Perhaps the most powerful speech (not sermon) given within the Confessing Church in Germany between 1933 and 1945:
Before the Storm (The Hour of Apostasy, 1937)
By Professor D. Hans Joachim Iwand, Bloestau near Kuggen
After the Reich Church Committee (Reichskirchenausschuss) under the leadership of Wilhelm Zoellner submitted its resignation to Reich Church Minister Hanns Kerrl on February 12, 1937, Adolf Hitler ordered the holding of elections to a constituent General Synod of the German Protestant Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) on February 15. In view of the experiences with the church elections of 1933, there were considerable reservations in the Confessing Church about participating in the elections. For this reason, the East Prussian Brotherhood Council (Bruderrat) invited 80 pastors to the parish hall of the Burgkirche in Koenigsberg on April 22, 1937, to prepare them for the education in the parishes. As head of the Confessing Church’s illegal preachers‘ seminar in Bloestau (East Prussia), Iwand gave the following speech entitled „The Hour of Apostasy“. A first publication under this title was prevented by the Gestapo immediately after printing by confiscation. A second printing was carried out under a new title by the book printer Julius Moessinger, Durlach (Baden), who was associated with the Confessing Church. On May 24, 1937, Iwand was expelled from East Prussia by the Gestapo. On June 23, he was arrested at a meeting of the Reich Brotherhood Council (Reichsbruderrat) in Berlin and imprisoned for a week in the Gestapo prison. The church elections were postponed several times by the state and finally canceled in November 1937 due to fears of new unrest within the church and a call for a boycott.
Dear brothers!
The hour in which we are gathered here bears a certain resemblance to the moment that lies between the grueling barrage and the subsequent assault. An eerie uncertainty as to when and in what form the enemy’s advance will take weighs heavily on everyone. The Protestant church people of Germany are called to an election, but the church itself knows neither the date nor the order in which the election is to take place. It is a characteristic of our church political situation that the church itself has no right of co-determination. In his letter to the Bishop of Hanover, Reich Church Minister Kerrl expressly points out that the election is in the hands of the people of the Church, not the Church itself. Thus we know only one thing, that the attack is imminent which is finally to bring about the goal of years of struggle, the collapse of the center of resistance in the Protestant Church, and we know that this center of resistance, at any rate in the opinion of the sharp-sighted opponent, lies nowhere else but with the confessing Church.
No one knows and can say now whether we will succeed in holding our positions; no one can foresee the depth to which the enemy has deployed; no one knows by what means the Church will be attacked and weakened; no one can predict how far back the force of the blow will throw us. All of this is left to conjecture, and it seems useless to me to arouse sentiments here with false hopes and deceptive figures that can all too easily turn into their opposite. For although God has many ways and means to help us, we should be careful not to rely on people and „make mere flesh their strength“ (Jeremiah 17:5).
Thus, in this sea of uncertainties, only one thing remains that is certain: the adversary should not believe that he is advancing into an empty field. There is a host of people standing over him against who are held to resist. Held, held together and upheld by the one under whose word and command they have come. This is precisely what gives the battle into which we are thrust such a strange, even more, a wonderful face. For here it is not only men against men and opinions against opinions, but here some stand with, others against God, and therefore one thing applies to this dispute: that we ourselves dare to reckon with God. The mystery of the adversary lies in what Luther called „great power and much cunning“, and it may well be that this gets us a little further in worldly terms, but the mystery that reigns over the Church is infinitely deeper, so deep that we ourselves can only ever grasp it in retrospect with praise and thanksgiving, with shame and amazement. For here is one on the scene – „with his Spirit and gifts“ – who is unassailable for the world, who stands as the invisible one in the midst of the visible church, and who provides his own with the armor that enables them to rightly knight (Ephesians 6:10 ff.; 2 Corinthians 10:4). „We have put on Christ“ (Galatians 3:27) – this is the confession of those whom God sends into this battle. This is the secret of resistance, against which all attacks by the enemy have broken and will break again and again.
