Ours is a time of anthropological crisis when we as a society cannot agree on what it means to be human. In such a context, theologians who faced that issue in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are obvious dialogue partners upon whom we can draw.

Twice in the last ten days my dear friend and colleague Fran Maier has drawn attention to the importance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the church in America today. At the Catholic Thing he noted that this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, in which a number of prominent theologians in Nazi Germany publicly opposed the “German Christians” who were seeking an accommodation with Nazism. Bonhoeffer was one of the signatories. Then, at the launch event for his fascinating new book, True Confessions, he quoted from Bonhoeffer’s letters, that it is “only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”

That Maier, a Catholic, calls on Bonhoeffer is a sign of the times. This is not simply because in the current climate Catholics and Protestants share common cultural concerns. It is also because the great temptation of our day, that of conflating politics with Christianity, is intense. The stakes are not as high as they were in Germany in 1934. But the principal challenge for Christians, that of remaining faithful as witnesses to the gospel rather than enablers of those whose politics resonate with our cultural tastes, is the same.

Bonhoeffer may be the most famous German theologian to oppose Hitler and Nazism, but he was not the only one. Another who speaks to our times is Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran theologian and pastor. Like Bonhoeffer, Thielicke was hounded by the Nazis, though he survived and was even able to pastor a church for a while in the 1940s. A polymath and a preacher, he wrote a massive theological ethics as well as a critique of Bultmann. Many of his sermons and lectures were collected and published. Also like Bonhoeffer, he was not an entirely reliable guide to traditional Christianity. His historical context was Nazism but his theological context was neo-orthodoxy. The latter was always somewhat more “neo” than “orthodox” at key points.

I first encountered Thielicke when I picked up a copy of Man in God’s World in a used bookstore in the late 1980s. It’s a series of lectures on Luther’s Small Catechism that he delivered in Stuttgart Cathedral in the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the series continued through the Allied bombings of the city. Thielicke knew that every lecture he gave would be the last gospel message that some members of his audience would ever hear. That gave them an urgency and a relevance I have not encountered elsewhere. Perhaps never has Richard Baxter’s comment about preaching as a dying man to dying men applied to anyone as pointedly as to Thielicke in Stuttgart during the war.

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