Tag Archives: Germany

The German Church and Islamic Territory

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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Statue of St. Michael's Victory over Satan at St. Michael's Church in Hamburg, Germany, a church not slated for conversion at this time.

Statue of St. Michael’s Victory over Satan at St. Michael’s Church in Hamburg, Germany, a church not slated for conversion at this time.

By Faith McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

In a Gatestone Institute article on February 12, Soeren Kern writes of empty German churches being converted into mosques for Germany’s growing Muslim population.

The latest church conversion is taking place in Hamburg, where the historic Kapernaumkirche (Capernaum Church) and associated property, a cultural heritage site, was sold in 2005 to the Al-Nour Islamic Center. But Kern reveals that from “Berlin to Dortmund to Mönchengladbach, the gradual proliferation of mosques housed in former churches reflects the rise of Islam as the fastest growing religion in post-Christian Germany.”

Feelings vary on shrinking German church-going population (possibly 400 Roman Catholic churches and 100 Protestant churches closed since 2000, and another 700 Roman Catholic churches scheduled for closing over the next few years). Kern indicates that the major German newspapers appear to take the changing culture philosophically and tell the news in editorials with such titles as “When Mosques Replace Churches,” and “Tenant Allah.”

Church leaders in Germany are not as acquiescent. Kern says that “many have responded to the situation with a sense of unease and foreboding.” He quotes Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy, as well as Christian political leaders who are resistant to the development and wish to pose “attractive building alternatives.”

What these leaders fail to understand, or don’t want to understand, is that such alternatives could never be as attractive as taking over a Christian church is for Islam. As the Rev. Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo has written in his book Faith, Power, and Territory, “Islam is unique among the major world religions in its emphasis on state structures and governance, which are considered to be of as much importance as private belief and morality (if not more).”

Speaking of the critical need for Christians in Islam-dominated countries to have buildings to an American Christian audience raised on the truth that “the Church is the people, not the buildings” — yet never faced with the horror of their building blown up or burned to the ground by jihadists, so ensconced comfortably within said buildings — Sookhdeo explained the significance of territory to Islam.

Western Christians may romanticize the idea of African Christians worshipping God under a tree, but Islamists see this as a lack of territory, power, and influence for the Church.  Build a mosque, or in the case of Germany and so many other places now in the West, convert a Christian church into a mosque, and you have taken that territory from the Dar al-Harb (the region where Islam does not dominate) and claimed it for the Dar al-Islam (the region where Islam is sovereign). Every mosque is a power base. This is why German Christian leaders are right to feel unease and a sense of foreboding.

The people of Hamburg ought to be just as alarmed that last November their Socialist mayor, Olaf Scholz, signed a “State treaty” with the Muslim communities of the city. Kern quotes Jorg Frooman of the Christian Democratic Party who says that the City of Hamburg “guaranteed that Islamic religious communities have the right, within the framework of applicable laws, to build and operate mosques, prayer and meeting rooms, educational institutions and other community organizations according to their own discretion. This includes ensuring the right to equip Islamic mosques with domes and minarets.” Treaty signatory, Daniel Abdin, the Chairman of the Al-Noor Center, assures, “Do not worry, the muezzin will not shout from the minaret.”

Entering into treaties with non-Muslims has been one of the most successful methods used by Islam to gain territory and power throughout 1200 years of history. Kern quotes Luthern pastor Ulrich Rüß from northern Germany, who says that the situation reveals “how far secularization and the strengthening of the Islamic religious claim to power has advanced in our society.” Hamburg is now just the latest example of the speed with which a culture is transformed when a once vibrant Christianity is dead or dying.

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Yet Another German Bishop Decries Persecution of Christians and Political Correctness

30 Sunday Dec 2012

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20121230-185715.jpg

By Andrew E. Harrod, PhD, JD, Esq.

​In another German manifestation of the church militant, Cologne’s Archbishop Joachim Meisner drew attention to the often ignored global persecution of Christians in his December 28, 2012, sermon and to politically (but not factually) correct understandings of human nature often prevalent in modern societies. Meisner spoke on the Feast of the Holy Innocents commemorating the Bethlehem children slaughtered by King Herod in attempt to kill the baby Jesus and regarded by the early church as the first martyrs.

