{"id":13791,"date":"2019-09-19T05:32:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T09:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/euangelion\/?p=13791"},"modified":"2019-09-19T06:41:58","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T10:41:58","slug":"ernst-lohmeyer-between-the-swastika-and-the-sickle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/euangelion\/2019\/09\/ernst-lohmeyer-between-the-swastika-and-the-sickle\/","title":{"rendered":"Ernst Lohmeyer – Between the Swastika and the Sickle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

James R. Edwards<\/strong><\/span>
\nBetween the Swastika and the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nGrand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019.
\nAvailable at Eerdmans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is easily one of the best books I\u2019ve read this year! I love reading the biographies of NT scholars, though some are boring, this one is certainly not!<\/p>\n

In 1979 I was leading a Berlin Fellowship team to Greifswald, the very city where Lohmeyer had disappeared. In the midst of a church meeting I incautiously inquired of Lohmeyer\u2019s fate. The pastor immediately terminated the meeting and took me for a walk, where he explained that the name of Ernst Lohmeyer could not be mentioned in East Germany.\u00a0Lohmeyer had been executed as an \u201cenemy of the state,\u201d he said, and my inquiry risked incriminating members of the congregation as Lohmeyer sympathizers in the eyes of the secret police, who were surely present at the meeting. I regretted my indiscretion, of course, but I resolved with equal intensity, if the opportunity ever arose, to attempt to restore the honor of his life and memory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I learned several things:<\/p>\n

\u2013 Tubingen university has a collection of Jewish hate literature written by faculty during the Nazi period.
\n\u2013 Gerhard Kittel tried to be a moderate Nazi, only against secular Jews, not practicing Jews. He also regarded extermination of the Jews as infeasible, not morally wrong!
\n\u2013 The German Christians regarded Nazism as the completion of the Protestant Reformation.
\n\u2013 Edwards (116) notes: \u201cOne of Nazism\u2019s most successful evils was its ability to co-opt personal virtues of its adherents for the evils of the party, with without corrupting the virtues or burdening the adherents with undue responsibility or guilt.\u201d See on this too Peter Haas\u2019s book\u00a0Morality After Auschwitz<\/em> which points out that the Nazi ethic was so compelling because it was so eclectic drawing on German philosophy, culture, Lutheranism, nationalism, Darwinianism, and even Nordic mythology.
\n\u2013 Lohmeyer\u2019s letter to Martin Buber in response to Kittel\u2019s book on the Jewish question is very moving.
\n\u2013 George Walter wrote a pamphlet arguing that the German church needed to \u201cfree itself from slavish dependence on the Bible\u201d which was \u201cunchristian and un-German\u201d and receive a new revelation through culture (136).
\n\u2013 There\u2019s also an amusing story of a Nazi official who came to Greifswald and told the theological faculty that they should teach religious pluralism and that the manuscripts of the Bible were obviously corrupted (158)
\n\u2013 The Reich bishop Ludwig Mueller is described as \u201ctheologically incompetent, power hungry, devious, and vain \u2013 just the man for the job\u201d (149).
\n\u2013 Lohmeyer was probably executed by the Russians due to guilt by association since a German military unit he was part of during the war committed an atrocity in Poland even though Lohmeyer was known to have been elsewhere, for being too soft on the de-Nazification of East Germany, and due to grudges against him by local German communist groups who wanted control of the university for themselves.<\/p>\n

See the interview with James Edwards over at Eerdword<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James R. Edwards Between the Swastika and the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019. Available at Eerdmans. This is easily one of the best books I\u2019ve read this year! I love reading the biographies of NT scholars, though some are boring, this one is certainly not! In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":13800,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nErnst Lohmeyer - Between the Swastika and the Sickle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"James R. Edwards Between the Swastika and the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019. 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