The 95 Theses of the Reformationsfest (1917)

This is an English translation of the 95 Leitsätze zum Reformationsfest 1917. These theses were meant to bring the church up-to-date to the new ideas of national socialism. Like all man-made doctrines, it is probably best ignored, but it may be useful for research purposes.

The translation below is created by feeding the images to Google Gemini. This means the translation is probably far from perfect, but it should still be sufficient to get a rough idea of the main messages of the text.

The 95 theses are as follows:

I

The necessity to make clear to the German people what Christianity is, and how it goes together with Germanness (Deutschtum), is undoubtedly present, and the longing for it is very great.
However, there are also wide circles among our people who are just as much religiously minded as they are decidedly German-minded, yet who turn away from Christianity because they despair of the possibility of completely detaching it from Judaism.
We cannot avoid the task of a "Germanization" (Verdeutschung) of Christianity for the very reason that, through the Wars of Liberation of 1813–15 and then especially through the last World War, we have become aware of our nationhood (Volkstum) in a completely different way than before.
Luther, with the Reformation, took the first powerful step toward liberating the German people from a foreign spiritual spell; Bismarck took the second by making it politically mature; the third we must all do ourselves through the Germanization of Christianity within ourselves.
Leading spirits such as Klopstock and Herder, Goethe and the Romantics, Kant and Schiller, Fichte and E. M. Arndt, Richard Wagner and Lagarde have provided the preliminary work by teaching us to more thoroughly grasp our own German essence in its depth and individuality.
Finally, modern racial research has opened our eyes to the pernicious effects of blood mixing between Germanic and non-Germanic members of the people and warns us to strive with all our might to keep our nationhood (Volkstum) as pure and self-contained as possible.
Religion is the innermost power and finest blossom in the spiritual life of a people, but it can only be culturally effective in a völkisch [national/ethnic] expression. Therefore, the national soul that has become aware of itself is particularly sensitive to disruptive religious influences.
A more intimate connection between Germanness (Deutschtum) and Christianity can only be achieved if the latter is released from the unnatural connection in which it stands with the Jewish religion according to mere tradition.
Even Kant aptly criticized the striking behavior of the Christian church, that even today it treats all people as if they all, without exception, had to be transformed into Jewish-Christians to whom the Jewish Messiah had come; likewise, Schleiermacher with full determination represented the conviction that "living Christianity requires no support base in Judaism at all".
The Christian church has no right to take the religious writings of Judaism as its own property, let alone to claim that Judaism did not correctly understand its own literature, which signifies a religious violation for which we as Christians should be ashamed.
It may be that the reliance on Jewish literature served the Christian church in a certain sense at the time of its first expansion, especially as long as it worked among Jews. (In Athens, Paul notoriously linked to Greek cultic institutions.) — However, after the Gospel of Christ has created its own literature, this reliance has become superfluous and, over time, harmful, and is therefore to be eliminated, just as one tears down a scaffold after the house is finished.
It is a naive gullibility to consider the Jews as favorites of God simply because they have claimed it for themselves. Likewise, it is a false assumption that the divine guidance of world history has only concerned itself with the "chosen" people of Israel and left all other peoples to themselves; whereas a more precise knowledge of real history proves religious activity within all peoples of the pre-Christian cultural world, from whom the Jews even learned in many ways and, in many cases, due to their narrow-mindedness, could not even learn.
It is mysterious how the simple and yet so characteristically distinct lay-religion of Jesus could become a graded papal hierarchy, and the heart-quickening sermon of the free grace of God's salvation could become a slavish system of works; but upon closer inspection, it is explained quite naturally by the fact that with the so-called Old Testament, the model of the Jewish priestly state and, in connection with it, Jewish Pharisaism, had slipped back into the Christian church as secret driving forces. These continued to operate in the Middle Ages alongside the influences of the Roman Empire and the character weaknesses of the Romanic peoples until the church was completely permeated by these evil effects, making Luther’s Reformation necessary.
In the same way, the intolerance and persecution-mania of Judaism simultaneously became the inheritance of the church, so that the religion of love went astray into anathemas and inquisitions, into witch-burnings and heresy trials, even to the extermination of entire peoples and horrors like those of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and Cromwell's slaughters in Ireland. All this was in honor of a God who—according to the Jewish conception—viewed all enemies of the Jews as his own and had them banished and cruelly exterminated; that is, not the Christian God, but the Jewish one.