​In his German homily text, Meisner used the occasion to direct attention “to the entire world, in which children of God, sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ are killed, harassed, and persecuted.” Meisner thereby determined that the “persecution of Christians is the worldwide most prevalent form of human rights violation and attacks.” Persecution of Christians is additionally “in Germany the most simply accepted kind and manner of human rights violation. Politics in Germany largely abandons persecuted Christians around the world.” Meisner therefore joined a growing list of German Catholic bishops who have seconded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s November 5, 2012, debated statement that Christianity is the “world’s most persecuted faith.”

​Meisner admonished his listeners that they “should and may not first consider politically correct behavior and speech, but rather political thinking, speaking, and acting according to God.” Such an outlook “was probably never so take for granted. The Sinai, the mountain of God’s commandments, was not always–to the detriment of persons and peoples–viewed as being in the center of human mountain landscape.”

​Yet Meisner reiterated a famous saying often quoted and heard by him in the original speech given by the leading Catholic intellectual Romano Guardini at the Berlin Catholic Conference (Katholikentag) in 1952. Speaking in East Berlin’s St. Mary’s Church (Marienkirche), “so to speak within hearing distance” of East Germany’s Communist dictator Walter Ulbricht, Guardini declared, “Only who knows God, knows the human person.” Meisner elaborated that
in order to learn to know, esteem, and love the human person, one needs the understanding of God. Wherever a society is constructed, in which God no longer appears at all, can this occur only to the detriment of the person. There conditions are created in which the person also no longer figures. Our society is on the way thereto. We have already experienced this twice in the last 80 ways. I was as a sufferer thereby present.

​In discussing interrelated human and divine natures, Meisner devoted the bulk of his homily to an increased secularization of German society in past decades provoking a corresponding withering away of respect for human life and its incubator, the family unit. “Our God,” explained Meisner,
is a God of life. And the human being, created as His image, should live–here temporally and there eternally. And therefore the killing of people is a contradiction in itself, namely the killing of children, of unborn or born, but also of people grown old, is actually a scandalous revolt against the order of creation.

​Meisner noted that Christian revelation proclaimed a God of several persons, namely Trinitarian in nature, because this triune God is a God of love, and “there can never be love for itself alone.” This divine nature reflects itself in God’s understanding of human nature proclaimed in Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Thus, Meisner explains, God created humanity as a pair, “as man and woman.” The “Creator’s will is in the process inserted in the human being, so that he seeks completion in that man and woman come together in marriage and then become a third and more persons.”

​This “Creation order of God” is “invented or conceived by no person, but rather is found preexisting and discovered in itself.” The recognition of this order and corresponding praxis “guarantee the peoples of the world, guarantee humanity, a blessed continuance.” “Wherever, though,” Meisner warns, “this knowledge of Creation becomes lost or is denied, there the result becomes visible in dying peoples, in the loss of marriage and family, in the devaluation of the child, namely the unborn, but also in the devaluation of the dying person.”

​Pope Benedict XVI, Meisner noted, had emphasized the importance of a society’s protection for nature and species when addressing the German parliament (Bundestag). “Yet the human being,” Meisner added, “also has a nature, which must be guarded and protected. Its constants become clear in the so-called natural law. Whoever is obligated to God, the Creator, is also obligated to the Creation and to the creatures, namely the creature human being.”

​Meisner admonished that man could not place himself above God. “All attempts in history according to certain political systems,” he analyzed,
to relativize marriage and family and to dispute their place in social life according to Creation always end to the detriment of the person. God’s Creation order can neither be nullified nor implemented by parliamentary decisions. This order is valid independent of parliaments. Therefore every person needs for his existence and essence a father and a mother. These are facts that do not need to be proven. The order of Creation, which we also call natural law, is not the result of a societal training, but a rather a truism placed in the nature of the person for his existence. The family is thus of a not high enough to treasure meaning and importance for the person as an individual, but also for a people. The over-aging of our German people is indeed no event of nature, but rather is grounded in a perverse conception of marriage and family. ​

​Meisner concluded that the “human person is no god, but he is of a divine origin. The person retains his dignity when he remains conscious of his ancestry, and he remains certain of his responsibility assigned to him as a fellow person and creature.” With this responsibility the human person “is blessed when he remains tied to the will of the Creator.” Meisner spoke out on the Feast of the Holy Innocents “not to accuse and injure, but rather to protect, care for, and nurture the order of Creation; so that for the human being circumstances remain guaranteed in which he can fully unfold himself.” In this respect Meisner admonished that each person remained “obligated to God” Who after earthly death would ask each person the question from Genesis 4:9: “Where is your brother Abel?” In a relativist era, Meisner’s words were hardly politically correct, but nonetheless necessary on both sides of the Atlantic.

