Rejection Of Mediation And The Immanence Of God
1920’s ‘nature-worshipers’ in Germany
“That is why we reject the whole concept of mediation, whether through a sacred person, a sacred book, or a sacred rite. We do not in any way desire to deprive those who still need that sort of thing, of any of their aids to faith. They must live their own religious life. But we are compelled to reject such things, not indeed because we deny the existence of God or of the eternal powers that govern life, but because we have found from experience that it is possible to have immediate contact with those powers. In taking up this position, we in no sense deny significance to religious leaders. Germany has been richly endowed with them throughout the course of its history. But the office of the leader is to help Man come to himself, to reach that inner core of his being in which the eternal reveals itself.
We are able to approach men of other faiths with the generous freedom which has always signalized the Teutonic and German genius, just because we base the idea of religious independence – which we oppose to that of mediation – on the immediate relation of men to God; that is, on the conviction that there is a divine spark in man which can be extinguished neither by sin nor death. Out of this religious experience arises the recognition that the religious destiny of individuals is as varied as their personal yearning. It is a true saying which an ancient sage puts into the mouth of the Deity: “According as a man seek refuge in me, so shall I also give myself to him”. Such was German, Teutonic, Indo-Germanic teaching and experience for hundreds of years.
This faith in the immediacy of human access to God, and in the divine spark of man, must not be confused with a superficial belief in the moral perfection of humanity. Our opponents are very fond of reproaching us with plainly ignoring the sin and tragedy of life. One of them goes so far as to write that I must have had a very easy life, to hold a belief like mine. Does he not realize that it is just through sin and tragedy that a man fights his way to an affirmation of life? For it is sin and tragedy that assist us to become in the truest sense what we are. We know a great deal about sin and tragedy, only we do not, like Christianity, ascribe them to original sin; on the contrary, we believe that tragedy is one of the laws of the world. We are here to become heroes along the path of adversity, and along the path too of our mistakes, for which we are responsible and with which we must come to terms. We are thereby lifted above the levels of sin and tragedy, and in the silence of our hearts can make the great affirmation.
Our concern is with religion. And in the end the question comes to this: Where does God meet us? Or, as Count Reventlow says: where is God?
Where is the reality in and through which we can have experience of God? The answer of Christianity is simple: in Jesus Christ, in the Bible, in Church and sacrament. But it has not been our experience that we there came into our closest contact with the eternal powers. We have been permitted to meet them in the realities of life, in history, in our own destiny, that is, in the things of immediate experience and in the deeps of our own soul. We regard the attempt to limit our meeting with God to a particular area, indeed, to a particular point in time and space, as the expression of a religion alien to us. God meets us in the unmediated reality, in the moment in which we stand, in the spot where destiny has placed us in order that we may master life there.
We believe in God’s immanence in the world and therefore in his presence in history. God has not revealed himself only in the past, certainly not only in a “chosen people” in the far-off land of Palestine; he reveals himself everywhere in every great event, and especially when nations and races are molded by the achievements of great leaders. We believe that God has laid a great task on our race, and that he has therefore revealed himself specifically in its history and will continue to do so. In that history we trace the will of the eternal. God meets us in the realities of the world, of our Aryan world, in such fashion that we cannot escape him unless we live a superficial life. We do not want to fasten our gaze on the past, but on the reality of the present moment. Our piety is a faith in the realities of natural law, in contrast to the other-worldly piety of Christianity.”
-Dr. Wilhelm Hauer, The Origin of The German Faith Movement