How much the Jewish-Babylonian creation story held back the development of natural science, which was already highly advanced among the Greeks, for centuries, and led to childish-deistic conceptions, is shown not only by the aberrations of the so-called Dark Middle Ages with its repercussions up to Galileo, but also by regrettable occurrences on Protestant soil right up to the most recent times, whereby the foul appearance is created as if Christianity does not go together with true culture and science.
The angry Jewish storm-god Yahweh, who works upon men with the motives of punishment and reward, is a different God than the one whom Jesus proclaimed to us as "Father" and as "Spirit," and whom our ancestors already sensed with their faith in the "All-Father". — Furthermore, the Old Testament is unsuitable as a religious book for us Christians for the very reason that it contains no unified conception of God, but is to be regarded as a historical document that flowed together from the most diverse influences of the Israelite environment, including Aryan-Persian ones, — all of it, however, held together by the recurring racial idea of a Judaism concerned for its political existence.
Goethe rightly says that from an advanced standpoint, no religion can be respected any longer that is still founded on fear. The slavish fear of God is, however, entirely the basis of the Jewish religion, while the Christian-childlike trust in God is founded only on love, which may well be combined with reverence for God, but is completely liberated from that slavish fear of God.
Luther’s otherwise so evangelical conception shows itself in this regard to be clouded by Jewish-medieval remnants when he demands that we should fear and love God — an example of how questionable it is to let the Christian church limp on both feet. Moreover, it was the later Luther who returned to these clouded views, while the earlier Luther, who gave us the three great programmatic writings of the Reformation—"To the Christian Nobility," "On the Babylonian Captivity," and "On the Freedom of a Christian"—and who Germanized the New Testament for us on the Wartburg, is to be fully claimed for a genuine German-Christianity.
A materialistic morality guided by the principle "that it may go well with you and you may live long on the earth," or as Proverbs 10:22 says even more clearly, that "the blessing of Yahweh makes rich without effort," stands in extreme contrast to the idealistic conception of Jesus, according to which one should do good without regard for advantage and reward or, as Kant says, "solely for the sake of the good"; which is why Jesus, with his entire appearance and above all his self-sacrifice, acted not according to Jewish but according to Christian principles.
The Israelite ancestors of the Jews, insofar as they stand out as national heroes and so-called patriarchs, are entirely unsuitable as role models and educational materials for us Germans, who have completely different ideals, and should therefore be removed from the curriculum of our schools as soon as possible. This applies specifically to a figure like Jacob, who, according to our concepts, violated every moral law, yet remained the "favorite" of the Jewish Yahweh.
Just as every right-minded pair of parents meets their child with full love from the start—which includes the necessary discipline within itself—every child has a right to an education in the spirit of the Gospel. They do not need to be set on a false track first by a sub-Christian method of teaching, which creates the danger that the path to understanding the teachings of Jesus is not eased but made harder for them, perhaps even ruining religion for them for a lifetime. Above all, the Christian church must not so fail in its vocation that it becomes, so to speak, an institution for the dissemination of Judaism.
The greater the significance the Old Testament has for a people—even if they outwardly belong to Christendom—the further that people is inwardly removed from actual Christianity. The best example of this is the English people, who for about three centuries have adopted a religiosity essentially determined by the Old Testament. Consequently, with its pharisaic proselytizing, its instincts directed exclusively toward monetary gain, its brutal claims to world domination, and its naive conceit of being able to claim the promises of the Jewish Yahweh for its "chosen" people today, it exhibits features in a quite striking way that remind one of the typical traits of Jewish religiosity—the very traits that Jesus fought against.
Christianity is a match for every enemy, except for that of self-falsification. It is, however, a terrifying thought that our German people, who have the glory of having accomplished the reform of Christianity through Luther, could sooner or later lose Christianity itself because those called to the service of Christianity, in false attachment to the Old [Testament], prevented themselves from resolutely casting out the foreign components that stand in opposition to the essence of Christianity.
But because there is clearly danger in delay, it is necessary for the sake of truth not to ask about what was "said to those of old," but to step over the contradiction against the well-founded and highly necessary New as firmly and energetically as Jesus did when, in contrast to Pharisees and scribes, he created the true religion for humanity, and as Luther proceeded against the clergy when he taught the Christian people to help themselves.

(A. Bartels. F. Andersen.)