German Catholic Bishops Decry Global Persecution of Christians, Call for Prayer

28 Friday Dec 2012

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Bishops in Germany.

(Photo credit: NPR)

By Andrew E. Harrod, PhD, Esq.

As previously announced on December 18, 2012, the Catholic Church’s German Bishops Conference has called upon all German Catholics to observe a day of prayer on December 26 in remembrance of persecuted Christians worldwide.  This observance follows a June 2012 decision of the conference to observe an annual day of prayer for persecuted Christians, thereby reinstituting a similar day of prayer previously observed until 1994 by the German Catholic Church primarily for Christians persecuted by East European Communist regimes.  The chosen second Christmas day, the Feast of St. Stephen, recalls Christianity’s first martyr.

The observance follows statements by Robert Zollitsch, archbishop of Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, and chairman of the conference, in a December 21, 2012, interview that “Christians currently are the most persecuted religion in the entire world.” Zollitsch thereby echoes earlier controverted statements made by German chancellor Angela Merkel to the German Lutheran Church’s synod on November 5, 2012.

In particular, Zollitsch noted religious repression in Muslim-majority countries. “We must conclude,” he said, “that there is real religious freedom in almost none of the Muslim countries.” The situation of Egypt’s Christians, threatened with the introduction of an Islamic theocracy ruled by sharia, was especially disconcerting to Zollitsch. “We had hoped,” explained Zollitsch, “that a bit of freedom of religion and speech is also coming with the Arab Spring.  But now we perceive with the example of Egypt that the development is going rather in the opposite direction.” To counter these trends, Zollitsch called for more efforts from the West, suggesting as an initial measure that tourists refrain from vacationing in religiously repressive countries.

Ludwig Schick, archbishop of Bamberg, Bavaria, and chairman of the Commission for International Church Affairs (Kommission Weltkirche), a kind of foreign minister for the conference, seconded Zollitsch. Schick termed the Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria as a “fall or winter of new pressures and persecutions” for Christians. Schick felt that the European Union (EU) “should and could do more” for religious freedom and warned that “there, where there is no freedom of religion, come other freedoms under pressure. Human rights in their entirety are then in danger.” Both Schick and Zollitsch repeated their concerns during their Feast of St. Stephen addresses.

Ironically, Schick had earlier on August 2, 2012, called for a stiffening of laws in Germany against insulting religious beliefs, currently now only applicable in case of a threat to public peace (press coverage in English and German here). Schick argued that insults to religion harmed the human dignity of their followers. The parliamentary leader of the German Green Party, Volker Beck, though, countered that Schick was “acting against democratic freedom rights.” Satire, Beck explained, did not have to please everyone and was not subject to prohibition merely because of offense. “Believers do not need any other criminal code protection against defamation, insult, and incitement than other social groups,” Beck elaborated.

Schick had proposed a blasphemy law after Germany’s leading satire magazine Titanic had published an image of Pope Benedict XVI as an incontinent man with a soiled soutane in allusion to a Vatican leaks scandal. Legal action by the Pope against personal insult had forced Titanic to cease the edition’s sale. As indicated by Beck, though, any criminalization of religious criticism in countries like Germany could serve as example and justification for precisely the criminalization of religious dissent in Muslim countries so feared by Schick and Zollitsch.

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St. Boniface and Wimpy Christians

05 Tuesday Jun 2012

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Paul Bunyan doesn’t have much on this. Except maybe that whole “giant blue ox” thing… (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

Today marks the feast day of St. Boniface, missionary to the Germans. Born in the county Devon area of England circa 680, he left his prosperous family at a young age to pursue a monastic vocation. In 716, he left to evangelize on the continent, joining St. Willibrord in Utrecht to minister to the Frisians. Later, Pope Gregory II named him the missionary bishop of Germania, where God used him mightily for His Church (we’ll talk about that later). Throughout his life, St. Boniface acted as a bridge between the Church and the Frankish court, starting with maior domo Charles Martel. He spent some years as archbishop of Maintz, baptizing many and ordering the church there in the teachings of Christ.

