German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700-1918
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Oxford History of the Christian Church Edited by Henry and Owen Chadwick This page intentionally left blank German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700–1918 Nicholas Hope Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Nicholas Hope 1995 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published in paperback 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700–1918 / Nicholas Hope (Oxford history of the Christian Church) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Protestant churches—Germany—History. 2. Protestant churches— Scandinavia—History. 3. Lutheran Church—Germany—History. 4. Lutheran Church—Scandinavia—History. 5. Germany—Church history—18th century. 6. Scandinavia—Church history—18th century. 7. Germany—Church history—19th century. 8. Scandinavia— Church history—19th century. 9. Germany—Church history—20th century. 10. Scandinavia—Church history—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. BX4844.H66 1995 280'.4'094309033—dc20 95–12091 ISBN 0–19–826994–3 For Susse and Agnes and our family past and present, with love This page intentionally left blank Preface On 24 June 1945 a declaration appeared in Copenhagen's Politiken, signed by Halfdan Høgsbro (1894–1976; bishop of Lolland and Falster 1950–64), director of Copenhagen's Pastoral College, and three other clergymen in the name of Danish parish clergy who had been officially appointed by the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs to look after roughly 240,000 German refugees, who were mainly from Lutheran East and West Prussia and Pomerania. This was a very large number (90,000 settled in greater Copenhagen alone) in a small Lutheran country (4.3 million) which had experienced Nazi occupation since April 1940. Høgsbro argued for the need to show compassion despite all that had happened under occupation; these refugees were not to be seen as ‘inferior’: they were mostly Lutheran countryfolk attached to home values and an old Christian and common Reformation tradition. How close and yet how far apart Lutheran Danes and Lutheran German neighbours were at this time. To write a history of German and Scandinavian Protestantism after 1945 without ire is hard. It is this old, poor, customary, contemplative, and unhurried, mainly Lutheran, churchscape of country and home- town Krähwinkel, defined by many German sixteenth-century local church orders and liturgies, and similar national church orders and liturgies in Lutheran Sweden and Denmark (the Dual Monarchies Sweden-Finland until 1809, and Denmark-Norway until 1814) which is the chief subject of this book. It survived the rise of modern economies after 1870, the First World War, and constitutional and social reorganization in the interwar period, only to be destroyed by German racial dictatorship, and by the course of a brutish Second World War at the end of which a displacement of parishioners on a colossal scale took place. Germany's Reformation churchscape and its iconography is no longer so easy to see today, despite the recent opening- up of the heartland, Saxony and Thuringia, and central and eastern Europe. So viii PREFACE many churches and parishes have been destroyed, and so much meaningful religious ritual has become redundant in our twentieth century. Who today understands the liturgical and social significance in Lutheran parishes of the two lengthy series of oil portraits hanging side by side in the nave of Stralsund's St Nicholas: the Pastores loci in cassocks wearing white ruffs, and, also in holy orders, the cantors in cassocks wearing white neckbands? ‘Deus praedicavit evangelium etiam per musicam’. It takes many pages to reach the semblance of modern times. During the writing of them there has been a constant sense of walking Tholuck's path. In order to understand why the Enlightenment (after c.1770) seemed to have such a destructive effect on the Lutheran church in his Puseyite times, Tholuck spent too much time, as a warm-hearted and pious Lutheran, on the bad old ‘Orthodox’ (meaning doctrinaire and statutory) Lutheran church in the period of consolidation (c.1550–1700) he so disliked, producing books—elegantly written and still very informative—which only took the story to 1750. But one can argue that Tholuck's slow progress was really governed by the structure and the ethos of Reformation church order which; as customary order, was more influential in shaping the Lutheran church of his generation than were the convenient keywords ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Pietism’, and ‘Enlightenment’. The sources for this book warn the reader not to have too high an expectation of theology or politics as forces changing average Protestant churchmanship. Memory, a sense of belonging to the home parish, habit—also in the Reformed landscapes of western and southern Germany, and in the West and East Prussias as they were known after the first Polish partition in 1772—seem always to have proven stronger than political intervention or enlightenment. Frederick the Great and his like passed one church statute after another to little avail. If there was a saying which expressed a common awareness amongst Protestant senior and parish clergy in the age of Enlightenment that to enlighten was to take a long, dimly lit walk uphill (use of the verb was usually more frequent than that of the noun), it was the translation—‘Starke Wahrheiten vor schwachen Augen zu verbergen, ist wahre Menschenliebe und Gütigkeit’—by Moses Mendelssohn of ‘'Tis real Humanity and Kindness, to hide strong Truths from tender Eyes’, uttered in Sensus Communis: An PREFACE ix Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709) by the Anglican third earl of Shaftesbury: the author much loved by the enlightened German and Scandinavian Lutheran clergy generation represented by his translator, Spalding. His sentiments were: be not too zealous with the truth; learn to tolerate ingrained prejudice, credulity, habit; only so much can be done: be humane. Mendelssohn thought it good, too, for enlightened Berliners to read the Psalms which he translated from the original Hebrew and published in 1783 with this purpose in mind. We should remain very sceptical about an apologetics fashioned after 1870 to cope with modern crisis, meaning the effect of the secular city and Socialism on parishioners and churchgoing, by clergy and academic theologians confronted for the first time by more reliable statistical evidence. Visitation records and pastoral notes in the period covered by this book show that churchmanship as a voluntary act—the obligatory home parish enforcing use of its rites, attendance, and fees disappeared first after c.1860 when home parish fees for baptism, marriage, and burial, and residence requirements were abolished by state legislation in the national interest of better economic and labour organization—was never very good in country and town parishes. And yet a Protestant religious ethos, consisting of Lutheran and Reformed family prayers, hymn singing, ethical conduct taught by catechisms, and customary churchmanship in Reformation parishes, continued to shape the home and a local identity, despite modern migration patterns designed by a new capitalist economy. There is change too. Reformation church order, notably the liturgy in church, and prayer at home, developed gradually from a complex language and orthography. When this book begins, both still consisted of clerical Latin (the Classical languages and a little Hebrew were essential for appointment to a clergy living and preferment), Luther's robust and vivid soteriology, the Calvinist and Zwinglian vernacular of personal ethical conduct and predestination, and a division between an upper-class ‘high’ (often foreign) language, and parish dialect. A century later, a national ‘high’ language carrying less theological weight had appeared; one which was spread by the utilitarian statutory prose of central and local government, by its new schooling, and to some extent by the simpler prose of cheaply printed New Testaments and devotional books used by Protestant and Catholic lay awakenings. Church x PREFACE music supporting the liturgy changed accordingly. Nevertheless, clerical Latin was pushed aside only after c.1850. What cannot be recaptured by a historian is the essential living, developing nature of a ministry using the spoken word, song, and human touch in its liturgy of worship, its homiletics, and its pastoral care. Ink and print tell us very little about what this was like. It is certainly not my intention to convey the impression of a Protestant museum. Meaning is also often lost in translation. I have not always been easy on the English-speaking reader, though I have kept Finnish and Estonian to a minimum (these languages are so different). If the Crichtons, Murrays, and Spaldings were able to speak these languages fluently in an age where schooling was abysmal by modern standards, there is no reason why an English-speaking reader today should not reflect a little on what remains untranslated.