Hermann Sasse: Criticism of Racial Ideology

Hermann Sasse (1895–1976) studied Protestant theology at the university in Berlin where he was influenced by the prominent exponents of liberal theology Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). His service in World War I induced him to study Luther intensively as well as to be receptive to emerging dialectical theology for a time.

Sasse received his first call to Templin in 1920; he served in Oranienburg from 1921 to 1928. While serving a parish, he earned his doctorate in theology and spent an academic year abroad in the USA in 1925-26. He attended the World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927. In addition to his ecumenical involvement, in which the concept of the confession played a major role, Sasse continued pursuing plans to switch to academia and earned his Habilitation degree in New Testament studies from the university in Berlin.

Sasse became the pastor of St. Maria in Berlin in 1928. In addition to this office, Sasse took on other duties: He worked as a social pastor and published the “Kirchliche Jahrbuch” from 1931 to 1934. In 1932, he published an extremely provocative examination of the NSDAP’s platform entitled Die Kirche und die politischen Mächte der Zeit (The Church and the Political Powers of the Day), which also sharply criticized the church’s and theology’s passiveness toward the conflation of religion and politics. He felt that article 24 of the NSDAP’s party platform made any discussion with a church impossible and surpassed all of Alfred Rosenberg’s (1893–1946) blasphemies and messianic Führer worship (65). Sasse stressed that Christian faith was the opposite of every natural and secular morality and the intentional and constant libel of the so-called Germanic sense of propriety and morality established in the party platform and in a future Nazi state was thus intolerable (66). It held that Jesus, champion of a doctrine overthrowing all morality, had been crucified by the Jews and thus simultaneously for the sake of the German nation and the Nordic race (ibid.).

Sasse had taught church history, history of dogma and confessional studies as an associate professor at the university in Erlangen since the summer semester of 1933. His theological position steadily continued evolving into entrenched Lutheran confessionalism until he doubted the confessional loyalty of his colleagues in Erlangen. This position made him become a staunch opponent of the German Christians and Nazi church policy. He publicly characterized the attempt to forcibly incorporate the Bavarian regional church in the Reich Church in the fall of 1934 as a steamroller rolling over the most ecclesiastical of the Protestant churches in Germany, over those who most faithfully preserved the knowledge of what church is in the sense of the Lutheran confession (Junge Kirche 1934, p. 895).

Although Sasse had collaborated on preparing the Theological Declaration of Barmen, his strict Lutheranism was irreconcilable with the Confessing Church’s theology. Sasse disapproved of the statement passed at the confessional synod of Barmen itself since an interdenominational statement violated the confession. On the other hand, he looked favorably upon the Lutheran regional churches’ efforts to unite more closely.

Sasse was made full professor in February of 1946. The military government appointed him vice chancellor and had him submit reports on his fellow faculty members. In 1948, Sasse switched his membership to the Old Lutheran Church out of protest against the founding of Evangelical Church in Germany and the Bavarian regional church’s decision to join it. In the summer of 1949, he went to Immanuel Theological Seminary of the United Lutheran Church in North Adelaide, Australia where, he found a theological freedom he had missed in Erlangen since he longer felt the Lutherans’ confessional status was being preserved.

The Bavarian regional church dispatched so-called professional aids to its pastors during World War II. These brief texts – penned by members of the church government as well as prominent theologians and frequently stemming from lectures– were intended to inform pastors about current pastoral and academic issues.

While one of the main topics was how to deal with death, two diametrically opposed contributions on Christian-Jewish relations were disseminated in July and August of 1944. In July of 1944, pastors received an essay The Christian Understanding of the Old Testament by Gerhard von Rad (1901–1971), an Old Testament scholar at the university in Jena. This text was based on a lecture delivered to Bavarian pastors one year earlier, which was supposed to be made available to those who had not been in attendance. Von Rad emphasized the indissoluble bond of the Old and New Testaments and the anticipation of the Christian congregation in ancient Israel. He asserted that the rejection of the Old Testaments common at present made it impossible to understand the New Testaments.

In the following month – possibly as a tactical measure to demonstrate support of the regime following the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 – pastors were sent a lecture On the origins of Judaism held at the university in Vienna by Gerhard Kittel (1888–1948), a New Testament scholar at the university in Tübingen. It explained, among other things, that the emancipation and assimilation of the Jews amounted to the release of a demon would lead led to ruin.

In a letter of August 28, 1944 on the ecclesiastical and theological situation, Sasse protested to Regional Bishop Hans Meiser (1881-1956) against the regional church’s dissemination of this shoddy, inferior piece of work. Sasse described Kittel as a radical German Christian who, as an employee at the “Reich Institute for History of the New Germany”, was using the New Testament to aid and abet Nazi racial policy. He noted that Kittel’s observations were unworthy of discussion for Bavarian pastors, especially since the church’s complicity in certain events – probably meaning the persecution and extermination of Jews– was already great enough that it did not need to be spreading Kittel’s ideas as well.