Word: dibelius
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...16th century when he made his people's declaration of independence, political as well as spiritual, from the tottering visible unity of Rome. This is the Germany which has now been ripped in two by the war of Communism and the democracies. This is the Germany of Otto Dibelius. Once Europe's arbiter, but now politically weak, this Germany logically has as its spokesman a Lutheran bishop, for its spiritual unity, at the moment, is the only bond which may keep its severed halves alive and hopeful...
...Otto Dibelius is a classic product of this Protestant Germany, and a witness to its unique spiritual and political character. "Every country," he is fond of saying, "has the religion it deserves. Every religion has the people who suit...
Throne & Altar. Dibelius was born in Berlin, the son of a high government official in a Germany prosperous, pious and proud. It was 1880, just nine years after Count Otto von Bismarck had Wilhelm I crowned Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors of the defeated French at Versailles. The Dibeliuses were a family of civil servants and clergymen -an uncle of Otto's was court chaplain to the King of Saxony-and he was brought up, as he tells it, "in the Reich tradition." The hero of his student days at the University of Berlin was "Bismarck...
...pious but practical young pastor. Otto Dibelius noticed these things. The professors at his seminary had taught him that a pastor should never enter the homes of his parishioners. "If you do," one instructor warned, "the mantle of Elijah will surely fall from your shoulders." In Scotland, as a student of the established church, Pastor Dibelius learned differently. Back in Germany, after months of observing the ways of his Calvinist brethren, he startled some of his colleagues by mixing freely with his parishioners and encouraging them to be active in the life of the church. Once, while...
...Otto Dibelius was one of the first to see that here was an entirely new premise for church and state relations, which Martin Luther, friend and loyal subject of Christian princes, had never bargained for. The German state no longer claimed divine sanction. Far from being the God blessed state of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, it might conceivably change itself into another state mentioned in the New Testament-the godless, seven-headed monster of St. John's Revelation...