and as executive secretary of
the Silesian Frauenhilfe) I spent six months in Landeshut getting
to know my grandparents better and attending a Volksschule. Here I
soon discovered that while being a pastor's son in the first grade
might have given me status in Michelsdorf, it made me subject to
hazing and beatings in the rough and tumble environment of this
urban school, where most of the other children came from what Karl
Marx would have called the proletariat. Before I was six I had
learned that class and the dialect associated with class was an
inescapable reality. I learned to speak two languages: the Silesian
dialect on the playground, and the High German expected in school
and at home.
[3] After the family moved to Breslau, I finished grade school
(i.e., the first four years) in a small private school and entered
the König Wilhelm Gymnasium to prepare myself to become a
pastor. The Gymnasium taught Latin from the first to the last year
(Sexta to Ober-Prima, nine years) and Greek starting at the third
year. This emphasis on classical languages and literature - one
hour for six days a week for each of these subjects - was
eventually very useful to me, though at the time it seemed a
meaningless exercise.
The Nazi Threat
[4] The routine of my education was interrupted in 1933
when my father was forced into retirement (zwangspensioniert) as a
result of Hitler's rise to power. At the time 44 years old, he had
opposed the rising Nazi tide and was forced 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 the refugees
from Germany employed him as pastor and missionary in Vienna. He
left Germany in June of 1933. My mother, my younger brother, and I
stayed in Breslau until the end of the academic year - which at
that time meant until March of 1934 - when we also moved to
Vienna.
[5] The change from the upper-class environment of the
König Wilhelm Gymnasium, attended by the sons of judges,
doctors, lawyers, architects, etc. - the Gebildeten,[1] in Schleiermacher's phrase
- to the Wasa Gymnasium in the ninth district of Vienna was an
enormous culture shock. Accustomed to being part of the majority
culture I was suddenly a member of a very small minority. In a
class of boys and girls who were either Roman Catholics or Jews,
the Lutherans had identity problems. (About 18 were Roman
Catholics, 17 were Jews, and three were Protestants.) Besides that,
I was the only one who spoke with a foreign accent. I was a
"Piefke," a boy who spoke a different brand of German. As a matter
of fact, since I moved to Vienna at the age of thirteen and for the
next sixty years I hardly ever opened my mouth on any subject
without people asking, "Where are you from?" I did make friends
among both the Jews and the Catholics, but I had to ask myself
rather early in life what it meant to be "Evangelisch, A.B." (a
Protestant committed to the Augsburg Confession).
[6] But while the Christian faith was important in my home, and
I went to church and was confirmed, the overwhelming experience in
these years was Viennese culture, which I devoured with enthusiasm:
from opera to theater, from Austro-Marxism to psychoanalysis. In
the background was always the menace of national socialism, which
had threatened briefly in 1934. In that summer the Austrian
Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated and the village in Styria
where we were on holiday was for a day or so ruled by Austrian Nazi
storm-troopers.
[7] While my Catholic and Jewish friends were mostly apolitical,
I was aware of the danger especially to me and my Jewish friends.
The Austrian government of the time was not devoted to democracy.
It practiced its own peculiar brand of Austro-Fascism, claiming to
be inspired by the papal encyclicals on social justice. Lutherans
were second-class citizens. If a Lutheran and Roman Catholic had
married and the marriage failed, the Roman Catholic partner could
obtain an annulment from the pope, but since there was no divorce
the Lutheran partner remained married to a person who soon might be
married to somebody else. The result of all this was a tendency
among Protestants to favor liberation from this government through
Anschluß to the German Reich. They would not believe that the
demonic evils of Nazism far outweighed the very real annoyances of
Austro-Fascism.
[8] With the exception of one committed social democrat, my
friends hardly ever talked politics. We talked about soccer, art,
and music, and went to the opera a couple of times a week in the
section for people who were willing to stand, either on the main
floor or in the gallery. We visited museums and attended
professional soccer games, hiked and skied in the Vienna woods, and
actually got along with each other amazingly well. I learned a
great deal about Catholic and Jewish culture and the peculiar
mixture of both which was the genius of Vienna between the first
and second World Wars. In 1937 I graduated from the Gymnasium and
began to study theology and philosophy at the University of Vienna.
