Paul Schempp

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1956 while teaching at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium, Stuttgart

Paul Schempp (born January 4, 1900 in Stuttgart , † June 4, 1959 in Bonn ) was an Evangelical Lutheran pastor , religion teacher and theology professor . During the time of National Socialism, he emerged as a determined representative of the Confessing Church (BK) in the Württemberg regional church and after 1945 was one of the first to vigorously advocate a renewal of the relationship between German Protestantism and Judaism .

Life

Schempp grew up in a family of craftsmen. His parents' house was shaped by the Württemberg Pietism . He studied theology in Tübingen , Marburg and Göttingen . As vicar, he was a repetitionist at the traditional Tübingen monastery . In 1930, together with his colleague and friend Hermann Diem, he founded the Church Theological Society , which was committed to Karl Barth's theology .

In addition to his first pastor's position in Waiblingen , he worked as a religious teacher in school, but was dismissed in 1933 for political reasons. In 1934 he took over the pastorate in Iptingen . He appeared as a theological consultant in various Christian groups, including a. at the evangelical church music and liturgical training center Kirchliche Arbeit Alpirsbach .

In the church struggle, Schempp was one of the first radical confessors who understood and represented the Barmen Theological Declaration as an impulse for a comprehensive democratization of the church. In almost all questions he sharply criticized the “zigzag course” of his regional bishop Theophil Wurm towards the Nazi regime. In 1933 he had elected Ludwig Müller , not Friedrich von Bodelschwingh , as Reich Bishop and worked closely with the German Christians . Only in April 1934 did Wurm join the BK and in May 1934 took part in its founding synod in Barmen. He was then forcibly removed by the DC and therefore confirmed by the BK at the 2nd Synod of Confessions as the rightful regional bishop . At the 3rd Synod of Confessions in Bad Oeynhausen, however, he advocated the establishment of a " Lutheran Council " in which the conservative regional churches positioned themselves against the Imperial Council of Brothers of the BK. This split the BK.

Schempp constantly admonished his bishop in the sense of the Barmer theses I - "Jesus Christ, as he is testified to us in the Holy Scriptures, is the one word of God ..." -, III and IV constantly that he is only a simple servant under the sole royal rule of Jesus Christ and not a tactical church politician. He must therefore submit to the elected organs of the BK as the only legitimate evangelical church. On November 21, 1934 he wrote to Wurm:

"The service of the church leadership is not primarily a stewardship, but a guard service over the sole validity of the word of God in faith and love in all church activities."

Christ, who is present in the community of brothers and sisters through his word, has entrusted preaching and leadership to the whole community, not to individual church leaders. Therefore, a right-wing minister in the Christian church cannot be an authoritarian hierarch or “ leader ”.

The conflict with the church leadership escalated in 1938 over the question of a " leadership oath ", which the Luther Council advocated and which the regional bishops of the intact regional churches then demanded from their pastors. At the same time, they distanced themselves from Karl Barth , author of the Barmer Declaration, when in August 1938, in his famous letter to Josef Hromádka , he inferred from it in his famous letter to Josef Hromádka, calling for all Czechs to armed resistance against the Nazi regime. They also distanced themselves from the second provisional church leadership of the BK when they wanted to read out a confession of penance as a notice of the impending world war in September 1938.

After violent and sometimes very personal attacks on Wurm, Schempp was forcibly removed from his pastoral office in 1939 and then drafted into the Wehrmacht . Protests by the BK groups and the BK leadership and attempts to mediate on both sides led him to renounce his pastor's office on his own initiative in 1943.

Example: he called the church leadership "Godless headquarters on Roten-Bühl-Platz".

After the end of the war and as a prisoner of war, he again became a pastor in the Protestant Reformed community in Stuttgart and again worked as a religion teacher at the Eberhard Ludwigs Gymnasium in Stuttgart . As the first representative of the former brother councils of the BK, he single-handedly wrote a text on May 29, 1945, "The Path of the Church", which named the past injustice, failure and deadly silence of the Church towards the Jews as grave guilt and from it profound consequences for their theology and future design warned:

"How cleverly one has justified anti-Semitism at least half of the biblical and withholding the permanent election of Israel and the Jewish origin of Christ!"

The BK had also known that the Christian freedom "to be a Jew for the Jews was forbidden, ... that the German people had outrageously usurped the Jewish belief in election, ... that salvation comes solely from the Jew Jesus Christ." ". Yet she failed miserably:

"It was pretended that the history of Israel, from the ruse of Jacob to the power of Caiaphas, was not a reflection of the Christian Church of all times."

For the future rebuilding of the church, Schempp often referred to examples from the Old Testament .

After the Stuttgart confession of guilt of October 1945, which Bishop Wurm had signed, Schempp was again the first to call for the guilt of Protestant Christians towards the Jews to be made concrete. He wrote a text on this, which the Church-Theological Society of Württemberg presented to the public on April 9, 1946. The first part highlighted the preachers' own fault in the we-form and named specific failures:

“We fell back discouraged and inactive when the members of the people of Israel among us were dishonored, robbed, tormented and killed. We allowed the exclusion of fellow Christians, who came after the flesh of Israel, from the offices of the Church, and even the Church's refusal to baptize Jews. We did not contradict the prohibition of the mission to the Jews  ... We indirectly encouraged racial arrogance by issuing countless proofs of Aryan ancestry and so did the service of the word of the good news for all the world ... "

In 1958 the University of Bonn appointed Schempp as professor for practical and systematic theology . He died after barely two semesters of teaching at the university.

Works

  • Theology of history. 1927
  • Marginal glosses on Barthianism. 1928
  • Luther's position on the Holy Scriptures (1929)
  • Sin and Sanctification (1932)
  • God's word for marriage. Wedding sermons (1938; 2nd edition 1951)
  • The Path of the Church (May 29, 1945)
  • The Story and Sermon of the Fall (1946)
  • The public educator. 1947
  • The gospel as political wisdom. 1948
  • The call of God. An explanation of the first petition of the Our Father . 1949
  • Lift up your heads. Radio speeches 1946–1950 . From the estate of ed. by Ernst Bizer
  • The individual and the community in Christ. 1950
  • God's word on the coffin. 25 eulogies. 1951; 1960 new ed. by Ernst Bizer and supplemented by 5 eulogies from 1939 to 1947
  • Law and gospel. 1952
  • The law of freedom. 1956
  • Theology and poetry . 1956
  • The profanity of the cult . 1958
  • Collected Essays. Edited by Ernst Bizer . 1960
  • Letters . (Ed. Ernst Bizer 1965)
  • Theological drafts. Edited by Richard Widmann. 1973

literature

Web links

Commons : Paul Schempp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Martin Widmann: Thirty portraits of the Württemberg "church struggle" ( Memento from May 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945 . 1990, p. 265
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Gerlach: When the witnesses were silent. Confessing Church and the Jews . 1993 2 ; P. 380 f.
  4. ↑ contains a comprehensive bibliography
  5. ↑ In it: The call of God - The position of the church towards the political parties - Free and responsible - We begin - A call to the youth - Power and freedom
personal data
SURNAME Schempp, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Evangelical Lutheran pastor, religion teacher and theology professor
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH June 4th 1959
Place of death Bonn