Word: lutheranism
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...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...
...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, of course." In 1906, following a year at the University of Edinburgh, he entered the ministry of the Lutheran Church...
...20th century, however, it was plain to see that Throne and Altar had its drawbacks. Sheltered by the umbrella of the Supreme Bishop's authority and supported by state funds,, the official Lutheran Church often became a state bureaucracy and bore little active Christian witness in the life outside the church doors...
...long before the Nazis began open warfare against religion. In rigged elections, they pushed pro-Nazi clergymen into positions of authority in the provincial Lutheran churches. Pastor Martin Niemöller was arrested when he spoke out against their anti-Semitism from his pulpit. Dibelius preached from Niemöller's church in Dahlem the following Sunday, and was soon on trial himself. Although acquitted by an old-fashioned judge, he was suspended from his position as general superintendent of the Kurmark church district. Still, he kept up a stouthearted resistance. Once Albert Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs...
...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...