Catechism Of The Germanic Religion: Part Three

Thesis 5.

“The German religion is not a religion of revelation in the Christian sense. It rests rather upon a natural ‘revelation’ of the divine forces in the world and in the human mind.”

Comments: What is Revelation?

“Christian revelation implies once and for all an Absolute: revelation through Christ and the ‘Word of God’ in the Bible. The Germans reject this for two reasons: it is revelation stressing one-sidedly the world beyond in a supernatural way and it involves the recognition of the Jewish people as ‘the chosen people of God on earth’.”

The German religion opposes to this the conception of continuous and natural revelation through the forms of nature and in the high human mind. To be pious means in the first instance to have integrity.

“We who belong to the German religion know that nowhere does the divine meaning of the world reveal itself more deeply and purely to penetrating knowledge (schauender Erkenntnis) than in the wealth of God in the Nordic soul and in the inexhaustible depths of the German mind…In our hearts are the ‘sacred Scriptures’…that Third Testament of which Master Ekkehart already speaks…And it is the greatest nonsense (Widersinn) that the people of Kant and Goethe should borrow its revelation from the Jews.”

“For the Bible is a literary document of an alien religion, as are the Vedas, the Talmud of Koran…It is not an unqualified blessing that the unpurged Luther translation should for centuries have been the book of education of millions of Germans…The summit of folly would be reached if this Jewish writing were to be regarded as the only valid book of revelation and of the Gospel.”

Thesis 6.

“The German religion is a religion of the people. It has nothing to do with free thought, atheist propaganda and the disintegration (Zersetzung) of religion. We who are genuine followers of the German religion take our stand on the basis of a positive religion.”

Comments: What is Disintegration of Religion?

“Disintegration was the mechanistic-materialistic mind of the second half of the 19^th Century, though which an anti-religious attitude became widespread. The German Faith Movement rejects Christianity as an alien religion, but only in order to set with German piety a racial (artgemass) knowledge of the Divine in its place. This is therefore the opposite of disintegration.”

“Christianity and religion are not the same thing as many think. On the contrary, religion and Christianity are often in conflict, as today. There are many pious Germans who today flee from the Christian Church not only because they have to listen to talk about Zion and Salem, David’s Son and Abraham’s seed, but because they do not find there what they understand by religion.”

To identify religion with Christianity is to stand in the way of development. This dogma of identity has, in fact, contributed largely to the spread of atheism among the German people.

“Where Christianity stops, there our religion begins. Belief in a personal God, in revelation and salvation is superstition, not religion. The biologically educated man seeks the solution of his moral and religious problems in the Cosmos, in nature and in the world of reality, in blood and soil, people and home, nation and Fatherland…

Our religion is no longer the international Christ-God, who could not prevent Versailles. Our religion is what grows living within us, the great, sacred, glowing desire to wash away 1,000 years of German sorrow and make good the sins of the Jewish-Christian alien religion against the German soul.”

Thesis 7.

“The German religion is not hostile to a Church. It seeks a German Church on the basis of a religious people.”

Comments: What is a Church?

“Church and Christianity are just as little to be identified as religion and Christianity.”

“A Church in the sense of a cult and place of devotion was possessed by all the pre-Christian peoples, especially by our German forefathers, who, as Tacitus reports, worshipped in free nature on sacred mountains or under sacred trees and celebrated their festivals in temples.”

“We are no longer the ancient Germans. That does not prevent us from entering deeply into the German forest-religion and from realizing that the Gothic dome is an imitation in stone of the Germanic holy forest place and that Gothic in its entirety derives from the German soul.”

In what concerns Church organization, Christianity is no final authority. Luther was able to free the German Church form the International Papal organization. 

“For those days this was a no less bold enterprise than what we of German religion propose today in freeing the German Church altogether from Christianity.”

The German religion thus seeks a Church upon a German religious foundation of knowledge. Only in this way can the opposition to the existing Church among large sections of the German people be overcome. Whole congregations with their Ministers will come to acknowledge the German religion and pass over into the German Church, as in the age of Luther.

“Luther could only overcome Rome with Christ. We, too, believe we can only overcome the Church with the Church. All other ways are Utopian. Come then to us German pastors, with your German feeling, who cannot find your way in this alien Jewish-Christian religion. Come with your whole congregation and help the German religion of the people to build up a German Church.”

-excerpted from “The 25 Theses of the German Religion: A Catechism” by Ernst Bergmann (1936)