Charles Martel had established himself as “the hammer” by laying down some serious hurt at Tours, among other places. (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

This pivotal relationship with the court and the pulpit gave Boniface the opportunity to reform church and society throughout the Franks’ lands, laying a stable foundation for medieval culture to flourish (here is a good yet brief Touchstone article on the subject). Not too shabby for a kid from Devonshire.

He met the end of his earthly days in Frisia, where he returned once again to convert the land’s occupants to Christ. His burden for that people never died over the years. Accompanied by a retinue of fellow workers, Boniface baptized a great many souls and summoned a confirmation meeting. However, a gang of armed assailants arrived and slew the archbishop. According to an early biography, he told his armed retinue, “Cease fighting. Lay down your arms, for we are told in Scripture not to render evil for good but to overcome evil by good.”

The martyrdom of St. Boniface (Photo Credit: ElfinSpell)

Nevertheless, St. Boniface’s most famous accomplishment remains the felling of Thor’s Oak in the village Geismar. Though there are many variations and legends surrounding the Anglo-Saxon saint’s encounter with the Donar Oak, all report that the saint entered the village and had the sacred tree publicly felled before the people. He had the wood from the tree employed in the construction of a church erected immediately over the tree’s spot. The Germanic people were amazed that he could do such a thing and not be struck down by the god of thunder. This not only encouraged current Christian followers in their freedom from their prior pagan rites, but also convinced myriads to convert to Christianity.

This does not mean that Boniface ran about as a beauty-sucking iconoclast. In the words of Anthony Esolen, he “took what was genuinely noble and good in those cultures and showed that that nobility was to be perfected in Christ.” When the backwater region we now know as Western Europe was threatened to be swallowed alive by the dual darkness of encroaching Islam and idolatry, a clergyman and his retinue preached the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. Thanks to the sacrificial efforts of Boniface, the Light of the World could be carried on through the generations and on into the rest of the world.

Let us now observe our own day. Numerous church leaders boast of “interfaith dialogue” and not just in public square politics. “Christian exclusivism” (Jesus is the only way to heaven and the sole bridge between man and God) is too insensitive to the needs and attitudes of a pluralistic society. Too many congregations have engaged in or ignored “hate speech” against other religious groups. Christians need to be carrying on more civil conversations that don’t step on so many toes.

Recent examples of such regrets are myriad. Somewhat recently, Claremont School of Theology declared itself an “interfaith” institution. Churches (St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle comes to mind) have decried the great sin of “Islamophobia.” Even Wycliffe Bible Translators struggles thanks to the “insider movement” in missiology. The “insider” idea is that Christians need to assume as much of the culture as possible so as to not alienate native peoples and keep new converts safe; some “insiders” even think it is acceptable for Christian converts to attend mosques while avoiding public baptism. For Wycliffe, translators worried that “Son of God” would come to mean that the Father had intimate relations with the Virgin Mary in Muslim contexts. Critics argued that ignoring the phrase attacks the dogma of the Trinity, a non-negotiable issue. After all, God doesn’t share. He has no interest in taking up merely part of the cosmic spotlight, nor will He have his nature construed to fit man’s sensibilities.

My co-worker Luke Moon recently wrote about necessary culture wars, which tend to come under fire from the likes of Rachel Held Evans. I think the nature of this conflict does indeed need to change. However, I think that surrender on various stances such as abortion and truly free economics will do great harm to the common good as well as the individual soul. I can’t help imagining what Jonathan Merritt would say if St. Boniface came back today. The patron saint of Germany exhibited tremendous political savvy in the Frankish courts while engaging in bold acts to proclaim Christ. Whatever the medieval saint might do, I’m thinking the young Rev. Merritt would rhetorically slap him on the wrist for seeking power and–worse–not playing nice in the sandbox.

In the context of interfaith, what I think we witness is a failure of virtue on both sides: prudence in not knowing the actual problems, temperance in not reacting properly, and especially courage in shrinking from duties. So, in memory of St. Boniface, when our brethren grasp for progress and polite relevance, let us gird up our theological loins. We must be all things for all men—in the service of Christ. He’s the one we’ve got to worry about. Why gain the world (and its approval) at the peril of your own soul? As IRD adjunct scholar Alan Wisdom told me this morning, “Boniface didn’t have any trouble understanding why the God of Israel got so ticked at idolatry. Jealousy. It’s not always a bad thing.”

“…and, having done all, to stand” comes to mind (Photo Credit Mainzstream)

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