The Neutralists' Neutralizer

One of Germany's best-known products, theology, lately has not given much aid and comfort to the West. The neutralism of Karl Barth, with its plague-on-both-your-houses detachment from the struggle between Communism and the free world, dominates such influential German clergymen as Pastor Niemoller, such prominent theologians as Bonn University's Professors Helmut Gollwitzer and Hans-Joachim Iwand. Last week Hamburg University students jampacked their biggest lecture hall to listen to a very different kind of theologian.

Helmut Thielicke, 48, whose cheerfully jowly face and shining pate are a popular fixture on West German TV screens, makes no bones about identifying the cause of the West with Christianity.

No Premature Eden. Thielicke's far-carrying voice in Western Germany does not depend on the eminence of his academic platform or on the 207 scholarly works on Christian ethics which he has published to date. It is what Thielicke says that counts--in his baroque, 3,000-capacity St. Michaelis Kirche in Hamburg, in the university lecture hall, on radio and TV (on which he never appears Sunday mornings so as not to interfere with church attendance).

What he says, over and over again, is that Christians must act. To a student meeting protesting Russia's oppression in

Hungary he once cried: "Are we still worth our freedom, we who do nothing but consume freedom instead of producing it?" Neutralist counsels of despair, like proposals for unilateral disarmament, enrage him. The proponents of uncontrolled atomic arming "are as guilty . . . as those others, the pacifist dreamers, who would make the world prematurely into an Eden."

Discovery of Faith. Helmut Thielicke began to study theology as a kind of academic chess. Theology appealed to him chiefly as the most scholarly study he could think of. "I suppose you wish to become a minister," said an examiner when Thielicke told him that theology was his projected major. "If possible," he replied, "I should like to avoid that."

Only during a period of serious illness as a student did Thielicke discover that theology was something more than an intellectual game. After recovering, says he, "I now knew what faith was." In 1940 he was ordained a minister in the Evangelical Church, shortly thereafter became a pastor in the ancient town of Ravensburg. Thielicke's anti-Nazi sermons earned him a stern prohibition against speaking in public. He wrote two books and smuggled them out to Switzerland, where they were published anonymously. Karl Goerdeler, a leader of the abortive July 20 plot against Hitler, engaged him to write part of the planned revolutionary government's declaration on relations with the church. With great good luck, Thielicke avoided either a rifle .bullet or a prison cell. After the Nazi collapse, Thielicke started his career over again, as a professor of theology at Tubingen. In 1951 he was made rector of Tubingen University and later president of the Council of German Rectors. He came to Hamburg in 1954 as the first dean of the newly founded Theological Faculty.

Thielicke sharply disagrees with Karl Earth's notion that Communism is a-Christian rather than antiChristian, or with the idea that Christianity could live in a Communist-dominated world. "If the Russian steamroller flattens everything up to the Atlantic Ocean because the West has nothing in the way of defense," Thielicke has written, "then we will be denied the capability of shaping a world having proper inner and social values . . . Once dead, one cannot regenerate oneself, even inwardly."

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