Word: dibeliuses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...although the Communist press calls him "an agent of the American imperialists," Dibelius refuses to preach a "crusade" against the Communists. As a Christian, he holds that his first duty, now as under the Nazis, is to "preserve the unity of the church of Jesus Christ," not to wage political warfare. As a German, he knows that his continued ministry to East as well as West helps keep alive some feeling of community in a divided country...
...Prison Chaplain. Dibelius has his philosophic reservations, too, about the West. "It is a self-deceit," he has written, "if one thinks of the totalitarian states of the East as intrinsically different from the democracies of the West." To Dibelius' mind, the democracies are at root the same "power states" as the dictatorships, because, he thinks, they do not base their authority...
...state, Dibelius charges, whether capitalist or socialist, has come to hold unprecedented power over the individual. And, unlike the old Christian monarchies, this "power state" has no goal other than its own projection and preservation.'Power," he says, "is like sea water. The more one drinks of it, the thirstier one gets...
...goal, a soul," i.e., to make it the state of Romans before it becomes the monster of Revelation. This the church can and must do, by projecting its influence into the schools, the factories, every walk of life. Even this effort may not succeed. "It may be," writes Dibelius, "that the church of Jesus Christ has but the same task as the chaplain in a prison where those condemned to death are kept: to prepare mankind...
...Eisenach, near Luther's old refuge in the castle of the Wartburg, the representatives of Germany's Protestants -seven-eighths Lutheran and the rest Calvinists of the Reformed faith-met to consider a church union. At a crucial moment in a long and stalemated discussion, Dibelius got up to preach. His text was Ezekiel 37:22: "And I will make them one nation." And, as he puts it, it was the one sermon of his life that "moved a mountain." The delegates went on to push through the constitution of the Evanglische Kirche in Deutschland (E.K.D.)-the Evangelical...