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Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian
One of our generation's most prophetic religious voices recounts her remarkable life-journey.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 5, 1999
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June 27, 2024
THE GERMAN THEOLOGIAN RECALLS AND EXPLAINS HER LIFE AND WORK
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle [Soelle] (1929-2003) was a German liberation theologian who taught systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1987. She wrote many books, such as On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing; Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology; The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity; Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America; Political Theology, etc.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1995 book, “Much is missing that a classic autobiography would contain. I have told nothing about my father… I have preferred to speak about certain central aspects of life in poetry, seeing that life brings along enough prose as it is… It is surely no coincidence that a German woman-theologian, who has become rather well-known, found no teaching position in her fatherland but could work in the more liberal world of the American academy. The encounter with that world has enriched and formed me to an extraordinary degree… it strengthened my hope in people who do not submit to the dictates of the economy, the military, and the advertising industry.” (Pg. xi)
She recalls of her youth, “I tried to make a distinction between Germany, the dream, and the Nazis, whom, almost without exception, I found repugnant or trivial… My parents had many Jewish friends, and by the time I was eight or nine, I had known what a concentration camp was. As children of parents opposed to the Nazis, we literally grew up with two languages. At home, there was plain language that named the shootings, torture, and deportations. But for school, where frankness was mortally dangerous, our speech was guarded… I knew much, but certainly not everything. I definitely knew nothing of Auschwitz…” (Pg. 4)
In her teen years, “My relationship to Christianity was a critical-liberal one; it had been damaged by the Nazis… I respected the Church inasmuch as it had dared to speak out now and then against what was happening… I could not call it ‘resistance’ because that was too big a word for the church’s actions… Christians were cowards, unable to look nihilism in the eye. I harbored a vulgarized Nietzschean disdain for Christianity… Our religion classes [in school] were so unbearable that my best friends in the grade above mine walked out en masse. I could not bring myself to join in their boycott, because I still wanted to know more---particularly about Jesus, the tortured one who did not become a nihilist… I really could not accept that one had to believe in the virgin birth in order to understand the Sermon on the Mount. Soon a new religion teacher made her appearance … [She] steered us into a radically different understanding of Christianity… I finally began to look for another philosophy of life. I studied theology in order to get at the truth that had been kept from me long enough. Slowly, a radical Christianity began to nest in me… I tried to make ‘the leap,’ as Søren Kierkegaard called it, into the passion for the unconditional, into the reign of God. I began to become a Christian.” (Pg. 12-13)
As she learned of the Holocaust, “I was preoccupied with the questions of my generation: How could this happen?... All during the fifties, I wanted to know exactly when, where, how, and by whom Jews had been murdered. Then, in the mid-sixties, I tried to develop a ‘post-Auschwitz’ theology---I did not want to write one sentence in which the awareness of that greatest catastrophe of my people was not made explicit… Collective shame is the minimum required for a people with a history like that of the Germans… And I am ashamed again, anew: by the poison gas that German industrialists sold to Israel’s enemies or by the billions German Marks that we could spare for the Gulf War but not for providing potable water to countries plagued with cholera. I need this shame about my people; I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the dead.” (Pg. 16-17)
She explains, “It was Rudolf Bultmann who spoke to where I was in my final high school years… I knew Bultmann to be a Christian hospitable to the Enlightenment. I need not leave my mind at the church door… How could these go together: thinking and believing, criticism and religiosity, reason and Christianity? Bultmann answered such questions with his program of demythologizing… It was not Bultmann’s intention to do away with or dissolve myth but to interpret it… The cat is out of the mythological bag; the stories of Jesus’ empty tomb and of his perhaps filmable resurrection are legends, media in which the first disciple expressed their faith… As a teacher, again and again, [Bultmann] helped people to have the courage for piety and did so no less as a proponent of existence freed from the mythological.” (Pg. 28-29)
She notes, “I had often been asked about my personal reasons for engagement on behalf of Vietnam… One cannot care for a few children while supporting a policy that incinerates so many children, that lets them starve or rot in camps. Another reason I became involved with Vietnam was both personal and Christian. I thought that I had known what it meant when I said, ‘I am a Christian.’ In those words I expressed a relationship to a human being who lived 2,000 years ago and who spoke the truth… I believed his story has implications to this very day… I could find no difference worth mentioning between the newly tested shells and poisons and the ancient technique of killing by crucifixion… The American antiwar movement played a very significant part for me. I was shaped extensively by Christians… This has given me a deep fascination with the United States, so much so that when I moved there, I felt intimations of homecoming. I Western Europe… I almost had to apologize for being a Christian. But in the United States, it was taken for granted; a radical Christian tradition lives there. Political radicalism blossomed forth from Christianity and traveled with it.” (Pg. 45-46)