By that time I had decided that in the world in which I lived there
were only two options.
Nietzsche vs. Christ
[9] One was the Nietzsche option: The radical rejection of
Christianity and with it all the sentimental reductionist
alternatives of the enlightenment and liberal protestantism. God is
dead and everything is permitted. I gave it some thought. My
academic and political environment made it appear attractive.
Nietzsche, too, was a Lutheran pastor's son. He wrote better German
than any other philosopher I had ever read. He was free from the
cloying religious sentimentality that says all the right things and
does nothing about it. Thus Spake Zarathustra was one of my
favorite books.
[10] The other option was to serve Jesus, the Christ, whom I had
seen as a stumbling block and foolishness to Jews and gentiles but
who was the only person to whom I could be completely committed.
The example of my parents, who were so obviously engaged in such
service - as counselling, feeding, and clothing refugees - made the
first option impossible. God had reached out to 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 but discipleship
to him would be inconceivable.
From Vienna to Philadelphia
[11] I knew, of course, that I would have to get out of
the doomed city of Vienna as soon as possible. The plan was to go
to the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, where a
Presbyterian friend of my father had been able to obtain a full
scholarship for me. The United Lutheran Church in America still
needed pastors who could preach in German and was willing to take a
chance on some of us who were trying to escape the Nazi
war-machine. While the distinguished Norwegian writer Ronald
Fangen, whom I once had given a guided tour of Vienna, had also
arranged for a scholarship at Uppsala, Sweden, I decided to go to
Philadelphia because my grandfather (who had never been outside the
German speaking parts of Europe) had told me, "Wolfgang, you can
never become a Swede but you may become an American."
[12] But in March of 1938 Hitler invaded Austria. My plans for
an orderly journey to America to begin my studies in the fall of
1938 had to be cancelled. I had to get out immediately. Agents of
the Gestapo had been at the office of the mission. My father had
not been home; he never went home again but left for Prague. I
followed a day later. From there we made our way to Sweden and I
tried to obtain my visa to the U.S. My application made months
earlier had been lost at the embassy in Vienna. After a short stay
in England and France I eventually secured a visa in January of
1939 and began my career as a theological student in
Philadelphia.
[13] After Nazi-occupied Vienna, London, and Paris during the
Munich crisis of 1938, Philadelphia represented another culture
shock. Isolationism was the political mood of the time. The
professor who was most kind to me, Dr. Paul Hoh, later president of
the seminary, warned me never to make any political comments
especially when visiting in congregations with German services. My
fellow students, who were extremely kind and supportive to the
greenhorn, amused by the way he handled knife and fork, had no
interest in foreign policy. Those few fellow-students who were
politically engaged were supporters of Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Especially my friend and later roommate Morgan Edwards, the son of
a Johnstown steelworker who had worked as a butcher in a
supermarket before coming to the seminary, introduced me to
American politics. He also took me home with him and we visited his
father at work in the steel mill.
[14] Theologically I marched to a different drummer from any of
my teachers or fellow students. After reading Karl Barth in Europe
and especially his small book on the Apostles' Creed, Credo, I had
become a "Barthian." The theological conflicts at the seminary -
and there were very few - were between the "orthodox" and the
"liberals," symbolized by Dr. Emil Fischer, who taught systematic
theology, and Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, who taught religious
education. Both positions seemed irrelevant to me. The emphasis on
higher criticism in the interpretation of the Bible, which seemed
daring and progressive to some, appeared obvious and obsolete to
one who had been influenced by Barth's commentary on Romans. I had
read the Old Testament commentaries based on Wellhausen - but they
seemed to say nothing to the world that was about 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
point than the talk about progress and progressive revelation by
the very decent and well-meaning Dr. Nolde. The war was starting in
Europe, and America was going to be part of it; and progress seemed
not to be the category which helped explain the situation during my
seminary years.
