Stuttgart or Manhattan: the Choice that Defines YOU
For the lips of a priest should preserve knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, because he’s the messenger of the LORD of the Heavenly Armies. But you priests turned aside from the way, and by your teaching you caused many to stumble.– Malachi
Sixty-seven years ago this Friday, a group of eleven evangelical clergyman put their names to a document entitled The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. It was October 19th, 1945 and along with ten other men, Martin Niemoller declared what history would record but few men remember,
With great pain we say: By us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole church: We did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.
Their confession stands as a palpable indictment against the humanist tendency to separate the sacred from the secular. In the spirit of Voltaire, they confessed that – every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do. Germany was crippled long before a shot was ever fired, not by bombs, tanks, or a forged alliance, but by apathy and unbelief. When the time arose to stand, her watchmen slumbered. Germany’s pulpits chose silence, and her political leaders were knowingly complicit in the Nietzschean deicide. I wonder, were it possible, just how many sermons Martin Niemoller would want to revisit. How many homilies on baptism or greed would the clergy have supplanted had they known the evil that lurked in the shadow of the steeple? How different would the subject be in the American pulpit today, if her shepherds were mindful?
In 2009, facing the most Biblically hostile administration in American history, a group of religious leaders met in Manhattan to form their own declaration. Professor Robert George, Princeton University; Professor Timothy George, Samford University and Chuck Colson, Founder of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, drafted the following: