Gerhard Gloege

Gerhard Gloege (born December 24, 1901 in Crossen an der Oder ; † April 15, 1970 in Bonn ) was one of the most important German Protestant theologians of the 20th century.

Live and act

Childhood and Education (1901–1929)

Gloege spent his early childhood in Crossen. His father passed away when he was 4 years old. When his mother died in December 1912, he moved to live with his eldest brother Georg in Friedenau . Here he passed his matriculation examination in 1920. He studied Protestant theology in Berlin and Marburg and attended the seminary in Wittenberg under Waldemar Macholz . He was vicar in Michowitz (Silesian coal field) . In 1926 he passed the second theological exam and became city vicar and in 1927 pastor in Bernau near Berlin . In the same year he married Elisabeth Biederstaedt received his doctorate with Gerhard Kittel in Tübingen for Dr. theol. During a replacement in Zepernick in July 1928, Gloege married Margarete Boden and Heinrich Himmler .

Church teacher in the church struggle and in secret (1930–1945)

In December 1929 Gloege became a lecturer in the New Testament at the first state-recognized church university in Germany, the church foreign seminar in Ilsenburg (Harz) . In the violent dispute between Karl Barth and Otto Dibelius , Gerhard Gloege built a bridge that a little later made it possible for the two opponents to act together in the Confessing Church .

At the end of 1933 Gloege was appointed director of studies of the seminary and parish priest in Naumburg am Queis . In the course of the formation of a Reich Church, Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller closed all Prussian seminars on March 15, 1934. If Gloege had joined the German Christians in Ilsenburg , he tore up his membership card in front of his congregation and from then on worked in the Confessing Church. The “Word of the Silesian Church Congress in Breslau on May 13, 1934 to the parishes and pastors of Silesia”, formulated by Gloege, showed him as an advocate of a clear separation of the Church from the German Christians and especially their blood ideology. How much this was also a political issue, however, remained open in Breslau. After this synod, a declaration was sent to the congregations of Silesia, which Gerhard Gloege also signed, which stated: “We do not want a split in our church… We affirm the constitution of the DEK of 1933 and strive for unity and consolidation, but by confession out. Our church can only come to peace through a church regiment that not only protects the confession, but acts on the basis of the confession. ”A clarification that was important for the Lutheran Gloege took place a few days later at the Barmen Confession Synod, at which he was an advisor in the theological committee was allowed to participate. In April, he had the commitment of the Pastors get to the content acquisition. In the following months Gloege is often on tour for the Confessing Church on lecture tours. On July 15, 1934 he was removed from office by the Prussian Bishop Ludwig Müller. He and his parish took legal action against it, but ultimately without success. When Ludwig Müller was introduced as Reich Bishop in the Berlin Cathedral on September 23, 1934, Gloege preached in Betsche (Lebus district) and declared Müller to be outside the church .

When the Prussian Church opened the seminary with a new leader close to the German Christians in November 1934, the Brotherhood Council of the Confessing Church decided to establish its own training center in Naumburg under the direction of Gerhard Gloege. For the first course, mainly candidates from the former seminary in Frankfurt / Oder appeared. They had to move into Gloeges' apartment, which the police tried unsuccessfully to prevent. At this point in time, Bishop Otto Zänker declared that he would lead the Silesian Church in contradiction to the Evangelical Upper Church Council . Gloege found in his radical course to withstand all state influences on the church, diverse support from his Naumburg parish. The police and Gestapo terror against representatives of the Confessing Church in Silesia increased in 1935. Over 200 Protestant pastors in Silesia were temporarily imprisoned. In March 1935 the Evangelical High Church Council ordered Gloege to be deposed as pastor of Naumburg. But Gloege stayed and the seminar business continued. Examination regulations were agreed with Bishop Zänker, in which the responsibility lay solely with the Confessing Church, but the regional church committee, which meanwhile mediated, set up an examination authority against the bishop. In the spirit of the Fourth Synod of the Confessing Church, Gloege could not recognize this, but the implementation became more and more difficult (collection of the church treasury, dismissal of employees at the seminary, detention of candidates, including Hans-Joachim Fränkel and the spokesman for the Silesian vicars Herbert Mochalski , Telephone seizure, interrogation). Gloege traveled a lot during these years to support families and communities whose members were imprisoned. There is an impressive report about his visit to Oberwalden , during which he spoke publicly to the conscience of the community and the Gestapo. Gloege recognized the dynamics of state church destruction more and more clearly.

When the Lutheran Council was convened in 1934, Gloege was one of them. In December 1935, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Luther Council to give up working with the church committees appointed by the Reich Bishop. Shortly thereafter, he witnessed the split in the Confessing Church and the Reich Brotherhood Council at the fourth synod of the Confessing Church in Bad Oeynhausen . Something similar happened a little later in the Confessing Church of the ecclesiastical province of Silesia . Gloege declared the Breslau Synod, later called the Christophori Synod, to be a “pseudo synod”. For the First Silesian Confession Synod , which is also known as the Naumburg Synod , he formulated the radical determination of position “From Church Power”. On the basis of the Schmalkaldic Articles , Gloege and with him all the synodals present rejected any church office not justified in the priesthood of all believers as heretical . Gloege was elected to the Silesian Brother Council by the Naumburg Synod. In the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church, he was also in the Lutheran Convention. Here, together with his colleague Hans Asmussen , he reflected on the question of the relationship between state and church and, in connection with the Synod in Halle in 1937, the question of communion within the Confessing Church.

In July 1937 Gloege took part in the "Evangelical Week" "in the fight against myth" in Görlitz . He was then interrogated. On August 15, a nationwide speech ban was announced to him. During these days he thought that he should expand his sphere of activity by teaching at other church schools. Himmler's ban on all “substitute universities” of the Confessing Church that same month made this path more and more difficult. The directors of the schools, in addition to Gloege u. a. Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Hans Joachim Iwand , Hermann Schlingensiepen and the Pastors' Emergency League without the imprisoned Martin Niemöller decided not to obey the instruction, but now the Gestapo intervened. In October, another 20 candidates began their studies in Naumburg. One of the theologians was immediately arrested. Gloege initially sued against his removal from office, but in September the Berlin District Court declared it valid. This was followed by the eviction order and other conditions. The parish church council stood behind Gloege and declared his apartment a parish apartment. He was then expelled from Naumburg. On the day of the scheduled eviction, Assessor Friedrich Justus Perels was with him. Several police interrogations followed and Gloege had to give up on January 30, 1938. In the service he declared that the “last Prussian confession seminar” had been broken up. Now the expulsion from Silesia followed. From March Gloege was together with his wife and two children with relatives in Eberswalde. After his personal intervention with the Secret State Police , he was given permission to take up a pastorate again. In the meantime, and later in Erfurt, he translated the section on Psalm 127 from Martin Luther's Latin lecture on the Step Psalms of 1533.

In November 1938 Gloege was elected as the first pastor at the Predigerkirche in Erfurt . His employment was associated with various conditions that significantly restricted his public appearance. So he worked primarily as a pastor. He supported u. a. the mother of the condemned pacifist Richard Felix Kaszemeik . Gloege was released from military service due to health restrictions.

Between the fronts of the Cold War (1945–1961)

After the end of the war Gloege was part of the provisional church leadership of the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony and became provost in Erfurt. At the same time he was entrusted with the negotiations with the Soviet military administration for the Erfurt-Weimar area. In 1946 there was an interim camp in Erfurt for prisoners who were brought to the Soviet Union. In negotiations with his Russian interlocutors, Gloege managed to get several people released, including Gerhard Lotz . Gloege gave the lecture at the Thuringian celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther's death . Shortly after the war, it was feared that the theological faculty at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena would not be able to resume its work due to a lack of suitable teachers. In the summer of 1946 Gloege was proposed and appointed as professor of systematic theology. Until 1947 he was also provost of Erfurt. Only after three semesters of teaching did he give his inaugural lecture on June 5, 1948, "God's plan of salvation as a problem of theology of history". In doing so, Gloege was aiming far beyond academic operations, because the World Assembly of Churches in Amsterdam in August of that year took place under the theme “The disorder of the world and God's plan of salvation”.

From time to time he was visiting professor in Halle. He turned down appointments to Leipzig and Tübingen. Together with Wilfried Joest , Regin Prenter ( Aarhus ) and Edmund Schlink , he edited the Lutheran journal Kerygma und Dogma from 1955 , was co-editor of the Theological Literature Newspaper and the important theological lexicon Religion in Past and Present (RGG), in the 3rd edition. Together with Claus Westermann , he published an introduction to the Bible, which enjoyed great popularity.

Last years of life

Gloege accepted a position at the University of Bonn in April 1961 as the successor to Hans Joachim Iwand. The GDR leadership allowed him to move. At the meeting of the Lutheran World Federation in 1963 - during the Second Vatican Council  - Gloege gave the main lecture on the importance of the doctrine of justification today . In 1967 he retired.

Honors

• 1953 honorary doctorate from the theological faculty of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
• 1959 Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Glasgow

Publications (selection)

• Kingdom of God and Church in the New Testament (New Testament Research 4). Gütersloh 1929; Darmstadt ² 1968.
• Translation: Martin Luther: From the Incarnation of Man. An academic lecture on the 127th Psalm. With introduction and afterword. Goettingen 1940
• Translation: Ph. S. Watson: To God's God (Let God be God). An introduction to Luther's theology . Translated from English and edited. Berlin 1952.
• Mythology and Lutheranism . Systematic-theological considerations on the problem of demythologizing (= Lutheranism 5). Berlin 1952, 1953², 1961³.
• Politia divina. The overcoming of medieval social thinking through Luther's doctrine of government. Festgabe for Karl Heussi, in: Scientific journal of the University of Jena 6, 1956/57, Gesellschafts- u. linguistic series, no. 5, pp. 445–464.
• On Karl Barth's doctrine of predestination. Fragmentary considerations on the approach to recast . In: Kerygma and Dogma II (1956), pp. 193-217 and pp. 233-255.
• On Karl Barth's doctrine of reconciliation ( KD IV / 3, 1 and 2) . In: Theologische Literaturzeitung 85 (1960), pp. 161-186.
• Every day. Our time in the New Testament . Kreuz, Stuttgart 1960 (numerous other editions up to 1990; translations: The Day of His Coming . SCM Press, London 1963 [below]; Giorno di tutti i giorni. La Bibbia per l'uomo d'oggi. Nuovo Testamento . 1993 [ below ]; A Biblia titkai. Bevezetés a Bibliába . Budapest 1997).
• Grace to the world. Critique and Crisis of Lutheranism . Goettingen 1964.
• Theological tracts . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen
  • Vol. 1: Salvation events and the world . 1965
  • Vol. 2: Annunciation and Responsibility . 1967
• Theses on Luther's doctrine of two kingdoms , in: Festschrift for Hermann Kunst , Berlin 1967, pp. 79–90 and in: Wort und Gemeinde (Festschrift for Erdmann Schott ), Berlin 1967, pp. 67–75.

literature

• Wilfried Joest: Review of G. Gloege, Theologische Traktate I and II. In: Theologische Literaturzeitung 1971, Sp. 534-540.
• Harald Schultze : Drafts for dogmatics. Review of the theological work of Gerhard Gloege . In: Kerygma and Dogma 1972, pp. 159-277.
• Gerhard Sauter :  Gloege, Gerhard . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG). 4th edition. Volume 3, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2000, Sp. 1010.
• Internet exhibition Evangelical Resistance