[15] Even before I graduated from Mt. Airy in 1941 my parents,
after having been briefly interned in French concentration camps,
had managed to escape to America with the help of the Second
Presbyterian Church in New York, and arrived in that city in
October of 1940. My brother John Gotthold, who had been shipped on
the notorious "Dunera" from England to Australia, was eventually
allowed to join the Australian army and later studied theology in
Sydney. He came to America after the end of the war and served a
number of Episcopal churches in New Jersey until his untimely death
in 1961.
[16] Upon my ordination I was called to serve two congregations
in New Jersey (Wenonah and Woodbury) of the old Ministerium of
Pennsylvania and Adjacent States and to preach every Sunday, twice
in English and once in German. The people in my congregations were
very good to me and tolerant of my mistakes. They seemed to like my
preaching - at least they liked me. They also allowed me to take
one day a week - Monday - to drive to Princeton Theological
Seminary to do graduate work.
From Barth to Luther
[17] The two most important teachers for me were Otto
Pieper and Josef Hromadka. Both were refugees. Pieper had been
Barth's successor at the University of Münster, and Hromadka,
a Christian socialist, had been the Czech interpreter of Barth's
theology in Prague. To him Barth had written his famous letter
indicating that the Czechs had the duty to resist the Nazis
militarily because of the resurrection of Christ. He allowed me to
work with him on Luther's doctrine of the church. I had begun my
study of the doctrine of the church at Mt. Airy and had written my
B.D. thesis - still required in those days - on Paul's
understanding of the church as the people of God, the true Israel.
It seemed a good idea to pursue this idea in Luther. This effort
produced eventually my Th.M. thesis for Princeton, called The
Reality of the Church as the Communion of Saints. I claimed that
Luther, far from being an individualist, believed that God saves us
into a community in which we are "baked together" like the bread in
holy communion. Here we share all we own and hold everything in
common and do not need the services of an ecclesiastical
bureaucracy to sell us shares in salvation. Luther rejected the
capitalist notion which undergirded the treasure of merits at the
disposal of the papacy. All Christians had free access to this
treasure because of the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus it
was his doctrine of the church, developed very early in his career,
which enabled him to stand up against what he considered the
pretensions of the papacy. I published this dissertation myself in
1943. But the importance of this study was that it had forced me to
read a lot of Luther. The more I read him the more I liked him. It
was the reading of Luther which slowly weaned me from Karl
Barth.
Union, Niebuhr and Faith Active in Love
[18] In 1943 the United States was at war with Hitler's
Germany. The most eloquent 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 Union
Theological Seminary. In 1943 this was a daring move, frowned upon
by the president of my synod, Dr. Emil Fischer of the Ministerium
of Pennsylvania, who had moved from the seminary to this position.
But I was not to be discouraged and began my studies at Union in
the fall of 1943. I received an assistantship in church history and
had the honor of working with Robert Hastings Nichols and John T.
McNeill, men of faith and great scholarly achievement.
[19] Reinhold Niebuhr was a controversial figure. Some of my
best friends would not take courses from him, considering him a
traitor to the pacifist cause. I admired him as a lecturer and as a
theologian who had applied his theology to the gigantic problems of
the day. I thought his interpretation of Luther was wrong-headed
and not based on the sources but on Ernst Troeltsch. I wrote my
Th.D. dissertation under him, which dealt with Luther's social
ethics and was later published as Faith Active in
Love.[2] I received much help from
John Bennett and John T. McNeill who served on my committee. I took
every course Paul Tillich offered and argued with him from my
Barthian perspective, to his amusement and my education. He
reported to my father, with whom he was associated in anti-Nazi
activities, that I questioned his Christianity, but this did not
keep him from befriending me, especially in later years when we
taught simultaneously in Hamburg, and still later when we both
taught in Chicago in the early sixties.
[20] In New York I met my wife, Elizabeth Rossing, a St. Olaf
graduate who was then a graduate student at Columbia, and was very
intelligent, beautiful, and kind, and shared my religious and
political concerns. We met in January and were married in June,
1945.
[21] It is apparent to me now that Niebuhr exerted a great
influence on me. My tendency to combine an orthodox Lutheran
theology with a liberal political stance was clearly influenced by
him. At the time it was a peculiar combination. When, after two
years as pastor at a bilingual congregation in the Bronx, I began
my teaching career at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1947, this
combination struck my colleagues and students as very odd. At the
time, the Lutheran church in Minnesota was pretty much the
Republican party at prayer. To be an active Democrat was peculiar
and to combine this with serious questions concerning the agenda of
theological liberalism was unheard-of. I became active in the
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, had a public
controversy with Senator Joseph McCarthy on the campus of the
college, and served as an alternate delegate to the Democratic
convention in 1952. After seven years of teaching philosophy and
religion at Gustavus Adolphus College I moved to the school of
religion at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1954.
[22] It was the year Faith Active in Love was published. In this
book I tried to show that Luther was a social activist from the
indulgence controversy in Wittenberg to his involvement with the
Counts of Mansfeld at the end of his life. The book was well
received, especially by Lutherans.
[23] My new position at Iowa meant that I no longer dealt with
philosophy but with "religion" and the teaching of religion in a
secular university. Iowa had pioneered in this effort and from the
beginning had approached it in a multi-religious manner. This was a
new experience for me and involved me in the valuable study of
non-Christian religions. For years I taught a large course in
cooperation with authorities on Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and
Buddhism which opened my eyes to the pluralistic world. While I
eventually relinquished this course in order to concentrate on the
course dealing with Judaism and Christianity taught jointly with my
friend Rabbi Jay Holstein, the Iowa experience gave me a much
broader context than my days in the parish and at Gustavus Adolphus
College.
[24] But while most of my students heard me in these large
introductory courses, I continued to teach undergraduate and
graduate students in the area of my graduate work - Christian
ethics and reformation studies. I believe it was this combination
which involved me in the efforts of the Lutheran church to develop
an ethical stance in the controversies of the times flowing from
confessional authorities of the church of the reformation.
Lutheran Theology in American Culture
[25] It seemed apparent to me that the maintenance of a
Lutheran church in North America could not be justified on the same
grounds as in Scandinavia or Germany. In those countries the
Lutheran church was an aspect of national identity. Practically
everybody, including most atheists, would agree that the cultural
expressions of the church, the ancient church buildings, the
classical music, the rituals marking the stages on life's way from
birth to death, were an inescapable component of being a Swede or
German. A similar claim cannot be made in this country. Many
aspects of Lutheran culture interfere with the acceptance of the
Lutheran church as part of our civil religion. Thus efforts are
being made to create a Lutheran church more acceptable to the
American religious sensibility, to drop the depressing emphasis on
the importance of sin and to omit hymns which talk about Jesus'
wounded head and the devil as the prince of this world and other
gloomy subjects.
[26] But while a Lutheran church without a Lutheran theology may
be sociologically viable in Germany or Scandinavia, it is doomed in
America. Without a distinctive theology there is no reason to
maintain a separate Lutheran church; its disappearance within the
mainstream of culture-protestantism of the right or the left is
unavoidable and by no means deplorable. There is no need for
another version of the UCC or the Episcopal church. For that matter
a Southern Baptist church with a slightly German accent is
redundant.
[27] That raises the question as to the nature of Lutheran
theological identity and its significance for the life of the
Christian church in this country. For years I have claimed, in
season and out of season - in Lutheran theological journals and
Funk and Wagnall's supermarket encyclopedia - that there are
certain distinctive aspects of Lutheran theology which if lost
would weaken and impoverish the Christian message in our world.
Here I shall mention them only as slogans: (1) the distinction of
law and gospel; (2) the Christian as righteous and sinner at the
same time; (3) the finite as the bearer of the infinite (with its
implications for sacrament, scripture, and vocation); and (4) the
theology of the cross vs. the theology of glory.