That is why our fathers sang in the difficult times of the Thirty Years‘ War: „You are the hero who can subdue them.“ That is why the Lord himself instructed his own in the hour when he stepped back into invisibility (John 14:19): „Take courage: I have conquered the world!“ (John 16:33). Based on this certainty, Christians have repeatedly emphasized him, his name and his work in the most difficult times of temptation and tribulation, even though the battle seems to have become ever harder, the enemy ever fiercer and the situation of the Church ever more hopeless; they had learned that in times when the waves are breaking over the ship, we must call on the Lord (Luke 8:24). There „we must have a watchman Christ“ (Luther). They struggled for this „awakening“. To call upon him in need means to confess him.
Confession is therefore the weapon given by God with which the Church confronts the attack of the world (Matthew 10:32). This is how the apostles first confessed Christ before the world and its rulers and continue to do so today. Known for who he is. Known as the Holy Spirit taught them (John 15:26; 14:26). They proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth as their Lord and the Savior of the world. That is why the confessions of the apostles, and likewise the confessions of the Reformers, are nothing other than the declaration of who and what Jesus Christ is, born of struggle. They confront the pagan world with the word of truth and, precisely in this frontal position, testify to the great mystery that has been announced: Jesus is the Lord (Philippians 2:11), he is the Lamb who bears the sin of the world (John 1:29; Revelation 19:9), he is the only begotten Son, he is the Word that became flesh (John 1:14), he is the Judge of the world who will come at the end of days, then all will see him, even those who have pierced him (Revelation 1:7). Jesus Christ is the only one in whom man hears, finds, has and keeps God as his God (Matthew 17:5; Romans 8:31). He is grace (Romans 3:25) and peace (Ephesians 2:14; Romans 5:1), He is the Reconciler (2 Corinthians 5:19; 1 Corinthians 1:30) and the Savior (1 John 4:14).
We must go a step further here and recognize that hardship and temptation repeatedly help the church to disregard everything else and to base its hope solely on the power and truth that lies in this confession. Oppressed by the world, the church appeals to the „word of truth“ (Ephesians 1:13; 1 John 4:6; 1 Timothy 3:15-16), and asks God: „Awaken dead Christendom from the sleep of security“. What a contradictio in se when clever church politicians then try to reconcile the two, the revival of Christianity and the preservation of security! Here lies the either/or for the confessing church, because the more certainties are taken away, the more credible and miraculous the church’s confession becomes. God’s power begins to become mighty in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
This, then, is the rule to which we must adhere if we really want to understand God’s guidance, that God’s power and the church’s powerlessness are one in the same, that our defeats open the way for God, that we should therefore have tribulation but not be afraid, that we will be oppressed but not perish, that if we put on Christ we will put on his death and his life (2 Corinthians 4:8-10), that we will always appear to be defeated, but for this very reason we will experience that God has his own wonderful ways of saving his cause, that we will always appear to be defeated, but for this very reason we will learn that God has His own wonderful ways of saving His cause, that God’s successes will occur among the failures of His messengers, and that the victory of the gospel does not coincide with the triumph of those who proclaim it. On the contrary: „The world will rejoice, but you will be sad“ – says the Lord to his disciples – „but,“ and this „but“ stands just as much over the joy of the world as over the sadness of the Church, „your sadness shall be turned into joy“ (John 16:20).
The army of Jesus Christ should „write this in their hearts“ so that they do not look at their own situation with the eyes of the enemy, so that they do not judge their position like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13), but so that we look at what the Lord is doing, „as the eyes of servants look at the hands of their masters“ (Psalm 123:2). We must never believe what the world tries to persuade us about our situation, we must plug our ears when the enemy’s parliamentarian comes into the camp to ask us to surrender and to make us realize the hopelessness of our situation, because the enemy does not know the secret of the Church. Yes, we don’t know it ourselves. We only know that he is with us whose name is called Wonderful, Counselor, Might, Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:5). And precisely because no one can measure his counsel and his power (1 Corinthians 1:19), our situation is beyond all, but really all, hostile as well as friendly judgment (1 Corinthians 2:15). The Church must know this. For it remains master of the situation in which it finds itself only as long as it does not allow itself to be dissuaded by any concern or calculation from freely confessing its Lord Jesus Christ and allowing its situation to be shaped by this confession. If she is therefore tolerated, she lives to the Lord; if she is therefore persecuted, she dies to the Lord, so that she is then always the same in good and bad days: the handmaid faithful to her Lord. The promise of her invincibility applies to this church and to her alone (Matthew 16:18). Neither the world nor the prince of the world is a match for the one confessed by the Church. He has broken the chains of death (Revelation 1:18). Therefore, where the Spirit dwells, who testifies to him as the victor, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).
II.
But it would not be like the Lord, who commanded his disciples to be sober and watchful (Matthew 26:41; 1 Thessalonians 5:6; 1 Peter 5:8), if we were to close our eyes and wait for the things to come. That is why it always seems strange to me when people say: We are not afraid for the Church, but we are afraid for our people, because faith in the invincibility of the Church is faith and not fatalism. It is precisely because of this faith that there is a genuine and justified concern for the Church. Did not the Lord of the Church himself fear for his own, did he not pray for them and for them out of this fear? (John 17:9; Luke 22:32) Is this not precisely the difference between the good shepherd and the hireling, that the shepherd takes the danger threatening the flock so seriously that he stakes his life on it, while the hireling flees, i.e. departs from the flock in fear? It could be a sign of such a flight from responsibility when it is said today that the Church cannot be in danger because it is insurmountable. No, the invincibility of the Church is based precisely on the fact that the good shepherd laid down his life for the sheep (John 10:12). There is probably no word that would give more right and nobility to the concern for the church than this. For the cause of the church does not rest in a system of doctrines – the wolf is certainly not after dogmas – but it is about people who are threatened, who are threatened precisely in their faithfulness to God (Revelation 2:10), people who are lost if they fall away from the living God (Hebrews 3:12), people who are tempted to renounce the salvation that was once the content and reason for their lives (Hebrews 2:3; 6:6). Does not this concern about apostasy run through all the apostolic letters? (Galatians 3:1; 1 Corinthians 10:6 ff.; Hebrews 3:12.) Does it not affect the life and work of everyone who has ever had a name in the history of the Church? Therefore, if we do not fear for our congregations today, when else have pastors ever feared for the church? Are we not burdened to excess by this distress and anxiety, if otherwise we know the faith that works through love? (Galatians 5:6)
For the time in which we find ourselves and the time that lies ahead of us is characterized by a falling away from Christianity, the force and actual course of which cannot yet be measured. To be sober today means to see this. To be awake today means to resist it. Those who do not see what is happening today can be sure that it is not because they do not agree with us in our judgment of the times? It is not a matter of the head, but a matter of the heart. One must have a stony heart not to feel this distress. You have to make reality fit yourself in every possible and impossible way in order to justify this guilelessness. You have to want to be blind in order to be blind.
