Word: dibelius
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...ugly taint of anti-Semitism fell last week on the Grand Old Man of German Protestantism-Otto Dibelius, Evangelical Bishop of Berlin and Brandenburg...
...began with a front-page article in East Berlin's Communist paper, Berliner Zeitung, timed to appear just after Bishop Dibelius' good-will tour through Nazi-nervous England and to coincide with the five-day Berlin meeting of the Evangelical Church of Berlin and Brandenburg. It quoted at length from an article by Otto Dibelius in the weekly Friede und Freude of April 9, 1933-just 68 days after Hitler had come to power. Wrote the then 52-year-old Dibelius: "The government of the Reich has finally recognized the necessity to boycott Jewish businesses in the correct...
...totalitarian state, wrote Bishop Dibelius, has no claim to the Biblical status of "the powers that be." In a totalitarian system "there is no right in the Christian sense of the word . . . Paul's words are set aside." Encountering a speed-limit sign along a highway in the free world, wrote Dibelius, he would not hesitate to slow down. But not in East Germany. First, because the speed limit would not be applied equally to ordinary citizens and Communist functionaries and because the slowdown would be made necessary, in all likelihood, by some immoral purpose, such as starving...
...Authority. Printed as a 23-page brochure by Bishop Dibelius' friends, the bishop's birthday letter exploded like a bomb in both Germanys. "The most sensational and most unsettling for church members of all the sensational and unsettling things [Dibelius] has said, preached and written," spluttered the West German Lutheran biweekly Stimme der Gemeinde (Voice of the Congregation). Bishop Lilje recoiled from his surprise package. "I cannot share Dibelius' views,'' he said. "One can't drive down the street any way one wants to." The board of managers of Dibelius' own Evangelical Church...
...Bishop Dibelius said nothing. He had succeeded in what he had set out to do: remind Germans of their precious right to say no to authority...