II

It is to be regarded as the main achievement of the Reformation that it returned to the original source of Christianity, to the Gospel of Jesus.
Through this, a promising beginning was set for a further development of Christianity fully corresponding to its essence.
Luther recognized that Christ alone can and may be the measure for this essence of the Christian religion. "Moses is of no concern to us Christians."
The practical conclusions to be drawn from this realization, however, were hindered in their implementation by the fact that Luther adopted the entire scriptural canon of the Roman Catholic Church and that Protestantism held fast to the connection of the New with the Old Testament.
As a result, the religious documents of the Jewish religion remained continuously linked with those of the Christian religion, and through this, a foreign body was introduced into the organism of the Christian church.
Protestant theology missed the danger and the violence of this introduction. It sought to justify the connection of both Testaments by claiming that neither Christ nor Christianity could be brought to a sufficient understanding without the preparatory Old Testament, since Christianity had emerged from Judaism.
Yet Christianity arose solely through the revelation of God in Christ and through Christ, as is attested by Christ himself in various sayings. The Christian religion is therefore an independent religion, completely independent of the Old Testament-Jewish one.
This was recognized by the Christian church and its theology insofar as they designated the Old Testament stage of revelation as a lower one compared to the New Testament-Christian one. They were forced into this recognition by the weight and the content of the Christian religion.
From this, it follows that the Old Testament is not required or usable for the explanation of the Christian religion and the understanding of the person of Christ, because the more perfect can never be made understandable and explained by the imperfect.
However, when it comes to the historical understanding of the Christian religion and the person of Christ, then it is to distinguish between the religious, the dogmatic, and the historical understanding. The historical can only ever refer to the New Testament contemporary history, not to the Old Testament and the history of the Jewish religion.
Every religion is a self-contained entity and is only to be understood from within itself and through itself. The Old Testament-Jewish and New Testament-Christian religions are two religions different from each other and in their main points even opposed to each other. They have a different concept of God, world, man, and history.
This difference has been clearly established by newer comparative religious science and is brought to steadily growing clarity through the advancing criticism of the Old Testament and of Judaism, as well as by the fact that the Jewish people decidedly rejected Christianity.
Even by way of history, this difference is recognizable. From the beginning, oppositions developed in the early Christian community through the disputes of Gentile Christianity with Jewish Christianity.
These oppositions still exist in the present and give cause for continued arguments and disputes, which must be brought to a resolution for the sake of the Christian religion.
This [religion] becomes a morbid religious hybrid through the retention of the Old Testament.
This hybrid formation destroys the unified character of the Christian religion, hinders its naturally necessary further development, makes an inner harmonious Christian piety impossible, and brings damaging conflict into the culture of Christian peoples, as religion is of the greatest influence on cultural life.
Therefore, the connection between the Christian and the Old Testament-Jewish religion is to be dissolved as soon as possible, and the Christian religion is to be placed solely upon itself.
This dissolution must take place by removing the Old Testament and all echoes of it from Christian religious instruction, from Christian worship—especially from the preaching of the Gospel and from the hymnals—and by relegating Old Testament theology to the philosophical faculty (general religious science).
Through this, the damaging foreign body of the Old Testament will be eliminated from the organism of the Christian church, and the Christian religion will be brought to the necessary independence in order to work through itself and to be recognized and acknowledged in its unique essence.
In this way, it becomes possible for the Christian religion to be fully adopted by all national individualities and to exert the most decisive influence on them, while gaining an ever-growing richness for itself.
Among all peoples, the German is recognizably most spiritually related to Christianity. This is due to its profound inner life, its loving understanding of the unique character of every people, and its idealism.
Therefore, Christianity and Germanness (Deutschtum) are to be brought into an increasingly intimate connection, as happened in the Reformation; not to establish a "German religion," but to allow the German people to become truly Christian.
From this arises the task for the German-Protestant church and theology to gradually bring about the purity of Christianity and thereby make it recognizable to all other peoples and make its full adoption possible for them as the perfect religion.
When that has happened, only then is the German Reformation completed and German Protestantism has fulfilled its mission.

(D. Katzer.)

