Blog

Whimsical Haiku.
Held close to the heart,
as if life depends on it,
crystal drops of hope.

Every 6 weeks or so I write a short Saturday Sermon for the Press and Journal, which is the paper that covers news from Aberdeen to Inverness. They are very specific about the word count – 185 words! Here's the one that was published on Saturday.

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I know, it’s summer. Or supposed to be. As I write, the haar has clothed the world outside in a coating of lalique grey. Mizzle, a mixture of mist and drizzle, has distilled into crystal jewels set on newly opened roses in the front garden.

When Jesus said God “sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous” he meant quite simply everyone caught in the rain gets wet. The indiscriminate love of God falls on human heads and hearts in the abundance of rain, every drop of it a touch of grace.

Mizzle is refined rain! Gazillions of droplets coalesce into diamonds of life giving water, falling gently upon God’s creation. Weather words can sometimes sum up our inner climate. Jesus knew that.

Take the word ‘seep’, which describes what haar shrouded mizzle does. The love of God, falling like refined rain, seeps through the cracks of our defences to soak and soften hearts hard-packed by over-busy and undernourished lives. Walking in the rain without an umbrella could become a parable of enacted prayer, lifting our faces to God whose love refreshes. Everyone caught in the rain gets wet!

Between the Swastika and the Sickle. The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer. James R Edwards, (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2019)

As a young PhD student in 1974, James Edwards was consulting a commentary on the Gospel of Mark published in 1937, written by the German New Testament scholar, Ernst Lohmeyer. The Foreword to the 1951 second edition written by one of Lohmeyer’s research assistants contained the intriguing comment that Lohmeyer had “been carried off by a higher power to a fate yet unresolved.” This led Edwards to begin a decades long detective hunt, as he pursued the truth about what happened to Lohmeyer. Why had nothing been heard of him after his arrest by the Russian occupying forces in 1946?

In 1979,  during a visit to East Germany to meet with Christians, Edwards tells of his embarrassment and shock at the reaction of those at the meeting when he asked about the fate of Ernst Lohmeyer. The meeting immediately closed down, the atmosphere became charged, and Edwards was taken for a long walk.  It was explained that the very mention of Lohmeyer’s name could incriminate and endanger those who were at the meeting, living as they did in a State controlled by a paranoid intelligence service, pervasive surveillance, and a web of unknown informers.

Over the years Edwards continued to visit East Germany to find answers to the unresolved fate of Lohmeyer. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was able to have many open conversations with Lohmeyer’s daughter Gudrun, and others who knew Lohmeyer at Greifswald University. He also gained access to many previously secret files and a vast collection of Lohmeyer’s correspondence with his wife (sometimes several per week over decades). Utilising all this primary material, and his full grasp of the range and depth of Lohmeyer’s publications and academic contributions, Edwards has produced a quite remarkable book, and one which required to be written – for several reasons.

First, Ernst Lohmeyer was never other than an opponent of National Socialism and Nazi ideology. In preaching, academic scholarship, social and administrative responsibilities he called out the ideological scholarship in theology and biblical studies produced by highly respected scholars in the service of Nazi views. In particular it was Lohmeyer, almost alone in German New Testament academic scholarship who insisted that the Christian faith has deep, essential and natural rootedness in the Jewish faith. It is not possible to be a Christian and also be antisemitic he argued.

One of the leading Nazi sympathisers was Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. For decades this multi volume Dictionary was one of the most influential scholarly resources in New Testament study, its production was in process throughout the five middle decades of the 20^th Century, and Kittel edited the first 5 volumes. Kittel’s book, The Jewish Question, published in 1933 as Hitler came to power, is an unflinching attempt to justify antisemitism to German intellectual culture, including the Church. It represents blatant skewing of biblical studies and theology to support Nazi anti-Jewish ideology, and in its echoing of Nazi philosophy and social norms, it demonised Jews as decadent, dangerous and, as aliens, requiring a social solution. It is a chilling piece of academic distortion in the interests of an aberrant political ideology. Alongside such anti-Semitic sentiments, and Kittel’s unabashed approval of depriving Jews of human rights, property rights and residency rights, the very different and defiant words of Ernst Lohmeyer, written to Martin Buber are from a different theological and moral world: “The Christian faith is Christian only insofar as it bears the Jewish faith in its heart…” Edwards exposes this ideological conflict in a central chapter which well illustrates the looming shadows and encroaching darkness in 1930’s Germany. The wise courage and intellectual clarity of Lohmeyer’s position was morally charged and resourced from a mind resonant with values quite counter to the Nazi vision of a racially purified volk.

A second reason this book needed writing was to rehabilitate Lohmeyer as a man of integrity, courage, intelligence and high citizenship. There are tensions and ambiguities in a life lived in Germany before and during World War II. Lohmeyer had fought in World War 1, he then developed his academic career as a major NT scholar, was conscripted in his late 40’s and served on the Russian front during the second World War. He returned a broken man to Griefswald, and recovered a sense of purpose as President elect of the University in 1945. But in 1946 was arrested, imprisoned, and soon after disappeared. No one knew definitively of his fate till after 1989 when various files became available following the fall of communist control of Eastern Europe.

The opportunity to right a great wrong opened up. Edwards worked with Lohmeyer’s family to uncover the truth and to provide the evidence which eventually exonerated Lohmeyer and restored to him the honour and appreciation due to a man who stood against evil and defended truth against those who wanted to create their own truth and weaponise it. Edwards has written a clear, evidenced account of a man who made decisions on moral grounds, and whose very humanity and compassion to his country's enemies constituted some of the evidence against him. The book climaxes with the moving story of Lohmeyer’s posthumous Inauguration as President of Greifswald University in 1996. This was a just recognition of an honour delayed by systemic injustice, and a public honouring of a man whose very existence a paranoid state tried to erase from history.

A third reason for this book is to do due honour to a scholar who, had he lived, could well have rivalled Bultmann in influence over NT studies (with whom he had serious arguments about the nature of the Gospels). Further, in ways requiring at least equal courage, integrity and spiritual maturity, Lohmeyer resisted Hitler, Nazi ideology and anti-Jewish policies, at least as much as Bonhoeffer. Reading Edwards account of Lohmeyer, it is clear that this was a man of immense moral stature and intellectual power, whose faithfulness to Christ led him into direct conflict with the powers that destroyed him. Bonhoeffer and Niemoller tend to be the celebrated examples of Christian resistance to Hitler – but the quiet integrity and theological faithfulness of Lohmeyer, in sermons and publications, ran like an eroding undercurrent against the ultimately transient foundations of Nazism.

My own interest in the history of New Testament interpretation means I was always going to read this book; and it is a fine book. It is hard to categorise it. Here is a biography, written by someone who has lived with the subject’s academic corpus, voluminous correspondence, multiple conversations with family and near associates of Lohmeyer, and who is himself a noted American NT scholar. The result is a narrative that is persuasive, deeply informed, sympathetic but not uncritical, resulting in a portrait of a man and the worlds he inhabited at home, in academy, in political upheaval and as one incapable of mere expediency in matters of the mind and soul.

Here also is history as judicial review. Edwards helped recover the honour of a good man, and his family; he has gone a long way to filling that troubling lacuna in the unresolved fate of a scholar whose disappearance and execution is one further tragic consequence of state power exercised in the interests of state security against its own people; it’s called tyranny. The account of Nazi Germany prewar, and the infiltration of universities and the subverting of moral intelligence are not irrelevant in a world where moral intelligence is again suspect and populism founded on making citizens afraid of those who are different is shouting its poison again.

This book is a salutary human story of perseverance in the seeking of justice and the rehabilitation of one who was judicially murdered for political reasons. The sections of the book detailing how the buried truth was uncovered are sobering in their descriptions of the lengths an oppressive state will go to eliminate those who think independently, and to silence those whose moral values have decisive and consistent purchase on their behaviour. In a brilliant comment Edwards notes, Lohmeyer lived out “what it means to be a moral human being in a world in which morality and humanity had almost ceased to exist.” (259)

Amongst the treasured documents of the Lohmeyer archive is the last long letter he wrote to his wife Melie, from Cell 19. Its contents are profoundly moving as he reviews his life, his driven ambition and academic obsessiveness, his failures in his deepest relationship of love, and the moral ambiguities and defeats of being a Wehrmacht Officer with power of life and death in occupied zones. Edwards shows great sensitivity and insight as a biographer handling the fragile testimony of a man at his most vulnerable. This final chapter is wonderfully well written, and invites the reader to temper judgement with compassion for a man whose inner struggles were made the more anguished by his own conscience and the moral impossibilities of being a Christian in charge of a military unit facing its own obliteration. I have seldom read a more knowing exposition of how redemption arises from the gift of suffering, and how all true loves are regenerated when acknowledged failure encounters forgiving grace. Lohmeyer, then, was a man of granite intellectual and moral integrity.  Not perfect, but good in the most meaningful ways that word can be used of a human being.

Here finally then, is a book that is both lucid and moving, composed by someone who cares about the subject, and provides an appreciative and critical account of a life lived as well as it could be. Lohmeyer lived in a world still not so far away that we should become complacent or unguarded about the consequences for peoples and communities, when unchecked populism is impatient with a moral commitment to the common good. As Edwards comments, “Lohmeyer refused to be infatuated with fashionable falsehoods that prey on all intellectual disciplines.” The moral vigilance and ethical courage of Lohmeyer are important light switches in an overshadowed world.