Admittedly, there are many pious speeches that ignore this reality. Some say: A reformation must come – and in this delusion that we must wait for a coming prophet, they abandon the responsibility that God has assigned to us today. Others say: A revival must take hold of the Church, it is the Church’s own fault that it has come to this. We have seen how D. Zoellner and his followers endeavored to transform the Confessing Church into such a revival movement – it almost broke up over this experiment! Still others – and these are the majority – say: you are mistaken, in truth what you call apostasy is the new life. Here at last is Christianity in action. Here is true and effective faith in God. It is precisely this thesis that is brought into people’s homes almost daily in black and white. It seeks recognition in everything that the eye sees and the ear hears. The kingdom of God – tangible, visible, perceptible in our midst! (Luke 17:21) Who would not know the attraction of these images and words! Who is so full that he could pass them by unchallenged? And yet – they are all just images and interpretations, „just as a hungry man dreams that he will eat, but when he wakes up, his soul is empty“! (Isaiah 29:8)
Only this illuminates the true danger of our situation. Not only are we in a time of apostasy, but, what is worse, time itself does not know this; on the contrary, it believes it is in the hour of an unparalleled religious renewal. Certainly, it too will wake up terribly once in a while. But there is a new one that does not lead to repentance (Hebrews 12:17; 2 Corinthians 7:10). For the time being, however, enough false prophets ensure that the dream continues to be dreamed (Jeremiah 23:28). For we can learn this from the Holy Scriptures: the apostasy of the people from the living God goes hand in hand with the appearance of false prophets who interpret the hunger dreams and substitute their visions for the Word of God (Jeremiah 23:22). Priests and elders gave the Jewish people the cue when it was time to bring the Lord of glory to the curse wood (John 19:7).
Only from this depth of diabolical seduction can we understand what Christ demands when he says: „Be sober! Watch! Pray, for apostasy has a double face, a factual and a spiritual face. Those who only fight against the facts will fight against it in vain. Those who are frightened by leaving the church are too late! It must be seen that apostasy finds its justification through a church and a prophethood that gives this event names that come from the sanctuary. The against the first commandment is covered by the sin against the second. The name of God is desecrated so that the difference between God and the idols is concealed. The secret of this magical metamorphosis lies in this intertwining. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Indeed, this reversal goes so far that the One who is the light of the world is placed in such an illumination that it almost seems as if he is in league with the powers of darkness. Therefore it is not enough for us to resist the apostasy; we must disenchant the spirit (Isaiah 3:20; Matthew 10:1), which calls this turning away from the living God by the name of godliness, which calls this fever, which to the knowledgeable is a sign of deadly disease, by the name of vitality, which calls this desolation of the sanctuary by the name of protection, cleansing of the temple and the establishment of true worship.
This is where we face the most difficult challenge. Not only must we resist evil, but we will also have to stand as those who are in league with evil (Matthew 10:25). We will not, as is usually the case, have the glory of having lived and worked for the good (Matthew 6:2; 23:5; 1 Corinthians 4:9.10). This hardship would be unbearable – after all, man believes what is often and loudly said – if we could not look up to him who did not shun this shame (Hebrews 12:2; 13:13), for this is how Christ himself stood in the world. He was crucified between two criminals. This is how the world sees him (Isaiah 53:9). Even today, the signs of the times indicate that the Church of Jesus Christ will once again have to stand where men once banished the Christ of God: in the midst of criminals. And yet his disciples were not ashamed of their Lord and testified to the glory of God’s covenant of grace precisely here (1 Corinthians 1:18). It is good for us if, like them, we nevertheless say: I am not ashamed of the gospel. That is what faith means.
III.
These two pieces belong together: confession and faith. Only where faith takes hold of God’s promise of grace in Jesus Christ crucified (Hebrews 4:16), where a person allows himself to be bound by the grace of God that makes the heart firm (Hebrews 13:9), will confession have the power that is unconquerable. Where faith has not first made a person certain of the righteousness that is valid before God, confession will remain a work of the lips, which he makes for his own glory but not for the glory of God (Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 7:21). Such a mouth will fall silent when confession no longer brings honor but shame (Matthew 26:74). And where confession no longer testifies that we are on the way to the same faith and knowledge of the Son of God (Ephesians 4:13), it will no longer edify the church, but will devastate it and give rise to rancor and empty contention (1 Corinthians 3:3). Confession is the element in which faith lives, for here it turns back to the one from whom it originated (2 Corinthians 4:13). Faith can only bear witness to itself in such a way that it makes the one from whom it comes and to whom it depends great and glorious (John 16:14). By confessing, the church points away from itself to its Lord and to the truth of God, which has been revealed in him for all the world. A confessing church – that is a church that opens the doors so that all may hear the call, all, good and bad, all who are invited. And yet the doors are open, even if those who reward the messenger with mockery and violence remain outside (Matthew 22).
IV.
In the language of the New Testament, confession means speaking together. It is the proclamation of the common truth, which is witnessed by all believers regardless of the particularity of their own way of life and church development. It is the slogan by which friend and foe can be recognized, which has therefore been demanded from the very beginning from everyone who desires admission to the castle of God (1 Corinthians 12:3). The battle is about this slogan. Today we have reached the point where we no longer wrestle over certain content-related statements of Christian faith as in earlier times, but today the demand is already that any such scrutiny should be avoided. In future, belonging to a certain people, influenced by Christianity in its history, should be sufficient to have the right of membership and co-determination in the Christian church (cf. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, chapter 3, The German national church). One is born into this church, not baptized, and one belongs to it thanks to the nobility of one’s ancestry, not thanks to the grace of God. Any inquiry that seeks to test the faith of the individual members of the church against the confession is considered pharisaical presumption and is perhorrized as dogmatism.
Only one dividing line applies: the nationality, which is understood as the order of creation. The basic features of the „German national church“ are taken from creation, no longer from God’s order of redemption. And since one no longer knows or wants to know anything about the fall of creation, Christ himself becomes a creature, the confession of the Son of God is dismissed as a ridiculous accessory and the world is set as eternal with all the values one would like to extract from it. We should know that in this framework, quite apart from anything else, the Church is impossible, because the Church „is, according to its purpose, the universal one against all inclination to national egoism. The attempt to make it subservient to this is an attack on its divine vocation“ (Martin Kaehler). It is precisely this attack that is in full swing; indeed, it has already largely succeeded. Under the distorted image of an internationalism that destroys peoples, the universal character of the Church is outlawed, and it seems to be forgotten that we as Christians and as peoples educated in the Church do not come from the Babylonian confusion of languages, but from Pentecost: from the day when the peoples learned to understand one another anew by listening to God’s Word.
We must realize that the confession of the „universal Christian church“ testifies that Jesus is the Son of Man (Matthew 16:27; 18:11; Acts 7:55). How else could we sing: „The eternal good is clothed in our poor flesh and blood?“ Or how else should our faith cling to the message that the Word became flesh? How should we approach the resurrection (Philippians 3:11) if Jesus, the antitype of Adam (Romans 5:14,15), the one in whose obedience the salvation of all men is determined (Romans 5:19), should no longer stand above the nations as a reminder and promise of a new world and a new humanity? (2 Corinthians 5:17; Revelation 21:1) If we hold on to the universality of the Church, it is about Christ, about the Son of Man and the „last man“ (1 Corinthians 15:45), about faith in the Holy Spirit, whom God has given us as a pledge for this new world of his (2 Corinthians 5:5).
That is why the Church of Jesus Christ must cease to be what its name guarantees if one were to proceed to replace the unifying and separating confession to the triune God with a confession to the spirit and the respective spiritual form of a nation. Such a church would be, to quote Kaehler once again, nothing other than „a department in the state mechanism of an absolute government, or a page in the building of democracy“. This is precisely why the struggle for the administration and order of the church is given its weight by this content, because by administration and order the other side understands the organizational expression of this content taken from the national religion. Therefore, the church order should be subject to the norm of the national order, and the administration, especially the management and financial authority, should lie with the state. It is strange that it took us so long to realize that the so-called questions of order are not questions of order at all, and that from that first attempt made in 1933 onwards, behind all organizational questions there was always only one goal: to give the church the character of a national church, i.e. a church that embraces all those born within the national borders, but which no longer claims to have anything else in common beyond the religious-political commitment to nationality.
In other words, it is believed that the actual state of the people has already reached this point of general and absolute indifference to the Christian faith, so that it is now only a matter of getting rid of the remnants of the former denominational churches so that the new religious life of the people can develop unhindered and according to its nature. The state sees itself as the liberator of all the „communities of conviction“ that have not been able to develop due to the oppression of the „old“ churches. It is likely that the coming election will be the beginning of the proclamation of the free people’s church, and that all that matters now is to gather as many votes as possible for this attempt in order to then provide them with churches for teaching purposes in accordance with the „size and importance“ (Rosenberg: myth!) of this movement on the basis of the percentages (!) won, and thus first create the „crystallization points“ from which the coming people’s church is to develop.
V.
In this attempt, we will for the first time also feel the organizational power of newly awakened paganism, a paganism that seeks to break the shackles of Christian morality and Christian doctrine in practice – because that means organizationally! – and sees itself as a mystery of redemption. And although everyone with insight knows that in this supposedly new belief in God the old, pale ghosts of the Enlightenment are making their way into our society – today they are drinking from the lifeblood of our people and are thus experiencing an uncanny and horrible revival. The very paganism that was said to be dead and believed to be dead lives more powerfully than ever in the midst of our Christian West; it feels itself to be the spiritual carrier of the newly awakened national life and is only able to see the empty shells in the remnants of Christian tradition, which must be removed carefully, not too soon, but in good time, so that the new can enter unhindered into the rights of the old. This paganism cannot be defeated with the weapon of enlightenment, the enlightened mind. On the contrary, the Enlightenment is the mother soil from which it emerged. The confrontation with this paganism, which has passed through the Christian epoch but is still alive and unbroken, is the topic we have been given. What is essential about it is that it identifies itself through miracles (Matthew 24:24; 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12). But the miracle of all miracles is his own power and resurrection. The wound that seemed to herald his downfall has been healed (Revelation 13). The new paganism presents itself as an image of health, strength and abundance. This fact brings people all over the earth to their knees before it. The worshippers of the God who is spirit are confronted with the worshippers of the beast, the service of the living God with the cult of the vital life force that carries and moves natural existence.
Holy Scripture has never left us in the dark about the fact that the anti-Christian paganism that will appear at the end of days has a different face to the paganism that Christianity encountered in the fullness of time (Mark 13:21, 22; Daniel 11:30 ff.). For while at that time open doors let in the messengers of the gospel, at the end of days paganism, which has passed through Christianity, bars its doors so as not to let in the one who is coming. It is the last effort of the powers that be, who know that the coming of the Lord means the end of their reign, and who therefore – without wanting to – give a sign to the suffering and struggling church: The Lord is near.
The times of apostasy are, whatever appearances may say to the contrary, under the sign of Advent, and whoever understands them correctly will heed the admonition: „But when these things begin to come to pass, then look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draweth nigh“ (Luke 21:28).
The sign of the cross becomes again what it was in the beginning, an offense to the whole world (Luke 2:34; Matthew 21:42; 1 Corinthians 1:23), which displays its glory, power and eternity in its own new signs (Revelation 13:13 ff.; 16:14). The boundaries between time and eternity are blurred (1 Corinthians 15:50). Earthly life thus loses its objectivity and sobriety, for sin and death now seem to have been abolished (2 Timothy 2:18). The question of the stomach – that is the biblical term (Romans 14:17; Matthew 4:3) for what we call socialism today – becomes a question of faith, with the result that the question of faith also becomes a question of the stomach (John 6:26, 27). Everything that our Lord Jesus Christ saw and suffered in his walk through the world as temptation and seduction from the path shown to him (Matthew 4:1-11; 16:22, 23; 26:39 and others) is now experienced by his church as threatening abysses and massive obstacles that seem to block all progress in the course of Christianity and cause painful losses to the existence of the church. Blessed are we if we know that we do not first have to pave the way to the goal, but that the key lies in discipleship (Matthew 4:19; John 8:12; 10:4; Hebrews 6:19, 20), which keeps the church from falling (1 Corinthians 10) just as it keeps it from growing weary (2 Corinthians 4:1; Hebrews 3:12-14).
NAMENSgedächtnis 