III

Jesus is not the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of the political hopes of the alleged people of God, but stands in complete opposition to Judaism, by which he was indeed cast out and killed. His appearance in Palestine can be understood from the location of this land, in which the three parts of the world—Asia, Europe, and Africa—meet as if at a pivot point, and from historical circumstances.
Not only Judaism, but the entire pre-Christian cultural world contributed to the historical preparation of his appearance, just as Judaism itself is permeated by all possible influences of the Babylonian, Persian, Asia Minor, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman worlds. The external circumstances under which Christ appears are only to be compared at all with the cradle in which the child is laid; the sole bearer of the Christian religion is Jesus, the personality.
As a Galilean, Jesus will not have been a racially pure Jew; indeed, the possibility of Aryan origin is not excluded just as the overall character of his teaching appears non-Jewish, and certain statements establish a conscious opposition to Judaism. Yet one must refrain from explaining Jesus solely through race, nation, and human circumstances, because his inner essence is too great and too mysterious for that.
The significance of Jesus for humanity is most simply described by the sentence that he brought to humanity the perfect religion, the religion of complete self-surrender to God.
Jesus first sought to bring this perfect religion into human hearts as a wandering preacher through teaching, and specifically as a joyful message of the free grace of a heavenly Father who has mercy on all people, the good as well as the evil: a message that had to lead to a collision with the views of the self-righteous and intolerant Jewish religion—which was contrary in its essence—and above all with its official representatives.
If Jesus stands so absolutely in opposition to Judaism, then on the other hand, his conception of God as an eternally active spirit is to be connected with Greek philosophy; just as the concept of God of Christ, corresponding to the essence of the perfect religion, includes within itself all earlier and later developments of a higher kind, i.e., those released from human barriers.
The life and teachings of Jesus can only be viewed as if through a veil due to the reports of the Gospels, which are to be judged according to the laws of myth-making and are often contradictory: we do not obtain a full view of the personality of Christ, but only a more or less clear reflection. Yet so much is given that both the highly developed creative power and simple faith can form an image and, above all, grasp the teachings of Jesus with the heart.
A certain judgment as to how far the true man Jesus was determined by people and time is not to be gained; but it is possible to detach the actual, innermost personality of the Savior from the historical-Jewish framing and to produce a spiritualized image that corresponds to the ideals of every people and every time. It is the right and the duty of every Christian people to create this image for itself and to orient its entire life upon it.
In connection with Jesus's new message of the love of God stands his likewise completely new teaching of universal love for humanity, best illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan. Through this, Christianity became the universal religion of humanity, in decided opposition to the older national religions, in particular the Jewish one, which represented and still represents the principle: "You shall love your neighbor, i.e., your fellow countryman, and hate your enemy". Christianity as the religion of humanity, however, excludes the development Here are the translations for the previous page (20) and the current page (21). Translation: Page 20 (Previous)
The life and teachings of Jesus can only be viewed as if through a veil due to the reports of the Gospels, which are to be judged according to the laws of myth-making and are often contradictory: we do not obtain a full view of the personality of Christ, but only a more or less clear reflection. Yet so much is given that both the highly developed creative power and simple faith can form an image and, above all, grasp the teachings of Jesus with the heart.
A certain judgment as to how far the true man Jesus was determined by people and time is not to be gained; but it is possible to detach the actual, innermost personality of the Savior from the historical-Jewish framing and to produce a spiritualized image that corresponds to the ideals of every people and every time. It is the right and the duty of every Christian people to create this image for itself and to orient its entire life upon it.
In connection with Jesus's new message of the love of God stands his likewise completely new teaching of universal love for humanity, best illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan. Through this, Christianity became the universal religion of humanity, in decided opposition to the older national religions, in particular the Jewish one, which represented and still represents the principle: "You shall love your neighbor, i.e., your fellow countryman, and hate your enemy". Christianity as the religion of humanity, however, excludes the development of individual peoples to a height corresponding to their essence not at all; on the contrary, it must desire it according to its overall character, so that the one flock of the one Shepherd may be worthy.
Completely new is further the principle of Jesus that truth stands above the religious community, and not, for instance, the religious community above the truth. This is a principle that secures the religious development in Christianity, the eternally renewed return to Christ, but also the expansion of all religious institutions and forms in the deepest and truest spirit of the peoples and times.
The all-transcending moral will, which Jesus brought into humanity through his appearance, rests primarily on his teaching of the infinite value of the individual human soul, which according to him is greater than the whole world, even life and death. With this, for the first time, the entire inwardness that a universally valid religion must have is perfectly enabled, and the danger of externalization into a system of statutes and mere churchdom is effectively countered.
Finally, as something new that Jesus taught, his separation of the worldly and the spiritual must also be mentioned, as expressed particularly strikingly by the principle: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's". Through this, the right to exist is denied to every so-called theocracy or hierarchy, while on the other hand patriotism and civic duty come into their full right and can develop in accordance with the spirit of Christianity, which is not foreign to the world.
In all the teachings of Christ, despite all the glow of holy passion, a perfect inner harmony and moral beauty are revealed, which make him appear entirely as a representative of the noblest humanity, in whom the opposites of truth and love, love and truth, are bound together and balanced to the deepest understanding of all that is human, without the danger of weak tolerance ever occurring.
Jesus not only taught his perfect religion but also lived it and activated it through deep-reaching work and struggle in the most diverse areas of life; it is precisely there that his independence, manliness, bravery, and unyieldingness clearly come to light, which qualities are the necessary complement to his friendly and mild features. It is significant that our ancestors specifically saw the brave element in the "Heliand" and portrayed Christ as "our hero".
As the deepest ground of all the glorious qualities of the Savior, his piety or devotion to God meets us, through which he above all testifies to us as the highest revelation of God, whom we would not even know if Jesus had not illustrated him to us through teaching and life. This fullness of God, which in him became, so to speak, incarnate or, as we are accustomed to saying, "flesh," allows us—since all other human concepts are insufficient—to look upon him as the "Son of God" based on the testimony of his contemporaries and to honor him as such; although the greatest honor that can be shown to him by us consists in acting according to his spirit.
The terrible tragedy of the crucifixion of Jesus, which shows in a shattering way how the very best on earth found precisely the very worst reception among humanity—and thus illuminates its entire blindness and depravity to the depths—appears as a divine arrangement, whose mystery reveals itself all the more, the more one is able to grasp the will of self-sacrifice in Jesus and, alongside it, the full realization of the free grace of God. For the deepest human sin and the highest divine forgiveness, the parable of the Prodigal Son is the best indicator; but the highest symbol remains the image of the Crucified One, which sets before our eyes the Savior in all his love, dignity, and beauty.
The voluntary sacrificial death of Christ has nothing to do with either the Jewish prophecies—which must first be violated in order to fit this event—nor with Jewish cultic institutions (as the Epistle to the Hebrews strives to demonstrate), nor with the concepts of Pauline theology determined by Jewish legal theories. It is to be explained solely from within itself and at the same time grasped spiritually.
Even if the wrong way to clarify the sacrificial death of Christ was not avoided in the New Testament, it is nevertheless recognizable from it that it was the personal impression of Jesus's entire life, especially his struggle in Gethsemane and his dying on Golgotha, which gradually helped his followers—initially shaken in faith by these events—to the firm conviction that their Lord and Master had triumphed over his enemies despite contrary outward appearances and had thus also triumphed over death and sin. This faith became for them the victory that overcame the world.
To the significance of Jesus as the Savior and Son of God is thus added that of the Redeemer, who frees us inwardly from all evils, infirmities, and inhibitions of this earthly existence, primarily also from the feeling of "God-servitude" (Gottesknechtschaft) that manifests in fear, and who leads us to God, without whom we are fallen to sin, as is made clear to us in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Sin appears in the parable first as blindness or folly of the erring human, insofar as it humbles him inwardly and leads him outwardly into misery, whereby he deceives himself and misjudges his true salvation. This folly and blindness of man was also what led them to misjudge Christ and lead him to the crucifixion, an act that retains its symbolic meaning for all times and makes clear again and again the human dependence on the grace of God.
Next, in Christ, the guilt of sin—which is connected to blindness but not removed by awakening—is placed before our eyes; this is linked to the responsibility taught by Jesus before ourselves, before God, but also before men, and whose characteristic is the bad conscience. The forgiveness brought by Jesus frees us from this guilt; through the act of Jesus's self-sacrifice on Golgotha, it is illustrated and realized, and it works upon us quite differently than the mere word of forgiveness.
The resurrection of Christ and his ascension into heaven are not to be understood in a coarse-material sense, but in a spiritual sense; they signify the continued life of Christ in the spirit and his entry into the invisible world, from which he continues to work upon his followers and all who open themselves to his spirit.
With the external power of sin, Jesus also breaks the inner power, i.e., selfishness and the preponderance of a disordered life of impulse, as they cling to man and are only to be overcome in constant struggle. Even the best Christian resembles the Prodigal Son here, who, though having returned to the Father's house, still has to wrestle with his weaknesses there, over which only the feeling of "God-childship" (Gotteskindschaft) can lift him, and from which it can free him only slowly and never completely.
Precisely for this reason, the faith in redemption is the effective principle of life, which brings about moral growth and the eternal "Die and Become" (Stirb und Werde) that is connected with earthly life. It also gives the joyful confidence of a new and higher life, to which the earthly life relates only as a time of preparation, even if it already carries its value within itself. It is a threefold power that fills the right Christian during the tireless inner work on himself: behind him he has the redemptive act of Jesus on the cross; before him the example of Jesus as an ideal never to be reached; finally in him that which Jesus himself called the Holy Spirit, which is nothing other than the Savior living on in eternal perfection and in the hearts of his redeemed.

(F. Andersen. A. Bartels.)

IV

If we seek to detach from our Christianity what has attached itself to its essence in the course of history from Judaism, Hellenism, and Romanism, we arrive back at that original "Galileanism" where we meet the simple and genuine personality of the Savior whose name it bears.
Then we learn to our joy that this Christianity of the Savior is fundamentally related to our inner Germanness (Deutschtum). Indeed, Germanness is not merely an influential element in the history of Christianity; it is rather the natural vessel of faith, which receives Christianity in its most humanly possible purity of essence.
The kinship of Christianity with Germanness rests on the essential importance that the soulful—the inwardness—and its living expression as a faith-strong and active will have for both of these world-historical spiritual phenomena.
A Christian form of faith may be associated with much feeling and imagination, as well as with much spiritual work; yet it cannot be called the actual German form if the expression of the soul as a will is not vividly manifested within it—which, in its religious connection with the Eternal sublime above the "I," is the truly free will in faith.
German Christianity is not a dogmatically fixed and rigid form of religion; even the concept of "confession" is to be understood in the German sense as an avowal (Bekenntnis) and thus as a personal expression of an inner experience and the willpower gained from it in the relationship of the human soul to the Divine essence.
German Christianity, as an experience of the soul, has the power to create life once again and thereby—beyond being a purely religious matter of faith, even if thoroughly determined by faith in the Eternal as a life-force—to become an effective cultural power within the Christian world.
Christianity is essentially liberation from the Law, and where legalism still operates, Christianity is not pure but determined by foreign influences. Liberation from the Law does not mean the freedom of lawlessness, but signifies the spiritual change from legality to duty—which, in turn, internalizes itself from an external way of acting into the human soul's own will.
We do not stand in relation to our God in the Jewish relationship of accounting (Verrechnung), of which errors such as indulgences, merit of works, and the treasury of the saints remained in Christian-Roman times. The Reformation proved itself a particularly German purification of Christianity by illuminating and abolishing these, whereby the "Credo" (creed/faith) took the place of "Credit".
The Apostolic Creed calls God the "Creator of Heaven and Earth" in memory of the Old Testament creation story. We, however, do not understand by this a divine craftsman who forms things of reality piece by piece and sets them in motion. Rather, we understand the eternally soul-bestowing power which, just as the soul builds the body everywhere, works the construction of the entire universe; it is as little the body or similar to it as the human soul is the body or similar to it. For world and body always remain imperfect patchwork, while God and soul in themselves are perfection.
In our confession of faith, the first article should apply to Christ, in whom the Godhead first appeared to us as a pure human. He awakened the Godhead in us as the Holy Spirit and allowed us to recognize the Godhead as eternal love, so that through appearance, awakening, and recognition together, the inner power of faith in the Godhead became alive in us.
Christ is to us not the oriental Messiah-King, but the "dear Savior," just as God is not the oriental wrathful deity, but the "dear God"—ideas intimately familiar to the German soul. (Thus also in the "Mother of God," all features of the oriental goddess and world-ruler are extinguished for us, and instead the "dear Maria," as Luther says, has remained for us as the image of cozy femininity, of the "good mother" and "dear woman," in which the old Germanic veneration of the Divine in the feminine has found its consecrated continuation and lasting satisfaction).
In the Apostolic Creed, the life of the Savior is narrated, which we are to understand in the sense of religious faith not as mere factual processes, but as the wonderful images with which the miracle of all miracles—the divine essence itself—once shone through the world of physicality and thus became the only true and worthy object of our faith.
Christ is not the "Son of David," which can mean nothing to us Germans, but the human embodiment of the divine essence, of good will, and the guarantee of the other world, of the "Kingdom of Heaven in us," in which no sin lives, where the sinful earthly human before God has been redeemed into the purified soul of good will.
Christ unites in himself mildness and strength, a unity which is also characteristic of the German essence characterized in such a way that strength enables a mildness which does not become weakness; mildness, in turn, becomes a strength from which coarseness is excluded. Where weakness and coarseness show themselves, we may say that, as the German forgot himself, Christianity also failed.
In the reconciliation of the Godhead, from which we were historically alienated, and in the liberation of the Divine within us, man rises to a joyfully conscious strength, to upright service, to pious sense of honor, to free nobility of soul before God and the world: a new form of humanity which entirely corresponds to the heroic sense of the German spirit, by elevating it to the highest level of its unique character.
German uniqueness is entirely matched by a union of opposites, such as mildness and strength, realism and idealism, individuality and community feeling, freedom and duty, faith and knowledge. Therein the prerequisite is already given to grasp also the great mysterious primal opposition of God and man through faith in the unifying personality of the Savior.
Christ as the "Judge of the Dead and the Living" can no longer be understood by us in the sense of the orientally influenced Middle Ages. Rather, we see in him—who as our dear Savior did not come to judge the world, but to save it—the separator and decider between those who are alive because they have faith, and those who are dead because they lack love.
In the Apostolic Creed, it says according to Jewish-sensual terminology: "Resurrection of the Flesh"; by this we Germans understand—faithful to the designation of the Holy Scriptures—the "Transfiguration of the Body," just as the Savior appeared transfigured to the disciples after death; which means nothing other than the overcoming of earthly death through eternal life, that the redeemed souls live in God: our old Germanic All-Father's (Walvater) blessed Einherjer transfigured into the "Communion of Saints".
Our faith does not go toward this world here; it does not cling to the things that appear in space and time, but rather it grasps with the soul what is in turn soulful—the essence of things beyond space and time; also not merely the ideas of God, but God himself, who lives in us through faith.
What Luther calls faith is called "freedom" by Kant, and it is nothing other than the good will in us, which works outwardly the Good, i.e., "love," just as the "categorical imperative" works moral actions; and upon this rests the whole of Christianity, as the German spirit understands it.
The innermost core of Christianity is, like everything Divine, Wonderful, and Metaphysical, mystical; yet "realistic," most living reality shall be its life in the outside world, where no miracles and mysteries are more necessary to do the work of faith, where rather nature and reason must work together to penetrate the breadth of real life with the spirit of divine truth and love.
We see in the Germanic traditions the powerful images of the Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung) and the rebirth of the gods and the world. We must—even if we wanted to believe science's claim that these images were influenced by Christianity—nevertheless recognize more than this in them: namely, the genuine sense of the ancient North-Aryan sun myth, from which the downfall and the return are inseparable. Thus, the kinship of the mythical and ethical religion of light, Germanness (Deutschtum), and Christianity is already deeply and firmly established, as for both of them the Savior Jesus Christ signifies the "Light of the World".
What German Christianity is reveals itself to the kindred soul immediately in the pure manifestations of German art. It ranges from the old "Heliand" to the deepened knightly poetry of the Grail quest, from the mysterious severity of Romanesque cathedrals to the high freedom of the Gothic, and in the truly felt and honestly created works of old German woodcarvers and painters up to Dürer's mastery, and in the evangelical church hymn since Luther up to Bach's music. It is a great unity of the inner formative powers of the German soul and Christian ethics, which forms the secure background for every further high development of German art through the centuries of evolving Christian culture.
From the standpoint of the achieved freedom of the German way and Christian faith, we finally gain the proper position regarding the essence and value of the Old Testament. It no longer weighs upon us as a religious compulsion from a foreign world, but remains as a significant centerpiece of world literature, indispensable for the knowledge of Judaism and its history, possessing high poetic (epic and lyrical) value. It also remains as a multi-faceted testimony of deep faith in God and the fervent piety of individual great religious personalities within the totality of our spiritual goods. This is achieved without henceforth having to suppress or even eliminate our own traditions of myth and history in our home and school education, and without thereby maintaining our Christianity—through its foreign nature—at an equally unnatural and dangerous distance from our Germanness. The Old Testament lost its religious significance before the appearance of the Savior who was disowned by its own believers; German Christianity began its blessed course through world history with the heartfelt and pure reception of the Savior’s appearance in the German soul and world.

(v. Wolzogen.)