"when our economic distress is fraught by ethical failure…" 

No, not the Guardian, and not the Telegraph – actually a commentary on Genesis reflecting on greed and self interest as the primary and promoted driver of a society. 

In such a society citizens then choose to give power to those who best demonstrate a capacity to satisfy our greed and selfishness without thought for others.

It cannot end well when economic values trump ethical values, and worth is measured by human acquisitiveness rather than human flourishing. 

And it cannot end well when the moral character, trustworthiness and ethical values of two Prime Ministerial candidates are deemed irrelevant so long as " We get what I want".

The Bible has a lot to say about hubris, power without moral accountability, leadership evacuated of integrity, and economics with neither ethics nor compassion.

Over the years I have had a close interest in the history of Christianity in Germany over the past two centuries. From the Enlightenment onward some of the most impressive and durable progress in several areas of intellectual scholarship was made in German universities. In areas of philosophy, theology and biblical studies, Germany led the field in critical scholarship, giving us some of the greatest names within these disciplines.

The first half of the 20th century has a star studded cast of names such as Harnack,  Bultmann, Dibelius, Bonhoeffer, names now pervasively present in theological and biblical scholarship a century and more later. One name almost entirely obscured by history is Ernst Lohmeyer. I have just bought the new theological biography of Lohmeyer, who for some time has been one of my heroes of whom I knew too little.

Along with other brave souls, Lohmeyer risked his life as a vocal and persistent critic of Nazi ideology, in particular the attempts to validate anti-semitism from the Bible. Removed from his post, banned from teaching, called up to the German army in 1943, and following the fall of Germany, taken as a prisoner of war by Russia, Lohmeyer virtually disappears. For long years no one knew if he was alive or dead. Until 1995. We now know he was executed by the Russians, but the full story has never been researched and told, until now. 

Once I've read J R Edwards' account of Lohmeyers life and fate, I'll post a review here. Meantime there is a brief introduction by Edwards  which you can read in Christianity Today here.

By the way, the title of this article is, I think, misleading and does justice to neither Lohmeyer nor Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a scholarly pastor whose story is now firmly embedded in post-war theology and German consciousness. Bonhoeffer's role in underground theological education, aiding the resistance, and his martyrdom in April 1945 has created an entire industry of scholarship, produced an ongoing theological ferment, and has left a legacy of division between those who see him as martyr, as theological revolutionary, and as one whose actions and involvement in an assassination attempt on Hitler goes against the very core of his own teaching in his seminal books, Discipleship and Ethics.

Lohmeyer, on the other hand was a major voice in the academy as an already established scholar of international stature, whose silencing and subsequent murder have remained obscure and politically awkward, and therefore his name, let alone his writings, have gone largely unpublicised. I look forward to having many of my own questions answered, and discovering much more of the truth about a man whose courage and integrity should not be forgotten. Lohmeyer was a German citizen, academic and soldier whose story, "like many who resisted Nazi and Communist repression, points toward Christ."  

Today at the Community Cafe one of our regulars, a woman with significant learning disabilities, stood up, tapped the table and requested silence. She then spoke of the very recent death of her aunt Margaret, "who loved me and I loved her." And she told us she was now going to say a prayer for her Aunt.

Rarely have I listened to a prayer that was more direct, intimate, real and entirely innocent of the need to impress. In loud, clear and deeply felt words she told God: she was glad her aunt was now with God and would know how much she had been loved; she thanked God for opening the gates to welcome her aunt home because she was special; and she thanked God, and her aunt, for looking out for her and looking after her up to now, and knew that would still be true because God loves everybody all the time; then she asked God's blessing on us all finishing with an emphatic Amen.

This was a moment of pure spiritual connection and of human communion born out of trusted friendships. People who usually come to talk about the usual stuff, were co-opted into the life and love, the grief and prayers of someone brave enough to speak her heart, and trust those who heard her speak it. We were ministered to by someone wise enough to know when to pray, and when to ask for that prayer to be held in the hearts of her friends.

This is why we do what we do – thank God.

The other day, a moment of encounter in a garden, cream roses floating in sunlight above a carpet of lavender, and the surprise discovery that the ache of joy in beauty has a close affinity to grief. 

That wondering gaze on beauty unlocks an unnamed yearning which gathers in the deep place we call the soul, and to my surprise, gently it takes on a name, and becomes a key that releases powerful memories, of Aileen. 

In grieving, loss is experienced as persistent longing, grief is made sharper by gratitude, and love needs only the slightest reason to remember – and beauty is more than enough reason. 

So as we love those we love and have lost, we remember what was beautiful, we hold on to what brought joy; and we nourish within us what fuels gratitude that will be lifelong, soul deep, and will always be felt as a wound that tells the story of a life. And that wound will not heal, despite all the reassurances it will, because love will not be denied the familiar ache that comes from a felt absence.

Exporting the Rapture. John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism, Donald Harman Akenson. (Oxford: 2019) 504 pages.

There are a number of very fine histories of the Plymouth Brethren and the several offshoots in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. The classic is by Roy Coad, but more recently and with considerably more historical documentation, there are the volumes by Neil Dickson (Scotland) and Tim Grass (UK and beyond).

This volume is different. It is a careful, detailed, and unsparing account of the role played by J N Darby in the origins and formation of the Brethren movement. Outside of brethren circles Darby is less well known; inside the movement he was a giant whose shadow loomed over the Brethren movement for 60 years, and continues to influence large swathes of Christian fundamentalism. In particular, this book traces the emergence of the Exclusive Brethren following the split of the Plymouth Brethren  in the 1840’s, and it details the decisive role of Darby in the creation and consolidation of the Exclusive Brethren.

Akenson’s main contention is that the Exclusive Brethren meet the criteria for a cult. A charismatic leader of magnetic personality; backed by authoritarian, tightly organised systems of oversight, discipline, and privileges of belonging; over-againstness as a way of relating to surrounding culture; a set of doctrines, beliefs and practices that give adherents identity and group solidarity; and in the case of a Christian cult, a particular and peculiar hermeneutic approach to the Bible.

This book is a gripping read. It is not a biography of Darby. It is a detailed critical narrative of the emergence of the Exclusive brethren under Darby, and near the end, a brief account of how the movement disintegrated in Darby’s later years and following his death. Within the constraining boundaries of the Exclusives, Darby operated as an organisational genius, with at times deep pastoral purpose, and at other times ruthless excision of any opposition, real or perceived. The narrative of events leading to the split of 1847/8, makes harrowing reading. Darby was a master tactician, a skilled manipulator, a master of argumentative rhetoric and damaging insinuation, but also a catalyst for those who sought comfort, identity and spiritual security within a tightly controlled community.

The demolition of Benjamin Wills Newton, his character, status and social networks in the 1840’s which led to the split, and the breaking of Edward Cronin in 1880, the oldest surviving member of the originating Assembly, by excluding him from fellowship for life and ruining his economic and social capital as a doctor, read like case studies in post-graduate Machiavellian outmanoeuvring. These narratives about the use and abuse of power, as told by Akenson, are a character study in ecclesial realpolitik underpinned by adamantine spiritual self-confidence. Darby emerges from these two episodes as one whose ways of treating those he opposed contradicted the more obvious virtues expected of those who believed their way of being embodied as “the (only) church of God.”

Following his death, Darby’s theological legacy would make enormous in inroads in North America, so that “premillennial dispensationalism” would develop in the 20^th Century to become one of the most popular and powerful clusters of theological ideas amongst millions of evangelicals. Ideas such as the rapture, the millennial reign, a two stage Second Coming of Jesus, the separation of Israel and Church into two dispensational realities, were peculiar aberrations from all previous expressions of the Christian eschatological tradition. Decisive in that process, was the influence over 60 years of JND, the founder, theological arbiter and unassailable authority within the movement during his lifetime.

This is a big book. It covers the origins of the Brethren, the start of Faith Missions, the developing of a peculiar biblical hermeneutic on prophecy and the end times, the formation of tight knit, radically committed separatist Assemblies, and the evolution of a cult centred on the teaching, influence and sheer force of personality that was J N Darby. There are kinder, more sympathetic even admiring accounts of Darby’s life; but they too have to find ways of explaining let alone justifying, the sometimes deplorable methods by which Darby established, maintained and propagated the true and only Church of God on earth.

In the novel Gilead, a grandfather writes long letters to his grandson. He is a very old pastor, and has learned stuff that it’s important to know, and important for his grandson to learn. Here’s one of the bottom line lessons of a good life:

“This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation.”

Jesus taught some astonishing things. Like this. “Forasmuch as you did it for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it for me.” Whether food for the hungry, company for the lonely, clothes and dignity for the poor, care and protection for the vulnerable – in each encounter with others, “What is the Lord asking of me, here, now?” Answer; treat this stranger the way you would treat Jesus.

The transience of flowers,

the ebb and flow of the sea,

the fluidity of a living community,

the changing context of the church;

faith, then, is embracing the transience,

accepting the ebb and flow,

adjusting to the fluidity,

and adapting to the changes

of a life lived seeking to follow faithfully after Christ.