A Defender of the Church

"I have lived my life for my church, not for any direction within the church, not for any theological school, not for any special task of the church, but for the church as a whole." Thus, in 1960, did Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius sum up his career in what he called his ecclesiastical testament. For the longtime head of Germany's Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, who died after a stroke and erysipelas last week at 86, it was a fitting self-appraisal.

In the 20th century, no man spoke up more strongly for the freedom of the church than Otto Dibelius. A stern, proud, blunt Prussian, Dibelius was one of the first German churchmen to protest Nazism, whose distorted views on Christianity he later termed "a frightful mixture of race, blood, soil and New Testament." Suspended as superintendent-general of the Kurmark church district in 1933, he continued his resistance by writing clandestine leaflets--for which he was arrested several times.

In 1937, when he stood trial for asserting the church's right to preach, among other things, that Jesus was a Jew, Dibelius was asked by Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, "Why do you keep on fighting when it is no longer your duty?" Replied Dibelius: "A Christian is never off duty."

After World War II, he was named Bishop of Berlin and head of the presiding Council of the Evangelical Church. Just as staunchly as he had rebuked Nazism, Dibelius attacked the "materialistic ideology" of Communism and repeatedly risked arrest to preach against atheism in his cathedral, East Berlin's Marienkirche. In 1957, after he signed an agreement with the Bonn Government on behalf of the church, providing for chaplain services to the new West German army, he was denounced by East Germany's Reds as the "NATO priest" and "atom bishop." Ultimately, he was barred from East Berlin.

Dibelius' objection to Nazism and Communism was mainly theological rather than political: both ideologies, he believed, subverted the Christian faith. An ecumenical pioneer who helped found the World Council of Churches, Dibelius was devoutly evangelical as well as Evangelical. In his sermons he preached his conviction that the Gospel was genuinely God's everlasting, ever-valid word to man. "Lord My God," he wrote in his autobiography, "Your word preserved me from skepticism and contempt, those characteristics of an age alienated from God."

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