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thus the assessment of Eberhard Jüngel , in: Um Gottes sake - Klarheit , in: EPD-Documentation 46/97, pp. 59–65, 64.
2. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Ernst Gloege (born April 22, 1886) was a Germanist and senior director of the Queen Luise School in Berlin-Friedenau. In 1934 he resigned from the Heinrich von Kleist Society due to the Aryan declaration that was requested .
3. ↑ The starting point was Otto Dibelius's book The Century of the Church . Berlin 1928 and Follow-up - A discussion with the friends and critics of the “Century of the Church” . Berlin 1928. Karl Barth responded with Die Not der Evangelischen Kirche . In: Between Times 9 (1931), pp. 89–116. For further controversy, cf. Wolf Krötke : God's glory and the church. On the understanding of God in the dispute between Karl Barth and Otto Dibelius . In: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 2 1989, pp. 437–450. Gerhard Gloege explained in the General Evangelical Lutheran Church Newspaper: “With the request: Your kingdom come, the church asks for its downfall.” Quoting this sentence, Dibelius Barth invited to a conversation in which there was mutual respect between the church political leaders . See Hartmut Fritz: Otto Dibelius. A cleric in the time between monarchy and dictatorship . Göttingen 1998, p. 382.
4. ↑ Report on March 29, 1934 in: Source book for the history of the Evangelical Church in Silesia . Edited by Gustav Adolf Benrath, Göttingen 1992, p. 469
5. ^ So Hans-Joachim Fränkel : The church fight in Silesia . In: Peter Maser , Peter Hauptmann (ed.): The church struggle in the German East and in the German-speaking churches . Göttingen 1992, pp. 49-66
6. ↑ Call of the Council of the Confessing Church of Silesia to all pastors on the occasion of the Barmen Confessing Synod of July 13, 1934 . In: Source book on the history of the Evangelical Church in Silesia . Edited by Gustav Adolf Benrath, Göttingen 1992
7. ^ Ernst Hornig : The Confessing Church in Silesia 1933-1945: History and Documents . Göttingen 1997, p. 110f.
8. ↑ See Ernst Hornig: The Confessing Church in Silesia 1933–1945: History and Documents . Göttingen 1997, p. 138ff.
9. ↑ Dietrich Meyer : Resistance and adaptation of the Evangelical Church of Silesia during National Socialism . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Self-assertion and opposition. Church as a place of resistance against state dictatorship . Berlin 2003, pp. 49-77, 55
10. ↑ Gloege to General Superintendent Johannes Eger on December 11, 1935. In: Ernst Hornig: The Confessing Church in Silesia 1933–1945: History and Documents . Göttingen 1997, p. 154ff.
11. ↑ Gloege: Report on a visit to Oberwalden on June 19, 1937 . In: Quellenbuch , pp. 491–493
12. ↑ Carsten Nicolaisen (Ed.): Responsibility for the Church II: Autumn 1935 to Spring 1937 . Göttingen 1992, 150f.
13. ↑ Gloege: From the church power . In: ibid .: Theological treatises I . Göttingen 1965, pp. 231-259, 251
14. ↑ Similarly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared in June 1936, "Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany, separates himself from salvation". Dietrich Bonhoeffer: On the question of church fellowship . In: Evangelische Theologie 3, 1936, pp. 214–233, p. 231
15. ↑ Gerhard Besier / Henning Gloege, unpublished documents from the interpretation history of Barmen: Gerhard Gloege, State and Church according to Lutheran doctrine in the interpretation of the fifth Barmer sentence, in: Gerhard Besier / Gerhard Ringshausen (editor): Confession, Resistance, Martyrium: von Barmen 1934 to Plötzensee 1944 , Göttingen 1986, pp. 396-425; Carsten Nicolaisen (editor): Responsibility for the Church, II .: autumn 1935 to spring 1937 , Göttingen 1992, pp. 149–151
16. ↑ Wording of the decree on the website of the Berlin State Library on Dietrich Bonhoeffer Archive link ( Memento of the original from 10 August 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
17. ^ Henning Gloege: Gerhard Gloege MS 2003
18. ↑ Gerhard Gloege: Von der Menschwerdung des Menschen , Göttingen 1940. It is a text that emphasizes Luther's late determination of the relationship and the foundation of belief in relation to politics and economics. Because of this publication Gloege was banned from being published by the Reich, which he obviously did not comply with (see list of publications and many anonymous texts).
19. ↑ An Erfurt war sermon was published after the war in: Claus Westermann (Hrsg.): Proclamation of the coming. Sermons of Old Testament texts , Munich 1958, pp. 20–27. Some sermon manuscripts are now in the Evangelical Central Archives in Berlin .
20. ^ Pastors' book of the KPS , Volume 3: Biograms Fe-Ha, Leipzig 2005, p. 289
21. ↑ Thomas A. Seidel : In the transition of the dictatorships. A study of the church reorganization in Thuringia 1945–1951. Stuttgart 2003, 243.
22. ^ Gerhard Gloege: The living Luther , 1946
23. ↑ Thomas A. Seidel: In the transition of the dictatorships . Stuttgart 2003, p. 160; Volker Leppin : From breaking apart to rebuilding . In: College in Socialism. Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (1945–1990) . Vol. 2, Cologne Weimar Vienna 2007, pp. 1848–1870
24. ↑ In 1957 Westermann's volume on the Old Testament was published under the title A Thousand Years and One Day , and Gloege's volume on the New Testament was published in 1960 under the title Aller Tage Tag . In it he wrote in a paraphrase of Luke 12, 49-53: “Never believe your comrade! Never trust your companion! "