[28] Everything I have ever written has been an attempt to
elucidate one or the other aspect of this message, convinced that
it might help all Christians to understand their election and the
resulting obligation. This proclamation is a debt Lutherans owe to
the ecumenical church. It is not a sign of superiority or a reason
for isolation, but rather a vocation which should contribute to the
wholeness 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 to the people of God which, while not equally
apparent to me, may be very obvious to them and important to all of
us.
The Protestant Faith - A Post-Denominational Book
[29] This understanding of the Lutheran tradition within
the ecumenical context has been the result of my experience as a
teacher of theology not only at Iowa but in Tanzania (1960), Japan
(1968), India (1978), Hong Kong (1980), and Taiwan (1993), and
three years as advisor to the Department of Studies of the LWF
(1981-84). I have learned that the theological insights so dear to
me and clearly identified with Luther and the church of the
reformation are, if freed from the denominational label, of value
to people who have no roots in the Europe of the sixteenth century.
In Taiwan, my book The Protestant Faith[3] has been translated into
Chinese, given another title more appropriate to the Chinese
setting (Biblical Systematic Theology), and published without my
knowledge or permission by a non-Lutheran publisher. I understand
it is in the third printing and used by Christians of various
backgrounds. When, while teaching at the China Evangelical Seminary
at Taipei in 1993, I asked for the reason for the book's apparent
popularity in a setting so very different from the Iowa students
for whom it was originally written, I was told that it summarizes
evangelical theology for a post-denominational Christianity in a
manner they consider appropriate to their situation. It may be of
some significance that while only one of my books is still in print
in the U.S.A., three are in print in Chinese.
[31] We are, indeed, in a post-denominational age. But this does
not imply that we live in a post-theological age. It is our task to
express the Christian faith in words that reach people at the turn
of the millennium. It is my conviction that the theology developed
in the sixteenth century, briefly characterized above, supplies
basic resources that can be used for the articulation of the
Christian faith in our time. This task should be undertaken in the
church for its members as well as for all the people on the outside
who are questioning the nature and destiny of humanity.
[30] People inside and outside the church are surrounded by
innumerable ideologies soliciting their attention and demanding
their loyalty. This situation is 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
what people believe, which makes theology the queen of the
sciences.
[32] 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 Presidential Lecture which gave me the opportunity to
explain what I had been up to for the last thirty-five years. I
called it "The Sacred and the Secular: Religion in the State
University,"[4] and claimed that (1) the
university is a major resource to the study of religion and (2) the
study of religion is a valuable resource to the academic task of
the university. This is what I had tried to demonstrate while
teaching the forty thousand students that had been enrolled in my
classes from 1954 to 1990.
[33] Having been brought to America more than half a century ago
to preach the gospel in German, I am now apprehensive that the
gospel may not be preached at all. If the church abandons its
responsibility to theology to devote itself entirely to
entertainment, pop-psychology, and social-work, the task of helping
people with the big questions will be assumed by others. If that
happens, somebody will eventually write a book with the title: The
Treason of the Church. It was at that point in a very similar
condition almost five hundred years ago that Luther entered the
picture. At the end of my pilgrimage I am convinced that his
relevance to our situation is enormous.
Copyright © 1994, Word & World, Luther Seminary.
Used with Permission.
Word & World, Supplement Series 2, pp. 1-9.
© December 2001
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 1, Issue 4
[1] F. Schleiermacher, On Religion:
Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers (Harper
Torchbook, New York, 1958). The term "cultured" is a somewhat
inadequate translation of the German word "gebildet."
[2] George Wolfgang Forell, Faith
Active in Love (New York: American, 1954; reprint,
Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959).
[3] George W. Forell, The
Protestant Faith (Englewood, Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960;
Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1975).
[4] George Wolfgang Forell, "The Sacred
and the Secular, Sixth Annual Presidential Lecture" (Iowa City, IA:
The University of Iowa, 1989).