Heinrich Kemner

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Heinrich Kemner (born June 19, 1903 in Dünne / Westphalia ; † June 13, 1993 in Walsrode ) was a Lutheran revival theologian and preacher. After his retirement as parish priest , he founded and directed the well-known Ahlden Youth Day , the Ahlden Brotherhood and the Krelingen Spiritual Armaments Center . As an evangelist and writer, he worked far beyond the borders of Germany.

Live and act

Heinrich Kemner was born on an old farm in Minden-Ravensberger Land, where he worked until he was 20 years old . After he had attended the agricultural school and college for practical farmers in Soest , he worked until 1929 as chief inspector at the Turow manor near Grimmen in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . He attended the private school Hansa-Gildemeister in Hanover and finally got the Abitur in 1931 in Krems an der Donau .

Kemner then studied theology in Vienna, Münster and Bonn. After he was dismissed from the Soest seminary in 1934 for resisting the German-Christian orientation, he was taken over by the Confessing Church . After various vicariate positions, including in Witten, and working as a press officer for the Gossner Mission in Berlin, he became an assistant chaplain at the Detmold town church , in Dielingen and finally in Dortmund-Schüren . Since he could not stay in the Westphalian regional church for reasons of conscience , Kemner moved to the Hanoverian regional church after his ordination, where he became pastor of Ahlden near Walsrode in 1937 .

During the Second World War , Kemner was drafted into a medical company. Back in Ahlden, he founded a youth home in 1946 and the first Ahlden youth convention , which was moved to Krelingen in 1973. From this the largest evangelistic youth convention in the Federal Republic of Germany developed , which in 1992 was renamed the youth festival BAM (encounter, action, music). In November 1952, Kemner founded the Ahlden Brotherhood , a Lutheran - Pietist association to which pastors and lay workers belong. In the following years he made a name for himself as one of the most famous pastors in Germany and the organizer of the revival movement in Germany. He published the magazine Awakening Voice and missionary in Switzerland , Finland , Norway , Sweden , Canada , the USA and South Africa . He was involved in the nationwide confessional movement No other gospel and in 1967 led the confessional movement in Lower Saxony.

Especially after his retirement in October 1969, Kemner built the Krelingen Spiritual Armaments Center in Krelingen . In addition to guest houses, a farm, a gardening shop, workshops, therapy facilities for alcohol addicts and the mentally ill, a church, a seminar to prepare for theology studies, a housing estate for the elderly and a large assembly hall were built here. In April 1983 Kemner received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class. In addition to his work as a pastor and evangelistic preacher, Kemner published 48 mostly evangelistic books.

Kemner was not without controversy about his conservatism . While he received support from politicians and personalities such as Martin Niemöller , Marianne von Weizsäcker , Ernst Albrecht , Peter Hahne or Horst Waffenschmidt , he was criticized for his sharp rejection of emancipation and homosexuality . "When homosexual men and lesbian women climb the pulpits of the churches", Kemner had preached, "then the divine eclipse is complete in her." After Maria Jepsen was elected bishop of Hamburg on April 4, 1992 , she was not only the first woman held in the Evangelical Lutheran Church office of a bishop, but spoke out for a "soft feminist theology", founded Kemner on 31 October 1992 in Krelingen the Gemeindenotbund , from December 1992 community Hilfsbund called because because of the "laxity" of the churches against feminism , Homosexuality and women's ordination the situation is worse "than when the pastors' emergency association was founded in the 3rd Reich ". Later Kemner and the arming center at least accepted the ordination of women because that was not the question on which everything depends.

Shortly after Kemner's death, the Verden public prosecutor's office investigated the clerical armory center in Krelingen for tax evasion, dubious donation bookings, black cash registers and personal enrichment of some employees. Kemner, "the uncrowned king of the bell bag" ( Der Spiegel ), came under criticism. Kemner, according to his successor Wilfried Reuter , "ruled the armament center" via the wallet and "handled financial matters from the aschkiepe". He was responsible for the “archaic” bookkeeping. The tax authorities then resolved the case and closed it in July 1994.

theology

Kemner was significantly influenced in his theological concerns by Sören Kierkegaard and Hermann Bezzel . His basic concern was that of the connection point of verbatim preaching. It succeeds when it leads to a crisis as the borderline experience of life, and thus opens up the eternal outlook ( καιρός ). The godless man is a seeker and at the same time desperate when he dares to look inside himself; in his goings-on there is a longing for eternity. In the conversion of man to God, however, he experiences the liberation from himself. The task of preaching is therefore not man in his need for thought, but his existential need, therefore the proclamation seeks the center of existence of man and needs just as urgency as the impetus for it Decision. Kemner saw the mystery of authority for the preacher in communion with Christ, but this only becomes possible through concrete confession. What remained for him was to hold fast to the eschatological hope in the proclamation of seeing the victories of God behind the resistances. The right understanding of justification and sanctification would remain of fundamental importance for the believer , without which dynamic following Christ and its credibility would not be possible. Justification of the Christian is not a passive occurrence and sanctification is not a pious actionism; The believer is and remains involved in both. Kemner contrasted dogged, pious activism with a “sacred naturalness” and saw the determination of believers in simultaneity with Christ (Kierkegaard).

Kemner thus positioned himself as a pietistically inspired critic of the historical-critical interpretation of the Bible and the demythologization of the Bible by Rudolf Karl Bultmann . He postulated biblical ethics as the absolute norm for faith and life, which made him a sharp critic of official church statements on abortion, homosexuality, sexual morality and emancipation. Accordingly, his criticism of a worldliness that was superficial from his perspective, in which sin remains nameless, was correspondingly sharp. Last but not least, he understood “sin” to mean “passion”:

“Physical poisoning is dangerous, mental poisoning even more. And how easily can they happen. It is the great danger of bad literature, dance floors and dubious films that they lead young people to believe that passion is the path to happiness. Whoever awakens its uncanny embers to the flame will experience that he burns with his soul in it. In every passion there is a temptation from hell. No matter how attractive the game with her is at first, the enemy of the soul lurks in secret. In an unmistakable diagnosis, Jesus recognized him as the murderer from the beginning. "

- Heinrich Kemner : All sorts on the way (1987)

Fonts
  • Heinrich Kemner - Pastor against his will. A cinematic portrait (1992)

literature

  • Jochen Eber:  Kemner, Heinrich. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 18, Bautz, Herzberg 2001, ISBN 3-88309-086-7 , Sp. 790-795.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • "... not in vain" - search for traces on the 100th birthday of Heinrich Kemner , ed. v. Wilfried Reuter, Groß Oesingen 2003. ISBN 3-86147-263-5
  • The spring meadow of God. Theology and revival today. Thank you for Heinrich Kemner on his 80th birthday , ed. i. A. of the Krelingen student body and the Ahlden brotherhood by Gerhard Diekmeyer, Walsrode 1983.
  • “Remember your teacher” (Hebr. 13: 7). Pastor Heinrich Kemner (1903–1993) , Walsrode 2003, 2nd edition 2006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Via BAM , bam-festival.de, accessed on June 17, 2017.
  2. ↑ final word on the anniversary of the municipal auxiliary Federation (31.10.1992) , gemeindenetzwerk.de
  3. ↑ idea-spectrum 21 (1992), p. 6.
  4. ↑ idea-spectrum 24 (1992), p. 12
  5. ↑ True miracles. Tax investigators are investigating the Krelingen armaments center, a stronghold of ultra-conservative pietism. In: Der Spiegel 13/1994, pp. 61–63.
  6. ^ Heinrich Kemner: All sorts on the way . Giessen 1987, p. 167.
personal data
SURNAME Kemner, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lutheran revival theologian and preacher
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Thin , Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 1993
Place of death Walsrode