She points out, “The seminary where I taught has the reputation of being a place of rebelliousness… people were indeed radicalized at Union Theological Seminary. Conversion is… an occasion when the grace of god grasps a person usually associated with a specific moment in the person’s life. From this theological tradition, however, arose questions relating to how one’s political awareness came about. Many people have experienced a similar event, a theological-political conversion.” (Pg. 60) Later, she adds, “I became a feminist through the agency of my American women friends. After reading my books in English translation, they campaigned that I be called to Union Theological Seminary.” (Pg. 65) She admits, “Why did I not become a professor in Germany? The reasons certainly had to do with sexism, politics, and church theology… I cannot say that I feel particularly bitter about this. For me… a professorship at a very liberal theological school in the United States was actually ideal.” (Pg. 67)
She acknowledges the difficulty of being a working mother: “Of course, it was a balancing act… My husband and I now divide the work of the home among ourselves… I have four children. Were I a young woman today I would still decide to have children. However strongly I critique patriarchy, my feminism is not separatist in relation to men… after recovery from the damages inflicted by patriarchy, the tasks of humanity remain to be addressed in common with men.” (Pg. 69-70)
She observes, ‘My theology never conformed to the church. I wanted to write ‘edifying discourses’ like Kierkegaard’s. Presumably, my readership so a large extent consists of people who have been alienated from the church and who for good reasons no longer attend its services. Often they switch their support to Amnesty International, but still sense that there is something missing in their nonreligious endeavors. They look for and need something different. These are the people whose language I speak.” (Pg. 90)
She states, “I think that today I would no longer define my theological position as ‘political theology.’ … Even when the concept of ‘political theology’ began to be filled with new meaning years ago, it still lacked clarity… Today I am overwhelmed and grateful that the ‘theology of liberation’ … has opened up theological dimensions that are so different from those I knew. I refer to the rereading of the Bible from the perspective of developing countries.” (Pg. 98) Later, she laments, “I often fear that Christianity and socialism are hardly anything but dinosaurs in postmodernity… There is no common good whereby human beings feel responsible for what happens in their village, or their part of the city, or to the neighbors and the children… And I ask if it does not take a piece of religious language in order to safeguard a compassionate interrelationship among people, to keep commonality and a life that is good for all.” (Pg. 144)
She concludes, “Theology that is truly alive … does not drop straight from heaven as ‘God’s Word.’ Rather, it constitutes itself in the solidarity of those affected. I continue to understand faith as a mixture of trust and fear, hope and doubt… My life is that of a theological worker who tries to tell something of God’s pain and God’s joy… It was my participation in the worldwide Christian movement toward a Conciliar Process in which justice, peace, and integrity of creation finally, clearly represent the heart of faith. Theologically, I think I am less alone today than years ago.” (Pg. 166)
This is a charming and very informative book, that will be “must reading” for fans of Soelle’s work, and of great interest to those concerned with contemporary/progressive theology.
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle [Soelle] (1929-2003) was a German liberation theologian who taught systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1987. She wrote many books, such as On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing; Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology; The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity; Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America; Political Theology, etc.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1995 book, “Much is missing that a classic autobiography would contain. I have told nothing about my father… I have preferred to speak about certain central aspects of life in poetry, seeing that life brings along enough prose as it is… It is surely no coincidence that a German woman-theologian, who has become rather well-known, found no teaching position in her fatherland but could work in the more liberal world of the American academy. The encounter with that world has enriched and formed me to an extraordinary degree… it strengthened my hope in people who do not submit to the dictates of the economy, the military, and the advertising industry.” (Pg. xi)
She recalls of her youth, “I tried to make a distinction between Germany, the dream, and the Nazis, whom, almost without exception, I found repugnant or trivial… My parents had many Jewish friends, and by the time I was eight or nine, I had known what a concentration camp was. As children of parents opposed to the Nazis, we literally grew up with two languages. At home, there was plain language that named the shootings, torture, and deportations. But for school, where frankness was mortally dangerous, our speech was guarded… I knew much, but certainly not everything. I definitely knew nothing of Auschwitz…” (Pg. 4)
In her teen years, “My relationship to Christianity was a critical-liberal one; it had been damaged by the Nazis… I respected the Church inasmuch as it had dared to speak out now and then against what was happening… I could not call it ‘resistance’ because that was too big a word for the church’s actions… Christians were cowards, unable to look nihilism in the eye. I harbored a vulgarized Nietzschean disdain for Christianity… Our religion classes [in school] were so unbearable that my best friends in the grade above mine walked out en masse. I could not bring myself to join in their boycott, because I still wanted to know more---particularly about Jesus, the tortured one who did not become a nihilist… I really could not accept that one had to believe in the virgin birth in order to understand the Sermon on the Mount. Soon a new religion teacher made her appearance … [She] steered us into a radically different understanding of Christianity… I finally began to look for another philosophy of life. I studied theology in order to get at the truth that had been kept from me long enough. Slowly, a radical Christianity began to nest in me… I tried to make ‘the leap,’ as Søren Kierkegaard called it, into the passion for the unconditional, into the reign of God. I began to become a Christian.” (Pg. 12-13)
As she learned of the Holocaust, “I was preoccupied with the questions of my generation: How could this happen?... All during the fifties, I wanted to know exactly when, where, how, and by whom Jews had been murdered. Then, in the mid-sixties, I tried to develop a ‘post-Auschwitz’ theology---I did not want to write one sentence in which the awareness of that greatest catastrophe of my people was not made explicit… Collective shame is the minimum required for a people with a history like that of the Germans… And I am ashamed again, anew: by the poison gas that German industrialists sold to Israel’s enemies or by the billions German Marks that we could spare for the Gulf War but not for providing potable water to countries plagued with cholera. I need this shame about my people; I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the dead.” (Pg. 16-17)
She explains, “It was Rudolf Bultmann who spoke to where I was in my final high school years… I knew Bultmann to be a Christian hospitable to the Enlightenment. I need not leave my mind at the church door… How could these go together: thinking and believing, criticism and religiosity, reason and Christianity? Bultmann answered such questions with his program of demythologizing… It was not Bultmann’s intention to do away with or dissolve myth but to interpret it… The cat is out of the mythological bag; the stories of Jesus’ empty tomb and of his perhaps filmable resurrection are legends, media in which the first disciple expressed their faith… As a teacher, again and again, [Bultmann] helped people to have the courage for piety and did so no less as a proponent of existence freed from the mythological.” (Pg. 28-29)
She notes, “I had often been asked about my personal reasons for engagement on behalf of Vietnam… One cannot care for a few children while supporting a policy that incinerates so many children, that lets them starve or rot in camps. Another reason I became involved with Vietnam was both personal and Christian. I thought that I had known what it meant when I said, ‘I am a Christian.’ In those words I expressed a relationship to a human being who lived 2,000 years ago and who spoke the truth… I believed his story has implications to this very day… I could find no difference worth mentioning between the newly tested shells and poisons and the ancient technique of killing by crucifixion… The American antiwar movement played a very significant part for me. I was shaped extensively by Christians… This has given me a deep fascination with the United States, so much so that when I moved there, I felt intimations of homecoming. I Western Europe… I almost had to apologize for being a Christian. But in the United States, it was taken for granted; a radical Christian tradition lives there. Political radicalism blossomed forth from Christianity and traveled with it.” (Pg. 45-46)
She points out, “The seminary where I taught has the reputation of being a place of rebelliousness… people were indeed radicalized at Union Theological Seminary. Conversion is… an occasion when the grace of god grasps a person usually associated with a specific moment in the person’s life. From this theological tradition, however, arose questions relating to how one’s political awareness came about. Many people have experienced a similar event, a theological-political conversion.” (Pg. 60) Later, she adds, “I became a feminist through the agency of my American women friends. After reading my books in English translation, they campaigned that I be called to Union Theological Seminary.” (Pg. 65) She admits, “Why did I not become a professor in Germany? The reasons certainly had to do with sexism, politics, and church theology… I cannot say that I feel particularly bitter about this. For me… a professorship at a very liberal theological school in the United States was actually ideal.” (Pg. 67)
She acknowledges the difficulty of being a working mother: “Of course, it was a balancing act… My husband and I now divide the work of the home among ourselves… I have four children. Were I a young woman today I would still decide to have children. However strongly I critique patriarchy, my feminism is not separatist in relation to men… after recovery from the damages inflicted by patriarchy, the tasks of humanity remain to be addressed in common with men.” (Pg. 69-70)
She observes, ‘My theology never conformed to the church. I wanted to write ‘edifying discourses’ like Kierkegaard’s. Presumably, my readership so a large extent consists of people who have been alienated from the church and who for good reasons no longer attend its services. Often they switch their support to Amnesty International, but still sense that there is something missing in their nonreligious endeavors. They look for and need something different. These are the people whose language I speak.” (Pg. 90)
She states, “I think that today I would no longer define my theological position as ‘political theology.’ … Even when the concept of ‘political theology’ began to be filled with new meaning years ago, it still lacked clarity… Today I am overwhelmed and grateful that the ‘theology of liberation’ … has opened up theological dimensions that are so different from those I knew. I refer to the rereading of the Bible from the perspective of developing countries.” (Pg. 98) Later, she laments, “I often fear that Christianity and socialism are hardly anything but dinosaurs in postmodernity… There is no common good whereby human beings feel responsible for what happens in their village, or their part of the city, or to the neighbors and the children… And I ask if it does not take a piece of religious language in order to safeguard a compassionate interrelationship among people, to keep commonality and a life that is good for all.” (Pg. 144)
She concludes, “Theology that is truly alive … does not drop straight from heaven as ‘God’s Word.’ Rather, it constitutes itself in the solidarity of those affected. I continue to understand faith as a mixture of trust and fear, hope and doubt… My life is that of a theological worker who tries to tell something of God’s pain and God’s joy… It was my participation in the worldwide Christian movement toward a Conciliar Process in which justice, peace, and integrity of creation finally, clearly represent the heart of faith. Theologically, I think I am less alone today than years ago.” (Pg. 166)
This is a charming and very informative book, that will be “must reading” for fans of Soelle’s work, and of great interest to those concerned with contemporary/progressive theology.
May 13, 2024
There are few leaders of the Christian tradition with as much to teach us of quality as Soellee. She demonstrates that wonderfully in this book, in which she mostly teaches us about the people who taught her.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews